The Fourth Hand (6 page)

Halfheartedly, Medea made her way out of Rudy’s room; to the depressed dog’s bewilderment, which quickly gave way to fawning, Irma began to shower her with affection.

Everything has a purpose, the simple girl was thinking. She remembered her earlier unhappiness and knew that the dog was her road to Dr. Zajac’s heart.

“Come here, sweetie-pie, come with me,” Zajac heard his housekeeper/assistant saying. “We’re gonna eat only what’s
good
for us today!”

As has been noted, Zajac’s col eagues were woeful y beneath his surgical skil s; they would have envied and despised him even more if they hadn’t been able to feel they had certain advantages over him in other areas. It cheered and encouraged them that their intrepid leader was crippled by love for his unhappy, wasting-away son.

And wasn’t it wonderful that, for the love of Rudy, Boston’s best hand surgeon lived night and day with a shit-eating dog? It was both cruel and uncharitable of Dr. Zajac’s inferiors to celebrate the unhappiness of Zajac’s six-year-old, nor was it accurate of the good hand surgeon’s col eagues to deem the boy “wasting-away.” Rudy was crammed ful of vitamins and orange juice; he drank fruit smoothies (mostly frozen strawberries and mashed bananas) and managed to eat an apple or a pear every day. He ate scrambled eggs and toast; he would eat cucumbers, if only with ketchup. He drank no milk, he ate no meat or fish or cheese, but at times he exhibited a cautious interest in yogurt, if there were no lumps in it.

Rudy
was
underweight, but with even a smal amount of regular exercise or any healthy adjustment in his diet, Rudy would have been as normal-looking as any little boy. He was an exceptional y sweet child—not only the proverbial

“good kid” but a model of fairness and goodwil . Rudy had simply been fucked up by his mother, who had nearly succeeded in poisoning Rudy’s feelings for his father. After al , Hildred had three weeks to work on the vulnerable six-year-old; every third weekend, Zajac had scarcely more than forty-eight hours to counteract Hildred’s evil influence.

And because Hildred was wel aware of Dr. Zajac’s idolatry of strenuous exercise, she forbade Rudy to play soccer or go ice-skating after school—the kid was hooked on videos instead.

Hildred, who in her years with Zajac had half kil ed herself to stay thin, now embraced plumpness. She cal ed this being

“more of a woman,” the very thought of which made her exhusband gag.

But what was most cruel was the way Rudy’s mother had al but convinced the child that his father didn’t love him.

Hildred was happy to point out to Zajac that the boy invariably returned from his weekends with his father depressed; that this was because Hildred
grilled
Rudy upon his return would never have occurred to her.

“Was there a woman around? Did you meet a woman?”

she would begin. (There was only Medea, and al the birds.) When you don’t see your kid for weeks at a time, the desire to bestow gifts is so tempting; yet when Zajac bought things for Rudy, Hildred would tel the boy that his father was bribing him. Or else her conversation with the child would unfold along these lines: “What did he buy you?
Roller
skates!
A lot of use you’l get out of them—he must want you to crack your head open! And I suppose he didn’t let you watch a single movie. Honestly, he has to entertain you for just two days and three nights—you’d expect him to be on his best behavior. You’d think he’d try a little harder!”

But the problem, of course, was that Zajac tried too hard.

For the first twenty-four hours they were together, his frenetic energy overwhelmed the boy. Medea would be as frantic to see Rudy as Zajac was, but the child was listless

—at least in comparison to the frenzied dog—and despite the

evidence,

everywhere,

of

what

affectionate

preparations the hand surgeon had undertaken to show his son a good time, Rudy seemed downright hostile to his father. He had been primed to be sensitive to examples of his father’s lack of love for him; finding none, he began their every weekend together confused.

There was one game Rudy liked, even on those miserable Friday nights when Dr. Zajac felt he’d been reduced to the painful task of trying to make smal talk with his only child.

Zajac clung with fatherly pride to the fact that the game was of his own invention.

Six-year-olds love repetition, and the game Dr. Zajac had invented might wel have been cal ed “Repetition Plus,”

although neither father nor son bothered to name the game.

At the onset of their weekends together, it was the only game they played.

They took turns hiding a stove timer, unfailingly set for one minute, and they always hid it in the living room. To say they

“hid it” is not quite correct, for the game’s only rule was that the stove timer had to remain visible. It could not be tucked under a cushion or stowed away in a drawer. (Or buried under a mound of birdseed in the cage with the purple finches.) It had to be in plain sight; but because it was smal and beige, the stove timer was hard to see, especial y in Dr. Zajac’s living room, which, like the rest of the old house on Brattle Street, had been hastily—Hildred would say

“tastelessly”—refurnished. (Hildred had taken al the good furniture with her.) The living room was cluttered with mismatched curtains and upholstery; it was as if three or four generations of Zajacs had lived and perished there, and nothing had ever been thrown away. The condition of the room made it fairly easy to hide an innocuous stove timer right out in the open. Rudy only occasional y found the timer within one minute, before the beeper would sound, and Zajac, even if he spotted the stove timer in ten seconds, would
never
locate the thing before the minute was up—much to his son’s delight. Hence Zajac feigned frustration while Rudy laughed. A breakthrough beyond the simple pleasure of the stove-timer game took both father and son by surprise. It was cal ed reading—the truly inexhaustible pleasure of reading aloud—and the books that Dr. Zajac decided to read to Rudy were the two books Zajac himself had loved most as a child. They were
Stuart
Little
and
Charlotte’s Web,
both by E. B. White.

Rudy was so impressed by Wilbur, the pig in
Charlotte’s
Web,
that he wanted to rename Medea and cal her Wilbur instead.

“That’s a boy’s name,” Zajac pointed out, “and Medea is a girl. But I suppose it would be al right. You could rename her Charlotte, if you like—Charlotte is a girl’s name, you know.”

“But Charlotte dies,” Rudy argued. (The eponymous Charlotte is a spider.) “I’m already afraid that Medea wil die.”

“Medea won’t die for a long time, Rudy,” Zajac assured his son.

“Mommy says you might kil her, because of the way you lose your temper.”

“I promise I won’t kil Medea, Rudy,” Zajac said. “I won’t lose my temper with her.” (This was typical of how little Hildred had ever understood him; that he lost his temper at dogshit didn’t mean he was angry at dogs!)

“Tel me again why they named her Medea,” the boy said.

It was hard to relate the Greek legend to a six-year-old—

just try describing what a sorceress is. But the part about Medea assisting her husband, Jason, in obtaining the Golden Fleece was easier to explain than the part about what Medea does to her own children. Why
would
anyone name a dog Medea? Dr. Zajac wondered. In the six months since he’d been divorced, Zajac had read more than a dozen books by child psychiatrists about the troubles children have after a divorce. A great emphasis was put on the parents’ having a sense of humor, which was not the hand surgeon’s strongest point.

Zajac’s indulgence in mischief overcame him only in those moments when he was cradling a dog turd in a lacrosse stick. However, in addition to his having been a midfielder at Deerfield, Dr. Zajac had sung in some kind of glee club there. Although his only singing now was in the shower, he felt a spontaneous outpouring of humor whenever he was taking a shower with Rudy. Taking a shower with his father was another item on the smal but growing list of things Rudy liked to do with his dad.

Suddenly, to the tune of “I Am the River,” which Rudy had learned to sing in kindergarten—the boy, as many only children do, liked to sing—Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac burst into song.

I am Medea

and I eat my poo.

In an-tiq-ui-ty

I killed my kids, too!

“What?” Rudy said. “Sing that again!” (They’d already discussed antiquity.) When his father sang the song again, Rudy dissolved into laughter. Scatological humor is the best stuff for six-year-olds.

“Don’t sing this around your mother,” Rudy’s father warned him. Thus they had a secret, another step in creating a bond between them.

Over time, two copies of
Stuart Little
made their way home with Rudy, but Hildred would not read it to the boy; worse, she threw away both copies of the book. It wasn’t until Rudy caught her throwing away
Charlotte’s Web
that he told his father, which became another bond between them.

Every weekend they were together, Zajac read al of either
Stuart Little
or
Charlotte’s Web
to Rudy. The little boy never tired of them. He cried every time Charlotte died; he laughed every time Stuart crashed the dentist’s invisible car. And, like Stuart, when Rudy was thirsty, he told his father that he had “a ruinous thirst.” (The first time, natural y, Rudy had to ask his father what “ruinous”

meant.)

Meanwhile, although Dr. Zajac had made much headway in Meanwhile, although Dr. Zajac had made much headway in contradicting Hildred’s message to Rudy—the boy was increasingly convinced that his father
did
love him—the hand surgeon’s smal -minded col eagues were nonetheless convincing themselves that they were superior to Zajac
because of
the al eged unhappiness and undernourishment of Zajac’s six-year-old son. At first Dr. Zajac’s col eagues felt superior to him because of Irma, too. They regarded her as a clear loser’s choice among housekeepers; but when Irma began to transform herself, they soon noticed her, long before Zajac himself showed any signs of sharing their interest.

His failure to be aware of Irma’s transformation was further proof of Dr. Zajac’s being a madman of the unseeing variety. The girl had dropped twenty pounds; she’d joined a gym. She ran three miles a day—she was no mere jogger, either. If her new wardrobe was lacking in taste, it quite consciously showed off her body. Irma would never be beautiful, but she was
built.
Hildred would start the rumor that her ex-husband was dating a stripper. (Divorced women in their forties are not known for their charitableness toward wel -built women in their twenties.) Irma, don’t forget, was in love. What did she care? One night she tiptoed, naked, through the dark upstairs hal . She’d rationalized that if Zajac had not gone to bed, and if he happened to see her without her clothes on, she would tel him she was a sleepwalker and that some force had drawn her to his room. Irma longed for Dr. Zajac to see her naked—by accident, of course—because she had developed more accident, of course—because she had developed more than a terrific body; she’d also developed a stalwart confidence in it. But tiptoeing past the doctor’s closed bedroom door, Irma was halted by the baffling conviction that she’d overheard Dr. Zajac praying. Prayer struck Irma, who was not religious, as a suspiciously unscientific activity for a hand surgeon. She listened at the doctor’s door a little longer and was relieved to hear that Zajac
wasn’t
praying—

he was just reading
Stuart Little
aloud to himself in a prayerful voice.

“ ‘At suppertime he took his ax, fel ed a dandelion, opened a can of deviled ham, and had a light supper of ham and dandelion milk,’ ” Dr. Zajac read from
Stuart
Little.

Irma was shaken by her love for him, but the mere mention of deviled ham made her feel il . She tiptoed back to her bedroom off the kitchen, pausing to munch some raw carrots out of the bowl of melting ice in the fridge. When would the lonely man ever notice her?

Irma ate a lot of nuts and dried fruit; she ate fresh fruit, too, and mounds of raw vegetables. She could concoct a mean steamed fish with gingerroot and black beans, which made such an impression on Dr. Zajac that the doctor startled Irma (and everyone who knew him) by hosting an impromptu dinner party for his medical-school students.

Zajac imagined that one of his Harvard boys might ask Irma out; she seemed lonely to him, as did most of the boys.

Little did the doctor know that Irma had eyes only for him.

Once Irma had been introduced to his young male med students as his “assistant”—and because she was so obviously a piece of ass—they assumed he was already banging her and abandoned al hope. (Zajac’s female med students probably thought that Irma was every bit as desperate-looking as Zajac.) No matter. Everyone loved the steamed fish with gingerroot and black beans, and Irma had other recipes. She treated Medea’s dog food with meat tenderizer, because she’d read in a magazine at her dentist’s office that meat tenderizer made a dog’s poo unappetizing, even to a dog. But Medea seemed to find the tenderizer enhancing.