Fourth Hand by Irving John

Author:Irving, John [Irving, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary, General Fiction
ISBN: 9781417620241
Amazon: 1417620242
Goodreads: 112317
Publisher: Bt Bound
Published: 2001-07-03T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Trying to Get Fired

THERE’D BEEN NEARLY a week of rapturous mourning when Wallingford tried and failed to ready himself for an impromptu weekend in Wisconsin with Mrs. Clausen and Otto junior at the cottage on the lake. The Friday-evening telecast, one week after the crash of Kennedy’s single-engine plane, would be Patrick’s last before his trip up north, although he couldn’t get a flight from New York with a connection to Green Bay until Saturday morning. There was no good way to get to Green Bay.

The Thursday-evening telecast was bad enough. Already they were running out of things to say, an obvious indication of which was Wallingford’s interview with a widely disregarded feminist critic. (Even Evelyn Arbuthnot had intentionally ignored her.) The critic had written a book about the Kennedy family, in which she’d stated that all the men were misogynists. It was no surprise to her that a young Kennedy male had killed two women in his airplane.

Patrick asked to have the interview omitted, but Fred believed that the woman spoke for a lot of women. Judging from the abrasive response of the New York newsroom women, the feminist critic did not speak for them. Wallingford, always unfailingly polite as an interviewer, had to struggle to be barely civil.

The feminist critic kept referring to young Kennedy’s “fatal decision,” as if his life and death had been a novel. “They left late, it was dark, it was hazy, they were flying over water, and John-John had limited experience as a pilot.”

These were not new points, Patrick was thinking, an unconvincing half-smile frozen on his handsome face. He also found it objectionable that the imperious woman kept calling the deceased “John-John.”

“He was a victim of his own virile thinking, the Kennedy-male syndrome,” she called it. “John-John was clearly testosterone-driven. They all are.”

“‘They …’” was all Wallingford managed to say.

“You know who I mean,” the critic snapped. “The men on his father’s side of the family.”

Patrick glanced at the TelePrompTer, where he recognized what were to be his next remarks; they were intended to lead his interviewee to the even more dubious assertion of the “culpability” of Lauren Bessette’s bosses at Morgan Stanley. That her bosses had made her stay late on “that fatal Friday,” as the feminist critic called it, was another reason that the small plane had crashed.

In the script meeting, Wallingford had objected to the word-forword content of one of his questions being on the prompter. That was almost never done—it was always confusing. You can’t put everything that’s supposed to be spontaneous on the TelePrompTer.

But the critic had come with a publicist, and the publicist was someone whom Fred was sucking up to—for unknown reasons. The publicist wanted Wallingford to deliver the question exactly as it was written, the point being that the demonization of Morgan Stanley was the critic’s next agenda and Wallingford (with feigned innocence) was supposed to lead her into it.

Instead he said: “It’s not clear to me that John F. Kennedy, Jr., was ‘testosterone-driven.

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