The Fourth Hand

CHAPTER TWO The Former Midfielder

THE BOSTON TEAM was headed by Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac, a hand surgeon with Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates—the leading center for hand care in Massachusetts. Dr. Zajac was also an assistant clinical professor of surgery at Harvard. It was his idea to initiate a search for potential hand donors and recipients on the Internet (www.needahand.com).

Dr. Zajac was a half-generation older than Patrick Wallingford. That both Deerfield and Amherst were all-boys’ institutions when he’d attended them is insufficient explanation for the single-sex attitude that accompanied his presence as strongly as his bad choice in aftershave.

No one from his Deerfield days, or from his four years at Amherst, remembered him. He’d played varsity lacrosse, in both prep school and college—he was actually a starter—but not even his coaches remembered him. It is exceedingly rare to remain that anonymous on athletic teams; yet Nick Zajac had spent his youth and young manhood in an uncannily unmemorable but successful pursuit of excellence, with no friends and not one sexual experience. In medical school, another med student, with whom the future Dr. Zajac shared a female cadaver, would forever remember him for his outraged shock at the sight of the body. “That she was long dead wasn’t the problem,” the lab partner would recall. “What got to Nick was that the cadaver was a woman, clearly his first.”

Another first would be Zajac’s wife. He was one of those overgrateful men who married the first woman who had sex with him. Both he and his wife would regret it.

The female cadaver had something to do with Dr. Zajac’s decision to specialize in hands. According to the former lab partner, the cadaver’s hands were the only parts of her that Zajac could stand to examine.

Clearly we need to know more about Dr. Zajac. His thinness was compulsive; he couldn’t be thin enough. A marathoner, a bird-watcher, a seed-eater—a habit he had acquired from his observation of finches—the doctor was preternaturally drawn to birds and to people who were famous. He became a hand surgeon to the stars.

Mostly they were sports stars, injured athletes, such as the Boston Red Sox pitcher with a torn anterior radio-ulnar ligament on his throwing hand. The pitcher was later traded to the Toronto Blue Jays for two infielders who never panned out and a designated hitter whose principal talent was hitting his wife. Zajac operated on the designated hitter, too. In attempting to lock herself in the car, the slugger’s wife had shut the car door on his hand—the most extensive damage occurring to the second proximal phalanx and the third metacarpal.

A surprising number of sports-star injuries happened away from the field or the court or the ice—like that goalie for the Boston Bruins, since retired, who slashed his superficial transverse ligament, left hand, by gripping a wineglass too tightly against his wedding ring. And there was that frequently penalized linebacker for the New England Patriots who severed a digital artery and some digital nerves by trying to open an oyster with a Swiss Army knife. They were risk-taking jocks—an accident-prone bunch—but they were famous. For a time, Dr. Zajac worshiped them; their signed photographs, radiating physical superiority, looked down from his office walls.

Yet even the on-the-job injuries to sports stars were often unnecessary, including a center for the Boston Celtics who attempted a backward slam dunk after the time on the shot clock had expired. He simply lost control of the ball and made a mess of his palmar fascia against the rim.

Never mind—Dr. Zajac loved them all. And not only the athletes. Rock singers seemed prone to hotel-room injuries of two kinds. Foremost was what Zajac categorized as “room-service outrage”; this led to stab wounds, scalding coffee and tea injuries, and a host of unplanned confrontations with inanimate objects. A close second to these were the innumerable mishaps in wet bathrooms, to which not only rock stars but also movie stars were inclined. Movie stars had accidents in restaurants, too, mostly upon leaving them. From a hand surgeon’s point of view, striking a photographer was preferable to striking a photographer’s camera. For the hand’s sake, any expression of hostility toward something made of metal, glass, wood, stone, or plastic was a mistake. Yet, among the famous, violence toward things was the leading source of the injuries the doctor saw.

When Dr. Zajac reviewed the docile visages of his renowned patients, it was with the realization that their success and seeming contentment were only public masks. All this may have preoccupied Zajac, but the doctor’s colleagues at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates were preoccupied with him. While they never called Dr. Zajac a star-fucker to his face, they knew what he was and felt superior to him—if only in this regard. As a surgeon, he was the best of them, and they knew this, too; it bothered them.

If, at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates, they refrained from comment on Zajac’s fame-fucking, they did permit themselves to admonish their superstar colleague for his thinness. It was commonly believed that Zajac’s marriage had failed because he’d grown thinner than his wife, yet no one at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates had been able to persuade Dr. Zajac to feed himself to save his marriage; they were not likely to have any success at convincing him to fatten himself up now that he was divorced. It was principally his love of birds that drove Zajac’s neighbors nuts. For reasons that were incomprehensible even to the area’s ornithologists, Dr. Zajac was convinced that the abundance of dogshit in Greater Boston had a deleterious effect on the city’s bird life.

There was a picture of Zajac that all his colleagues savored, although only one of them had seen the actual image. On a Sunday morning in his snow-covered yard on Brattle Street, the renowned hand surgeon—in knee-high boots, his red flannel bathrobe, and a preposterous New England Patriots ski hat, a brown paper bag in one hand, a child-size lacrosse stick in the other—was searching his yard for dog turds. Although Dr. Zajac didn’t own a dog, he had several inconsiderate neighbors, and Brattle Street was one of the most popular dog-walking routes in Cambridge.

The lacrosse stick had been intended for Zajac’s only child, an unathletic son who visited him every third weekend. The troubled boy, disturbed by his parents’

divorce, was an underweight six-year-old, an obdurate noneater—quite possibly at the urging of his mother, whose uncomplicated mission was to drive Zajac crazy. The ex-wife, whose name was Hildred, spoke dismissively on this subject. “Why should the kid eat? His father doesn’t. He sees his father starving himself, so he starves himself, too!” Therefore, in the divorce settlement, Zajac was permitted to see his son only once every three weeks, and for no longer than a weekend at a time. And Massachusetts has what they call no-fault divorce! (What Wallingford called his favorite oxymoron.)

In fact, Dr. Zajac agonized over his beloved child’s eating disorder and sought both medical and practical solutions to his son’s condition. (Hildred would barely acknowledge that her starved-looking son had a problem.) The boy’s name was Rudy; and on the weekends when he visited his father, he was often treated to the spectacle of Dr. Zajac force-feeding himself copious amounts of food, which Zajac would later vomit up in private, disciplined silence. But with or without his father’s example, Rudy hardly ate at all.

One pediatric gastroenterologist called for exploratory surgery to rule out any possible diseases of the colon. Another prescribed a syrup, an indigestible sugar that worked as a diuretic. A third suggested Rudy would outgrow the problem; it was the only gastroenterological advice that both Dr. Zajac and his ex-wife could accept.

Meanwhile, Zajac’s former live-in housekeeper had quit—she could not bear to see the quantity of food that was thrown away every third Monday. Because Irma, the new live-in housekeeper, took offense at the word “housekeeper,” Zajac had been careful to call her his “assistant,” although the young woman’s principal responsibilities were cleaning the house and doing the laundry. Maybe it was her obligatory daily retrieval of the dog turds from the yard that broke her spirit—the ignominy of the brown paper bag, her clumsiness with the child’s lacrosse stick, the menial nature of the task.

Irma was a homely, sturdily built girl in her late twenties, and she’d not anticipated that working for a “medical doctor,” as Irma called Zajac, would include such demeaning labor as combating the shitting habits of the Brattle Street dogs.

It further hurt her feelings that Dr. Zajac thought she was a new immigrant for whom English was a second language. English was Irma’s first and only language, but the confusion came from what little Zajac could understand from overhearing her unhappy voice on the telephone.

Irma had her own phone in her bedroom off the kitchen, and she was often talking at length to her mother or to one of her sisters late at night when Zajac was raiding the refrigerator. (The scalpel-thin surgeon limited his snacks to raw carrots, which he kept in a bowl of melting ice in the fridge.)

To Zajac, it seemed that Irma was speaking a foreign language. Doubtless some interference to his hearing was caused by his constant chomping on raw carrots and the maddening trill of the caged songbirds throughout the house, but the primary reason for Zajac’s mistaken assumption was that Irma was always hysterically crying when she spoke to her mother or sisters. She was recounting to them how humiliating it was to be consistently undervalued by Dr. Zajac. Irma could cook, but the doctor rarely ate regular meals. She could sew, but Zajac assigned the repair of his office and hospital clothing to his dry-cleaning service; what chiefly remained of his other laundry were the besweated clothes he ran in. Zajac ran in the morning (sometimes in the dark) before breakfast, and he ran again (often in the dark) at the end of the day.

He was one of those thin men in their advancing forties who run along the banks of the Charles, as if they are eternally engaged in a fitness competition with all the students who also run and walk in the vicinity of Memorial Drive. In snow, in sleet, in slush, in summer heat—even in thunderstorms—the wispy hand surgeon ran and ran. At five-eleven, Dr. Zajac weighed only 135 pounds. Irma, who was five-six and weighed about 150, was convinced that she hated him. It was the litany of how Zajac had offended her that Irma sang, sobbing into the phone at night, but the hand surgeon, overhearing her, thought: Czech? Polish? Lithuanian?

When Dr. Zajac asked her where she was from, Irma indignantly answered,

“Boston!” Good for her! Zajac concluded. There is no patriotism like that of the grateful European immigrant. Thus Dr. Zajac would congratulate her on how good her English was, “considering,” and Irma would weep her heart out on the phone at night.

Irma refrained from comment on the food the doctor bought every third Friday, nor did Dr. Zajac explain his instructions, every third Monday, to throw it all away. The food would simply be collected on the kitchen table—an entire chicken, a whole ham, fruits and vegetables, and melting ice cream—with a typewritten note: dispose of. That was all.

It must be connected to his abhorrence of dogshit, Irma imagined. With mythic simplicity, she assumed that the doctor had a dispose-of obsession. She didn’t know the half of it. Even on his morning and evening runs, Zajac carried a lacrosse stick, a grown-up one, which he held as if he were cradling an imaginary ball.

There were many lacrosse sticks in the Zajac household. In addition to Rudy’s, which was relatively toylike in appearance, there were numerous adult-size ones, in varying degrees of overuse and disrepair. There was even a battered wooden stick that dated from the doctor’s Deerfield days. Weaponlike in its appearance, because of its broken and retied rawhide strings, it was wrapped in dirty adhesive tape and caked with mud. But in Dr. Zajac’s skilled hands, the old stick came alive with the nervous energy of his agitated youth, when the neurasthenic hand surgeon had been an underweight but intensely accomplished midfielder. When the doctor ran along the banks of the Charles, the outmoded wooden lacrosse stick conveyed the readiness of a soldier’s rifle. More than one rower in Cambridge had experienced a dog turd or two whizzing across the stern of his scull, and one of Zajac’s medical-school students—formerly the coxswain of a Harvard eight-oared racing shell—claimed to have adroitly ducked a dog turd aimed at his head.

Dr. Zajac denied trying to hit the coxswain. His only intention was to rid Memorial Drive of a notable excess of dogshit, which he scooped up in his lacrosse stick and flicked into the Charles River. But the former coxswain and medschool student had kept an eye out for the crazed midfielder after their memorable first encounter, and there were other oarsmen and coxswains who swore they’d seen Zajac expertly cradle a turd in his old lacrosse stick and fire it at them. It’s a matter of record that the former Deerfield midfielder scored two goals against a previously undefeated Andover team, and three goals against Exeter twice. (If none of Zajac’s teammates remembered him, some of his opponents did. The Exeter goalie said it most succinctly: “Nick Zajac had a wicked fucking shot.”)

Dr. Zajac’s colleagues at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates had also heard him decry the “utter silliness of participating in a sport while facing backward,” thereby documenting Zajac’s contempt for rowers. But so what? Aren’t eccentricities fairly common among overachievers?

The house on Brattle Street resounded with warblers, like a woodland glen. The dining-room bay windows were spray-painted with big black X ’s to prevent birds from crashing into them, which gave Zajac’s home an aura of perpetual vandalism. A wren with a broken wing lay recovering in its own cage in the kitchen, where not long before a cedar waxwing with a broken neck had died—to Irma’s accumulating sorrows.

Sweeping up the birdseed that was scattered under the songbirds’ cages was one of Irma’s never-ending chores; despite her efforts, the sound of birdseed crunching underfoot would have made the house an unwise choice for burglars. Rudy, however, liked the birds—the undernourished boy’s mother had heretofore refused to get him a pet of any kind—and Zajac would have lived in an aviary if he thought it would make Rudy happy, or get him to eat.

But Hildred was so steadfastly conniving in tormenting her ex-husband that it was insufficiently satisfying for her to have reduced Zajac’s time with their son to a mere two days and three nights every month. And so, thinking she’d found a way to further poison their time together, she finally got Rudy a dog.

“You’ll have to keep it at your father’s, though,” she told the six-year-old. “It can’t stay here.”

The mutt, which came from some humane-society sort of place, was generously referred to as “part Lab.” Would that be the black part? Zajac wondered. The dog was a spayed female, about two years old, with an anxious, craven face and a squatter, bulkier body than that of a Labrador retriever. There was something houndlike about the way her upper lips were floppy and overhung her lower jaw; her forehead, which was more brown than black, was wrinkled by a constant frown. The dog walked with her nose to the ground, often stepping on her ears, and with her stout tail twitching like a pointer’s. (Hildred had got her in the hope that the abandoned mutt was a bird dog.)

“Medea will be put to death if we don’t keep her, Dad,” Rudy solemnly told his father.

“Medea,” Zajac repeated.

In veterinary terms, Medea suffered from “dietary indiscretion”; she ate sticks, shoes, rocks, paper, metal, plastic, tennis balls, children’s toys, and her own feces. (Her so-called dietary indiscretion was definitely part Lab.) Her zeal for eating dogshit, not only her own, was what had prompted her former family to abandon her.

Hildred had outdone herself in finding a dog on death row with habits that seemed certain to make her ex-husband insane, or more insane. That Medea was named for a classical sorceress who killed her own children was too perfect. Had the voracious part-Lab had puppies, she would have eaten them. What a horror it was for Hildred to discover that Dr. Zajac loved the dog. Medea searched for dogshit as assiduously as he did—they were kindred souls—and now Rudy had a dog to play with, which made him happier to see his father. Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac may have been a hand surgeon to the stars, but he was first and foremost a divorced dad. It would be initially her tragedy and then her triumph that Irma was moved by Dr. Zajac’s love for his son. Her own father had left her mother before she was born, and he’d not troubled himself to have any relationship with Irma or her sisters.

One Monday morning after Rudy had gone back to his mother, Irma began her workday by attempting to clean the boy’s room. For the three weeks that he was gone, the six-year-old’s room was kept as tidy as a shrine; in practice, it was a shrine, and Zajac could often be found sitting worshipfully there. The morose dog was also drawn to Rudy’s room. Medea appeared to miss Rudy as much as Zajac did.

This morning, however, Irma was surprised to find Dr. Zajac asleep, naked, in his departed son’s bed. The doctor’s legs overhung the foot of the bed, and he had flung the bedcovers off; no doubt the heat of the sixty-pound dog was sufficient. Medea lay chest-to-chest with the hand surgeon, her muzzle at his throat, a paw caressing the sleeping doctor’s bare shoulder.

Irma stared. She’d never before had such an uninterrupted look at a naked man. The former midfielder was more puzzled than insulted that women were not drawn to his superb fitness, but while he was by no means an unattractive man, his utter craziness was as visible as his skeleton. (This was less apparent when Zajac was asleep.)

The transplant-driven surgeon was both mocked and envied by his colleagues. He ran obsessively, he ate almost nothing, he was a bird nut newly enamored of the dietary indiscretion of an exceedingly neurotic dog. He was also driven by the unchecked agony he felt for a son he hardly ever saw. Yet what Irma now perceived in Dr. Zajac overrode all this. She suddenly recognized the heroic love he bore for the child, a love shared by both man and dog. (In her newfound weakness, Irma was also moved by Medea.)

Irma had never met Rudy. She didn’t work weekends. What she knew was only what she could glean from photographs, of which there were an increasing number after each of the blessed son’s visits. While Irma had sensed that Rudy’s room was a shrine, she was unprepared to see Zajac and Medea in their embrace in the little boy’s bed. Oh, she thought, to be loved like that!

That instant, that very second, Irma fell in love with Dr. Zajac’s obvious capacity for love—notwithstanding that the good doctor had evinced no discernible capacity for loving her. On the spot, Irma became Zajac’s slave—not that he would soon notice it.

At that life-changing moment, Medea opened her self-pitying eyes and raised her heavy head, a string of drool suspended from her overhanging lip. To Irma, who had an unrestrained enthusiasm for finding omens in the most commonplace occurrences, the dog’s slobber was the haunting color of a pearl. Irma could tell that Dr. Zajac was about to wake up, too. The doctor had a boner as big around as his wrist, as long as… well, let’s just say that, for such a scrawny guy, Zajac had quite a schlong. Irma thereupon decided that she wanted to be thin. It was a reaction no less sudden than the discovery of her love for Dr. Zajac. The awkward girl, who was nearly twenty years younger than the divorced doctor, was scarcely able to stagger into the hall before Zajac woke up. To alert the doctor that she was nearby, she called the dog. Halfheartedly, Medea made her way out of Rudy’s room; to the depressed dog’s bewilderment, which quickly gave way to fawning, Irma began to shower her with affection.

Everything has a purpose, the simple girl was thinking. She remembered her earlier unhappiness and knew that the dog was her road to Dr. Zajac’s heart.

“Come here, sweetie-pie, come with me,” Zajac heard his housekeeper/assistant saying. “We’re gonna eat only what’s good for us today!”

As has been noted, Zajac’s colleagues were woefully beneath his surgical skills; they would have envied and despised him even more if they hadn’t been able to feel they had certain advantages over him in other areas. It cheered and encouraged them that their intrepid leader was crippled by love for his unhappy, wasting-away son. And wasn’t it wonderful that, for the love of Rudy, Boston’s best hand surgeon lived night and day with a shit-eating dog? It was both cruel and uncharitable of Dr. Zajac’s inferiors to celebrate the unhappiness of Zajac’s six-year-old, nor was it accurate of the good hand surgeon’s colleagues to deem the boy “wasting-away.” Rudy was crammed full of vitamins and orange juice; he drank fruit smoothies (mostly frozen strawberries and mashed bananas) and managed to eat an apple or a pear every day. He ate scrambled eggs and toast; he would eat cucumbers, if only with ketchup. He drank no milk, he ate no meat or fish or cheese, but at times he exhibited a cautious interest in yogurt, if there were no lumps in it.

Rudy was underweight, but with even a small amount of regular exercise or any healthy adjustment in his diet, Rudy would have been as normal-looking as any little boy. He was an exceptionally sweet child—not only the proverbial “good kid” but a model of fairness and goodwill. Rudy had simply been fucked up by his mother, who had nearly succeeded in poisoning Rudy’s feelings for his father. After all, Hildred had three weeks to work on the vulnerable six-year-old; every third weekend, Zajac had scarcely more than forty-eight hours to counteract Hildred’s evil influence. And because Hildred was well aware of Dr. Zajac’s idolatry of strenuous exercise, she forbade Rudy to play soccer or go ice-skating after school—the kid was hooked on videos instead.

Hildred, who in her years with Zajac had half killed herself to stay thin, now embraced plumpness. She called this being “more of a woman,” the very thought of which made her ex-husband gag.

But what was most cruel was the way Rudy’s mother had all but convinced the child that his father didn’t love him. Hildred was happy to point out to Zajac that the boy invariably returned from his weekends with his father depressed; that this was because Hildred grilled Rudy upon his return would never have occurred to her.

“Was there a woman around? Did you meet a woman?” she would begin. (There was only Medea, and all the birds.)

When you don’t see your kid for weeks at a time, the desire to bestow gifts is so tempting; yet when Zajac bought things for Rudy, Hildred would tell the boy that his father was bribing him. Or else her conversation with the child would unfold along these lines: “What did he buy you? Roller skates! A lot of use you’ll get out of them—he must want you to crack your head open! And I suppose he didn’t let you watch a single movie. Honestly, he has to entertain you for just two days and three nights—you’d expect him to be on his best behavior. You’d think he’d try a little harder!”

But the problem, of course, was that Zajac tried too hard. For the first twenty-four hours they were together, his frenetic energy overwhelmed the boy. Medea would be as frantic to see Rudy as Zajac was, but the child was listless—at least in comparison to the frenzied dog—and despite the evidence, everywhere, of what affectionate preparations the hand surgeon had undertaken to show his son a good time, Rudy seemed downright hostile to his father. He had been primed to be sensitive to examples of his father’s lack of love for him; finding none, he began their every weekend together confused.

There was one game Rudy liked, even on those miserable Friday nights when Dr. Zajac felt he’d been reduced to the painful task of trying to make small talk with his only child. Zajac clung with fatherly pride to the fact that the game was of his own invention.

Six-year-olds love repetition, and the game Dr. Zajac had invented might well have been called “Repetition Plus,” although neither father nor son bothered to name the game. At the onset of their weekends together, it was the only game they played.

They took turns hiding a stove timer, unfailingly set for one minute, and they always hid it in the living room. To say they “hid it” is not quite correct, for the game’s only rule was that the stove timer had to remain visible. It could not be tucked under a cushion or stowed away in a drawer. (Or buried under a mound of birdseed in the cage with the purple finches.) It had to be in plain sight; but because it was small and beige, the stove timer was hard to see, especially in Dr. Zajac’s living room, which, like the rest of the old house on Brattle Street, had been hastily—Hildred would say “tastelessly”—refurnished. (Hildred had taken all the good furniture with her.) The living room was cluttered with mismatched curtains and upholstery; it was as if three or four generations of Zajacs had lived and perished there, and nothing had ever been thrown away. The condition of the room made it fairly easy to hide an innocuous stove timer right out in the open. Rudy only occasionally found the timer within one minute, before the beeper would sound, and Zajac, even if he spotted the stove timer in ten seconds, would never locate the thing before the minute was up—much to his son’s delight. Hence Zajac feigned frustration while Rudy laughed. A breakthrough beyond the simple pleasure of the stove-timer game took both father and son by surprise. It was called reading—the truly inexhaustible pleasure of reading aloud—and the books that Dr. Zajac decided to read to Rudy were the two books Zajac himself had loved most as a child. They were Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web, both by E. B. White.

Rudy was so impressed by Wilbur, the pig in Charlotte’s Web, that he wanted to rename Medea and call her Wilbur instead.

“That’s a boy’s name,” Zajac pointed out, “and Medea is a girl. But I suppose it would be all right. You could rename her Charlotte, if you like—Charlotte is a girl’s name, you know.”

“But Charlotte dies,” Rudy argued. (The eponymous Charlotte is a spider.) “I’m already afraid that Medea will die.”

“Medea won’t die for a long time, Rudy,” Zajac assured his son.

“Mommy says you might kill her, because of the way you lose your temper.”

“I promise I won’t kill Medea, Rudy,” Zajac said. “I won’t lose my temper with her.” (This was typical of how little Hildred had ever understood him; that he lost his temper at dogshit didn’t mean he was angry at dogs!)

“Tell me again why they named her Medea,” the boy said.

It was hard to relate the Greek legend to a six-year-old—just try describing what a sorceress is. But the part about Medea assisting her husband, Jason, in obtaining the Golden Fleece was easier to explain than the part about what Medea does to her own children. Why would anyone name a dog Medea? Dr. Zajac wondered. In the six months since he’d been divorced, Zajac had read more than a dozen books by child psychiatrists about the troubles children have after a divorce. A great emphasis was put on the parents’ having a sense of humor, which was not the hand surgeon’s strongest point.

Zajac’s indulgence in mischief overcame him only in those moments when he was cradling a dog turd in a lacrosse stick. However, in addition to his having been a midfielder at Deerfield, Dr. Zajac had sung in some kind of glee club there. Although his only singing now was in the shower, he felt a spontaneous outpouring of humor whenever he was taking a shower with Rudy. Taking a shower with his father was another item on the small but growing list of things Rudy liked to do with his dad.

Suddenly, to the tune of “I Am the River,” which Rudy had learned to sing in kindergarten—the boy, as many only children do, liked to sing—Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac burst into song.

I am Medea

and I eat my poo.

In an-tiq-ui-ty

I killed my kids, too!

“What?” Rudy said. “Sing that again!” (They’d already discussed antiquity.) When his father sang the song again, Rudy dissolved into laughter. Scatological humor is the best stuff for six-year-olds.

“Don’t sing this around your mother,” Rudy’s father warned him. Thus they had a secret, another step in creating a bond between them.

Over time, two copies of Stuart Little made their way home with Rudy, but Hildred would not read it to the boy; worse, she threw away both copies of the book. It wasn’t until Rudy caught her throwing away Charlotte’s Web that he told his father, which became another bond between them.

Every weekend they were together, Zajac read all of either Stuart Little or Charlotte’s Web to Rudy. The little boy never tired of them. He cried every time Charlotte died; he laughed every time Stuart crashed the dentist’s invisible car. And, like Stuart, when Rudy was thirsty, he told his father that he had “a ruinous thirst.” (The first time, naturally, Rudy had to ask his father what “ruinous”

meant.)

Meanwhile, although Dr. Zajac had made much headway in contradicting Hildred’s message to Rudy—the boy was increasingly convinced that his father did love him—the hand surgeon’s small-minded colleagues were nonetheless convincing themselves that they were superior to Zajac because of the alleged unhappiness and undernourishment of Zajac’s six-year-old son. At first Dr. Zajac’s colleagues felt superior to him because of Irma, too. They regarded her as a clear loser’s choice among housekeepers; but when Irma began to transform herself, they soon noticed her, long before Zajac himself showed any signs of sharing their interest.

His failure to be aware of Irma’s transformation was further proof of Dr. Zajac’s being a madman of the unseeing variety. The girl had dropped twenty pounds; she’d joined a gym. She ran three miles a day—she was no mere jogger, either. If her new wardrobe was lacking in taste, it quite consciously showed off her body. Irma would never be beautiful, but she was built. Hildred would start the rumor that her ex-husband was dating a stripper. (Divorced women in their forties are not known for their charitableness toward well-built women in their twenties.) Irma, don’t forget, was in love. What did she care? One night she tiptoed, naked, through the dark upstairs hall. She’d rationalized that if Zajac had not gone to bed, and if he happened to see her without her clothes on, she would tell him she was a sleepwalker and that some force had drawn her to his room. Irma longed for Dr. Zajac to see her naked—by accident, of course—because she had developed more than a terrific body; she’d also developed a stalwart confidence in it. But tiptoeing past the doctor’s closed bedroom door, Irma was halted by the baffling conviction that she’d overheard Dr. Zajac praying. Prayer struck Irma, who was not religious, as a suspiciously unscientific activity for a hand surgeon. She listened at the doctor’s door a little longer and was relieved to hear that Zajac wasn’t praying—he was just reading Stuart Little aloud to himself in a prayerful voice.

“ ‘At suppertime he took his ax, felled a dandelion, opened a can of deviled ham, and had a light supper of ham and dandelion milk,’ ” Dr. Zajac read from Stuart Little.

Irma was shaken by her love for him, but the mere mention of deviled ham made her feel ill. She tiptoed back to her bedroom off the kitchen, pausing to munch some raw carrots out of the bowl of melting ice in the fridge. When would the lonely man ever notice her?

Irma ate a lot of nuts and dried fruit; she ate fresh fruit, too, and mounds of raw vegetables. She could concoct a mean steamed fish with gingerroot and black beans, which made such an impression on Dr. Zajac that the doctor startled Irma (and everyone who knew him) by hosting an impromptu dinner party for his medical-school students.

Zajac imagined that one of his Harvard boys might ask Irma out; she seemed lonely to him, as did most of the boys. Little did the doctor know that Irma had eyes only for him. Once Irma had been introduced to his young male med students as his “assistant”—and because she was so obviously a piece of ass—they assumed he was already banging her and abandoned all hope. (Zajac’s female med students probably thought that Irma was every bit as desperate-looking as Zajac.) No matter. Everyone loved the steamed fish with gingerroot and black beans, and Irma had other recipes. She treated Medea’s dog food with meat tenderizer, because she’d read in a magazine at her dentist’s office that meat tenderizer made a dog’s poo unappetizing, even to a dog. But Medea seemed to find the tenderizer enhancing.

Dr. Zajac sprinkled the birdseed in the outdoor birdfeeder with red pepper flakes; he’d told Irma that this made the birdseed inedible to squirrels. Afterward, Irma tried sprinkling Medea’s dog turds with red pepper flakes, too. While this was visually interesting, especially against the new-fallen snow, the dog found the pepper off-putting only initially.

And drawing even greater attention to the dogshit in his yard did not please Zajac. He had a far simpler, albeit more athletic method of preventing Medea from eating her own shit. He got to her turds first, with his lacrosse stick. He usually deposited the turds in the ubiquitous brown paper bag, although on occasion Irma had seen him take a shot at a squirrel in a tree clear across Brattle Street. Dr. Zajac missed the squirrel every time, but the gesture went straight to Irma’s heart. While it was too soon to say if the girl Hildred had named “Nick’s stripper” would ever find her way into Zajac’s heart, there was another area of concern at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates: it was only a matter of time before Dr. Zajac, although he was still in his forties, would have to be included in the title of Boston’s foremost surgical associates in hand treatment. Soon it would have to be Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink, Zajac & Associates. Don’t think this didn’t gall the eponymous Schatzman, even though he was retired. Don’t think it didn’t rile the surviving Gingeleskie brother, too. In the old days, when the other Gingeleskie was alive, they were Schatzman, Gingeleskie & Gingeleskie—this being before Mengerink’s time. (Dr. Zajac said privately that he doubted Dr. Mengerink could cure a hangnail.) As for Mengerink, he’d had an affair with Hildred when she was still married to Zajac; yet he despised Zajac for getting a divorce, even though the divorce had been Hildred’s idea. Unbeknownst to Dr. Zajac, his ex-wife was on a mission to drive Dr. Mengerink crazy, too. It seemed the cruelest of fates, to Mengerink, that Zajac’s name was soon destined to follow his on the venerable surgical associates’ letterhead and nameplate. But if Dr. Zajac pulled off the country’s first hand transplant, they would all be lucky if they weren’t renamed Zajac, Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates. (Worse things could happen. No doubt Harvard would soon make Zajac an associate professor.)

And now Dr. Zajac’s housekeeper/assistant had transformed herself into an instant erection machine, although Zajac himself was too screwed up to realize it. Even old Schatzman, retired, had observed the changes in Irma. And Mengerink, who’d had to change his home phone number twice to discourage Zajac’s ex-wife from calling him—Mengerink had noticed Irma, too. As for Gingeleskie, he said: “Even the other Gingeleskie could pick Irma out of a crowd,” referring, of course, to his dead brother.

From the grave, a corpse couldn’t miss seeing what had happened to the housekeeper/assistant-turned-sexpot. She looked like a stripper with a day job as a personal trainer. How had Zajac missed the transformation? No wonder such a man had managed to pass through prep school and college unremembered. Yet when Dr. Zajac went shopping on the Internet for potential hand donors and recipients, no one at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates called him crass or said that they thought www.needahand.com was a tad crude. Despite his shit-eating dog, his obsession with fame, his wasting-away thinness, and his problem-ridden son—and, on top of everything, his inconceivable obliviousness to his cheeks-of-steel “assistant”—in the pioneer territory of hand-transplant surgery, Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac remained the man in charge.

That Boston’s most brilliant hand surgeon was reputed to be a sexless jerk was a matter of no account to his only son. What does a six-year-old boy care about his father’s professional or sexual acumen, especially when he is beginning to see for himself that his father loves him?

As for what launched the newfound affection between Rudy and his complicated father, credit must be spread around. Some acknowledgment is due a dumb dog who ate her own poo, as well as that long-ago single-sex glee club at Deerfield, where Zajac first got the mistaken idea he could sing. (After the spontaneous opening verse of “I Am Medea,” both father and son would compose many more verses, all of them too childishly scatological to record here.) And there were also, of course, the stove-timer game and E. B. White.

In addition, we should put in a word for the value of mischief in father-son relations. The former midfielder had first developed an instinct for mischief by cradling and then whizzing dog turds into the Charles River with a lacrosse stick. If Zajac had initially failed to interest Rudy in lacrosse, the good doctor would eventually turn his son’s attention to the finer points of the sport while walking Medea along the banks of the historic Charles.

Picture this: there is the turd-hunting dog, dragging Dr. Zajac after her while she strains against her leash. (In Cambridge, of course, there is a leash law; all dogs must be leashed.) And there, running abreast of the eager part-Lab—yes, actually running, actually getting some exercise !—is six-year-old Rudy Zajac, his child-size lacrosse stick held low to the ground in front of him. Picking up a dog turd in a lacrosse stick, especially on the run, is a lot harder than picking up a lacrosse ball. (Dog turds come in varying sizes and are, on occasion, entangled with grass, or they have been stepped on.) Nevertheless, Rudy had been well coached. And Medea’s determination, her powerful lunges against the leash, gave the boy precisely what was needed in the process of mastering any sport—especially “dog-turd lacrosse,” as both father and son called it. Medea provided Rudy with competition.

Any amateur can cradle a dog turd in a lacrosse stick, but try doing it under the pressure of a shit-eating dog; in any sport, pressure is as fundamental a teacher as a good coach. Besides, Medea outweighed Rudy by a good ten pounds and could easily knock the boy down.

“Keep your back to her—attaboy!” Zajac would yell. “Cradle, cradle—keep cradling! Always know where the river is!”

The river was their goal—the historic Charles. Rudy had two good shots, which his father had taught him. There was the standard over-the-shoulder shot (either a long lob or a fairly flat trajectory) and there was the sidearm shot, which was low to the water and best for skipping the dog turds, which Rudy preferred. The risk with the sidearm shot was that the lacrosse stick passed low to the ground; Medea could block a sidearm shot and eat it in a hurry.

“Midriver, midriver!” the former midfielder would be coaching. Or else he would shout: “Aim for under the bridge!”

“But there’s a boat, Dad.”

“Aim for the boat, then,” Zajac would say, more quietly, aware that his relations with the oarsmen were already strained.

The resulting shouts and cries of the outraged oarsmen gave a certain edge to the rigors of competition. Dr. Zajac was especially engaged by the high-pitched yelps the coxswains made into their megaphones, although nowadays one had to be careful—some of the coxswains were girls.

Zajac disapproved of girls in sculls or in the larger racing shells, no matter whether the girls were rowers or coxswains. (This was surely another hallmark prejudice of his single-sex education.)

As for Dr. Zajac’s modest contribution to the ongoing pollution of the Charles River… well, let’s be fair. Zajac had never been an advocate of environmental correctness. In his hopelessly old-fashioned opinion, a lot worse than dogshit was dumped into the Charles on a daily basis. Furthermore, the dogshit that little Rudy Zajac and his father were responsible for throwing into the Charles River was for a good cause, that of solidifying the love between a divorced father and his son. Irma deserves some credit, too, despite being a prosaic girl who would one day watch the lions-eating-the-hand episode on video with Dr. Zajac and say, “I never knew lions could eat somethin’ so quick. ”

Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac, who knew next to everything there was to know about hands, couldn’t watch the footage without exclaiming: “Oh, God, my God—there it goes! Sweet Jesus, it’s gone ! It’s all gone!”

Of course it didn’t hurt the chances of Patrick Wallingford, Dr. Zajac’s first choice among the would-be hand recipients, that Wallingford was famous; a television audience estimated in the millions had witnessed the frightening accident. Thousands of children and uncounted adults were still suffering nightmares, although Wallingford had lost his hand more than five years ago and the televised footage of the accident itself was less than thirty seconds long.

“Thirty seconds is a long time to be engaged in losing your hand, if it’s your hand,” Patrick had said.

People meeting Wallingford, especially for the first time, would never fail to comment on his boyish charm. Women would remark on his eyes. Whereas Wallingford had formerly been envied by men, the way in which he was maimed had put an end to that; not even men, the gender more prone to envy, could be jealous of him anymore. Now men and women found him irresistible. Dr. Zajac hadn’t needed the Internet to find Patrick Wallingford, who had been the first choice of the Boston surgical team from the start. More interesting was that www.needahand.com had turned up a surprising candidate in the field of potential donors. (What Zajac meant by a donor was a fresh cadaver.) This donor was not only alive—he wasn’t even dying!

His wife wrote Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates from Wisconsin.

“My husband has got the idea that he wants to leave his left hand to Patrick Wallingford—you know, the lion guy,” Mrs. Otto Clausen wrote. Her letter caught Dr. Zajac in the middle of a bad day with the dog. Medea had ingested a sizable section of lawn hose and had required stomach surgery. The miserable dog should have spent the weekend recovering at the vet’s, but it was one of those weekends when young Rudy visited his father; the six-year-old divorce survivor might have reverted to his former inconsolable self without Medea’s company. Even a drugged dog was better than no dog. There would be no dog-turd lacrosse for the weekend, but it would be a challenge to prevent Medea from eating her stitches, and there was always the reliable stove-timer game and the more reliable genius of E. B. White. It would certainly be a good time to devote some constructive reinforcement to Rudy’s ever-experimental diet. In short, the hand surgeon was a trifle distracted. If there was something disingenuous about the charm of Mrs. Otto Clausen’s letter, Zajac didn’t catch it. His eagerness for the media possibilities overrode all else, and the Wisconsin couple’s unabashed choice of Patrick Wallingford as a worthy recipient of Otto Clausen’s hand would make a good story.

Zajac didn’t find it at all odd that Mrs. Clausen, instead of Otto himself, had written to offer her husband’s hand. All Otto had done was sign a brief statement; his wife had composed the accompanying letter.

Mrs. Clausen hailed from Appleton, and she proudly mentioned that Otto was already registered with the Wisconsin Organ Donor Affiliates. “But this hand business is a little different—I mean different from organs,” she observed. Hands were indeed different from organs, Dr. Zajac knew. But Otto Clausen was only thirty-nine and in no apparent proximity to death’s door. Zajac believed that a fresh cadaver with a suitable donor hand would show up long before Otto’s. As for Patrick Wallingford, his desire and need for a new left hand might possibly have put him at the top of Dr. Zajac’s list of wannabe recipients even if he hadn’t been famous. Zajac was not a thoroughly unsympathetic man. But he was also among the millions who’d taped the three-minute lion story. To Dr. Zajac, the footage was a combination of a hand surgeon’s favorite horror film and the precursor of his future fame.

It suffices to say that Patrick Wallingford and Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac were on a collision course, which didn’t bode well from the start.