A Man Called Milo Morai

by Robert Adams

  While speaking, she had pushed a button, and, when another woman in white opened the door, she said, "Miss Pollak, please get word to Dr. Guiscarde that Mr. Moray is conscious now."

  Although she had promised him all the water he wanted, she actually allowed him only small sips from the glass tube and carried on a nonstop monologue for the ten minutes before a spare, gangly young man entered and took her place at the bedside, signaling her to raise the head of the bed. From his black bag he removed a stethoscope, a reflector mounted on a headband and several other instruments, with which he proceeded to subject the patient to a brief examination. Then, bidding the woman to leave the room, he took her chair, slumping into it with a deep sigh.

  "Do you recall anything of what happened to you night before last, Mr. Moray? No? Well, a beat cop interrupted a pair of men who had slugged you, knocked you down and were in the process of robbing you. When he went to the callbox to get an ambulance down there, the two came back, but that was when their luck ran out; one ran again but the other fought, and the cop killed him with his baton, I hear tell. Officer Robert Emmett Murphey is as strong as the proverbial ox, so I find it entirely believable that he bashed the robber just a little too hard."

  "The hoodlum who got away must have had the money from your billfold, that and your watch and chain, which were ripped from your vest to the severe detriment of the pocket and buttonhole, I fear me. But they never had time or leisure to get your vest open, much less the shirt, so your moneybelt and all within it are laid away in the hospital safe in an envelope that I personally sealed before turning it over to the administrator. But, man, don't you know that it's been illegal to hold gold for more than two years now? If the federal government knew you were walking around with six or seven pounds of double eagles, they'd roast you over a slow fire."

  "Not that I necessarily agree with Roosevelt's policies, you understand, for they don't seem to be working out all that well for the vast majority of the people who have elected him twice, now. About the only good thing he's done was to make it legal to sell good booze again, in place of those poisonous bootleg slops."

  "When you are ready to convert some of those gold pieces to cash, let me know. I think my father would buy them from you at a premium, since they look to be brand-new, unworn coins. He's a well-known numismatist, so he can buy and hold them legally, which is one way to get around Roosevelt and his socialism."

  "Strange thing about you, though. When they brought you in here, your hair was a sticky mat of blood, yet I could find no wound or even an abrasion anywhere on your head to account for that blood. Your hat was crushed, which might mean that the thick, stiff furfelt absorbed most of the blow you were dealt, but that still doesn't account for the blood. My theory is that blood, from the man the cop killed ran down to the center of the alley and pooled under your head. Gruesome, heh? But it's as reasonable a theory as any other, I think."

  "I'm going to have you moved upstairs to a nicer room, a real private room. I'd like to observe you for a few days —head injuries can be tricky. You can easily afford private nurses and these days most of the nurses are in dire need of patients who can pay for their services. Mrs. Jennings, who was here when you woke a few minutes ago, will be your night nurse, and I have another in mind for your day nurse, too. Should you not care for what the hospital kitchen calls food, and not many do, there are several restaurants hereabouts that can cater your meals for reasonable costs."

  "Whom should we contact about you, Mr. Moray? Family? Friends? Business associates?"

  It took some little time, days of repetitive questioning, the bringing in of other doctors, specialists, before the man called Milo Moray was able to finally convince them all that he truly lacked any memory of his name and his life prior to the assault on him by the two thugs.

  The room was bright, cheery, furnished fully, and had attached a private toilet and bath to justify its steep rate of five dollars a day. The patient found the food provided bland but palatable and only rarely had meals fetched in to him from outside sources. Mrs. Jennings and Miss Duncan, his nurses, cared for him competently, brought him books from the nearby public library and helped him pass the time with conversations. As he could remember nothing of his past life, they told him of themselves and, in Mrs. Jennings' case, of her husband and child.

  Not that he ever seemed to lack for conversation. His status as something of a mystery man seemed to bring the oddballs out of the woodwork, as Dr. Gerald Guiscarde put it. He himself spent as much time as his busy schedule would allow with his patient, conversing with him as an equal, and he also continued to set various tests to the man he called Milo Moray.

  Among other things, he was able to determine that although his patient's English was accentless, non-regional American, he also was more than merely fluent in High German and French, as well as Latin and Classical Greek. Dr. Sam Osterreich, the psychiatrist, was able to add to the list of accomplishments the facts that the memoryless man was also well grounded in Yiddish, Hebrew, several dialects of Plattdeutsch, Hungarian, Polish and Russian. Through assorted visitors, it was established that the man called Moray could converse in such other tongues as Slovak, Croatian, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, Armenian and Basque.

  But he proved unable to understand Cantonese, Sioux, Hindi, Tamil or Welsh, though he was proved to be fluent in Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic and Dutch. It was the consensus of opinion among the linguists that Guiscarde filtered in that, although probably a university graduate, certainly well educated, Moray had not learned most of his vast array of tongues in an academic setting, but rather through living among and conversing with the people whose native languages he had learned so well and in such depth.

  Dr. Osterreich was a stooped little gnome of a man whose English was sometimes halting and always heavily accented. He had studied under fellow Austrian Dr. Sigmund Freud. In his mid-fifties, he was a very recent immigrant and had been a widower since his wife had died of influenza while he had been serving as a medical officer of the Imperial Austro-Hungarian Army in the Great War.

  One early evening after his office hours, he showed up at the mystery patient's room with a large chess set and board, a commodious flask of fine brandy and a brace of crystal snifters. He had been prepared to teach the game to his host, but it proved unnecessary, in the end, for the man called Moray was sufficiently adept to make their games long and slow, and the psychiatrist was to return many times for chess, brandy and rambling chats in English, German and Yiddish.

  After a signal defeat one night, the doctor tipped over his king and regarded his host for a long moment. "What-efer you war, mein freund, goot, solid gold I vould lay that a military man you vunce war. The firm principles of strategy and tactics most naturally to you seem to come. You ponder, you efery aspect weigh, but then mofe mit alacrity and resolution. Too young you look to have been in the late unpleasantness, but to know all that you seem to know, I also feel that older than you look you must assuredly to be. Efen mit a true ear for languages, for instance, more years than you seem to have vould have required been for you to have mastered so fery many as you haf. Most truly a puzzle you are, mein freund, Milo."

  Some month after first awakening in the hospital, the patient had just breakfasted one morning when Dr. Gerald Guiscarde arrived with a large, thick manila envelope under one arm.

  "Milo, I've conferred with Sam, and we agree that there's nothing we can do for you, in the hospital or out, so it's just a useless waste of your money to stay here any longer, I feel."

  "Now, I took the liberty of sending your gold to my father, and he bought it all, as I was certain he would, for thirty-four dollars per coin, which came to two thousand, eight hundred and fifty-six dollars. There's an accounting in the envelope along with your moneybelt, but I'll tell you now that with the hospital, the nurses, Sam, me, and the specialists all paid, you still have two thousand and twenty-two dollars and eighteen cents."

  "Have you plans after you leave here? You don
't intend to leave the area, do you? Sam and I still would like to see you regularly, keep up with your progress, as it were."

  The patient smiled sadly. "Where would I go? What would I do? I seem to have lost not only my past but, with it, any roots I might have had. No, I suppose I'll find a residence hotel somewhere, then try to find a job of some description."

  But his day nurse, Fanny Duncan, would not hear of such a thing, and that was how he wound up a boarder in the same house in which she lived. His ten dollars per week brought him a comfortable room, three plain but good meals per day, bath and toilet down the hall, clean bed linens once a week and a familial atmosphere.

  In 1914, Staff Sergeant Patrick O'Shea had left the Army he had so dearly loved behind him to take over the management of the brewery following the calamitous deaths of his father and all three of his elder brothers in a boating accident. He had also married his eldest brother's widow, Maggie, a new bride become suddenly a new widow, and they had moved into the big, rambling family house. With a staff of well-trained servants, they lived comfortably and happily, their first, Michael Gilbert O'Shea, being born in 1916. Patrick himself seemed to be adapting well to his executive position, but then the first dim tattoo of the war drums began to be heard and the warhorse in him began to champ at the bit.

  By the time the twins, Sally and Joseph, came along, their father was in the trenches. He returned to a business ruined by Prohibition. He returned crippled and nearly blind from being gassed. That was when Maggie, perforce, took over the house and the family.

  Regretfully, she let most of the servants go, retaining only the cook, the children's nurse and a single housemaid. After conferring with Patrick's attorney, she sold the brewery—lock, stock, barrels and land—for the best price she could get, paid the workers a generous severance and then followed the attorney's advice in investing what was left. Thanks to the income derived from those shrewd investments, she was soon able to hire back all of the former servants and go back to the kind of life into which she had married. And thus they lived for more than ten years.

  Then, overnight, their fortune was wiped out along with many another on Black Friday. Her attorney and financial adviser, who had been on that Thursday a multimillionaire, shot himself in the head with a shotgun, Maggie's butler did the same with a German pistol. With a rare prescience, she went down the following Monday and emptied what money lay still in her accounts out of the banks which soon were closed.

  By this time, the children were really too old to have need of a nurse, so she retained only the cook and Nellie, the maid. She firmly insisted that her elder daughter, Sally, and her younger, Kathleen, spend most of their free time in learning the arts of housekeeping and cooking, for she anticipated and feared the day when there would be too little money left to pay for any servants at all. Herself, she dusted off her only marketable skill and secured a nursing job in the nearby hospital; it was not much money, true, but it was steady and far better than nothing.

  With two guest rooms and two more rooms of former servants sitting vacant and useless, Maggie O'Shea got the idea of taking in boarders, nurses, all of them. When, in 1934, Michael's appointment to the United States Military Academy emptied yet another room, she had no difficulty in promptly filling it with another nurse, Miss Fanny Duncan.

  In 1936, two more rooms became vacant. Joseph enlisted in the Navy and his twin, Sally, moved into the hospital residence hall to begin her nurse's training. This meant that Maggie had to hire on a second maid, but there was space for another in the quarters that had once been the chauffeur's over the garage, and with the combination of her salary, her husband's pension and seventy dollars each week in paid rents, she could easily afford the extra employee. And so there were presently two more nurses in the house that certain of the more affluent neighbors were beginning to call "the Convent of Saint Maggie," not that Maggie cared a fig. She had kept her house, kept her family together, adequately fed and clothed and even provided gainful employment for non-family household members, which was more than many another could say in these hard, bitter times.

  Even crippled as he was, a living testament to the horrors of modern warfare, to the inherent dangers of a soldier's life, Maggie often felt that the government should be paying Patrick far more than his pension for, if nothing else, his recruiting activities. He had gotten his eldest an appointment to the USMA, persuaded his youngest to enter the military, along with many another man and boy with whom he had come in contact over the years. The old soldier had even gone after the nurses resident in his home and, at length, blarneyed one of them, Jane Sullivan, into entering the Army Nurse Corps.

  Jane Sullivan's room became vacant while Fanny Duncan was still nursing the mystery man, and it was Fanny who first got the idea, broached it to Dr. Guis-carde and, with his not inconsiderable help, convinced first Maggie O'Shea, then the man called Milo Moray.

  "Look, Maggie," Guiscarde had said, "we want to keep the patient in a sheltered environment for as long as necessary, and we want that environment to be as close as possible to the hospital. And it's not as if he were some deadbeat or bum, anyway. No, he's not employed yet, but in confidence I'll tell you this: he paid a staggering bill for his hospital room, round-the-clock nursing and the bills of several doctors in full and in cash, to the tune of well over eight hundred dollars, and he's still well heeled even after the outlay. His resources would allow him to pay your going rent for going on four years even if he never got a job.

  "Although he still can't remember his past life or even his own name, he's a proven brain—brilliant. He speaks a score of languages at the least, fluently, too. Dr. Samuel Osterreich says that he has met darned few men who were as good at chess as is this patient…" He let that last dangle enticingly, having been coached on that particular by Fanny Duncan.

  "Well," Maggie pondered aloud, "I've never taken in a man for a boarder before, but this man sounds like he… and poor Pat has had nobody living in to play chess with since the boys left. All right, doctor, I'll take him on a trial basis. If he works out, fine. If it looks like he won't fit in, I'll have to heave him out. Okay?"

  After his first meeting with Mr. Milo Moray, Pat O'Shea told him bluntly, "Mister, whatever else you was, you was a soldier, once, prob'ly a of ser. You just carry yourself that way, and b'lieve me, I knows. Most likely, the bestest way for you to get your mem'ry back is to re-up. 'Course, with you not rememb'ring and all, you prob'ly won't get your commission back right away, but when you ready to enlist, you just let me know. I'll get you back in—I knows some guys, local."

  Müo—he was finally beginning to think of himself as Milo Moray, since that was what everyone called him, for all that the name evoked not even the faint ghost of a memory within him—tramped the streets for over two weeks, searching in vain for some variety of employment. There just were no jobs available, it seemed.

  Pat O'Shea pointed out that the frustration would be every bit as bad or worse in another area. "It's the same all over thishere country, Milo. A few folks thinks and says it's bettern it was five, six years ago, but don't look that way to me, no way. Bestest thing a man could do, I think, is to enlist. The Army's a good life. Oh, yeah, it's hard sometimes and a man don't get paid much, but he gets his clothes and three squares a day, regular, and he don't have to pay doctors or dentists nothin', and once he gets him a few stripes, he's in like Flynn, less he fucks up or suthin'."

  Dr. Sam Osterreich arrived at the O'Shea house shortly after dinner of a night. After a few games of chess with O'Shea, he took Milo aside and opened the briefcase he had brought along.

  Shoving a wad of newsprint toward Milo, he said, "Read, if read you can, please."

  Two of the sheets were German newspapers, one was Russian, one French and one Italian. To his surprise, Milo discovered that he could comprehend all of them, and he began to read them to the psychiatrist, but was interrupted by a wave of the hand.

  "Nein, nein, you do not understand. Translate them to me, ple
ase, if you can."

  When Milo had done so, had translated the gist of short articles from four of the five papers, Osterreich nodded brusquely and took back the papers.

  "Enough. Gut, gut, sehr gut. A job you now haf, if still you need of one haf, mein freund. You may vork here, in your home, or in an office downtown from where you must in any case go to be gifen the papers each week and to return the completed translations of the indicated articles. One penny per word will be paid for each accurate translation returned, and to be accurate, they all must, this very important is, Milo."

  "The bulk of the papers will in German be, but some will in Russian be, or in French, Spanish, Italian, various of the Slavic and Scandinavian languages, Finnish, sometimes, Yiddish, Dutch, Portuguese and even Slovakian."

  Pat O'Shea had been shamelessly eavesdropping, and he now demanded, "Now, just a minute, doctor, what in hell you getting Milo mixed up in, anyhow? Some of this-here Bolshevik mess? I heard you just say some them papers was going to be in Russian!"

  Osterreich shook his balding head vigorously. "Nothing of the sort, Mr. O'Shea. To a group of recent immigrants I have the honor to belong, to be an officer. Convinced we all are that in Europe a very bloodbath approaching is, a holocaust of such proportions as nefer seen in the world before has been. To alert the citizens and officials of this, our new homeland, we are now trying through means of issuing a monthly digest of signs culled from European newspapers. We do this at our own expense, for most imperative it is that our new, free, vonderful homeland be warned, be prepared and secure when starts does this conflagration, for in this war, coming, there no neutrals will be, we fear; all nations combatants will be and only the strongest vill survive it."