The Recognitions

by William Gaddis

  —An accident? Stanley repeated. The strain of calm in his voice, instead of breaking, had driven it down to a dumbness. He stared.

  —This is serious, now listen, she . . .

  —She was going to marry me.

  —O.K., but a chance like this, she couldn’t just . . . she would have been made.

  —Made?

  —I told you, 1 told her, she . . . we’ve rented a whole town for this thing. Even if they changed the story line around on us a little, they’re going to make it the Divine Comedy by Dante now, instead of a straight life of the B.V.M., see? So maybe she’ll only have a bit-part at the end, but that’s all right. The whole thing builds up to that anyway, see? Where he meets her at the end. I haven’t read the script yet, but they got a shooting script all ready for this thing, see? This Divine Comedy by Dante . . .

  —She’s dead, Stanley insisted suddenly, then was silent again.

  —But . . . what happened? What happened?

  —She died, she . . . she had a place on her lip, a sore, a . . . and it got infected, it was something like . . . staphylococcic infection, and it happened just like that almost, in a couple of days, she . . .

  —How’d she pick up something like that just like that, she . . .

  —She wasted away, so quickly as though she . . . she had no will to live, and she . . . she said, Stanley shuddered, —from kissing Saint-Peter-in-the-Boat, she said, For some fishes, the sea, the sea . . .

  —Come on, get hold of yourself, you can’t . . . The man took his shoulder, nodded and muttered, —Yeah, she . . . God damn it. He looked at Stanley, who stood staring dumbly at the pictures on the silk necktie. —And . . . God damn it, we’ve got it all tied in, this contest, we’ve got it all tied in with this canonization that’s coming up, and this Assumption thing, all this God-damned publicity for this contest, God damn it, she was the B.V.M. incarnate, she had it in the bag. Now it’s too late to do a God-damned thing. Then as Stanley’s eyes remained fixed on a brown silk nut, he took Stanley’s shoulder and said, —Christ. Come on. Come in and have a drink. We’ll bounce back.

  —No, I have to leave. I have to get a train.

  —Come on in for one drink. Christ. Look, this little jerk in the car with me, he’s this ex-king who wants his God-damned throne back, I’ve got to have lunch with him. But come on in for a drink with us. You can meet the little jerk. It’s lousy luck. You’ll bounce back . . . Then he looked down at the pavement between himself and Stanley. —God damn it, he said, —I had a friend, a guy who was in college with me, he just got killed in a plane accident, he used to say the whole thing is like this handkerchief and this cannon ball falling in this vacuum, they fall the same speed, you know? And every God damn place you go, and every God damn thing you do, it’s still this same God damn handkerchief and this same God damn cannon ball falling in this same God damn vacuum.

  On the afternoon train, Stanley saw Don Bildow too late to avoid him. Don Bildow had a big box under his arm. He stayed Stanley for long enough to tell him he was on his way to Paris, and ask Stanley where he was going, but gave him no chance to answer. —That was lucky, he went on, —the boy from the tailor just got to the train with this in time, this is my new suit and I almost missed the train. I’m going to put it on before we get to the Swiss border so I won’t have to pay duty.

  —Yes but, excuse me, Stanley said, possibly the first time he had ever spoken to Bildow with such sharp dismissal, —I’m tired. Excuse me.

  —What’s the matter? You, I’m surprised you’re not staying in Rome, for that thing tomorrow? The canonization of that saint?

  The train roared northward. Second Class was no dirtier than most trains, but Don Bildow kept on his spotted threadbare old suit, dirty shirt and tie, until the last bit of Lago Maggiore disappeared from the passing landscape. Then he went into the men’s room, and got out of his clothes. He washed as best he could, though his plastic-rimmed glasses kept falling down into the basin. Then he put on a new Italian part-silk shirt from a small rolled package in his pocket. All his property: his money, passport, testosterone tablets and contraceptives, and a few letters, was folded into a copy of a stiff-covered magazine on the floor. He had got a new yellow and brown tie looped round his collar, when he realized he must dispose of the evidence of the old clothes somehow. The window would not open, so one by one with his new sleeve rolled up, he pushed them down through the hopper. By the time he reached his jacket, it went through quite easily, for by then the hopper was fairly clean. Then he opened the box from the tailor in Rome. All it contained was a sailor suit made for a boy of seven, with short pants. Nonetheless the hand stitching was fine, the double seams drawn with exquisite care. There was even a little round hat with ribbons, and the name of the first Italian dreadnought, Dante Alighieri, embroidered in gold round the band.

  —Maybe . . . he gasped, looking at it. Then he put on his glasses and looked at it. —Stanley, maybe Stanley would . . . have something . . . But his friend had got off some time before, at Milan, to change for Fenestrula and he stood unsteadily on the shifting floor, holding the blouse at a rolled-sleeved arm’s length, and staring at it through the plastic rimmed lenses. The whole outfit was made as carefully as any tailoring for a real grownup, he could see, even in that light, as his train roared toward the Simplon.

  In the next morning’s light, the church looked much smaller than he had imagined it would be, and different than Stanley had pictured it the night before, when he arrived in the dark and walked up to look at it immediately after he’d got his few possessions settled in a pension room in the town. The whole town was different than he’d imagined in the darkness. The masses and shadows were gone, and he found nothing to suggest what they might have been. In one entirely different direction from where he thought he had walked, he came upon what he had taken for an enclosed, dimly lighted and possibly private chapel of some sort: it turned out to be a public convenience. And the church itself was a good deal smaller, its single spire a good deal more modest against the vast consciousness of the lighted sky, than undefined shadows had raised it at night, and as, once he’d seen it in daylight, he realized he would never see it again.

  The walls of the church were heavy, and furrowed apart in places. At one end near the ground, he could see the rubble core.

  Stanley was dressed, that morning, in his best suit, the blue one, and the second time worn. He walked with hands clasped low in front of him; for, putting on the trousers, he’d been dismayed to find moth holes round about the crotch. He wore a white shirt, and a red necktie, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, the way he had thought it would be.

  He came back to his room from early Mass, where he had also got a look at the gigantic organ (for it was the gift of an American), and confirmed his arrangement to play it later in the morning, and also, or rather first off, sought the intervention of that saint still to be rung in that morning on behalf of three souls equally dear, and equally beautiful.

  And it was those he thought of, and not the work he thought of, as he stood alone in his room and looked at the work, which was all that was left. He looked at it with sudden malignity, as though in that moment it had come through at the expense of everything, and everyone else, and most terribly, of each of those three souls: but there was this about him, standing, running a hand through his short hair, pulling up his belt, and staring at that work, which since it was done, he could no longer call his own: even now, it was the expense of those three he thought of, and not of his own.

  He was standing as though he expected something to move; and nothing did. Nothing moved in the room, until a chill shook his shoulders, and he turned to look behind him, his lips ready to speak, but no one was there. Nonetheless, he was still standing, poised, half turned, waiting, when the bells released him, and he quickly gathered up the pages he needed, and hurried down to the street.

  He carried them clasped before him, and did not look up until he had reached the church itself. There he
explained he had come early, to play through this one part he would play later, explained as best he could, that is, with his hands, the pages, pointing to the organ, to himself (the red necktie), for this priest understood no English, and spoke to him in Italian, a continuous stream of it as he conducted Stanley to the keyboard, leading him with a hand on his arm, then on his shoulder, and Stanley came on head bowed, closely attending the words he did not understand, as he seated himself and touched the keys, pulling out one stop and another as he listened, and why the priest shook his head and pushed two of them back as he spoke, Stanley did not understand (and he pulled them back out when the priest was gone, apparently in a hurry to be off somewhere before the next service called him back). —Prego, fare attenzione, non usi troppo i bassi, le note basse. La chiesa è così vecchia che le vibrazioni, capisce, potrebbero essere pericolose. Per favore non bassi . . . e non strane combinazioni di note, capisce . . .

  When he was left alone, when he had pulled out one stop after another (for the work required it), Stanley straightened himself on the seat, tightened the knot of the red necktie, and struck. The music soared around him, from the corner of his eye he caught the glitter of his wrist watch, and even as he read the music before him, and saw his thumb and last finger come down time after time with three black keys between them, wringing out fourths, the work he had copied coming over on the Conte di Brescia, wringing that chord of the devil’s interval from the full length of the thirty-foot bass pipes, he did not stop. The walls quivered, still he did not hesitate. Everything moved, and even falling, soared in atonement.

  He was the only person caught in the collapse, and afterward, most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played.

  WILLIAM GADDIS (1922—98) stands among the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. The winner of two National Book Awards (for J R [1976] and A Frolic of His Own [1995]), as well as a MacArthur Genius Award, a Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he wrote five novels during his lifetime, including Carpenter’s Gothic (1985), Agapē Agape (published posthumously in 2002), and his early masterpiece The Recognitions (1955). He is loved and admired for his stylistic innovations, his unforgettable characters, his pervasive humor, and the breadth of his intellect and vision.

  WILLIAM H. GASS—essayist, novelist, literary critic—was born in Fargo, North Dakota. He has been the recipient of the first PEN/Nabokov Award, the PEN/Spielvogel-Diamondstein Award for the Art of the Essay, three National Book Critics Circle Awards for Criticism, a Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Award for Fiction and the Medal of Merit for Fiction from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations. He lives in St. Louis.

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