The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (5 page)

I explained my stand briefly, but Prendergast ended by calling me a coward, and some other students had to stop the threatening fight. After that scene I had no occasion before the faculty meeting to question him about Wyck’s actual behavior.

The whole episode was in character. Prendergast and I, at the University of Maine, had both engaged in a feat of undergraduate journalism that caused quite a flurry on the campus: a little crusading weekly hat he immodestly called
Prendergast’s Pillory.
 He was, of course, editor-in-chief. I was literary editor, general proofreader, make-up man, and office dog.

It had been good fun. Prendergast filled the two inside pages with excellent militant editorials, naming names and sparing no one. He put two or three local bootleggers out of business for selling bad liquor, of which
Prendergast’s Pillory
 published an exact chemical analysis, together with the name of the seller, place of purchase, and price. The government took no notice, but the students simply stopped buying. The paper printed frequent attacks upon what were considered unjust administrative procedures. Each issue contained a curt analysis of the teaching qualifications of one member of the faculty.

My friend Prendergast was always crusading for what he believed to be just causes, in a courageous but transient way. On the other hand, he had blind spots of character. It should be emphasized, however, that the main source of his B.S. degree was the
Pillory,
 rather than classwork. Amiable professors, who admired him as a journalist, overlooked his neglect of format studies.

But the situation at medical school had proved to be decidedly different. No one would give him a passing grade in Physiological Chemistry on the basis of his worth as a crusader. Glibness and an excellent memory had barely got him by the first two years. We all knew, moreover, that he was a chronic cribber on exams. It had not surprised me in the least to learn that Wyck had caught him at it. His dissections were excellently done, with the aid of a glance or two at the work of tolerant friends.

In the
Pillory,
 Prendergast had bitterly fought the examination system per se. Since he sincerely disbelieved in examinations as a way of testing knowledge, I suppose he could crib without any loss of self-respect. At any rate, examinations had been the immediate cause of his undoing; and he was certainly displaying journalistic shrewdness in attacking an author for his woes at once so terrifying and so vulnerable as Gideon Wyck.

When the threatened fight over signing his petition had ended in Prendergast’s being hauled away, a hoarse voice sounded from the basements stairs.

“Hey, Doc. Hey one o’ you, give us a hand. Hey!”

That, I knew was Charlie Michaud, the diener[
2
] of the anatomy museum, who indiscriminately addressed all students as “Doc.” I descended the basement stairs that led to the preparation room, where bodies for dissection were embalmed.

“Hello, Doc,” Charlie said, “want to see my latest invention? It’s a whiz. Only trouble is, I invented it so as to make it easier for one guy to do the job, and, by George, it takes two to run it. I got tired o’ sawin’ all these damn skulls with a handsaw, so I rigged up this little rotary saw—see!—on this extry motor that was kickin’ around. Only, it takes both my hands to hold the saw gadget steady, and that damn stiff’s head wobbles. Put yer foot on her face, will ya? Hold it steady, so’s I can take the top of her head off. I’m scairt I’ll dig in too deep, the way my nice invention’s workin’ so far.”

“How do I know you won’t cut my foot off, while you’re at it?” I objected, as I climbed up beside the corpse on which he was working.

“All you got to do is jump in time, Doc,” he said, genially. “Here she goes.”

He pressed a switch, and the little motor with its rotary saw snarled to full speed. I jammed the instep of my boot down hard on the stiff’s face, and said, “Go ahead, but take it easy.”

The head shuddered under my foot as the saw bit into the skull. Charlie moved it steadily through a half circle. Then we heaved the corpse over, and he completed the process from the back.

“There, Doc,” he said, exultantly, bending the head back a little and taking off the top of the skull as if it were the lid of a box. “How’s that? Woulda taken half an hour, the old way. Did it in no more’n a minute, with this new invention.”

He stuck his fingers down between the bone and the brain, lifting the frontal lobe free of the temporal.

“Ain’t she a beauty?” he said, admiringly. “Inside of he head looks a lot better than the outside, hey? Wouldn’t think she’d have such a nice, neat brain, with a mug like that, would you? Well, thanks, Doc. I’ll give you a yell when I’ve got another to do.”

The little sample episode out of Charlie’s routine labors is given to help explain some of the occurrences yet to come. Ordinarily, the very presence of a dead body is a deeply disturbing factor in community life. People in general cannot rest content until they have put a corpse out of the way, underground or in the crematory oven. Our efforts were of an exactly opposite sort. It was difficult for the school to get corpses at all. When we got them, we did all that we could to make them last. Each of us had his own cadaver in the anatomy course, and became exceedingly well acquainted with every wrinkle and secret of it, as Rupert Brooke would say, before the year was over. But it takes only a week or so to get thoroughly used to working in a room full of mutilated dead bodies; presently you reach a point where you think nothing of holding a dead woman’s face steady with your foot, while someone else saws the top of her head off. In such surroundings, the remains of violent crime do not seem quite so appalling as they must among good ordinary citizens.

1. Guazzo’s
   Compendium Maleficarum,
   a famous handbook used in the Church’s persecution of witches, gives it as a common sign of demonic possession to “feel a contraction of the heart,
   as if it had been unmercifully beaten.”
   See p. 169 of edition tr. by E. A. Ashwin, London, John Rodker, 1929.
   
2. The casual use of the term “diener” in this narrative is one reason why Mr. Painter feels certain that a genuine medical student is the author. The term, so far as I have been able to discover, is in use in this country in medical schools exclusively. It apparently comes directly from the German for “servant,” and reveals the Germanic training of most of the teachers.
   

Jap Ross, a big squint-eyed classmate of mine, joined me as I was hurrying down once more to leave the building. “Had lunch?” he asked. “Come on over to the dog cart with me.”

“I’d like to see that symmelus, up at the hospital, while it’s still alive,” I said. “If it is still alive, that is.”

“That what?”

I explained. There was no reason why a third-year medic should know about the classifications of monsters, a subject that would not be touched upon except in its relation to obstetrics, in the last year. My own information came from the accident of my job with Prexy Alling.

“Oh, all right,” Jap said. “I hear you and Dick Prendergast were going to bust each other in the nose, a little while ago. Each of you claiming that you were the true papa of the whatchemecallit—symbolus?”

“No, I’m not a claimant. In fact, I don’t even know whether the mother was one of my girl friends. Who was she?”

“Dunno. Hey, Mickey,” Ross shouted to a second-year man, “congratulations. I hear you’re the father of a bouncing, eight-pound, symbol-whatchemecallit. Nice going, boy, old boy. Who’s the mother?”

Mickey Rehan came prancing over to assure us that he could not possibly have any children in the month of April. He had spent both July and August nursing a lumber freighter from Eastport to Algiers and back, and had been quarantined during his whole stay in the foreign port.

“All right, you’re exonerated,” Ross agreed. /“Cherchez la femme,/ and then we’ll have a better idea of who’s the proud papa. Who was she?”

“Girl named Mullin, according to Daisy Towers, who ought to know. Ever heard of her?”

The name sounded vaguely familiar, but I could not place it. Neither could Jap, who grunted, “She must have come by way of the Widow.”

That remark touches upon one of the reasons why Prexy has to be careful about reactions in the state legislature. To say that a woman had come to the hospital “by way of the Widow” meant that she had been resident for a while in a boardinghouse kept by the Widow Schmidt on the road to South Alton.

The Widow’s was both a practical and humane institution. However, since it dealt with a social problem which the community preferred to ignore, it was subjected to continual efforts at suppression. It was a boardinghouse, a refuge for pregnant woman who wanted both secrecy and intelligent medical care during the latter, more noticeable months of their pregnancy. Anyone who did not object to an audience could have her child gratis at the Altonville hospital, in consideration of the training thus afforded to students at the College of Surgery. Such patients needed a place to stay for the last doubtful week or two, and many preferred to stay at the Widow’s for two or three months, or even longer.

The Widow formerly had been a professional abortionist. Prexy once told me that she, after serving a stiff jail term, had come to him with the candid proposition that she set up an establishment along the present lines. He had recognized both the humanity and the scientific advantages of the arrangement, and had offered her some measure of protection in return for the right of medical overseership. An interne from the hospital visited the place daily, accompanied at least once a week by one of the staff physicians. It was suspected that the Widow occasionally indulged in her old profession, but no one had caught her at it.

As Ross and I neared the hospital, someone was saying, “Hell, you goofs, the proud papa’s probably old Gideon himself. She was the Wyck’s maid before she got a bit too much of a profile and had to be sent off to the Widow’s.”

Then I remembered. The girl had been discharged from the nursing staff. Her name was Sarah Mullin. She had fetched up as housemaid at the Wyck’s. As I speculated upon the not unlikely possibility that Wyck had philandered with his own domestic servant, a phrase he had spoken that very morning flashed back into my memory:

“Forget the moths, Fred,” he had said, intimating that he would have something better, in the way of monsters, for Dr. Alling to make slides of. And he had added, “I’m expecting it any day.”

For a moment my brain spun with the notion, ghastly and fantastic, that Gideon Wyck, by some means of prenatal influence unknown to orthodox morphological science, had deliberately begotten this monster. It was doubly shocking, with such a thought in mind, to be confronted at the main door of the hospital by Wyck himself. There was a bitter smile on his small, handsome mouth. His eyes seemed luminous with a checked passion. His face was still very pale. I felt as if released from an evil spell when he walked slowly down the steps.

Jap and I found the wretched little monstrosity in a room adjoining the free maternity ward. Several other medics were clustered around it, pridefully displaying to each other their calloused natures. The head and upper body of the creature were well enough formed, but for an abnormally distended belly. Although still breathing faintly, it must soon die; because the lower limbs were completely fuse together, leaving no external opening for either the intestinal or the urinary system. The creature’s single, centrally located leg tapered to where the knees should have been, and there contracted suddenly to a girth of little more than your thumb, continuing thence for a few more inches and ending in a raw, skinless blob.

“Not even a semicolon to punctuate his brief career,” remarked Ross.

“Yeah,” someone cut in, “Wyck’s going to do a post[
1
] on him, as soon as young symmy cashes in his checks, and find out just what does become of his pipes.”

In view of this I found it difficult to believe that Wyck could be the father of the monster. We had every cause for thinking the old doctor unbalanced; but even so, it did not seem fair to suppose that he was sufficiently morbid to cut up a child of his own begetting, especially when his co-worker, Dr. Alling, was at least as competent for the special requirements of the job.