The Fourth Hand

  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-name-was--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 anyone! 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--yo
u'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?

  CHAPTER NINE

  Wallingford Meets a

  Fellow Traveler

  MEANWHILE, AN ATTRACTIVE, photogenic woman with a limp had just turned sixty. As a teenager, and all her adult life, she'd worn long skirts or dresses to conceal her withered leg. She'd been the last person in her hometown to come down with poliomyelitis; the Salk vaccine was available too late for her. For almost as long as she'd had the deformity, she'd been writing a book with this provocative title: How I Almost Missed Getting Polio. She said that the end of the century struck her as "as good a time as any" to make multiple submissions to more than a dozen publishers, but they all turned her book down.

  "Bad luck or not, polio or whatever, the book isn't very well written," the woman with the limp and the withered leg admitted to Patrick Wallingford, on-camera. She looked terrific when she was sitting down. "It's just that everything in my life happened because I didn't get that damn vaccine. I got polio instead."

  Of course she quickly acquired a publisher after her interview with Wallingford, and almost overnight she had a new title: I Got Polio Instead. Someone rewrote the book for her, and someone else would make a movie of it--starring a woman who looked nothing at all like the woman with the limp and the withered leg, except that the actress was attractive and photogenic, too. That was what being on-camera with Wallingford could do for you.

  Nor would Patrick miss the irony that when he'd lost his left hand the first time, the world had been watching. In those best-of-the-century moments that were positively made for television, the lion-eating-the-hand episode was always included. Yet when he'd lost his hand the second time--more to the point, when he'd lost Mrs. Clausen--the camera wasn't on him. What mattered most to Wallingford had gone unrecorded.

  The new century, at least for a while, would remember Patrick as the lion guy. But it was neither news nor history that, if Wallingford were keeping score of his life, he wouldn't have started counting until he met Doris Clausen. So much for how the world keeps score.

  In the category of transplant surgery, Patrick Wallingford would not be remembered. At the close of the century, one counts the successes, not the failures. Thus, in the field of hand-transplant surgery, Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac would remain unfamous, his moment of possible greatness surpasse
d by what truly became the first successful hand-transplant procedure in the United States, and only the second ever. "The fireworks guy," as Zajac crudely called Matthew David Scott, appeared to have what Dr. Zajac termed a keeper.

  On April 12, 1999, less than three months after receiving a new left hand, Mr. Scott threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the Phillies' opening game in Philadelphia. Wallingford wasn't exactly jealous. (Envious ... well, maybe. But not in the way you might think.) In fact, Patrick asked Dick, his news editor, if he could interview the evident "keeper." Wouldn't it be fitting, Wallingford suggested, to congratulate Mr. Scott for having what he (Wallingford) had lost? But Dick, of all people, thought the idea was "tacky." As a result, Dick was fired, though many would argue he was a news editor waiting to be fired.

  Any euphoria among the New York newsroom women was shortlived. The new news editor was as much of a dick as Dick had ever been; anticlimactically, his name was Fred. As Mary whatever-her-name-was would say--Mary had developed a sharper tongue in the intervening years--"If I'm going to be dicked around, I think I'd rather be Dicked than Fredded."

  In the new century, that same international team of surgeons who performed the world's first successful hand transplant in Lyon, France, would try again, this time attempting the world's first double hand-and-forearm transplant. The recipient, whose name was not made public, would be a thirty-three-year-old Frenchman who'd lost both his hands in a fireworks accident (another one) in 1996, the donor a nineteen-year-old who had fallen off a bridge.

  But Wallingford would be interested only in the fates of the first two recipients. The first, ex-convict Clint Hallam, would have his new hand amputated by one of the surgeons who performed the transplant operation. Two months prior to the amputation, Hallam had stopped taking the medication prescribed as part of his anti-rejection treatment. He was observed wearing a leather glove to hide the hand, which he described as "hideous." (Hallam would later deny failing to take his medication.) And he would continue his strained relationship with the law. Mr. Hallam had been seized by the French police for allegedly stealing money and an American Express card from a liver-transplant patient who'd befriended him in the hospital in Lyon. While he was eventually allowed to leave France--after he repaid some of the money--the police would issue warrants for Hallam's arrest in Australia concerning his possible role in a fuel scam. (It seems that Zajac was right about him.)