John Irving - The Fourth Hand

That instant, that very second, Irma fell in love with Dr. Zajac’s obvious capacity for love—notwithstanding that the good doctor had evinced no discernible capacity for loving her. On the spot, Irma became Zajac’s slave—not that he would soon notice it.

At that life-changing moment, Medea opened her self-pitying eyes and raised her heavy head, a string of drool suspended from her overhanging lip. To Irma, who had an unrestrained enthusiasm for finding omens in the most commonplace occurrences, the dog’s slobber was the haunting color of a pearl. Irma could tell that Dr. Zajac was about to wake up, too. The doctor had a boner as big around as his wrist, as long as… well, let’s just say that, for such a scrawny guy, Zajac had quite a schlong. Irma thereupon decided that she wanted to be thin. It was a reaction no less sudden than the discovery of her love for Dr. Zajac. The awkward girl, who was nearly twenty years younger than the divorced doctor, was scarcely able to stagger into the hall before Zajac woke up. To alert the doctor that she was nearby, she called the dog. Halfheartedly, Medea made her way out of Rudy’s room; to the depressed dog’s bewilderment, which quickly gave way to fawning, Irma began to shower her with affection.

Everything has a purpose, the simple girl was thinking. She remembered her earlier unhappiness and knew that the dog was her road to Dr. Zajac’s heart.

“Come here, sweetie-pie, come with me,” Zajac heard his housekeeper/assistant saying. “We’re gonna eat only what’s good for us today!”

As has been noted, Zajac’s colleagues were woefully beneath his surgical skills; they would have envied and despised him even more if they hadn’t been able to feel they had certain advantages over him in other areas. It cheered and encouraged them that their intrepid leader was crippled by love for his unhappy, wasting-away son. And wasn’t it wonderful that, for the love of Rudy, Boston’s best hand surgeon lived night and day with a shit-eating dog? It was both cruel and uncharitable of Dr. Zajac’s inferiors to celebrate the unhappiness of Zajac’s six-year-old, nor was it accurate of the good hand surgeon’s colleagues to deem the boy “wasting-away.” Rudy was crammed full of vitamins and orange juice; he drank fruit smoothies (mostly frozen strawberries and mashed bananas) and managed to eat an apple or a pear every day. He ate scrambled eggs and toast; he would eat cucumbers, if only with ketchup. He drank no milk, he ate no meat or fish or cheese, but at times he exhibited a cautious interest in yogurt, if there were no lumps in it.

Rudy was underweight, but with even a small amount of regular exercise or any healthy adjustment in his diet, Rudy would have been as normal-looking as any little boy. He was an exceptionally sweet child—not only the proverbial “good kid” but a model of fairness and goodwill. Rudy had simply been fucked up by his mother, who had nearly succeeded in poisoning Rudy’s feelings for his father. After all, Hildred had three weeks to work on the vulnerable six-year-old; every third weekend, Zajac had scarcely more than forty-eight hours to counteract Hildred’s evil influence. And because Hildred was well aware of Dr. Zajac’s idolatry of strenuous exercise, she forbade Rudy to play soccer or go ice-skating after school—the kid was hooked on videos instead.

Hildred, who in her years with Zajac had half killed herself to stay thin, now embraced plumpness. She called this being “more of a woman,” the very thought of which made her ex-husband gag.

But what was most cruel was the way Rudy’s mother had all but convinced the child that his father didn’t love him. Hildred was happy to point out to Zajac that the boy invariably returned from his weekends with his father depressed; that this was because Hildred grilled Rudy upon his return would never have occurred to her.

“Was there a woman around? Did you meet a woman?” she would begin. (There was only Medea, and all the birds.)

When you don’t see your kid for weeks at a time, the desire to bestow gifts is so tempting; yet when Zajac bought things for Rudy, Hildred would tell the boy that his father was bribing him. Or else her conversation with the child would unfold along these lines: “What did he buy you? Roller skates! A lot of use you’ll get out of them—he must want you to crack your head open! And I suppose he didn’t let you watch a single movie. Honestly, he has to entertain you for just two days and three nights—you’d expect him to be on his best behavior. You’d think he’d try a little harder!”

But the problem, of course, was that Zajac tried too hard. For the first twenty-four hours they were together, his frenetic energy overwhelmed the boy. Medea would be as frantic to see Rudy as Zajac was, but the child was listless—at least in comparison to the frenzied dog—and despite the evidence, everywhere, of what affectionate preparations the hand surgeon had undertaken to show his son a good time, Rudy seemed downright hostile to his father. He had been primed to be sensitive to examples of his father’s lack of love for him; finding none, he began their every weekend together confused.

There was one game Rudy liked, even on those miserable Friday nights when Dr. Zajac felt he’d been reduced to the painful task of trying to make small talk with his only child. Zajac clung with fatherly pride to the fact that the game was of his own invention.

Six-year-olds love repetition, and the game Dr. Zajac had invented might well have been called “Repetition Plus,” although neither father nor son bothered to name the game. At the onset of their weekends together, it was the only game they played.

They took turns hiding a stove timer, unfailingly set for one minute, and they always hid it in the living room. To say they “hid it” is not quite correct, for the game’s only rule was that the stove timer had to remain visible. It could not be tucked under a cushion or stowed away in a drawer. (Or buried under a mound of birdseed in the cage with the purple finches.) It had to be in plain sight; but because it was small and beige, the stove timer was hard to see, especially in Dr. Zajac’s living room, which, like the rest of the old house on Brattle Street, had been hastily—Hildred would say “tastelessly”—refurnished. (Hildred had taken all the good furniture with her.) The living room was cluttered with mismatched curtains and upholstery; it was as if three or four generations of Zajacs had lived and perished there, and nothing had ever been thrown away. The condition of the room made it fairly easy to hide an innocuous stove timer right out in the open. Rudy only occasionally found the timer within one minute, before the beeper would sound, and Zajac, even if he spotted the stove timer in ten seconds, would never locate the thing before the minute was up—much to his son’s delight. Hence Zajac feigned frustration while Rudy laughed. A breakthrough beyond the simple pleasure of the stove-timer game took both father and son by surprise. It was called reading—the truly inexhaustible pleasure of reading aloud—and the books that Dr. Zajac decided to read to Rudy were the two books Zajac himself had loved most as a child. They were Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web, both by E. B. White.

Rudy was so impressed by Wilbur, the pig in Charlotte’s Web, that he wanted to rename Medea and call her Wilbur instead.

“That’s a boy’s name,” Zajac pointed out, “and Medea is a girl. But I suppose it would be all right. You could rename her Charlotte, if you like—Charlotte is a girl’s name, you know.”

“But Charlotte dies,” Rudy argued. (The eponymous Charlotte is a spider.) “I’m already afraid that Medea will die.”