“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 multimillionare, 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 jo,b in the nearby hospital; it was not much money, true, but it was steady and far better than nothing.