comma placement?

07:29 Sep 30, 2011 

Firstly, this really does need a comma after "smiling". The phrase "with hands open" functions as one more qualifier in a list referring to the person and the comma indicates this; without it, the implication is that "with hands open" describes the manner of smiling, which of course is not so.

The comma after "open" is a different matter. If you leave this comma, the reader could, in theory, take "resting in his lap" as a fifth element in the list and interpret it as qualifying the person. However, I think no reader would find it even momentarily confusing. As Jane says, "resting in his lap", qualifies the hands, not the person. "With hands open" is a qualifier referring to the person, but "open" is a subqualifier referring to the hands, and "resting in his lap" is another. Thus we have two qualifiers for "hands": "open" and "resting in his lap", and it is quite normal in literary style to separate them with a comma instead of "and" (just as there is no "and" here between "smiling" and "with hands open", the last two elements in a list). So I think the comma after "open" could be retained and the rest left unchanged. For stylistic reasons, that is what I would do.