The Fourth Hand Read online

  Every weekend they were together, Zajac read all of either Stuart Little or Charlotte's Web to Rudy. The little boy never tired of them. He cried every time Charlotte died; he laughed every time Stuart crashed the dentist's invisible car. And, like Stuart, when Rudy was thirsty, he told his father that he had "a ruinous thirst." (The first time, naturally, Rudy had to ask his father what "ruinous" meant.)

  Meanwhile, although Dr. Zajac had made much headway in contradicting Hildred's message to Rudy--the boy was increasingly convinced that his father did love him--the hand surgeon's small-minded colleagues were nonetheless convincing themselves that they were superior to Zajac because of the alleged unhappiness and undernourishment of Zajac's six-year-old son.

  At first Dr. Zajac's colleagues felt superior to him because of Irma, too. They regarded her as a clear loser's choice among housekeepers; but when Irma began to transform herself, they soon noticed her, long before Zajac himself showed any signs of sharing their interest.

  His failure to be aware of Irma's transformation was further proof of Dr. Zajac's being a madman of the unseeing variety. The girl had dropped twenty pounds; she'd joined a gym. She ran three miles a day--she was no mere jogger, either. If her new wardrobe was lacking in taste, it quite consciously showed off her body. Irma would never be beautiful, but she was built. Hildred would start the rumor that her ex-husband was dating a stripper. (Divorced women in their forties are not known for their charitableness toward well-built women in their twenties.)

  Irma, don't forget, was in love. What did she care? One night she tiptoed, naked, through the dark upstairs hall. She'd rationalized that if Zajac had not gone to bed, and if he happened to see her without her clothes on, she would tell him she was a sleepwalker and that some force had drawn her to his room. Irma longed for Dr. Zajac to see her naked--by accident, of course--because she had developed more than a terrific body; she'd also developed a stalwart confidence in it.

  But tiptoeing past the doctor's closed bedroom door, Irma was halted by the baffling conviction that she'd overheard Dr. Zajac praying. Prayer struck Irma, who was not religious, as a suspiciously unscientific activity for a hand surgeon. She listened at the doctor's door a little longer and was relieved to hear that Zajac wasn't praying--he was just reading Stuart Little aloud to himself in a prayerful voice.

  "'At suppertime he took his ax, felled a dandelion, opened a can of deviled ham, and had a light supper of ham and dandelion milk,'" Dr. Zajac read from Stuart Little.

  Irma was shaken by her love for him, but the mere mention of deviled ham made her feel ill. She tiptoed back to her bedroom off the kitchen, pausing to munch some raw carrots out of the bowl of melting ice in the fridge.

  When would the lonely man ever notice her?

  Irma ate a lot of nuts and dried fruit; she ate fresh fruit, too, and mounds of raw vegetables. She could concoct a mean steamed fish with gingerroot and black beans, which made such an impression on Dr. Zajac that the doctor startled Irma (and everyone who knew him) by hosting an impromptu dinner party for his medical-school students.

  Zajac imagined that one of his Harvard boys might ask Irma out; she seemed lonely to him, as did most of the boys. Little did the doctor know that Irma had eyes only for him. Once Irma had been introduced to his young male med students as his "assistant"--and because she was so obviously a piece of ass--they assumed he was already banging her and abandoned all hope. (Zajac's female med students probably thought that Irma was every bit as desperate-looking as Zajac.)

  No matter. Everyone loved the steamed fish with gingerroot and black beans, and Irma had other recipes. She treated Medea's dog food with meat tenderizer, because she'd read in a magazine at her dentist's office that meat tenderizer made a dog's poo unappetizing, even to a dog. But Medea seemed to find the tenderizer enhancing.

  Dr. Zajac sprinkled the birdseed in the outdoor birdfeeder with red pepper flakes; he'd told Irma that this made the birdseed inedible to squirrels. Afterward, Irma tried sprinkling Medea's dog turds with red pepper flakes, too. While this was visually interesting, especially against the new-fallen snow, the dog found the pepper off-putting only initially.

  And drawing even greater attention to the dogshit in his yard did not please Zajac. He had a far simpler, albeit more athletic method of preventing Medea from eating her own shit. He got to her turds first, with his lacrosse stick. He usually deposited the turds in the ubiquitous brown paper bag, although on occasion Irma had seen him take a shot at a squirrel in a tree clear across Brattle Street. Dr. Zajac missed the squirrel every time, but the gesture went straight to Irma's heart.

  While it was too soon to say if the girl Hildred had named "Nick's stripper" would ever find her way into Zajac's heart, there was another area of concern at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates: it was only a matter of time before Dr. Zajac, although he was still in his forties, would have to be included in the title of Boston's foremost surgical associates in hand treatment. Soon it would have to be Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink, Zajac & Associates.

  Don't think this didn't gall the eponymous Schatzman, even though he was retired. Don't think it didn't rile the surviving Gingeleskie brother, too. In the old days, when the other Gingeleskie was alive, they were Schatzman, Gingeleskie & Gingeleskie--this being before Mengerink's time. (Dr. Zajac said privately that he doubted Dr. Mengerink could cure a hangnail.) As for Mengerink, he'd had an affair with Hildred when she was still married to Zajac; yet he despised Zajac for getting a divorce, even though the divorce had been Hildred's idea.

  Unbeknownst to Dr. Zajac, his ex-wife was on a mission to drive Dr. Mengerink crazy, too. It seemed the cruelest of fates, to Mengerink, that Zajac's name was soon destined to follow his on the venerable surgical associates' letterhead and nameplate. But if Dr. Zajac pulled off the country's first hand transplant, they would all be lucky if they weren't renamed Zajac, Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates. (Worse things could happen. No doubt Harvard would soon make Zajac an associate professor.)

  And now Dr. Zajac's housekeeper/assistant had transformed herself into an instant erection machine, although Zajac himself was too screwed up to realize it. Even old Schatzman, retired, had observed the changes in Irma. And Mengerink, who'd had to change his home phone number twice to discourage Zajac's ex-wife from calling him--Mengerink had noticed Irma, too. As for Gingeleskie, he said: "Even the other Gingeleskie could pick Irma out of a crowd," referring, of course, to his dead brother.

  From the grave, a corpse couldn't miss seeing what had happened to the housekeeper/assistant-turned-sexpot. She looked like a stripper with a day job as a personal trainer. How had Zajac missed the transformation? No wonder such a man had managed to pass through prep school and college unremembered.

  Yet when Dr. Zajac went shopping on the Internet for potential hand donors and recipients, no one at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates called him crass or said that they thought www.needahand.com was a tad crude. Despite his shit-eating dog, his obsession with fame, his wasting-away thinness, and his problem-ridden son--and, on top of everything, his inconceivable obliviousness to his cheeks-of-steel "assistant"--in the pioneer territory of hand-transplant surgery, Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac remained the man in charge.

  That Boston's most brilliant hand surgeon was reputed to be a sexless jerk was a matter of no account to his only son. What does a six-year-old boy care about his father's professional or sexual acumen, especially when he is beginning to see for himself that his father loves him?

  As for what launched the newfound affection between Rudy and his complicated father, credit must be spread around. Some acknowledgment is due a dumb dog who ate her own poo, as well as that long-ago single-sex glee club at Deerfield, where Zajac first got the mistaken idea he could sing. (After the spontaneous opening verse of "I Am Medea," both father and son would compose many more verses, all of them too childishly scatological to record here.) And there were also, of course, the stove-timer game and E. B. Whit
e.

  In addition, we should put in a word for the value of mischief in father-son relations. The former midfielder had first developed an instinct for mischief by cradling and then whizzing dog turds into the Charles River with a lacrosse stick. If Zajac had initially failed to interest Rudy in lacrosse, the good doctor would eventually turn his son's attention to the finer points of the sport while walking Medea along the banks of the historic Charles.

  Picture this: there is the turd-hunting dog, dragging Dr. Zajac after her while she strains against her leash. (In Cambridge, of course, there is a leash law; all dogs must be leashed.) And there, running abreast of the eager part-Lab--yes, actually running, actually getting some exercise!--is six-year-old Rudy Zajac, his child-size lacrosse stick held low to the ground in front of him.

  Picking up a dog turd in a lacrosse stick, especially on the run, is a lot harder than picking up a lacrosse ball. (Dog turds come in varying sizes and are, on occasion, entangled with grass, or they have been stepped on.) Nevertheless, Rudy had been well coached. And Medea's determination, her powerful lunges against the leash, gave the boy precisely what was needed in the process of mastering any sport--especially "dog-turd lacrosse," as both father and son called it. Medea provided Rudy with competition.

  Any amateur can cradle a dog turd in a lacrosse stick, but try doing it under the pressure of a shit-eating dog; in any sport, pressure is as fundamental a teacher as a good coach. Besides, Medea outweighed Rudy by a good ten pounds and could easily knock the boy down.

  "Keep your back to her--attaboy!" Zajac would yell. "Cradle, cradle--keep cradling! Always know where the river is!"

  The river was their goal--the historic Charles. Rudy had two good shots, which his father had taught him. There was the standard over-the-shoulder shot (either a long lob or a fairly flat trajectory) and there was the sidearm shot, which was low to the water and best for skipping the dog turds, which Rudy preferred. The risk with the sidearm shot was that the lacrosse stick passed low to the ground; Medea could block a sidearm shot and eat it in a hurry.

  "Midriver, midriver!" the former midfielder would be coaching. Or else he would shout: "Aim for under the bridge!"

  "But there's a boat, Dad."

  "Aim for the boat, then," Zajac would say, more quietly, aware that his relations with the oarsmen were already strained.

  The resulting shouts and cries of the outraged oarsmen gave a certain edge to the rigors of competition. Dr. Zajac was especially engaged by the high-pitched yelps the coxswains made into their megaphones, although nowadays one had to be careful--some of the coxswains were girls.

  Zajac disapproved of girls in sculls or in the larger racing shells, no matter whether the girls were rowers or coxswains. (This was surely another hallmark prejudice of his single-sex education.)

  As for Dr. Zajac's modest contribution to the ongoing pollution of the Charles River ... well, let's be fair. Zajac had never been an advocate of environmental correctness. In his hopelessly old-fashioned opinion, a lot worse than dogshit was dumped into the Charles on a daily basis. Furthermore, the dogshit that little Rudy Zajac and his father were responsible for throwing into the Charles River was for a good cause, that of solidifying the love between a divorced father and his son.

  Irma deserves some credit, too, despite being a prosaic girl who would one day watch the lions-eating-the-hand episode on video with Dr. Zajac and say, "I never knew lions could eat somethin' so quick."

  Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac, who knew next to everything there was to know about hands, couldn't watch the footage without exclaiming: "Oh, God, my God--there it goes! Sweet Jesus, it's gone! It's all gone!"

  Of course it didn't hurt the chances of Patrick Wallingford, Dr. Zajac's first choice among the would-be hand recipients, that Wallingford was famous; a television audience estimated in the millions had witnessed the frightening accident. Thousands of children and uncounted adults were still suffering nightmares, although Wallingford had lost his hand more than five years ago and the televised footage of the accident itself was less than thirty seconds long.

  "Thirty seconds is a long time to be engaged in losing your hand, if it's your hand," Patrick had said.

  People meeting Wallingford, especially for the first time, would never fail to comment on his boyish charm. Women would remark on his eyes. Whereas Wallingford had formerly been envied by men, the way in which he was maimed had put an end to that; not even men, the gender more prone to envy, could be jealous of him anymore. Now men and women found him irresistible.

  Dr. Zajac hadn't needed the Internet to find Patrick Wallingford, who had been the first choice of the Boston surgical team from the start. More interesting was that www.needahand.com had turned up a surprising candidate in the field of potential donors. (What Zajac meant by a donor was a fresh cadaver.) This donor was not only alive--he wasn't even dying!

  His wife wrote Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates from Wisconsin. "My husband has got the idea that he wants to leave his left hand to Patrick Wallingford--you know, the lion guy," Mrs. Otto Clausen wrote.

  Her letter caught Dr. Zajac in the middle of a bad day with the dog. Medea had ingested a sizable section of lawn hose and had required stomach surgery. The miserable dog should have spent the weekend recovering at the vet's, but it was one of those weekends when young Rudy visited his father; the six-year-old divorce survivor might have reverted to his former inconsolable self without Medea's company. Even a drugged dog was better than no dog. There would be no dog-turd lacrosse for the weekend, but it would be a challenge to prevent Medea from eating her stitches, and there was always the reliable stove-timer game and the more reliable genius of E. B. White. It would certainly be a good time to devote some constructive reinforcement to Rudy's ever-experimental diet.

  In short, the hand surgeon was a trifle distracted. If there was something disingenuous about the charm of Mrs. Otto Clausen's letter, Zajac didn't catch it. His eagerness for the media possibilities overrode all else, and the Wisconsin couple's unabashed choice of Patrick Wallingford as a worthy recipient of Otto Clausen's hand would make a good story.

  Zajac didn't find it at all odd that Mrs. Clausen, instead of Otto himself, had written to offer her husband's hand. All Otto had done was sign a brief statement; his wife had composed the accompanying letter.

  Mrs. Clausen hailed from Appleton, and she proudly mentioned that Otto was already registered with the Wisconsin Organ Donor Affiliates. "But this hand business is a little different--I mean different from organs," she observed.

  Hands were indeed different from organs, Dr. Zajac knew. But Otto Clausen was only thirty-nine and in no apparent proximity to death's door. Zajac believed that a fresh cadaver with a suitable donor hand would show up long before Otto's.

  As for Patrick Wallingford, his desire and need for a new left hand might possibly have put him at the top of Dr. Zajac's list of wannabe recipients even if he hadn't been famous. Zajac was not a thoroughly unsympathetic man. But he was also among the millions who'd taped the three-minute lion story. To Dr. Zajac, the footage was a combination of a hand surgeon's favorite horror film and the precursor of his future fame.

  It suffices to say that Patrick Wallingford and Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac were on a collision course, which didn't bode well from the start.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Before Meeting Mrs. Clausen

  TRY BEING AN ANCHOR who hides the evidence of his missing hand under the news desk--see what that gets you. The earliest letters of protest were from amputees. What was Patrick Wallingford ashamed of?

  Even two-handed people complained. "Be a man, Patrick," one woman wrote. "Show us."

  When he had problems with his first prosthesis, wearers of artificial limbs criticized him for using it incorrectly. He was equally clumsy with an array of other prosthetic devices, but his wife was divorcing him--he had no time to practice.

  Marilyn simply couldn't get over how he'd "behaved." In this case, she didn't mean the other w
omen--she was referring to how Patrick had behaved with the lion. "You looked so ... unmanly," Marilyn told him, adding that her husband's physical attractiveness had always been "of an inoffensive kind, tantamount to blandness." What she really meant was that nothing about his body had revolted her, until now. (In sickness and in health, but not in missing pieces, Wallingford concluded.)

  Patrick and Marilyn had lived in Manhattan in an apartment on East Sixty-second Street between Park and Lexington avenues; naturally it was Marilyn's apartment now. Only the night doorman of Wallingford's former building had not rejected him, and the night doorman was so confused that his own name was unclear to him. Sometimes it was Vlad or Vlade; at other times, it was Lewis. Even when he was Lewis, his accent remained an indecipherable mixture of Long Island with something Slavic.

  "Where are you from, Vlade?" Wallingford had asked him.

  "It's Lewis. Nassau County," Vlad had replied.

  Another time, Wallingford said, "So, Lewis ... where were you from?"

  "Nassau County. It's Vlad, Mr. O'Neill."

  Only the doorman mistook Patrick Wallingford for Paul O'Neill, who became a right fielder for the New York Yankees in 1993. (They were both tall, dark, and handsome in that jutting-chin fashion, but that was as far as the resemblance went.)

  The confused doorman had unusually unshakable beliefs; he first mistook Patrick for Paul O'Neill when O'Neill was a relatively unknown and unrecognized player for the Cincinnati Reds.

  "I guess I look a little like Paul O'Neill," Wallingford admitted to Vlad or Vlade or Lewis, "but I'm Patrick Wallingford. I'm a television journalist."

  Since Vlad or Vlade or Lewis was the night doorman, it was always dark and often late when he encountered Patrick. "Don't worry, Mr. O'Neill," the doorman whispered conspiratorially. "I won't tell anybody."

  Thus the night doorman assumed that Paul O'Neill, who played professional baseball in Ohio, was having an affair with Patrick Wallingford's wife in New York. At least this was as close as Wallingford could come to understanding what the poor man thought.