The Fourth Hand

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 med-school 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.