The Fourth Hand

by John Irving

  Who was he kidding? If you have a baby with someone, of course you're going to be dicked around! And he had underestimated Mary Shanahan before. She could find a hundred ways to dick him around.

  Yet Wallingford recognized what had changed in him--he was no longer acquiescing. Possibly he was the new or semi-new Patrick Wallingford, after all. Moreover, the coldness of Mary Shanahan's tone of voice had been encouraging; he'd sensed that his prospects for getting fired were improving.

  On his way to the airport, Patrick had looked at the taxi driver's newspaper, just the weather page. The forecast for northern Wisconsin was warm and fair. Even the weather boded well.

  Mrs. Clausen had expressed some anxiety about the weather, because they would be flying to the lake up north in a small plane; it was some kind of seaplane, or what Doris had called a floatplane. Green Bay itself was part of Lake Michigan, but where they were going was roughly between Lake Michigan and Lake Superior--the part of Wisconsin that is near Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

  Since Wallingford couldn't get to Green Bay before Saturday and he had to be back in New York on Monday, Doris had determined they should take the little plane. It was too long a drive from Green Bay for such a short weekend; this way they would have two nights in the boathouse apartment at the cottage on the lake.

  To get to Green Bay, Patrick had previously tried two different Chicago connections and one connecting flight through Detroit; this time he'd opted for a change of planes in Cincinnati. Sitting in the waiting area, he was overcome by a moment of typically New York incomprehension. (This happened only seconds before the boarding call.) Why were so many people going to Cincinnati on a Saturday in July?

  Of course Wallingford knew why he was going there--Cincinnati was simply the first leg of a journey in three parts--but what could possibly be attracting all these other people to the place? It would never have occurred to Patrick Wallingford that anyone knowing his reasons for the trip might have found Mrs. Clausen's lasting allure the most improbable excuse of all.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Up North

  THERE WAS A MOMENT when the floatplane banked and Doris Clausen closed her eyes. Patrick Wallingford, eyes wide open, didn't want to miss the steep descent to the small, dark lake. Not even for a new left hand, a keeper, would Wallingford have blinked or looked away from that sideslipping view of the dark-green trees and the suddenly tilted horizon. One wingtip must have been pointed at the lake; the window on the seaplane's downward side revealed nothing but the fast-approaching water.

  At such a sharp angle, the pontoons shuddered and the plane shook so violently that Mrs. Clausen clutched little Otto to her breast. Her movement startled the sleeping child, who commenced to cry only seconds before the pilot leveled off and the small plane landed less than smoothly on the wind-ruffled water. The firs flew by and the white pines were a wall of green, a blur of jade where the blue sky had been.

  Doris at last exhaled, but Wallingford hadn't been afraid. Although he'd never been to the lake up north before, nor had he ever flown in a floatplane, the water and the surrounding shore, as well as every frame of the descent and landing, were as familiar to him as that blue-capsule dream. All those years since he'd lost his hand the first time seemed shorter than a single night's sleep to him now; yet, during those years, he had wished continually for that pain-pill dream to come true. At long last, Patrick Wallingford had no doubt that he'd touched down in that blue-capsule dream.

  Patrick took it as a good sign that the uncountable members of the Clausen family had not descended en masse on the various cabins and outbuildings. Was it out of respect for the delicacy of Doris's situation--a single parent, a widow with a possible suitor--that Otto senior's family had left the lakefront property unoccupied for the weekend? Had Mrs. Clausen asked them for this consideration? In which case, did she anticipate that the weekend had romantic potential?

  If so, Doris gave no indication of it. She had a list of things to do, which she attended to matter-of-factly. Wallingford watched her start the pilot lights for the propane hot-water heaters, the gas refrigerators, and the stove. He carried the baby.

  Patrick held little Otto in his left arm, without a hand, because at times he needed to shine the flashlight for Mrs. Clausen. The key to the main cabin was nailed to a beam under the sundeck; the key to the finished rooms above the boathouse was nailed to a two-by-four under the big dock.

  It wasn't necessary to unlock and open all the cabins and outbuildings--they wouldn't be using them. The smaller shed, now used for tools, had been an outhouse before there was plumbing, before they pumped water from the lake. Mrs. Clausen expertly primed the pump and pulled the cord to start the gasoline engine that ran the pump.

  Doris asked Patrick to dispose of a dead mouse. She held little Otto while Wallingford removed the mouse from the trap and loosely buried it under some leaves and pine needles. The mousetrap had been set in a kitchen cupboard; Mrs. Clausen discovered the dead rodent while she was putting the groceries away.

  Doris didn't like mice--they were dirty. She was revolted by the turds they left in what she called "surprise places" throughout the kitchen. She asked Patrick to dispose of the mouse turds, too. And she disliked, even more than their turds, the suddenness with which mice moved. (Maybe I should have brought Charlotte's Web instead of Stuart Little, Wallingford worried.)

  All the food in paper or plastic bags, or in cardboard boxes, had to be stored in tin containers because of the mice; over the winter, not even the canned food could be left unprotected. One winter something had gnawed through the cans--probably a rat, but maybe a mink or a weasel. Another winter, what was almost certainly a wolverine had broken into the main cabin and made the kitchen its lair; the animal had left a terrible mess.

  Patrick understood that this was part of the summer-camp lore of the cottage. He could easily envision the life lived here, even without the other Clausens present. In the main cabin, where the kitchen and dining room were--also the biggest of the bathrooms--he saw the board games and puzzles stacked on shelves. There were no books to speak of, save a dictionary (doubtless for settling arguments in Scrabble) and the usual field guides that identify snakes and amphibians, insects and spiders, wildflowers, mammals, and birds.

  In the main cabin, too, were the visualizations of the ghosts that had passed through or still visited there. These took the form of artless snapshots, curled at the edges. Some of these photos were badly faded from long exposure to sunlight; others were rust-spotted from the old tacks pinning them to the rough pine walls.

  And there were other mementos that spoke of ghosts. The mounted heads of deer, or just their antlers; a crow's skull that revealed the perfect hole made by a .22-caliber bullet; some undistinguished fish, home-mounted on plaques of shellacked pine boards. (The fish looked as if they'd been crudely varnished, too.)

  Most outstanding was a single talon of a large bird of prey. Mrs. Clausen told Wallingford it was an eagle's talon; it was not a trophy but a record of shame, displayed in a jewelry box as a warning to other Clausens. It was awful to shoot an eagle, yet one of the less disciplined Clausens had done the deed, for which he was harshly punished. He'd been a young boy at the time, and he'd been "grounded," Doris said--meaning he had missed two hunting seasons, back-to-back. If that wasn't lesson enough, the murdered eagle's talon remained as further evidence against him.

  "Donny," Doris said, shaking her head as she uttered the eagle-killer's name. Attached to the plush lining of the jewelry box (by a safety pin) was a photo of Donny--he looked crazed. He was a grown man now, with children of his own; when his kids saw the talon, they were probably ashamed of their father all over again.

  Mrs. Clausen's telling of the tale was sobering, and she related it in the manner that it had been told to her--a cautionary tale, a moral warning. DON'T SHOOT EAGLES!

  "Donny was always a wild hair," Mrs. Clausen reported.

  In his mind's eye, Wallingford could see them interacting--the
ghosts in the photographs, the fishermen who had caught the shellacked fish, the hunters who'd shot the deer and the crow and the eagle. He imagined the men standing around the barbecue, which was covered with a tarp and stowed on the sundeck under an eave of the roof.

  There was an indoor and an outdoor fridge, which Patrick imagined were full of beer. Mrs. Clausen later corrected this impression; only the outdoor refrigerator was full of beer. It was the designated beer fridge--nothing else was allowed in it.

  While the men watched the barbecue and drank their beer, the women fed the children--at the picnic table on the deck in good weather, or at the long dining-room table when the weather was bad. The limitations of space in cottage life spoke to Wallingford of children and grown-ups eating separately. Mrs. Clausen, at first laughing at Patrick's question, confirmed that this was true.

  There was a row of photographs of women in hospital gowns in beds, their newborns beside them; Doris's photo was not among them. Wallingford felt the conspicuousness of her and little Otto's absence. (Big Otto hadn't been there to take their picture.) There were men and boys in uniforms--all kinds of uniforms, military and athletic--and women and girls in formal dresses and bathing suits, most of them caught in the act of protesting that their pictures were being taken.

  There was a wall for dogs--dogs swimming, dogs fetching sticks, some dogs forlornly dressed in children's clothes. And in a nook above the dresser drawers in one of the bedrooms, inserted by their edges into the frame of a pitted mirror, were photos of the elderly, probably now deceased. An old woman in a wheelchair with a cat in her lap; an old man without a paddle in the bow of a canoe. The old man had long white hair and was wrapped in a blanket like an Indian; he seemed to be waiting for someone to sit in the stern and paddle him away.

  In the hall, opposite the bathroom door, was a cluster of photographs in the shape of a cross--a shrine to a young Clausen male declared missing-in-action in Vietnam. In the bathroom itself was another shrine, this one to the glory days of the Green Bay Packers--a hallowed gathering of old magazine photos picturing the "invincible ones."

  Wallingford had great difficulty identifying these heroes; the pages torn from magazines were wrinkled and water-spotted, the captions barely legible. "In a locker room in Milwaukee," Wallingford struggled to read, "after clinching their second Western Division championship, December 1961." There were Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, and Coach Lombardi--the coach holding a bottle of Pepsi. Jim Taylor was bleeding from a gash on the bridge of his nose. Wallingford didn't recognize them, but he could identify with Taylor, who was missing several front teeth.

  Who were Jerry Kramer and Fuzzy Thurston, and what was the "Packer sweep"? Who was that guy caked in mud? (It was Forrest Gregg.) Or Ray Nitschke, muddy and bald and dazed and bleeding; sitting on the bench at a game in San Francisco, Nitschke held his helmet in his hands like a rock. Who are these people, or who were they? Wallingford wondered.

  There was that famous photo of the fans at the Ice Bowl--Lambeau Field, December 31, 1967. They were dressed for the Arctic or the Antarctic; their breath obscured their faces in the cold. Some Clausens had to have been among them.

  Wallingford would never know the meaning of that pile of bodies, or how the Dallas Cowboys must have felt to see Bart Starr lying in the end zone; not even his Green Bay teammates had known that Starr was going to improvise a quarterback sneak from the one-yard line. In the huddle, as every Clausen knew, the quarterback had called, "Brown right. Thirty-one wedge." The result was sports history--it just wasn't a history Wallingford knew.

  To realize how little he knew Mrs. Clausen's world gave Patrick pause.

  There were also the personal but unclear photos that required interpretation to outsiders. Doris tried to explain. That hulking rock in the wake off the stern of the speedboat--that was a black bear, discovered one summer swimming in the lake. That blurry shape, like a time-lapsed photograph of a cow grazing out-of-place among the evergreens, was a moose making its way to the swamp, which according to Mrs. Clausen was "not a quarter of a mile from here." And so on ... the confrontations with nature and the crimes against nature, the local victories and the special occasions, the Green Bay Packers and the births in the family, the dogs and the weddings.

  Wallingford noted, as quickly as he could, the photograph of Otto senior and Mrs. Clausen at their wedding. They were carving the cake; Otto's strong left hand covered Doris's smaller hand, which held the knife. Patrick experienced a pang of familiarity when he saw Otto's hand, although he'd not seen it with the wedding ring before. What had Mrs. Clausen done with Otto's ring? he wondered. What had she done with hers?

  At the front of the well-wishers who surrounded the cutting of the cake, a young boy stood holding a plate and a fork. He was nine or ten; because he was formally dressed like the other members of the wedding party, Patrick assumed he'd been the ring bearer. He didn't recognize the kid, but since the ring bearer would be a young man now, Wallingford realized that he might have met him. (In all likelihood, given the boy's round face and determined cheerfulness, he was a Clausen.)

  The maid of honor stood beside the boy, biting her lower lip; she was a pretty young woman who seemed easily distracted, a girl often swayed by caprice. Like Angie, maybe?

  At a glance, Patrick knew he'd never met her before; that she was the kind of girl he was familiar with, he also knew. She was not as nice as Angie. Once upon a time, the maid of honor might have been Doris's best friend. But the choice could also have been political; possibly the wayward-looking girl was big Otto's kid sister. And whether or not she and Doris had ever been friends, Patrick doubted that they were friends now.

  As for the sleeping arrangements, Wallingford's first look at the two finished rooms above the boathouse made the matter clear. Doris had set up the portable crib in the room with the twin beds, one of which she'd already used as a makeshift changing table--little Otto's diapers and clothes were arrayed there. Mrs. Clausen told Patrick that she would sleep in the other twin bed in that room, which left the second room above the boathouse to Wallingford; it had a queen-size bed, which looked bigger in the narrow room.

  As Patrick unpacked his things, he noted that the left side of the bed was flush to the wall--that would have been Otto senior's side. Given the narrowness of the room, the only way into the bed was from Doris's side; even then, the passage was skinny. Maybe Otto senior had climbed in from the foot of the bed.

  The walls of the room were the same rough pine as the interior of the main cabin, although the pine boards were lighter, almost blond--all but one large rectangle near the door, where perhaps a picture or a mirror had been hung. Sunlight had bleached the walls almost everywhere else. What had Mrs. Clausen taken down?

  Thumbtacked to the wall, above Otto senior's side of the bed, were various photos of the restoration of the rooms above the boathouse. There was Otto senior, without a shirt, tanned and well muscled. (The carpenter's belt reminded Patrick of the tool belt Monika with a k had had stolen from her at the circus in Junagadh.) There was also a photo of Doris in a one-piece bathing suit--a purple tank, conservatively cut. She had her arms crossed over her breasts, which made Wallingford sad; he would have liked to have seen more of her breasts.

  In the photograph, Mrs. Clausen was standing on the dock, watching Otto senior at work with a table saw. Since there was no electricity at the cottage on the lake, the gasoline generator on the dock must have supplied the power. The dark puddle at Doris's bare feet suggested that her bathing suit was wet. Quite possibly, she'd hugged her arms to her breasts because she was cold.

  When Wallingford closed the bedroom door to change into his swim trunks, that same purple one-piece bathing suit was hanging on a nail on the back of the door. Patrick couldn't resist touching it. The purple bathing suit had spent much time in the water and in the sun; it's doubtful that even a trace of Doris's scent was attached to it, although Wallingford held the suit to his face and imagined that he could smell her.

 
; In truth, the suit smelled more like Lycra, and like the lake, and the wood of the boathouse; but Patrick clutched the suit as tightly as he would have held fast to Mrs. Clausen--had she been wet and cold and shivering, the two of them taking off their wet bathing suits together.

  This was truly pathetic behavior to display in the case of a no-nonsense, some would say frumpy, one-piece tank suit, fully front-lined, with the shoulder straps crossed in the back. The built-in shelf bra with thin, soft cups was a practical choice for a large-breasted but narrow-chested woman, which Doris Clausen was.

  Wallingford returned the purple bathing suit to the nail on the back of the bedroom door; he hung it, as she had done, by the shoulder straps. Beside it, on another nail, was the only other article of Mrs. Clausen's clothing in the bedroom--a once-white, now somewhat grimy, terry-cloth robe. That this unexciting garment excited him was embarrassing.

  He opened the dresser drawers as quietly as possible, looking for Doris's underwear. But the bottom drawer held only sheets and pillowcases and an extra blanket; the middle drawer was full of towels. The top drawer rattled noisily with candles, flashlight batteries, several boxes of wooden matches, an extra flashlight, and a box of tacks.

  In the rough pine boards above Mrs. Clausen's side of the bed, Patrick noticed the small holes that tacks had made. She'd once tacked photographs there, as many as a dozen. Of what, or of whom, Wallingford could only guess. Why Doris had apparently removed the photos was another unknown.

  There came a knock on the bedroom door just as Patrick was tying the strings on his swim trunks, which he'd long ago learned to do with his right hand and his teeth. Mrs. Clausen wanted her bathing suit and the terry-cloth robe; she told Wallingford which drawer the towels were in, unaware that he already knew, and asked him to bring three towels to the dock.

  When she'd changed, they met in the narrow hall and descended the steep stairs to the ground floor of the boathouse; the staircase was open, which would be hazardous to little Otto next summer. Otto senior had meant to enclose the staircase. "He just didn't get around to it," Mrs. Clausen commented.