The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck

by Alexander Laing

  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.

  Seven

  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.

  “Last arrivals for this year,” he said. “Tomorrow we’ll give these babies their annual bath of chlorine for what ails ’em.” The stiff, musty carcasses were sewed up in white gauze shrouds. We heaved them into their stalls and sauntered back into the preparation room. The diener banged the vault door, snapped a system of bolts, and turned the key in the padlock. While I was washing the corpsiness off my hands, Dr. Wyck stalked silently up and laid on the table by the sink a thin book with marbled paper sides.

  “That that to the President’s,” he said. “It belongs with that Geoffory set. I found it in my office, upstairs.”

  I nodded and turned to rinse my hands. As I did so his reflection appeared in the mirror, side face. His features, which had been under control when he spoke to me, suddenly were contorted as if by extreme agony. I swung to see what was wrong, and found him smiling sourly at me, quite as usual.

  Had the mirror played a trick? I could have sworn that, for a moment when he felt himself to be unobserved, he had betrayed extreme suffering. Was it suffering, though, or something to do with the growing mania that apparently was overtaking him? I got out as quickly as possible.

  A few minutes later, while walking up Packard Road, I inspected the volume, which contained illustrations to the history of Anomalies.[1] The plates showed specific examples of abnormal births, but I found none of the symmelus type born at our hospital this morning. Prexy placed it with its companion volumes and then dictated a short address for the night’s faculty meeting. Presently, while I was typing it out, he picked up the volume of plates and went out on the sun porch. When I was separating the carbons to be filed away, I looked up to see him standing at the study door.

  “What next, sir?” I asked.

  “Get Wyck on the phone for me. I want to get all the facts straight about the student’s petition.”

  When I called his office, Daisy Towers said, “Sorry, Davy. He’s home, but he’s being pestered with long-distance calls today. I’ll call you back.”

  While waiting, I was overcome by a queer mixture of thoughts and emotions. A whole series of pent-up tensions had started to touch each other off, like a string of firecrackers.

  Daisy’s ring broke my reverie, and I called Dr. Alling to the phone. While he argued with the stubborn old Gideon, I looked again at the volume of plates. Quite by accident I noticed, on the contents page, the line:

  PLANCHE V. Monstres Syméliens.

  I turned to the place and found that Plate V had been neatly torn out!

  Dr. Alling hung up the receiver. I asked him at once if he had noticed that one of the plates was missing.

  “Oh?” He stopped short, and then admitted slowly, “Yes, as a matter of fact, I did.”

  “I’m sure it didn’t drop out en route, sir,” I said, leaving it for him to mention the coincidence that it was a picture of the very kind of monster born that morning. But he merely told me to inform Dr. Wyck of the loss at once, as the book was a rare first edition.

  After supper I came early to the medical school, hoping to find in the library a modern edition reproducing the plate; but my curiosity went unrewarded. Out in the second-floor corridor again, I noticed a strip of light by Dr. Wyck’s office door. He answered my knock with a surly, “Come in.”

  When I told him about the missing plate, he stared suspiciously, and then said, “All right, I can order a Photostat from the Library of Congress. Which one was it?”

  “Plate five.”

  He scribbled a notation, and then said, “I suppose we’d better be getting up to that damned meeting.”

  Thinking that he perhaps had forgotten Dr. Alling’s request, I said, “I thought this was your night off, sir.”

  “Well, Fred Alling may get away with playing God Almighty to the rest of the town, but he’s not going to do it with me. The gathering of nincompoops up there in the faculty room are always changing things behind my back. Well, if anything’s to be changed this time, it’ll be done to my face.”

  As we climbed slowly to the next floor, I noticed that he was gripping hard at the rail for support. The building itself was warm enough; yet the old doctor was still wearing a light topcoat indoors. We had reached the top of the stairway when somebody came out of the library on the floor below and called, “Oh, Dr. Wyck.”

  It was a classmate of mine named Jarvis. The doctor said, “Have you got something to keep busy with?”

  “Yes,” Jarvis answered, “we both brought our evening’s work.”

  “Keep at it then till I call you,” Dr. Wyck said, and stalked into the faculty room.

  Dr. Alling looked up with surprise; but the flash of annoyance on his face was quickly mastered. Wyck took his seat at the right end of the front row—to which he was entitled by seniority. I took my usual place at a small desk at the right of the dais, facing Prexy. The entire faculty was present. Also, in the back of the room, I saw Dick Prendergast and a small, rather pompous individual who was unknown to me.

  Prexy read his address; I read the minutes; there were three routine votes with no discussion. Prendergast’s petition was the last item to come up. It was, in its way, a masterpiece; but like most masterpieces, it was much too long—twenty-one typed pages—and did not lend itself readily to quotation. It is enough to describe it as vibrant with a sense of injustice that was unquestionably sincere, and studded with shrewd citations of Dr. Wyck’s unfairness, chose exclusively from among those instances in which the old doctor had been voted down by his colleagues, an excellent series of precedents for the final eloquent appeal that they vote him, not only down, but out of the faculty itself. Prendergast made no reference to the charge of cribbing, which
Wyck had given as justification of his own severity toward the student.

  Dick finished with a flourish and sat down. Prexy then inquired whether Dr. Wyck would like to have the matter tabled in order to have an opportunity to prepare a formal reply.

  “Oh, I don’t see any good reason for delaying, Mr. President,” Wyck drawled. “Ask Prendergast if he wrote this examination.”

  Dick hesitated, and then with a forced show of confidence indentified the blue book[2] as his own.

  Dr. Wyck then said, “Will the secretary see if Jarvis and Ross are in the library?”

  When they entered the faculty room, Dr. Wyck handed Jarvis another blue book, and said, “Where did you sit while writing this exam, Jarvis—if you did write it?”

  Jarvis inspected the blue book and said, “I must have been sitting in my regular assigned seat for your lecture, sir, I’m sure. The left end of the front row.”

  “Which hand do you write with?”

  “My right hand,” said the mystified Jarvis.

  “Do you remember who sat directly behind you, during that examination, Jarvis?” Dr. Wyck next inquired, and I expected to hear Jarvis say that it was Prendergast; for it was not obvious that the doctor was trying to show that the latter had copied from the former’s paper. Jarvis said, however, “I couldn’t be sure, sir. Ross usually did.”

  Ross then replaced Jarvis on the carpet, and admitted that he always had sat behind Jarvis.

  “Very well. And at the examination in question, who sat at your right, Ross?”

  Before Jap could answer, Dick leaped up to say, “I object.”

  “Ah, you do at last object?” Dr. Wyck said grimly. “To what, pray?”

  Prendergast hesitated, and then said lamely, “To the fact that I’m not given a chance to cross-examine one witness before the next is called.”

  “This is not a court of law,” Prexy said, smiling slightly. “However, we will extend this privilege, if you wish it.”

  But Prendergast had had nothing to ask Jarvis.

  “What he really objects to, I gather,” Dr. Wyck continued, “is having it known that his assigned seat was so located that he had a good view of the paper Jarvis was writing with his right hand, in the next chair ahead and to the left.”

  Prendergast whispered with the stout little man beside him, and then said, “I object to the whole procedure, Mr. President. All this is irrelevant to the specific charges of my petition.”

  “I’m sorry,” Prexy answered, “but I must again remind you that this is not a court of law. You will have a full opportunity for rebuttal. And you have a right to seek formal redress at law if you care to.”

  Poor Dick sat down, with the air of a general trying to revise plans in a crisis.

  “Ross,” Dr. Wyck continued, “do you recall any unusual occurrence during the first exam in my course, last fall?”

  Looking most uncomfortable, Ross swung around toward Prexy, and announced, “Sir, I don’t know what this is all about, but unless there’s a charge of some kind against me personally, I’d like to be excused. It—well, I’m not a preacher, sir.”

  “We want no lies,” Prexy told him promptly, “but you may refuse to answer any question, according to your conscience.”

  At once Dr. Wyck turned his attention to Prendergast. “Did I, or did I not, ask you, in the middle of the examination, to finish your paper where there was better light, in a seat alone in the back row?”

  “Yes, I remember that you did, now you mention it,” Prendergast said, with a show of cordiality. “And I was glad to have the opportunity. The room’s abominably lighted.”

  “Well, gentlemen,” Dr. Wyck concluded, “I leave these two blue books for your comparison. Jarvis got a perfect grade of twenty-five on each of the four questions. Prendergast answered the first two perfectly, when sitting in sight of Jarvis’s paper. But he got only three out of a possible twenty-five on the third, and a flat zero on the fourth, while gratefully writing under the better light of the rear windows. I recommend to your attention the underlined passages of identical wording in the two papers—all occurring in the first two questions—and leave to your discretion the problem of whether Jarvis copied over his shoulder from Prendergast, or whether it was Prendergast who relied upon Jarvis. I might add, although I hope it is not necessary, that Jarvis has stood at the head of his class throughout the last five semesters.”

  The above is mainly a transcript from my own shorthand minutes. I shall not attempt to give the rest of it verbatim. The parallel passages from the two blue books were read into the record by Prexy himself. Dick had enough sense to see that the case so far was all against him; but his basic nature showed up again when he pleaded, ably and even impressively, that since the grade for the examination had been entered originally by Dr. Wyck for full credit of fifty-three points, therefore he, Prendergast, had been fraudulently led into wasting time and money every since, to provide a “sadistic old megalomaniac” with an object to bully. It might have saved him if he had let it go at that; but the odd quirk which made him a sincere defender of preposterous propositions was once more his undoing. He ended by pointing out that it was mathematically possible for such parallel passages to have been written independently and he had the quaint crust to ask the members of the faculty to believe that this was the ten-millionth case.

  That hardly accounted, however, for the fact that he had done so very, very badly on the last two questions; and it was, moreover, an unfortunate reminder that in his exams there always seemed to be some evidence of cribbing. Much as it must have pained them to side with Gideon Wyck, his colleagues voted unanimously to expel, from the Maine State College of Surgery, the author of the petition rather than its subject.

  As the meeting adjourned, Prendergast was talking quickly and passionately with his companion. Dr. Wyck, still wearing his topcoat, walked up to Prexy and demanded the two blue books. Prexy handed them over without speaking a word. Wyck thrust them into an inside pocket and stalked from the room.

  Presently Prendergast’s pompous little companion marched up from the back of the room, and Prexy advanced to meet him, looking cordial and solicitous at once.

  “I’m terribly, terribly sorry about this wretched business, Senator,” he said. “I was altogether sincere in my belief that Dr. Wyck was too ill to be present, as I told you. I was sure that no action would be taken at this time.”

  The little statesman snorted something unintelligible. It was only then that I realized the full extent of the calamity. The stranger was obviously Prendergast’s uncle—Senator Tolland—one of the pivotal group in the legislature, whose allegiance Prexy had gained only through the exercise of much shrewdness and tact. Moreover, Prexy himself had had no idea of the relationship between Senator Tolland and Prendergast until that very evening.

  “Do you mean to say, sir,” he asked, “that on all these seventeen occasions which Dick, here, had cited, the faculty as a group voted unanimously to override this man Wyck, in—in assigning grades, and whatnot?”

  Prexy nervously admitted that it was so.

  “You should have discharged him on the first repetition of it, sir. If he is not cashiered at once I shall submit a bill to the legislature to withhold the carry-over appropriation voted last term, pending an investigation, sir, of Dr. Wyck’s fitness to teach.”

  Prexy mildly pointed out the Prendergast’s record had been continually worse, not only under Wyck, but in all his work except dissections, all year. The nephew broke in to say that this was due to Wyck, whose persecution had unsettled him to the verge of a nervous breakdown.

  Senator Tolland significantly mentioned a society for protecting animals from cruelty, and a number of religious organizations. Prexy visibly blanched. It was terrifically hard to get cadavers for dissection, over the prejudices of squeamish folk, and the antivivisectionists were continually seeking injunctions against the use of living animals in medical research. I did not blame Prexy for inviting the senator to confer
with him further at his own residence.

  Histoire Générale et Particulière des Anomalies do l’Organisation chez l’Homme at les Amimaux; etc. des Monstruosités, des variétés et des vices de conformation, ou Traité de Tératologie, par M. Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Paris: J. B. Ballière, Librairie de l’Académie Royale de Médecine, 1837. (The volume referred to above is the “Atlas” containing twenty engraved plates and a table of contents.)

  A kind of blank notebook, with blue covers, in which formal examinations at most colleges and similar institutions are written. The standard blue book cannot be purchased, and is given out by the proctor at the time of the examination, to reduce the chance for cheating, or smuggling notes into the examination room.—Ed.

  Eight

  Atlantic Street in unlighted for the three deserted blocks between the lunch wagon and the two big globes over the hospital gates. Consequently, as I swung along the sandy side path, I was able to see two figures standing in the middle of the gateway. I approached noiselessly, all the more interested when I recognized one of them as Nurse Finch. The other, I soon gathered, was the farmer named Tompkins; he was objecting, “But I can’t afford to pay no more to thet place, miss, ’spite of what ye say.”

  “You leave her for the night,” Muriel insisted. “She’s just completely tuckered out, and there’s no sense bumping her back to the farm tonight. I’ll see to it that you don’t have to pay anything. And about the other bill, for the oxygen and all, just you forget it. None of the other doctors but him would have billed you with that.”

  The old fellow growled that he would be glade to hand the money over to Wyck in person for the chance to do something or other; but just what the threat was I could not hear. Muriel extended her hand. He wiped his apologetically on his thigh before shaking hands with a vigorous, awkward jerk. Then he turned and went back through the gates to get his flivver. Muriel, to my surprise, turned north on the lonely road to Alton Center. There was no house in that direction for miles except old Gideon’s. I was about to join her when the question of her reason for walking in that direction, at such an hour, made me pause. I decided to intercept her in front of the Wyck residence if she did seem to actually to contemplate turning in there.