The Fourth Hand

CHAPTER ELEVEN Up North

THERE WAS A MOMENT when the floatplane banked and Doris Clausen closed her eyes. Patrick Wallingford, eyes wide open, didn’t want to miss the steep descent to the small, dark lake. Not even for a new left hand, a keeper, would Wallingford have blinked or looked away from that sideslipping view of the darkgreen trees and the suddenly tilted horizon. One wingtip must have been pointed at the lake; the window on the seaplane’s downward side revealed nothing but the fast-approaching water.

At such a sharp angle, the pontoons shuddered and the plane shook so violently that Mrs. Clausen clutched little Otto to her breast. Her movement startled the sleeping child, who commenced to cry only seconds before the pilot leveled off and the small plane landed less than smoothly on the wind-ruffled water. The firs flew by and the white pines were a wall of green, a blur of jade where the blue sky had been.

Doris at last exhaled, but Wallingford hadn’t been afraid. Although he’d never been to the lake up north before, nor had he ever flown in a floatplane, the water and the surrounding shore, as well as every frame of the descent and landing, were as familiar to him as that blue-capsule dream. All those years since he’d lost his hand the first time seemed shorter than a single night’s sleep to him now; yet, during those years, he had wished continually for that pain-pill dream to come true. At long last, Patrick Wallingford had no doubt that he’d touched down in that blue-capsule dream.

Patrick took it as a good sign that the uncountable members of the Clausen family had not descended en masse on the various cabins and outbuildings. Was it out of respect for the delicacy of Doris’s situation—a single parent, a widow with a possible suitor—that Otto senior’s family had left the lakefront property unoccupied for the weekend? Had Mrs. Clausen asked them for this consideration? In which case, did she anticipate that the weekend had romantic potential? If so, Doris gave no indication of it. She had a list of things to do, which she attended to matter-of-factly. Wallingford watched her start the pilot lights for the propane hot-water heaters, the gas refrigerators, and the stove. He carried the baby.

Patrick held little Otto in his left arm, without a hand, because at times he needed to shine the flashlight for Mrs. Clausen. The key to the main cabin was nailed to a beam under the sundeck; the key to the finished rooms above the boathouse was nailed to a two-by-four under the big dock.

It wasn’t necessary to unlock and open all the cabins and outbuildings—they wouldn’t be using them. The smaller shed, now used for tools, had been an outhouse before there was plumbing, before they pumped water from the lake. Mrs. Clausen expertly primed the pump and pulled the cord to start the gasoline engine that ran the pump.

Doris asked Patrick to dispose of a dead mouse. She held little Otto while Wallingford removed the mouse from the trap and loosely buried it under some leaves and pine needles. The mousetrap had been set in a kitchen cupboard; Mrs. Clausen discovered the dead rodent while she was putting the groceries away. Doris didn’t like mice—they were dirty. She was revolted by the turds they left in what she called “surprise places” throughout the kitchen. She asked Patrick to dispose of the mouse turds, too. And she disliked, even more than their turds, the suddenness with which mice moved. (Maybe I should have brought Charlotte’s Web instead of Stuart Little, Wallingford worried.) All the food in paper or plastic bags, or in cardboard boxes, had to be stored in tin containers because of the mice; over the winter, not even the canned food could be left unprotected. One winter something had gnawed through the cans—probably a rat, but maybe a mink or a weasel. Another winter, what was almost certainly a wolverine had broken into the main cabin and made the kitchen its lair; the animal had left a terrible mess.

Patrick understood that this was part of the summer-camp lore of the cottage. He could easily envision the life lived here, even without the other Clausens present. In the main cabin, where the kitchen and dining room were—also the biggest of the bathrooms—he saw the board games and puzzles stacked on shelves. There were no books to speak of, save a dictionary (doubtless for settling arguments in Scrabble) and the usual field guides that identify snakes and amphibians, insects and spiders, wildflowers, mammals, and birds.

In the main cabin, too, were the visualizations of the ghosts that had passed through or still visited there. These took the form of artless snapshots, curled at the edges. Some of these photos were badly faded from long exposure to sunlight; others were rust-spotted from the old tacks pinning them to the rough pine walls. And there were other mementos that spoke of ghosts. The mounted heads of deer, or just their antlers; a crow’s skull that revealed the perfect hole made by a .22caliber bullet; some undistinguished fish, home-mounted on plaques of shellacked pine boards. (The fish looked as if they’d been crudely varnished, too.) Most outstanding was a single talon of a large bird of prey. Mrs. Clausen told Wallingford it was an eagle’s talon; it was not a trophy but a record of shame, displayed in a jewelry box as a warning to other Clausens. It was awful to shoot an eagle, yet one of the less disciplined Clausens had done the deed, for which he was harshly punished. He’d been a young boy at the time, and he’d been “grounded,”

Doris said—meaning he had missed two hunting seasons, back-to-back. If that wasn’t lesson enough, the murdered eagle’s talon remained as further evidence against him.

“Donny,” Doris said, shaking her head as she uttered the eagle-killer’s name. Attached to the plush lining of the jewelry box (by a safety pin) was a photo of Donny—he looked crazed. He was a grown man now, with children of his own; when his kids saw the talon, they were probably ashamed of their father all over again.

Mrs. Clausen’s telling of the tale was sobering, and she related it in the manner that it had been told to her—a cautionary tale, a moral warning. DON’T SHOOT

EAGLES!

“Donny was always a wild hair,” Mrs. Clausen reported.

In his mind’s eye, Wallingford could see them interacting—the ghosts in the photographs, the fishermen who had caught the shellacked fish, the hunters who’d shot the deer and the crow and the eagle. He imagined the men standing around the barbecue, which was covered with a tarp and stowed on the sundeck under an eave of the roof.

There was an indoor and an outdoor fridge, which Patrick imagined were full of beer. Mrs. Clausen later corrected this impression; only the outdoor refrigerator was full of beer. It was the designated beer fridge—nothing else was allowed 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 Wallingford 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. Wallingford 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—all 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 wall 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 hall, 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 hallowed gathering of old magazine photos picturing the “invincible ones.”

Wallingford 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,” Wallingford 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. Wallingford 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? Wallingford 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. Wallingford would never know the meaning of that pile of bodies, or how the Dallas 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 called, “Brown right. Thirty-one wedge.” The result was sports history—it just wasn’t a history Wallingford 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.

Wallingford 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 smaller 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 well-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 formally 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, Wallingford realized that he might have met him. (In all 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, Wallingford’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 Wallingford; 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 wall—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 walls of the room were the same rough pine as the interior of the main cabin, although the pine boards were lighter, almost blond—all but one large rectangle near the door, where perhaps a picture or a mirror had been hung. Sunlight had bleached the walls almost everywhere else. What had Mrs. Clausen taken down? Thumbtacked to the wall, 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 well 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 Wallingford 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 Wallingford 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 Wallingford held the suit to his face and imagined that he could smell her.

In truth, the suit smelled 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, fully 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. Wallingford 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 pillowcases and an extra blanket; the middle drawer was full 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 small holes that tacks had made. She’d once tacked photographs there, as many as a dozen. Of what, or of whom, Wallingford 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 Wallingford 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 hall 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 smaller 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 Wallingford had expected. Otto junior could sit up by himself, until he seemed to forget where he was; then he’d roll over on his side. At eight months, the child could pull 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’ll be moving, on all 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 pull off his face as frequently as Patrick would have predicted. “You swim. I’ll watch him. Then you can watch him while I swim,” Mrs. Clausen told Wallingford.

Patrick was impressed by the sheer amount of baby paraphernalia Mrs. Clausen had brought for the weekend; he was equally 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. Wallingford didn’t really 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 small beach of coarse sand, strewn with rocks, where Wallingford bathed little Otto in the lake. Initially the boy was shocked by the coldness of the water, but he never cried; he let Wallingford 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. Wallingford 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. Wallingford, because of the one-hand problem, was less skillful at taking his suit off while wrapped in a towel. Finally Doris laughed and said she would look the other way while he managed it, out in the open. (She didn’t tell 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 Wallingford drank a beer—he was still 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—all 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 Wallingford that he should use the toilet in the main cabin, and brush his teeth in the bathroom sink there. 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 tranquillity that they had eaten their dinner together with Doris dressed in her old bathrobe and Wallingford wearing only a towel around his waist. He’d never lived like this, not with anyone. Wallingford 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 still struck the treetops on the eastern shore. In the windless evening, the mosquitoes had already risen—they hadn’t waited till dark. Patrick and Doris were waving the mosquitoes away as they carried little Otto and the baby’s paraphernalia into the boathouse apartment. Wallingford 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.

Wallingford sensed a remoteness he’d never experienced, and it was not yet fully dark. Still 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 wall on her side of the bed.

He’d fallen 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 full 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 hall and led him down the stairs, holding his one hand and pointing the flashlight at their bare feet. With his stump, Wallingford 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, illuminating 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 Wallingford, 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.

Wallingford 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 followed her into the water, but not as gracefully 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 smaller 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, especially 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. Wallingford could hear the ghosts of boisterous, fun-loving Clausens going back and forth to the beer fridge—a screen door whapping and someone calling, “Don’t let the mosquitoes in!” Or a woman’s voice: “That dog is all 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 call. 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 all.”

Wallingford wasn’t sure if he was really 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 calling, 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 followed her again.

They went to look at little Otto, sleeping. Wallingford 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 Wallingford had not heard before—she sounded ashamed. She gave a slight squeeze to Wallingford’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 Wallingford 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 still held Wallingford’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 all 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 called me and asked me out, I didn’t say I would—not at first. I called my friend, just to be sure they were getting divorced and that our going out was all 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 all Wallingford could do not to shout, “Good!”

“So I told him I wouldn’t go out with him anymore. He took it okay, he’s still friendly, but she won’t talk to me. And she was the maid of honor at my wedding, if you can imagine that.” Wallingford could, if only on the basis of a single photograph. “Well, that’s all. I just wanted to tell 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 all! That it hadn’t worked out made Wallingford feel more than glad; he felt elated. He also felt naïve. Without being beautiful, Mrs. Clausen was one of the most sexually attractive women he’d ever met. Of course men would call 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 tell 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, Wallingford began one. It was the wrong story to begin, but he was a journalist—a fact guy, not a storyteller.

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. Really, he had !

All 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 finally 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 all along that she was about to become his boss… well, 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 Wallingford’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 Wallingford 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: “I don’t really think of this as an illustration of why I might have trouble maintaining a monogamous relationship, but it is a little disturbing.”

What a way to begin a proposal! Was it any wonder that Doris withdrew her hand from his and turned to look at him? Wallingford, who sensed from his misguided prologue that he was already in trouble, couldn’t look at her while he talked. He stared instead at their sleeping child, as if the innocence of Otto junior might serve to shield Mrs. Clausen from all that was sexually incorrigible and morally reprehensible in his relationship with Mary Shanahan.

Mrs. Clausen was appalled. She wasn’t, for once, even looking at her son; she couldn’t take her eyes off Wallingford’s handsome profile as he clumsily recounted the details of his shameful behavior. He was babbling now, out of nervousness, in part, but also because he feared that the impression he was making on Doris was the opposite of what he’d intended.

What had he been thinking? What an absolute mess it would be if Mary Shanahan was pregnant with his child!

Still in a confessional mode, he lifted the towel to show Mrs. Clausen the bruise on his shin from the glass-topped table in Mary’s apartment; he also showed her the burn from the hot-water faucet in Mary’s shower. She’d already noticed how his back was scratched. And the love-bite on his left shoulder—she’d noticed that, too.

“Oh, that wasn’t Mary,” Wallingford confessed.

This was not the best thing he could have said.

“Who else have you been seeing?” Doris asked.

This wasn’t going as he’d hoped. But how much more trouble could Patrick get into by telling Mrs. Clausen about Angie? Surely Angie’s was a simpler story.

“I was with the makeup girl, but it was only for one night,” Wallingford began. “I was just horny.”

What a way with words he had! (Talk about neglecting the context!) He told Doris about the phone calls from various members of Angie’s distraught family, but Mrs. Clausen was confused—she thought he meant that Angie was underage. (All the gum-chewing didn’t help.) “Angie is a good-hearted girl,”

Patrick kept saying, which gave Doris the impression that the makeup girl might be mentally disabled. “No, no!” Wallingford protested. “Angie is neither underage nor mentally disabled, she’s just… well…”

“A bimbo?” asked Mrs. Clausen.

“No, no! Not exactly,” Patrick protested loyally.

“Maybe you were thinking that she might be the very last person you would sleep with—that is, if I accepted you,” Doris speculated. “And since you didn’t know whether I would accept you or reject you, there was no reason not to sleep with her.”

“Yes, maybe,” Wallingford replied weakly.

“Well, that’s not so bad,” Mrs. Clausen told him. “I can understand that. I can understand Angie, I mean.” He dared to look at her for the first time, but she looked away—she stared at Otto junior, who was still blissfully asleep. “I have more trouble understanding Mary,” Doris added. “I don’t know how you could have been thinking of living with me and little Otto while you were trying to make that woman pregnant. If she is pregnant, and it’s your baby, doesn’t that complicate things for us? For you and me and Otto, I mean.”

“Yes, it does,” Patrick agreed. Again he thought: What was I thinking? Wasn’t this also a context he had overlooked?

“I can understand what Mary was up to,” Mrs. Clausen went on. She suddenly gripped his one hand in both of hers, looking at him so intently that he couldn’t turn away. “Who wouldn’t want your baby?” She bit her lower lip and shook her head; she was trying not to get loud and angry, at least not in the room with her sleeping child. “You’re like a pretty girl who has no idea how pretty she is. You have no clue of your effect. It’s not that you’re dangerous because you’re handsome—you’re dangerous because you don’t know how handsome you are!

And you’re thoughtless.” The word stung him like a slap. “How could you have been thinking of me while you were consciously trying to knock up somebody else? You weren’t thinking of me! Not then.”

“But you seemed such a… remote possibility,” was all Wallingford could say. He knew that what she’d said was true.

What a fool he was! He’d mistakenly believed that he could tell her the stories of his most recent sexual escapades and make them as understandable to her as her far more sympathetic story was to him. Because her relationship, although a mistake, had at least been real; she’d tried to date an old friend who was, at the time, as available as she was. And it hadn’t worked out—that was all. Alongside Mrs. Clausen’s single misadventure, Wallingford’s world was sexually lawless. The sheer sloppiness of his thinking made him ashamed. Doris’s disappointment in him was as noticeable as her hair, which was still wet and tangled from their night swim. Her disappointment was as plainly apparent as the dark crescents under her eyes, or what he’d noticed of her body in the purple bathing suit, and what he’d seen of her naked in the moonlight and in the lake. (She’d put on a little weight, or had not yet lost the weight she’d put on when she was pregnant.)

What Wallingford realized he loved most about her went far beyond her sexual frankness. She was serious about everything she said, and purposeful about everything she did. She was as unlike Mary Shanahan as a woman could be: she was forthright and practical, she was trusting and trustworthy; and when Mrs. Clausen gave you her attention, she gave you all of it.

Patrick Wallingford’s world was one in which sexual anarchy ruled. Doris Clausen would permit no such anarchy in hers. What Wallingford also realized was that she had actually taken his proposal seriously; Mrs. Clausen considered everything seriously. In all likelihood, her acceptance had not been as remote a possibility as he’d once thought—he’d just blown it.

She sat apart from him on the small bed with her hands clasped in her lap. She looked neither at him nor at little Otto, but at some undefined and enormous tiredness, which she was long familiar with and had stared at—often at this hour of the night or early morning—many times before. “I should get some sleep,” was all she said.

If her faraway gaze could have been measured, Patrick guessed that she might have been staring through the wall—at the darker rectangle on the wall of the other bedroom, at that place near the door where a picture or a mirror had once hung.

“Something used to hang on the wall… in the other bedroom,” he conjectured, trying without hope to engage her. “What was it?”

“It was just a beer poster,” Mrs. Clausen flatly informed him, an unbearable deadness in her voice.

“Oh.” Again his utterance was involuntary, as if he were reacting to a punch. Naturally it would have been a beer poster; of course she wouldn’t have wanted to go on looking at it.

He extended his one hand, not letting it fall in her lap but lightly brushing her stomach with the backs of his fingers. “You used to have a metal thing in your belly button. It was an ornament of some kind,” he ventured. “I saw it only once.”

He didn’t add that it was the time she’d mounted him in Dr. Zajac’s office. Doris Clausen seemed so unlike a person who would have a pierced navel!

She took his hand and held it in her lap. This was not a gesture of encouragement; she just didn’t want him touching her anywhere else. “It was supposed to be a good-luck charm,” Doris explained. In the way she said “supposed to be,”

Wallingford could detect years of disbelief. “Otto bought it in a tattoo shop. We were trying everything at the time, for fertility. It was something I wore when I was trying to get pregnant. It didn’t work, except with you, and you probably didn’t need it.”

“So you don’t wear it anymore?”

“I’m not trying to get pregnant anymore,” she told him.

“Oh.” He felt sick with the certainty that he had lost her.

“I should get some sleep,” she said again.

“There was something I wanted to read to you,” he told her, “but we can do it another time.”

“What is it?” she asked him.

“Well, actually, it’s something I want to read to little Otto—when he’s older. I wanted to read it to you now because I was thinking of reading it to him later.”

Wallingford paused. Out of context, this made no more sense than anything else he’d told her. He felt ridiculous.

“What is it?” she asked again.

“Stuart Little,” he answered, wishing he’d never brought it up.

“Oh, the children’s book. It’s about a mouse, isn’t it?” He nodded, ashamed. “He has a special car,” she added. “He goes off looking for a bird. It’s a kind of On the Road about a mouse, isn’t it?”

Wallingford wouldn’t have put it that way, but he nodded. That Mrs. Clausen had read On the Road, or at least knew of it, surprised him.

“I need to sleep,” Doris repeated. “And if I can’t sleep, I brought my own book to read.”

Patrick managed to restrain himself from saying anything, but barely. So much seemed lost now—all the more so because he hadn’t known that it might have been possible not to lose her.

At least he had the good sense not to jump into the story of reading Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web aloud (and naked) with Sarah Williams, or whatever her name was. Out of context—possibly, in any context—that story would have served only to underline Wallingford’s weirdness. The time he might have told her that story, to his advantage, was long gone; now wouldn’t have been good. Now he was just stalling because he didn’t want to lose her. They both knew it.

“What book did you bring to read?” he asked.

Mrs. Clausen took this opportunity to get up from where she sat beside him on the bed. She went to her open canvas bag, which resembled several other small bags containing the baby’s things. It was the only bag she’d brought for herself, and she’d not yet bothered (or had not yet had the time) to unpack it. She found the book beneath her underwear. Doris handed it to him as if she were too tired to talk about it. (She probably was.) It was The English Patient, a novel by Michael Ondaatje. Wallingford hadn’t read it but he’d seen the movie.

“It was the last movie I saw with Otto before he died,” Mrs. Clausen explained.

“We both liked it. I liked it so much that I wanted to read the book. But I put off reading it until now. I didn’t want to be reminded of the last movie I saw with Otto.”

Patrick Wallingford looked down at The English Patient. She was reading a grownup literary novel and he’d planned to read her Stuart Little. How many more ways would he find to underestimate her?

That she worked in ticket sales for the Green Bay Packers didn’t exclude her from reading literary novels, although (to his shame) Patrick had made that assumption. He remembered liking the movie of The English Patient. His ex-wife had said that the movie was better than the book. That he doubted Marilyn’s judgment on just about everything was borne out when she made a comment about the novel that Wallingford remembered reading in a review. What she’d said about The English Patient was that the movie was better because the novel was “too well written.”

That a book could be too well written was a concept only a critic—and Marilyn—could have.

“I haven’t read it,” was all Wallingford said to Mrs. Clausen, who put the book back in her open bag on top of her underwear.

“It’s good,” Doris told him. “I’m reading it very slowly because I like it so much. I think I like it better than the movie, but I’m trying not to remember the movie.”

(Of course this meant that there wasn’t a scene in the film she would ever forget.) What else was there to say? Wallingford had to pee. Miraculously, he refrained from telling Mrs. Clausen this—he’d said quite enough for one night. She shined the flashlight into the hall for him, so that he didn’t have to grope in the dark to find his room.

He was too tired to light the gas lamp. He took the flashlight he found on the dresser top and made his way down the steep stairs. The moon had set; it was much darker now. The first light of dawn couldn’t be far off. Patrick chose a tree to pee behind, although there was no one who could have seen him. By the time he finished peeing, the mosquitoes had already found him. He quickly followed the beam of his flashlight back to the boathouse.

Mrs. Clausen and little Otto’s room was dark when Wallingford quietly passed their open door. He remembered her saying that she never slept with the gaslight on. The propane lamps were probably safe enough, but a lighted lamp was still a fire—it made her too anxious to sleep.

Wallingford left the door to his room open, too. He wanted to hear when Otto junior woke up. Maybe he would offer to watch the child so that Doris could go back to sleep. How difficult could it be to entertain a baby? Wasn’t a television audience tougher? That was as far as he thought it out.

He finally 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 still asleep, Wallingford was supernaturally 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 still fussed while his mother changed him. From Doris’s tone of voice, and the varying baby noises that Otto made, Wallingford 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 all 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 Wallingford to keep her up most of the night. That Doris carried only one small bag for all 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 Wallingford 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. All 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.”

Wallingford 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 Wallingford 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 pillow; his bright eyes followed the bottle as it passed between his parents.

Later Mrs. Clausen sat Otto upright between two pillows. Wallingford 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 spellbound.

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

Wallingford 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 Wallingford 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 Wallingford 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. Wallingford 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, thoughtfully.

“And there’s east,” continued the repairman. “I once had an interesting experience on an easterly course. Do you want me to tell 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 all 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 shall 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 Wallingford. 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 Wallingford 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.)

Wallingford was thrilled 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 fallen asleep—in all likelihood, before she fully comprehended the relevancy of the “Heading North” chapter. Doris lay on her side, still turned toward Patrick and their baby boy, and although her hair partly covered her face, Wallingford could see that she was smiling. Well… if not exactly smiling, at least she wasn’t frowning. Both in her expression and in the tranquillity of her repose, Mrs. Clausen seemed more at peace than Wallingford had ever known her to be. Or more deeply asleep—Patrick couldn’t really tell.

Taking his new responsibility seriously, Wallingford picked up Otto junior and inched out of the bed—carefully, 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 Wallingford contemplated the astonishing smallness 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, Wallingford wondered what he should do next. As Otto junior sat upright on the bed, virtually imprisoned by the pillows Patrick had securely piled around him, the inexperienced father searched through the bags of baby paraphernalia. He assembled the following 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 Wallingford 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, Wallingford 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 challenge, 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, Wallingford 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.

Wallingford wondered what else he could feed the child. The kettle on the stove was still 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 Wallingford 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 all around for a couple of minutes before throwing up half his breakfast.

Wallingford 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 Wallingford’s lap. (Wallingford 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 Wallingford’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 Wallingford’s chest and left shoulder, with Wallingford’s left arm around him. They rocked back and forth for ten minutes or more, until Otto fell 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 challenging to Wallingford 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 fallen away from a mural at night.

It was not only a passage to be reread and admired; it also reflected well on the reader who had marked it. Wallingford 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 Wallingford 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. Well, Wallingford thought, as he fell 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? Mrs. Clausen found them sleeping in the rocker. Good mother that she was, she closely examined the evidence of Otto’s breakfast—including what remained of the baby’s formula in his bottle, her son’s strikingly spattered shirt, his peachstained hair and banana-spotted socks and shoes, and the unmistakable indication that he had puked on Patrick’s boxer shorts. Mrs. Clausen must have found everything to her liking, especially the sight of the two of them asleep in the rocking chair, because she photographed them twice with her camera. Wallingford didn’t wake up until Doris had already made coffee and was cooking bacon. (He remembered telling her that he liked bacon.) She was wearing her purple bathing suit. Patrick imagined his swimming trunks all alone on the clothesline, a self-pitying symbol of Mrs. Clausen’s probable rejection of his proposal.

They spent the day lazily, if not entirely relaxed, together. The underlying tension between them was that Doris made no mention of Patrick’s proposal. They took turns swimming off the dock and watching Otto. Wallingford once again went wading with the baby in the shallow water by the sandy beach. They took a boat ride together. Patrick sat in the bow, with little Otto in his lap, while Mrs. Clausen steered the boat—the outboard, because Doris understood it better. The outboard didn’t go as fast as the speedboat, but it wouldn’t have mattered as much to the Clausens if she’d scratched it or banged it up. They ferried their trash to a Dumpster on a dock at the far end of the lake. All the cottagers took their trash there. Whatever garbage—bottles, cans, paper trash, uneaten food, Otto’s soiled diapers—they didn’t take to the Dumpster on the dock, they would have to carry with them on the floatplane.

In the outboard with the motor running, they couldn’t hear each other talk, but Wallingford looked at Mrs. Clausen and very carefully mouthed the words: “I love you.” He knew she’d read his lips and had understood him, but he didn’t grasp what she said to him in return. It was a longer sentence than “I love you”; he sensed she was saying something serious.

On the way back from dumping the trash, Otto junior fell asleep. Wallingford carried the sleeping boy up the stairs to his crib. Doris said that Otto usually took two naps during the day; it was the motion of the boat that had lulled the child to sleep so soundly. Mrs. Clausen speculated that she would have to wake him up to feed him.

It was past late afternoon, already early evening; the sun had started sinking. Wallingford said: “Don’t wake up little Otto just yet. Come down to the dock with me, please.” They were both in their bathing suits, and Patrick made sure that they took two towels with them.

“What are we doing?” Doris asked.

“We’re going to get wet again,” he told her. “Then we’re going to sit on the dock, just for a minute.”

It bothered Mrs. Clausen that they might not hear Otto crying if he woke up from his nap, not even with the windows in the bedroom open. The windows faced out over the lake, not over the big outdoors dock, and the occasional passing motorboat made an interfering noise, but Patrick promised that he’d hear the baby. They dove off the big dock and climbed quickly up the ladder; almost immediately, the dock was enveloped in shade. The sun had dropped below the treetops on their side of the lake, but the eastern shore was still in sunlight. They sat on the towels on the dock while Wallingford told Mrs. Clausen about the pills he’d taken for pain in India, and how (in the blue-capsule dream) he’d felt the heat of the sun in the wood of the dock, even though the dock was in shade.

“Like now,” he said.

She just sat there, shivering slightly in her wet bathing suit. Patrick persisted in telling her how he had heard the woman’s voice but never seen her; how she’d had the sexiest voice in the world; how she’d said, “My bathing suit feels so cold. I’m going to take it off. Don’t you want to take yours off, too?”

Mrs. Clausen kept looking at him—she was still shivering.

“Please say it,” Wallingford asked.

“I don’t feel like doing this,” Doris told him.

He went on with the rest of the cobalt-blue dream—how he’d answered, “Yes.”

And the sound of the water dripping from their wet bathing suits, falling between the planks of the dock, returning to the lake. He told her how he and the unseen woman had been naked; then how he’d smelled the sunlight, which her shoulders had absorbed; and how he’d tasted the lake on his tongue, which had traced the contours of the woman’s ear.

“You had sex with her, in the dream?” Mrs. Clausen asked.

“Yes.”

“I can’t do it,” she said. “Not out here, not now. Anyway, there’s a new cottage across the lake. The Clausens told me that the guy has a telescope and spies on people.”

Patrick saw the place she meant. The cabin across the lake was a raw-looking color; the new wood stood out against the surrounding blue and green.

“I thought the dream was coming true,” was all he said. (It almost came true, he wanted to tell her.)

Mrs. Clausen stood up, taking her towel with her. She took off her wet bathing suit, covering herself with her towel in the process. She hung her suit on the line and wrapped herself more tightly in her towel. “I’m going to wake up Otto,” she said.

Wallingford took off his swim trunks and hung his suit on the line beside Doris’s. Because she’d already gone to the boathouse, he was unconcerned about covering himself with his towel. In fact, he faced the lake naked for a moment, just to force the asshole with the telescope to take a good look at him. Then Wallingford wrapped his towel around himself and climbed the stairs to his bedroom. He changed into a dry bathing suit and a polo shirt. By the time he went to the other bedroom, Mrs. Clausen had changed, too; she was wearing an old tank top and some nylon running shorts. They were clothes a boy might wear in a gym, but she looked terrific.

“You know, dreams don’t have to be exactly true-to-life in order to come true,” she told him, without looking at him.

“I don’t know if I have a chance with you,” Patrick said to her. She walked up the path to the main cabin, purposely ahead of him, while he carried little Otto. “I’m still thinking about it,” she said, keeping her back to him. Wallingford calculated what she’d said by counting the syllables in her words. He thought it was what she’d said to him in the boat when he couldn’t hear her. (“I’m still thinking about it.”) So he had a chance with her, though probably a slim one. They ate a quiet dinner on the screened-in porch of the main cabin, which overlooked the darkening lake. The mosquitoes came to the surrounding screens and hummed to them. They drank the second bottle of red wine while Wallingford talked about his fledgling effort to get fired. This time he was smart enough to leave Mary Shanahan out of the story. He didn’t tell Doris that he’d first got the idea from something Mary had said, or that Mary had a fairly developed plan concerning how he might get himself fired.

He talked about leaving New York, too, but Mrs. Clausen seemed to lose patience with what he was saying. “I wouldn’t want you to quit your job because of me, ”

she told him. “If I can live with you, I can live with you anywhere. Where we live or what you do isn’t the issue.”

Patrick paced around with Otto in his arms while Doris washed the dishes.

“I just wish Mary wouldn’t have your baby,” Mrs. Clausen finally said, when they were fighting off the mosquitoes on the path back to the boathouse. He couldn’t see her face; again she was ahead of him, carrying the flashlight and a bag of baby paraphernalia while he carried Otto junior. “I can’t blame her… wanting to have your baby,” Doris added, as they were climbing the stairs to the boathouse apartment. “I just hope she doesn’t have it. Not that there’s anything you can or should do about it. Not now.”

It struck Wallingford as typical of himself that here was an essential element of his fate, which he’d unwittingly set in motion but over which he had no control; whether Mary Shanahan was pregnant or not was entirely an accident of conception.

Before leaving the main cabin—when he had used the bathroom, and after he’d brushed his teeth—he had taken a condom from his shaving kit. He’d held it in his hand all the way to the boathouse. Now, as he put Otto down on the bed that served as a changing table in the bedroom, Mrs. Clausen saw that the fist of Wallingford’s one hand was closed around something.

“What have you got in your hand?” she asked.

He opened the palm of his hand and showed her the condom. Doris was bending over Otto junior, changing him. “You better go back and get another one. You’re going to need at least two,” she said.

He took a flashlight and braved the mosquitoes again; he returned to his bedroom above the boathouse with a second condom and a cold beer.

Wallingford lit the gas lamp in his room. While this is an easy job for two-handed people, Patrick found it challenging. He struck the wooden match on the box, then held the lit match in his teeth while he turned on the gas. When he took the match from his mouth and touched the flame to the lamp, it made a popping sound and flared brightly. He turned down the propane, but the light in the bedroom dimmed only a little. It was not very romantic, he thought, as he took off his clothes and got into bed naked.

Wallingford pulled just the top sheet over him, up to his waist; he lay on his stomach, propped on his elbows, with the two pillows hugged to his chest. He looked out the window at the moonlight on the lake—the moon was huge. In only two or three more nights, it would be an official full moon, but it looked full now. He’d left the unopened bottle of beer on the dresser top; he hoped they might share the beer later. The two condoms, in their foil wrappers, were under the pillows. Between the racket the loons were making and a squabble that broke out among some ducks near shore, Patrick didn’t hear Doris come into his room, but when she lay down on top of him, with her bare breasts against his back, he knew she was naked.

“My bathing suit feels so cold, ” she whispered in his ear. “I’m going to take it off. Don’t you want to take yours off, too?”

Her voice was so much like the woman’s voice in the blue-capsule dream that Wallingford had some difficulty answering her. By the time he managed to say

“yes,” she’d already rolled him over onto his back and pulled the sheet down.

“You better give me one of those things,” she said.

He was reaching behind his head and under the pillows with his only hand, but Mrs. Clausen was quicker. She found one of the condoms and tore open the wrapper in her teeth. “Let me do it. I want to put it on you,” she told him. “I’ve never done this.” She seemed a little puzzled by the appearance of the condom, but she didn’t hesitate to put it on him; unfortunately, she tried putting it on inside out.

“It’s rolled a certain way,” Wallingford said.

Doris laughed at her mistake. She not only put the condom on the right way; she was in too much of a hurry for Patrick to talk to her. Mrs. Clausen may never have put a condom on anyone before, but Wallingford was familiar with the way that she straddled him. (Only this time he was lying on his back, not sitting up straight in a chair in Dr. Zajac’s office.)

“Let me say something to you about being faithful to me,” Doris was saying, as she moved up and down with her hands on Patrick’s shoulders. “If you’ve got a problem with monogamy, you better say so right now—you better stop me.”

Wallingford said nothing, nor did he do anything to stop her.

“Please don’t make anyone else pregnant,” Mrs. Clausen said, even more seriously. She bore down on him with all her weight; he lifted his hips to meet her.

“Okay,” he told her.

In the harsh light of the gas lamp, their moving shadows were cast against the wall where the darker rectangle had earlier caught Wallingford’s attention—that empty place where Otto senior’s beer poster had been. It was as if their coupling were a ghost portrait, their future together still undecided.

When they finished making love, they drank the beer, draining the bottle in a matter of seconds. Then they went naked for a night swim, with Wallingford taking just one towel for the two of them and Mrs. Clausen carrying the flashlight. They walked single-file to the end of the boathouse dock, but this time Doris asked Patrick to climb down the ladder into the lake ahead of her. He’d no sooner entered the water than she told him to swim back to her, under the narrow dock.

“Just follow the flashlight,” she instructed him. She shined the light through the planks in the dock, illuminating one of the support posts that disappeared into the dark water. The post was bigger around than Wallingford’s thigh. Several inches above the waterline, just under the planks of the dock and alongside a horizontal two-by-four, something gold caught Patrick’s eye. He swam closer until he was looking straight up at it. He had to keep treading water to see it. A tenpenny nail had been driven into the post; two gold wedding bands were looped on the nail, which had been hammered over, into a bent position, with its head driven into the post. Patrick realized that Mrs. Clausen would have needed to tread water while she pounded in the nail, and then attached the rings, and then bent the nail over with her hammer. It hadn’t been an easy job, even for a good swimmer who was fairly strong and two-handed.

“Are they still there? Do you see them?” Doris asked.

“Yes,” he answered.

She once again positioned the flashlight so that the beam was cast out over the lake. He swam out from under the dock, into the beam of light, where he found her waiting for him; she was floating on her back with her breasts above the surface. Mrs. Clausen didn’t say anything. Wallingford remained silent with her. He speculated that, one winter, the ice could be especially thick; it might grind against the boathouse dock and the rings might be lost. Or a winter storm could sweep the boathouse away. Whatever, the wedding rings were where they belonged—that was what Mrs. Clausen had wanted to show him.

Across the lake, the newly arrived Peeping Tom had the lights on in his cabin. His radio was playing; he was listening to a baseball game, but Patrick couldn’t tell which teams were playing.

They swam back to the boathouse, with both the flashlight on the dock and the gas lamps shining from the two bedroom windows to guide them. This time Wallingford remembered to pee in the lake so that later he wouldn’t have to go in the woods, with the mosquitoes.

They both kissed Otto junior good night, and Doris extinguished the gaslight in the boy’s room and closed his curtains. Then she turned off the lamp in the other bedroom, where she lay naked and cool from the lake, under just the top sheet, with her and Wallingford’s hair still wet and cold in the moonlight. She’d not closed their curtains on purpose; she wanted to wake up early, before the baby. Both she and Patrick fell instantly asleep in the moonlit room. That night, the moon didn’t set until almost three in the morning.

The sunrise was a little after five on Monday, but Mrs. Clausen was up well before then. When Wallingford woke, the room was a pearl-gray or pewter color and he was aware of being aroused; it was not unlike one of the more erotic moments in the blue-capsule dream.

Mrs. Clausen was putting the second condom on him. She had found what was, even for Wallingford, a novel way to do it—she was unrolling it on his penis with her teeth. For someone with no previous experience with condoms, she was surpassingly innovative, but Doris confessed that she had read about this method in a book.

“Was it a novel?” Wallingford wanted to know. (Of course it was!)

“Give me your hand,” Mrs. Clausen commanded.

He naturally thought that she meant the right one—it was his only hand. But when he extended his right hand to her, she said, “No, the fourth one.”

Patrick thought he’d misheard her. Surely she’d said, “No, the other one”—the nohand or the nonhand, as almost everyone called it.

“The what?” Wallingford asked, just to be sure.

“Give me your hand, the fourth one,” Doris said. She seized his stump and gripped it tightly between her thighs, where he could feel his missing fingers come to life.

“There were the two you were born with,” Mrs. Clausen explained. “You lost one. Otto’s was your third. As for this one,” she said, clenching her thighs for emphasis,

“this is the one that will never forget me. This one is mine. It’s your fourth.”

“Oh.” Perhaps that was why he could feel it, as if it were real. They swam naked again after they made love, but this time one of them stood at the window in little Otto’s bedroom, watching the other swim. It was during Mrs. Clausen’s turn that Otto junior woke up with the sunrise.

Then they were busy packing up; Doris did all the things that were necessary to close the cottage. She even found the time to take the last of their trash across the lake to the Dumpster on the dock. Wallingford stayed with Otto. Doris drove the boat a lot faster when the baby wasn’t with her.

They had all their bags and the baby gear assembled on the big dock when the floatplane arrived. While the pilot and Mrs. Clausen loaded the small plane, Wallingford held Otto junior in his right arm and waved no-handed across the lake to the Peeping Tom. Every so often, they could see the sun reflected in the lens of his telescope.

When the floatplane took off, the pilot made a point of passing low over the newcomer’s dock. The Peeping Tom was pretending that his telescope was a fishing pole and he was fishing off his dock; the silly asshole kept making imaginary casts. The tripod for the telescope stood incriminatingly in the middle of the dock, like the mounting for a crude kind of artillery. There was too much noise in the cabin for Wallingford and Mrs. Clausen to talk without shouting. But they looked at each other constantly, and at the baby, whom they passed back and forth between them. As the floatplane was descending for its landing, Patrick told her again—without a sound, just by moving his lips—“I love you.”

Doris did not at first respond, and when she did so—also without actually saying the words, but by letting him read her lips—it was that same sentence, longer than

“I love you,” which she had spoken before. (“I’m still thinking about it.”) Wallingford could only wait and see.

From where the seaplane docked, they drove to Austin Straubel Airport in Green Bay. Otto junior fussed in his car seat while Wallingford made an effort to amuse him. Doris drove. Now that they could hear each other talk, it seemed they had nothing to say.

At the airport, where he kissed Mrs. Clausen good-bye, and then little Otto, Patrick felt Mrs. Clausen put something in his right front pocket. “Please don’t look at it now. Please wait until later,” she asked him. “Just think about this: my skin has grown back together, the hole has closed. I couldn’t wear that again if I wanted to. And besides, if I end up with you, I know I don’t need it. I know you don’t need it. Please give it away.”

Wallingford knew what it was without looking at it—the fertility doohickey he’d once seen in her navel, the body ornament that had pierced her belly button. He was dying to see it.

He didn’t have to wait long. He was thinking about the ambiguity of Mrs. Clausen’s parting words—“if I end up with you”—when the thing she’d put in his pocket set off the metal-detection device in the airport. He had to take it out of his pocket and look at it then. An airport security guard took a good look at it, too; in fact, the guard had the first long look at it.

It was surprisingly heavy for something so small; the grayish-white, metallic color gleamed like gold. “It’s platinum,” the security guard said. She was a dark-skinned Native American woman with jet-black hair, heavyset and sad-looking. The way she handled the belly-button ornament indicated she knew something about jewelry. “This must have been expensive,” she said, handing the doohickey back to him.

“I don’t know—I didn’t buy it,” Wallingford replied. “It’s a body-piercing item, for a woman’s navel.”

“I know,” the security guard told him. “They usually set the metal detector off when they’re in someone’s belly button.”

“Oh,” Patrick said. He was only beginning to grasp what the good-luck charm was. A tiny hand—a left one.

In the body-piercing trade, it was what they called a barbell—a rod with a ball that screws on and off one end, just to keep the ornament from falling off, not unlike an earring post. But at the other end of the rod, which served the design as a slender wrist, was the most delicate, most exquisite little hand that Patrick Wallingford had ever seen. The middle finger was crossed over the index finger in that near-universal symbol of good luck. Patrick had expected a more specific fertility symbol—maybe a miniature god or something tribal. Another security guard came over to the table where Wallingford and the first security guard were standing. He was a small, lean black man with a perfectly trimmed mustache. “What is it?” he asked his colleague.

“A body ornament, for your belly button,” she explained.

“Not for mine!” the man said, grinning.

Patrick handed him the good-luck charm. That was when the Windbreaker slipped off Wallingford’s left forearm and the guards saw that his left hand was gone.

“Hey, you’re the lion guy!” the male guard said. He’d scarcely glanced at the small platinum hand with the crossed fingers, resting in the palm of his bigger hand.

The female guard instinctively reached out and touched Patrick’s left forearm.

“I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you, Mr. Wallingford,” she said. What kind of sadness was it that showed in her face? Wallingford had instantly known she was sad, but he’d not (until now) considered the possible reasons. There was a small, fishhook-shaped scar on her throat; it could have come from anything, from a childhood accident with a pair of scissors to a bad marriage or a violent rape.

Her colleague—the small, lean black man—was now looking at the body ornament with new interest. “Well, it’s a hand. A left one. I get it!” he said excitedly. “I guess that would be your good-luck charm, wouldn’t it?”

“Actually, it’s for fertility. Or so I was told.”

“It is ?” the Native American woman asked. She took the doohickey out of her fellow guard’s hand. “Let me see that again. Does it work?” she asked Patrick. He could tell she was serious.

“It worked once,” Wallingford replied.

It was tempting to guess what her sadness was. The female security guard was in her late thirties or early forties; she was wearing a wedding ring on her left ring finger and a turquoise ring on the ring finger of her right hand. Her ears were pierced—more turquoise. Perhaps her belly button was pierced, too. Maybe she couldn’t get pregnant.

“Do you want it?” Wallingford asked her. “I have no further use for it.”

The black man laughed. He walked away with a wave of his hand. “Oooh-oooh!

You don’t want to go there!” he said to Patrick, shaking his head. Maybe the poor woman had a dozen children; she’d been begging to get her tubes tied, but her nogood husband wouldn’t let her.

“You be quiet!” the female guard called after her departing colleague. He was still laughing, but she was not amused.

“You can have it, if you want it,” Wallingford told her. After all, Mrs. Clausen had asked him to give it away.

The woman closed her dark hand over the fertility charm. “I would very much like to have it, but I’m sure I can’t afford it.”

“No, no! It’s free! I’m giving it to you. It’s already yours,” Patrick said. “I hope it works, if you want it to.” He couldn’t tell if the woman guard wanted it for herself or for a friend, or if she just knew somewhere to sell it. At some distance from the security checkpoint, Wallingford turned and looked at the Native American woman. She was back at work— to all other eyes, she was just a security guard—but when she glanced in Patrick’s direction, she waved to him and gave him a warm smile. She also held up the tiny hand. Wallingford was too far away to see the crossed fingers, but the ornament winked in the bright airport light; the platinum gleamed again like gold.

It reminded Patrick of Doris’s and Otto Clausen’s wedding rings, shining in the flashlight’s beam between the dark water and the underside of the boathouse dock. How many times since she’d nailed the rings there had Doris swum under the dock to look at them, treading water with a flashlight in her hand? Or had she never looked? Did she only see them—as Wallingford now would—in dreams or in the imagination, where the gold was always brighter and the rings’

reflection in the lake more everlasting?

If he had a chance with Mrs. Clausen, it was not really a matter that would be decided upon the discovery of whether or not Mary Shanahan was pregnant. More important was how brightly those wedding rings under the dock still shone in Doris Clausen’s dreams, and in her imagination.

When his plane took off for Cincinnati, Wallingford was—at that moment, literally—as up in the air as Doris Clausen’s thoughts about him. He would have to wait and see.

That was Monday, July 26, 1999. Wallingford would long remember the date; he wouldn’t see Mrs. Clausen again for ninety-eight days.