The Fourth Hand

by John Irving

  A tenpenny nail had been driven into the post; two gold wedding bands were looped on the nail, which had been hammered over, into a bent position, with its head driven into the post. Patrick realized that Mrs. Clausen would have needed to tread water while she pounded in the nail, and then attached the rings, and then bent the nail over with her hammer. It hadn't been an easy job, even for a good swimmer who was fairly strong and two-handed.

  "Are they still there? Do you see them?" Doris asked.

  "Yes," he answered.

  She once again positioned the flashlight so that the beam was cast out over the lake. He swam out from under the dock, into the beam of light, where he found her waiting for him; she was floating on her back with her breasts above the surface.

  Mrs. Clausen didn't say anything. Wallingford remained silent with her. He speculated that, one winter, the ice could be especially thick; it might grind against the boathouse dock and the rings might be lost. Or a winter storm could sweep the boathouse away. Whatever, the wedding rings were where they belonged--that was what Mrs. Clausen had wanted to show him.

  Across the lake, the newly arrived Peeping Tom had the lights on in his cabin. His radio was playing; he was listening to a baseball game, but Patrick couldn't tell which teams were playing.

  They swam back to the boathouse, with both the flashlight on the dock and the gas lamps shining from the two bedroom windows to guide them. This time Wallingford remembered to pee in the lake so that later he wouldn't have to go in the woods, with the mosquitoes.

  They both kissed Otto junior good night, and Doris extinguished the gaslight in the boy's room and closed his curtains. Then she turned off the lamp in the other bedroom, where she lay naked and cool from the lake, under just the top sheet, with her and Wallingford's hair still wet and cold in the moonlight. She'd not closed their curtains on purpose; she wanted to wake up early, before the baby. Both she and Patrick fell instantly asleep in the moonlit room. That night, the moon didn't set until almost three in the morning.

  The sunrise was a little after five on Monday, but Mrs. Clausen was up well before then. When Wallingford woke, the room was a pearl-gray or pewter color and he was aware of being aroused; it was not unlike one of the more erotic moments in the blue-capsule dream.

  Mrs. Clausen was putting the second condom on him. She had found what was, even for Wallingford, a novel way to do it--she was unrolling it on his penis with her teeth. For someone with no previous experience with condoms, she was surpassingly innovative, but Doris confessed that she had read about this method in a book.

  "Was it a novel?" Wallingford wanted to know. (Of course it was!)

  "Give me your hand," Mrs. Clausen commanded.

  He naturally thought that she meant the right one--it was his only hand. But when he extended his right hand to her, she said, "No, the fourth one."

  Patrick thought he'd misheard her. Surely she'd said, "No, the other one"--the no-hand or the nonhand, as almost everyone called it.

  "The what?" Wallingford asked, just to be sure.

  "Give me your hand, the fourth one," Doris said. She seized his stump and gripped it tightly between her thighs, where he could feel his missing fingers come to life.

  "There were the two you were born with," Mrs. Clausen explained. "You lost one. Otto's was your third. As for this one," she said, clenching her thighs for emphasis, "this is the one that will never forget me. This one is mine. It's your fourth."

  "Oh." Perhaps that was why he could feel it, as if it were real.

  They swam naked again after they made love, but this time one of them stood at the window in little Otto's bedroom, watching the other swim. It was during Mrs. Clausen's turn that Otto junior woke up with the sunrise.

  Then they were busy packing up; Doris did all the things that were necessary to close the cottage. She even found the time to take the last of their trash across the lake to the Dumpster on the dock. Wallingford stayed with Otto. Doris drove the boat a lot faster when the baby wasn't with her.

  They had all their bags and the baby gear assembled on the big dock when the floatplane arrived. While the pilot and Mrs. Clausen loaded the small plane, Wallingford held Otto junior in his right arm and waved no-handed across the lake to the Peeping Tom. Every so often, they could see the sun reflected in the lens of his telescope.

  When the floatplane took off, the pilot made a point of passing low over the newcomer's dock. The Peeping Tom was pretending that his telescope was a fishing pole and he was fishing off his dock; the silly asshole kept making imaginary casts. The tripod for the telescope stood incriminatingly in the middle of the dock, like the mounting for a crude kind of artillery.

  There was too much noise in the cabin for Wallingford and Mrs. Clausen to talk without shouting. But they looked at each other constantly, and at the baby, whom they passed back and forth between them. As the floatplane was descending for its landing, Patrick told her again--without a sound, just by moving his lips--"I love you."

  Doris did not at first respond, and when she did so--also without actually saying the words, but by letting him read her lips--it was that same sentence, longer than "I love you," which she had spoken before. ("I'm still thinking about it.")

  Wallingford could only wait and see.

  From where the seaplane docked, they drove to Austin Straubel Airport in Green Bay. Otto junior fussed in his car seat while Wallingford made an effort to amuse him. Doris drove. Now that they could hear each other talk, it seemed they had nothing to say.

  At the airport, where he kissed Mrs. Clausen good-bye, and then little Otto, Patrick felt Mrs. Clausen put something in his right front pocket. "Please don't look at it now. Please wait until later," she asked him. "Just think about this: my skin has grown back together, the hole has closed. I couldn't wear that again if I wanted to. And besides, if I end up with you, I know I don't need it. I know you don't need it. Please give it away."

  Wallingford knew what it was without looking at it--the fertility doohickey he'd once seen in her navel, the body ornament that had pierced her belly button. He was dying to see it.

  He didn't have to wait long. He was thinking about the ambiguity of Mrs. Clausen's parting words--"if I end up with you"--when the thing she'd put in his pocket set off the metal-detection device in the airport. He had to take it out of his pocket and look at it then. An airport security guard took a good look at it, too; in fact, the guard had the first long look at it.

  It was surprisingly heavy for something so small; the grayish-white, metallic color gleamed like gold. "It's platinum," the security guard said. She was a dark-skinned Native American woman with jet-black hair, heavyset and sad-looking. The way she handled the belly-button ornament indicated she knew something about jewelry. "This must have been expensive," she said, handing the doohickey back to him.

  "I don't know--I didn't buy it," Wallingford replied. "It's a body-piercing item, for a woman's navel."

  "I know," the security guard told him. "They usually set the metal detector off when they're in someone's belly button."

  "Oh," Patrick said. He was only beginning to grasp what the good-luck charm was. A tiny hand--a left one.

  In the body-piercing trade, it was what they called a barbell--a rod with a ball that screws on and off one end, just to keep the ornament from falling off, not unlike an earring post. But at the other end of the rod, which served the design as a slender wrist, was the most delicate, most exquisite little hand that Patrick Wallingford had ever seen. The middle finger was crossed over the index finger in that near-universal symbol of good luck. Patrick had expected a more specific fertility symbol--maybe a miniature god or something tribal.

  Another security guard came over to the table where Wallingford and the first security guard were standing. He was a small, lean black man with a perfectly trimmed mustache. "What is it?" he asked his colleague.

  "A body ornament, for your belly button," she explained.

  "Not for mine!" the man said, grinning
.

  Patrick handed him the good-luck charm. That was when the Windbreaker slipped off Wallingford's left forearm and the guards saw that his left hand was gone.

  "Hey, you're the lion guy!" the male guard said. He'd scarcely glanced at the small platinum hand with the crossed fingers, resting in the palm of his bigger hand.

  The female guard instinctively reached out and touched Patrick's left forearm. "I'm sorry I didn't recognize you, Mr. Wallingford," she said.

  What kind of sadness was it that showed in her face? Wallingford had instantly known she was sad, but he'd not (until now) considered the possible reasons. There was a small, fishhook-shaped scar on her throat; it could have come from anything, from a childhood accident with a pair of scissors to a bad marriage or a violent rape.

  Her colleague--the small, lean black man--was now looking at the body ornament with new interest. "Well, it's a hand. A left one. I get it!" he said excitedly. "I guess that would be your good-luck charm, wouldn't it?"

  "Actually, it's for fertility. Or so I was told."

  "It is?" the Native American woman asked. She took the doohickey out of her fellow guard's hand. "Let me see that again. Does it work?" she asked Patrick. He could tell she was serious.

  "It worked once," Wallingford replied.

  It was tempting to guess what her sadness was. The female security guard was in her late thirties or early forties; she was wearing a wedding ring on her left ring finger and a turquoise ring on the ring finger of her right hand. Her ears were pierced--more turquoise. Perhaps her belly button was pierced, too. Maybe she couldn't get pregnant.

  "Do you want it?" Wallingford asked her. "I have no further use for it."

  The black man laughed. He walked away with a wave of his hand. "Oooh-oooh! You don't want to go there!" he said to Patrick, shaking his head. Maybe the poor woman had a dozen children; she'd been begging to get her tubes tied, but her no-good husband wouldn't let her.

  "You be quiet!" the female guard called after her departing colleague. He was still laughing, but she was not amused.

  "You can have it, if you want it," Wallingford told her. After all, Mrs. Clausen had asked him to give it away.

  The woman closed her dark hand over the fertility charm. "I would very much like to have it, but I'm sure I can't afford it."

  "No, no! It's free! I'm giving it to you. It's already yours," Patrick said. "I hope it works, if you want it to." He couldn't tell if the woman guard wanted it for herself or for a friend, or if she just knew somewhere to sell it.

  At some distance from the security checkpoint, Wallingford turned and looked at the Native American woman. She was back at work--to all other eyes, she was just a security guard--but when she glanced in Patrick's direction, she waved to him and gave him a warm smile. She also held up the tiny hand. Wallingford was too far away to see the crossed fingers, but the ornament winked in the bright airport light; the platinum gleamed again like gold.

  It reminded Patrick of Doris's and Otto Clausen's wedding rings, shining in the flashlight's beam between the dark water and the underside of the boathouse dock. How many times since she'd nailed the rings there had Doris swum under the dock to look at them, treading water with a flashlight in her hand?

  Or had she never looked? Did she only see them--as Wallingford now would--in dreams or in the imagination, where the gold was always brighter and the rings' reflection in the lake more everlasting?

  If he had a chance with Mrs. Clausen, it was not really a matter that would be decided upon the discovery of whether or not Mary Shanahan was pregnant. More important was how brightly those wedding rings under the dock still shone in Doris Clausen's dreams, and in her imagination.

  When his plane took off for Cincinnati, Wallingford was--at that moment, literally--as up in the air as Doris Clausen's thoughts about him. He would have to wait and see.

  That was Monday, July 26, 1999. Wallingford would long remember the date; he wouldn't see Mrs. Clausen again for ninety-eight days.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Lambeau Field

  HE WOULD HAVE TIME to heal. The bruise on his shin (the glass-topped table in Mary's apartment) first turned yellow and then light brown; one day it was gone. Likewise the burn (the hot-water faucet in Mary's shower) soon disappeared. Where his back had been scratched (Angie's nails), there was suddenly no evidence of Patrick's thrashing encounter with the makeup girl from Queens; even the sizable blood blister on his left shoulder (Angie's love-bite) went away. Where there'd been a purplish hematoma (the love-bite again), there was nothing but Wallingford's new skin, as innocent-looking as little Otto's shoulder--that bare, that unmarked.

  Patrick remembered rubbing sunscreen on his son's smooth skin; he missed touching and holding his little boy. He missed Mrs. Clausen, too, but Wallingford knew better than to press her for an answer.

  He also knew that it was too soon to ask Mary Shanahan if she was pregnant. All he said to her, as soon as he got back from Green Bay, was that he wanted to take her up on her suggestion to renegotiate his contract. There were, as Mary had pointed out, eighteen months remaining on Patrick's present contract. Hadn't it been her idea that he ask for three years, or even five?

  Yes, it had. (She'd said, "Ask for three years--no, make that five.") But Mary seemed to have no memory of their earlier conversation. "I think three years would be a lot to ask for, Pat," was all she said.

  "I see," Wallingford replied. "Then I suppose I might as well keep the anchor job."

  "But are you sure you want the job, Pat?"

  He believed that Mary wasn't being cautious just because Wharton and Sabina were there in her office. (The moon-faced CEO and the bitter Sabina sat listening with seeming indifference, not saying a word.) What Wallingford understood about Mary was that she didn't really know what he wanted, and this made her nervous.

  "It depends," Patrick replied. "It's hard to imagine trading an anchor chair for field assignments, even if I get to pick my own assignments. You know what they say: 'Been there, done that.' It's hard to look forward to going backward. I guess you'd have to make me an offer, so I have a better idea of what you have in mind."

  Mary looked at him, smiling brightly. "How was Wisconsin?" she asked.

  Wharton, whose frozen blandness would begin to blend in with the furniture if he didn't say something (or at least twitch) in the next thirty seconds, coughed minimally into his cupped palm. The unbelievable blankness of his expression called to mind the vacuity of a masked executioner; even Wharton's cough was underexpressed.

  Sabina, whom Wallingford could barely remember sleeping with--now that he thought of it, she'd whimpered in her sleep like a dog having a dream--cleared her throat as if she'd swallowed a pubic hair.

  "Wisconsin was fine."

  Wallingford spoke as neutrally as possible, but Mary correctly deduced that nothing had been decided between him and Doris Clausen. He couldn't have waited to tell her if he and Mrs. Clausen were really a couple. Just as, the second Mary knew she was pregnant, she wouldn't wait to tell him.

  And they both knew it had been necessary to enact this standoff in the presence of Wharton and Sabina, who both knew it, too. Under the circumstances, it wouldn't have been advisable for Patrick Wallingford and Mary Shanahan to be alone together.

  "Boy, is it ever frosty around here!" was what Angie told Wallingford, when she got him alone in the makeup chair.

  "Is it ever!" Patrick admitted. He was glad to see the good-hearted girl, who'd left his apartment the cleanest it had been since the day he moved in.

  "So ... are ya gonna tell me about Wisconsin or what?" Angie asked.

  "It's too soon to say," Wallingford confessed. "I've got my fingers crossed," he added--an unfortunate choice of words because he was reminded of Mrs. Clausen's fertility charm.

  "My fingers are crossed for ya, too," Angie said. She had stopped flirting with him, but she was no less sincere and no less friendly.

  Wallingford would throw away his digital
alarm clock and replace it with a new one, because whenever he looked at the old one he would remember Angie's piece of gum stuck there--as well as the near-death gyrations that had caused her gum to be expectorated with such force. He didn't want to lie in bed thinking about Angie unless Doris Clausen said no.

  For now, Doris was being vague. Wallingford had to acknowledge that it was hard to know what to make of the photographs she sent him, although her accompanying comments, if not cryptic, struck him as more mischievous than romantic.

  She hadn't sent him a copy of every picture on the roll; missing, Patrick saw, were two he'd taken himself. Her purple bathing suit on the clothesline, alongside his swimming trunks--he'd taken two shots in case she wanted to keep one of the photos for herself. She had kept them both.

  The first two photos Mrs. Clausen sent were unsurprising, beginning with that one of Wallingford wading in the shallow water near the lakeshore with little Otto naked in his arms. The second picture was the one that Patrick took of Doris and Otto junior on the sundeck of the main cabin. It was Wallingford's first night at the cottage on the lake, and nothing had happened yet between him and Mrs. Clausen. As if she weren't even thinking that anything might happen between them, her expression was totally relaxed, free of any expectation.

  The only surprise was the third photograph, which Wallingford didn't know Doris had taken; it was the one of him sleeping in the rocking chair with his son.

  Patrick did not know how to interpret Mrs. Clausen's remarks in the note that accompanied the photographs--especially how matter-of-factly she reported that she'd taken two shots of little Otto asleep in his father's arms and had kept one for herself. The tone of her note, which Wallingford had at first found mischievous, was also ambiguous. Doris had written: On the evidence of the enclosed, you have the potential to be a good father.

  Only the potential? Patrick's feelings were hurt. Nevertheless, he read The English Patient in the fervent hope he would find a passage to bring to her attention--maybe one she had marked, one they both liked.

  When Wallingford called Mrs. Clausen to thank her for the photographs, he thought he might have found such a passage. "I loved that part about the 'list of wounds,' especially when she stabs him with the fork. Do you remember that? 'The fork that entered the back of his shoulder, leaving its bite marks the doctor suspected were caused by a fox.'"