The Fourth Hand (36 page)

He final y took off the towel from around his waist. He put on a pair of boxer shorts and crawled into bed, but before he turned the flashlight off, he made sure he’d memorized where it was in case he needed to find it in the dark. (He left it on the floor, by Mrs. Clausen’s side of the bed.) Now that the moon had set, there was an almost total blackness that resembled his prospects with Mrs. Clausen. Patrick forgot to close his curtains, although Doris had warned him that the sun rose directly in his windows. Later, when he was stil asleep, Wal ingford was supernatural y aware of a predawn light in the sky. This was when the crows started cawing; even in his sleep, he was more aware of the crows than he was of the loons. Without seeing it, he sensed the increasing light. Then little Otto’s crying woke him, and he lay listening to Mrs. Clausen soothe the child. The boy stopped crying fairly quickly, but he stil fussed while his mother changed him. From Doris’s tone of voice, and the varying baby noises that Otto made, Wal ingford could guess what they were doing. He heard them go down the boathouse stairs; Mrs. Clausen kept talking as they went up the path to the main cabin. Patrick remembered that the baby formula had to be mixed with bottled water, which Mrs. Clausen heated on the stove.

He looked first in the area of his missing left hand and then at his right wrist. (He would never get used to wearing his watch on his right arm.) Just as the rising sun shot through his bedroom windows from across the lake, Patrick saw that it was only a little past five in the morning.

As a reporter, he’d traveled al over the world—he was familiar with sleep deprivation. But he was beginning to realize that Mrs. Clausen had had eight months of sleep deprivation; it had been criminal of Wal ingford to keep her up most of the night. That Doris carried only one smal bag for al her things, yet she’d brought half a dozen bags of paraphernalia for the baby, was more than symbolic—little Otto was her life.

What measure of madness was it that Wal ingford had even imagined
he
could entertain little Otto while Mrs. Clausen caught up on her sleep? He didn’t know how to feed the child; he’d only once (yesterday) seen Doris change a diaper. And he couldn’t be trusted to burp the baby. (He didn’t know that Mrs. Clausen had stopped burping Otto.) I should summon the courage to jump in the lake and drown, Patrick was thinking, when Mrs. Clausen came into his room carrying Otto junior. The baby was wearing only a diaper. Al Doris was wearing was an oversize T-shirt, which had probably belonged to Otto senior. The T-shirt was a faded Green Bay green with the familiar Packers’

logo; it hung past midthigh, almost to her knees.

“We’re wide awake now, aren’t we?” Mrs. Clausen was saying to little Otto.

“Let’s make sure Daddy is wide awake, too.”

Wal ingford made room for them in the bed. He tried to remain calm. (This was the first time Doris had referred to him as “Daddy.”)

Before dawn, it had been cool enough to sleep under a blanket, but now the room was flooded with sunlight. Mrs.

Clausen and the baby slipped under the top sheet while Wal ingford pushed the blanket off the foot of the bed to the floor.

“You should learn how to feed him,” Doris said, handing the bottle of formula to Patrick. Otto junior was laid upon a pil ow; his bright eyes fol owed the bottle as it passed between his parents.

Later Mrs. Clausen sat Otto upright between two pil ows.

Wal ingford watched his son pick up a rattle and shake it and put it in his mouth—not exactly a fascinating chain of events, but the new father was spel bound.

“He’s a very easy baby,” Mrs. Clausen said.

Wal ingford didn’t know what to say.

“Why don’t you try reading him some of that mouse book you brought?” she asked. “He doesn’t have to understand you—it’s the sound of your voice that matters. I’d like to hear it, too.”

Patrick climbed out of bed and came back with the book.

“Nice boxers,” Doris told him.

There were parts of
Stuart Little
that Wal ingford had marked, thinking that they might have special significance for Mrs. Clausen. How Stuart’s first date with Harriet Ames goes awry because Stuart is too upset about his canoe being vandalized to accept Harriet’s invitation to the dance.

Alas, Harriet says good-bye,

“leaving Stuart alone with his broken dreams and his damaged canoe.”

Patrick had once thought Doris would like that part—now he wasn’t so sure. He decided he would skip ahead to the last chapter, “Heading North,” and read only the bit about Stuart’s philosophical conversation with the telephone repairman. First they talk about the bird Stuart is looking for. The telephone repairman asks Stuart to describe the bird, then the repairman writes down the description. While Wal ingford read this part, Mrs. Clausen lay on her side and watched him with their son. Otto, with only an occasional glance at his mother, appeared to be listening intently to his father. With both his mother and father near enough to touch, the child was getting sufficient attention.

Then Patrick reached the moment when the telephone repairman asks Stuart where he’s headed. Wal ingford read this excerpt with particular poignancy.

“North,” said Stuart.

“North is nice,” said the repairman. “I’ve always enjoyed going north. Of course, south-west is a fine direction, too.”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” said Stuart, thoughtful y.

“And there’s east,” continued the repairman. “I once had an interesting experience on an easterly course. Do you want me to tel you about it?”

“No, thanks,” said Stuart.

The repairman seemed disappointed, but he kept right on talking.

“There’s something about north,” he said, “something that sets it apart from al other directions. A person who is heading north is not making any mistake, in my opinion.”

“That’s the way I look at it,” said Stuart. “I rather expect that from now on I shal be traveling north until the end of my days.”

“Worse things than that could happen to a person,” said the repairman.

“Yes, I know,” answered Stuart.

Worse things than that had happened to Patrick Wal ingford. He’d not been heading north when he met Mary Shanahan, or Angie, or Monika with a
k
—or his ex-wife, for that matter. He had met Marilyn in New Orleans, where he was doing a three-minute story on excessive partying at Mardi Gras; he’d been having a fling with a Fiona somebody, another makeup girl, but he dumped Fiona for Marilyn. (A long-acknowledged mistake.) A trivial statistic, but Wal ingford couldn’t think of a woman he’d had sex with while traveling north. As for being up north, he’d only been there with Doris Clausen, with whom he wanted to remain—not necessarily up north but
anywhere

—until the end of his days.

Pausing for dramatic effect, Patrick repeated just that phrase—“until the end of my days.” Then he looked at little Otto, afraid that the child might be bored, but the boy was as alert as a squirrel; his eyes flashed from his father’s face to the colored picture on the book’s cover. (Stuart in his birchbark canoe with summer memories stamped on the bow.)

Wal ingford was thril ed to have seized and kept his young son’s attention, but when he glanced at Mrs. Clausen, upon whom he’d hoped to make a redeeming impression, he realized that she’d fal en asleep—in al likelihood, before she ful y comprehended the relevancy of the “Heading North” chapter. Doris lay on her side, stil turned toward Patrick and their baby boy, and although her hair partly covered her face, Wal ingford could see that she was smiling. Wel . . . if not exactly smiling, at least she wasn’t frowning. Both in her expression and in the tranquil ity of her repose, Mrs. Clausen seemed more at peace than Wal ingford had ever known her to be. Or more deeply asleep—Patrick couldn’t real y tel .

Taking his new responsibility seriously, Wal ingford picked up Otto junior and inched out of the bed—careful y, so as not to wake the boy’s mother. He carried the child into the other bedroom, where he did his best to imitate Doris’s orderly routine. He boldly attempted to change the baby on the bed that was appointed as a changing table, but (to Patrick’s dismay) the diaper was dry, little Otto was clean, and while Wal ingford contemplated the astonishing smal ness of his son’s penis, Otto peed straight up in the air in his father’s face. Now Patrick had grounds for changing the diaper—not easy to do one-handed.

That done, Wal ingford wondered what he should do next.

As Otto junior sat upright on the bed, virtual y imprisoned by the pil ows Patrick had securely piled around him, the inexperienced father searched through the bags of baby paraphernalia. He assembled the fol owing items: a packet of formula, a clean baby bottle, two changes of diapers, a shirt, in case it was cool outside—if they went outside—and a pair of socks and shoes, in case Otto was happiest bouncing in the jumper-seat.

That contraption was in the main cabin, where Wal ingford carried Otto next. The socks and shoes, Patrick thought—

thereby revealing the precautionary instincts of a good father—would protect the baby’s tiny toes and prevent him from getting splinters in his soft little feet. As an afterthought, just before he’d left the boathouse apartment with Otto and the bag of paraphernalia, Wal ingford had added the baby’s hat to the bag, along with Mrs. Clausen’s copy of
The English
Patient.
His one hand had lightly touched Doris’s underwear as he’d reached for the book.

It was cooler in the main cabin, so Patrick put the shirt on Otto, and just for the chal enge, also dressed the boy in his socks and shoes. He tried putting Otto in the jumper-seat, but the child cried. Patrick then put the little boy in the highchair, which Otto seemed to like better. (Only momentarily—there was nothing to eat.) Finding a baby spoon in the dish drainer, Wal ingford mashed a banana for Otto, who enjoyed spitting out some of the banana and rubbing his face with it before wiping his hands on his shirt.

Wal ingford wondered what else he could feed the child.

The kettle on the stove was stil warm. He dissolved the powdered formula in about eight ounces of the heated water and mixed some of the formula with a little baby cereal, but Otto liked the banana better. Patrick tried mixing the baby cereal with a teaspoon of strained peaches from one of the jars of baby food. Otto cautiously liked this, but by then several globs of banana, and some of the peach-cereal mixture, had found their way into his hair.

It was evident to Wal ingford that he’d managed to get more food on Otto than in him. He dampened a paper towel with warm water and wiped the baby clean, or almost clean; then he took Otto out of the highchair and put him in the jumper-seat again. The boy bounced al around for a couple of minutes before throwing up half his breakfast.

Wal ingford took his son out of the jumper-seat and sat down in a rocking chair, holding the child in his lap. He tried giving him a bottle, but the besmeared little boy drank only an ounce or two before he spit up in Wal ingford’s lap.

(Wal ingford was wearing just his boxer shorts, so what did it matter?) Patrick tried pacing back and forth with Otto in the crook of his left arm and Mrs. Clausen’s copy of
The
English Patient
held open, like a hymnal, in his right hand.

But given Wal ingford’s handless left arm, Otto was too heavy to carry in this fashion for long. Patrick returned to the rocking chair. He sat Otto on his thigh and let the boy lean against him; the back of the child’s head rested on Wal ingford’s chest and left shoulder, with Wal ingford’s left arm around him. They rocked back and forth for ten minutes or more, until Otto fel asleep. Patrick slowed the rocker down; he held the sleeping boy on his lap while he attempted to read
The English Patient.
Holding the book open in his one hand was less difficult than turning the pages, which required an act of considerable manual dexterity—as chal enging to Wal ingford as some of his efforts with prosthetic devices—but the effort seemed suited to the early descriptions of the burned patient, who doesn’t appear to remember who he is.

Patrick read only a few pages, stopping at a sentence Mrs.

Clausen had underlined in red—the description of how the eponymous English patient drifts in and out of consciousness as the nurse reads to him.

So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fal en away from a mural at night.

It was not only a passage to be reread and admired; it also reflected wel on the reader who had marked it. Wal ingford closed the book and placed it gently on the floor. Then he shut his eyes and concentrated on the soothing motion of the rocker. When Wal ingford held his breath, he could hear his son breathing—a holy moment for many parents. And as he rocked, Patrick made a plan. He would go back to New York and read
The English Patient.
He would mark his favorite parts; he and Mrs. Clausen could compare and discuss their choices. He might even be able to persuade her to rent a video of the movie, which they could watch together. Wel , Wal ingford thought, as he fel asleep in the rocking chair, holding his sleeping son . . . wouldn’t this be a more promising subject between them than the travels of a mouse or the imaginative ardor of a doomed spider?