William Gaddis - The Recognitions

Janet did not go to church. There was no disaffection, but she seemed to have attained some unity of her own. And she was no longer found benumbed on the kitchen floor; but might interrupt any household drudgery to hurry to her room where rapturous gasps could have been heard from behind the closed door, if anyone had listened. For the most part she went about her work happily, detached, padding through the dim passages in soft slippers, and ordering the kitchen with dark-gloved hands. Occasionally she kept to her bed.

Gwyon's interest in his son's painting was perfunctory when it did occur, slightly distracted and puzzled as he became now for anything intruding upon him from worlds that were not his own. He only broke through this withdrawal once, when he sustained a shock at seeing an unfinished approximation to the picture of Camilla on the living-room mantel. It was done in black on a smooth gesso ground, on strong linen, a stark likeness which left its lines of completion to the eye of the beholder. It was this quality which appeared to upset Gwyon: once he'd seen it he was constantly curious, and would stand looking away from it, and back, completing it in his own mind and then looking again as though, in the momentary absence of his stare and the force of his own plastic imagination, it might have completed itself. Still each time he returned to it, it was slightly different than he remembered, intractably thwarting the completion he had managed himself. — Why won't you finish it? he burst out finally.

— There's something about a… an unfinished piece of work, a… a thing like this where. do you see? Where perfection is still possible? Because it's there, it's there all the time, all the time you work trying to uncover it. Wyatt caught a hand before him and gripped it as his father's were gripped behind the back turned to him. — Because it's there., he repeated.

Gwyon turned back to the unfinished panel muttering, — Yes, yes. Praxiteles. and his voice tailed off as he returned and stood following the line of the nose, bringing it back round the broken circle of a Byzantine hoop of gold, while behind him his hands opened and closed on nothing.

The table of the Seven Deadly Sins was unfinished. It remained unfinished for some years, when Wyatt went away to study. It was still hidden and untouched when he came home from Divinity School, where he had completed a year's work.

Something was wrong then. His father knew it, but Reverend Gwyon by this time lived immersed in himself. He shied from talking with Wyatt about his studies. From his flushed face and his agitated manner, it seemed that one word could summon in him histories and arguments of such complexity that they might now take hours, where they had in truth taken centuries, to unravel: but he seemed at pains to dismiss them as quickly as he could, commenting directly, then obliquely, and then changing the subject entirely. — Mithras? Of course, he answered to some question of Wyatt's. — It didn't fail because it was bad. Mithraism almost triumphed over Christianity. It failed because it was so near good. He mumbled something, and then added, — That's the trouble today. No mystery. Everything secularized. No mystery, no weight to anything at all…, and he got up and left the room, as he did often in the middle of conversation. Especially these questionings grown from Wyatt's studies. -Pelagianism? he repeated over a plate of disintegrated white lima beans (for Wyatt seldom saw him but at meals). — If it hadn't been Pelagius it would have been someone else. But by now we… too many of us may embrace original sin ourselves to explain our own guilt, and behave. treat everyone else as though they were full-fledged. umm. Pelagians doing just as they please. He did not elaborate, but sat drumming his fingers on the mahogany dining-room table top.

— Free will. Wyatt commenced, but his father was not listening. In all these discussions there seemed to be decisions he had made privately, and in the effort of suppressing them could at last say nothing at all. But as the weeks passed, Wyatt pressed him more and more for encouragement in his own study for the church. Sometimes Gwyon rose to this as though it were his duty to do so. He might manage, for instance, to discourse on the intricacies of transubstantiation without dissent, or even departure from orthodoxy; but as his references mounted, and his enthusiasm grew, reaching the doctrine, which he called Aristotelian, of God retaining the 'accidents' of the bread and wine (in order not to shock His worshipers, he added), and embarked upon a discussion of the 'accidents' of reality, and the redemption of matter, he left the table abruptly to get a reference, a paper or a book from his study, and did not come back. It was all as though he had no wish to push Wyatt into the ministry, like a man whose forebears have served all their lives on wooden ships, and he the last of them to do so, who will not force his son to serve on one knowing that the last of them will go down with him. Full proof of his ministry had begun. It was beyond his hand to stop it now.

Something was wrong. The summer fell away to fall, and Wyatt packed to leave. In the increasing amount of time he had spent painting, a plan formed of its own accord, so spontaneous of generation that he went on unaware of it, and it might seem only by chance that he did not stray from the confines of its design. He had called less and less frequently upon his father for encouragement toward the ministry, and Gwyon appeared to appreciate that, to become more relaxed, leading their conversations off in the direction of the past, the monastery in Estremadura, and Fr. Manomuerta to whom he still wrote, and sent packages of food; or the town of San Zwingli, the barrel organs in the streets, and the still uncanonized patron saint; the only bullfight he had ever seen: —And you don't kill with the sword, but with the cape, the art of the cape., he said following his son up the stairs, to the sewing room where Wyatt was packing.

The room was littered with sketches, studies, diagrams and unfinished canvases. A large panel stood face to the wall, and Wyatt, who'd entered first, suddenly backed up against it and stood there staring at the floor as though overcome by an idea, something he had known all along, but only now dared bring to consciousness.

— What is it, what did you bring me up to show me? Gwyon asked, looking over the litter. — Some painting, is it, you've done? Finished? At that he took a step toward the large panel, and Wyatt threw out his arms as though to protect it. — Eh? Gwyon stopped. — What is it? What's the matter? Didn't you have something to show me?

— Yes, yes, but I… I did, but. here. Wyatt's eyes had been darting about the floor, then he stooped abruptly and snatched up a paper. — Yes, here, he said holding it out, — you see, this. this is what I've been. doing. He held the paper out, his face in a blank expression which fused into desperate appeal as he looked up at his father.

— This? All these lines? Gwyon said, taking it.

— Yes, it's studies in perspective.

— I see, all these lines, coming together here at one point.

— Yes, Wyatt mumbled, backing away toward the panel again. — The vanishing point. That's called the vanishing point. He was staring wide-eyed at his father, but he withdrew his eyes quickly when Gwyon looked up, and waited there, shaking throughout his frame, until his father left the room. Even then he did not move, but waited until the heavy footfalls sounded to the bottom of the stairs. Then he swung round to the panel, pulled it out from the wall, and looked at this finished copy of the Bosch painting with a new expression on his face.

At supper that evening, each of them tended his plate with more than the usual shy pretense to interest, nervously alert to one another, but silent until Gwyon called Janet in to open a bottle of wine. He seemed prepared to sit over that dark oloroso sherry all evening, starting sentences and leaving them unfinished, looking up at his son with the evasiveness of a conspirator, one, that is, involved in a conspiracy to which no one has confessed. For an instant their unblinking eyes locked with one another, then Gwyon turned away, and started to recount the brave deceit of the 'old Italian grandee, the Conte di Brescia, looking, as he spoke, at the table top of the Seven Deadly Sins under the far window, without a shadow on his features to suggest that he knew he was looking at an imposture, or hint at the memory of the meticulous and molding pictures he had found buried wrapped in newspapers behind the carriage barn, that evening of Midsummer Day years before.