The Fourth Hand

by John Irving

  Well ... if not exactly smiling, at least she wasn't frowning. Both in her expression and in the tranquillity of her repose, Mrs. Clausen seemed more at peace than Wallingford had ever known her to be. Or more deeply asleep--Patrick couldn't really tell.

  Taking his new responsibility seriously, Wallingford picked up Otto junior and inched out of the bed--carefully, so as not to wake the boy's mother. He carried the child into the other bedroom, where he did his best to imitate Doris's orderly routine. He boldly attempted to change the baby on the bed that was appointed as a changing table, but (to Patrick's dismay) the diaper was dry, little Otto was clean, and while Wallingford contemplated the astonishing smallness of his son's penis, Otto peed straight up in the air in his father's face. Now Patrick had grounds for changing the diaper--not easy to do one-handed.

  That done, Wallingford wondered what he should do next. As Otto junior sat upright on the bed, virtually imprisoned by the pillows Patrick had securely piled around him, the inexperienced father searched through the bags of baby paraphernalia. He assembled the following items: a packet of formula, a clean baby bottle, two changes of diapers, a shirt, in case it was cool outside--if they went outside--and a pair of socks and shoes, in case Otto was happiest bouncing in the jumper-seat.

  That contraption was in the main cabin, where Wallingford carried Otto next. The socks and shoes, Patrick thought--thereby revealing the precautionary instincts of a good father--would protect the baby's tiny toes and prevent him from getting splinters in his soft little feet. As an afterthought, just before he'd left the boathouse apartment with Otto and the bag of paraphernalia, Wallingford had added the baby's hat to the bag, along with Mrs. Clausen's copy of The English Patient. His one hand had lightly touched Doris's underwear as he'd reached for the book.

  It was cooler in the main cabin, so Patrick put the shirt on Otto, and just for the challenge, also dressed the boy in his socks and shoes. He tried putting Otto in the jumper-seat, but the child cried. Patrick then put the little boy in the highchair, which Otto seemed to like better. (Only momentarily--there was nothing to eat.)

  Finding a baby spoon in the dish drainer, Wallingford mashed a banana for Otto, who enjoyed spitting out some of the banana and rubbing his face with it before wiping his hands on his shirt.

  Wallingford wondered what else he could feed the child. The kettle on the stove was still warm. He dissolved the powdered formula in about eight ounces of the heated water and mixed some of the formula with a little baby cereal, but Otto liked the banana better. Patrick tried mixing the baby cereal with a teaspoon of strained peaches from one of the jars of baby food. Otto cautiously liked this, but by then several globs of banana, and some of the peach-cereal mixture, had found their way into his hair.

  It was evident to Wallingford that he'd managed to get more food on Otto than in him. He dampened a paper towel with warm water and wiped the baby clean, or almost clean; then he took Otto out of the highchair and put him in the jumper-seat again. The boy bounced all around for a couple of minutes before throwing up half his breakfast.

  Wallingford took his son out of the jumper-seat and sat down in a rocking chair, holding the child in his lap. He tried giving him a bottle, but the besmeared little boy drank only an ounce or two before he spit up in Wallingford's lap. (Wallingford was wearing just his boxer shorts, so what did it matter?)

  Patrick tried pacing back and forth with Otto in the crook of his left arm and Mrs. Clausen's copy of The English Patient held open, like a hymnal, in his right hand. But given Wallingford's handless left arm, Otto was too heavy to carry in this fashion for long. Patrick returned to the rocking chair. He sat Otto on his thigh and let the boy lean against him; the back of the child's head rested on Wallingford's chest and left shoulder, with Wallingford's left arm around him. They rocked back and forth for ten minutes or more, until Otto fell asleep.

  Patrick slowed the rocker down; he held the sleeping boy on his lap while he attempted to read The English Patient. Holding the book open in his one hand was less difficult than turning the pages, which required an act of considerable manual dexterity--as challenging to Wallingford as some of his efforts with prosthetic devices--but the effort seemed suited to the early descriptions of the burned patient, who doesn't appear to remember who he is.

  Patrick read only a few pages, stopping at a sentence Mrs. Clausen had underlined in red--the description of how the eponymous English patient drifts in and out of consciousness as the nurse reads to him.

  So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.

  It was not only a passage to be reread and admired; it also reflected well on the reader who had marked it. Wallingford closed the book and placed it gently on the floor. Then he shut his eyes and concentrated on the soothing motion of the rocker. When Wallingford held his breath, he could hear his son breathing--a holy moment for many parents. And as he rocked, Patrick made a plan. He would go back to New York and read The English Patient. He would mark his favorite parts; he and Mrs. Clausen could compare and discuss their choices. He might even be able to persuade her to rent a video of the movie, which they could watch together.

  Well, Wallingford thought, as he fell asleep in the rocking chair, holding his sleeping son ... wouldn't this be a more promising subject between them than the travels of a mouse or the imaginative ardor of a doomed spider?

  Mrs. Clausen found them sleeping in the rocker. Good mother that she was, she closely examined the evidence of Otto's breakfast--including what remained of the baby's formula in his bottle, her son's strikingly spattered shirt, his peach-stained hair and banana-spotted socks and shoes, and the unmistakable indication that he had puked on Patrick's boxer shorts. Mrs. Clausen must have found everything to her liking, especially the sight of the two of them asleep in the rocking chair, because she photographed them twice with her camera.

  Wallingford didn't wake up until Doris had already made coffee and was cooking bacon. (He remembered telling her that he liked bacon.) She was wearing her purple bathing suit. Patrick imagined his swimming trunks all alone on the clothesline, a self-pitying symbol of Mrs. Clausen's probable rejection of his proposal.

  They spent the day lazily, if not entirely relaxed, together. The underlying tension between them was that Doris made no mention of Patrick's proposal.

  They took turns swimming off the dock and watching Otto. Wallingford once again went wading with the baby in the shallow water by the sandy beach. They took a boat ride together. Patrick sat in the bow, with little Otto in his lap, while Mrs. Clausen steered the boat--the outboard, because Doris understood it better. The outboard didn't go as fast as the speedboat, but it wouldn't have mattered as much to the Clausens if she'd scratched it or banged it up.

  They ferried their trash to a Dumpster on a dock at the far end of the lake. All the cottagers took their trash there. Whatever garbage--bottles, cans, paper trash, uneaten food, Otto's soiled diapers--they didn't take to the Dumpster on the dock, they would have to carry with them on the floatplane.

  In the outboard with the motor running, they couldn't hear each other talk, but Wallingford looked at Mrs. Clausen and very carefully mouthed the words: "I love you." He knew she'd read his lips and had understood him, but he didn't grasp what she said to him in return. It was a longer sentence than "I love you;" he sensed she was saying something serious.

  On the way back from dumping the trash, Otto junior fell asleep. Wallingford carried the sleeping boy up the stairs to his crib. Doris said that Otto usually took two naps during the day; it was the motion of the boat that had lulled the child to sleep so soundly. Mrs. Clausen speculated that she would have to wake him up to feed him.

  It was past late afternoon, already early evening; the sun had started sinking. Wallingford said: "Don't wake up little Otto
just yet. Come down to the dock with me, please." They were both in their bathing suits, and Patrick made sure that they took two towels with them.

  "What are we doing?" Doris asked.

  "We're going to get wet again," he told her. "Then we're going to sit on the dock, just for a minute."

  It bothered Mrs. Clausen that they might not hear Otto crying if he woke up from his nap, not even with the windows in the bedroom open. The windows faced out over the lake, not over the big outdoors dock, and the occasional passing motorboat made an interfering noise, but Patrick promised that he'd hear the baby.

  They dove off the big dock and climbed quickly up the ladder; almost immediately, the dock was enveloped in shade. The sun had dropped below the treetops on their side of the lake, but the eastern shore was still in sunlight. They sat on the towels on the dock while Wallingford told Mrs. Clausen about the pills he'd taken for pain in India, and how (in the blue-capsule dream) he'd felt the heat of the sun in the wood of the dock, even though the dock was in shade.

  "Like now," he said.

  She just sat there, shivering slightly in her wet bathing suit.

  Patrick persisted in telling her how he had heard the woman's voice but never seen her; how she'd had the sexiest voice in the world; how she'd said, "My bathing suit feels so cold. I'm going to take it off. Don't you want to take yours off, too?"

  Mrs. Clausen kept looking at him--she was still shivering.

  "Please say it," Wallingford asked.

  "I don't feel like doing this," Doris told him.

  He went on with the rest of the cobalt-blue dream--how he'd answered, "Yes." And the sound of the water dripping from their wet bathing suits, falling between the planks of the dock, returning to the lake. He told her how he and the unseen woman had been naked; then how he'd smelled the sunlight, which her shoulders had absorbed; and how he'd tasted the lake on his tongue, which had traced the contours of the woman's ear.

  "You had sex with her, in the dream?" Mrs. Clausen asked.

  "Yes."

  "I can't do it," she said. "Not out here, not now. Anyway, there's a new cottage across the lake. The Clausens told me that the guy has a telescope and spies on people."

  Patrick saw the place she meant. The cabin across the lake was a raw-looking color; the new wood stood out against the surrounding blue and green.

  "I thought the dream was coming true," was all he said. (It almost came true, he wanted to tell her.)

  Mrs. Clausen stood up, taking her towel with her. She took off her wet bathing suit, covering herself with her towel in the process. She hung her suit on the line and wrapped herself more tightly in her towel. "I'm going to wake up Otto," she said.

  Wallingford took off his swim trunks and hung his suit on the line beside Doris's. Because she'd already gone to the boathouse, he was unconcerned about covering himself with his towel. In fact, he faced the lake naked for a moment, just to force the asshole with the telescope to take a good look at him. Then Wallingford wrapped his towel around himself and climbed the stairs to his bedroom.

  He changed into a dry bathing suit and a polo shirt. By the time he went to the other bedroom, Mrs. Clausen had changed, too; she was wearing an old tank top and some nylon running shorts. They were clothes a boy might wear in a gym, but she looked terrific.

  "You know, dreams don't have to be exactly true-to-life in order to come true," she told him, without looking at him.

  "I don't know if I have a chance with you," Patrick said to her.

  She walked up the path to the main cabin, purposely ahead of him, while he carried little Otto. "I'm still thinking about it," she said, keeping her back to him.

  Wallingford calculated what she'd said by counting the syllables in her words. He thought it was what she'd said to him in the boat when he couldn't hear her. ("I'm still thinking about it.") So he had a chance with her, though probably a slim one.

  They ate a quiet dinner on the screened-in porch of the main cabin, which overlooked the darkening lake. The mosquitoes came to the surrounding screens and hummed to them. They drank the second bottle of red wine while Wallingford talked about his fledgling effort to get fired. This time he was smart enough to leave Mary Shanahan out of the story. He didn't tell Doris that he'd first got the idea from something Mary had said, or that Mary had a fairly developed plan concerning how he might get himself fired.

  He talked about leaving New York, too, but Mrs. Clausen seemed to lose patience with what he was saying. "I wouldn't want you to quit your job because of me," she told him. "If I can live with you, I can live with you anywhere. Where we live or what you do isn't the issue."

  Patrick paced around with Otto in his arms while Doris washed the dishes.

  "I just wish Mary wouldn't have your baby," Mrs. Clausen finally said, when they were fighting off the mosquitoes on the path back to the boathouse. He couldn't see her face; again she was ahead of him, carrying the flashlight and a bag of baby paraphernalia while he carried Otto junior. "I can't blame her ... wanting to have your baby," Doris added, as they were climbing the stairs to the boathouse apartment. "I just hope she doesn't have it. Not that there's anything you can or should do about it. Not now."

  It struck Wallingford as typical of himself that here was an essential element of his fate, which he'd unwittingly set in motion but over which he had no control; whether Mary Shanahan was pregnant or not was entirely an accident of conception.

  Before leaving the main cabin--when he had used the bathroom, and after he'd brushed his teeth--he had taken a condom from his shaving kit. He'd held it in his hand all the way to the boathouse. Now, as he put Otto down on the bed that served as a changing table in the bedroom, Mrs. Clausen saw that the fist of Wallingford's one hand was closed around something.

  "What have you got in your hand?" she asked.

  He opened the palm of his hand and showed her the condom. Doris was bending over Otto junior, changing him. "You better go back and get another one. You're going to need at least two," she said.

  He took a flashlight and braved the mosquitoes again; he returned to his bedroom above the boathouse with a second condom and a cold beer.

  Wallingford lit the gas lamp in his room. While this is an easy job for two-handed people, Patrick found it challenging. He struck the wooden match on the box, then held the lit match in his teeth while he turned on the gas. When he took the match from his mouth and touched the flame to the lamp, it made a popping sound and flared brightly. He turned down the propane, but the light in the bedroom dimmed only a little. It was not very romantic, he thought, as he took off his clothes and got into bed naked.

  Wallingford pulled just the top sheet over him, up to his waist; he lay on his stomach, propped on his elbows, with the two pillows hugged to his chest. He looked out the window at the moonlight on the lake--the moon was huge. In only two or three more nights, it would be an official full moon, but it looked full now.

  He'd left the unopened bottle of beer on the dresser top; he hoped they might share the beer later. The two condoms, in their foil wrappers, were under the pillows.

  Between the racket the loons were making and a squabble that broke out among some ducks near shore, Patrick didn't hear Doris come into his room, but when she lay down on top of him, with her bare breasts against his back, he knew she was naked.

  "My bathing suit feels so cold," she whispered in his ear. "I'm going to take it off. Don't you want to take yours off, too?"

  Her voice was so much like the woman's voice in the blue-capsule dream that Wallingford had some difficulty answering her. By the time he managed to say "yes," she'd already rolled him over onto his back and pulled the sheet down.

  "You better give me one of those things," she said.

  He was reaching behind his head and under the pillows with his only hand, but Mrs. Clausen was quicker. She found one of the condoms and tore open the wrapper in her teeth. "Let me do it. I want to put it on you," she told him. "I've never done this." She seemed a lit
tle puzzled by the appearance of the condom, but she didn't hesitate to put it on him; unfortunately, she tried putting it on inside out.

  "It's rolled a certain way," Wallingford said.

  Doris laughed at her mistake. She not only put the condom on the right way; she was in too much of a hurry for Patrick to talk to her. Mrs. Clausen may never have put a condom on anyone before, but Wallingford was familiar with the way that she straddled him. (Only this time he was lying on his back, not sitting up straight in a chair in Dr. Zajac's office.)

  "Let me say something to you about being faithful to me," Doris was saying, as she moved up and down with her hands on Patrick's shoulders. "If you've got a problem with monogamy, you better say so right now--you better stop me."

  Wallingford said nothing, nor did he do anything to stop her.

  "Please don't make anyone else pregnant," Mrs. Clausen said, even more seriously. She bore down on him with all her weight; he lifted his hips to meet her.

  "Okay," he told her.

  In the harsh light of the gas lamp, their moving shadows were cast against the wall where the darker rectangle had earlier caught Wallingford's attention--that empty place where Otto senior's beer poster had been. It was as if their coupling were a ghost portrait, their future together still undecided.

  When they finished making love, they drank the beer, draining the bottle in a matter of seconds. Then they went naked for a night swim, with Wallingford taking just one towel for the two of them and Mrs. Clausen carrying the flashlight. They walked single-file to the end of the boathouse dock, but this time Doris asked Patrick to climb down the ladder into the lake ahead of her. He'd no sooner entered the water than she told him to swim back to her, under the narrow dock.

  "Just follow the flashlight," she instructed him. She shined the light through the planks in the dock, illuminating one of the support posts that disappeared into the dark water. The post was bigger around than Wallingford's thigh. Several inches above the waterline, just under the planks of the dock and alongside a horizontal two-by-four, something gold caught Patrick's eye. He swam closer until he was looking straight up at it. He had to keep treading water to see it.