The Fourth Hand

Wallingford acquiesced. "Okay. I'll see if I can get a reservation."

"I'll get you a reservation," Zajac said. "They know me, and Irma has a membership at their health club." Irma, Wallingford deduced, must be the wife--she of the less-than-golden tongue.

"Thank you," was all that Wallingford could say. In the background, he could hear the happy shrieks of Dr. Zajac's son, the growls and romping of the savage-sounding dog, the bouncing of the hard, heavy ball.

"Not on my stomach!" Irma shouted. Patrick heard that, too. Not what on her stomach? Wallingford had no way of knowing that Irma was pregnant, much less that she was expecting twins; while she wasn't due until mid-September, she was already as big around as the largest of the songbirds' cages. Obviously, she didn't want a child or a dog jumping on her stomach.

Patrick said good night to the gang in the newsroom; he'd never been the last of the evening-news people to leave. Nor would he be tonight, for there was Mary waiting for him by the elevators. What she'd overheard of his telephone conversation had misled her. Her face was bathed in tears.

"Who is she?" Mary asked him.

"Who's who?" Wallingford said.

"She must be married, if you're seeing her on a Saturday morning."

"Mary, please--"

"Whose weekend are you afraid of ruining?" she asked. "Isn't that how you put it?"

"Mary, I'm going to Boston to see my hand surgeon."

"Alone?"

"Yes, alone."

"Take me with you," Mary said. "If you're alone, why not take me? How much time can you spend with your hand surgeon, anyway? You can spend the rest of the weekend with me!"

He took a chance, a big one, and told her the truth. "Mary, I can't take you. I don't want you to have my baby because I already have a baby, and I don't get to see enough of him. I don't want another baby that I don't get to see enough of."

"Oh," she said, as if he'd hit her. "I see. That was clarifying. You're not always clear, Pat. I appreciate you being so clear."

"I'm sorry, Mary."

"It's the Clausen kid, isn't it? I mean he's actually yours. Is that it, Pat?"

"Yes," Patrick replied. "But it's not news, Mary. Please, let's not make it news."

He could see she was angry. The air-conditioning was cool, even cold, but Mary was suddenly colder. "Who do you think I am?" she growled. "What do you take me for?"

"One of us," was all Wallingford could say.

As the elevator door closed, he could see her pacing; her arms were folded across her small, shapely breasts. She wore a summery, tan-colored skirt and a peach-colored cardigan, buttoned at her throat but otherwise open down the front--"an anti-air-conditioning sweater," he'd heard one of the newsroom women call such cardigans. Mary wore the sweater over a white silk T-shirt. She had a long neck, a nice figure, smooth skin, and Patrick especially liked her mouth, which had a way of making him question his principle of not sleeping with her.

At La Guardia, he was put on standby for the first available shuttle to Boston; there was a seat for him on the second flight. It was growing dark as his plane landed at Logan, and there was a little fog or light haze over Boston Harbor.

Patrick would think about this later, recalling that his flight landed in Boston about the same time John F. Kennedy, Jr., was trying to land his plane at the airport in Martha's Vineyard, not very far away. Or else young Kennedy was trying to see Martha's Vineyard through that same indeterminate light, in something similar to that haze.

Wallingford checked into the Charle

s before ten and went immediately to the indoor swimming pool, where he spent a restorative half hour by himself. He would have stayed longer, but they closed the pool at ten-thirty. Wallingford--with his one hand--enjoyed floating and treading water. In keeping with his personality, he was a good floater.

He'd planned to get dressed and walk around Harvard Square after his swim. Summer school was in session; there would be students to look at, to remind him of his misspent youth. He could probably find a place to have a decent dinner with a good bottle of wine. In one of the bookstores on the square, he might spot something more gripping to read than the book he'd brought with him, which was a biography of Byron the size of a cinder block. But even in the taxi from the airport, Wallingford had felt the oppressive heat getting to him; and when he went back to his room from the pool, he took off his wet bathing suit and lay down naked on the bed and closed his eyes for a minute or two. He must have been tired. When he woke up almost an hour later, the air-conditioning had chilled him. He put on a bathrobe and read the room-service menu. All he wanted was a beer and a hamburger--he no longer felt like going out.

True to himself, he would not turn on a television on the weekend. Given that the only alternative was the Byron biography, Patrick's resistance to the TV was all the more remarkable. But Wallingford fell asleep so quickly--Byron had barely been born, and the wee poet's feckless father was still alive--that the biography caused him no pain at all.

In the morning, he ate breakfast in the casual restaurant in the downstairs of the hotel. The dining room irritated him without his knowing why. It wasn't the children. Maybe there were too many grown-ups who seemed bothered by the very presence of children.

The previous night and this morning, while Wallingford was not watching television or even so much as glancing at a newspaper, the nation had been reliving one of TV's not-the-news images. JFK, Jr.'s plane was missing; it appeared that he had flown into the ocean. But there was nothing to see--hence what was shown on television, again and again, was that image of young Kennedy at his father's funeral procession. There was John junior, a three-year-old boy in shorts saluting his father's passing casket--exactly as his mother, whispering in the little boy's ear, had instructed him to do only seconds before. What Wallingford would later consider was that this image might stand as the representative moment of our country's most golden century, which has also died, although we are still marketing it.