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What Dr. Zajac didn't tell Patrick was that Otto Clausen's widow had demonstrated unheard-of zeal on behalf of the donor hand. Mrs. Clausen had not only accompanied her husband's body from Green Bay to Milwaukee, where (in addition to most of his organs) Otto's left hand was removed; she'd also insisted on accompanying the hand, which was packed in ice, on the flight from Milwaukee to Boston.
Wallingford, of course, had no idea that he was going to meet more than his new hand in Boston; he was also going to meet his new hand's widow.
This development was less upsetting to Dr. Zajac and the other members of the Boston team than a more unusual but no less spur-of-the-moment request of Mrs. Clausen's. Yes, there were some strings attached to the donor hand, and Dr. Zajac was only now learning of them. He had probably been wise in not telling Patrick about the new demands.
With time, everyone at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates hoped, Wallingford might warm to the widow's seemingly last-minute ideas. Apparently not one to beat around the bush, she had requested visitation rights with the hand after the transplant surgery.
How could the one-handed reporter refuse?
"She just wants to see it, I suppose," Dr. Zajac suggested to Wallingford in the doctor's office in Boston.
"Just see it?" Patrick asked. There was a disconcerting pause. "Not touch it, I hope--not hold hands or anything."
"Nobody can touch it! Not for a considerable period of time after the surgery," Dr. Zajac answered protectively.
"But does she mean one visit? Two? For a year?"
Zajac shrugged. "Indefinitely--those are her terms."
"Is she crazy?" Patrick asked. "Is she morbid, grief-stricken, deranged?"
"You'll see," Dr. Zajac said. "She wants to meet you."
"Before the surgery?"
"Yes, now. That's part of her request. She needs to be sure that she wants you to have it."
"But I thought her husband wanted me to have it!" Wallingford cried. "It was his hand!"
"Look--all I can tell you is, the widow's in the driver's seat," Dr. Zajac said. "Have you ever had to deal with a medical ethicist?" (Mrs. Clausen had been quick to call a medical ethicist, too.)
"But why does she want to meet me?" Patrick wanted to know. "I mean before I get the hand."
This part of the request and the visitation rights struck Dr. Zajac as the kind of thing only a medical ethicist could have thought up. Zajac didn't trust medical ethicists; he believed that they should keep out of the area of experimental surgery. They were always meddling--doing their best to make surgery "more human."
Medical ethicists complained that hands were not necessary to live, and that the anti-rejection drugs posed many risks and had to be taken for life. They argued that the first recipients should be those who had lost both hands; after all, double-hand amputees had more to gain than recipients who'd lost only one hand.
Unaccountably, the medical ethicists loved Mrs. Clausen's request--not just the creepy visitation rights, but also that she insisted on meeting Patrick Wallingford and deciding if she liked him before permitting the surgery. (You can't get "more human" than that.)
"She just wants to see if you're ... nice," Zajac tried to explain.
This new affront struck Wallingford as both an insult and a dare; he felt simultaneously offended and challenged. Was he nice? He didn't know. He hoped he was, but how many of us truly know?
As for Dr. Zajac, the doctor knew he himself wasn't especially nice. He was cautiously optimistic that Rudy loved him, and of course he knew that he loved his little boy. But the hand specialist had no illusions concerning himself in the niceness department; Dr. Zajac, except to his son, had never been very lovable.
With a pang, Zajac recalled his brief glimpse of Irma's abs. She must do sit-ups and crunches all day!
"I'll leave you alone with Mrs. Clausen now," Dr. Zajac said, uncharacteristically putting his hand on Patrick's shoulder.
"I'm going to be alone with her?" Wallingford asked. He wanted more time to get ready, to test expressions of nice. But he needed only a second to imagine Otto's hand; maybe the ice was melting.
"Okay, okay, okay," Patrick repeated.
Dr. Zajac and Mrs. Clausen, as if choreographed, changed places in the doctor's office. By the third "okay," Wallingford realized that he was alone with the brand-new widow. Seeing her gave him a sudden chill--what he would think of later as a kind of cold-lake feeling.
Don't forget, she had the flu. When she dragged herself out of bed on Super Bowl Sunday night, she was still feverish. She put on clean underwear and the pair of jeans that were on the bedside chair, and also the faded green sweatshirt--Green Bay green, with the lettering in gold. She'd been wearing the jeans and the sweatshirt when she started to feel ill. She put on her old parka, too.
Mrs. Clausen had owned that faded Green Bay Packers sweatshirt for as long as she could remember going with Otto to the cottage. The old sweatshirt was the color of the fir trees and white pines on the far shore of the lake at sunset. There had been nights in the boathouse bedroom when she'd used the sweatshirt as a pillowcase, because laundry at the cottage could be done o
