The Fourth Hand (22 page)

But Wal ingford was unimpressed by the progress of his soul. It may have been noticeable to others, but what did that matter? He didn’t have Doris Clausen, did he?

Wallingford Meets a Fellow Traveler

M
EANWHILE, AN ATTRACTIVE, photogenic woman with a limp had just turned sixty. As a teenager, and al her adult life, she’d worn long skirts or dresses to conceal her withered leg. She’d been the last person in her hometown to come down with poliomyelitis; the Salk vaccine was available too late for her. For almost as long as she’d had the deformity, she’d been writing a book with this provocative title:
How I Almost Missed Getting Polio.
She said that the end of the century struck her as “as good a time as any” to make multiple submissions to more than a dozen publishers, but they al turned her book down.

“Bad luck or not, polio or whatever, the book isn’t very wel written,” the woman with the limp and the withered leg admitted to Patrick Wal ingford, on-camera. She looked terrific when she was sitting down. “It’s just that everything in my life happened because I didn’t get that damn vaccine. I got polio instead.”

Of course she quickly acquired a publisher after her interview with Wal ingford, and almost overnight she had a new title:
I Got Polio Instead.
Someone rewrote the book for her, and someone else would make a movie of it—

starring a woman who looked nothing at al like the woman with the limp and the withered leg, except that the actress was attractive and photogenic, too. That was what being on-camera with Wal ingford could do for you.

Nor would Patrick miss the irony that when he’d lost his left hand the first time, the world had been watching. In those best-of-the-century moments that were positively made for television, the lion-eating-the-hand episode was always included. Yet when he’d lost his hand the second time—

more to the point, when he’d lost Mrs. Clausen—the camera wasn’t on him. What mattered most to Wal ingford had gone unrecorded.

The new century, at least for a while, would remember Patrick as the lion guy. But it was neither news nor history that, if Wal ingford were keeping score of his life, he wouldn’t have started counting until he met Doris Clausen.

So much for how the world keeps score.

In the category of transplant surgery, Patrick Wal ingford would not be remembered. At the close of the century, one counts the successes, not the failures. Thus, in the field of hand-transplant surgery, Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac would remain unfamous, his moment of possible greatness surpassed by what truly became the first successful handtransplant procedure in the United States, and only the second ever. “The fireworks guy,” as Zajac crudely cal ed Matthew David Scott, appeared to have what Dr. Zajac termed a keeper.

On April 12, 1999, less than three months after receiving a new left hand, Mr. Scott threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the Phil ies’ opening game in Philadelphia. Wal ingford wasn’t exactly jealous. (Envious . . . wel , maybe. But not in the way you might think.) In fact, Patrick asked Dick, his news editor, if he could interview the evident “keeper.”

Wouldn’t it be fitting, Wal ingford suggested, to congratulate Mr. Scott for having what he (Wal ingford) had lost? But Dick, of al people, thought the idea was “tacky.” As a result, Dick was fired, though many would argue he was a news editor waiting to be fired. Any euphoria among the New York newsroom women was short-lived. The new news editor was as much of a dick as Dick had ever been; anticlimactical y, his name was Fred. As Mary whatever-her-name-was would say—Mary had developed a sharper tongue in the intervening years—“If I’m going to be dicked around, I think I’d rather be Dicked than
Fredded.
”

In the new century, that same international team of surgeons who performed the
world’s
first successful hand transplant in Lyon, France, would try again, this time attempting the world’s first
double
hand-and-forearm transplant. The recipient, whose name was not made public, would be a thirty-three-year-old Frenchman who’d lost both his hands in a fireworks accident (another one) in 1996, the donor a nineteen-year-old who had fal en off a bridge. But Wal ingford would be interested only in the fates of the first two recipients. The first, ex-convict Clint Hal am, would have his new hand amputated by one of the surgeons who performed the transplant operation. Two months prior to the amputation, Hal am had stopped taking the medication prescribed as part of his anti-rejection treatment. He was observed wearing a leather glove to hide the hand, which he described as “hideous.” (Hal am would later deny failing to take his medication.) And he would continue his strained relationship with the law. Mr.

Hal am had been seized by the French police for al egedly stealing money and an American Express card from a liver-transplant patient who’d befriended him in the hospital in Lyon. While he was eventual y al owed to leave France—

after he repaid some of the money—the police would issue warrants for Hal am’s arrest in Australia concerning his possible role in a fuel scam. (It seems that Zajac was right about him.)

The second, Matthew David Scott of Absecon, New Jersey, is the only successful recipient of a new hand whom Wal ingford would admit to envying in an interesting way. It was never Mr. Scott’s new hand that Patrick Wal ingford envied. But in the media coverage of that Phil ies game, where the fireworks guy threw out the first bal , Wal ingford noted that Matthew David Scott had his son with him. What Patrick envied Mr. Scott was his
s o n .
He’d had premonitions of what he would cal the “fatherhood feeling”

when he was stil recovering from losing Otto senior’s hand.

The painkil ers were nothing special, but they may have been what prompted Patrick to watch his first Super Bowl.

Of course he didn’t know how to watch a Super Bowl.

You’re not supposed to watch a game like that alone.

He kept wanting to cal Mrs. Clausen and ask her to explain what was happening in the game, but Super Bowl XXXI I was the symbolic anniversary of Otto Clausen’s accident (or suicide) in his beer truck; furthermore, the Packers weren’t playing. Therefore, Doris had told Patrick that she intended to lock herself away from sight or sound of the game. He would be on his own.

Wal ingford drank a beer or two, but what people liked about watching footbal eluded him. To be fair, it was a bad matchup; while the Broncos won their second straight Super Bowl, and their fans were no doubt delighted, it was not a close or even a competitive game. The Atlanta Falcons had no business being in the Super Bowl in the first place. (At least that was the opinion of everyone Wal ingford would later talk to in Green Bay.) Yet, even distractedly watching the Super Bowl, Patrick for the first time could imagine going to a Packer home game at Lambeau Field with Doris and Otto junior. Or just with little Otto, maybe when the boy was a bit older. The idea had surprised him, but that was January 1999. By April of that year, when Wal ingford watched Matthew David Scott and his son at the Phil ies game, the thought was no longer surprising; he’d had a couple more months of missing Otto junior and the boy’s mother. Even if it was true that he’d lost Mrs. Clausen, Wal ingford rightly feared that if he didn’t make an effort to see more of little Otto now—meaning the summer of ’99, when Otto junior was stil only eight months old (he wasn’t quite crawling)—there would simply be no relationship to build on when the boy was older.

The one person in New York to whom Wal ingford confided his fears of the missed opportunity of fatherhood was Mary.

Boy, was she a bad choice for a confidante! When Patrick said that he longed to be “more like a father” to Otto junior, Mary reminded him that he could knock her up anytime he felt like it and become the father of a child living in New York.

“You don’t have to go to Green Bay, Wisconsin, to be a father, Pat,” Mary told him.

How she’d gone from being such a nice girl to expressing her one-note wish to have Wal ingford’s
seed
was not a credit to the other women in the New York newsroom, or so Patrick believed. He continued to overlook the fact that
men
had been a far greater influence on Mary. She’d had problems with men, or at least she thought she had. (Same difference.)

Every weeknight, when he concluded his telecast, Wal ingford never knew if they were watching when he said,

“Good night, Doris. Good night, my little Otto.”

Mrs. Clausen had not once cal ed to say she’d seen the evening news. It was July 1999. There was a heat wave in New York. It was a Friday. Most summer weekends, Wal ingford went to Bridgehampton, where he’d rented a house. Except for the swimming pool—Patrick made a point of not swimming in the ocean with one hand—it was real y like staying in the city. He saw al the same people at the same kinds of parties, which, in fact, was what Wal ingford and a lot of other New Yorkers liked about being out there.

That weekend, friends had invited him to the Cape; he was supposed to fly to Martha’s Vineyard. But even before he felt a slight prickling where his hand had been detached—

some of the twinges seemed to extend to the empty space where his left hand used to be—he’d phoned his friends and canceled the trip with some bul shit excuse.

At the time, he didn’t know how lucky he was, not to be flying to Martha’s Vineyard that Friday night. Then he remembered that he’d lent his house in Bridgehampton for the weekend. A bunch of the New York newsroom women were having a weekend-long baby shower there. Or an orgy, Patrick cynical y imagined. He passingly wondered if Mary would be there. (That was the old Patrick Wal ingford wondering.) But Patrick didn’t ask Mary if she was one of the women using his summer house that weekend. If he’d asked, she would have known he was free and offered to change her plans.

Wal ingford was stil undervaluing how sensitive and vulnerable women who have struggled to have a child were; a weekend-long baby shower for someone else would not likely have been Mary’s choice.

So he was in New York on a Friday in mid-July with no weekend plans and nowhere to go. As he sat in makeup for the Friday-evening news, he thought of cal ing Mrs.

Clausen. He had never invited himself to Green Bay; he’d always waited to be invited. Yet both Doris and Patrick were aware that the intervals between her invitations had grown longer. (The last time he’d been in Wisconsin, there was stil snow on the ground.)

What if Wal ingford simply cal ed her and said, “Hi! What are you and little Otto doing this weekend? How about I come to Green Bay?” Remarkably, without second-guessing himself, he just did it; he cal ed her out of the blue.

“Hel o,” said her voice on the answering machine. “Little Otto and I are up north for the weekend. No phone. Back Monday.”

He didn’t leave a message, but he did leave some makeup on the mouthpiece of the phone. He was so distracted by hearing Mrs. Clausen’s voice on the answering machine, and even more distracted by that half-imagined, half-dreamed image of her at the cottage on the lake, that without thinking he attempted to wipe the makeup off the mouthpiece with his left hand. He was surprised when the stump of his left forearm made contact with the phone—that was the first twinge. When he hung up, the prickling sensations continued. He kept looking at his stump, expecting to see ants, or some other smal insects, crawling over the scar tissue. But there was nothing there.

He knew there couldn’t be bugs
under
the scar tissue, yet he felt them al through the telecast.

Later Mary would remark that there’d been something listless in the delivery of his usual y cheerful good-night wishes to Doris and little Otto, but Wal ingford knew that they couldn’t have been watching. There was no electricity at the cottage on the lake—Mrs. Clausen had told him that.

(For the most part, she seemed unwil ing to talk about the place up north, and when she did talk about it, her voice was shy and hard to hear.)

The prickling sensations continued while Patrick had his makeup removed; his skin crawled. Because he was thinking about something Dr. Zajac had said to him, Wal ingford was only vaguely mindful that the regular makeup girl was on vacation. He supposed she had a crush on him—he’d not yet been tempted. He thought it was the way she chewed her gum that he missed. Only now, in her absence, did he fleetingly imagine her in a new way—

naked. But the supernatural twinges in his nonhand kept distracting him, as did his memory of Zajac’s blunt advice.

“Don’t mess around if you ever think you need me.”

Therefore, Patrick didn’t mess around. He cal ed Zajac at home, although he assumed that Boston’s most renowned hand surgeon would be spending his summer weekends out of town. Actual y, Dr. Zajac had rented a place in Maine that summer, but only for the month of August, when he would have custody of Rudy. Medea, now more often cal ed Pal, would eat a ton of raw clams and mussels, shel s and al ; but the dog had seemingly outgrown a taste for her own turds, and Rudy and Zajac played lacrosse with a lacrosse bal . The boy had even attended a lacrosse clinic in the first week of July. Rudy was with Zajac for the weekend, in Cambridge, when Wal ingford cal ed.