The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck

by Alexander Laing

  I had arranged to take dictation from Prexy every morning for two hours, until it was time for the eleven o’clock lecture. At half past eight, after a troubled sleep and a hasty breakfast, I was on my way to Dr. Alling’s house. My unpleasant reveries over the events that had occurred in the dark early hours of the morning were interrupted by the incisive noise of feminine heels behind me. It was Muriel Finch, walking stiffly, frowning. I waited for her to catch up, but she was not in a talkative mood.

  “Regular morning grouch?” I asked.

  “That’s the least you can expect, after an all-night shift.”

  “Why aren’t you in the dorm, then, by now?”

  “I wanted some air—fresh air. I hate that smelly place. Oh, how I hate it!”

  We had taken the left-hand turn, southward, onto Packard Road, the last house on which was my destination. Prexy had located his home for solitude, when he wanted it. We walked for a little way without speaking. Then Muriel sobbed suddenly, crying, “I hate this whole damned town. I’ll go crazy if I stay here another day. I know I will.”

  When I patted her shoulder, she shrank from the touch, and then apologized. “I just can’t help it. People are such muts. All of them. I don’t mean—any one person.” She looked up in a half-scared fashion and said, “You didn’t think I meant anybody in particular?”

  I thought I knew what was wrong with her. She went by the name of “the blond floozy” among the medical students, who had a theory that a unique impediment of speech made it very difficult for her to pronounce the word “no,” especially when the moon was shining, with a jug of applejack near by. There was a general tendency to be lenient about the private lives of nurses and of medics, so long as their affairs were managed without impairment of their duties and studies. But Muriel had several times been slated for lateness on the night shift, and for a fit or two of hysterics while in attendance upon critical operations. It was hard to understand why these derelictions, in her case, were being overlooked. As I did no learn the reason till later, I shall save it for its proper place in the narrative.

  “Dave,” she blurted suddenly, “do you think I could get a job somewhere else?”

  I asked where she had worked last, and she said, “I came right here from the farm. Father died. There are four kids younger than me. They need what I can send, they and Mom. But I’ll go crazy if I have to stay any longer.”

  “Want to tell me what’s the trouble?” I asked.

  She looked quickly sidewise, as if in fear, and asked, “What are you thinking? What do you mean?”

  “Nothing much. I’d just like to think that some of my friends are liars. Would it help any if I punched them on the snoot?”

  She looked almost relieved, and then defiant. “Oh, that! Just ’cause I’m a farm kid, I suppose. All you read about—wicked cities, nice upright country folks. Oh yeah? If they knew what went on back of the barn on every farm I ever saw.”

  She was talking shrilly, and hysterically.

  “Don’t worry, Dave. They didn’t have anything to teach me here. Maybe I’m too—good-natured. What if I am? You can be a lot worse things than good-natured. People can act like you’d think they were—Dave! Do you—do you believe in—devils? On earth, I mean, getting inside of people—like in the Bible. Oh, never mind, I guess I am going crazy.”

  Impressed, I took a flyer. “I can’t think of anybody who’s got a fiend inside him, around here—of course excepting old Wyck.”

  She stopped short, staring with startled eyes.

  “Then you know— What are you talking about?”

  “Things you couldn’t possibly know about. Got anything to add to the horrible record?”

  “She said, “No!” as if in great relief.

  “Well, that reminds me. Biddy Connell claims you told her that the amputation wasn’t necessary. Maybe it wasn’t. But no good can possibly come of saying a thing like that.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she cut in.

  “Oh, yes I do. I’m not thinking about Wyck. The hell with him. I’m thinking of the Connells. It’s bad enough to be crippled. But it’s harder to bear if somebody gives you the idea that it wasn’t necessary. Don’t you understand that?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she repeated stubbornly. “Oh, but I’ve got to tell somebody—something—anything— Even if it’s just what happened last night.”

  “What was that, Muriel?”

  “No, never mind.”

  “Suit yourself,” I said with a shrug.

  “All right, then, I will!” she cried. “Other people saw that. They can at least make him stop practicing, even if that’s all they do. And there was somebody else saw that much, anyway, about half past one this morning.”

  “Saw what?” I inquired, mystified.

  “Saw the way he treated two poor old people at the hospital.”

  I remembered Marjorie Wyck’s call to say that her father was wanted at the hospital, after he had stopped in to see Mike.

  Finally she got out her incoherent story, in bursts of passionate bitterness. It seemed to me not to be worth all the fuss she was making about it, but I realized that her emotion was being caused by something worse which she dared not speak of. Here is the outline of the incident:

  Peter Tompkins, aged fourteen years, had shot himself through the lung while hunting. Mike had told me “the histhory of the case” a month ago, it having been his blood that saved the boy’s life. Peter had progressed fairly well for three weeks or so. Then a lung abscess had developed, and Gideon Wyck had told the poverty-stricken parents that nothing could save their son. At their insistence, however, an oxygen tent had been rigged. At one o’clock the morning on which my story opens—April 3rd—after the costly cylinders of gas had been hissing for four days and five hours, Nurse Finch failed to distinguish a pulse, and put a call in for Dr. Wyck. “There they sat, near dead themselves,” she said, “when in comes Dr. Wyck. Four days they’d been watching, with hardly a break, he in his overalls and a patched old army coat. She had on something you couldn’t tell what it was, it was so old.

  “ ‘Phew,’ says Dr. Wyck, coming in, ‘what makes this place stink so?’ I nodded toward them, a little bit. ‘Phew,’ he says again, ‘Why don’t you send ’em out for a bath?’ A nice thing, with their son dying in the room. I whispered there might not be any use in their coming back.

  “ ‘Hey?’ he says, ‘The boy dead?’ just as loud as before. Oh, I could have—well, never mind. The old farmer says, ‘We ain’t afraid to learn, now, any more, Doctor,’ and he snaps, ‘Why should you be? I told you four days ago it was no use.’ He’s off his head, Dave, really. Oh, you’ve got to believe me.

  “Well, the kid was dead. But even that wasn’t enough for the old devil. He starts right away saying that the hospital couldn’t pay for the oxygen, trying to make them pay forty dollars right away. Forty dollars! They won’t see that much actual cash in a year, on the kind of a farm they must have.

  “And there’s old Wyck in his swanky clothes, telling that ragged couple to rake up forty dollars. They can’t let him go on in the clinic. He’s insane. I know it.

  “Got any more reasons than that for thinking so?” I asked, pausing in front of Alling’s.

  She seemed to shudder. Her hands folded into fists. “No,” she said. “No, nothing special.”

  “Well, have you reported this to anyone yet?”

  She gasped suddenly. “No! Oh, no. And you mustn’t either. They’ve got to find some other things about him that I don’t know about. Don’t you see? He’d know it was me that told, unless— Those old people! I wish they’d have the nerve to come right to Alling about it.”

  She stared at me in a strange fashion, turned suddenly, and hurried on.

  Three

  I found that Prexy Alling was waiting for me in his study, and made once more the conscious effort to be at east which was necessary in the presence of his deformity. You mus
t have seen his picture in the papers; but he usually poses in a fashion to conceal the twisted body that may have more than a little to do with her personal interest in unusual places of medicine and surgery. All year I have been taking notes for a work, the title of which reveals its author’s attitude. Planned to fill at least six sturdy quarts, it pleases him to call it A Short Sketch for a History of Concomitant Variations in Morphogenesis and Psychogenesis.[1] The title is not overly modest as he himself sees it, in comparison with all that yet remains to be collated.

  As I came in on the morning of which I have been writing, he said, “Hello, Saunders. While it’s fresh in mind I want you to take this revision for that introduction to the third part. I at last got it straight in my mind while I was shaving this morning.”

  I am reproducing this material from my notes, because of the bearing which it has on later events:

  “Science,” he dictated, “has its own superstitions. Among them is a bewildering tendency to act as if it sees nothing whatever, when confronted by phenomena which it cannot as yet see clearly and fully. Yet as we advance the science of therapeutics, our methodologies encroach more and more upon realms now loosely described as ‘psychic.’ It has long been known and generally acknowledged that madmen are wont to exhibit super-physical strength. On the 7th of February, 1932, under the supervision of the Director of the Main State Asylum for the Insane, Dr. A. V. Kernochan, I personally was permitted to measure with a dynamograph the physical reactions of certain inmates of that institution. The most significant case was that of J. T. L., still an inmate, who makes a continual boast of his great strength. J. T. L.’s weight is 157 pounds. His proportions are about normal, his muscular development pronounced but not extraordinary. With shoulders strapped into the mechanism show in plate No. (?) he was able to exert 2600 foot-pounds of contractile effort between shoulders and fists. On the other hand, R. O. M., a profession wrestler who volunteered for the same experiment on the 12th of February, at the Maine State College of Surgery, in the presence of Gideon Wyck, M.D., could exert a maximum of only 1050 foot-pounds in the same apparatus under like conditions. R. O. M. weighed 211 pounds, stripped, and displays abnormal muscular development, but is not muscle-bound. The professional wrestler also permitted me to contract his muscles galvanically to the point of torture, increasing the maximum force by a little more than 10 per cent, which still indicated less than half the strength of his slighter, mad rival.

  “What casued the amazing discrepancy? Wise men, in all ages and among all peoples of the earth, have ascribed the strength of madmen to demonic possession. And what is demonic possession? What are demons? The modern alienist does not even inquire. What, for example, is the relationship between the increased muscular contraction produced galvanically in my wrestler’s arms, and that produced by madness in the arms of J. T. L.? Is the demon itself a kind of galvanic manifestation? Could the application of contrary voltaic pressure neutralize the effect of the demon?”

  At the end of each paragraph of dictation, Dr. Alling smacked his lips, as if with relish for the flavor of his own words, and then waited for the nod which showed him that I had caught up. There was more to the new version of the introduction; but the above first part is sufficient for my dual purpose of showing the almost too tolerant quality of Prexy’s mind, and of indicating why he alone, of all persons in Altonville, found it convenient to see a great deal of that unpleasant old curmudgeon, Gideon Wyck. In disposition, in tastes, in outlook, they were miles apart. But Wyck, aside from being an excellent surgeon, was deeply, fantastically learned in one of the many fields of historico-medical research to be covered in Dr. Alling’s Short Sketch. Prexy had told me that every single book he wanted on the subjects of demonology and witchcraft had proved to be already on hand, in the curious library of Gideon Wyck.

  I was next set to copying, from a modern reprint of a work named Demoniality,[2] some marked passages arguing that abnormal human beings are products of love between normal women and men possessed of demons. Midway in the task, I could not help looking up curiously at my employer, wondering what his own inmost feelings must be, when reading such passages—he himself being almost a dwarf. He caught my eye, and smiled half bitterly, as if understanding the motive of my glance. I blushed, and bent over my work again.

  For half an hour we continued in silence, I copying, he browsing through a stack of books which he had borrowed the day before from Dr. Wyck. Presently, looking up to rest my eyes, I saw him take a paper marker from one of the volumes and toss it absent-mindedly into the wastebasket. Then he retrieved it, remarking, “That’s a nice way for me to treat another man’s property. He probably wants to keep that place. Oh, by the way, Wyck told me last night at the laboratory that he particularly wanted this one back today. I guess I’ll drive us over. Bring this book out, will you? I’ll go around and get the car.”

  As I took up the indicated book—a volume of Frazer’s Golden Bough, a series of notations on the paper marker, made with what seemed to be intentionally faint pencil strokes, caught my eye. Something, perhaps a premonition that he wanted the notations rather than the book itself, prompted me to copy them off. I give them here:

  Jl 16/300 Dc 23/500

  Sp 3/400 Jn 29/500

  Nv 1/400 Fb 24/500

  Then I hastened out to the road, called by the horn of Dr. Alling’s big old Marmon. We drove directly to Wyck’s home, which is situated about a half mile away, diagonally across from the northwest corner of the hospital fence. His daughter Marjorie, who kept house for the old widower, answered the bell. Under her somehow ethereal outer calm I sensed nervousness and a resentment of our intrusion into the gloomy building, set off by itself at the town’s edge, amid stumpy pines. Marjorie always had the air of a bewitched princess; and the old place, with intricate scrollwork festooning the veranda and the eaves, was painted a chocolate brown that had faded to the precise color of gingerbread. Obviously, nothing could have been done about the house without razing it and building it anew. I suppose both Wyck and his daughter had recognized that minor changes would only make matters worse. At least it was all of a piece: they had left it just as they found it: a monument to the most tasteless period of American Victorianism. In this setting Marjorie Wyck moved gracefully back and forth, indifferent to her surroundings. She was clad in a simple blue morning dress that seemed the height of fashion.

  “I think father will be done right away,” Marjorie said. “You should know better than to call so early, Dr. Alling. He’s seldom through shaving before half past ten.”

  “I know, my dear. But he left my laboratory early, last night. Early, that is, for him—around half past one.”

  I mentioned that Dr. Wyck had been called to the Connells’, and thence to the hospital. Prexy said, “Oh?” and Marjorie seemed to drift out of the room as if on a breeze. She is probably the most graceful, as well as the most preoccupied, person I have ever known.

  “Ah, here it is. Here’s what you’ll need your French for,” Prexy said, hopping slightly to pluck out an old book from the shelf second below the top. “The Geoffroys[3] were the first to go at the problem of abnormal births with any degree of thoroughness. We still use their awkward system of classification. That is, we have up until now. I’m putting the whole subject on a rational basis in my History.”

  Then a board creaked, and I looked up quickly to see Gideon Wyck lifting from the center table the book we had just returned at his request. “Morning,” he said sourly, letting the pages purr under an affectedly careless thumb. As the inserted paper marker flashed by, he snapped the book shut and slipped it into one of the big pockets of his gaudy dressing gown.

  “I say, you are looking ill, Gideon,” Prexy remarked. “You didn’t get out of bed to see us, did you? Better go back, if you did.”

  “Nonsense. Never been sick a day in my life.”

  Dr. Wyck scowled, and took a cigarette from a box on the table.

  Nevertheless, he was pale—paler even than la
st night. His hand shook as he lit the cigarette. Then, as if in boyish bravado, he took a tremendously deep drag and stood eyeing us insolently as thick smoke streamed outward slowly from his nostrils. I remember noting his almost comical similarity to the theatrical idea of an old roué on a morning after. He wore claret-colored silk pyjamas, open at the neck, and a brocaded dressing gown. His hair, of a suspiciously purple blackness, had just a suggestion of gray at the roots, to indicate that it needed to be redyed. The paleness of his features certainly meant that, if he was not ill, he had had far too little sleep.

  “Did you get those slides finished, last night?” he inquired.

  “The ones from the calf, I did,” Prexy answered, “but the moths are no good. They crush under the sharpest blade in the shop.”

  “Forget the moths, Fred. I’ll have something better than moths for you before your lecture’s due.”

  “Will you? What?”

  “I’ll tell you when I’ve got it. I’m expecting it any day, now.”

  “Meanwhile, you plan to be cryptic, I gather. Suit yourself. Say, where’s the Atlas to this Geoffroy set? May we take the whole thing along?”

  “Yes, if you like. The picture book’s in my office, I guess. I’ll get it for you this afternoon.”

  “What else have you got on monsters[4] that I haven’t seen?”

  “I don’t think there’s much. You’ve got copies of my papers, haven’t you? I sent you copies of them all.”

  “Yes. Well, we’ll be going. And you’d better put yourself to bed. You don’t look a bit well. Oh, that reminds me—there’s another reason. I don’t want you to come to faculty meeting tonight. There was a student in to see me at breakfast time who’s going to have you fired by petition to the state legislature. What’s his name? P-something.”