The Fourth Hand

A prosthesis of his invention--it was predictably called "The Zajac"--was now manufactured in Germany and Japan. (The German model was marginally more expen

sive, but both were marketed worldwide.) The success of "The Zajac" had permitted Dr. Zajac to reduce his surgical practice to half-time. He still taught at the medical school, but he could devote more of himself to his inventions, and to Rudy and Irma and (soon) the twins.

"You should have children," Zajac was telling Patrick Wallingford, as the doctor turned out the lights in his office and the two men awkwardly bumped into each other in the dark. "Children change your life."

Wallingford hesitantly mentioned how much he wanted to construct a relationship with Otto junior. Did Dr. Zajac have any advice about the best way to connect with a young child, especially a child one saw infrequently?

"Reading aloud," Dr. Zajac replied. "There's nothing like it. Begin with Stuart Little, then try Charlotte's Web."

"I remember those books!" Patrick cried. "I loved Stuart Little, and I can remember my mother weeping when she read me Charlotte's Web."

"People who read Charlotte's Web without weeping should be lobotomized," Zajac responded. "But how old is little Otto?"

"Eight months," Wallingford answered.

"Oh, no, he's just started to crawl," Dr. Zajac said. "Wait until he's six or seven--I mean years. By the time he's eight or nine, he'll be reading Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web to himself, but he'll be old enough to listen to those stories when he's younger."

"Six or seven," Patrick repeated. How could he wait that long to establish a relationship with Otto junior?

After Zajac locked his office, he and Patrick rode the elevator down to the ground floor. The doctor offered to drive his patient back to the Charles Hotel since it was on his way home, and Wallingford gladly accepted. It was on the car radio that the famous TV journalist finally learned of Kennedy's missing plane.

By now it was mostly old news to everyone but Wallingford. JFK, Jr., was, together with his wife and sister-in-law, lost at sea, presumed dead. Young Kennedy, a relatively new pilot, had been flying the plane. There was mention of the haze over Martha's Vineyard the previous night. Luggage tags had been found; later would come the luggage, then the debris from the plane itself.

"I guess it would be better if the bodies were found," Zajac remarked. "I mean better than the speculation if they're never found."

It was the speculation that Wallingford foresaw, regardless of finding or not finding the bodies. There would be at least a week of it. The coming week was the week Patrick had almost chosen for his vacation; now he wished he had chosen it. (He'd decided to ask for a week in the fall instead, preferably when the Green Bay Packers had a home game at Lambeau Field.)

Wallingford went back to the Charles like a man condemned. He knew what the news, which was not the news, would be all the next week; it was everything that was most hateful in Patrick's profession, and he would be part of it.

The grief channel, the woman at breakfast had said, but the deliberate stimulation of public mourning was hardly unique to the network where Wallingford worked. The overattention to death had become as commonplace on television as the coverage of bad weather; death and bad weather were what TV did best.

Whether they found the bodies or not, or regardless of how long it might take to find them--with or without what countless journalists would call "closure"--there would be no closure. Not until every Kennedy moment in recent history had been relived. Nor was the invasion of the Kennedy family's privacy the ugliest aspect of it. From Patrick's point of view, the principal evil was that it wasn't news--it was recycled melodrama.

Patrick's hotel room at the Charles was as silent and cool as a crypt; he lay on the bed trying to anticipate the worst before turning on the TV. Wallingford was thinking about JFK, Jr.'s older sister, Caroline. Patrick had always admired her for remaining aloof from the press. The summer house Wallingford was renting in Bridgehampton was near Sagaponack, where Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg was spending the summer with her husband and children. She had a plain but elegant kind of beauty; although she would be under intense media scrutiny now, Patrick believed that she would manage to keep her dignity intact.

In his room at the Charles, Wallingford felt too sick to his stomach to turn the TV on. If he went back to New York, not only would he have to answer the messages on his answering machine, but his phone would never stop ringing. If he stayed in his room at the Charles, he would eventually have to watch television, even though he already knew what he would see--his fellow journalists, our self-appointed moral arbiters, looking their most earnest and sounding their most sincere.

They would already have descended on Hyannisport. There would be a hedge, that ever-predictable barrier of privet, in the background of the frame. Behind the hedge, only the upstairs windows of the brilliantly white house would be visible. (They would be dormer windows, with their curtains drawn.) Yet, somehow, the journalist standing in the foreground of the shot would manage to look as if he or she had been invited.

Naturally there would be an analysis of the small plane's disappearance from the radar screen, and some sober commentary on the pilot's presumed error. Many of Patrick's fellow journalists would not pass up the opportunity to condemn JFK, Jr.'s judgment; indeed, the judgment of all Kennedys would be questioned. The issue of "genetic restlessness" among the male members of the family would surely be raised. And much later--say, near the end of the following week--some of these same journalists would declare that the coverage had been excessive. They would then call for a halt to the process. That was always the way.

Wallingford wondered how long it would take for someone in the New York newsroom to ask Mary where he was. Or was Mary herself trying to reach him? She knew he was seeing his hand surgeon; at the time of the procedure, Zajac's name had been in the news. As he lay immobilized on the bed in the cool room, Patrick found it strange that someone from the all-news network hadn't already called him at the Charles. Maybe Mary was also out of reach.

On an impulse, Wallingford picked up the phone and dialed the number at his summer house in Bridgehampton. A hysterical-sounding woman answered the phone. It was Crystal Pitney--that was her married name. Patrick couldn't remember what Crystal's last name had been when he'd slept with her. He recalled that there was something unusual about her lovemaking, but he couldn't think what it was.

"Patrick Wallingford is not here!" Crystal shouted in lieu of the usual hello. "No one here knows where he is!"

In the background, Patrick heard the television; the familiar, self-serious droning was punctuated by occasional outbursts from the newsroom women.

"Hello?" Crystal Pitney said into the phone. Wallingford hadn't said a word. "What are you, a creep?" Crystal asked. "It's a breather--I can hear him breathing!" Mrs. Pitney announced to the other women.

That was it, Wallingford remembered. When he'd made love to her, Crystal had forewarned him that she had a rare respiratory condition. When she got out of breath and not enough oxygen went to her brain, she started seeing things and generally went a little crazy--an understatement, if there ever was one. Crystal had got out of breath in a hurry; before Wallingford knew what was happening, she'd bitten his nose and burned his back with the bedside lamp.

Patrick had never met Mr. Pitney, Crystal's husband, but he admired the man's fortitude. (By the standards of the New York newsroom women, the Pitneys had had a long marriage.)

"You pervert!" Crystal yelled. "If I could see you, I'd bite your face off!"

Patrick didn't doubt this; he hung up before Crystal got out of breath. He immediately put on his bathing suit and a bathrobe and went to the swimming pool, where no one could phone him.