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.
Fourteen
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.
“Leave me alone,” I ordered. “I’m a medic. Have you got a clean handkerchief?”
One was produced, and I used it, rolled, to separate his foaming his jaws, as the only immediate danger in such an attack is that the victim may bit his tongue off. The twitching diminished, and I expected him to go into the series of snores that should end the seizure. Instead, he rolled over suddenly, laughed, an opened his eyes with hugely dilated pupils that reminded me of Mike’s at the moment of his first violent madness. Ted Gideon’s attack had lasted less than five minutes. He began to talk in an exultant fashion, disconnectedly: the state called epilepsia larvata, which at times succeeds a minor attack. I knelt beside him, listening attentively. His ravings not only confirmed some of our former conjectures explicitly, but also seemed to add new information which we could hardly have surmised.
As I was too busy listening to take down his words, I shall try to describe rather than to reproduce what he said. At first, between bursts of laughter, he seemed to be making boyish love to a reluctant and inexperienced girl, for he kept repeating vague boasts about his experience as a man of the world, chiding the young lady for her prudishness. Then he became angry, and began to describe his prowess as a lover, using the fine old Anglo-Saxon four-letter monosyllables with that peculiar fervor which we sometimes notice in the remarks of patients coming out of either—an effect which must be the psychological atoning for repression of such terms in ordinary speech. Next he was releasing a speech which extolled the advantages of being a bastard. Chuckling with imbecilic glee, he announced that his father had become impotent, and that he himself had inherited his father’s mistresses.
All of this came out garbled with irrelevant words and inaudible whisperings. His ravings next took on a sad tone, and the word “Sarah” was repeated over and over, with promises of marriage and outburst of invective against his father.
Gradually he quieted, and I questioned his two scared friends. They were positive that he had never had such an attack before; but one of them remembered that while swimming, Ted had once fainted. He had recovered while being brought ashore, had thought that his rescuer was trying to duck him, and had promptly ducked the rescuer. Everyone thought at the time that he had been pretending, but Ted had insisted that nothing had happened until someone tried to duck him. This confirmed mu suspicion that the improperly diagnosed symptoms of a year back had been early phrases of the disease of epilepsy. Old Wyck himself surely could not have known what it was, or he would never have allowed the boy to act as his driver.
I had to proceed quickly now, and it seemed wise to take what I had learned and be satisfied, for the time being. So I told his friends to watch him, and above all things not to let him know that he had done anything other than faint from illness, explaining that an epileptic never realizes that he has had a fit unless told. Then I hastened to the clergyman, described what had happened, and cautioned him that it would be most unwise under the circumstances to mention me or my mission. With that I left for Nantucket. There I gave my Harvard friend all the data except the spoken phrases, confident that he would continue the case history, a fact which might be of use before I was through.
On board the boat, headed back to New Bedford, I had every reason to believe that all these new facts had been collected without the knowledge of Ted Gideon. Of the things he had said aloud he would have no memory whatever.
The narrator does not seem to realize the interesting point that such an amputation had been advocated to aid in curing the malady from which “Ted Gideon” is later described as being a sufferer. See the New International Encyclopaedia, vol. viii, page 25.—Ed.
Fifteen
Adequate sleep, food, and fresh air—the therapeutic three virtues which all good doctors prescribe for others and skimp for themselves—had worked their usual miracles with me. The chance discovery of Ted Gideon, while it shortened my mental vacation, eased my mind after homecoming. Nantucket physicians hardly would allow him to leave the island. I would know where to find him.
When I reached home, at 4 P.M. on August 29th, Biddy seemed genuinely glad to see me.
“Hello there, Mr. David. Did ye meet any pretty girls at the beach? I’ll bet ye did all yer sleepin’ in the mornin’.”
“Biddy,” I said, “I had trouble fighting them off, but ’tis God’s truth that I haven’t had a date in two weeks.”
“I don’t believe ye. But if there’s truth in it, then ye must be in love. And that reminds me—Daisy Towers called yesterday to inquire when you’d a be comin’ home. She says you told her today, in a letter, and I says why was you writin’ letters to her, I’d like to know?”
Feeling that my face was reddening, I explained that it was on hospital business. “How’s Mike?” I asked.
“They say he’ll niver be any better”—her voice caught—“oh, and God knows I miss him, Mr. David.”
I gave her a squeeze, told her she was
a brave colleen, and hurried off to see Daisy, who threw me a kiss through the reception window.
“Well, Romeo, have you been resting or going in for frivolity and riot?” she asked with good-natured suspicion. Then she added in a whisper, “Lots has happened.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” I said softly. “What till I tell you who I saw.”
With eyes alone she asked the question—Who? In the mirror I could now see the face of the housemother, listening intently, unaware of the reflection. I stepped back and silently framed with my lips the name, “Ted Watson.” Daisy pursed her lips, said “Number please,” and thrust a switchboard plug into the appropriate jack.
Eight-thirty came at last. Daisy was wearing a cool green frock, kind to her coppery hair and to the golden tan of her shoulders. Her mother was seated beside her on the porch, but soon excused herself.
“Thank goodness,” Daisy sighed. “I’ve been burning up since five o’clock. What about”—she lowered her voice—“Ted Watson?”
“The legal name’s Ted Gideon,” I corrected her, and then gave a full account of the case history, ending with a description of the epileptic seizure.
“Could the epilepsy have been hereditary? That might account for some of the old wretch’s conduct,” she said.
“It’s not likely. But we’ve got to work on the theory that this trail of monsters and maniacs leads back to a single primary cause. Mike and the son both mad, and three monsters born—”
“It’s five now, David. Since you left there was one miscarriage with the baby so macerated that no one could tell what it was. And there was—” She paused impressively.
“Another symmelus?” I asked grimly.
“Yes, a fourth symmelus, with no arms. The hands were like flippers. Except for the head and the color of it, you could think it was a baby seal.”
The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck Page 10
