The Recognitions

by William Gaddis

  She stood supporting herself on the door jamb, and looked at him wearily; sniffed, and raised her eyes as though looking over distance in the landscape of his kingdom, the strong-scented landscape of Sheol. Finally she said, —So keep your friends to yourself, but let me tell you, when the doctor gives me morphine for my pains, what happens to it? Right out of the house it disappears. Who steals it? Your son, that’s who steals it. From his mother yet.

  —He’s not mine, he’s yours. I don’t claim him. Does he ever go to church? No. He hasn’t got any morals, he hasn’t got any talent.

  —So who ruined him? So who stood over him when he was a baby, and says, My ain’t it wonderful his first two fingers are the same length, so he could pick pockets, trying to teach him how to make his fingers like scissors, picking pockets. So who stood over him and says, My, with sensitive fingertips like that I could feel the tumblers fall in any safe in the world. So who was it give him Daddy’s signet ring, like he was a prince of somewhere, except this signet ring it’s got a little knife in it, to cut pockets open yet.

  Her husband turned to look at her. His was an odd look, for one pupil had shrunk almost to a pin-point, swimming in eserine which he wiped away. —Those things were primary courses, like any kid gets in his first grade school. Do you think I wanted him to be a bum? So I taught him some basic things, how to use his hands. Did he ever learn anything? Did he ever try? No. He never worked a day in his life, like his father. You had his moral side to bring up. That’s a mother’s work, all those years I was away you had him here to bring up his moral side. Look how it come out.

  —So who’s crying over spilled milk? It’s no good to talk about, all I want is he stops stealing his mother’s morphine. I go through his pockets, even, looking for it, what do I find, seasick remedy and chewing gum I find.

  —So you think he’s seasick? You know what he uses them for? He goes to the dog track, and dopes the dogs up with Mothersill’s seasick remedy. The chewing gum he puts between their pads to slow them up. You think I taught him that?

  —Anything bad he knows, you must have taught him.

  She stood there, gazing at him, as he dropped eserine into his right eye. —Such a clown, yet, she said wistfully. —Anyhow he’s never been in prison like his fine father who just come out again.

  —You think I didn’t figure that out? he said, turning from the mirror, to look at her with two pin-pointed pupils. —There was a war going on, and things are bad when there’s a war. It’s hard to get metal for the plates, it’s hard to get the right inks, everybody you can depend on gets drafted, or they get a job in an airplane factory. Like prosperity, things get lousy. It’s not so easy now.

  But she just looked at him. —Frank, ain’t it ever going to let up? Every time you go in this room, I don’t know who’s coming out. Two months go by, and everything gets chalk on them from your hands when you clean your plate. Everything smells all the time. Like I used to think lavender was flowers, but now I smell it somewhere all I think of is you doing this . . . this . . .

  —I’m busy, he said, and returned to the table before him. —You’re disturbing me on my nerves.

  —Your nerves! she wailed, back at the sink. —So maybe I haven’t got any nerves? Whenever you’re away J think when you come back maybe it will be different, and then by the time you’re back a month I almost wish you was away again. You’d be in there yet for that trouble you was in over the stamp, if it wasn’t for a mistake they made.

  —Mistake! If ever the hand of the Virgin watched over me it was that time. That conviction was thrown out because one of the jurymen was a Jew. He took his oath swearing on a New Testament. A mistake you call that. That was the Virgin Mary getting even for a mistake the Jews made two thousand years ago, that’s what a mistake it was. He waited for her to answer, suspecting that she had turned off her hearing aid. Then he went on, nostalgically, looking at himself in the glass, —That stamp was beautiful, that one-penny Antigua stamp. It took me four months to make that plate. And do you think the color was easy? Do you think just anybody can make the color puce? That’s why that kid is no good. Would he work hard on something like that? Do you hear me? He waited, suspiciously, to see if she had turned off her hearing aid, something he had not yet caught her at.

  —I hear you, she said wearily, at the sink, and turned off her hearing aid.

  —Well then stop talking to me like I was a common gangster. Did you ever see me with a gun? Did I ever hurt anybody, except once and that was a mistake, everybody knows it was, and you couldn’t count the Masses I’ve had said for her. He crossed himself hurriedly, and chose his hair for the evening, a healthy black mop. —Not like that kid, he wouldn’t have a Mass said for his own mother. He’s slipshod and no good. Whenever I was home to give him the benefit of my study and experience, I tried to teach him. I taught him how to spring a Yale lock with a strip of celluloid. I taught him how to open a lock with wet thread and a splinter. I taught him how to look like he has a deformed spine, or a deformed foot. Nobody taught me all that. I learned it myself. It was a lot of work, and he had me right here to teach him, right here, his own father. So what does he learn? Nothing. He’s never done a day’s work in his life. You think a bum like that I’d claim him for my son? He’s like everybody now, they don’t study their work, they don’t study their materials. Show me somebody who can get that color green so perfect, he went on, looking down at the back of a twenty-dollar bill. —It’s not a place for bums to get into, it’s a place for artists, for craftsmen.

  Mr. Sinisterra paused to fit the black hair in place over his own, a thinning texture of early gray. Then he went on in a lower tone, —He has no ambition like his father. I tried to teach him how to make copper plates, zinc plates, glass plates. The only platinum plate I ever made he almost ruined it for me. Just once he tried it alone, he tried to make some Revenue stamps. I helped him right through it, like a old master, cleaning the copper plate with benzine, putting on the wax ground, softening it with a little lavender oil. He made a mess of it. I had to throw the whole thing out before he got us all in trouble. Even the color, do you think he could tell the difference of one green and another? He couldn’t tell it from red even. His father’s a craftsman, an artist, he’s nothing but a bum.

  Mr. Sinisterra dusted the black hair into place. There were sounds from the kitchen, but no answering words; only the clatter of pans. —It isn’t like the old days, he said, looking at himself in the glass. —It isn’t like when you could pass a gilded quarter for a ten-dollar gold piece. It isn’t like the days of Pete McCartney and Fred Biebusch, and Big Bill the Queersman, the days when Brockway passed a hundred thousand just like that. It isn’t like the days when Johnnie the Gent melted down the Ascot Cup.

  He went to the rack to choose a necktie. Flicking aside Eton and Harrow, he lifted the soft dark blue with jagged red streaks of the Honourable Artillery Company, considered it for a moment, and then replaced it beside the false arm hung on the rack. —It’s not a place for bums to get into, it’s a place for art. You know how big the spaces behind Hamilton on the ten are? Less than one one-hundred-twentieth of an inch. Do you call that a place for bums? That kid wouldn’t even try, when he made those Revenue stamps. The acid got under the wax and made everything jagged. Do you think he cared? He didn’t even know the difference. How sharper than a snake’s tooth it is to have a kid like that, do you hear me? You never read a book in your life. Well never mind. It’s a great disappointment for a father, when his son don’t take an interest in his father’s work and carry it on.

  The pig, stamped upon the coins of Eleusis when she coined her first autonomous money in the fourth century B.C., the pig of purification, adorned the necktie which Mr. Sinisterra chose, and turned to the mirror to knot it about his neck with a manner of great tradition born. —It’s a great disappointment when he don’t appreciate our tradition, he said. —Our family wasn’t just nobody in Salerno, every secret we have has been handed down from father
to son for generations. Do you think he cares? My father was proud of me. He turned to put on his suit coat, flicking at its lapels, and buttoning it before the mirror. His chest filled as he looked at himself there.

  Behind him lay the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; and the magnanimous grant of Constantine, though that emperor was some five centuries dead when the spirit of his generosity prevailed through forgers in Rome, to bequeath all of western Europe to the Papacy. Behind him lay decrees, land grants, and wills, whose art of composition became a regular branch of the monastic industry, busy as those monks in the Middle Ages were keeping a-kindle the light of knowledge which they had helped to extinguish everywhere else. Behind lay Polycrates, who minted gold-coated lead coins in his own kingdom of Samos; and Solon, who decreed death for such originality in his. Canute severed guilty hands; and England, escaping his empire and succumbing to the Normans not much later, removed not only hands but eyes, a lily flower of punishment gilded with castration which solved nothing, for even in the reign of Edward III it was found necessary to draw and quarter a number of talented ecclesiastics.

  Historians, anxious to rescue some semblance of a system from the chaos of the past, point out that since the dawn of civilization, the center of civilization has moved westward: from Polycrates’ Asian island and Solon’s Athens to Constantine’s Roman Empire nine centuries later, on to Charlemagne’s Frankish labyrinth, ever onward to Canute the Dane at the millennium, across the Channel to the fourteenth-century England of Edward III it came, gathered its breath there (while word of renascence breathed behind in Italy) for three centuries, readying for the leap across the sea to shores of a New World, where early settlers (having thrown off that yoke of tyrannical ignorance, religious persecution) promoted a culture founded in pure reason, and introduced their civilized art to the Indians, forging wampum of porcelain and bone. They prospered. Hard work was the only expression of gratitude their deity exacted and money might be expected to accrue as testimonial; though Pennsylvania decreed the pillory, with the ears nailed to it and cut off, and a complement of thirty-nine lashes and a fine, these dedicated beings did not quail. But like so many of the mystic contrivances devised by priesthoods which slip, slide, and perish in lay hands, this too became a cottage industry: tradesmen, barbers, and barkeeps issued money, keeping up as best they could with the thousand different banks who were doing the same thing. Before the war which was fought to preserve the Union, a third of the paper money in circulation was counterfeit, and another third the issue of what were generously termed “irresponsible” banks. Meanwhile inspectors went from one bank to another, following the security bullion which was obligingly moved from the bank they had just inspected to the one where they next arrived; and the importunate public, demanding the same assurance, was satisfied with boxes rattling broken glass. Merchants kept “counterfeit detectors” under their counters, and every bill offered them in payment was checked against this list of all counterfeits in circulation, and notes rendered worthless by the disappearance of the evanescent banks which had issued them.

  Mr. Sinisterra kept his copy of Bicknall’s Counterfeit Detector for 1839 as a professional curiosity, much as a noted surgeon may exhibit a copy of Galen’s Anatomy. And just as the noted cardiac surgeon may admire Galen’s discovery that the arteries contain blood (and not air, as four centuries of the Alexandrian school had taught), but still smile patronizingly at his theory that the septum of the heart was pierced by imperceptible foramina (allowing passage of the blood from the right into the left ventricle); so Mr. Sinisterra mused over the ingenious devices of the century before him in Bicknall’s, which listed 20 issues of money on fictitious banks, 43 banks whose notes were worthless, 54 banks which were bankrupt, 254 banks whose notes were counterfeited, and 1395 varieties of counterfeit notes in circulation. Thus he was becomingly proud of his tradition, which he had brought to the land of opportunity to exercise in the early part of the century, when the proportion of Italians to immigrants from less imaginative lands was about five to one: he whose consecration had helped to raise New York to its present reputation for being the greatest modern center of counterfeiting money of every currency in the world.

  He crossed himself before the mirror, turned down his collar, and let his gaze rest upon the Siam National Railway’s Guide to Bangkok, noting, as he did, that he must pick up a copy of Baedeker’s Spain. He allowed himself a moment to dream, saw himself voyaging (for the Eternal City, in a Holy Year, lay before him) like those early pilgrims to the Holy Land, Lententide in Rome, Holy Week at Compostella while their families were left starving at home, where they eventually returned decked with cockleshells to recount their adventures, and receive the applause and reverent congratulations of their lesser neighbors who had cravenly remained at home to work for their living.

  Into his pocket he thrust the Theologia Moralis; and, on second thought, a small sandy mustache with spirit gum stuck to it. He picked up the package of bills, and paused to gaze for a moment into the fearless eyes of Andrew Jackson before he folded the paper closed upon them, and secured it with two elastic bands. How could Jackson, fighting in the Battle of Hanging Rock at the age of thirteen, know that a hundred seventy-odd years later a man would be laboring over his portrait with the exquisite care of love Mr. Sinisterra showed for those eyes, those lips, that shag of hair? that more than a century later his rousing battle with wealth, and the Bank of the United States, would be taken up, if on slightly different grounds, by one so covetous of anonymity as this man who stood thrusting two hundred and fifty vignettes of the seventh President into his pocket now?

  His wife did not turn around when he entered behind her, muttering —Seventy-two eighty-eight-hundredths of an inch apart! That’s no work for a bum. He stopped, and said in a hoarse whisper, —Do you hear me? Still she did not turn. He raised his voice with the same question. Then he advanced upon her. She jumped, and let out a cry, clinging to the sink with one hand, fumbling at her bosom with the other. —You haven’t heard a thing I’ve said all this time. You turned it off, didn’t you? Didn’t you! With that, he tore the hearing aid from her dress, and threw it on the floor. —There! he said, and stamped on it. —Now you don’t have to listen to me.

  She only stared at him, at his eyes pin-pointed, bearing blindness, through those dusty lenses. She shook her head, looking at his light reversible coat. —It’s cold out, Frank.

  —I know it, he said. —I won’t be long.

  —It’s cold out, Frank. Here, you ought to take this around your neck. She went over to a chair, and picked up a green scarf which her son had thrown there. —Wear this. Probably it ain’t his anyway.

  Mr. Sinisterra stood while she put the scarf round his neck. —I’m sorry, he said, —but when you don’t pay attention to me . . . Stupidity, I just cannot stand stupidity. She shook her head; and he left her there, stooping over to pick up the broken snarl of wire and plastic case at her feet. With that in her hand, she closed the door to his room which he had left open behind him, murmuring, —The smell . . . the smell gets everywhere, though no one heard her; and she could not be certain that she heard herself, echoing over Sheol.

  hello.

  Mr. Pivner gazed at a full-page advertisement in his newspaper . . . You can say “hello” to a man as you pass him on the street. But you can’t sell him anything.

  Mr. Pivner’s reading embraced tangible things. He had not gone to college (but rather something which called itself a business school: he had studied “accounting”). True, even if he had, he might never have read Democritus, the sire of materialism (judged insane by his neighbors, true, those rare Abderites, who summoned Hippocrates to cure him). Mr. Pivner’s attention rarely came upon things at first hand in any case. He preferred those mummifactory presentations called “digests,” which reassured him about his own opinions before he knew what they were. Had he read Democritus, he might have discovered, in philosophy’s first collection of ethical precepts, among portents of atheism, and
the vision of his own soul composed of round, smooth, especially mobile atoms, that it is the unexpected which occurs.

  Since life itself tried vigorously to teach him this, however, it was this knowledge that he resisted most successfully. In his reading (a serious pursuit, whether advertising or the Old Testament) he chose, not the disquieting road to serenity, but the serenely narrow path to eventual and total derangement. Nirvana? what sense could he make of a lifetime spent striving toward a goal where nothing was? what satisfaction with Buddhism even when it had reached its tangible (idolatrous) form, to sit in a vase-domed temple turning a prayer wheel before a gilded statue, muttering, —Life is suffering

  What sense in the Buddhists? They who affirm.

  What sense in the Gainas? They who say Perhaps

  As far from the Prince of Kapilavastu (who brought hope that the chain of twenty-four lakhs of birth in the soul’s migration might be severed), as he was from the Nazarene (who, agreeing with the Buddha that life was a sore thing, virility even worse, threatened resurrection), Mr. Pivner sat staring through rimless glasses at a kindly book-jacket face which returned his amorphous gaze. He was preparing to meet his son, to win him as a friend, and influence him as a person.