The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (13 page)

“He’s still trying to trap you into some kind of admission, Davy,” she commented.

“If he is, he damned near succeeded,” I confessed. “He looked so worn out that I was on the verge of doing anything that would ease his mind. Then I remembered I’d promised you I wouldn’t.”

“I only asked you to promise not to tell my part of it,” she reminded me. “The rest is up to you.”

“I know, Daisy. I guess if we do any confessing, we’ll have to do it hand it hand.”

“Suits me,” she said, giving my hand a swing.

So we kept our counsel. One day in July Daisy whistled under my windows after the end of her stint, and when we had walked a little way from town toward Alton Plain, she said, “Well, it’s happened, kid. There’s been a third monster born at the hospital, and Alling gave orders to hush the fact up. Nobody’s to know, except those in attendance.”

“Whew! Then how do you know?”

“People when they get excited say things over the telephone as if nobody in between could hear. Of course, we’re not supposed to hear, but the trick’s too easy, if you know how.”

“Well, what kind is it, this time?”

She spoke slowly. “It’s a third symmelus.”

Minor abnormalities are frequent enough, but pronounced monsters have always been very rare. It was an amazing coincidence that two monsters of any sort should appear in quick succession at the same hospital. There of exactly the same class, until after all other possible causes had been investigated.

I was thoughtful. “Got any new theories, Daisy?”

“Nothing scientific, except that there isn’t a doubt that it’s Wyck’s doing. It would at least be a comfort to know for sure that he’s dead, and that this sort of thing therefore can’t go on much longer.”

I was glad Daisy had been a nurse, as that made it easy for us to discuss such matters as these.

Early in August I got my two weeks’ vacation. I decided to go to Nantucket, the most different place I could think of, within a couple of hundred miles. In going over some of Dr. Wyck’s effects with Dr. Alling, I had chanced upon an illustrated folder, glamorously extolling the island. The room I hired was in sight of the old windmill, and for a luxurious week I did nothing but take long walks across the lonely heath to swim by myself on the southern beaches, where a heavy surf discouraged the run of tourists. One say I walked the ten miles or so to the eastern end of the island. After changing into a swimming suit in a niche of the sand cliffs, I strolled down the beach. I was a little lonely, and felt like walking among the groups of people near the ’Sconset cottages.

The shortage of men was evident. Several girls gave me the glad eye, but I thought I would make a choosy inspection of the whole beach before drumming up any acquaintanceships. Presently I came upon a group of five girls, in minimum costumes, burying a sixth person in the sand.

I had the shock of my life upon seeing half-concealed features that seemed indubitably those of Gideon Wyck! Trembling, I walked on a little way, and then cast myself down on the beach, with my head half concealed by my arm. His eyes had been closed to guard against the dribbles of sand, but the lips and nose were unmistakable. I remembered that it was a circular found in Wyck’s office that had decided me to come here.

For awhile I watched, not knowing what to do. Then, in a scattering cloud of sand, the buried one erupted in one great bound, seized the arms of two of the girls, and hauled them into the surf. In blank amazement I watched as he ducked them with great agility and came running out to pursue others of the group.

Had my eyes deceived me? It was preposterous to think of the old doctor acting so like an athlete. He easily corralled two more of the girls, ducked them, and pursued the fifth at top speed for a quarter of a mile. Just as I was ready to doubt my own sanity, the truth dawned on me. It was not Wyck, but Wyck’s bastard, Ted Watson, whose features, half covered by sand, had been indistinguishable from those of his father.

Not far from me on the beach was a typical New England resort patronizer, a testy little man with spectacles and an air of having inherited not quite enough money. He was staring with comically intense disapproval toward the Watson boy. I walked past the little man, assuming a like expression of distaste, and remarked, “Vulgar clown. Who is he? Do you know?”

“Oh yes. A townie, Ted Gideon.”

I swallowed my surprise at the name and said, “You mean he lives here all the time?”

“Unfortunately. There he is, still wearing that lifeguard emblem. He’s not a lifeguard at all, this year. I shall make a complaint.”

I questioned the little man further, and learned that Ted Watson, alias Ted Gideon, was regarded by the summer cottagers as a native of the island. For two years he had served as a lifeguard, but had had to be discharged near the end of the preceding season for reasons unexplained.

I strolled away, being careful to keep out of sight of Ted Watson-Gideon, and stopped at the post office to ask innocently where a
Mrs.
 Gideon lived. Told that the only Gideon thereabouts was an orphan named Ted, I then inquired whether he had relatives in Nantucket proper. The postmistress said he had lived with a family named Scruggs. She seemed somewhat reluctant to talk, so I said, “I’m looking for a Mrs. Gideon, of Marblehead.”

“Well, I don’t know any Mrs. Gideon, but I do know that boy ain’t right in his head,” she said, with a sniff, “and fools they all were to make him a lifeguard. Now, if they’d of asked
me!”

I let it go at that, and took the long walk back to the principal village of the island. There I discovered that a man named Scruggs was the proprietor of a small boat yard. While casting about for a means of quizzing Scruggs, fate helped me beautifully in the person of a fellow from the Harvard Graduate School who had a room in the same house as mine. He was making an anthropological study of the native islanders and for nearly a year had been measuring their heads and inquiring into their genealogies. The Harvard man was out. I looked up Scruggs, who turned out to be a shrewd and weather-beaten proprietor of railroad apparatus to haul small craft out of water and shore them up for the winter. Introducing myself as a student from Columbia University, I told him I was compiling a genealogy of the Scruggs family. To my great satisfaction he replied, “Oh, another of you damned fools, hey?”

After listening to a long song and dance about his ancestors, I at last got him down to the present generation. “And how about your other son?” I asked, when he had finished. “They told me you had a grown boy.”

“That one? Ted? Naw, he just boarded with is. He’s an orphan. We did our best by him, but he was no damn good. Blood tells.”

When coaxed, he told how an advertisement had appeared in the local paper, ten years ago, inviting applications from person willing to bring up an orphan aged ten, for four hundred dollars a year. Scruggs and his wife, who had just lost their second child, had been chosen. At irregular intervals an agent from Boston had dropped in without warning to see whether the boy was being cared for properly. Checks had been mailed quarterly from the Boston-Phoenix Trust Company, and the boy had been privileged to draw personally a small allowance from the local bank.

At fifteen, he had got in with a “bad crowd,” as Scruggs said, of summer tourists, and had worked all summer as a deck hand on their yachts. He ended with, “And four years ago I had to fire him out. I treated him like a son, but he turned out rotten.”

And that was all I could get out of Mr. Scruggs.

Two days later the Harvard man invited me to his room for a cocktail.

“So you’re a medic?” he inquired. “What field?”

“I’m being driven into psychopathology.”

“That’s my province, but I picked the wrong place to work in. Confidentially, I’m after indexes of insanity and sexual aberration. You see, these people can’t help marrying their own cousins, if they marry on the island. But nobody’s ever let in any bad blood, so they can inbreed like Egyptian kings. Anybody here could raise the healthiest family you ever saw by his own sister. It’s very depressing. They only worth-while case histories I’ve got, so far, are when scions of fine old Boston families lead Nantucketers astray.”

I hazarded the question, “Did you find anything in the Scruggs family? They look shifty-eyed.”

“Did I? My only real case, but it’s got nothing to do with natives, worse luck. Scruggses are hear only two generations, and the young brat’s misleader came from the healthy hills of Maine. Look at this, will you?”

I tried to suppress my eagerness as I inspected some index cards. The first, genealogical, simply lacked pertinent information. The boy was from Maine, an orphan, his affairs administered by the Boston-Phoenix Trust. That was all. My Harvard friend permitted me to copy the gist of the record.

* * *

Ted Gideon at the age of 14/15 had been taught certain perverse practices by the son of a prominent yachtsman, and had in turn corrupted the Scruggs boy. Upon discovery he was committed for juvenile delinquency but was paroled in the custody of a retired clergyman living at ’Sconset who succeeded in imbuing the boy with a desire for normality. The subject was not congenitally abnormal. In the summers of 1930 and 1931 he had been employed as lifeguard, in token of renewed confidence of the community. Late in the latter season he had suffered an attack of some unidentified disease. The Boston-Phoenix investigator, at his next visit, had taken the boy back to Boston, in September, 1931. Ted had returned to the island in May, 1932, and during the present summer had been guilty of no known reversions to abnormal practices. He had, however, developed a rather morbid attitude toward girls, showing off in their presence like a much younger boy. Outgrowing self-consciousness about the mystery of his own origin, he taunted other young persons of both sexes with the assertion that he knew “more about life with a big L than they would ever know.” The investigator had noted that the little finger was missing from his left hand. Since no one remembered this before he left for Boston, it was assumed that it had been amputated during the last year.[
1
]

* * *

It was fairly certain that Gideon Wyck had decently acknowledged his obligation toward his own bastard and had attempted to give him a chance to grow up unhandicapped, in a place psychologically remote. It also seemed likely that the bank trustees, knowing that father was a famous physician, had turned the boy over to him for direct observation when he was seized by an illness that baffled the island doctors. Such a thesis could perfectly well account for Ted’s presence near Altonville during the winter. It could not explain why he had been forced to camp in a hole in the hills. On the other hand, it increased the reasons why old Wyck might have had an uncanny hold of some sort over the boy. His honorable attitude toward the bastard might have undergone any kind of change with the increase of insanity.

And there were ameliorating possibilities, too. If Dr. Wyck had been tending a sick son whom, for the good of both, he had thought best to hide from the town at large, he well might have needed to take a nurse—Muriel—along with him. I resolved therefore to take a long chance by confronting the boy and telling him I bore a message from Marjorie Wyck, insisting he must return and confer with her at once. Perhaps I could thus get him into the custody of the sheriff and of Dr. Alling, without having to tell anything else that I knew.

Next day, which was to be my last on the island, I again walked to ’Sconset. The boy was nowhere on the beach, so, with heart beating to the tune of my suppressed excitement, I looked up the retired clergyman and asked to see his ward. He was a kindly old man, but suspicious, and insisted on knowing what I wanted. As I was pondering over what to say, there flashed into my memory a bit of information given to me by Dr. Alling. Before his disappearance, old Gideon Wyck had withdrawn from his account five hundred dollars might be a farewell gift to start the boy in the world.

“I’m afraid of the person who’s been paying for Ted’s maintenance,” I said, “and he’s asked me to check up on what’s being done with the extra five hundred.”

“You mean the money Ted brought back with him?”

“Of course,” I answered, trying to remain calm under the sudden realization that the boy could have murdered his father to possess himself of a sum of money, with no other motive than the sense of the disgrace of their relationship.

“I understood it was four hundred. It’s always been four hundred a year from the Trust Company, you know, but that ended this year.”

“My friend told me five hundred,” I said, looking accusingly at the poor old fellow, who hastened to say, “I shall have to speak with Ted. You know, we’ve had—trouble with him—of various sorts. But he’s always been honest about money.”

“I should very much prefer to see him before you say anything,” I insisted. “I must do my best to fulfill his benefactor’s wishes.”

“As you think best. He’s going sailing, with friends. He should be coming in within an hour, for lunch. But please be careful. He’s still—ill. You know, he gave me more than three hundred and sixty dollars, to take care of him. The rest he said he had had to use for expenses, getting here.”

There were several small craft a few miles out. Presently one of them began to zigzag toward the wharf. Before it arrived I saw the boy in the cockpit. When they had tied the boat up, Ted and two others approached. His friends said, “Hope you get over your mal de mer,” and turned into the intersecting street. I stopped up and confronted the boy, who was walking slowly, as if ill. An odd look in his eyes provoked me to say something altogether unintended.

“Ted,” I said sternly, “I am brining you a message from your father, and you know where he is.”

He stared at me and emitted a curious, moaning shriek. Both his arms began to shake. Without warning he pitched forward. His two friends heard the cry, and came running back. As he lay twitching in the road, mouth distorted, teeth snapping, I knew past doubt that I was witnessing the
grand mal 
of epilepsy.