John Irving - The Fourth Hand

“Did you get the ax or what?”

Suddenly it was quiet; all the sportswriters wanted to know. Mrs. Clausen squeezed his hand again, and Patrick repeated what he’d told the Clausen family.

“I just didn’t want to miss the game.”

The hacks loved the line, Stubby especially, although Wallingford wasn’t able to duck the question.

“Was it Wharton, that fuck?” Stubby Farrell asked.

“It was Mary Shanahan,” Wallingford told Stubby, thus telling them all. “She wanted my job.” Mrs. Clausen was smiling at him; she let him know that she knew what Mary had really wanted.

Wallingford was thinking that he might hear one of them (maybe Stubby) say that he was a good guy or a nice guy, or a good journalist, but all he caught of their conversation was more sports talk and the familiar nicknames that would follow him to his grave.

Then the elevator opened and the sports hacks trotted around the side of the stadium; they had to go out in the cold to get to either the home-team or the visiting-team locker rooms. Doris led Patrick out from under the stadium pillars and into the parking lot. The temperature had fallen, but the cold air felt good on Wallingford’s bare head and ears as he walked to the car holding Mrs. Clausen’s hand. The temperature might have been in the thirties, near freezing, but probably it was just the wind that made it feel that cold.

Doris turned the car radio on; from her comments, Patrick wondered why she wanted to hear the end of the game. The seven turnovers were the most by the Packers since they had committed seven against the Atlanta Falcons eleven years before. “Even Levens fumbled,” Mrs. Clausen said in disbelief. “And Freeman—what did he catch? Maybe two passes all night. He might have got all of ten yards!”

Matt Hasselbeck, the Packers’ rookie quarterback, completed his first NFL

pass—he finished 2-of-6 for 32 yards. “Wow!” shouted Mrs. Clausen, derisively.

“Holy cow!” The final score was Seattle 27, Green Bay 7.

“I had the best time,” Wallingford said. “I loved every minute of it. I love being with you.”

He took off his seat belt and lay down in the front seat beside her, resting his head in her lap. He turned his face toward the dashboard lights and cupped the palm of his right hand on her thigh. He could feel her thigh tighten when she accelerated or let up on the accelerator, and when she occasionally touched the brake. Her hand gently brushed his cheek; then she went back to holding the steering wheel with both her hands.

“I love you,” Patrick told her.

“I’m going to try to love you, too,” Mrs. Clausen said. “I’m really going to try.”

Wallingford accepted that this was the most she could say. He felt one of her tears fall on his face, but he made no reference to her crying other than to offer to drive—an offer he knew she would refuse. (Who wants to be driven by a onehanded man?)

“I can drive,” was all she said. Then she added: “We’re going to your hotel for the night. My mom and dad are staying with little Otto. You’ll see them in the morning, when you see Otto. They already know I’m going to marry you.”

The beams from passing headlights streaked through the interior of the cold car. If Mrs. Clausen had turned the heat on, it wasn’t working. She drove with the driver’s-side window cracked open, too. There was little traffic; most of the fans were staying at Lambeau Field until the bitter end.

Patrick considered sitting up and putting his seat belt back on. He wanted to see that old mountain of coal on the west side of the river again. He wasn’t sure what the coal stack signified to him—perseverance, maybe.

Wallingford also wanted to see the television sets glowing in the darkness, all along their route, on their way back downtown; surely every set was still turned on to the dying game, and would stay on for the postgame analysis, too. Yet Mrs. Clausen’s lap was warm and comforting, and Patrick found it easier to feel her occasional tears on his face than to sit up beside her and see her crying. As they were nearing the bridge, she spoke to him: “Please put your seat belt on. I don’t want to lose you.”

He sat up quickly and buckled his belt. In the dark car, he couldn’t tell if she’d stopped crying or not.

“You can shut the radio off now,” she told him. He did. They drove over the bridge in silence, the towering coal stack at first looming and then growing smaller behind them.

We never really know our future, Wallingford was thinking; nobody’s future with anyone is certain. Yet he imagined that he could envision his future with Doris Clausen. He saw it with the unlikely and offsetting brightness with which her and her late husband’s wedding rings had leapt out of the dark at him, under the boathouse dock. There was something golden in his future with Mrs. Clausen—maybe the more so because it struck him as so undeserved. He no more merited her than those two rings, with their kept and unkept promises, deserved to be nailed under a dock, only inches above the cold lake.

And for how long would he have Doris, or she him? It was fruitless to speculate—as fruitless as trying to guess how many Wisconsin winters it would take to bring the boathouse down and sink it in the unnamed lake.

“What’s the name of the lake?” he asked Doris suddenly. “Where the cottage is . .

. that lake.”

“We don’t like the name,” Mrs. Clausen told him. “We never use the name. It’s just the cottage on the lake.”

Then, as if she knew he’d been thinking about her and Otto’s rings nailed under the dock, she said: “I’ve picked out our rings. I’ll show them to you when we get to the hotel. I chose platinum this time. I’m going to wear mine on the ring finger of my right hand.” (Where the lion guy, as everyone knew, would have to wear his, too.)

“You know what they say,” Mrs. Clausen said. “ ‘Leave no regrets on the field.’ ”

Wallingford could guess the source. Even to him, the phrase smacked of football—and of a courage he heretofore had lacked. In fact, it was what the old sign said at the bottom of the stairwell at Lambeau Field, the sign above the doors that led to the Packers’ locker room.

LEAVE

NO REGRETS

ON THE FIELD

“I get it,” Patrick replied. In a men’s room at Lambeau, he’d seen a man with his beard painted yellow and green, like Donny’s face; the necessary degree of devotion was getting through to him. “I get it,” he repeated.

“No, you don’t,” Mrs. Clausen contradicted him. “Not yet, not quite.” He looked closely at her—she’d stopped crying. “Open the glove compartment,” Doris said. He hesitated; it occurred to him that Otto Clausen’s gun was in there, and that it was loaded. “Go on—open it.”

In the glove compartment was an open envelope with photographs protruding from it. He could see the holes the tacks had made in the photos—the occasional rust spot, too. Of course he knew where the photos were from before he saw what they were of. They were the photographs, a dozen or more, that Doris had once tacked to the wall on her side of the bed—those pictures she’d taken down because she couldn’t stand to see them in the boathouse anymore.

“Please look at them,” Mrs. Clausen requested.

She’d stopped the car. They were in sight of the hotel. She had just pulled over and stopped with the motor running. Downtown Green Bay was almost deserted; everyone was at home or returning home from Lambeau Field. The photographs were in no particular order, but Wallingford quickly grasped their theme. They all showed Otto Clausen’s left hand. In some, the hand was still attached to Otto. There was the beer-truck driver’s brawny arm; there was Otto’s wedding ring, too. But in some of the pictures, Mrs. Clausen had removed the ring—from what Wallingford knew was the dead man’s hand.