The Fourth Hand (34 page)

If he had to get up and pee in the middle of the night, he could go outside with a flashlight and be quick about it.

“Just get back to the boathouse before the mosquitoes find you,” Mrs. Clausen warned.

Using her camera, Patrick took a picture of Doris and little Otto on the sundeck of the main cabin.

The grown-ups barbecued a steak for their dinner, which they ate with some green peas and rice. Mrs. Clausen had brought two bottles of red wine—they drank only one. While Doris did the dishes, Patrick took her camera down to the dock and took two pictures of their bathing suits side-by-side on the clothesline. It seemed to him the height of privacy and domestic tranquil ity that they had eaten their dinner together with Doris dressed in her old bathrobe and Wal ingford wearing only a towel around his waist. He’d never lived like this, not with anyone. Wal ingford took another beer with him when they went back to the boathouse. As they navigated the pine-needle path, they were aware that the west wind had dropped and the lake was dead-calm; the setting sun stil struck the treetops on the eastern shore. In the windless evening, the mosquitoes had already risen—they hadn’t waited til dark. Patrick and Doris were waving the mosquitoes away as they carried little Otto and the baby’s paraphernalia into the boathouse apartment. Wal ingford watched the encroaching darkness from his bedroom window while he listened to Mrs. Clausen putting Otto junior to bed in the next room. She was singing him a nursery rhyme. Patrick’s windows were open; he could hear the mosquitoes humming against the screens.

The loons were the only other sound, save an outboard puttering on the lake, over which he could hear voices.

Perhaps they were fishermen returning home, or teenagers.

Then the outboard docked, faroff, and Mrs. Clausen was no longer singing to little Otto; it was quiet in the other bedroom. Now the loons and an occasional duck were the only sound, except for the mosquitoes.

Wal ingford sensed a remoteness he’d never experienced, and it was not yet ful y dark. Stil wrapped in the towel, he lay on the bed and let the room grow darker. He tried to imagine the photographs that Doris had once tacked to the wal on her side of the bed.

He’d fal en sound asleep when Mrs. Clausen came and woke him with the flashlight. In her old white bathrobe, she stood at the foot of the bed like a ghost, the light pointed at herself. She kept blinking the flashlight on and off, as if she were trying to impress him with how dark it was, although there was nearly a ful moon.

“Come on,” she whispered. “Let’s go swimming. We don’t need suits for a night swim. Just bring your towel.”

She went out into the hal and led him down the stairs, holding his one hand and pointing the flashlight at their bare feet. With his stump, Wal ingford made a clumsy effort to keep the towel tight around his waist. The boathouse was very dark. Doris took him down the gangplank and out on the slender dividing dock between the moored boats. She shined the flashlight ahead of them, il uminating the ladder at the end of the dock.

So the ladder was for night swims. Patrick was being invited to take part in a ritual that Mrs. Clausen had enacted with her late husband. Their careful, single-file navigation of the thin, dark dock seemed a holy passage.

The flashlight caught a large spider moving quickly along a mooring line. The spider startled Wal ingford, but not Mrs.

Clausen. “It’s just a spider,” she said. “I like spiders. They’re so industrious.”

So she likes industriousness
and
spiders, Patrick thought.

He hated himself for bringing
Stuart Little
instead of
Charlotte’s Web.
Perhaps he wouldn’t even mention to Doris that he had brought the stupid book with him, let alone that he’d imagined reading it first to her and then to little Otto.

At the ladder, Mrs. Clausen took off her robe. She’d clearly had some practice at arranging the flashlight on the robe so that it pointed out over the lake. The light would be a beacon for them to return to.

Wal ingford took off his towel and stood naked beside her.

She gave him no time to think about touching her; she went quickly down the ladder and slipped into the lake, making almost no sound. He fol owed her into the water, but not as graceful y or noiselessly as she had managed it. (You try going down a ladder with one hand.) The best Patrick could do was clutch the side rail in the crook of his left arm; his right hand and arm did most of the work.

They swam close together. Mrs. Clausen was careful not to swim too far ahead of him, or she treaded water or just floated until he caught up with her. They went out past the deep end of the big outdoors dock, where they could see the dark outline of the unlit main cabin and the smal er outbuildings; the rudimentary buildings resembled a wilderness colony, abandoned. Across the moonlit lake, the other summer cottages were unlit, too. The cottagers went to bed early and got up with the sun.

In addition to the flashlight aimed at the lake from the dock in the boathouse, there was another light visible—in Otto junior’s bedroom. Doris had left the gas lamp on, in case the child woke up; she didn’t want him to be frightened by the dark. With the windows open, she was sure she would hear the baby if he awakened and cried. Sound travels very clearly over water, especial y at night, Mrs. Clausen explained.

She could easily talk while swimming—she didn’t once sound out of breath. She talked and talked, explaining everything. How she and Otto senior could never swim at night by diving off the big outdoors dock, where the other Clausens (in the other cabins) would hear them. But by entering the lake from inside the boathouse, they’d discovered that they could reach the water undetected.

Wal ingford could hear the ghosts of boisterous, fun-loving Clausens going back and forth to the beer fridge—a screen door whapping and someone cal ing, “Don’t let the mosquitoes in!” Or a woman’s voice: “That dog is al wet!”

And the voice of a child: “Uncle Donny did it.”

One of the dogs would come down to the lake and bark witlessly at Mrs. Clausen and Otto senior, swimming naked and undetected—except by the dog. “Someone shoot that damn dog!” an angry voice would cal . Then someone else would say,

“Maybe it’s an otter or a mink.” A third person, either opening or closing the door of the beer fridge, would comment: “No, it’s just that brainless dog. That dog barks at anything, or at nothing at al .”

Wal ingford wasn’t sure if he was real y swimming naked with Doris Clausen, or if she was sleeplessly reliving her night swims with Otto senior. Patrick loved swimming beside her, despite the obvious melancholy attached to it.

When the mosquitoes found them, they swam underwater for a short distance, but Mrs. Clausen wanted to go back to the boathouse. If they swam underwater, even briefly, they wouldn’t hear the baby if he cried or notice if the gaslight flickered. There were the stars and the moon in the northern night sky; there was a loon cal ing, and another loon diving nearby. Just briefly, the swimmers thought they heard snatches of a song. Maybe someone in one of the dark cottages across the lake was playing a radio, but the swimmers didn’t think it was a radio. The song, which was a song they were both familiar with, was on their minds at that moment simultaneously. It was a popular song about missing someone, and clearly Mrs. Clausen was missing her late husband. Patrick missed Mrs. Clausen, although in truth they’d only ever been together in his imagination. She went up the ladder first. Treading water, he saw her silhouette—the beam of the flashlight was behind her. She quickly put on her robe as he struggled onehanded up the ladder. She shined the flashlight down at the dock, where he could see his towel; while he picked it up and wrapped it around his waist, she waited with the light pointed at her feet. Then she reached back and took his one hand, and he fol owed her again.

They went to look at little Otto, sleeping. Wal ingford was unprepared; he didn’t know that watching a sleeping child was as good as a movie to some mothers. When Mrs.

Clausen sat on one of the twin beds and commenced to stare at her sleeping son, Patrick sat down beside her. He had to—she’d not let go of his hand. It was as if the child were a drama, unfolding.

“Story time,” Doris whispered, in a voice Wal ingford had not heard before—she sounded ashamed. She gave a slight squeeze to Wal ingford’s one hand, just in case he was confused and had misunderstood her. The story was for him, not for little Otto.

“I tried to see someone, I mean someone else,” she said. “I tried going out with him.”

Did “going out” with someone mean what Wal ingford thought it meant, even in Wisconsin?

“I slept with someone, someone I shouldn’t have slept with,”

Mrs. Clausen explained.

“Oh . . .” Patrick couldn’t help saying; it was an involuntary response. He listened for the breathing of the sleeping child, not hearing it above the sound the gaslight made, which was like a kind of breathing.

“He’s someone I’ve known for a long time, but in another life,” Doris went on.

“He’s a little younger than I am,” she added. She stil held Wal ingford’s one hand, although she’d stopped squeezing it. He wanted to squeeze her hand—to show her his sympathy, to support her—but his hand felt anesthetized.

(He recognized the feeling.) “He used to be married to a friend of mine,” Mrs. Clausen continued. “We al went out together when Otto was alive. We were always doing things, the four of us, the way couples do.”

Patrick managed to squeeze her hand a little.

“But he broke up with his wife—this was after I lost Otto,”

Mrs. Clausen explained. “And when he cal ed me and asked me out, I didn’t say I would—not at first. I cal ed my friend, just to be sure they were getting divorced and that our going out was al right with her. She said it was okay, but she didn’t mean it. It
wasn’t
okay with her, after the fact.

And I
shouldn’t
have. I didn’t like him, anyway. Not in that way.”

It was al Wal ingford could do not to shout, “Good!”

“So I told him I wouldn’t go out with him anymore. He took it okay, he’s stil friendly, but
she
won’t talk to me. And she was the maid of honor at my wedding, if you can imagine that.” Wal ingford could, if only on the basis of a single photograph. “Wel , that’s al . I just wanted to tel you,” Mrs.

Clausen said.

“I’m glad you told me,” Patrick managed to say, although

“glad” didn’t come close to what he felt—a devastating jealousy in tandem with an overwhelming relief. She’d slept with an old friend—that was al ! That it hadn’t worked out made Wal ingford feel more than glad; he felt elated. He also felt naïve. Without being beautiful, Mrs. Clausen was one of the most sexual y attractive women he’d ever met. Of course men would cal her and ask her “out.” Why hadn’t he foreseen this?

He didn’t know where to start. Possibly Patrick took too much encouragement from the fact that Mrs. Clausen now gripped his hand more tightly than before; she must have been relieved that he’d been a sympathetic listener.

“I love you,” he began. He was pleased that Doris didn’t take her hand away, although he felt her grip lessen. “I want to live with you and little Otto. I want to marry you.” She was neutral now, just listening. He couldn’t tel what she thought.

They didn’t look at each other, not once. They continued to stare at Otto junior sleeping. The child’s open mouth beckoned a story; therefore, Wal ingford began one. It was the wrong story to begin, but he was a journalist—a fact guy, not a storytel er.

What he neglected was the very thing he deplored about his profession—he left out the context! He should have begun with Boston, with his trip to see Dr. Zajac because of the sensations of pain and crawling insects where Otto senior’s hand had been. He should have told Mrs. Clausen about meeting the woman in the Charles Hotel—how they’d read E. B. White to each other, naked, but they’d
not
had sex; how he’d been thinking of Mrs. Clausen the whole time. Real y, he
had
!

Al that was part of the context of how he’d acquiesced to Mary Shanahan’s desire to have his baby. And while it might have gone better with Doris Clausen if Patrick had begun with Boston, it would have been better yet if he’d begun with Japan—how he’d first asked Mary, then a young married woman who was
pregnant,
to come to Tokyo with him; how he’d felt guilty about that, and for so long had resisted her; how he’d tried so hard to be “just a friend.”

Because wasn’t it part of the context, too, that he’d final y slept with Mary Shanahan with no strings attached?

Meaning wasn’t he being “just a friend” to give her what she said she wanted? Just a baby, nothing more. That Mary wanted his apartment, too, or maybe she wanted to move in with him; that she also wanted his job, and she knew al along that she was about to become his boss . . . wel , shit,
that
was a surprise! But how could Patrick have predicted it? Surely if any woman could sympathize with another woman wanting to have Patrick Wal ingford’s baby, wasn’t it reasonable for Patrick to think that Doris Clausen would be the one? No, it
wasn’t
reasonable! And how
could
she sympathize, given the half-assed manner in which Wal ingford told the story? He’d just plunged in. He was artless, in the worst sense of the word—meaning oafish and crude. He began with what amounted to a confession: