The Fourth Hand (33 page)

There was an indoor and an outdoor fridge, which Patrick imagined were ful of beer. Mrs. Clausen later corrected this impression; only the outdoor refrigerator was ful of beer. It was the designated beer fridge—nothing else was al owed 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 diningroom table when the weather was bad. The limitations of space in cottage life spoke to Wal ingford 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. Wal ingford 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

—al 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 wal 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 hal , 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 hal owed gathering of old magazine photos picturing the “invincible ones.”

Wal ingford 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,” Wal ingford 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.

Wal ingford 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? Wal ingford 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. Wal ingford would never know the meaning of that pile of bodies, or how the Dal as 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 cal ed, “Brown right. Thirty-one wedge.” The result was sports history—it just wasn’t a history Wal ingford 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.

Wal ingford 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 smal er 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 wel -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 formal y 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, Wal ingford realized that he might have met him. (In al 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, Wal ingford’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 Wal ingford; it had a queensize 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 wal —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 wal s of the room were the same rough pine as the interior of the main cabin, although the pine boards were lighter, almost blond—al but one large rectangle near the door, where perhaps a picture or a mirror had been hung. Sunlight had bleached the wal s almost everywhere else. What had Mrs. Clausen taken down? Thumbtacked to the wal , 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 wel 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 Wal ingford 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 Wal ingford 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 Wal ingford held the suit to his face and imagined that he could smel her.

In truth, the suit smel ed 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, ful y 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. Wal ingford 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 oncewhite, 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 pil owcases and an extra blanket; the middle drawer was ful 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 smal holes that tacks had made.

She’d once tacked photographs there, as many as a dozen. Of what, or of whom, Wal ingford 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 Wal ingford 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 hal 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. There was a gangplank and a slender dock that separated the two boats tied up in the boathouse, the family speedboat and a smal er outboard.

At the open end of the boathouse, a ladder went into the water from the dividing dock. Who would want to enter or climb out of the lake from inside the boathouse? But Patrick didn’t mention the ladder because Mrs. Clausen was already making arrangements for the baby on the big outdoors dock.

She’d brought some toys and a quilt the size of a picnic blanket. The child wasn’t crawling as actively as Wal ingford had expected. Otto junior could sit up by himself, until he seemed to forget where he was; then he’d rol over on his side. At eight months, the child could pul himself up to his feet—
if
there was a low table or some other sturdy thing for him to hang on to. But he often forgot he was standing; he would suddenly sit down or topple sideways.

And most of little Otto’s crawling was backward—he could back up more easily than he could move forward. If he was surrounded by some interesting objects to handle and look at, he would sit in one spot quite contentedly—but not for long, Doris pointed out. “In a few weeks, we won’t be able to sit on a dock with him. He’l be moving, on al fours, nonstop.”

For now, because of the sun, the child wore a long-sleeved shirt, long pants, and a hat—also sunglasses, which he didn’t pul off his face as frequently as Patrick would have predicted. “You swim. I’l watch him. Then you can watch him while I swim,” Mrs. Clausen told Wal ingford.

Patrick was impressed by the sheer amount of baby paraphernalia Mrs. Clausen had brought for the weekend; he was equal y impressed by how calmly and effortlessly Doris seemed to have adjusted to being a mother. Or maybe motherhood did that to women who’d wanted to have a baby as badly and for as long as Mrs. Clausen had wanted one. Wal ingford didn’t real y know. The lake water felt cold, but only when you first went in. Off the deep end of the dock, the water was blue-gray; nearer shore, it took on a greener color from the reflected fir trees and white pines.

The bottom was sandier, less muddy, than Patrick had anticipated, and there was a smal beach of coarse sand, strewn with rocks, where Wal ingford bathed little Otto in the lake. Initial y the boy was shocked by the coldness of the water, but he never cried; he let Wal ingford wade with him in his arms while Mrs. Clausen took their picture. (She seemed quite the expert with a camera.)

The grown-ups, as Patrick began to think of Doris and himself, took turns swimming off the dock. Mrs. Clausen was a good swimmer. Wal ingford explained that, with one hand, he felt more comfortable just floating or treading water. Together they dried little Otto, and Doris let Patrick try to dress the child—his first attempt. She had to show him how to do the diaper. Mrs. Clausen was deft at taking her bathing suit off under the terry-cloth robe. Wal ingford, because of the one-hand problem, was less skil ful at taking his suit off while wrapped in a towel. Final y Doris laughed and said she would look the other way while he managed it, out in the open. (She didn’t tel him about the Peeping Tom with the telescope on the opposite shore of the lake—not yet.) Together they carried the baby and his paraphernalia to the main cabin. There was a child’s highchair already in place, and Wal ingford drank a beer—he was stil wearing just a towel—while Mrs. Clausen fed Otto junior. She told Patrick that they should feed the baby and make their own dinner, and be finished with everything they had to do in the main cabin—al before dark. After dark, the mosquitoes came. They should be settled into the boathouse apartment by then. There was no bathroom in the boathouse. Doris reminded Wal ingford that he should use the toilet in the main cabin, and brush his teeth in the bathroom sink there.