The Fourth Hand

CHAPTER SIX The Strings Attached

IN BOTH THE Green Bay Press-Gazette and The Green Bay News-Chronicle, Otto Clausen’s postgame, self-inflicted shooting was relegated to the trivial end of Super Bowl coverage. One Wisconsin sportscaster was gauche enough to say,

“Hey, there are a lot of Packer fans who probably considered shooting themselves after Sunday’s Super Bowl, but Otto Clausen of Green Bay actually pulled the trigger.” Yet even the most tactless, insensitive reporting of Otto’s death did not seriously label it a suicide.

When Patrick Wallingford first heard about Otto Clausen—he saw the minute-anda-half story on his very own international channel in his hotel room in Mexico City—he vaguely wondered why that dick Dick hadn’t sent him to interview the widow. It was the kind of story he was usually assigned.

But the all-news network had sent Stubby Farrell, their old sports hack, who’d been at the Super Bowl in San Diego, to cover the event. Stubby had been in Green Bay many times before, and Patrick Wallingford had never even watched a Super Bowl on TV.

When Wallingford saw the news that Monday morning, he was already rushing to leave his hotel to catch his flight to New York. He scarcely noticed that the beertruck driver had a widow. “Mrs. Clausen couldn’t be reached for comment,” the ancient sports hack reported.

Dick would have made me reach her, Wallingford thought, as he bolted his coffee; yet his mind registered the ten-second image of the beer truck in the near-empty parking lot, the light snow covering the abandoned vehicle like a gauzy shroud.

“Where the party ended, for this Packer fan,” Stubby intoned. Cheesy, Patrick Wallingford thought. (No pun intended—he as yet had no idea what a cheesehead was.)

Patrick was almost out the door when the phone rang in his hotel room; he very nearly let it ring, worried as he was about catching his plane. It was Dr. Zajac, all the way from Massachusetts. “Mr. Wallingford, this is your lucky day,” the hand surgeon began.

As he awaited his subsequent flight to Boston, Wallingford watched himself on the twenty-four-hour news; he saw what remained of the story he’d been sent to Mexico City to cover. On Super Bowl Sunday, not everyone in Mexico had been watching the Super Bowl.

The family and friends of renowned sword-swallower José Guerrero were gathered at Mary of Magdala Hospital to pray for his recovery; during a performance at a tourist hotel in Acapulco, Guerrero had tripped and fallen onstage, lancing his liver. They’d risked flying him from Acapulco to Mexico City, where he was now in the hands of a specialist—liver stab wounds bleed very slowly. More than a hundred friends and family members had assembled at the tiny private hospital, which was surrounded by hundreds more well-wishers. Wallingford felt as if he’d interviewed them all. But now, about to leave for Boston to meet his new left hand, Patrick was glad that his three-minute report had been edited to a minute and a half. He was impatient to see the rerun of Stubby Farrell’s story; he would pay closer attention this time.

Dr. Zajac had told him that Otto Clausen was left-handed, but what did that mean, exactly? Wallingford was right-handed. Until the lion, he’d always held the microphone in his left hand so that he would be free to shake hands with his right. Now that he had only one hand in which to hold the microphone, Wallingford had largely dispensed with shaking hands.

What would it be like to be right-handed and then get a left-handed man’s left hand? Hadn’t the left-handedness been a function of Clausen’s brain? Surely the predetermination to left-handedness was not in the hand. Patrick kept thinking of a hundred such questions he wanted to ask Dr. Zajac.

On the telephone, all the doctor had said was that the medical authorities in Wisconsin had acted quickly enough to preserve the hand because of the “prompt consideration of Mrs. Clausen.” Dr. Zajac had been mumbling. Normally he didn’t mumble, but the doctor had been up most of the night, administering to the vomiting dog, and then—with Rudy’s overzealous assistance—he had attempted to analyze the peculiar-looking substance (in her vomit) that had made Medea sick. Rudy’s opinion was that the partially digested duct tape looked like the remains of a seagull. If so, Zajac thought to himself, the bird had been long dead and sticky when the dog ate it. But the analytically minded father and son wouldn’t really get to the bottom of what Medea had eaten until the DogWatch man called on Monday morning to inquire how the invisible barrier was working, and to apologize for leaving behind his roll of duct tape.

“You were my last job on Friday,” the DogWatch man said, as if he were a detective. “I must have left my duct tape at your place. I don’t suppose you’ve seen it around.”

“In a manner of speaking, yes—we have,” was all Dr. Zajac could manage to say. The doctor was still recovering from the sight of Irma, fresh from her morning shower. The girl had been naked and toweling dry her hair in the kitchen. She’d come back from the weekend early Monday morning, gone for a run, and then taken a shower. She was naked in the kitchen because she’d assumed she was alone in the house—but don’t forget that she wanted Zajac to see her naked, anyway.

Normally at that time Monday morning, Dr. Zajac had already returned Rudy to his mother’s house—in time for Hildred to take the boy to school. But Zajac and Rudy had both overslept, the result of their being up most of the night with Medea. Only after Dr. Zajac’s ex-wife called and accused him of kidnapping Rudy did Zajac stumble into the kitchen to make some coffee. Hildred went on yelling after he put Rudy on the phone.

Irma didn’t see Dr. Zajac, but he saw her—everything but her head, which was largely hidden from view because she was toweling dry her hair. Great abs! the doctor thought, retreating.

Later he found he couldn’t speak to Irma, except in an uncustomary stammer. He haltingly tried to thank her for her peanut-butter idea, but she couldn’t understand him. (Nor did she meet Rudy.) And as Dr. Zajac drove Rudy to his angry mother’s house, he noticed that there was a special spirit of camaraderie between him and his little boy—they had both been yelled at by Rudy’s mother. Zajac was euphoric when he called Wallingford in Mexico, and much more than Otto Clausen’s suddenly available left hand was exciting him—the doctor had spent a terrific weekend with his son. Nor had his view of Irma, naked, been unexciting, although it was typical of Zajac to notice her abs. Was it only Irma’s abs that had reduced him to stammering? Thus the “prompt consideration of Mrs. Clausen” and similar formalities were all the soon-to-be-celebrated hand surgeon could manage to impart to Patrick Wallingford over the phone. What Dr. Zajac didn’t tell Patrick was that Otto Clausen’s widow had demonstrated unheard-of zeal on behalf of the donor hand. Mrs. Clausen had not only accompanied her husband’s body from Green Bay to Milwaukee, where (in addition to most of his organs) Otto’s left hand was removed; she’d also insisted on accompanying the hand, which was packed in ice, on the flight from Milwaukee to Boston.

Wallingford, of course, had no idea that he was going to meet more than his new hand in Boston; he was also going to meet his new hand’s widow. This development was less upsetting to Dr. Zajac and the other members of the Boston team than a more unusual but no less spur-of-the-moment request of Mrs. Clausen’s. Yes, there were some strings attached to the donor hand, and Dr. Zajac was only now learning of them. He had probably been wise in not telling Patrick about the new demands.

With time, everyone at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates hoped, Wallingford might warm to the widow’s seemingly last-minute ideas. Apparently not one to beat around the bush, she had requested visitation rights with the hand after the transplant surgery.

How could the one-handed reporter refuse?

“She just wants to see it, I suppose,” Dr. Zajac suggested to Wallingford in the doctor’s office in Boston.

“Just see it?” Patrick asked. There was a disconcerting pause. “Not touch it, I hope—not hold hands or anything.”

“Nobody can touch it! Not for a considerable period of time after the surgery,” Dr. Zajac answered protectively.

“But does she mean one visit? Two? For a year ?”

Zajac shrugged. “Indefinitely—those are her terms.”

“Is she crazy?” Patrick asked. “Is she morbid, grief-stricken, deranged?”

“You’ll see,” Dr. Zajac said. “She wants to meet you.”

“Before the surgery?”

“Yes, now. That’s part of her request. She needs to be sure that she wants you to have it.”

“But I thought her husband wanted me to have it!” Wallingford cried. “It was his hand!”

“Look—all I can tell you is, the widow’s in the driver’s seat,” Dr. Zajac said.

“Have you ever had to deal with a medical ethicist?” (Mrs. Clausen had been quick to call a medical ethicist, too.)

“But why does she want to meet me?” Patrick wanted to know. “I mean before I get the hand.”

This part of the request and the visitation rights struck Dr. Zajac as the kind of thing only a medical ethicist could have thought up. Zajac didn’t trust medical ethicists; he believed that they should keep out of the area of experimental surgery. They were always meddling—doing their best to make surgery “more human.”

Medical ethicists complained that hands were not necessary to live, and that the anti-rejection drugs posed many risks and had to be taken for life. They argued that the first recipients should be those who had lost both hands; after all, doublehand amputees had more to gain than recipients who’d lost only one hand. Unaccountably, the medical ethicists loved Mrs. Clausen’s request—not just the creepy visitation rights, but also that she insisted on meeting Patrick Wallingford and deciding if she liked him before permitting the surgery. (You can’t get “more human” than that.)

“She just wants to see if you’re… nice,” Zajac tried to explain. This new affront struck Wallingford as both an insult and a dare; he felt simultaneously offended and challenged. Was he nice? He didn’t know. He hoped he was, but how many of us truly know?

As for Dr. Zajac, the doctor knew he himself wasn’t especially nice. He was cautiously optimistic that Rudy loved him, and of course he knew that he loved his little boy. But the hand specialist had no illusions concerning himself in the niceness department; Dr. Zajac, except to his son, had never been very lovable. With a pang, Zajac recalled his brief glimpse of Irma’s abs. She must do sit-ups and crunches all day!

“I’ll leave you alone with Mrs. Clausen now,” Dr. Zajac said, uncharacteristically putting his hand on Patrick’s shoulder.

“I’m going to be alone with her?” Wallingford asked. He wanted more time to get ready, to test expressions of nice. But he needed only a second to imagine Otto’s hand; maybe the ice was melting.

“Okay, okay, okay,” Patrick repeated.

Dr. Zajac and Mrs. Clausen, as if choreographed, changed places in the doctor’s office. By the third “okay,” Wallingford realized that he was alone with the brandnew widow. Seeing her gave him a sudden chill—what he would think of later as a kind of cold-lake feeling.

Don’t forget, she had the flu. When she dragged herself out of bed on Super Bowl Sunday night, she was still feverish. She put on clean underwear and the pair of jeans that were on the bedside chair, and also the faded green sweatshirt—Green Bay green, with the lettering in gold. She’d been wearing the jeans and the sweatshirt when she started to feel ill. She put on her old parka, too. Mrs. Clausen had owned that faded Green Bay Packers sweatshirt for as long as she could remember going with Otto to the cottage. The old sweatshirt was the color of the fir trees and white pines on the far shore of the lake at sunset. There had been nights in the boathouse bedroom when she’d used the sweatshirt as a pillowcase, because laundry at the cottage could be done only in the lake. Even now, when she stood in Dr. Zajac’s office with her arms crossed on her chest—as if she were cold, or concealing from Patrick Wallingford any impression he might have been able to have of her breasts—Mrs. Clausen could almost smell the pine needles, and she sensed Otto’s presence as strongly as if he were right there with her in Zajac’s office.

Given the hand surgeon’s photo gallery of famous patients, it’s a wonder that neither Patrick Wallingford nor Mrs. Clausen paid much attention to the surrounding walls. The two of them were too engaged in noticing each other, although, in the beginning, there was no eye contact between them. Mrs. Clausen’s running shoes had got wet in the snow back in Wisconsin, and they still looked wet to Wallingford, who found himself staring at her feet. Mrs. Clausen took her parka off and sat in the chair beside Patrick. It was Wallingford’s impression that, when she spoke, she addressed his surviving hand.

“Otto felt awful about your hand—the other one, I mean,” she began, never taking her eyes from the hand that remained. Patrick Wallingford listened to her with the concealed disbelief of a veteran journalist who usually knows when an interviewee is lying, which Mrs. Clausen was.

“But,” the widow went on, “I tried not to think about it, to tell you the truth. And when they showed the lions eating you up, I had trouble watching it. It still makes me sick to think about it.”

“Me, too,” Wallingford said; he didn’t believe she was lying now. It’s hard to tell much about a woman in a sweatshirt, but she seemed fairly compact. Her dark-brown hair needed washing, but Patrick sensed that she was generally a clean person who maintained a neat appearance. The overhead fluorescent light was harsh to her face. She wore no makeup, not even lipstick, and her lower lip was dry and split—probably from biting it. The circles under her brown eyes exaggerated their darkness, and the crow’s-feet at the corners indicated that she was roughly Patrick’s age. (Wallingford was only a few years younger than Otto Clausen, who’d been only a little older than his wife.)

“I suppose you think I’m crazy,” Mrs. Clausen said.

“No! Not at all! I can’t imagine how you must feel—I mean beyond how sad you must be.” In truth, she looked like so many emotionally drained women he’d interviewed—most recently, the sword-swallower’s wife in Mexico City—that Patrick felt he’d met her before.

Mrs. Clausen surprised him by nodding and then pointing in the general direction of his lap. “May I see it?” she asked. In the awkward pause that followed, Wallingford stopped breathing. “Your hand… please. The one you still have.”

He held out his right hand to her, as if it had been newly transplanted. She reached out to take it but stopped herself, leaving his hand extended in a lifeless-looking way.

“It’s just a little small,” she said. “Otto’s is bigger.”

He took back his hand, feeling unworthy.

“Otto cried when he saw how you lost your other hand. He actually cried!” We know, of course, that Otto had felt like throwing up; it had been Mrs. Clausen who’d cried, yet she managed to make Wallingford think that her husband’s compassionate tears were a source of wonder to her still. (So much for a veteran journalist knowing when someone was lying. Wallingford was completely taken in by Mrs. Clausen’s account of Otto’s crying.)

“You loved him very much. I can see that,” Patrick said.

The widow bit her lower lip and nodded fiercely, tears welling in her eyes. “We were trying to have a baby. We just kept trying and trying. I don’t know why it wasn’t working.” She dropped her chin to her chest. She held her parka to her face and sobbed quietly into it. Although it was not as faded, the parka was the same Green Bay green as her sweatshirt, with the Packers’ logo (the gold helmet with the white G ) emblazoned on the back.

“It will always be Otto’s hand to me,” Mrs. Clausen said with unexpected volume, pushing the parka away. For the first time, she leveled her gaze at Patrick’s face; she looked as if she’d changed her mind about something. “How old are you, anyway?” she asked. Perhaps from seeing Patrick Wallingford only on television, she’d expected someone older or younger.

“I’m thirty-four,” Wallingford answered, defensively.

“You’re my age exactly,” she told him. He detected the faintest trace of a smile, as if—either in spite of her grief or because of it—she were genuinely mad.

“I won’t be a nuisance—I mean after the operation,” she continued. “But to see his hand… later, to feel it… well, that shouldn’t be very much of a burden to you, should it? If you respect me, I’ll respect you.”

“Certainly!” Patrick said, but he failed to see what was coming.

“I still want to have Otto’s baby.”

Wallingford still didn’t get it. “Do you mean you might be pregnant?” he cried excitedly. “Why didn’t you say so? That’s wonderful! When will you know?”

That same trace of an insane smile crossed her face again. Patrick hadn’t noticed that she’d kicked off her running shoes. Now she unzipped her jeans; she pulled them down, together with her panties, but she hesitated before taking off her sweatshirt.

It was additionally disarming to Patrick that he’d never seen a woman undress this way—that is, bottom first, leaving the top until last. To Wallingford, Mrs. Clausen seemed sexually inexperienced to an embarrassing degree. Then he heard her voice; something had changed in it, and not just the volume. To his surprise, he had an erection, not because Mrs. Clausen was half naked but because of her new tone of voice.

“There’s no other time,” she told him. “If I’m going to have Otto’s baby, I should already be pregnant. After the surgery, you’ll be in no shape to do this. You’ll be in the hospital, you’ll be taking a zillion drugs, you’ll be in pain—”

“Mrs. Clausen!” Patrick Wallingford said. He quickly stood up—and as quickly he sat back down. Until he’d tried to stand, he hadn’t realized how much of a hard-on he had; it was as obvious as what Wallingford said next.

“This would be my baby, not your husband’s, wouldn’t it?”

But she’d already taken off the sweatshirt. Although she’d left her bra on, he could nonetheless see that her breasts were more special than he’d imagined. There was the glint of something in her navel; the body-piercing was also unexpected. Patrick didn’t look at the ornament closely—he was afraid it might have something to do with the Green Bay Packers.

“His hand is the closest to him I can get,” Mrs. Clausen said with unflagging determination. The ferocity of her will could easily have been mistaken for desire. But what worked, meaning what was irresistible, was her voice. She held Wallingford down in the straight-backed chair. She knelt to undo his belt buckle, then she yanked down his pants. By the time Patrick leaned forward, to stop her from removing his undershorts, she’d already removed them. Before he could stand up again, or even sit up straight, she had straddled his lap; her breasts brushed his face. She moved so quickly, he’d somehow missed the moment when she’d taken off her bra.

“I don’t have his hand yet!” Wallingford protested, but when had he ever said no?

“Please respect me,” she begged him in a whisper. What a whisper it was!

Her small, firm buttocks were warm and smooth against his thighs, and his fleeting glimpse of the doohickey in her navel—even more than the appeal of her breasts—had instantly given Wallingford what felt like an erection on top of his erection. He was aware of her tears against his neck as her hand guided him inside her.

It was not his right hand that she clutched in hers and pulled to her breast—it was his stump. She murmured something that sounded like, “What were you going to do right now, anyway—nothing this important, right?” Then she asked him,

“Don’t you want to make a baby?”

“I respect you, Mrs. Clausen,” he stammered, but he abandoned all hope of resisting her. It was clear to them both that he’d already given in.

“Please call me Doris,” Mrs. Clausen said through her tears.

“Doris?”

“Respect me, respect me. That’s all I ask.” She was sobbing.

“I do, I do respect you… Doris,” Patrick said. His one hand had instinctively found the small of her back, as if he’d slept beside her every night for years and even in the dark he could reach out and touch exactly that part of her he wanted to hold. At that moment, he could have sworn that her hair was wet—wet and cold, as if she’d just been swimming. Of course, he would think later, she must have known she was ovulating; a woman who’s been trying and trying to get pregnant surely knows. Doris Clausen must also have known that her difficulty in getting pregnant had been entirely Otto’s problem.

“Are you nice?” Mrs. Clausen was whispering to him, while her hips moved relentlessly against the downward pressure of his one hand. “Are you a good man?”

Although Patrick had been forewarned that this was what she wanted to know, he never expected she would ask him directly— no more than he’d anticipated a sexual encounter with her. Speaking strictly as an erotic experience, having sex with Doris Clausen was more charged with longing and desire than any other sexual encounter Wallingford had ever had. He wasn’t counting the wet dream induced by that cobalt-blue capsule he’d been given in Junagadh, but that extraordinary painkiller was no longer available—not even in India—and it should never be considered in the same category as actual sex.

As for actual sex, Patrick’s encounter with Otto Clausen’s widow, singular and brief though it was, put his entire weekend in Kyoto with Evelyn Arbuthnot to shame. Having sex with Mrs. Clausen even eclipsed Wallingford’s tumultuous relationship with the tall blond sound technician who’d witnessed the lion attack in Junagadh.

That unfortunate German girl, who was back home in Hamburg, was still in therapy because of those lions, although Wallingford suspected she’d been more profoundly traumatized by fainting and then waking up in one of the meat carts than by seeing poor Patrick lose his left wrist and hand.

“Are you nice ? Are you a good man?” Doris repeated, her tears wetting Patrick’s face. Her small, strong body drew him farther and farther inside her, so that Wallingford could scarcely hear himself answer. Surely Dr. Zajac, as well as some other members of the surgical team who were presently assembling in the waiting room, must have heard Patrick’s plaintive cries.

“Yes! Yes! I am nice! I am a good man!” Wallingford wailed.

“Is that a promise?” Doris asked him in a whisper. It was that whisper again—what a killer!

Once more Wallingford answered her so loudly that Dr. Zajac and his colleagues could hear. “Yes! Yes! I promise! I do, I really do!”

The knock on the hand surgeon’s office door came a little later, after it had been quiet for a while. “Are we all right in there?” asked the head of the Boston team. At first Zajac thought they looked all right. Patrick Wallingford was dressed again and still sitting in the straight-backed chair. Mrs. Clausen, fully dressed, lay on her back on Dr. Zajac’s office rug. The fingers of her hands were clasped behind her head, and her elevated feet rested on the seat of the empty chair beside Wallingford.

“I have a bad back,” Doris explained. She didn’t, of course. It was a recommended position in several of the many books she’d read about how to get pregnant.

“Gravity,” was all she’d said in way of explanation to Patrick, as he’d smiled enchantedly at her.

They’re both crazy, thought Dr. Zajac, who could smell sex in the room. A medical ethicist might not have approved of this new development, but Zajac was a hand surgeon, and his surgical team was raring to go.

“If we’re feeling pretty comfy about this,” Zajac said—looking first at Mrs. Clausen, who looked very comfortable, and then at Patrick Wallingford, who looked stupefyingly drunk or stoned—“how about it? Do we have a green light?”

“Everything’s okay with me!” Doris Clausen said loudly, as if she were calling to someone over an expanse of water.

“Everything’s fine with me,” Patrick replied. “I guess we have a green light.”

It was the degree of sexual satisfaction in Wallingford’s expression that rang a bell with Dr. Zajac. Where had he seen that expression before? Oh, yes, he’d been in Bombay, where he’d been performing a number of exceedingly delicate hand surgeries on children in front of a selective audience of Indian pediatric surgeons. Zajac remembered one surgical procedure from there especially well—it involved a three-year-old girl who’d got her hand caught and mangled in the gears of some farm machinery.

Zajac was sitting with the Indian anesthesiologist when the little girl started to wake up. Children are always cold, often disoriented, and usually frightened when they awaken from general anesthesia. On occasion, they’re sick to their stomachs. Dr. Zajac remembered that he’d excused himself in order to miss seeing the unhappy child. He would have a look at how her hand was doing, of course, but that could be later on, when she was feeling better.

“Wait—you have to see this,” the Indian anesthesiologist told Zajac. “Just have a quick look at her.”

On the child’s innocent face was the expression of a sexually satisfied woman. Dr. Zajac was shocked. (The sad truth was that Zajac had never, personally, seen the face of a woman as sexually satisfied as that before.)

“My God, man,” Dr. Zajac said to the Indian anesthesiologist, “what did you give her?”

“Just a little something extra in her I.V.—not very much of it, either!” the anesthesiologist replied.

“But what is it? What’s it called?”

“I’m not supposed to tell you,” said the Indian anesthesiologist. “It’s not available in your country, and it never will be. It’s about to become unavailable here, too. The ministry of health intends to ban it.”

“I should hope so,” Dr. Zajac remarked—he abruptly left the recovery room. But the girl hadn’t been in any pain; and when Zajac examined her hand later, it was fine, and she was resting comfortably.

“How’s the pain?” he asked the child. A nurse had to translate for him.

“She says ‘everything’s okay.’ She has no pain,” the nurse interpreted. The girl went on babbling.

“What’s she saying now?” Dr. Zajac asked, and the nurse became suddenly shy or embarrassed.

“I wish they wouldn’t put that painkiller in the anesthesia,” the nurse told him. The child appeared to be relating a long story.

“What’s she telling you?” Zajac asked.

“Her dream,” the nurse answered, evasively. “She believes she’s seen her future. She’s going to be very happy and have lots of children. Too many, in my opinion.”

The little girl just smiled at him; for a three-year-old, there’d been something inappropriately seductive in her eyes.

Now, in Dr. Zajac’s Boston office, Patrick Wallingford was grinning in the same shameless fashion.

What an absolutely cuckoo coincidence! Dr. Zajac decided, as he looked at Wallingford’s sexually besotted expression.

“The tiger patient,” he’d called that little girl in Bombay, because the child had explained to her doctors and nurses that, when her hand had been caught in the farm machinery, the gears had growled at her like a tiger. Cuckoo or not, something about the way Wallingford looked gave Dr. Zajac pause. “The lion patient,” as Zajac had long thought of Patrick Wallingford, was possibly in need of more than a new left hand.

What Dr. Zajac didn’t know was that Wallingford had finally found what he needed—he’d found Doris Clausen.