The Recognitions

by William Gaddis

  Reverend Gwyon returned to the breakfast table empty-handed. He startled slightly upon seeing the empty chair to his left, and looked no more composed upon seeing the one to his right occupied. So Reverend Gwyon sat alone there at the head of the table as he did every morning, with a second, a third, and a fourth glass of the dark oloroso from Spain and the look on his face of a man who’s just come on a bone in a mouthful of fishmeat.

  —“Ah, that dear old mother’s Bible, Wherein my name she wrote, And marked me many sacred texts, Which once I well could quote . . .”

  These words, rising on the clear New England morning air, were neither loud nor clear, for the Town Carpenter was absorbed in his work, and the five ten-penny nails he had clamped between his gums did not serve song as teeth, even so few, might have done. He continued to hammer, and word by word the next stanza became clearer, as nail by nail was taken to be driven into the wood. By the time he reached the last stanza, and stood back to look at his work, his mouth was quite empty of anything but song, which came out quite clear, and the small dog lying there raised its head to attend,

  —So who’ll bid for a Bible?

  A purchaser I crave.

  Live while we may, we’ll drink today:

  There’s no drinking in the grave.

  With that, he threw his hammer in the dog’s direction. The dog moved as fast as the hammer, gained its feet, and followed him up the lawn wagging its tail.

  Janet was there in the kitchen, older, square-shouldered, her face dark about the chin and faintly blue the rest of it from that mercuric compound of Aunt May’s prescription renewed year after year. She strode to the stove, where two pots stood over the fire. The one she stirred, with a large spoon worn off square with stirring, was Scotch oatmeal. The other pot bubbled on, and Janet paid it no attention but to sniff the rising steam and turn away the large features of her face, drawing down her upper lip so that that gum was almost covered, and appearing not to breathe, careful and troubled about many things.

  When the Town Carpenter arrived she was to her knees on the floor there and he, hearing the sharp tinkle of a bell as he got near, had slowed his uneven pace, and paused in the door respectfully. He waited for her to rise before he advanced into the kitchen with, —“Nymph in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered,” crossing then to the other pot on the stove, —as Tom Swift has it, he added.

  —Not that fork, not that fork! Janet said, coming to take away the fork he’d picked up.

  —There . . . now, he said to her, looking helpless until she thrust a piece of lath in his hand where she’d got the fork from.

  —But this, it’s got paint on it, he said waving the stick in the air.

  —Old old paint, years and years old and hard and dry and it was white, she said sounding weary, speaking dry and low in no effort to make herself heard but giving him anyway the satisfaction of seeing her lips move. Then she turned away, stooped, cumbered with much serving.

  He bent absorbed over the other pot; from it he raised a steaming length on the end of the stick. —There now, he muttered, let it drop back and stirred it a bit. —A month of underwear can’t come clean in a minute.

  —Four days it’s been there, Janet said absently, —four days in the year, lamenting the daughter of Jephthah four days in the year . . .

  He continued to stir at his pot. —You were late this morning, he interrupted finally, as she drew breath to go on and fight the battles of Ammon and Gilead, to follow the daughter of Jephthah bewailing her virginity in the mountains. She did not answer but with three sharp raps of the spoon on the rim of the saucepan.

  —Three minutes late when I heard your press commence this morning, the Town Carpenter went on, to the square of her back. —How many pages did you print, tell me.

  —You don’t print them one two three four five, she answered not turning, —six seven eight nine ten eleven . . .

  —How many? He tried to see her lips as she reached a bowl down.

  —Eight one five four at a time, Janet said in the same dull tone, —two seven three six at a time . . .

  —There now, he mumbled, shaking his head and looking back into his own pot on the stove. —We all have our work to do.

  —The Lord keep us, until we finish it, Janet said.

  The shape of those first two syllables on her lips seemed to strike him, familiar; and the Town Carpenter drew his own lips close, bridling the argument which lay impatient behind them, not, however, before its invitation had escaped. —A man . . .

  —The Lord . . .

  —A man takes his own chances, he got out quickly. Janet looked at him, her brow and lip drawn up, troubled.

  —There now, I meant nothing. No disrespect to you, he said, twice her age but no more serious for all that even now, turning slow with his arms hung down and the top button of his underwear standing out like a creased stud against his informal attire. —After it all, he brought out soberly, —after your healing miracle then, restoring me the use of my legs, well, there now, I couldn’t be disrespectful to you after that.

  —Not to me, but to our Lord He healed you.

  —There now, he mumbled in assent, —not after that.

  —You must not talk so about these things, she said. —You must not, he must not, they must not . . .

  —Do you recall the queer little salesman selling brushes, the Town Carpenter began, opening a new conversation since he’d lost track of the old one, —and told Reverend he was a Manichee . . .

  Janet carried a bowl of oatmeal away through the door. Directly she was out he got the fork she’d taken from him and came back to his pot on the stove. He leaned down to blow off the steam, and then speared twice, each time coming up with a boiled potato. He quick wiped the fork on his trouser knee, then looked at it, and at the spot on his trouser knee, with a look near guilt, and thrust the tines of the fork under his shirt to wipe them clean there. When Janet came back, the fork was where she’d laid it; but she took no notice of him eating the one or the dog standing over the other boiled potato waiting for it to cool. She stood, wringing one hand in the other, and her eyes were very wide.

  —There now, what is it? the Town Carpenter demanded, watching.

  —He’s come.

  —What is it, now?

  —He’s here. As he said he would come.

  The Town Carpenter hung there, imbibing Janet’s excitement. She sought another bowl.

  —Another bowl? he demanded, confused. —Someone’s here?

  —He’s come back.

  —So it’s not the weightless show of a priest was here, him or the Manichee brush salesman. Is it . . . is it . . .

  —He . . .

  —Prester John?

  —Prester John! Janet repeated. —If Prester John is young and old, and warm and cold, and breathes and does not breathe alive, wears blood on the hand, and sees with eyes not open. Maran-atha!

  —He’s come! There now, the Town Carpenter said. —Feed him. Feed him well, it’s a long journey. Here, a potato, take a potato . . . But she was gone, with another bowl of oatmeal. —There now, no disrespect after that, the Town Carpenter muttered going toward the outside door. —He’ll come down. I’ll wait for him there, he said to himself; but he paused in the door till Janet returned to the kitchen. —There, he murmured to her, —no disrespect, you know. “I am but a lump of clay, but I was placed beside a rose and caught its fragrance . . .” He stood a minute looking at Janet busy over the metal sink, squinting his eyes up with looking at her. Then the dog followed him out the door and down the lawn toward the carriage barn, carrying its hot potato.

  He’d only got halfway down there when her voice on the air stopped him, and he turned. —And he, has he eaten? she cried.

  —That one, he won’t come near, the Town Carpenter called back to her, and he motioned toward the fence below which led away from the carriage barn and coursed the pasture’s bounds. Title to that piece of land, long disputed with a neighbor, fell to his bull who spent th
e days there and had gradually become a familiar, encouraged by the girl and the old man with a feed box and even, finally, a stall in the carriage barn. Now Janet came out unwrapped in the cold morning and down the slope with long strides to the fence, where she made a moaning sound that brought the bull from out of sight immediately. The bull was all black, the weight well up in its forequarters sustaining those swells of muscle mounting in the great swell of the neck. Its approach was effortless, not a movement wasted, because every bit of it was in movement, movement which absorbed the weight of it and became motion coming forth here on legs as slender they looked as a man’s wrists swinging beneath. It came on at an angle to its path, which gave it a sense of drift as though suffering the wind to carry it along from behind; and the great weight of it was not apparent until it came close by, when even its breath dashed on the cold air fell with weight, and a hoof no longer adrift, but exerted to break the crust of the winter ground, made its force volitive, standing still.

  Janet had watched its advance with a look of familiar wonder which almost broke her face into a smile. Now it was before her she stirred the feed in the box there with a square hand of hers and gazed with two eyes into one; and which of them made the gentle sound that rose between them wasn’t clear as she caught a finger in a curl above the eye, and then left the bull at the feed box, sobering her face as she turned back for the house, and the bull raised its head, and watched her go.

  The Town Carpenter raised a two-by-four, and nailed it carefully slightly out of line. —O pirate ships of the drunken main! O monster cruisers of wicked gain! . . . there now. He’s finally got here.

  Once in, Janet made across the kitchen for the dining room, there picked up the empty oatmeal bowl from the empty place at the head of the table, and stood staring at the figure across. —He’s come, she murmured, and advanced an empty hand in the air. Then her gaze shortened to her hand there, which she squared round to meet it, to look at the palm, and return to the kitchen. She put the empty bowl in the sink. Then she slipped on a pair of gloves, took a slip of emery cloth from her skirt pocket and knelt rubbing her chin, her cheek, and her upper lip.

  The sun was high enough now to fill the dining room with its light, over the dark dining table, and the low table under the window, and warm on the back of his neck when he woke moving nothing but his eyelids, opened upon the bowl of cold oatmeal before him, and nothing there else but a spoon. He did stare at the bowl and the spoon for a moment, or a minute, in that waking suspension of time when co-ordination is impossible, when every fragment of reality intrudes on its own terms, separately, clattering in and the mind tries to grasp each one as it passes, sensing that these things could be understood one by one and unrelated, if the stream could be stopped before it grows into a torrent, and the mind is engulfed in the totality of consciousness. Al-Shira-al-jamânija, consider the Dog Star: death? or Islam. Then perfect diamonds, and so across that brink of unbearable loneliness, and fully awake, startled only with the quiet, and the sunlight bearing flecks of silent motion. If there had been a dream, it was gone back where it came from, to refurbish its props, to be recast probably, possibly rewritten, given a new twist to put it across, make it memorable to the audience and acceptable to the censor, all that, but the same old director, same producer, waiting to dissemble the same obscenities before the same captive audience, waiting, again, the first curtain of sleep. He smiled, looking at the oatmeal, and as he did so reached up a hand as though to feel the smile on his face, and fix it there; it was gone when he looked up to the end of the table and saw it empty, and as immediately occupied it from memory but memory which, so suddenly assailed, leaped too far back, and brought forth the Emperor Valerian blinded, in taut agony, flayed under the hand of Sapor, the Persian emperor who battled Christianity in the name of the sun prophet Zoroaster, whose god, Ormazd, lord of light and goodness, wars ceaselessly against Ahriman, and the hosts of evil.

  This house had a sense of bereavement about it; though no one had come or gone in a long time. The corridors rang with oppressive familiarity and, perhaps it was the distance that each step covered, the sense of diffusion persisted, diffusion from essential childhood, moving too fast too slowly, rested physically, arriving too soon without expenditure or the pulsations of effort, filling too much space and thus less instead of more powerful, less capable of hiding.

  He was inclined to pause, passing the maimed hand upraised of the noseless Olalla, with his hand upon things, affirming their mass; and each weighed enough in return, resisting his touch, to affirm its reality, to belie, that is, the realities which had taken its place.

  Suffer barbaric childhood to give and receive remorselessly; civilized age learns to protect what it has, to neither give nor accept freely, to trust its own mistrust above faith, and intriguing others above the innocent. Intrigue, after all, is rational, something the mind can sink its teeth into, and defeat it with the good digestion of reason, a hopeless prospect for the toothless heart, and God only knows what innocence will do next. So prudence rescues the emotions, and exiles them out of reach, countenancing only anxious glances from what another hero came forth from the desert to call “the hesitating retinue of finer shades.”

  In the unilluminated hallway where Olalla stood in her niche, he paused the ball of a thumb on the saint’s broken nose, and smiled, the same involuntary smile of recognition that had lightened his face, and left it and come back, remaining each time a little longer and more fully extended, trying the unfamiliar terrain, since his arrival.

  Childhood, the plain-dealer: nothing approached it but upon intimate terms. It’s the shades of experience that afford shadows of fear, but the black-and-white of childhood discovers the intimacy of terror. Here, benign Olalla suffers the plunder of her face with wistful gravity in her stone eyes, empty now of the vengeful malice with which they had threatened blind justice upon unwary passers-by; and the hand, once poised to smash a passing skull, now lay flat up in benediction. What greater comfort does time afford, than the objects of terror re-encountered, and their fraudulence exposed in the flash of reason? Triumph! as though it were any cleaner, or happier, or more bare of disappointment, than the deadening shock of re-encounter with the object of love.

  Songs of innocence and experience. fill the head so empty of aching that the ache is forgotten, a brawl, but an orderly one, a sequence of decorous violence as neatly carried forth as the fight between the Pleasant and the Unpleasant Thoughts in Handel’s Almira.

  There were no clocks anywhere in sight or hearing.

  —And hmmm . . . he did, did he? And he took away the horses that the kings of Judah had given to the sun, at the entering in of the house of the Lord, by the Chamber of Nathan-melech . . . hmm, Melech? Melich? the chamberlain, which was in the suburbs, and burned the chariots of the sun with fire . . .

  This came, borne from behind the study door on the pungent vehicle of caraway, into the hall where he stood about to knock.

  —And he put down the idolatrous priests, and hmmm whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense in the high places in the cities of Judah, and in the places round about Jerusalem; them also that burned incense hmmm hmmmph unto Baal, to the sun, and to the moon, and to the planets, and to all the host of heaven . . .

  Though the words stopped, the caraway came on, unladen but maintaining a belligerent calm out into the hall where he lowered his hand without knocking. Then as he turned from the door he said to himself aloud,

  —How safe I am from accident here.

  —In the precious blood of . . .

  —Janet!

  —Yes, she answered in a loud clear whisper, —I knew you would return. She stood before him with her gloved hands clasped, and her eyes shining with what light there was in the hall. He started past her, saying —My father . . .

  —Still awaits you, she assented, eager. —Our Father . . .

  —Janet, he said getting by her, and smiling to her, to calm the great agitation which threatened, as
she came after him close as could be without touching him, to break out in some more vehement expression of welcome, —yes, I have come back.

  —Rabboni, they doubted, she said. —I did not.

  —Yes, seeing you here, and . . . he faltered, —I . . . my father . . . backing from her, —back . . .

  —From the tomb! she whispered clear.

  —Yes, it . . . in a way, he mumbled, reaching the door, —recovering from . . . good God, I . . . He fumbled with the handle behind him; and she held off, reflecting the vigilant angles of woodwork beyond her.

  —The . . . reassuring feeling . . . he went on, figuring his hand in the air between them, —being home again . . . though the scraping of the door obscured his words to her, —here, to feel myself again, here . . .

  —They will not know you.

  —The reason I came back . . .

  —Shall I tell them, it is you, come back?

  The chill of outdoors embraced him from behind. —I . . . I . . . He commenced to shiver against it.

  —Or will you tell them, in your own time? she asked with a step toward him.

  —Yes, yes, he said, getting the door closed between them, and shutting her intensively submissive, conspiratory affirmation into the dim hall with her.

  The scraps of cloud which the dawn had found out, drifting with no apparent purpose, met here and there now the sky was light. A delegation of them moved round to east, toward the sun; and others, darkly separate in the west, conspired together over Mount Lamentation, where he raised his eyes. It was the most prominent of an ascendance of rolling hills, drawn up against the only clear horizon; and that simply, it had been the horizon beyond which lay destiny. Again, the cold air stabbed with each breath. No matter the direction on a map, it was beyond Mount Lamentation Lapland lay, waiting for the Gospel. From one step to the next he dropped his weight, jarring, as his feet hit, restraining him down the hard slope toward the carriage barn; and remarkable here, as indoors, the distance a few steps covered, each one a familiar measurement of compulsion, but without the sense of motion, of the dash which this precipitous decline had once insisted down.