The Fourth Hand

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 women—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.