The Fourth Hand

eternally engaged in a fitness competition with all the students who also run and walk in the vicinity of Memorial Drive. In snow, in sleet, in slush, in summer heat—even in thunderstorms—the wispy hand surgeon ran and ran. At five-eleven, Dr. Zajac weighed only 135 pounds. Irma, who was five-six and weighed about 150, was convinced that she hated him. It was the litany of how Zajac had offended her that Irma sang, sobbing into the phone at night, but the hand surgeon, overhearing her, thought: Czech? Polish? Lithuanian?

When Dr. Zajac asked her where she was from, Irma indignantly answered,

“Boston!” Good for her! Zajac concluded. There is no patriotism like that of the grateful European immigrant. Thus Dr. Zajac would congratulate her on how good her English was, “considering,” and Irma would weep her heart out on the phone at night.

Irma refrained from comment on the food the doctor bought every third Friday, nor did Dr. Zajac explain his instructions, every third Monday, to throw it all away. The food would simply be collected on the kitchen table—an entire chicken, a whole ham, fruits and vegetables, and melting ice cream—with a typewritten note: dispose of. That was all.

It must be connected to his abhorrence of dogshit, Irma imagined. With mythic simplicity, she assumed that the doctor had a dispose-of obsession. She didn’t know the half of it. Even on his morning and evening runs, Zajac carried a lacrosse stick, a grown-up one, which he held as if he were cradling an imaginary ball.

There were many lacrosse sticks in the Zajac household. In addition to Rudy’s, which was relatively toylike in appearance, there were numerous adult-size ones, in varying degrees of overuse and disrepair. There was even a battered wooden stick that dated from the doctor’s Deerfield days. Weaponlike in its appearance, because of its broken and retied rawhide strings, it was wrapped in dirty adhesive tape and caked with mud. But in Dr. Zajac’s skilled hands, the old stick came alive with the nervous energy of his agitated youth, when the neurasthenic hand surgeon had been an underweight but intensely accomplished midfielder. When the doctor ran along the banks of the Charles, the outmoded wooden lacrosse stick conveyed the readiness of a soldier’s rifle. More than one rower in Cambridge had experienced a dog turd or two whizzing across the stern of his scull, and one of Zajac’s medical- school students—formerly the coxswain of a Harvard eight-oared racing shell—claimed to have adroitly ducked a dog turd aimed at his head.

Dr. Zajac denied trying to hit the coxswain. His only intention was to rid Memorial Drive of a notable excess of dogshit, which he scooped up in his lacrosse stick and flicked into the Charles River. But the former coxswain and medschool student had kept an eye out for the crazed midfielder after their memorable first encounter, and there were other oarsmen and coxswains who swore they’d seen Zajac expertly cradle a turd in his old lacrosse stick and fire it at them. It’s a matter of record that the former Deerfield midfielder scored two goals against a previously undefeated Andover team, and three goals against Exeter twice. (If none of Zajac’s teammates remembered him, some of his opponents did. The Exeter goalie said it most succinctly: “Nick Zajac had a wicked fucking shot.”)

Dr. Zajac’s colleagues at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates had also heard him decry the “utter silliness of participating in a sport while facing backward,” thereby documenting Zajac’s contempt for rowers. But so what? Aren’t eccentricities fairly common among overachievers?

The house on Brattle Street resounded with warblers, like a woodland glen. The dining-room bay windows were spray-painted with big black X ’s to prevent birds from crashing into them, which gave Zajac’s home an aura of perpetual vandalism. A wren with a broken wing lay recovering in its own cage in the kitchen, where not long before a cedar waxwing with a broken neck had died—to Irma’s accumulating sorrows.

Sweeping up the birdseed that was scattered under the songbirds’ cages was one of Irma’s never-ending chores; despite her efforts, the sound of birdseed crunching underfoot would have made the house an unwise choice for burglars. Rudy, however, liked the birds—the undernourished boy’s mother had heretofore refused to get him a pet of any kind—and Zajac would have lived in an aviary if he thought it would make Rudy happy, or get him to eat.

But Hildred was so steadfastly conniving in tormenting her ex-husband that it was insufficiently satisfying for her to have reduced Zajac’s time with their son to a mere two days and three nights every month. And so, thinking she’d found a way to further poison their time together, she finally got Rudy a dog.

“You’ll have to keep it at your father’s, though,” she told the six-year-old. “It can’t stay here.”

The mutt, which came from some humane-society sort of place, was generously referred to as “part Lab.” Would that be the black part? Zajac wondered. The dog was a spayed female, about two years old, with an anxious, craven face and a squatter, bulkier body than that of a Labrador retriever. There was something houndlike about the way her upper lips were floppy and overhung her lower jaw; her forehead, which was more brown than black, was wrinkled by a constant frown. The dog walked with her nose to the ground, often stepping on her ears, and with her stout tail twitching like a pointer’s. (Hildred had got her in the hope that the abandoned mutt was a bird dog.)

“Medea will be put to death if we don’t keep her, Dad,” Rudy solemnly told his father.

“Medea,” Zajac repeated.

In veterinary terms, Medea suffered from “dietary indiscretion”; she ate sticks, shoes, rocks, paper, metal, plastic, tennis balls, children’s toys, and her own feces. (Her so-called dietary indiscretion was definitely part Lab.) Her zeal for eating dogshit, not only her own, was what had prompted her former family to abandon her.

Hildred had outdone herself in finding a dog on death row with habits that seemed certain to make her ex- husband insane, or more insane. That Medea was named for a classical sorceress who killed her own children was too perfect. Had the voracious part-Lab had puppies, she would have eaten them. What a horror it was for Hildred to discover that Dr. Zajac loved the dog. Medea searched for dogshit as assiduously as he did—they were kindred souls—and now Rudy had a dog to play with, which made him happier to see his father. Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac may have been a hand surgeon to the stars, but he was first and foremost a divorced dad. It would be initially her tragedy and then her triumph that Irma was moved by Dr. Zajac’s love for his son. Her own father had left her mother before she was born, and he’d not troubled himself to have any relationship with Irma or her sisters.

One Monday morning after Rudy had gone back to his mother, Irma began her workday by attempting to clean the boy’s room. For the three weeks that he was gone, the six-year-old’s room was kept as tidy as a shrine; in practice, it was a shrine, and Zajac could often be found sitting worshipfully there. The morose dog was also drawn to Rudy’s room. Medea appeared to miss Rudy as much as Zajac did.

This morning, however, Irma was surprised to find Dr. Zajac asleep, naked, in his departed son’s bed. The doctor’s legs overhung the foot of the bed, and he had flung the bedcovers off; no doubt the heat of the sixty-pound dog was sufficient. Medea lay chest-to-chest with the hand surgeon, her muzzle at his throat, a paw caressing the sleeping doctor’s bare shoulder.

Irma stared. She’d never before had such an uninterrupted look at a naked man. The former midfielder was more puzzled than insulted that women were not drawn to his superb fitness, but while he was by no means an unattractive man, his utter craziness was as visible as his skeleton. (This was less apparent when Zajac was asleep.)

The transplant-driven surgeon was both mocked and envied by his colleagues. He ran obsessively, he ate almost nothing, he was a bird nut newly enamored of the dietary indiscretion of an exceedingly neurotic dog. He was also driven by the unchecked agony he felt for a son he hardly ever saw. Yet what Irma now perceived in Dr. Zajac overrode all this. She suddenly recognized the heroic love he bore for the child, a love shared by both man and dog. (In her newfound weakness, Irma was also moved by Medea.)

Irma had never met Rudy. She didn’t work weekends. What she knew was only what she could glean from photographs, of which there were an increasing number after each of the blessed son’s visits. While Irma had sensed that Rudy’s room was a shrine, she was unprepared to see Zajac and Medea in their embrace in the little boy’s bed. Oh, she thought, to be loved like that!

That instant, that very second, Irma fell in love with Dr. Zajac’s obvious capacity for love—notwithstanding that the good doctor had evinced no discernible capacity for loving her. On the spot, Irma became Zajac’s slave—not that he would soon notice it.

At that life-changing moment, Medea opened her self-pitying eyes and raised her heavy head, a string of drool suspended from her overhanging lip. To Irma, who had an unrestrained enthusiasm for finding omens in the most commonplace occurrences, the dog’s slobber was the haunting color of a pearl. Irma could tell that Dr. Zajac was about to wake up, too. The doctor had a boner as big around as his wrist, as long as… well, let’s just say that,