The Fourth Hand

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-namewas—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 any one! 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—you’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.”