The Recognitions

by William Gaddis

  As dawn neared outside he was still fully awake, lying under the crack in the ceiling, under the yellowed ivory (thirteenth century) crucifix over the bed. He heard the truck collecting rubbish at the far end of his block. Christmas so near, again? Suddenly he looked at the watch strapped to his wrist, a rage of figures battling through his mind. He saw Anselm, and shuddered; Esme, and moaned: what unholy thing was that? what knowledge of evil did they share? for so they did, antipodal, but embracing in his mind, images profaning his love in their coupling. He stretched his arms above his head. Did one wear a watch in the tomb? A long walk, he decided; and then he would go to Mass. Why had Agnes Deigh refused to go to Mass with him, one day when they had met; it was just time, and near enough. —I’ve got to have drinks with someone, business is business darling, he could hear her voice again. Then her profane images shouldered his missionary intentions aside, and the more he thought of her.

  He had turned his face to the window just above him, where uncertain light entered to show things as they had been left in each other’s shadows the night before, shadowless now, older, wearing out separately and all together. This window he had to keep open in summer, so that passers-by could look in, upsetting to him, as though the friction of their glances might wear things down further; the window open in summer so that things might be thrown in, as some children one day, playing, had thrown something a dog had done on the sidewalk in behind the radiator.

  There was a slight tapping on the door, as though someone were knocking who did not want to be answered to, knocking to find no one instead of someone there. Stanley sat up on the edge of his low couch, the door handle turned a slow quarter-circle, and back.

  —Who is it? he cried out. —Who is it out there?

  —Stanley? A girl’s voice: it was Hannah, he let her in. —It’s so cold, she said, —I’m sorry, but can I sleep in your chair?

  —Stay here, he said. —Lie down, Hannah. I’m going out.

  —But no, don’t leave for me. Go back to bed. But you’re all dressed?

  —Yes, stay here. I’m going out.

  —Is everything all right, Stanley? Has anything . . .

  —Nothing has changed. Go to bed here, Hannah. I’m going out to Mass.

  In the hall, where he stopped in the communal toilet, he was troubled again by the problem in arithmetic penciled on the wall there. Someone had multiplied 763 by 37, and got 38,231. He had checked it, idly, two years before; then carefully, at every sitting since. Who had made the mistake? Was it too late to find them and tell them? 10,000 . . . what? Had that person gained it? or lost it? Was it too late? Stanley looked at his wrist watch. He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?

  —I’ll go in and try the door first, said Otto.

  Feasley got out to follow, returned to get the leg out of the back seat, and rejoined him. The door was locked. —There’s somebody awake inside, Otto said. Out on the sidewalk, he twisted the lock on the window grating. Feasley said, —I’ll get a wrench, handed the leg to Otto and went back to the car. Suddenly the window shade shot up in Otto’s face, the sash after it.

  —What are you doing here?

  —Oh, I . . . Hannah, I . . . I mean we . . .

  —What are you doing here at this window anyhow?

  —Why nothing I . . . Hannah was dressed only in a shirt, for all he could see. —We just . . . well, so long Hannah. See you later, he called as he heard the car’s engine racing behind him, and he ran toward it, the bare foot waving his goodbye to Hannah from under his arm.

  —He’s got a girl in there, Hannah’s sleeping with him, said Otto as they roared away. —Say listen, he said looking round him, —have you seen a little tan bag, a pigskin dispatch case? Suddenly frantic, he turned to look behind them in the car. The car slid around a corner, leaned to one side in a skid, recovered, skidded in the other direction, and Feasley was cursing as it went head-on into a pole. They got out. Otto looked, found nothing but the leg. —Come on. The hell with it.

  —But what about this thing? Otto said, wrapping the cloth around it more tightly as they walked fast up Little West Twelfth Street.

  —O Chrahst put it in an ashcan.

  He started to, but three men rounded the corner, and he tucked it back under his sling. They got a subway, vapidly curious people appearing on all sides around them.

  Stanley had taken a long bus ride, returning to the neighborhood of the hospital, and been walking for some time, it seemed, when he heard six o’clock strike nearby. Following the direction of the bells, he found the church and went in, mind seething as he stopped and genuflected. He moved toward a pew in the back, and had almost knelt beside her when he recognized Agnes Deigh. He clutched at her wrist. She started in terror away from him, awakened.

  —Stanley?

  —You’re here, he whispered.

  —Oh God. Her head lolled forward and away from him. —Take me home.

  —But you’re here, at Mass.

  —I know it. Take me home. Stanley, now.

  —Look, we can’t carry this thing all over town in broad daylight. It’s beginning to smell, too.

  —Let’s have a look. Chra-ahst, it’s turning gray.

  Across from them a woman stared, but did not see them, her mouth working, her fingers working at her beads. It was the first car of the train, and at stops a voice rose, where at the glass which looked forward into the tube a woman talked, so close to her own image in that glass that it was steamed by her breath. —They told us all about it, there it is in letters where anyone can read it, everyone knows, they’re killing each other, boys killing each other millions of American boys are being killed you can read all about it . . .

  The roar of the train drowned her out.

  —What shall I do with it?

  —Leave it on the seat, there in the corner. We’ll get off at this stop.

  —he cut them both up and put them in suitcases and those are the people who travel on airplanes . . . The doors clapped to behind them, and they waited on the platform for another train. —My old man’s going to get me this time, for mucking up that God-damned car again.

  A girl stood in front of them, waiting for the next train, on her way to work in a chewing-gum factory: Hestia, Vesta, virgin-sworn, the hearth and the home (a cheap fluff of a jabot she wore, imitation coral earrings, crippling shoes, under a thin elbow a tabloid catalogue of the day’s misinformation). —Chrahst, I don’t know whether it’s a boy or a girl, after that little nigger at the party last night. Hey honey, do you want to make thirty-five cents?

  —No, I’m really not a Catholic any more, I just put that picture of Cardinal Spellman up there because that corner of the room needs a little red, said Agnes Deigh, almost recovered. —Do you want a drink?

  —Now?

  —Stanley, you look exhausted too, she said. —Here, drink this, it will warm you. She handed him a glass of port, and swallowed down, herself, almost choking, some whisky. —What a God-awful mess this place is. He must have got here. Agnes looked around, at her own underclothing scattered broadcast in the living room. One of her best gowns was hung over her sunlamp, which was turned on.

  —It is warming, Stanley said, drinking, —I can feel it all through me.

  —God, I’m so tired, she said, beginning to undress. —Will you help me? He followed her into the bedroom. —Thank God you found me.

  —What’s this? Stanley said, aghast holding up a card he’d taken from the table, reading in a whisper —“Christ has come!”

  —Oh Stanley, you’re not supposed to see that. It’s a Christmas card.

  —Christmas card! But who . . .

  —Don’t be upset, Stanley. From that Swedish boy they call Big Anna.

  —But it’s . . . disgusting, this picture . . .

  —I know, Stanley. But these things happen in the world. Throw it in the wastebasket. No, don’t tear it up, just throw it in the baske
t.

  —But . . . why do you know those people?

  —Oh Stanley, she said, and paused bent double over a rolled-down stocking. —Don’t you see, Stanley, sometimes people like that are . . . are easier for a woman. They’re safer somehow . . . She had taken off her stockings then, in the pause, and stood up dressed only in her slip. She picked up a plant, and carried it into the other room. —I just can’t stand to have anything living and breathing in the same room where I’m trying to sleep. She sat down on the bed again with a glass of water, and laid two sleeping pills beside it. —God, what a smell of perfume he left in the place. He must have dropped the bottle. Oh, come Stanley, sit here. You do understand about people like that don’t you? Just don’t think about them. You’ve got to be philosophical, darling. Thank God you found me in that church.

  —Yes, thank God, who led you there.

  —But Stanley dear . . .

  —You were at Mass, he said.

  —I’m not a Catholic any more, I tell you.

  —You will always be a Catholic. It is not for you to say. But why have you strayed so far? he asked, sitting beside her.

  —Even when I was a child, I was frightened out of it, it seemed. Once in my convent school, I remember when we were all sent to look at a reliquary. It was . . . I don’t know, a splinter of the Cross, or a crumb of something. They even had one that they said contained a bit of the original darkness that Moses called down on the world, imagine. Yes, I think it was a crumb, from the biscuit that bled when it was trampled by Zwingli’s soldiers. But I didn’t go, I went to a movie instead. The next day in class I was told to get up and describe the reliquary, and I gave a wonderful description, about it being big and fancy and gold, with a peep-hole and a magnifying lens so you could see the speck inside. Then they whipped me, and told me that it hadn’t even been on exhibit, it was away being cleaned . . .

  —But these things are our trials as children to prepare us . . .

  —And I used to chew the wafer, she went on, almost somnilo-quent, in an arrested whisper. —I couldn’t hold it in my mouth without chewing it. The more I knew it was sinful, the more I chewed His Body, I had to chew it . . .

  —These sins we commit as children . . .

  But now Agnes had breathed deeply and sat back. She glimpsed her face in a boudoir mirror and said, —Don’t I look awful, my eye . . .

  —What happened to it?

  —At that party, that terrible party, in the ladies’ room, another woman hit me with her hand bag. This has gone far enough, she said. She didn’t think I was really a . . . she thought I was one of the people in costume. Agnes was staring at the floor. Then she sniffed and turned to Stanley with a smile forcing her lips. —But analysis is safer, and you have the same confessional.

  —But don’t you understand what happened this morning? he brought out fervently. —You didn’t know you were coming to Mass, but you were directed there, as I was, as He led me there to . . .

  She put an arm around his shoulders, and her strap came undone. Mickey Mouse pointed to 6:45. —Stanley, she said. —You’re such a boy.

  Dawn, somewhere beyond the incinerator plant which had won first prize in functional architecture a decade before: Fuller was busy in Mr. Brown’s bathroom, picking up every piece of Mr. Brown’s hair he could find and putting it into an envelope. Esme wakened for a moment in a strange bed, looked at the arm round her, could identify neither its owner nor its sex, and went back to sleep. Esther woke, hearing sounds which seemed to have been going on for a long time; as though she’d heard a key turn in the lock hours before, and footsteps, and the sound of a voice, or voices. But she lay still, and closed her eyes, as she did always on the dull sounds of Rose’s dreams. In the street below, young policemen raced the engines of their motorcycles to arrogant pitch, and roared to duty. In the East Fifty-first Street station-house, Big Anna sat on a bench weeping. —But nobody even saw my gown, he cried. —We saw it, Jack, said the man behind the desk, turning to another policeman in shirtsleeves, —Is he known? Anselm was descending the steps of the I.R.T. West Side subway, on all fours. Adeline had just closed a door behind her, having wakened beside someone with short-cut hair and heavy hands, whom she remembered having taken for a man the night before. Herschel was not to be wakened until some hours later, by two sailors in a Chelsea hotel room, where he lay bandaged over chest and back, the protective gauze of Dutch Siam, tattoo artist.

  Dawn, just as it came to Australian skies, a woman of bad character in a cloak of red possum skins.

  What Stanley marveled at most was the wealth of her that had appeared as her garments came off. There was so much of her. She stood, wiping the make-up from her face turned away, and he stared at her thighs from behind, as a collector stares at the fine patina glazed over the courses of worms, for those vast vermiculated surfaces were furrowed so. Terror struck him. He started to rise from the bed and reach for his shirt. Too late. She was there, tumbling the marvelous cucumiform weights down upon a chest which looked as though it would cave in under such manna. —Look, she said, joy of this world recovered, raising herself so that her front swung pendulant over him, unequaled, and unequal lengths untouched by baby’s hand, —you can play telephone with them.

  Trains from great distance over barbarous land, ships from civilized shores and airplanes from nowhere aimed at the island, dived at it, into it, unloaded lives upon it. Far uptown Mr. Pivner lay, unconscious arabesque in nervous imitation of sleep (he was, in fact, enduring a train wreck in Rajputana), that part of him already vigilant which would reach the control of the alarm clock an instant before it went off.

  In Harlem, walking alone, Otto looked at his watch, forgot to see the time and looked again, as he sought the scene of Saturnalia where he hoped to recover the pigskin dispatch case.

  The streets were filling with people whose work was not their own. They poured out, like buttons from a host of common ladles, though some were of pressed paper, some ivory, some horn, and synthetic pearl, to be put in place, to break, or fall off lost, rolling into gutters and dark corners where no Omnipotent Hand could reach them, no Omniscient Eye see them; to be replaced, seaming up the habits of this monster they clothed with their lives.

  The newspaper quivered in Basil Valentine’s hands, clasped behind him. Music, from another corner, plucked at his back. It was a pavan by a dead Spaniard.

  Hungary to Sell Famed Paintings . . . Vienna . . . Diplomatic sources here said today that Hungary was attempting to sell in the West masterpieces from Budapest’s National Art Gallery. The Gallery included paintings by Raphael, Tintoretto, Murillo, and others collected by the Austro-Hungarian emperors and princes. The informants said some of the paintings were being shipped to the United States as diplomatic luggage in the hope of interesting American art collectors.

  He brought the newspaper up before him and read that again in the dull light of the dawn where he stood at the windows.

  The desk in the far corner of the room was still littered with the papers he had spent the night over, finally snapped off the light and sat in a deep chair with his fingertips resting against his eyelids, and his head erect. The Vulliamy clock on the mantel had struck three times gently, at regular intervals, before he moved; and then, only his fingers moved, to remain arched before his face, meeting their tips in gothic contemplation, his eyes clear as though he’d done no more than blink them.

  Now he gave an impatient sigh, dropped the newspaper on the window shelf, and stood looking straight out at the gray sky. —Another blue day? he murmured, as the stately strokes of the harp came to an end, and he turned from the window.

  The letterheads among the sheaf of papers on his desk witnessed important oppositions in the world, languages as various as the devices and crests which adorned them. He sat down and hurriedly checked over a coded message against its original, —Put Inononu in touch immediately, have received necessary information . . . which he crumpled in his hand. He slipped the rest of the papers into a
dispatch case, and was gone for a moment into the bedroom to lock it in a wall safe behind the chest. Then he went to the bathroom, dropped the crumpled note into the basin and put a match to it, washed the ashes down the drain, washed his hands slowly and with care, and went in to make tea.

  There was exquisite correspondence between the Sèvres cup and the back of his hand, where blue veins showed making the flesh appear translucent: it was not a reflection of mutual fragility, but rather the delicacy of the porcelain completed a composition enhancing, as it did, the tensile strength of the hand which raised it. In the other, he opened a book, and read. Now and then his lips moved, as he turned the pages of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises which he had, contrary to habit, lent out (for this was not the only, certainly not the nicest copy he had). A fly landed on the print, and he struck at it. The fly rose and crossed the room to settle busily upon a golden figure, a bull lowering its jewel-collared head to thrust with its horns at the egg floating in the rock cavity before it. The figure was small, and stood on a column at the end of the couch.