The Fourth Hand

CHAPTER EIGHT Rejection and Success

IT WAS ALL RIGHT with Wallingford when Doris talked about wanting her child to know his or her father’s hand. What this meant to Patrick was that he could expect to go on seeing her. He loved her with slimmer and slimmer hope of her reciprocation, which was disquietingly unlike the way she loved the hand. She would hold it to her belly, against the unborn child’s persistent kicks, and while she could occasionally feel Wallingford flinch in pain, she had ceased to find his twinges alarming.

“It’s not really your hand,” Mrs. Clausen reminded Patrick, not that he needed reminding. “Imagine what it must be like for Otto—to feel a child he’s never going to see. Of course it hurts him!”

But wasn’t it Wallingford’s pain? In his former life, with Marilyn, Patrick might have responded sarcastically. (“Now that you put it that way, I’m not worried about the pain.”) But with Doris… well, all he could do was adore her. Moreover, there was strong support for Mrs. Clausen’s argument. The new hand didn’t look like Patrick’s—it never would. Otto’s left hand was not that much bigger, but we do a lot of looking at our hands—it’s hard to get used to someone else’s. There were times when Wallingford would stare at the hand intently, as if he expected it to speak; nor could he resist smelling the hand—it did not have his smell. He knew that from the way Mrs. Clausen closed her eyes, when she smelled the hand, it smelled like Otto.

There were welcome distractions. During his long recovery and rehabilitation, Patrick’s career, which had been grounded in the Boston newsroom so that he could be close to Dr. Zajac and the Boston team, began to flourish. (Maybe

“flourish” is too strong a word; let’s just say that the network allowed him to branch out a bit.)

The twenty-four-hour international channel created a weekend-anchor slot for him following the evening news; this Saturday-night sidebar to the regular news show was telecast from Boston. While the producers still gave Wallingford all the stories about bizarre casualties, they permitted him to introduce and summarize these stories with a dignity that was surprising and newfound—both in Wallingford and in the all-news network. No one in Boston or New York—not Patrick, not even Dick—could explain it.

Patrick Wallingford acted on-camera as if Otto Clausen’s hand were truly his own, conveying a sympathy previously absent from the calamity channel and his own reporting. It was as if he knew he’d got more than a hand from Otto Clausen. Of course, among serious reporters—meaning those journalists who reported the hard news in depth and in context—the very idea of a sidebar to what passed for the news on the disaster network was laughable. In the real news, there were refugee children whose mothers and aunts had been raped in front of them, although neither the women nor the children would usually admit to this. In the real news, the fathers and uncles of these refugee children had been murdered, although there was scant admitting to this, either. There were also stories of doctors and nurses being shot—deliberately, so that the refugee children would be without medical care. But tales of such willful evil in foreign countries were not reported in depth on the so-called international channel, nor would Patrick Wallingford ever get a field assignment to report them.

More likely, he would be expected to find improbable dignity in and sympathy for the victims of frankly stupid accidents, like his. If there was what could be called a thought behind this watered-down version of the news, the thought was as small as this: that even in what was gruesome, there was (or should be) something uplifting, provided that what was gruesome was idiotic enough.

So what if the all-news network would never send Patrick Wallingford to Yugoslavia? What was it the confused doorman’s brother had said to Vlad or Vlade or Lewis? (“Look—you have a job, don’t you?”) Well, Wallingford had a job, didn’t he?

And most Sundays he was free to fly to Green Bay. When the football season started, Mrs. Clausen was eight months pregnant; it was the first time in recent memory that she wouldn’t see a single Packer home game at Lambeau Field. Doris joked that she didn’t want to go into labor on the forty-yard line—not if it was a good game. (What she meant was that no one would have paid any attention to her.) Therefore, she and Wallingford watched the Packers on television. Absurdly, he flew to Green Bay just to watch TV.

But a Packer game, even on television, provided the longest sustained period of time that Mrs. Clausen would stroke the hand or permit the hand to touch her; and while she stared transfixed at the football game, Patrick could look at her the same way. He was conscious of memorizing her profile, or the way she bit her lower lip when it was third and long. (Doris had to explain to him that third and long was when Brett Favre, the Green Bay quarterback, had the greatest potential for getting sacked or throwing an interception.)

Occasionally she hurt Wallingford without meaning to. When Favre got sacked, or when he was intercepted—worse, whenever the other team scored—Mrs. Clausen would sharply squeeze her late husband’s hand.

“Aaahhh!” Wallingford would cry out, shamelessly exaggerating his agony. There would be kisses for the hand, even tears. It was worth the pain, which was quite different from those twinges caused by the kicking of the unborn child; those pins and needles were from another world.

Thus, bravely, Wallingford flew almost every week to Green Bay. He never found a hotel he liked, but Doris wouldn’t allow him to stay in the house she’d shared with Otto. During these trips, Patrick met other Clausens—Otto had a huge, supportive family. Most of them weren’t shy about demonstrating their affection for Otto’s hand. While Otto’s father and brothers had choked back sobs, Otto’s mother, who was memorably large, had wept openly; and the only unmarried sister had clutched the hand to her breast, just before fainting. Wallingford had looked away, thereby failing to catch her when she fell. Patrick blamed himself that she’d chipped a tooth on a coffee table, and she was not a woman with the best of smiles to begin with.

While the Clausens were a clan whose outdoorsy good cheer contrasted sharply with Wallingford’s reserve, he found himself strangely drawn to them. They had the loyal exuberance of season-ticket holders, and they’d all married people who looked like Clausens. You couldn’t tell the in-laws from the blood relatives, except for Doris, who stood apart.

Patrick could see how kind the Clausens were to her, and how protective. They’d accepted her, although she was clearly different; they loved her as one of their own. On television, those families who resembled the Clausens were nauseating, but the Clausens were not.

Wallingford had also traveled to Appleton to meet Doris’s mother and father, who wanted to visit with the hand, too. It was from Mrs. Clausen’s father that Wallingford learned more about Doris’s job; he hadn’t known that she’d had the job ever since her graduation from high school. For longer than Patrick Wallingford had been a journalist, Doris Clausen had worked in ticket sales for the Green Bay Packers. The Packers’ organization had been very supportive of Mrs. Clausen—they’d even put her through college.

“Doris can get you tickets, you know,” Mrs. Clausen’s father told Patrick. “And tickets are wicked hard to come by around here.”

Green Bay would have a rough season following their loss to Denver in Super Bowl XXXII. As Doris had said so movingly to Otto, the last day the unlucky man was alive, “There’s no guarantee of returning to the Super Bowl.”

The Packers wouldn’t get past the wild-card game, losing what Mrs. Clausen called a heartbreaker in the first round of the playoffs to San Francisco. “Otto thought we had the 49ers’ number,” Doris said. But by then she had a new baby to take care of. She was more philosophical now about Green Bay’s losses than she and Otto had ever been before.

It was a big baby, a boy—nine pounds, eight ounces—and he was so long overdue that they’d wanted to induce labor. Mrs. Clausen wouldn’t hear of it; she was one to let nature take its course. Wallingford missed the delivery. The baby was almost a month old before Patrick could get away from Boston. He should never have flown on Thanksgiving Day—his flight was late getting into Green Bay. Even so, he arrived in time to watch the fourth quarter of the Minnesota Vikings’ game with the Dallas Cowboys, which Minnesota won. (A good omen, Doris declared—Otto had hated the Cowboys.) Perhaps because her mother was staying with her, to help with Otto junior, Mrs. Clausen was relaxed about inviting Wallingford to visit her and the new baby at home.

Patrick did his best to forget the details of that house—all the pictures of Otto senior, for example. It was no surprise to see photographic evidence that Otto senior and Doris had been sweethearts—she’d already told Wallingford about that—but the photos of the Clausens’ marriage were more than Patrick could bear. There was in their photographs not only their obvious pleasure, which was always of the moment, but also their anticipated happiness—their unwavering expectations of a future together, and of a baby in that future. And what was the setting of the pictures that so seized Wallingford’s attention? It was neither Appleton nor Green Bay. It was the cottage on the lake, of course! The weathered dock; the lonely, dark water; the dark, abiding pines. There was also a photo of the boathouse apartment under construction, and there were Otto’s and Doris’s wet bathing suits, drying in the sunlight on the dock. Surely the water had lapped against the rocking boats, and—especially before a storm—it must have slapped against the dock. Patrick had heard it many times. Wallingford recognized in the photographs the source of the recurrent dream that wasn’t quite his. And always underlying that dream was the other one, the one the prescience pill had inspired—that wettest of all wet dreams brought on by the unnamed Indian painkiller, now banned.

Looking at the photographs, Wallingford began to realize that it was not the

“unmanly” loss of his hand that had conclusively turned his ex-wife against him; instead, in refusing to have children, he’d already lost her. Patrick could see how the paternity suit, even though it proved to be false, had been the bitterest pill for Marilyn to swallow. She’d wanted children. How had he underestimated the urgency of that?

Now, as he held Otto junior, Wallingford wondered how he could not have wanted one of these. His own baby in his arms!

He cried. Doris and her mother cried with him. Then they shut off the tears because the twenty-four-hour international news team was there. Although he was not the reporter assigned to this story, Wallingford could have predicted all the shots.

“Get a close-up of the hand, maybe the baby with the hand,” Patrick heard one of his colleagues say. “Get the mother and the hand and the baby together.” And later, in a sharply spoken aside to the cameraman: “I don’t care if Pat’s head is in the frame, just so his hand is there!”

On the plane back to Boston, Wallingford remembered how happy Doris had looked; although he rarely prayed, he prayed for the health of Otto junior. He hadn’t realized that a hand transplant would make him so emotional, but he knew it wasn’t just the hand.

Dr. Zajac had warned him that any decline in his slowly acquired dexterity could be a sign of a rejection reaction. Also, rejection reactions could occur in the skin. Patrick had been surprised to hear this. He’d always known that his own immune system could destroy the new hand, but why skin ? There seemed to be so many more important, internal functions that could go wrong. “Skin is a bugger,” Dr. Zajac had said.

No doubt “bugger” was an Irma-ism. She and Zajac, whom she called Nicky, were in the habit of renting videos and watching them in bed at night. But being in bed led to other things—Irma was pregnant, for example—and in the last video they’d watched, many of the characters had called one another buggers. That skin could be a bugger would be imparted to Patrick soon enough. On the first Monday in January, the day after the Packers dropped that wild-card game in San Francisco, Wallingford flew to Green Bay. The town was in mourning; the lobby of his hotel was like a funeral home. He checked into his room, he showered, he shaved. When he called Doris, her mother answered the phone. Both the baby and Doris were napping; she’d have Doris call him at his hotel when she woke up. Patrick was considerate enough to ask her to pass along his condolences to Doris’s father. “About the 49ers, I mean.”

Wallingford was still napping—dreaming of the cottage on the lake—when Mrs. Clausen came to his hotel room. She hadn’t called first. Her mother was watching the baby. She’d brought the car and would drive Patrick to her house to see Otto junior a little later.

Wallingford didn’t know what this meant. Was she seeking a moment to be alone with him? Did she want some contact, if only with the hand, that she didn’t want her mother to see? But when Patrick touched her face with the palm of his hand—being careful to touch her with his left hand, of course—Mrs. Clausen abruptly turned her face away. And when he thought about touching her breasts, he could see that she’d read his mind and was repulsed.

Doris didn’t even take off her coat. She’d had no ulterior motive for coming to his hotel. She must have felt like taking a drive—that was all. This time, when Wallingford saw the baby, little Otto appeared to recognize him. This was highly unlikely; nevertheless, it further broke Patrick’s heart. He got back on the plane to Boston with a disturbing premonition. Not only had Doris permitted no contact with the hand—she’d barely looked at it! Had Otto junior stolen all her affection and attention?

Wallingford had a bad week or more in Boston, pondering the signals Mrs. Clausen might be sending him. She’d said something about how, when little Otto was older, he might like seeing and holding his father’s hand from time to time. What did she mean by “older”—how much older? What had she meant, “from time to time”? Was Doris trying to tell Patrick that she intended to see him less ? Her recent coldness to the hand caused Wallingford his worst insomnia since the pain immediately following his surgery. Something was wrong. Now when Wallingford dreamed of the lake, he felt cold—a wet-bathing-suit-afterthe-sun-has-gone-down kind of cold. While this had been one of several sensations he’d experienced in the Indian painkiller dream, in this new version his wet bathing suit never led to sex. It led nowhere. All Patrick felt was cold, a kind of upnorth cold. Then, not long after his Green Bay visit, he woke up unusually early one morning with a fever—he thought it was the flu. He had a good look at his left hand in the bathroom mirror. (He’d been training the hand to brush his teeth; it was an excellent exercise, his physical therapist had told him.) The hand was green. The new color began about two inches above his wrist and darkened at his fingertips and the tip of his thumb. It was the mossy-green color of a well-shaded lake under a cloudy sky. It was the color of firs from a distance, or in the mist; it was the blackening dark green of pine trees reflected in water. Wallingford’s temperature was 104.

He thought of calling Mrs. Clausen before he called Dr. Zajac, but there was an hour’s time difference between Boston and Green Bay and he didn’t want to wake up the new mother or her baby. When he phoned Zajac, the doctor said he’d meet him at the hospital—adding, “I told you skin was a bugger.”

“But it’s been a year !” Wallingford cried. “I can tie my shoes! I can drive! I can almost pick up a quarter. I’ve come close to picking up a dime !”

“You’re in uncharted water,” Zajac replied. The doctor and Irma had seen a video with that lamentable title, Uncharted Water, the night before. “All we know is, you’re still in the fifty-percent-probability range.”

“Fifty percent probability of what ?” Patrick asked.

“Of rejection or acceptance, pal,” Zajac said. “Pal” was Irma’s new name for Medea.

They had to remove the hand before Mrs. Clausen could get to Boston, bringing her baby and her mother with her. There would be no last looks, Dr. Zajac had to tell Mrs. Clausen—the hand was too ugly.

Wallingford was resting fairly comfortably when Doris came to his bedside in the hospital. He was in some pain, but there was nothing comparable to what he’d felt after the attachment. Nor was Wallingford mourning the loss of his hand, again—it was losing Mrs. Clausen that he feared.

“But you can still come see me, and little Otto,” Doris assured him. “We’d enjoy a visit, from time to time. You tried to give Otto’s hand a life!” she cried. “You did your best. I’m proud of you, Patrick.”

This time, she paid no attention to the whopping bandage, which was so big that it looked as if there might still be a hand under it. While it pleased Wallingford that Mrs. Clausen took his right hand and held it to her heart, albeit briefly, he was suffering from the near-certain foreknowledge that she might not clutch this remaining hand to her bosom ever again.

“I’m proud of you… of what you’ve done,” Wallingford told her; he began to cry.

“With your help,” she whispered, blushing. She let his hand go.

“I love you, Doris,” Patrick said.

“But you can’t,” she replied, not unkindly. “You just can’t.”

Dr. Zajac had no explanation for the suddenness of the rejection—that is, he had nothing to say beyond the strictly pathological.

Wallingford could only guess what had happened. Had the hand felt Mrs. Clausen’s love shift from it to the child? Otto might have known that his hand would give his wife the baby they’d tried and tried to have together, but how much had his hand known? Probably nothing.

As it turned out, Wallingford needed only a little time to accept the end result of the fifty-percent-probability range. After all, he knew divorce—he’d been rejected before. Physically and psychologically speaking, losing the first hand had been harder than losing Otto’s. No doubt Mrs. Clausen had helped Wallingford feel that Otto’s hand was never quite his. (We can only guess what a medical ethicist might have thought of that.)

Now when Wallingford tried to dream of the cottage on the lake, nothing was there. Not the smell of the pine needles, which he’d first struggled to imagine but had since grown used to; not the lap of the water, not the cries of the loons. It is true, as they say, that you can feel pain in an amputated limb long after the limb is gone, but this came as no surprise to Patrick Wallingford. The fingertips of Otto’s left hand, which had touched Mrs. Clausen so lightly, had been without feeling; yet Patrick had truly felt Doris when the hand touched her. When, in his sleep, he would raise his bandaged stump to his face, Wallingford believed he could still smell Mrs. Clausen’s sex on his missing fingers.

“Ache all gone?” she’d asked him.

Now the ache wouldn’t leave him; it seemed as permanently a part of him as his not having a left hand.

Patrick Wallingford was still in the hospital on January 24, 1999, when the first successful hand transplant in the United States was performed in Louisville, Kentucky. The recipient, Matthew David Scott, was a New Jersey man who’d lost his left hand in a fireworks accident thirteen years before the attachment surgery. According to The New York Times, “a donor hand suddenly became available.”

A medical ethicist called the Louisville hand transplant “a justifiable experiment”; unremarkably, not every medical ethicist agreed. (“The hand is not essential for life,” as the Times put it.)

The head of the surgical team for the Louisville operation made the now-familiar point about the transplanted hand: that there was only “a fifty-percent probability that it will survive a year, and after that we just really don’t know.” He was a hand surgeon, after all; like Dr. Zajac, of course he would talk about “it” surviving, meaning the hand.

Wallingford’s all-news network, aware that Patrick was still recovering in a Boston hospital, interviewed a spokesperson for Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink, Zajac & Associates. Zajac thought the so-called spokesperson must have been Mengerink, because the statement, while correct, demonstrated a characteristic insensitivity to Wallingford’s recent loss. The statement read:

“Animal experiments have shown that rejection reactions rarely occur before seven days, and ninety percent of the reactions occur in the first three months,”

which meant that Patrick’s rejection reaction was out of sync with the animals’. But Wallingford wasn’t offended by the statement. He wholeheartedly wished Matthew David Scott well. Of course he might have felt more affinity for the world’s very first hand transplant, because it, like his, had failed. That one was performed in Ecuador in 1964; in two weeks, the recipient rejected the donor’s hand. “At the time, only crude anti-rejection therapy was available,” the Times pointed out. (In ’64, we didn’t have the immunosuppressant drugs that are in standard use in heart, liver, and kidney transplants today.) Once out of the hospital, Patrick Wallingford moved quickly back to New York, where his career blossomed. He was made the anchor for the evening news; his popularity soared. He’d once been a faintly mocking commentator on the kind of calamity that had befallen him; he’d heretofore behaved as if there were less sympathy for the bizarre death, the bizarre loss, the bizarre grief, simply because they were bizarre. He knew now that the bizarre was commonplace, hence not bizarre at all. It was all death, all loss, all grief—no matter how stupid. Somehow, as an anchor, he conveyed this, and thereby made people feel cautiously better about what was indisputably bad.

But what Wallingford could do in front of a TV camera, he could not duplicate in what we call real life. This was most obvious with Mary whatever-her-namewas—Patrick utterly failed to make her feel even a little bit good. She’d gone through an acrimonious divorce without realizing that there was rarely any other kind. She was still childless. And while she’d become the smartest of the New York newsroom women, with whom Wallingford now worked again, Mary was not as nice as she’d once been. There was something edgy about her behavior; in her eyes, where Wallingford had formerly spotted only candor and an acute vulnerability, there was evidence of irritability, impatience, and cunning. These were all qualities that the other New York newsroom women had in spades. It saddened Wallingford to see Mary descending to their level—or growing up, as those other women would doubtless say.

Still Wallingford wanted to befriend her—that was truly all he wanted to do. To that end, he had dinner with her once a week. But she always drank too much and, when Mary drank, their dinner conversation turned to that topic between them which Wallingford vigilantly tried to avoid—namely, why he wouldn’t sleep with her.

“Am I that unattractive to you?” she would usually begin.

“You’re not unattractive to me, Mary. You’re a very good-looking girl.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Please, Mary—”

“I’m not asking you to marry me,” Mary would say. “Just a weekend away somewhere—just one night, for Christ’s sake! Just try it! You might even be interested in more than one night.”

“Mary, please —”

“Jesus, Pat—you used to fuck any one! How do you think it makes me feel… that you won’t fuck me ?”

“Mary, I want to be your friend. A good one.”

“Okay, I’ll be blunt—you’ve forced me,” Mary told him. “I want you to make me pregnant. I want a baby. You’d produce a good-looking baby. Pat, I want your sperm. Is that okay? I want your seed. ”

We can imagine that Wallingford was a little reluctant to act on this proposition. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know what Mary meant; he just wasn’t sure that he wanted to go through all that again. Yet, in one sense, Mary was right: Wallingford would produce a good-looking kid. He already had.

Patrick was tempted to tell Mary the truth: that he’d made a baby, and that he loved his baby very much; that he loved Doris Clausen, the beer-truck driver’s widow, too. But as seemingly nice as Mary was, she still worked in the New York newsroom, didn’t she? She was a journalist, wasn’t she? Wallingford would have been crazy to tell her the truth.

“What about a sperm bank?” Patrick asked Mary one night. “I would be willing to consider making a contribution to a sperm bank, if you really have your heart set on having my child.”

“You shit!” Mary cried. “You can’t stand the thought of fucking me, can you? Jesus, Pat—do you need two hands just to get it up? What’s the matter with you? Or is it me ?”

It was an outburst of the kind that would put an end to their having dinner together on a weekly basis, at least for a while. On that upsetting evening, when Patrick had the taxi drop Mary at her apartment building first, she wouldn’t even say good night.

Wallingford, who was understandably distracted, told the taxi driver the wrong address. By the time Patrick realized his mistake, the cabbie had left him outside his old apartment building on East Sixty-second Street, where he’d lived with Marilyn. There was nothing to do but walk half a block to Park Avenue and hail an uptown cab; he was too tired to walk the twenty-plus blocks. But naturally the confused doorman recognized him and came running out on the sidewalk before Patrick could slip away.

“Mr. Wallingford!” Vlad or Vlade or Lewis said, in surprise.

“Paul O’Neill,” Patrick said, alarmed. He held out his one and only hand. “Bats left, throws left—remember?”

“Oh, Mr. Wallingford, Paul O’Neill couldn’t hold a fuckin’ Roman candle to you!

That’s a kinda firecracker,” the doorman explained. “I love the new show! Your interview with the legless child… you know, that kid who fell or was pushed into the polar-bear tank.”

“I know, Vlade,” Patrick said.

“It’s Lewis,” Vlad said. “Anyway, I just loved it! And that miserable fuckin’

woman who was given the results of her sister’s smear test—I don’t believe it!”

“I had trouble believing that one myself,” Wallingford admitted. “It’s called a Pap smear.”

“Your wife’s with someone,” the doorman noted slyly. “I mean tonight she’s with someone.”

“She’s my ex -wife,” Patrick reminded him.

“Most nights she’s alone.”

“It’s her life,” Wallingford said.

“Yeah, I know. You’re just payin’ for it!” the doorman replied.

“I have no complaints about how she lives her life,” Patrick said. “I live uptown now, on East Eighty-third Street.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Wallingford,” the doorman told him. “I won’t tell anybody!”

As for the missing hand, Patrick had learned to enjoy waving his stump at the television camera; he happily demonstrated his repeated failures with a variety of prosthetic devices, too.

“Look here—there are people only a little better coordinated than I am who have mastered this gizmo,” Wallingford liked to begin. “The other day, I watched a guy cut his dog’s toenails with one of these things. It was a frisky dog, too.”

But the results were predictably the same: Patrick would spill his coffee in his lap, or he would get his prosthesis snagged in his microphone wire and pop the little mike off his lapel.

In the end he would be one-handed again, nothing artificial. “For twenty-four-hour international news, this is Patrick Wallingford. Good night, Doris,” he would always sign off, waving his stump. “Good night, my little Otto.”

Patrick would be a long time re-entering the dating scene. After he tried it, the pace disappointed him—it seemed either too fast or too slow. He felt out of step, so he stopped altogether. He occasionally got laid when he traveled, but now that he was an anchor, not a field reporter, he didn’t travel as much as he used to. Besides, you can’t call getting laid “dating”; Wallingford, typically, wouldn’t have called it anything at all.

At least there was nothing comparable to the anticipation he’d felt when Mrs. Clausen would roll on her side, away from him, holding his (or was it Otto’s?) hand at first against her side and then against her stomach, where the unborn child was waiting to kick him. There would be no matching that, or the taste of the back of her neck, or the smell of her hair.

Patrick Wallingford had lost his left hand twice, but he’d gained a soul. It was both loving and losing Mrs. Clausen that had given Patrick his soul. It was both his longing for her and the sheer wishing her well; it was getting back his left hand and losing it again, too. It was wanting his child to be Otto Clausen’s child, almost as much as Doris had wanted this; it was loving, even unrequited, both Otto junior and the little boy’s mother. And such was the size of the ache in Patrick’s soul that it was visible —even on television. Not even the confused doorman could mistake him for Paul O’Neill, not anymore.

He was still the lion guy, but something in him had risen above that image of his mutilation; he was still disaster man, but he anchored the evening news with a newfound authority. He had actually mastered the look he’d first practiced in bars at the cocktail hour, when he was feeling sorry for himself. The look still said, Pity me, only now his sadness seemed approachable.

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