The Fourth Hand

by John Irving

  Wallingford also wanted to see the television sets glowing in the darkness, all along their route, on their way back downtown; surely every set was still turned on to the dying game, and would stay on for the postgame analysis, too. Yet Mrs. Clausen's lap was warm and comforting, and Patrick found it easier to feel her occasional tears on his face than to sit up beside her and see her crying.

  As they were nearing the bridge, she spoke to him: "Please put your seat belt on. I don't want to lose you."

  He sat up quickly and buckled his belt. In the dark car, he couldn't tell if she'd stopped crying or not.

  "You can shut the radio off now," she told him. He did. They drove over the bridge in silence, the towering coal stack at first looming and then growing smaller behind them.

  We never really know our future, Wallingford was thinking; nobody's future with anyone is certain. Yet he imagined that he could envision his future with Doris Clausen. He saw it with the unlikely and offsetting brightness with which her and her late husband's wedding rings had leapt out of the dark at him, under the boathouse dock. There was something golden in his future with Mrs. Clausen--maybe the more so because it struck him as so undeserved. He no more merited her than those two rings, with their kept and unkept promises, deserved to be nailed under a dock, only inches above the cold lake.

  And for how long would he have Doris, or she him? It was fruitless to speculate--as fruitless as trying to guess how many Wisconsin winters it would take to bring the boathouse down and sink it in the unnamed lake.

  "What's the name of the lake?" he asked Doris suddenly. "Where the cottage is ... that lake."

  "We don't like the name," Mrs. Clausen told him. "We never use the name. It's just the cottage on the lake."

  Then, as if she knew he'd been thinking about her and Otto's rings nailed under the dock, she said: "I've picked out our rings. I'll show them to you when we get to the hotel. I chose platinum this time. I'm going to wear mine on the ring finger of my right hand." (Where the lion guy, as everyone knew, would have to wear his, too.)

  "You know what they say," Mrs. Clausen said. "'Leave no regrets on the field.'"

  Wallingford could guess the source. Even to him, the phrase smacked of football--and of a courage he heretofore had lacked. In fact, it was what the old sign said at the bottom of the stairwell at Lambeau Field, the sign above the doors that led to the Packers' locker room.

  LEAVE NO REGRETS ON THE FIELD

  "I get it," Patrick replied. In a men's room at Lambeau, he'd seen a man with his beard painted yellow and green, like Donny's face; the necessary degree of devotion was getting through to him. "I get it," he repeated.

  "No, you don't," Mrs. Clausen contradicted him. "Not yet, not quite." He looked closely at her--she'd stopped crying. "Open the glove compartment," Doris said. He hesitated; it occurred to him that Otto Clausen's gun was in there, and that it was loaded. "Go on--open it."

  In the glove compartment was an open envelope with photographs protruding from it. He could see the holes the tacks had made in the photos--the occasional rust spot, too. Of course he knew where the photos were from before he saw what they were of. They were the photographs, a dozen or more, that Doris had once tacked to the wall on her side of the bed--those pictures she'd taken down because she couldn't stand to see them in the boathouse anymore.

  "Please look at them," Mrs. Clausen requested.

  She'd stopped the car. They were in sight of the hotel. She had just pulled over and stopped with the motor running. Downtown Green Bay was almost deserted; everyone was at home or returning home from Lambeau Field.

  The photographs were in no particular order, but Wallingford quickly grasped their theme. They all showed Otto Clausen's left hand. In some, the hand was still attached to Otto. There was the beer-truck driver's brawny arm; there was Otto's wedding ring, too. But in some of the pictures, Mrs. Clausen had removed the ring--from what Wallingford knew was the dead man's hand.

  There were photos of Patrick Wallingford, too. Well, at least there were photos of Patrick's new left hand--just the hand. By the varying degrees of swelling in the hand and wrist, and in the forearm area of the surgical attachment, Wallingford could tell at what stages Doris had photographed him with Otto's hand--what she had called the third one.

  So he hadn't dreamed that he was having his picture taken in his sleep. That was why the sound of the shutter had seemed so real. And with his eyes shut, naturally the flash would have struck him as faint and distant, as incomplete as heat lightning--just the way Wallingford remembered it.

  "Please throw them away," Mrs. Clausen asked. "I've tried, but I can't make myself do it. Please just get rid of them."

  "Okay," Patrick said.

  She was crying again, and he reached out to her. He'd never initiated touching her breast with his stump before. Even through her parka, he could feel her breast; when she clasped his forearm tightly there, he could also feel her breathing.

  "Just don't ever think I haven't lost something, too," Mrs. Clausen told him angrily.

  Doris drove on to the hotel. After she'd handed Patrick the keys and had gone ahead of him into the lobby, he was left to park the car. (He decided to have someone from the hotel do it.)

  Then he disposed of the photographs--he dropped them, and the envelope, in a public trash receptacle. They were quickly gone, but he'd not missed their message. Wallingford knew that Mrs. Clausen had just told him all she ever would about her obsession; showing him those photographs of the hand was the absolute end of what she had to say about it.

  What had Dr. Zajac said? There was no medical reason why the hand-transplant surgery hadn't worked; Zajac couldn't explain the mystery. But it was no mystery to Patrick Wallingford, whose imagination didn't suffer the constraints of a scientific mind. The hand had finished with its business--that was all.

  Interestingly, Dr. Zajac had little to say to his students at Harvard Medical School on the subject of "professional disappointment." Zajac was happy in his semiretirement with Irma and Rudy and the twins; he thought professional disappointment was as anticlimactic as professional success.

  "Get your lives together," Zajac told his Harvard students. "If you've already come this far, your professions should take care of themselves." But what do medical-school students know about having lives? They haven't had time to have lives.

  Wallingford went up to Doris Clausen, who was waiting for him in the lobby. They took the elevator to his hotel room without exchanging a word.

  He let her use the bathroom first. For all her plans, Doris had brought nothing with her but a toothbrush, which she carried in her purse. And in her haste to get ready for bed, she forgot to show Patrick the platinum wedding rings, which were also in her purse. (She would show him the rings in the morning.)

  While Mrs. Clausen was in the bathroom, Wallingford watched the late-night news--as a matter of principle, not on his old channel. One of the sports hacks had already leaked the story of Patrick's dismissal to another network; it made a good show-ender, a better-than-average kicker. "Lion Guy Gets Ax from Pretty Mary Shanahan." (That was who she would be from this time forth: "Pretty Mary.")

  Mrs. Clausen had come out of the bathroom, naked, and was standing beside him.

  Patrick quickly used the bathroom while Doris watched the wrap-up of the Green Bay game. She was surprised that Dorsey Levens had carried the ball twenty-four times for 104 yards, a solid performance for him in a losing cause.

  When Wallingford, also naked, came out of the bathroom, Mrs. Clausen had already switched off the TV and was waiting for him in the big bed. Patrick turned out the lights and got into bed beside her. They held each other while they listened to the wind--it was blowing hard, in gusts, but they soon ceased to hear it.

  "Give me your hand," Doris said. He knew which one she meant.

  Wallingford began by holding Mrs. Clausen's neck in the crook of his right arm; with his right hand, he held fast to one of her breasts. She started by scissoring
the stump of his left forearm between her thighs, where he could feel the lost fingers of his fourth hand touching her.

  Outside their warm hotel, the cold wind was a harbinger of the coming winter, but they heard only their own harsh breathing. Like other lovers, they were oblivious to the swirling wind, which blew on and on in the wild, uncaring Wisconsin night.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IAM INDEBTED to Charles Gibson at ABC News and Good Morning America for his sixteen-page, single-spaced fax to me--the most detailed notes I received on the first draft of this (or any other) novel. Thank you, Charlie. I owe a similar debt to Dr. Martin Schwartz in Toronto; this isn't the first time that Dr. Schwartz has advised me on the medical verisimilitude in a work of fiction. Thank you again, Marty.

  I am grateful to David Maraniss, whom I consulted on matters pertaining to Lambeau Field and the Green Bay Packers, and to Jane Mayer for her insightful article "Bad News," which was published in the August 14, 2000, New Yorker.

  In The New York Times of November 1 and 2, 1999, the reporting of the crash of EgyptAir 990 was most informative to me--in particular, pieces by Francis X. Clines, John Kifner, Robert D. McFadden, Andrew C. Revkin, Susan Sachs, Matthew L. Wald, and Amy Waldman. Dr. Lawrence K. Altman's three stories on hand-transplant surgeries were especially enlightening; they appeared in the Times on January 26, 1999, January 15, 2000, and February 27, 2001.

  As for the glut of commentary and opinion that followed the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr., my sources were largely undistinguished (and often indistinguishable from one another) and too numerous to cite. The same can be said for most of the television I watched on the subject. Not least, I would like to thank the three assistants who worked for me in the period of time this novel was written: for their careful typing and proofreading of the manuscript, and their thoughtful criticism, my thanks to Chloe Bland, Edward McPherson, and Kelly Harper Berkson. More than ever, my editor, Harvey Ginsberg, has made me look better than I am. And, as always, to my friend David Calicchio and my wife, Janet, who both read this novel more than once--thanks again.

  Janet gave me the idea for The Fourth Hand. One night we were watching the news on television before we went to bed. A story about the nation's first hand transplant got our attention. There were only brief views of the surgical procedure, and hardly a word about how the patient--the recipient, as I thought of him--lost his hand in the first place. There was nothing about the donor. The new hand had to have come from someone who'd died recently; probably he'd had a family.

  Janet asked the inspiring question: "What if the donor's widow demands visitation rights with the hand?"

  Dr. John C. Baldwin, the Dean of Dartmouth Medical School, has assured me that this probably wouldn't happen in what we call real life--not without the unlikely concurrence of enough lawyers and medical ethicists to start a small liberal-arts college. But I always listen to the storytelling possibilities. Every novel I've written has begun with a "What if ..."

  --J.I.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JOHN IRVING published his first novel at the age of twenty-six. He has received awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation; he has won an O. Henry Award, a National Book Award, and an Oscar.

  In 1992, Mr. Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In January 2001, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  The Fourth Hand is a work of fiction. Other than those well-known individuals and news events referred to for purposes incidental to the plot, all names, places, characters, and events are the product of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. To the extent that real persons and reported events are mentioned in the novel, the author has included such references without the knowledge or cooperation of the individuals involved.

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2002

  Copyright (c) 2001 Garp Enterprises, Ltd.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, in 2002. First published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2001. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Irving, John

  The fourth hand: a novel eISBN: 978-0-30736649-8

  I. Title.

  PS3559.R8F68 2002 813'.54 C2001-904292-2

  www.randomhouse.ca

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