by John Irving
The second, Matthew David Scott of Absecon, New Jersey, is the only successful recipient of a new hand whom Wallingford would admit to envying in an interesting way. It was never Mr. Scott's new hand that Patrick Wallingford envied. But in the media coverage of that Phillies game, where the fireworks guy threw out the first ball, Wallingford noted that Matthew David Scott had his son with him. What Patrick envied Mr. Scott was his son.
He'd had premonitions of what he would call the "fatherhood feeling" when he was still recovering from losing Otto senior's hand. The painkillers were nothing special, but they may have been what prompted Patrick to watch his first Super Bowl. Of course he didn't know how to watch a Super Bowl. You're not supposed to watch a game like that alone.
He kept wanting to call Mrs. Clausen and ask her to explain what was happening in the game, but Super Bowl XXXIII was the symbolic anniversary of Otto Clausen's accident (or suicide) in his beer truck; furthermore, the Packers weren't playing. Therefore, Doris had told Patrick that she intended to lock herself away from sight or sound of the game. He would be on his own.
Wallingford drank a beer or two, but what people liked about watching football eluded him. To be fair, it was a bad matchup; while the Broncos won their second straight Super Bowl, and their fans were no doubt delighted, it was not a close or even a competitive game. The Atlanta Falcons had no business being in the Super Bowl in the first place. (At least that was the opinion of everyone Wallingford would later talk to in Green Bay.)
Yet, even distractedly watching the Super Bowl, Patrick for the first time could imagine going to a Packer home game at Lambeau Field with Doris and Otto junior. Or just with little Otto, maybe when the boy was a bit older. The idea had surprised him, but that was January 1999. By April of that year, when Wallingford watched Matthew David Scott and his son at the Phillies game, the thought was no longer surprising; he'd had a couple more months of missing Otto junior and the boy's mother. Even if it was true that he'd lost Mrs. Clausen, Wallingford rightly feared that if he didn't make an effort to see more of little Otto now--meaning the summer of '99, when Otto junior was still only eight months old (he wasn't quite crawling)--there would simply be no relationship to build on when the boy was older.
The one person in New York to whom Wallingford confided his fears of the missed opportunity of fatherhood was Mary. Boy, was she a bad choice for a confidante! When Patrick said that he longed to be "more like a father" to Otto junior, Mary reminded him that he could knock her up anytime he felt like it and become the father of a child living in New York.
"You don't have to go to Green Bay, Wisconsin, to be a father, Pat," Mary told him.
How she'd gone from being such a nice girl to expressing her one-note wish to have Wallingford's seed was not a credit to the other women in the New York newsroom, or so Patrick believed. He continued to overlook the fact that men had been a far greater influence on Mary. She'd had problems with men, or at least she thought she had. (Same difference.)
Every weeknight, when he concluded his telecast, Wallingford never knew if they were watching when he said, "Good night, Doris. Good night, my little Otto." Mrs. Clausen had not once called to say she'd seen the evening news.
It was July 1999. There was a heat wave in New York. It was a Friday. Most summer weekends, Wallingford went to Bridgehampton, where he'd rented a house. Except for the swimming pool--Patrick made a point of not swimming in the ocean with one hand--it was really like staying in the city. He saw all the same people at the same kinds of parties, which, in fact, was what Wallingford and a lot of other New Yorkers liked about being out there.
That weekend, friends had invited him to the Cape; he was supposed to fly to Martha's Vineyard. But even before he felt a slight prickling where his hand had been detached--some of the twinges seemed to extend to the empty space where his left hand used to be--he'd phoned his friends and canceled the trip with some bullshit excuse.
At the time, he didn't know how lucky he was, not to be flying to Martha's Vineyard that Friday night. Then he remembered that he'd lent his house in Bridgehampton for the weekend. A bunch of the New York newsroom women were having a weekend-long baby shower there. Or an orgy, Patrick cynically imagined. He passingly wondered if Mary would be there. (That was the old Patrick Wallingford wondering.) But Patrick didn't ask Mary if she was one of the women using his summer house that weekend. If he'd asked, she would have known he was free and offered to change her plans.
Wallingford was still undervaluing how sensitive and vulnerable women who have struggled to have a child were; a weekend-long baby shower for someone else would not likely have been Mary's choice.
So he was in New York on a Friday in mid-July with no weekend plans and nowhere to go. As he sat in makeup for the Friday-evening news, he thought of calling Mrs. Clausen. He had never invited himself to Green Bay; he'd always waited to be invited. Yet both Doris and Patrick were aware that the intervals between her invitations had grown longer. (The last time he'd been in Wisconsin, there was still snow on the ground.)
What if Wallingford simply called her and said, "Hi! What are you and little Otto doing this weekend? How about I come to Green Bay?" Remarkably, without second-guessing himself, he just did it; he called her out of the blue.
"Hello," said her voice on the answering machine. "Little Otto and I are up north for the weekend. No phone. Back Monday."
He didn't leave a message, but he did leave some makeup on the mouthpiece of the phone. He was so distracted by hearing Mrs. Clausen's voice on the answering machine, and even more distracted by that half-imagined, half-dreamed image of her at the cottage on the lake, that without thinking he attempted to wipe the makeup off the mouthpiece with his left hand. He was surprised when the stump of his left forearm made contact with the phone--that was the first twinge.
When he hung up, the prickling sensations continued. He kept looking at his stump, expecting to see ants, or some other small insects, crawling over the scar tissue. But there was nothing there. He knew there couldn't be bugs under the scar tissue, yet he felt them all through the telecast.
Later Mary would remark that there'd been something listless in the delivery of his usually cheerful good-night wishes to Doris and little Otto, but Wallingford knew that they couldn't have been watching. There was no electricity at the cottage on the lake--Mrs. Clausen had told him that. (For the most part, she seemed unwilling to talk about the place up north, and when she did talk about it, her voice was shy and hard to hear.)
The prickling sensations continued while Patrick had his makeup removed; his skin crawled. Because he was thinking about something Dr. Zajac had said to him, Wallingford was only vaguely mindful that the regular makeup girl was on vacation. He supposed she had a crush on him--he'd not yet been tempted. He thought it was the way she chewed her gum that he missed. Only now, in her absence, did he fleetingly imagine her in a new way--naked. But the supernatural twinges in his nonhand kept distracting him, as did his memory of Zajac's blunt advice.
"Don't mess around if you ever think you need me." Therefore, Patrick didn't mess around. He called Zajac at home, although he assumed that Boston's most renowned hand surgeon would be spending his summer weekends out of town.
Actually, Dr. Zajac had rented a place in Maine that summer, but only for the month of August, when he would have custody of Rudy. Medea, now more often called Pal, would eat a ton of raw clams and mussels, shells and all; but the dog had seemingly outgrown a taste for her own turds, and Rudy and Zajac played lacrosse with a lacrosse ball. The boy had even attended a lacrosse clinic in the first week of July. Rudy was with Zajac for the weekend, in Cambridge, when Wallingford called.
Irma answered the phone. "Yeah, what is it?" she said.
Wallingford contemplated the remote possibility that Dr. Zajac had an unruly teenage daughter. He knew only that Zajac had a younger child, a six-or seven-year-old boy--like Matthew David Scott's son. In his mind's eye, Patrick was forever seeing that unknown little
boy in a baseball 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.
"Is Dr. Zajac there?" Wallingford asked.
"This is Mrs. Zajac," Irma answered. "Who wants him?"
"This is Patrick Wallingford. Dr. Zajac operated on--"
"Nicky!" Patrick heard Irma yell, although she'd partly covered the mouthpiece of the phone with her hand. "It's the lion guy!"
Wallingford could identify some of the background noise: almost certainly a child, definitely a dog, and the unmistakable thudding of a ball. 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 ball away from the dog? Zajac, out of breath, finally came to the phone.
When Wallingford finished describing his symptoms, he added hopefully, "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 air-conditioning in New York?"
"It's not always pain," Wallingford 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 Wallingford 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.
"Well, look at it this way," Zajac said. "Those nerves still have something to say."
"But why now?" Wallingford asked him. "It's been half a year since I lost it. I've felt something before, but nothing this specific. I actually 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, or 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," Wallingford told him.
"That's what I mean," Zajac replied. "What you're feeling is known medically 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 still sitting somewhere in the stump of your nerve bundle, accompanied by millions 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," Wallingford replied. ("Not really," 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 tell that his patient wasn't satisfied. "Look," Zajac continued, "if you're worried about it, fly up here. Stay in a nice hotel. I'll 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'll just have to find someone to unlock the building. I've done that before. I have my own keys to the office."
Wallingford wasn't really 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 telling him. "I'll see you in the morning, just to put your mind at ease."
"At what time?" Wallingford 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."
Wallingford acquiesced. "Okay. I'll see if I can get a reservation."
"I'll get you a reservation," Zajac said. "They know me, and Irma has a membership at their health club." Irma, Wallingford deduced, must be the wife--she of the less-than-golden tongue.
"Thank you," was all that Wallingford could say. In the background, he could hear the happy shrieks of Dr. Zajac's son, the growls and romping of the savage-sounding dog, the bouncing of the hard, heavy ball.
"Not on my stomach!" Irma shouted. Patrick heard that, too. Not what on her stomach? Wallingford 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?" Wallingford 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 actually 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 all Wallingford could say.
As the elevator door closed, he could see her pacing; her arms were folded across her small, shapely breasts. She wore a summery, tan-colored skirt and a peach-colored cardigan, buttoned at her throat but otherwise open down the front--"an anti-air-conditioning sweater," he'd heard one of the newsroom women call such cardigans. Mary wore the sweater over a white silk T-shirt. She had a long neck, a nice figure, smooth skin, and Patrick especially 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, recalling 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.
Wallingford checked into the Charle
s 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. Wallingford--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, Wallingford 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 chilled him. He put on a bathrobe and read the room-service menu. All 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 all the more remarkable. But Wallingford fell asleep so quickly--Byron had barely been born, and the wee poet's feckless father was still alive--that the biography caused him no pain at all.
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 Wallingford was not watching television or even so much as glancing at a newspaper, the nation had been reliving one of TV's not-the-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 Wallingford 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 still marketing it.
