The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (6 page)

A few moments later another incident occurred which seemed for awhile to confirm the assumption that Wyck had not sired the creature. While I was in the main hallway, downstairs, an old Ford came slurring around the hospital drive. A youth dashed up the steps. When he reached the reception window, however, he stopped short and said nothing at all.

Daisy Towers, seated at her switchboard, looked at him with a curt professional air and said, “Yes?”

I noticed that his fists were folding and unfolding in extreme agitation. He was rather handsome, ruddy, with wavy black hair worn long, and a thin, patrician nose that made all the more incongruous his costume: a faded flannel shirt, grease-stained khaki trousers, army boots, and a floppy felt hat with fishhooks and snells in the band.

When Daisy spoke a second time, he gulped, and asked jerkily, “Is there—did somebody get born here, today?”

“Who’s asking?” Daisy inquired. “Are you a prospective father?”

He seemed confused. Something buzzed on the switchboard. She attended to the call, and then turned again toward the waiting youth.

“It’s Sarah Mullin, I mean,” he blurted at last. “You’ve got to tell me. I heard—”

Daisy spoke more kindly. “What was it you heard?”

“Then she’s all right? Then she didn’t—”

Daisy said softly, “She died in childbirth.”

He swayed a little, turning to stare toward me with eyes which, I am sure, registered nothing that they saw.

“Is your name—Ted?” Daisy asked.

He nodded.

“Well, they told me to tell you, if you came, that she kept murmuring your name before—the end.”

He sobbed, turned quickly, and stumbled out to his car.

“That’s one mystery settled,” I remarked to Daisy. “But you wouldn’t think such a healthy specimen as that would have a deformed child.”

“No, you wouldn’t—and there isn’t any reason for thinking so even now,” she answers decisively.

“You mean that maybe he wasn’t the father?”

“That’s what I mean, Dave, without any maybe. If that fellow was the father you couldn’t have dragged him away from the baby with a team of Morgans.”

“That’s so. Who was he, then, her brother?”

“No. It’s a jolt to realize all of a sudden that you’ve become an uncle, without having had any say about it. That guy was just plain in love with her, that’s all. Anybody who was as worked up as he was over the situation in general would have clamped all his emotions right onto the kid, if the kid was his relation, Dave.”

Her analysis seemed sensible, when I thought it over. “Maybe he was somebody she’d given the gate,” I suggested, “and this lad wouldn’t admit to himself that he was still nuts about her—until he suddenly heard that she was dead.”

“That sounds a great deal more like it,” Daisy agreed. “But I’m sure I’ve seen that pair together, somewhere. It was six weeks ago yesterday that she went to the Widow’s, and—”

“How do you know that?”

She patted the switchboard and pointed to the telephone receiver clamped against one ear. “Six weeks ago yesterday,” she repeated, “and it wasn’t as long ago as that that I saw them, either. Wait! I remember! A month ago last Saturday I drove down to a dance at South Alton with your friend Jib Tucker. We nearly bumped into a couple walking by the roadside, in the dark. We backed up to be sure of things. I remember them standing there, hand in hand. It couldn’t have been very far from the Widow’s.”

That turned my suspicions about the monster’s paternity back again upon the sudden visitor to the hospital. Daisy was still positive, however, in her disagreement.

“Well, who was the father, then?” I inquired.

“Ask me no questions, and I’ll be in no danger of losing my job, Davy.”

It was plain that she knew more about the case than she cared to reveal, so I let it go at that.

1. I.e., a post mortem.
   

I liked Daisy in spite of her tongue. She was pretty, with coppery hair and a kind of golden tan that still lingered in April. Her quick fingers never fumbled over the rows of plugs and switches. Her hearing was so acute that she seldom asked for a number to be repeated. Certainly she was to me the most attractive girl in town, and the only one—barring Marjorie Wyck—who seemed at all civilized. Most of the nurses were just small town girls. But Daisy’s family really belonged on the faculty side of the town-and-gown division. Her father had been treasurer of the medical school. His death had left his wife and daughter not too well provided for. Daisy had become a nurse at the age of eighteen, and, three years later, had taken the switchboard job. It paid less, but she liked the work better.

The medics, in general, ran the nurses ragged getting rid of their own inferiority complexes, another reason why the high-spirited Miss Towers preferred the switchboard job.

“It’s nearly one. Wait a minute, and you can have the joy of walking home with me,” she offered. I remember suddenly about the blood transfusions, and thought it a good idea to investigate wile I was on the spot. Daisy, when I told her what I wanted, admitted me to the little office behind the reception booth and pulled a drawer from the card index cabinet.

“What’s the problem?” she inquired.

“Ask me no questions till I find out whether I’m making a fool of myself,” I answered, unable to decide whether it was plausible that Wyck could have some ailment which made it possible for him to keep up an appearance of health only with the aid of blood transfusions. The primary anemias almost always are complications of other diseases which he could hardly have concealed. Indeed, the only justification for my suspicions lay in Wyck’s extraordinary character, which would drive him to bully himself even more than he bullied others, especially after his lifelong boast of perfect health.

If Mike had been giving blood to Wyck, the process obviously would have terminated at the time of Mike’s accident—and that might account for Wyck’s recent extreme pallor. I bent eagerly over the card giving Mike’s record as a blood donor. It showed eight transfusions within twenty months. Five of them, all to women, had been accomplished more than a year ago. The sixth, on the 8th day of October, had failed to save a man who was dying at the time. The seventh, on February 16th of the current year, had been given to one Joseph Baker—a first-year medic who had gone through the windshield of his roadster and was now at home convalescing. The last entry surprised me. It reads:

7 March 1932 {

to Peter Thompkins, 250 cc. to Joseph Baker, 250 cc.

Mike always told me about his cases. I had gathered from what he said that this transfusion had gone entirely to the boy who had shot himself: young Peter. Daisy got me the latter’s registry card, which showed that another donor had first been used for a full 500 cc., but that an additional amount had been needed. The explanation seemed therefore to be that, since Mike had been called in to give half the usual amount of blood, at the full minimum price, the physicians in charge had decided to draw off the normal amount and give half of it to Baker, who probably would have been still anemic. Baker’s card confirmed this.

“Well,” Daisy asked, “have you made a fool of yourself?”

“I would have,” I admitted, realizing that there was nothing to show that Mike had given blood to Wyck, “if I’d told you what I was looking for. But I’ve found something else to wonder about.”

“Which is?”

“I’ll trade you this information for yours about the paternity of the symmelus,” I offered.

She shook her head. “Rather not, Davy. I’d like to be just a little more sure of it.”

“The same goes for mine,” I agreed.

I was wondering. Mike’s awful seizure of pain, after midnight, had apparently coincided with the death of a boy into whose veins 250 cc. of Mike’s own blood had been introduced not long before. It seemed impossible that similar symptoms could have escaped notice in thousands of other cases when transfusions had failed to save a life; but the tantalizing fact remained that Mike’s own arm from which the transfusions had been made was now amputated, and the pain had centered in the severed ends of its nerves, giving Mike the impression that the agony which he experienced actually was being suffered in the arm that was no longer there.

When I told Daisy that I wanted to copy Mike’s record she decided not to wait. Nevertheless, the job was done so speedily that she was still in sight on Atlantic Street when I passed out through the hospital gates. There, the noise of a door slamming, some distance away, caused me to look curiously toward the pine grove concealing Wyck’s residence. Someone leaped into a parked Ford which turned and came snorting toward me at a furious rate. I saw that it was driven by the same strange boy, named Ted. He was frowning. His lips twisted in an almost maniacal way. It occurred to me that, even if the boy Ted had been only her casual friend, he would have know that Sarah had worked at the Wycks’ and would be likely to suspect the old doctor of having seduced her. I thought it might be a good idea to stop in at the gingerbread house to make sure that all was well.

When Dr. Wyck himself answered my knock. I felt rather foolish, so I said the first thing that I could think of:

“Mike had another of those attacks, this morning, sir. If it’s going to keep up this way, I was thinking it might be a good idea to keep him doped for awhile.”

The old doctor seemed to be without a quick answer. Presently he said, “No, I wouldn’t do that. No, not by any means.”

It was an unwritten law at the College of Surgery that whenever a student failed to understand the reason in pathology for a given course of treatment, he should demand an explanation. I hesitated this time, because I had a certain conviction that Gideon Wyck was unwilling to give the argument. This was confirmed when he added:

“I warn you, don’t do anything like that, at least until tomorrow. Understand?”

There again, as I look back upon it, was a warning I should have heeded, that something portentous would happen before the night was out. I am now quite sure that Gideon Wyck had his own good reasons for subjecting Mike to a deliberate recurrence of the agonizing seizures; but it was not until long afterward that the reasons were revealed.

As I stood uncomfortably in his doorway, I surprised myself by bluntly asking the question uppermost in my mind.

“What did Mike mean when he said something about giving blood to you, sir?”

He laughed sharply and unpleasantly. “So far as I can see, he was merely referring to the fact that it was I who drew off blood from him to be injected into various patients—such as your fellow student Joseph Baker. Mike must have been brooding on the nothing that I make my living by taking blood out of him and putting it into somebody else.”

I dismissed the problem and changed the subject by saying, “How is Joe Baker getting along? Have you heard, sir?”

Again he stared at me quietly, and again answered with a question.

“Have the boys heard anything from him, of late?”

I shook my head, and he added curtly, “Neither have I. Why should I?”

It seemed impossible to talk without making him touchy, so I took my departure. Once more I had been impressed by the remarkable pallor of his usually ruddy face, by the sagging of his cheeks that had remained so smooth up to a few weeks before. Something else had struck me, too—an odor such as one gets at the bedsides of invalids who have been subsisting largely on medicines. It was his breath that smelled of chemical which I was at a loss to identify.

As I turned the corner, Marjorie Wyck was approaching, with a basket on her arm. I paused to say, “I’m sorry about Sarah. You liked her, didn’t you?”

Her throat colored a little. “I did for awhile,” she said. Her half-prudish reaction puzzled me. Did she herself believe that her father had misled the unlucky Sarah? I got no real chance to decide, for her personality seemed suddenly to withdraw into vagueness. I have never know anyone else who could be so utterly preoccupied at times, so oblivious of her surroundings. Doubtless it all came from living with a surly old man, in that hideous old home.

All third-year men at medical school take a course called “Human Anatomy 3 & 4” to become familiar with the body from a specialized surgical point of view. Six P.M. of the day about which I have been writing was the deadline for the year 1932. Consequently, when I drifted down to the dissecting room it was buzzing with prayers and curses. Only Prendergast seemed at ease.

All year he had kept about one day behind the fastest of us, profiting by our blunders. The oath which meant that someone had cut too deeply always brought Prendergast to the table in question. Next day, when he reached the part of the job himself, he would do it perfectly. I noticed that he had uncovered my cadaver to match notes. I was willing to forget our quarrel so I merely began to go over my work step by step to make sure that all was in order. Prendergast left without offering to make up. I was preparing to go, myself, when Charlie the diener hailed me for help in getting two freshly embalmed bodies on high shelves in the dark vault.