The Fourth Hand (25 page)

“What are you, a creep?” Crystal asked. “It’s a
breather
—I can hear him breathing!” Mrs. Pitney announced to the other women.

That was it, Wal ingford remembered. When he’d made love to her, Crystal had forewarned him that she had a rare respiratory condition. When she got out of breath and not enough oxygen went to her brain, she started seeing things and general y went a little crazy—an understatement, if there ever was one. Crystal had got out of breath in a hurry; before Wal ingford knew what was happening, she’d bitten his nose and burned his back with the bedside lamp.

Patrick had never met Mr. Pitney, Crystal’s husband, but he admired the man’s fortitude. (By the standards of the New York newsroom women, the Pitneys had had a long marriage.)

“You pervert!” Crystal yel ed. “If I could see you, I’d bite your face off!”

Patrick didn’t doubt this; he hung up before Crystal got out of breath. He immediately put on his bathing suit and a bathrobe and went to the swimming pool, where no one could phone him.

The only other person in the pool besides Wal ingford was a woman swimming laps. She wore a black bathing cap, which made her head resemble the head of a seal, and she was churning up the water with choppy strokes and a flutter kick. To Patrick, she manifested the mindless intensity of a windup toy. Finding it unsettling to share the swimming pool with her, Wal ingford retreated to the hot tub, where he could be alone. He did not turn on the whirlpool jets, preferring the water undisturbed. He gradual y grew accustomed to the heat, but no sooner had he found a comfortable position, which was halfway between sitting and floating, than the lap-swimming woman got out of the pool, turned on the timer for the jets, and joined him in the bubbling hot tub.

She was a woman past the young side of middle age.

Wal ingford quickly noted her unarousing body and politely looked away.

The woman, who was disarmingly without vanity, sat up in the roiling water so that her shoulders and upper chest were above the surface; she pul ed off her bathing cap and shook out her flattened hair. It was then that Patrick recognized her. She was the woman who’d cal ed him a

“carrion feeder” at breakfast—hounding him, with her burning eyes and noticeable breathing, al the way to the elevators. The woman could not now conceal her shock of recognition, which was simultaneous to his.

She was the first to speak. “This is awkward.” Her voice had a softer edge than what Wal ingford had heard in her attack on him at breakfast.

“I don’t want to antagonize you,” Patrick told the woman. “I’l just go to the swimming pool. I prefer the pool to the hot tub, anyway.” He rested the heel of his right hand on the underwater ledge and pushed himself to his feet. The stump of his left forearm emerged from the water like a raw, dripping wound. It was as if some creature below the hot tub’s surface had eaten his hand. The hot water had turned the scar tissue blood-red.

The woman stood up when he did. Her wet bathing suit was not flattering—her breasts drooped; her stomach protruded like a smal pouch. “Please stay a minute,”

the woman asked. “I want to explain.”

“You don’t need to apologize,” Patrick replied. “In general, I agree with you. It’s just that I didn’t understand the context. I didn’t come to Boston because JFK, Jr.’s plane was missing. I didn’t even
know
about his plane when you spoke to me. I came to see my doctor, because of my hand.” He instinctively lifted his stump, which he stil spoke of as a hand. He quickly lowered it to his side, where it trailed in the hot tub, because he saw that, inadvertently, he’d pointed with his missing hand to her sagging breasts.

She encircled his left forearm with both her hands, pul ing him into the churning hot tub with her. They sat beside each other on the underwater ledge, her hands holding him an inch or two above where he’d been dismembered. Only the lion had held him more firmly. Once again he had the sensation that the tips of his left middle and left index fingers were touching a woman’s lower abdomen, although he knew those fingers were gone.

“Please listen to me,” the woman said. She pul ed his maimed arm into her lap. He felt the end of his forearm tingle as his stump brushed the smal bulge of her stomach; his left elbow rested on her right thigh.

“Okay,” Wal ingford said, in lieu of grabbing the back of her neck in his right hand and forcing her head underwater.

Truly, short of half-drowning her in the hot tub, what else could he have done?

“I was married twice, the first time when I was very young,”

the woman began; her bright, excited eyes held his attention as firmly as she held his arm. “I lost them. The first one divorced me, the second died. I actual y loved them both.”

Christ! Wal ingford thought. Did every woman of a certain age have a version of Evelyn Arbuthnot’s story? “I’m sorry,”

Patrick said, but the way she squeezed his arm indicated that she didn’t want to be interrupted.

“I have two daughters, from my first marriage,” the woman went on. “Throughout their childhood and adolescence, I never slept. I was certain something terrible was going to happen to them, that I would lose them, or one of them. I was afraid al the time.”

It sounded like a true story. (Wal ingford couldn’t help judging the start of any story this way.)

“But they survived,” the woman said, as if most children didn’t. “They’re both married now and have children of their own. I have four grandchildren. Three girls, one boy. It kil s me not to see more of them than I do, but when I see them, I feel afraid for them. I start to worry again. I don’t sleep.”

Patrick felt the radiating twinges of mock pain where his left hand had been, but the woman had slightly relaxed her grip and there was an unanalyzed comfort in having his arm held so urgently in her lap, his stump pressing against the swel of her abdomen.

“Now I’m pregnant,” the woman told him; his forearm didn’t respond. “I’m fiftyone! I’m not supposed to get pregnant! I came to Boston to have an abortion—my doctor recommended it. But I cal ed the clinic from the hotel this morning. I lied. I said my car had broken down and I had to reschedule the appointment. They told me they can see me next Saturday, a week from today. That gives me more time to think about it.”

“Have you talked to your daughters?” Wal ingford asked.

Her lion’s grip on his arm was there again.

“They’d try to convince me to have the baby,” the woman replied, with renewed intensity. “They’d offer to raise the child with their children. But it would stil be mine. I couldn’t stop myself from loving it, I couldn’t help but be involved. Yet I simply can’t stand the fear. The mortality of children . . . it’s more than I can bear.”

“It’s your choice,” Patrick reminded her. “Whatever decision you make, I’m sure it wil be the right one.” The woman didn’t look so sure.

Wal ingford wondered who the unborn child’s father was; whether or not this thought was conveyed by the tremble in his left forearm, the woman either felt it or she read his mind.

“The father doesn’t know,” she said. “I don’t see him anymore. He was just a col eague.”

Patrick had never heard the word “col eague” used so dismissively.

“I don’t want my daughters to know I’m pregnant because I don’t want them to know I have sex,” the woman confessed.

“That’s also why I can’t make up my mind. I don’t think you should have an abortion because you’re trying to keep the fact that you’ve had sex a secret. That’s not a good enough reason.”

“Who’s to say what’s a ‘good enough’ reason if it’s
your
reason? It’s your choice,”

Wal ingford repeated. “It’s not a decision anyone else can or should make for you.”

“That’s not hugely comforting,” the woman told him. “I was al set to have the abortion until I saw you at breakfast. I don’t understand what you triggered.”

Wal ingford had known from the beginning that al this would end up being his fault. He made the most tentative effort to retrieve his arm from the woman’s grasp, but she was not about to let him go that easily.

“I don’t know what got into me when I spoke to you. I’ve never spoken to anyone like that in my life!” the woman continued. “I shouldn’t blame you, personal y, for what the media does, or what I think they do. I was just so upset to hear about John junior, and I was even more upset by my first reaction. When I heard about his plane being lost, do you know what I thought?”

“No.” Patrick shook his head; the hot water was making his forehead perspire, and he could see beads of sweat on the woman’s upper lip.

“I was glad his mother was dead . . . that she didn’t have to go through this. I was sorry for him, but I was glad for her that she was dead. Isn’t that awful?”

“It’s perfectly understandable,” Wal ingford replied. “You’re a mother . . .” His instinct just to pat her on the knee, underwater, was sincere—that is, heartfelt without being in the least sexual. But because the instinct traveled down his left arm, there was no hand to pat her knee with.

Unintentional y, he jerked his stump away from her; he’d felt the invisible crawling insects again. For a pregnant fiftyone-year-old mother of two and a pregnant grandmother of four, the woman was undaunted by Wal ingford’s uncontrol able gesture. She calmly reached for his handless arm again. To Patrick’s surprise, he wil ingly put his stump back in her lap. The woman took hold of his forearm without reproach, as if she’d only momentarily misplaced a cherished possession.

“I apologize for attacking you in public,” she said sincerely.

“It was uncal ed for. I’m simply not myself.” She gripped his forearm so tightly that an impossible pain was registered in Wal ingford’s missing left thumb. He flinched. “Oh, God! I’ve hurt you!” the woman cried, letting go of his arm. “And I haven’t even asked you what your doctor said!”

“I’m okay,” Patrick said. “It’s principal y the nerves that were regenerated when the new hand was attached. Those nerves are acting up. My doctor thought my love life was the problem, or just stress.”

“Your love life,” the woman repeated flatly, as if that were not a subject she cared to address. Wal ingford didn’t want to address it, either. “But why are you stil here?” she suddenly asked.

Patrick thought she meant the hot tub. He was about to say that he was there because she’d
held
him there! Then he realized that she meant why hadn’t he gone back to New York. Or, if not New York, shouldn’t he be in Hyannisport or Martha’s Vineyard?

Wal ingford dreaded tel ing her that he was stal ing his inevitable

return

to

his

questionable

profession

(“questionable” given the Kennedy spectacle, to which he would soon be contributing); yet he admitted this to the woman, however reluctantly, and further told her that he’d intended to walk to Harvard Square to pick up a couple of books that his doctor had recommended. He’d considered that he might spend what remained of the weekend reading them.

“But I was afraid someone in Harvard Square would recognize me and say something to me along the lines of what you said to me at breakfast.” Patrick added: “It wouldn’t have been undeserved.”

“Oh, God!” the woman said again. “Tel me what the books are. I’l go get them for you. No one ever recognizes
me.
”

“That’s very kind of you, but—”

“
Please
let me get the books for you! It would make me feel better!” She laughed nervously, pushing her damp hair away from her forehead.

Wal ingford sheepishly told her the titles.

“Your
doctor
recommended them? Do you have children?”

“There’s a little boy who’s like a son to me, or I want him to be more like a son to me,” Patrick explained. “But he’s too young for me to read him
Stuart Little
or
Charlotte’s Web.
I just want them so that I can imagine reading them to him in a few years.”

“I read
Charlotte’s Web
to my grandson only a few weeks ago,” the woman told him. “I cried al over again—I cry every time.”

“I don’t remember the book very wel , just my mother crying,” Wal ingford admitted.

“My name is Sarah

Wil iams.”

There

was

an

uncharacteristic hesitation in her voice when she said her name and held out her hand.

Patrick shook her hand, both their hands touching the foamy bubbles in the hot tub. At that moment, the whirlpool jets shut off and the water in the tub was instantly clear and stil . It was a little startling and too obvious an omen, which elicited more nervous laughter from Sarah Wil iams, who stood up and stepped out of the tub.

Wal ingford admired that way women have of getting out of the water in a wet bathing suit, a thumb or a finger automatical y pul ing down the back of the suit. When she stood, her smal bel y looked almost flat—it was swol en ever so slightly. From his memory of Mrs. Clausen’s pregnancy, Wal ingford guessed that Sarah Wil iams couldn’t have been more than two, at the most three, months pregnant. If she hadn’t told him she was carrying a child, he would never have guessed. And maybe the pouch was always there, even when she wasn’t pregnant.

“I’l bring the books to your room.” Sarah was wrapping herself up in a towel.

“What’s your room number?”

He told her, grateful for the occasion to prolong his procrastination, but while he was waiting for her to bring him the children’s books, he would stil have to decide whether to go back to New York that night or not until Sunday morning. Maybe Mary wouldn’t have found him yet; that would buy Patrick a little more time. He might even discover that he had the wil power to delay turning the TV