The Fourth Hand (16 page)

She’d come back from the weekend early Monday morning, gone for a run, and then taken a shower. She was naked in the kitchen because she’d assumed she was alone in the house—but don’t forget that she
wanted
Zajac to see her naked, anyway.

Normal y at that time Monday morning, Dr. Zajac had already returned Rudy to his mother’s house—in time for Hildred to take the boy to school. But Zajac and Rudy had both overslept, the result of their being up most of the night with Medea. Only after Dr. Zajac’s ex-wife cal ed and accused him of kidnapping Rudy did Zajac stumble into the kitchen to make some coffee. Hildred went on yel ing after he put Rudy on the phone.

Irma didn’t see Dr. Zajac, but he saw her—everything but her head, which was largely hidden from view because she was toweling dry her hair. Great abs! the doctor thought, retreating.

Later he found he couldn’t speak to Irma, except in an uncustomary stammer. He haltingly tried to thank her for her peanut-butter idea, but she couldn’t understand him. (Nor did she meet Rudy.) And as Dr. Zajac drove Rudy to his angry mother’s house, he noticed that there was a special spirit of camaraderie between him and his little boy—they h a d
both
been yel ed at by Rudy’s mother. Zajac was euphoric when he cal ed Wal ingford in Mexico, and much more than Otto Clausen’s suddenly available left hand was exciting him—the doctor had spent a terrific weekend with his son. Nor had his view of Irma, naked, been unexciting, although it was typical of Zajac to notice her abs. Was it only Irma’s abs that had reduced him to stammering? Thus the “prompt consideration of Mrs. Clausen” and similar formalities were al the soon-to-be-celebrated hand surgeon could manage to impart to Patrick Wal ingford over the phone. What Dr. Zajac didn’t tel Patrick was that Otto Clausen’s widow had demonstrated unheard-of zeal on behalf of the donor hand. Mrs. Clausen had not only accompanied her husband’s body from Green Bay to Milwaukee, where (in addition to most of his organs) Otto’s left hand was removed; she’d also insisted on accompanying the hand, which was packed in ice, on the flight from Milwaukee to Boston.

Wal ingford, of course, had no idea that he was going to meet more than his new hand in Boston; he was also going to meet his new hand’s widow. This development was less upsetting to Dr. Zajac and the other members of the Boston team than a more unusual but no less spur-of-the-moment request of Mrs. Clausen’s. Yes, there were some strings attached to the donor hand, and Dr. Zajac was only now learning of them. He had probably been wise in not tel ing Patrick about the new demands.

With time, everyone at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink

& Associates hoped, Wal ingford might warm to the widow’s seemingly last-minute ideas. Apparently not one to beat around the bush, she had requested visitation rights with the hand after the transplant surgery.

How could the one-handed reporter refuse?

“She just wants to see it, I suppose,” Dr. Zajac suggested to Wal ingford in the doctor’s office in Boston.

“Just
see
it?” Patrick asked. There was a disconcerting pause. “Not
touch
it, I hope—not hold hands or anything.”

“
Nobody
can touch it! Not for a considerable period of time after the surgery,” Dr. Zajac answered protectively.

“But does she mean one visit? Two? For a
year
?”

Zajac shrugged. “Indefinitely—those are her terms.”

“Is she crazy?” Patrick asked. “Is she morbid, grief-stricken, deranged?”

“You’l see,” Dr. Zajac said. “She wants to meet you.”

“Before the surgery?”

“Yes, now. That’s part of her request. She needs to be sure that she wants you to have it.”

“But I thought her
husband
wanted me to have it!”

Wal ingford cried. “It was
his
hand!”

“Look—al I can tel you is, the widow’s in the driver’s seat,”

Dr. Zajac said.

“Have you ever had to deal with a medical ethicist?” (Mrs.

Clausen had been quick to cal a medical ethicist, too.)

“But
why
does she want to meet me?” Patrick wanted to know. “I mean before I get the hand.”

This part of the request
and
the visitation rights struck Dr.

Zajac as the kind of thing only a medical ethicist could have thought up. Zajac didn’t trust medical ethicists; he believed that they should keep out of the area of experimental surgery. They were always meddling—doing their best to make surgery “more human.”

Medical ethicists complained that hands were not necessary to live, and that the anti-rejection drugs posed many risks and had to be taken for life. They argued that the first recipients should be those who had lost
both
hands; after al , doublehand amputees had more to gain than recipients who’d lost only one hand. Unaccountably, the medical ethicists
loved
Mrs. Clausen’s request—not just the creepy visitation rights, but also that she insisted on meeting Patrick Wal ingford and deciding if she liked him before permitting the surgery. (You can’t get “more human”

than that.)

“She just wants to see if you’re . . . nice,” Zajac tried to explain. This new affront struck Wal ingford as both an insult and a dare; he felt simultaneously offended and chal enged.

Was he nice? He didn’t know. He hoped he was, but how many of us truly know?

As for Dr. Zajac, the doctor knew he himself wasn’t especial y nice. He was cautiously optimistic that Rudy loved him, and of course he knew that he loved his little boy.

But the hand specialist had no il usions concerning himself in the niceness department; Dr. Zajac, except to his son, had never been very lovable. With a pang, Zajac recal ed his brief glimpse of Irma’s abs. She must do sit-ups and crunches al day!

“I’l leave you alone with Mrs. Clausen now,” Dr. Zajac said, uncharacteristical y putting his hand on Patrick’s shoulder.

“I’m going to be alone with her?” Wal ingford asked. He wanted more time to get ready, to test expressions of nice.

But he needed only a second to imagine Otto’s hand; maybe the ice was melting.

“Okay, okay, okay,” Patrick repeated.

Dr. Zajac and Mrs. Clausen, as if choreographed, changed places in the doctor’s office. By the third “okay,” Wal ingford realized that he was alone with the brandnew widow.

Seeing her gave him a sudden chil —what he would think of later as a kind of cold-lake feeling.

Don’t forget, she had the flu. When she dragged herself out of bed on Super Bowl Sunday night, she was stil feverish.

She put on clean underwear and the pair of jeans that were on the bedside chair, and also the faded green sweatshirt

—Green Bay green, with the lettering in gold. She’d been wearing the jeans and the sweatshirt when she started to feel il . She put on her old parka, too. Mrs. Clausen had owned that faded Green Bay Packers sweatshirt for as long as she could remember going with Otto to the cottage.

The old sweatshirt was the color of the fir trees and white pines on the far shore of the lake at sunset. There had been nights in the boathouse bedroom when she’d used the sweatshirt as a pil owcase, because laundry at the cottage could be done only in the lake. Even now, when she stood in Dr. Zajac’s office with her arms crossed on her chest—

as if she were cold, or concealing from Patrick Wal ingford any impression he might have been able to have of her breasts—Mrs. Clausen could almost smel the pine needles, and she sensed Otto’s presence as strongly as if he were right there with her in Zajac’s office.

Given the hand surgeon’s photo gal ery of famous patients, it’s a wonder that neither Patrick Wal ingford nor Mrs.

Clausen paid much attention to the surrounding wal s. The two of them were too engaged in noticing each other, although, in the beginning, there was no eye contact between them. Mrs. Clausen’s running shoes had got wet in the snow back in Wisconsin, and they stil looked wet to Wal ingford, who found himself staring at her feet. Mrs.

Clausen took her parka off and sat in the chair beside Patrick. It was Wal ingford’s impression that, when she spoke, she addressed his surviving hand.

“Otto felt awful about your hand—the other one, I mean,”

she began, never taking her eyes from the hand that remained. Patrick Wal ingford listened to her with the concealed disbelief of a veteran journalist who usual y knows when an interviewee is lying, which Mrs. Clausen was.

“But,” the widow went on, “I tried not to think about it, to tel you the truth. And when they showed the lions eating you up, I had trouble watching it. It stil makes me sick to think about it.”

“Me, too,” Wal ingford said; he didn’t believe she was lying now. It’s hard to tel much about a woman in a sweatshirt, but she seemed fairly compact. Her dark-brown hair needed washing, but Patrick sensed that she was general y a clean person who maintained a neat appearance. The overhead fluorescent light was harsh to her face. She wore no makeup, not even lipstick, and her lower lip was dry and split—probably from biting it. The circles under her brown eyes exaggerated their darkness, and the crow’s-feet at the corners indicated that she was roughly Patrick’s age.

(Wal ingford was only a few years younger than Otto Clausen, who’d been only a little older than his wife.)

“I suppose you think I’m crazy,” Mrs. Clausen said.

“No! Not at al ! I can’t imagine how you must feel—I mean beyond how sad you must be.” In truth, she looked like so many emotional y drained women he’d interviewed—most recently, the sword-swal ower’s wife in Mexico City—that Patrick felt he’d met her before.

Mrs. Clausen surprised him by nodding and then pointing in the general direction of his lap. “May I see it?” she asked. In the awkward pause that fol owed, Wal ingford stopped breathing. “Your
hand
. . . please. The one you stil have.”

He held out his right hand to her, as if it had been newly transplanted. She reached out to take it but stopped herself, leaving his hand extended in a lifeless-looking way.

“It’s just a little smal ,” she said. “Otto’s is bigger.”

He took back his hand, feeling unworthy.

“Otto cried when he saw how you lost your other hand. He actual y cried!” We know, of course, that Otto had felt like throwing up; it had been Mrs. Clausen who’d cried, yet she managed to make Wal ingford think that her husband’s compassionate tears were a source of wonder to her stil .

(So much for a veteran journalist knowing when someone was lying. Wal ingford was completely taken in by Mrs.

Clausen’s account of Otto’s crying.)

“You loved him very much. I can see that,” Patrick said.

The widow bit her lower lip and nodded fiercely, tears wel ing in her eyes. “We were trying to have a baby. We just kept trying and trying. I don’t know why it wasn’t working.”

She dropped her chin to her chest. She held her parka to her face and sobbed quietly into it. Although it was not as faded, the parka was the same Green Bay green as her sweatshirt, with the Packers’ logo (the gold helmet with the white
G
) emblazoned on the back.

“It wil always be Otto’s hand to me,” Mrs. Clausen said with unexpected volume, pushing the parka away. For the first time, she leveled her gaze at Patrick’s face; she looked as if she’d changed her mind about something. “How old are you, anyway?” she asked. Perhaps from seeing Patrick Wal ingford only on television, she’d expected someone older or younger.

“I’m thirty-four,” Wal ingford answered, defensively.

“You’re my age exactly,” she told him. He detected the faintest trace of a smile, as if—either in spite of her grief or because of it—she were genuinely mad.

“I won’t be a nuisance—I mean after the operation,” she continued. “But to see his hand . . . later, to feel it . . . wel , that shouldn’t be very much of a burden to you, should it? If you respect me, I’l respect you.”

“Certainly!” Patrick said, but he failed to see what was coming.

“I stil want to have Otto’s baby.”

Wal ingford stil didn’t get it. “Do you mean you might be pregnant?” he cried excitedly. “Why didn’t you say so?

That’s wonderful! When wil you know?”

That same trace of an insane smile crossed her face again.

Patrick hadn’t noticed that she’d kicked off her running shoes. Now she unzipped her jeans; she pul ed them down, together with her panties, but she hesitated before taking off her sweatshirt.

It was additional y disarming to Patrick that he’d never seen a woman undress this way—that is, bottom first, leaving the top until last. To Wal ingford, Mrs. Clausen seemed sexual y inexperienced to an embarrassing degree. Then he heard her voice; something had changed in it, and not just the volume. To his surprise, he had an erection, not because Mrs. Clausen was half naked but because of her new tone of voice.

“There’s no other time,” she told him. “If I’m going to have Otto’s baby, I should already be pregnant. After the surgery, you’l be in no shape to do this. You’l be in the hospital, you’l be taking a zil ion drugs, you’l be in pain—”

“Mrs. Clausen!” Patrick Wal ingford said. He quickly stood up—and as quickly he sat back down. Until he’d tried to stand, he hadn’t realized how much of a hard-on he had; it was as obvious as what Wal ingford said next.

“This would be
my
baby, not your husband’s, wouldn’t it?”

But she’d already taken off the sweatshirt. Although she’d left her bra on, he could nonetheless see that her breasts were more special than he’d imagined. There was the glint of something in her navel; the body-piercing was also unexpected. Patrick didn’t look at the ornament closely—he was afraid it might have something to do with the Green Bay Packers.