The Fourth Hand

The twinge (even his memory of the twinge) was gone, and in its aftermath floated the best night's sleep Wallingford would ever have, but for the disquieting thought, when he woke up, that the dream had seemed not quite his. It was also not as close to his cobalt-blue-capsule experience as he would have liked.

To begin with, there'd been no sex in the dream, nor had Wallingford felt the heat of the sun in the planks of the dock, or the dock itself through what seemed to be a towel; instead there'd been only a far-off sense that there was a dock somewhere else.

That night he didn't hear the camera shutter in his sleep. You could have taken Patrick Wallingford's photograph a thousand times that night. He would never have known.

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.