The Fourth Hand (24 page)

“Jackal!” cried an elderly man at an adjacent table.

The woman, Patrick’s first attacker, said to his back:

“Vulture . . . carrion feeder . .

.”

Wal ingford kept walking, but he could sense that the woman was fol owing him; she accompanied him to the elevators, where he pushed the button and waited. He could hear her breathing, but he didn’t look at her. When the elevator door opened, he stepped inside and al owed the door to close behind his back. Until he pushed the button for his floor and turned to face her, he didn’t know that the woman was not there; he was surprised to find himself alone.

It must be Cambridge, Patrick thought—al those Harvard and M.I.T. intel ectuals who loathed the crassness of the media. He brushed his teeth, right-handed, of course. He was ever-conscious of how he’d been learning to brush his teeth with his left hand when it had just up and died. Stil clueless about the breaking news, he rode the elevator down to the lobby and took a taxi to Dr. Zajac’s office. It was deeply disconcerting to Patrick that Dr. Zajac—

specifical y, his face—smel ed of sex. This evidence of a private life was not what Wal ingford wanted to know about his hand surgeon, even while Zajac was reassuring him that there was nothing wrong with the sensations he was experiencing in the stump of his left forearm.

It turned out there was a word for the feeling that smal , unseen insects were crawling over or under his skin.

“Formication,” Dr. Zajac said. Natural y Wal ingford misheard him. “Excuse me?” he asked.

“It means ‘tactile hal ucination.’
Formication,
” the doctor repeated, “with an
m.
”

“Oh.”

“Think of nerves as having long memories,” Zajac told him.

“What’s triggering those nerves isn’t your missing hand. I mentioned your love life because
you
once mentioned it.

As for stress, I can only imagine what a week you have ahead of you. I don’t envy you the next few days. You know what I mean.”

Wal ingford
didn’t
know what Dr. Zajac meant. What did the doctor imagine of the week Wal ingford had ahead of him?

But Zajac had always struck Wal ingford as a little crazy.

Maybe everyone in Cambridge was crazy, Patrick considered.

“It’s true, I’m a little unhappy in the love-life department,”

Wal ingford confessed, but there he paused—he had no memory of discussing his love life with Zajac. (Had the painkil ers been more potent than he’d thought at the time?) Wal ingford was further confused by trying to decide what was different about Dr. Zajac’s office. After al , that office was sacred ground; yet it had seemed a very different place when Mrs. Clausen was having her way with him in the exact chair in which he now sat, scanning the surrounding wal s.

Of course! The photographs of Zajac’s famous patients—

they were gone! In their place were children’s drawings.

One child’s drawings, actual y—they were al Rudy’s.

Castles in heaven, Patrick would have guessed, and there were several of a large, sinking ship; doubtless the young artist had seen
Titanic.
(Both Rudy and Dr. Zajac had seen the movie twice, although Zajac had made Rudy shut his eyes during the sex scene in the car.)

As for the model in the series of photos of an increasingly pregnant young woman

. . . wel , not surprisingly, Wal ingford felt drawn to her coarse sexuality. She must have been Irma, the self-described
M rs.
Zajac, who’d spoken to Patrick on the phone. Wal ingford learned that Irma was expecting twins only when he inquired about the empty picture frames that were hanging from the wal s in half a dozen places, always in twos.

“They’re for the twins, after they’re born,” Zajac told Patrick proudly. No one at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink, Zajac & Associates envied Zajac having twins, although that moron Mengerink opined that twins were what Zajac deserved for fucking Irma twice as much as Mengerink believed was “normal.”

Schatzman had no opinion of the upcoming birth of Dr.

Zajac’s twins, because Schatzman was more than retired—

Schatzman had died. And Gingeleskie (the living one) had shifted his envy of Zajac to a more virulent envy of a younger col eague, someone Dr. Zajac had brought into the surgical association. Nathan Blaustein had been Zajac’s best student in clinical surgery at Harvard. Dr. Zajac didn’t envy young Blaustein at al . Zajac simply recognized Blaustein as his technical superior—“a physical genius.”

When a ten-year-old in New Hampshire had lopped off his thumb in a snow blower, Dr. Zajac had insisted that Blaustein perform the reattachment surgery. The thumb was a mess, and it had been unevenly frozen. The boy’s father had needed almost an hour to find the severed thumb in the snow; then the family had to drive two hours to Boston. But the surgery had been a success. Zajac was already lobbying his col eagues to have Blaustein’s name added to the office nameplate and letterhead—a request that caused Mengerink to seethe with resentment, and no doubt made Schatzman and Gingeleskie (the dead one) rol in their graves.

As for Dr. Zajac’s ambitions in hand-transplant surgery, Blaustein was now in charge of such procedures. (There would soon be many procedures of that kind, Zajac had predicted.) While Zajac said he would be happy to be part of the team, he believed young Blaustein should head the operation because Blaustein was now the best surgeon among them. No envy or resentment there. Quite unexpectedly, even to himself, Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac was a happy, relaxed man. Ever since Wal ingford had lost Otto Clausen’s hand, Zajac had contented himself with his inventions of prosthetic devices, which he designed and assembled on his kitchen table while listening to his songbirds. Patrick Wal ingford was the perfect guinea pig for Zajac’s inventions, because he was wil ing to model any new prosthesis on his evening newscast—even though he chose not to wear a prosthesis himself. The publicity had been good for the doctor. A prosthesis of his invention—it was

predictably

cal ed

“The

Zajac”—was

now

manufactured in Germany and Japan. (The German model was marginal y more expensive, but both were marketed worldwide.) The success of “The Zajac” had permitted Dr.

Zajac to reduce his surgical practice to half-time. He stil taught at the medical school, but he could devote more of himself to his inventions, and to Rudy and Irma and (soon) the twins.

“You should have children,” Zajac was tel ing Patrick Wal ingford, as the doctor turned out the lights in his office and the two men awkwardly bumped into each other in the dark. “Children change your life.”

Wal ingford hesitantly mentioned how much he wanted to construct a relationship with Otto junior. Did Dr. Zajac have any advice about the best way to connect with a young child, especial y a child one saw infrequently?

“Reading aloud,” Dr. Zajac replied. “There’s nothing like it.

Begin with
Stuart
Little,
then try
Charlotte’s Web.
”

“I remember those books!” Patrick cried. “I loved
Stuart
Little,
and I can remember my mother weeping when she read me
Charlotte’s Web.
”

“People who read
Charlotte’s Web
without weeping should be lobotomized,” Zajac responded. “But how old is little Otto?”

“Eight months,” Wal ingford answered.

“Oh, no, he’s just started to crawl,” Dr. Zajac said. “Wait until he’s six or seven—I mean
years
. By the time he’s eight or nine, he’l be reading
Stuart Little
and
Charlotte’s
Web
to himself, but he’l be old enough to listen to those stories when he’s younger.”

“Six or seven,” Patrick repeated. How could he wait that long to establish a relationship with Otto junior?

After Zajac locked his office, he and Patrick rode the elevator down to the ground floor. The doctor offered to drive his patient back to the Charles Hotel since it was on his way home, and Wal ingford gladly accepted. It was on the car radio that the famous TV journalist final y learned of Kennedy’s missing plane. By now it was mostly old news to everyone but Wal ingford. JFK, Jr., was, together with his wife and sister-in-law, lost at sea, presumed dead. Young Kennedy, a relatively new pilot, had been flying the plane.

There was mention of the haze over Martha’s Vineyard the previous night. Luggage tags had been found; later would come the luggage, then the debris from the plane itself.

“I guess it would be better if the bodies were found,” Zajac remarked. “I mean better than the speculation if they’re never found.”

It was the speculation that Wal ingford foresaw, regardless of finding or not finding the bodies. There would be at least a week of it. The coming week was the week Patrick had almost chosen for his vacation; now he wished he
had
chosen it. (He’d decided to ask for a week in the fal instead, preferably when the Green Bay Packers had a home game at Lambeau Field.)

Wal ingford went back to the Charles like a man condemned. He knew what the news, which was
not
the news, would be al the next week; it was everything that was most hateful in Patrick’s profession, and he would be part of it. The
grief
channel, the woman at breakfast had said, but the deliberate stimulation of public mourning was hardly unique to the network where Wal ingford worked. The overattention to death had become as commonplace on television as the coverage of bad weather; death and bad weather were what TV did best. Whether they found the bodies or not, or regardless of how long it might take to find them—with or without what countless journalists would cal

“closure”—there would
be
no closure. Not until every Kennedy moment in recent history had been relived. Nor was the invasion of the Kennedy family’s privacy the ugliest aspect of it. From Patrick’s point of view, the principal evil was that it wasn’t news—it was recycled melodrama.

Patrick’s hotel room at the Charles was as silent and cool as a crypt; he lay on the bed trying to anticipate the worst before turning on the TV. Wal ingford was thinking about JFK, Jr.’s older sister, Caroline. Patrick had always admired her for remaining aloof from the press. The summer house Wal ingford was renting in Bridgehampton was near Sagaponack, where Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg was spending the summer with her husband and children. She had a plain but elegant kind of beauty; although she would be under intense media scrutiny now, Patrick believed that she would manage to keep her dignity intact. In his room at the Charles, Wal ingford felt too sick to his stomach to turn the TV

on. If he went back to New York, not only would he have to answer the messages on his answering machine, but his phone would never stop ringing. If he stayed in his room at the Charles, he would eventual y have to watch television, even though he already knew what he would see—his fel ow journalists, our selfappointed moral arbiters, looking their most earnest and sounding their most sincere.

They would already have descended on Hyannisport. There would be a hedge, that ever-predictable barrier of privet, in the background of the frame. Behind the hedge, only the upstairs windows of the bril iantly white house would be visible. (They would be dormer windows, with their curtains drawn.) Yet, somehow, the journalist standing in the foreground of the shot would manage to look as if he or she had been invited.

Natural y there would be an analysis of the smal plane’s disappearance from the radar screen, and some sober commentary on the pilot’s presumed error. Many of Patrick’s fel ow journalists would not pass up the opportunity to condemn JFK, Jr.’s judgment; indeed, the judgment of
all
Kennedys would be questioned. The issue of “genetic restlessness” among the male members of the family would surely be raised. And much later—say, near the end of the fol owing week—some of these same journalists would declare that the coverage had been excessive. They would then cal for a halt to the process.

That was always the way. Wal ingford wondered how long it would take for someone in the New York newsroom to ask Mary where he was. Or was Mary herself trying to reach him? She knew he was seeing his hand surgeon; at the time of the procedure, Zajac’s name had been in the news.

As he lay immobilized on the bed in the cool room, Patrick found it strange that someone from the al -news network hadn’t already cal ed him at the Charles. Maybe Mary was also out of reach. On an impulse, Wal ingford picked up the phone and dialed the number at his summer house in Bridgehampton. A hysterical-sounding woman answered the phone. It was Crystal Pitney—that was her married name. Patrick couldn’t remember what Crystal’s last name had been when he’d slept with her. He recal ed that there was something unusual about her lovemaking, but he couldn’t think what it was.

“Patrick Wal ingford is not here!” Crystal shouted in lieu of the usual hel o. “No one here knows where he is!”

In the background, Patrick heard the television; the familiar, self-serious droning was punctuated by occasional outbursts from the newsroom women.

“Hel o?” Crystal Pitney said into the phone. Wal ingford hadn’t said a word.