The Fourth Hand by John Irving Read Free Book Online Page A

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