The Recognitions

by William Gaddis

  —Wait . . .

  —Eh?

  —Do you think . . . here, do you want some more brandy?

  —I’ll get along, I don’t want to keep you, Valentine said, in his voice a tone of cordial deference; and back a step, something rolled away from his foot, and he stooped to retrieve it. —Rose madder? he read from the label.

  —Oh that, it’s nothing. Rose madder, it’s too late.

  —Too late? Valentine looked up pretending surprise at the eager distress in the voice, and the unsteady hand where he surrendered the packet.

  —I got it for a Bouts, the first Dierick Bouts, but these colors, . . . madder lake wasn’t used until the sixteenth century. And Bouts was dead. Dierick Bouts, he . . . he was dead. Wait . . . listen, do you think something might go wrong?

  —Go wrong?

  —If I try to tell them, about these pictures?

  —Have it your own way, Valentine shrugged. —If you think you can do it alone.

  —But the proof? even with that?

  —You’re sure they’re safe? Valentine’s lips drew to a thin smile.

  —Well, wait then. Wait. If you . . .

  —I? If I could help you?

  —Yes, these fragments . . .

  —Bring them along, then, if you like. We’ll work this thing out. Basil Valentine put on his hat; and his eyes, gone hard under the black brim, were drawn over the wrinkled shoulder from the lined face before him to the clear face on the easel, as he added, —Bring them up to my place, then. Do you hear? There’s no room for mistakes. He stood like that, staring at the picture up on the easel whose unsurprised eyes looked beyond him; and finally, murmuring, —Your mother, eh? he took his eyes from it with abrupt effort. —A Stabat Mater? Not a girl, not a woman at all.

  He turned on his heel and pulled open the door. —It’s going to smell strange out there, after this . . . odor of sanctity? The gold seal ring shone against the edge of the open door, glittering softly in the light of the bare electric bulb, as the slow light of day entered behind him with the sound of bells. —Hear Saint Bavon’s? Another blue day. I’ll be waiting for you. And many thanks for the cognac.

  There was not a cab in sight.

  —Blood is all they know, every hour boys being killed, an airplane just crashed and who was surprised, forty-one people killed, though there is some hope that the stewardess, who survived, will be able to tell police, because it is all there in the newspapers that anyone can read . . .

  What was it?

  Stanley sat down. Across from him a woman stared into his face, lips moving, fingers moving on her beads. He clutched the chisel in his pocket, the first time in years he had been on the subway, as though overcome with the necessity to dive down into darkness and not emerge until he reached home. He was not shivering from the cold, though it was cold in the subway. He was still buttoning his shirt. What was it she had cried to him when he asked her to kneel beside him, beside the bed; and then as he retreated through one door, fled toward another, escaped naked with all of his clothes in his hand, out into the hall where her voice died but the smell of her perfume followed him. He pulled his necktie’s knot to his throat. The train roared into its rock firmament where lights twinkled in warning ahead of this front car and the woman’s voice disappeared while her lips still moved, steaming the glass before them, and Stanley realized that he was on the wrong train, going in the wrong direction.

  He looked up anxiously; as though another passenger might have made his mistake and, confirming him, prove everyone else misguided, misdirected. (It was an expression Stanley wore much of the time.) Standing across from him, gazing as though able to see through the dirty glass, a tall man stood with a handkerchief held to his nose and mouth. Gold glittered at his cuff. Then a woman of an uncertain age and massive shifting proportions trod on Stanley’s foot, and swung, with grand inertia, into a white pole.

  —You never see Jews drunk like that, said the person next to Stanley.

  —Yehhh? the woman shouted, turning to them. The train was nearing a station. Stanley got up and went to the door where the tall man stood with his handkerchief to his face, turned, now, to the car. —Yehhh? the woman shouted, swinging round with Stanley. Both her hands were free. —Is that what you want? That’s what you want is it? she cried, and as she did gripped the hem of her dress, and it became immediately apparent that it was the only garment she had on.

  Stanley staggered into the tall man with the handkerchief, whose eyes had frozen in a cold blue horror, who whispered, —Good God! . . .

  —Here! Come and get it! Come and get it!

  Then a commotion started in the other end of the car, where a shabby old man had found something: but the commotion was his, only two others got up to look; the others stared in dreadful scorn, just as these seated near Stanley stared, not at the woman, but at him and the man beside him.

  —Come on, both of you, you scared . . . ? The train lurched, approaching a station, and her skirt sagged and dropped as she caught a pole. The doors opened, and she kept shouting after them, —Come on, come on, you . . . throw a toilet seat around your heads and we’ll all use it . . .

  HE WAS WOUNDED

  for our

  transgressions,

  he was bruised

  for our iniquities:

  . . . and with his

  stripes we are

  healed,

  read the placard against which the tall man steadied himself. Across the top someone had scribbled, Jesus a comunist. He stood there with his handkerchief covering his face, and Stanley stopped, himself beside a placard which called public attention to a lower East Side knishery, where someone had penciled, Hitler was right. The handkerchief came down slowly, and the man caught a glimpse of a dirty shade of himself in the mirror of a chewing-gum vending machine. —Excuse me . . . are you all right? Stanley ventured.

  The handkerchief was withdrawn, and he said in a level voice to Stanley, —Those, my dear young man, are the creatures that were once burned in witch hunts.

  When Basil Valentine got home, he ran his bath immediately; and as the warm water closed over his shoulders, and one dry hand supported a cigarette, he exhaled, looking up at the clean ceiling, and his lips moved as though, all this time since he had taken his fingertips from his eyelids, seated out there in the big chair waiting for the dawn, he had been talking to himself.

  Trucks were moving, loaded, toward the docks, and loaded away from the market as Stanley hurried toward his locked place, already assaulted. Why had he let Hannah stay? the last person he wanted to explain to now: even running, the odor of perfume from Agnes Deigh’s nakedness rose to him. Birds clustered loudly at a horse trough. It was daylight.

  His room was empty when he got there. Immediately, he noticed that the window over the bed was open, but he had no strength to pull it down. He dropped on the bed and lay still in the cold. What was it she had cried out as he ran, the cry and the voice of her a thing almost tangible hurled through the air between them, which entered and froze him in flight, as though an eternal abstraction were materialized in cast metal and bone, and Love showed its scarred steel jaws edged with broken teeth.

  What was it? With his ear against the mattress, he stared at the cathedral of Fenestrula; and the beats of his heart were magnified in the bedsprings and sent back to him with the regular clattering resonance of snare drums. Crang, crang, crang, they went in regular familiar rhythm, missing a beat, or doubling one, in faithful accompaniment to something.

  On the walk outside, a man approached unsteadily rubbing a rough cheekbone with a rough hand. The lucidity of the blue day rising over him seemed to prompt him to clarify the immediate issue of that turbid pool which, if questioned later on, he would call his memory, but found now resident in his cheekbone, where the blood was already dry. —He was Boyma, the man muttered, —then I must be Go . . . ro . . . gro . . . go . . .

  Crang . . . crang . . . crang What was it? With his last breath of consciousness he r
ealized that he had left his glasses on the table beside her uptown bed. Crang crang crang came the drums over the hill and into sight. They were playing Onward Christian Soldiers.

  Two feet away from Stanley, the man stopped in the shallow covert that the window afforded to commit a nuisance, never glancing down at the face which lay in exhaustion under the open window at his feet.

  II

  This is as if a drunk man should think himself to be sober, and should act indeed in all respects as a drunk man, and yet think himself to be sober, and should wish to be called so by others. Thus, therefore, are those also who do not know what is true, yet hold some appearance of knowledge, and do many evil things as if they were good, and hasten to destruction as if it were salvation.

  —The Clementine Recognitions, Book V

  —I mean to tell her about the toast, this morning putting butter upon his toast, and the toast spoke with me, Fuller said, his voice in the near-inaudible confidence of intimacy. —But though I pause to listen very close, the toast conversed in a language with which as yet I remain unacquainted. Perhaps it was instructin me? he added, and his hand stopped its motion, the dirty polishing rag came to rest on the lance-rest, and he peered into the dark eye-slit of the helmet. Nothing moved. The armor stood at attention to his confidences, as it had been doing for some years. Polishing every hinge and joint, every plate and vent, had long since established his close informal acquaintance with this figure which, on first meeting, had posed no such possibility. It was some time before Fuller penetrated the cold reserve, and gained the ascendancy over the formidable hauteur with which it had greeted his reluctant advances. Left to himself, he would certainly have avoided it, and at best passed it with that respect inspired by mistrust, regarding it as his oppressor’s ally. But as so often happens under the hands of tyrants, it was Mr. Brown himself who had brought them together. In his insistence that this, his favorite, be kept spotless and irreproachable, Mr. Brown had fostered a conspiracy right under his own nose.

  —I already tell Adeline that the drawer method apparently destined to no great success, he went on, as the polishing rag moved again over a palette. He was recounting a recent visit to a woman of his own age, color, and forebears (but substantially heavier) whom he consulted, hands extended but not touching across a polished wood table top, concerning his affliction. Adeline, in turn, consulted her daughter Elsie, who had died when only three and was now going to school on the other side, but willingly played truant in this good cause. —I assure her, every time I enter my room I write his name upon a piece of paper and secrete it in the drawer. But when she learn that I spell his name in a variety of ways, there lies the hindrance. Perhaps you already brought misfortune to others whose names you spelt unwitting, she reprimand me.

  The polishing cloth had by now reached the breastplate, which Fuller saved until last because of its flat accessibility, the directness of the encounter it permitted, and the rewarding way in which it shone. —Next we contemplate tryin the hair method, he continued, sounding slightly troubled. —She direck me to gather an envelope of his hair, which Elsie will proceed to treat the secret way, and return to me to burn sayin over it certain words from the mysteries she resides party to. Fuller rubbed hard, showing severe vexation in his sudden energy, bent lower, addressing now not the patient helmet but his own darting reflection in the breastplate. —I suggest perhaps this method reek of a kind of magic, I hesitate to do an unchristian act even upon him. But she hasten to assure me this method is Christian because I employ it against the forces of evil. Then she proceed to recount to me what Saint Louis instruck, this in the olden time of course, when a Jew have the best of you in controversy, to thrust a sword into his belly right up to the handle. He stopped and stood back to look at his work, but added, —Seem when Elsie die, ten thousand people die that same moment, nine thousand nine hundred ninety-five depart to hell direckly, four to the purgaratory, only Elsie carried straight to heaven. Thus she appear highly recommended, he reassured the impassive figure before him. They faced each other silently for a moment. Then darting the rag forward for another quick rub at the beaver, Fuller said, —I must hurry, to return in ample time, and he straightened up, and went to his room.

  On his way back, the thick envelope deep in an inside pocket, he peered round the door onto the balcony, first to the head of the stairs, to see if the black dog were watching. He ventured to the rail, and there it lay below, a still blot on the Aubusson roses. With a glance of intrepid calm at his lustrous confidante, he turned to the stairs looking somewhat harried, but satisfied. Fuller was a good head taller than that suit of armor; and surely, on short acquaintance, his heart would have filled with foreboding suspicions toward one so anxious at his own safety, so apprehensive of others, that all his beauty lay in his defense. But year by year, polishing every plate and vent, every joint and hinge, Fuller had discovered every weak link in the mail, every chink in the armor, and he saw it now as a weaker demonstration of his own more elastic resistance, a hollow hope, but one which held its gauntleted hand forth, and a face which no longer glittered with disdain, but where, in their moments of confidence, familiarity had bred content.

  Some time later Fuller entered with what he considered great stealth. He had not got far in the dark front hall, however, before he tripped on something. The large flat package fell flat on the floor. Fuller remained suspended before it. Then he saw two black eyes fixed upon him. The moment he looked up, the dog turned and trotted away. —You goin to write it down in your report, Fuller muttered, and straightened the package up again. —Some day I goin to discover where you keep it and destroy every page, he went on. —Rescue many good people from grief and vexation. Notably myself, he finished, entering the vast living room.

  There, rising from one of the chairs before the fireplace, he saw a thin column of blue smoke. He retreated, put the straw hat in a very small panel closet in the hall, and approached again. Then, with great relief, he said, —Oh, it is you, sar. Good afternoon.

  —Yes, it is, Fuller. For the moment, anyway. Who did you think . . .

  —I take for granted maybe it’s goin to be Mister Valentine, sar. I fallen into the habit of expectin the worst durin my residence here.

  —We all have, we all have. Bring me some brandy, will you Fuller? Bring in the bottle of cordon bleu. The bottle with the blue ribbon on it.

  —Yes sar, but Mister Brown, sar . . .

  —When he sees me drinking the best he’s got, I know it. Bring it in anyhow.

  —Yes sar. A few minutes later, Fuller came in with ice and a glass, siphon, and the bottle of cordon bleu. —Could I mix somethin up for you, sar? he asked from the pulpit, where he stood, white-gloved. Given permission, he came across the carpet bearing a tumbler of brandy and ice in one hand, the siphon bottle in the other. He stepped with care. —A curious thing, he said upon arrival, —seem I always inclined to avoid steppin upon the flowers. Though he got no response, he continued to stand there, white hands swinging slightly above the table of the Seven Deadly Sins. Finally he said, —Thahss your package I encounter in the hallway, sar? and brought his eyes about in what he considered a surreptitious glance, if only because of the oblique angle of the steady stare which he lowered upon the face before him. —I trust I not responsible for any damage to the contents when it fall downward at my feet. We have a small collision there in the darkness. After another prolonged pause, Fuller said, —Upon my enterin the room seem like there not a soul present but myself. Mister Brown still occupied at the office, I presume.

  Siphon was blown into the glass; and at last the voice said, —What is it, Fuller? What have you got on your mind?

  Fuller’s chest rose; at the same time his voice lowered to a tone consonant with the commonplace topics through which he planned to approach his question. —You tell me then, sar, is there such a thing as octopus?

  —Yes. Of course.

  —You have really observed one, sar?

  —Well, I . . . not
actually, no. But enough pictures of them, photographs.

  Fuller looked at him with respectful disbelief. —Yes sar, I encounter the pictures myself upon occasion. Sar? Does there exist such a thing as mermaids, sar?

  —That’s legend, Fuller. They don’t really exist, no.

  Fuller looked at him with respectful disbelief. Nevertheless, he went on, —Are you acquainted with Saint Louis, sar?

  —I’ve never been there.

  —No sar, this one to which I refer is a mahn, sar, a kind of ghost-mahn they havin in the church. Fuller paused, and was rewarded with what appeared to be a look of reminiscence.

  —The Crusader, who bought the original crown of thorns.

  —Most likely the very same gentlemahn, Fuller said, raising his white hands. —Sound very reliable.