The Fourth Hand

“Oh.” He felt sick with the certainty that he had lost her.

“I should get some sleep,” she said again.

“There was something I wanted to read to you,” he told her, “but we can do it another time.”

“What is it?” she asked him.

“Well, actually, it’s something I want to read to little Otto—when he’s older. I wanted to read it to you now because I was thinking of reading it to him later.”

Wallingford paused. Out of context, this made no more sense than anything else he’d told her. He felt ridiculous.

“What is it?” she asked again.

“Stuart Little,” he answered, wishing he’d never brought it up.

“Oh, the children’s book. It’s about a mouse, isn’t it?” He nodded, ashamed. “He has a special car,” she added. “He goes off looking for a bird. It’s a kind of On the Road about a mouse, isn’t it?”

Wallingford wouldn’t have put it that way, but he nodded. That Mrs. Clausen had read On the Road, or at least knew of it, surprised him.

“I need to sleep,” Doris repeated. “And if I can’t sleep, I brought my own book to read.”

Patrick managed to restrain himself from saying anything, but barely. So much seemed lost now—all the more so because he hadn’t known that it might have been possible not to lose her.

At least he had the good sense not to jump into the story of reading Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web aloud (and naked) with Sarah Williams, or whatever her name was. Out of context—possibly, in any context—that story would have served only to underline Wallingford’s weirdness. The time he might have told her that story, to his advantage, was long gone; now wouldn’t have been good. Now he was just stalling because he didn’t want to lose her. They both knew it.

“What book did you bring to read?” he asked.

Mrs. Clausen took this opportunity to get up from where she sat beside him on the bed. She went to her open canvas bag, which resembled several other small bags containing the baby’s things. It was the only bag she’d brought for herself, and she’d not yet bothered (or had not yet had the time) to unpack it. She found the book beneath her underwear. Doris handed it to him as if she were too tired to talk about it. (She probably was.) It was The English Patient, a novel by Michael Ondaatje. Wallingford hadn’t read it but he’d seen the movie.

“It was the last movie I saw with Otto before he died,” Mrs. Clausen explained.

“We both liked it. I liked it so much that I wanted to read the book. But I put off reading it until now. I didn’t want to be reminded of the last movie I saw with Otto.”

Patrick Wallingford looked down at The English Patient. She was reading a grownup literary novel and he’d planned to read her Stuart Little. How many more ways would he find to underestimate her?

That she worked in ticket sales for the Green Bay Packers didn’t exclude her from reading literary novels, although (to his shame) Patrick had made that assumption. He remembered liking the movie of The English Patient. His ex-wife had said that the movie was better than the book. That he doubted Marilyn’s judgment on just about everything was borne out when she made a comment about the novel that Wallingford remembered reading in a review. What she’d said about The English Patient was that the movie was better because the novel was “too well written.”

That a book could be too well written was a concept only a critic—and Marilyn—could have.

“I haven’t read it,” was all Wallingford said to Mrs. Clausen, who put the book back in her open bag on top of her underwear.

“It’s good,” Doris told him. “I’m reading it very slowly because I like it so much. I think I like it better than the movie, but I’m trying not to remember the movie.”

(Of course this meant that there wasn’t a scene in the film she would ever forget.) What else was there to say? Wallingford had to pee. Miraculously, he refrained from telling Mrs. Clausen this—he’d said quite enough for one night. She shined the flashlight into the hall for him, so that he didn’t have to grope in the dark to find his room.

He was too tired to light the gas lamp. He took the flashlight he found on the dresser top and made his way down the steep stairs. The moon had set; it was much darker now. The first light of dawn couldn’t be far off. Patrick chose a tree to pee behind, although there was no one who could have seen him. By the time he finished peeing, the mosquitoes had already found him. He quickly followed the beam of his flashlight back to the boathouse.

Mrs. Clausen and little Otto’s room was dark when Wallingford quietly passed their open door. He remembered her saying that she never slept with the gaslight on. The propane lamps were probably safe enough, but a lighted lamp was still a fire—it made her too anxious to sleep.

Wallingford left the door to his room open, too. He wanted to hear when Otto junior woke up. Maybe he would offer to watch the child so that Doris could go back to sleep. How difficult could it be to entertain a baby? Wasn’t a television audience tougher? That was as far as he thought it out.

He finally took off the towel from around his waist. He put on a pair of boxer shorts and crawled into bed, but before he turned the flashlight off, he made sure he’d memorized where it was in case he needed to find it in the dark. (He left it on the floor, by Mrs. Clausen’s side of the bed.) Now that the moon had set, there was an almost total blackness that resembled his prospects with Mrs. Clausen. Patrick forgot to close his curtains, although Doris had warned him that the sun rose directly in his windows. Later, when he was still asleep, Wallingford was supernaturally aware of a predawn light in the sky. This was when the crows started cawing; even in his sleep, he was more aware of the crows than he was of the loons. Without seeing it, he sensed the increasing light. Then little Otto’s crying woke him, and he lay listening to Mrs. Clausen soothe the child. The boy stopped crying fairly quickly, but he still fussed while his mother changed him. From Doris’s tone of voice, and the varying baby noises that Otto made, Wallingford could guess what they were doing. He heard them go down the boathouse stairs; Mrs. Clausen kept talking as they went up the path to the main cabin. Patrick remembered that the baby formula had to be mixed with bottled water, which Mrs. Clausen heated on the stove.

He looked first in the area of his missing left hand and then at his right wrist. (He would never get used to wearing his watch on his right arm.) Just as the rising sun shot through his bedroom windows from across the lake, Patrick saw that it was only a little past five in the morning.

As a reporter, he’d traveled all over the world—he was familiar with sleep deprivation. But he was beginning to realize that Mrs. Clausen had had eight months of sleep deprivation; it had been criminal of Wallingford to keep her up most of the night. That Doris carried only one small bag for all her things, yet she’d brought half a dozen bags of paraphernalia for the baby, was more than symbolic—little Otto was her life.

What measure of madness was it that Wallingford had even imagined he could entertain little Otto while Mrs. Clausen caught up on her sleep? He didn’t know how to feed the child; he’d only once (yesterday) seen Doris change a diaper. And he couldn’t be trusted to burp the baby. (He didn’t know that Mrs. Clausen had stopped burping Otto.)

I should summon the courage to jump in the lake and drown, Patrick was thinking, when Mrs. Clausen came into his room carrying Otto junior. The baby was wearing only a diaper. All Doris was wearing was an oversize T- shirt, which had probably belonged to Otto senior. The T-shirt was a faded Green Bay green with the familiar Packers’ logo; it hung past midthigh, almost to her knees.

“We’re wide awake now, aren’t we?” Mrs. Clausen was saying to little Otto.

“Let’s make sure Daddy is wide awake, too.”

Wallingford made room for them in the bed. He tried to remain calm. (This was the first time Doris had referred to him as “Daddy.”)

Before dawn, it had been cool enough to sleep under a blanket, but now the room was flooded with sunlight. Mrs. Clausen and the baby slipped under the top sheet while Wallingford pushed the blanket off the foot of the bed to the floor.

“You should learn how to feed him,” Doris said, handing the bottle of formula to Patrick. Otto junior was laid upon a pillow; his bright eyes followed the bottle as it passed between his parents.

Later Mrs. Clausen sat Otto upright between two pillows. Wallingford watched his son pick up a rattle and shake it and put it in his mouth—not exactly a fascinating chain of events, but the new father was spellbound.