The Fourth Hand

“I’m okay,” Patrick said. “It’s principally the nerves that were regenerated when the new hand was attached. Those nerves are acting up. My doctor thought my love life was the problem, or just stress.”

“Your love life,” the woman repeated flatly, as if that were not a subject she cared to address. Wallingford didn’t want to address it, either. “But why are you still here?” she suddenly asked.

Patrick thought she meant the hot tub. He was about to say that he was there because she’d held him there! Then he realized that she meant why hadn’t he gone back to New York. Or, if not New York, shouldn’t he be in Hyannisport or Martha’s Vineyard?

Wallingford dreaded telling her that he was stalling his inevitable return to his questionable profession (“questionable” given the Kennedy spectacle, to which he would soon be contributing); yet he admitted this to the woman, however reluctantly, and further told her that he’d intended to walk to Harvard Square to pick up a couple of books that his doctor had recommended. He’d considered that he might spend what remained of the weekend reading them.

“But I was afraid someone in Harvard Square would recognize me and say something to me along the lines of what you said to me at breakfast.” Patrick added: “It wouldn’t have been undeserved.”

“Oh, God!” the woman said again. “Tell me what the books are. I’ll go get them for you. No one ever recognizes me. ”

“That’s very kind of you, but—”

“Please let me get the books for you! It would make me feel better!” She laughed nervously, pushing her damp hair away from her forehead.

Wallingford sheepishly told her the titles.

“Your doctor recommended them? Do you have children?”

“There’s a little boy who’s like a son to me, or I want him to be more like a son to me,” Patrick explained. “But he’s too young for me to read him Stuart Little or Charlotte’s Web. I just want them so that I can imagine reading them to him in a few years.”

“I read Charlotte’s Web to my grandson only a few weeks ago,” the woman told him. “I cried all over again—I cry every time.”

“I don’t remember the book very well, just my mother crying,” Wallingford admitted.

“My name is Sarah Williams.” There was an uncharacteristic hesitation in her voice when she said her name and held out her hand.

Patrick shook her hand, both their hands touching the foamy bubbles in the hot tub. At that moment, the whirlpool jets shut off and the water in the tub was instantly clear and still. It was a little startling and too obvious an omen, which elicited more nervous laughter from Sarah Williams, who stood up and stepped out of the tub.

Wallingford admired that way women have of getting out of the water in a wet bathing suit, a thumb or a finger automatically pulling down the back of the suit. When she stood, her small belly looked almost flat—it was swollen ever so slightly. From his memory of Mrs. Clausen’s pregnancy, Wallingford guessed that Sarah Williams couldn’t have been more than two, at the most three, months pregnant. If she hadn’t told him she was carrying a child, he would never have guessed. And maybe the pouch was always there, even when she wasn’t pregnant.

“I’ll bring the books to your room.” Sarah was wrapping herself up in a towel.

“What’s your room number?”

He told her, grateful for the occasion to prolong his procrastination, but while he was waiting for her to bring him the children’s books, he would still have to decide whether to go back to New York that night or not until Sunday morning. Maybe Mary wouldn’t have found him yet; that would buy Patrick a little more time. He might even discover that he had the willpower to delay turning the TV

on, at least until Sarah Williams came to his room. Maybe she would watch the news with him; they seemed to agree that the coverage would be unbearable. It’s always better not to watch a bad newscast by yourself—let alone a Super Bowl. Yet as soon as he was back in his hotel room, he could summon no further resistance. He took off his wet bathing suit but kept the bathrobe on, and—while noticing that the message light on his telephone was flashing—he found the remote control for the TV in the drawer, where he’d hidden it, and turned the television on.

He flipped through the channels until he found the all-news network, where he watched what he could have predicted (John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Tribeca connection) come to life. There were the plain metal doors of the loft John junior had bought at 20 North Moore. The Kennedys’ residence, which was across the street from an old warehouse, had already been turned into a shrine. JFK, Jr.’s neighbors—and probably utter strangers posing as his neighbors—had left candles and flowers; perversely, they’d also left what looked like get-well cards. While Patrick felt genuinely awful that the young couple and Mrs. Kennedy’s sister had, in all likelihood, died, he detested those people groveling in their fantasy grief in Tribeca; they were what made the worst of television possible. But as much as Wallingford hated the telecast, he also understood it. There were only two positions the media could take toward celebrities: worship them or trash them. And since mourning was the highest form of worship, the deaths of celebrities were understandably to be prized; furthermore, their deaths allowed the media to worship and trash them all at once. There was no beating it. Wallingford turned off the TV and put the remote back in the drawer; he would be on television and a part of the spectacle soon enough. He was relieved when he called to inquire about his message light—only the hotel itself had called, to ask when he was checking out.

He told the hotel he would check out in the morning. Then he stretched out on the bed in the semidark room. (The curtains were still closed from the night before; the maids hadn’t touched the room because Patrick had left theDO NOT

DISTURB sign on the door.) He lay waiting for Sarah Williams, a fellow traveler, and the wonderful books for children and world-weary adults by E. B. White. Wallingford was a news anchor in hiding; he was deliberately making himself unavailable at the moment the story of Kennedy’s missing plane was unfolding. What would management make of a journalist who wasn’t dying to report this story? In fact, Wallingford was shrinking from it —he was a reporter who was putting off doing his job ! (No sensible news network would have hesitated to fire him.)

And what else was Patrick Wallingford putting off? Wasn’t he also hiding from what Evelyn Arbuthnot had disparagingly called his life ? When would he finally get it? Destiny is not imaginable, except in dreams or to those in love. Upon meeting Mrs. Clausen, Patrick could never have envisioned a future with her; upon falling in love with her, he couldn’t imagine the future without her.

It was not sex that Wallingford wanted from Sarah Williams, although he tenderly touched her drooping breasts with his one hand. Sarah didn’t want to have sex with Wallingford, either. She might have wanted to mother him, possibly because her daughters lived far away and had children of their own. More likely, Sarah Williams realized that Patrick Wallingford was in need of mothering, and—in addition to feeling guilty for having publicly abused him—she was feeling guilty for how little time she spent with her grandchildren.

There was also the problem that Sarah was pregnant, and that she believed she could not endure again the fear of one of her own children’s mortality; nor did she want her grown daughters to know she was having sex.

She told Wallingford that she was an associate professor of English at Smith. She definitely sounded like an English teacher when she read aloud to Patrick in a clear, animated voice, first from Stuart Little and then from Charlotte’s Web,

“because that is the order in which they were written.”

Sarah lay on her left side with her head on Patrick’s pillow. The light on the night table was the only one on in the darkened room; although it was midday, they kept all the curtains closed.

Professor Williams read Stuart Little past lunchtime. They weren’t hungry. Wallingford lay naked beside her, his chest in constant contact with her back, his thighs touching her buttocks, his right hand holding one, and then the other, of her breasts. Pressed between them, where they were both aware of it, was the stump of Patrick’s left forearm. He could feel it against his bare stomach; she could feel it against the base of her spine.

The ending of Stuart Little, Wallingford thought, might be more gratifying to adults than to children—children have higher expectations of endings. Still it was “a youthful ending,” Sarah said, “full of the optimism of young adults.”

She sounded like an English teacher, all right. Patrick would have described the ending of Stuart Little as a kind of second beginning. One has the sense that a new adventure is waiting for Stuart as