The Fourth Hand (23 page)

Irma answered the phone. “Yeah, what is it?” she said.

Wal ingford contemplated the remote possibility that Dr.

Zajac had an unruly teenage daughter. He knew only that Zajac had a younger child, a six-or sevenyear-old boy—like Matthew David Scott’s son. In his mind’s eye, Patrick was forever seeing that unknown little boy in a basebal jersey, his hands raised like his father’s—both of them celebrating that victory pitch in Philadelphia. (A “victory pitch” was how someone in the media had described it.)

“Yeah?”
Irma said again. Was she a surly, oversexed babysitter for Zajac’s little boy? Perhaps she was the housekeeper, except she sounded too coarse to be Dr.

Zajac’s housekeeper.

Zajac’s housekeeper.

“Is Dr. Zajac there?” Wal ingford asked.

“This is
Mrs.
Zajac,” Irma answered. “Who wants him?”

“This is Patrick Wal ingford. Dr. Zajac operated on—”

“Nicky!” Patrick heard Irma yel , although she’d partly covered the mouthpiece of the phone with her hand. “It’s the lion guy!”

Wal ingford could identify some of the background noise: almost certainly a child, definitely a dog, and the unmistakable thudding of a bal . There was the scrape of a chair and the scrambling sound of the dog’s claws slipping on a wood floor. It must have been some kind of game.

Were they trying to keep the bal away from the dog? Zajac, out of breath, final y came to the phone.

When Wal ingford finished describing his symptoms, he added hopeful y, “Maybe it’s just the weather.”

“The weather?” Zajac asked.

“You know—the heat wave,” Patrick explained.

“Aren’t you indoors most of the time?” Zajac asked. “Don’t they have airconditioning in New York?”

“It’s not always pain,” Wal ingford went on. “Sometimes the sensation is like the start of something that doesn’t go anywhere. I mean you think the twinge or the prickle is going to lead to pain, but it doesn’t—it just stops as soon as it starts. Like something interrupted . . . something electrical.”

“Precisely,” Dr. Zajac told him. What did Wal ingford expect? Zajac reminded him that, only five months after the attachment surgery, he’d regained twenty-two centimeters of nerve regeneration.

“I remember,” Patrick replied.

“Wel , look at it this way,” Zajac said. “Those nerves stil have something to say.”

“But why
now
?” Wal ingford asked him. “It’s been half a year since I lost it. I’ve felt something before, but nothing this
specific.
I actual y feel like I’m
touching
something with my left middle finger or my left index finger, and I don’t even have a left
hand
!”

“What’s going on in the rest of your life?” Dr. Zajac responded. “I assume there’s some stress attached to your line of work? I don’t know how your love life is progressing, o r
if
it’s progressing, but I remember that your love life seemed to be a matter of some concern to you—or so you said. Just remember, there are other factors affecting nerves, including nerves that have been cut off.”

“They don’t feel ‘cut off’—that’s what I mean,” Wal ingford told him.

“That’s what
I
mean,” Zajac replied. “What you’re feeling is known medical y as

‘paresthesia’—a wrong sensation, beyond perception. The nerve that used to make you feel pain or touch in your left middle finger, or in your left index finger, has been severed twice—first by a lion and then by me! That cut fiber is stil sitting somewhere in the stump of your nerve bundle, accompanied by mil ions of other fibers coming from and going everywhere. If that neuron is stimulated at the tip of your nerve stump—by touch, by memory, by a
dream
—it sends the same old message it always did. The feelings that seem to come from where your left hand used to be are being registered by the same nerve fibers and pathways that
used to
come from your left hand. Do you get it?”

“Sort of,” Wal ingford replied. (“Not real y,” was what he should have said.) Patrick kept looking at his stump—the invisible ants were crawling there again. He’d forgotten to mention the sensation of crawling insects to Dr. Zajac, but the doctor didn’t give him time.

Dr. Zajac could tel that his patient wasn’t satisfied. “Look,”

Zajac continued, “if you’re worried about it, fly up here. Stay in a nice hotel. I’l see you in the morning.”

“Saturday morning?” Patrick said. “I don’t want to ruin your weekend.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Dr. Zajac told him. “I’l just have to find someone to unlock the building. I’ve done that before. I have my own keys to the office.”

Wal ingford wasn’t real y worried about his missing hand anymore, but what else was he going to do this weekend?

“Come on—take the shuttle up here,” Zajac was tel ing him.

“I’l see you in the morning, just to put your mind at ease.”

“At what time?” Wal ingford asked.

“Ten o’clock,” Zajac told him. “Stay at the Charles—it’s in Cambridge, on Bennett Street, near Harvard Square. They have a great gym, and a pool.”

Wal ingford acquiesced. “Okay. I’l see if I can get a reservation.”

“I’l get you a reservation,” Zajac said. “They know me, and Irma has a membership at their health club.” Irma, Wal ingford deduced, must be the wife—she of the less-than-golden tongue.

“Thank you,” was al that Wal ingford could say. In the background, he could hear the happy shrieks of Dr. Zajac’s son, the growls and romping of the savagesounding dog, the bouncing of the hard, heavy bal .

“Not on my stomach!” Irma shouted. Patrick heard that, too.

N o t
what
on her stomach? Wal ingford had no way of knowing that Irma was pregnant, much less that she was expecting twins; while she wasn’t due until mid-September, she was already as big around as the largest of the songbirds’ cages. Obviously, she didn’t want a child or a dog jumping on her stomach.

Patrick said good night to the gang in the newsroom; he’d never been the last of the evening-news people to leave.

Nor would he be tonight, for there was Mary waiting for him by the elevators. What she’d overheard of his telephone conversation had misled her. Her face was bathed in tears.

“Who is she?” Mary asked him.

“Who’s
who
?” Wal ingford said.

“She must be married, if you’re seeing her on a Saturday morning.”

“Mary, please—”

“Whose weekend are you afraid of ruining?” she asked.

“Isn’t that how you put it?”

“Mary, I’m going to Boston to see my hand surgeon.”

“Alone?”

“Yes, alone.”

“Take me with you,” Mary said. “If you’re alone, why not take me? How much time can you spend with your hand surgeon, anyway? You can spend the rest of the weekend with me!”

He took a chance, a big one, and told her the truth. “Mary, I can’t take you. I don’t want you to have my baby because I already
have
a baby, and I don’t get to see enough of him. I don’t want another baby that I don’t get to see enough of.”

“Oh,” she said, as if he’d hit her. “I see. That was clarifying.

You’re not always clear, Pat. I appreciate you being so clear.”

“I’m sorry, Mary.”

“It’s the Clausen kid, isn’t it? I mean he’s actual y yours. Is that it, Pat?”

“Yes,” Patrick replied. “But it’s not news, Mary. Please, let’s not make it news.”

He could see she was angry. The air-conditioning was cool, even cold, but Mary was suddenly colder. “Who do you think I am?” she growled. “What do you take me for?”

“One of us,” was al Wal ingford could say.

As the elevator door closed, he could see her pacing; her arms were folded across her smal , shapely breasts. She wore a summery, tan-colored skirt and a peachcolored cardigan, buttoned at her throat but otherwise open down the front—“an anti-air-conditioning sweater,” he’d heard one of the newsroom women cal such cardigans. Mary wore the sweater over a white silk T-shirt. She had a long neck, a nice figure, smooth skin, and Patrick especial y liked her mouth, which had a way of making him question his principle of not sleeping with her. At La Guardia, he was put on standby for the first available shuttle to Boston; there was a seat for him on the second flight. It was growing dark as his plane landed at Logan, and there was a little fog or light haze over Boston Harbor. Patrick would think about this later, recal ing that his flight landed in Boston about the same time John F. Kennedy, Jr., was trying to land his plane at the airport in Martha’s Vineyard, not very far away.

Or else young Kennedy was trying to
see
Martha’s Vineyard through that same indeterminate light, in something similar to that haze.

Wal ingford checked into the Charles before ten and went immediately to the indoor swimming pool, where he spent a restorative half hour by himself. He would have stayed longer, but they closed the pool at ten-thirty. Wal ingford—

with his one hand—enjoyed floating and treading water. In keeping with his personality, he was a good floater.

He’d planned to get dressed and walk around Harvard Square after his swim. Summer school was in session; there would be students to look at, to remind him of his misspent youth. He could probably find a place to have a decent dinner with a good bottle of wine. In one of the bookstores on the square, he might spot something more gripping to read than the book he’d brought with him, which was a biography of Byron the size of a cinder block. But even in the taxi from the airport, Wal ingford had felt the oppressive heat getting to him; and when he went back to his room from the pool, he took off his wet bathing suit and lay down naked on the bed and closed his eyes for a minute or two. He must have been tired. When he woke up almost an hour later, the air-conditioning had chil ed him.

He put on a bathrobe and read the room-service menu. Al he wanted was a beer and a hamburger—he no longer felt like going out.

True to himself, he would not turn on a television on the weekend. Given that the only alternative was the Byron biography, Patrick’s resistance to the TV was al the more remarkable. But Wal ingford fel asleep so quickly—Byron had barely been born, and the wee poet’s feckless father was stil alive—that the biography caused him no pain at al .

In the morning, he ate breakfast in the casual restaurant in the downstairs of the hotel. The dining room irritated him without his knowing why. It wasn’t the children. Maybe there were too many grown-ups who seemed bothered by the very presence of children.

The previous night and this morning, while Wal ingford was not watching television or even so much as glancing at a newspaper, the nation had been reliving one of TV’s notthe-news images. JFK, Jr.’s plane was missing; it appeared that he had flown into the ocean. But there was nothing to see—hence what was shown on television, again and again, was that image of young Kennedy at his father’s funeral procession. There was John junior, a three-year-old boy in shorts saluting his father’s passing casket—exactly as his mother, whispering in the little boy’s ear, had instructed him to do only seconds before. What Wal ingford would later consider was that this image might stand as the representative moment of our country’s most golden century, which has also died, although we are stil marketing it.

His breakfast finished, Patrick sat at his table, trying to finish his coffee without returning the relentless stare of a middle-aged woman across the room. But she now made her way toward him. Her path was deliberate; while she pretended to be only passing by, Wal ingford knew she was going to say something to him. He could always tel . Often he could guess what the women were going to say, but not this time.

Her face had been pretty once. She wore no makeup, and her undyed brown hair was turning gray. In the crow’s-feet at the corners of her dark-brown eyes there was something sad and tired that reminded Patrick of Mrs. Clausen grown older.

“Scum . . . despicable swine . . . how do you sleep at night?” the woman asked him in a harsh whisper; her teeth were clenched, her lips parted no wider than was necessary for her to spit out her words.

“Pardon me?” said Patrick Wal ingford.

“It didn’t take you long to get here, did it?” she asked.

“Those poor families . . . the bodies not even recovered.

But that doesn’t stop you, does it? You thrive on other people’s misfortune. You ought to cal yourself the
death
network—no, the
grief
channel! Because you do more than invade people’s privacy—you steal their grief! You make their private grief public before they even have a chance to grieve!”

Wal ingford wrongly assumed that she was speaking generical y of his TV

newscasts past. He looked away from the woman’s entrenched stare, but among his fel ow breakfast-eaters, he saw that no assistance would be forthcoming; from their unanimously hostile expressions, they appeared to share the demented woman’s view.

“I try to report what’s happened with sympathy,” Patrick began, but the nearviolent woman cut him off.

“Sympathy!” she cried. “If you had an ounce of sympathy for those poor people, you’d leave them alone!”

Since the woman was clearly deranged, what could Wal ingford do? He pinned his bil to the table with the stump of his left forearm, quickly adding a tip and his room number before signing his name. The woman watched him coldly. Patrick stood up from the table. As he nodded good-bye to the woman and started to leave the restaurant, he was aware of the children gaping at his missing hand. An angry-looking sous-chef, al in white, stood glaring at Wal ingford from behind a counter. “Hyena,” the sous-chef said.