The Fourth Hand (42 page)

“Okay, if that’s how it is, you’re fired,” Wharton announced.

Everyone seemed surprised that it was Wharton who said it, including Wharton. Before the script meeting, they’d had another meeting, to which Patrick had not been invited.

Probably they’d decided that Sabina would be the one to fire Wal ingford. At least Sabina looked at Wharton with an exasperated sense of surprise. Mary Shanahan had got over how surprised she was pretty quickly. For once, maybe Wharton had felt something unfamiliar and exciting taking charge inside him. But everything that was eternal y insipid about him had instantly returned to his flushed face; he was again as vapid as he’d ever been. Being fired by Wharton was like being slapped by a tentative hand in the dark.

“When I get back from Wisconsin, we can work out what you owe me,” was al Wal ingford told them.

“Please clear out your office and your dressing room before you go,” Mary said. This was standard procedure, but it irritated him.

They sent someone from security to help him pack up his things and to carry the boxes down to a limo. No one came to say good-bye to him, which was also standard procedure, although if Angie had been working that Sunday night, she probably would have.

Wal ingford was back in his apartment when Mrs. Clausen cal ed. He hadn’t seen his piece at the Ramada Plaza, but Doris had watched the whole story.

“Are you stil coming?” she asked.

“Yes, and I can stay as long as you want me to,” Patrick told her. “I just got fired.”

“That’s very interesting,” Mrs. Clausen commented. “Have a safe flight.”

This time he had a Chicago connection, which got him into his hotel room in Green Bay in time to see the evening telecast from New York. He wasn’t surprised that Mary Shanahan was the new anchor. Once again Wal ingford had to admire her. She wasn’t pregnant, but Mary had wound up with at least one of the babies she wanted.

“Patrick Wal ingford is no longer with us,” Mary began cheerful y. “Good night, Patrick, wherever you are!”

There was in her voice something both perky and consoling. Her manner reminded Wal ingford of that time in his apartment when he’d been unable to get it up and she’d sympathized by saying, “Poor penis.” As he’d understood only belatedly, Mary had always been part of the bigger picture.

It was a good thing he was getting out of the business. He wasn’t smart enough to be in it anymore. Maybe he’d never been smart enough.

And what an evening it was for news! Natural y no survivors had been found. The mourning for the victims on EgyptAir 990 had just begun. There was the footage of the usual calamity-driven crowd that had gathered on a gray Nantucket beach—the “body-spotters,” Mary had once cal ed them. The “death-watchers,”

which was Wharton’s term for them, were warmly dressed.

That close-up from the deck of a Merchant Marine Academy ship—the pile of passengers’ belongings retrieved from the Atlantic—must have been Wharton’s work. After floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, train wrecks, plane crashes, school shootings, or other massacres, Wharton always chose the shots of articles of clothing, especial y the shoes. And of course there were children’s toys; dismembered dol s and wet teddy bears were among Wharton’s favorite disaster items.

Fortunately for the al -news network, the first vessel to arrive at the crash site was a Merchant Marine Academy training ship with seventeen cadets aboard. These young novices at sea were great for the human-interest angle—they were about the age of col ege upperclassmen. There they were in the spreading pool of jet fuel with the fragments of the plane’s wreckage, plus people’s shopping bags and body parts, bobbing to the oily surface around them. Al of them wore gloves as they plucked this and that from the sea.

Their expressions were what Sabina termed

“priceless.”

Mary milked her end lines for al they were worth. “The big questions remain unanswered,” Ms. Shanahan said crisply.

She was wearing a suit Patrick had never seen before, something navy blue. The jacket was strategical y opened, as were the top two buttons of her pale-blue blouse, which closely resembled a man’s dress shirt, only silkier. This would become her signature costume, Wal ingford supposed.

“Was the crash of the Egyptian jetliner an act of terrorism, a mechanical failure, or pilot error?” Mary pointedly asked.

I would have reversed the order, Patrick thought—clearly

“an act of terrorism”

should have come last.

In the last shot, the camera was not on Mary but on the grieving families in the lobby of the Ramada Plaza; the camera singled out smal groups among them as Mary Shanahan’s voice-over concluded, “So many people want to know.” Al in al , the ratings would be good; Wal ingford knew that Wharton would be happy, not that Wharton would know how to express his happiness.

When Mrs. Clausen cal ed, Patrick had just stepped out of the shower.

“Wear something warm,” she warned him. To Wal ingford’s surprise, she was cal ing from the lobby. There would be time for him to see little Otto in the morning, Doris said.

Right now it was time to go to the game; he should hurry up and get dressed. Therefore, not knowing what to expect, he did. It seemed too soon to leave for the game, but maybe Mrs. Clausen liked to get there early. When Wal ingford left his hotel room and took the elevator to the lobby to meet her, his sense of pride was only slightly hurt that not one of his col eagues in the media had tracked him down and asked him what Mary Shanahan had meant when she’d announced, to mil ions, “Patrick Wal ingford is no longer with us.”

There’d doubtless been cal s to the network already; Wal ingford could only wonder how Wharton was handling it, or maybe they had put Sabina in charge. They didn’t like to say they’d fired someone—they didn’t like to admit that someone had quit, either. They usual y found some bul shit way to say it, so that no one knew exactly what had happened.

Mrs. Clausen had seen the telecast. She asked Patrick: “Is that the Mary who isn’t pregnant?”

“That’s her.”

“I thought so.”

Doris was wearing her old Green Bay Packers parka, the one she’d been wearing when Wal ingford first met her.

Mrs. Clausen was not wearing its hood as she drove the car, but Patrick could imagine her smal , pretty face peering out from it like the face of a child. And she had on jeans and running shoes, which was how she’d dressed that night when the police informed her that her husband was dead.

She was probably wearing her old Packers sweatshirt, too, although Wal ingford couldn’t see what was under her parka.

Mrs. Clausen was a good driver. She never once looked at Patrick—she just talked about the game. “With a couple of four-two teams, anything can happen,” she explained.

“We’ve lost the last three in a row on Monday night. I don’t believe what they say. It doesn’t matter that Seattle hasn’t played a Monday-night game in seven years, or that there’s a bunch of Seahawks who’ve never played at Lambeau Field before. Their coach knows Lambeau—he knows our quarterback, too.”

The Green Bay quarterback would be Brett Favre.

Wal ingford had read a paper (just the sports pages) on the plane. That’s how he’d learned who Mike Holmgren was—

formerly the Packers’ coach, now the coach of the Seattle Seahawks. The game was a homecoming for Holmgren, who’d been very popular in Green Bay.

“Favre wil be trying too hard. We can count on that,” Doris told Patrick. As she spoke, the passing headlights flashed on and off her face, which remained in profile to him.

He kept staring at her—he’d never missed anyone so much. He would have liked to think she’d worn these old clothes for him, but he knew the clothes were just her game uniform. When she’d seduced him in Dr. Zajac’s office, she must have had no idea what she was wearing, and she probably had no memory of the order in which she’d taken off her clothes. Wal ingford would never forget the clothes and the order.

They drove west out of downtown Green Bay, which didn’t have much of a downtown to speak of—nothing but bars and churches and a haggard-looking riverside mal . There weren’t many buildings over three stories high; and the one hil of note, which hugged the river with its ships loading and unloading—until the bay froze in December—was a huge coal stack. It was a virtual mountain of coal.

“I would not want to be Mike Holmgren, coming back here with his four-two Seattle Seahawks,” Wal ingford ventured.

(It was a version of something he’d read in the sports pages.)

“You sound like you’ve been reading the newspapers or watching TV,” Mrs. Clausen said. “Holmgren knows the Packers better than the Packers know themselves. And Seattle’s got a good defense. We haven’t been scoring a lot of points against good defenses this year.”

“Oh.” Wal ingford decided to shut up about the game. He changed the subject.

“I’ve missed you and little Otto.”

Mrs. Clausen just smiled. She knew exactly where she was going. There was a special parking sticker on her car; she was waved into a lane with no other cars in it, from which she entered a reserved area of the parking lot. They parked very near the stadium and took an elevator to the press box, where Doris didn’t even bother showing her tickets to an official-looking older man who instantly recognized her.

He gave her a friendly hug and a kiss, and she said, with a nod to Wal ingford, “He’s with me, Bil . Patrick, this is Bil .”

Wal ingford shook the older man’s hand, expecting to be recognized, but there was no sign of recognition. It must have been the ski hat Mrs. Clausen had handed to him when they got out of the car. He’d told her that his ears never got cold, but she’d said, “Here they wil . Besides, it’s not just to keep your ears warm. I want you to wear it.”

It wasn’t that she didn’t want him to be recognized, although the hat would keep him from being spotted by an ABC

cameraman—for once, Wal ingford wouldn’t be on-camera.

Doris had insisted on the hat to make him look as if he belonged at the game. Patrick was wearing a black topcoat over a tweed jacket over a turtleneck, and gray flannel trousers. Almost no one wore such a dressy overcoat to a Packer game.

The ski hat was Green Bay green with a yel ow headband that could be pul ed down over your ears; it had the unmistakable Packers’ logo, of course. It was an old hat, and it had been stretched by a head bigger than Wal ingford’s. Patrick didn’t need to ask Mrs. Clausen whose hat it was. Clearly the hat had belonged to her late husband.

They passed through the press box, where Doris said hi to a few other official ooking people before entering the bleacher-style seats, high up. It wasn’t the way most of the fans entered the stadium, but everybody seemed to know Mrs. Clausen. She was, after al , a Green Bay Packers employee. They went down the aisle toward the dazzling field. It was natural grass, 87,000 square feet of it—what they cal ed an “athletic blue blend.” Tonight was its debut game.

“Wow,” was al Wal ingford said under his breath. Although they were early, Lambeau Field was already more than half ful .

The stadium is a pure bowl, with no breaks and no upper deck; there is only one deck at Lambeau, and al the outdoor seats are of the bleacher type. The stands were a primordial scene during the pregame warm-ups: the faces painted green and gold, the yel ow plastic-foam things that looked like big flexible penises, and the lunatics with huge wedges

of

cheese

for

hats—the
cheeseheads
!

Wal ingford knew he was not in New York.

Down the long, steep aisle they went. They had seats at about midstadium level on the forty-yard line; they were stil on the press-box side of the field. Patrick fol owed Doris, past the stout knees turned sideways, to their seats. He grew aware that they were seated among people who knew them—not just Mrs. Clausen, but Wal ingford, too. And it wasn’t that they knew him because he was famous, not in Otto’s hat; it was that they were
expecting
him. Patrick suddenly realized that he’d met more than half of the closest surrounding fans before. They were Clausens!

He recognized their faces from the countless photos tacked to the wal s of the main cabin at the cottage on the lake.

The men patted his shoulders; the women touched his arm, the left one. “Hey, how ya doing?” Wal ingford recognized the speaker from his crazed look in the photograph that was safety-pinned to the lining of the jewelry box. It was Donny, the eagle-kil er; one side of his face was painted the color of corn, the other the toovivid green of an impossible il ness.

“I missed seein’ ya on the news tonight,” a friendly woman said. Patrick remembered her from a photograph, too; she’d been one of the new mothers, in a hospital bed with her newborn child.

“I just didn’t want to miss the game,” Wal ingford told her.

He felt Doris squeeze his hand; until then, he’d not realized she was holding it. In front of al of them! But they knew already—long before Wal ingford. She’d already told them.

She had accepted him! He tried to look at her, but she’d put up the hood of her parka. It wasn’t that cold; she was just hiding her face from him. He sat down beside Mrs.

Clausen, stil holding her hand. His handless arm was seized by an older woman on his left. She was another Mrs.