William Gaddis: The Recognitions

Wyatt was four years old when his father returned alone from Spain, a small disgruntled person with sand-colored hair, hazel eyes which burned into green on angry occasion, and hands constantly busy, clutching and opening on nothing, breaking something, or picking his nose. He was in celebrant spirits that spring day, and observed the solemn homecoming by emptying the pot on which he meditated for an hour or so each morning into a floor register. Aunt May was there a moment later. She gave him a hard slap on the bottom, realized her mistake, and pondered with some bitterness the end of this Christian family while she washed her hands. She had just come from the father, who had told her about the impatient piece of luggage waiting in quarantine. Leaving his room brusquely, to take this revelation away and try to fit it into the hectic tangram of recent events, she had hardly reached the newel at the stairhead when she heard a crash. She returned to find the Reverend swaying unsteadily among the breakage of a Bennington ware pitcher, a peculiarly ugly thing of which she'd been very fond. The Reverend, who'd been about to change, now trying to pull his trousers back up, said something about the roll of a ship, and losing his balance when the chiffonier failed to move over and support him. If her sniff was meant simply to express disdain, a sharp attentive look came to her face as she repeated it, and she was about to speak when, from below decks, rose the hilarious sound of metal being banged against metal. Down the. wide golden-oak front staircase vaulted Aunt May, traveling at a great rate but retaining the glasses clamped to her nose, thus her dignity.

— It's certainly reached the furnace by this time, she said when the child's father appeared, drying her hands on an old dishcloth. — You can smell it all over the house, she added in unnecessary comment to heighten the effect, and turned on Wyatt with, — Why did you do such a nasty thing? He stood looking behind her, at the picture of his mother on the mantel, a photograph made before Camilla was married. Aunt May gripped his small-boned shoulder in her hand and shook him. She was his Christian mentor. It was she who had washed his mouth out with laundry soap after the rabbit episode. — Do you enjoy the smell? she went on, drawing the word out so that it seemed laden with odor itself.

— You'd better go to your room, said his father, in a voice stern only with effort, for this sudden demand for discipline was confusing.

— To his room! said the woman, as though she would lop off a hand as a lesson. — Why that boy.

— Go to your room, Wyatt. Reverend Gwyon was stern now, but for her, not the child; and Aunt May swept out of the room to write a hurried note rescinding a tea invitation to the ladies of the Use-Me Society. The father and son faced one another across the stark declivity of their different heights, the man staring wordless at this incarnation of something he had imagined long before, in a different life; the child staring beyond at his virgin mother.

Gwyon recovered himself, but before he could speak the sound which was not yet a word in his throat Wyatt had turned away and walked slowly up the stairs to his room, to a chair beside a closed window where he sat looking out upon the unfulfilled landscape of the spring, picking his nose, and seeming not to breathe.

Beyond the roof of the carriage barn, clouds conspired over Mount Lamentation. He looked there with open unblinking eyes as though in that direction lay the hopeless future which already existed, of which he was already fully aware, to which he was conclusively committed. His shoulders were drawn in, as though confirmed in the habit of being cold.

For one dedicate in the Lord's service, as Aunt May assured him. that he was, Wyatt seemed already to have piled up a tidy store of sin. He could move in few directions without adding to it. His most remarkable accomplishment had occurred right after Hallowe'en. He was in his mother's sewing room going through the button drawer, in the afternoon when he should have been taking his nap, when she came in. She was dressed in white, and although she appeared to be looking for something, she did not seem to see him. He ran toward her, crying out with pleasure, but before he could reach her she turned and went out, at the instant Aunt May came through the door. — She was here, where did she go? Mother was here., he started to Aunt May, with barely another word when that flesh-and-bloodless woman picked him up and took him to his bed, to force him down there with little more than a turn of her wrist, and leave him to "beseech the Lord" to help him stop lying. It was days later when Aunt May called him to her, shaking, with an opened letter in her hand, and had him repeat that lie in detail. Quivering like the letter he stared at in her hand, he spoke with frightened reluctance, as though this were a device, logical for Aunt May, to promote more punishment. But when he was done Aunt May had him kneel beside his bed and pray to the Lord to help him forget it, pray to the Lord to forgive him. She even knelt with him.

The Lord had not helped him: he remembered it very well. There was some confusion in his mind when his father returned, for somehow his father and the Lord were the same person and he almost asked his father to help him forget it. That would not do, because Aunt May had told him never to tell his father. Didn't his father know? And if the Lord was everywhere, hadn't He seen Camilla come in, dressed in a white sheet, looking for something?

Aunt May never mentioned that again. But she lost no time telling his father about the rabbit. — I scarcely know how to tell you, she commenced, and when Gwyon looked satisfactorily alarmed she went on, — Your son has learned, somewhere, to swear. It's scarcely surprising, with a grandfather who talks to him just the way he talks to his cronies in the saloon, and fills him full of all kinds of drivel. She went on to explain that she had taken a toy away from Wyatt every time this happened (being lenient), until he was left with only one, a cloth rabbit. (For the truth of that, the words which cost him those treasures were darn and heck: she seemed to know their euphemistic derivation well enough.) — And then, the last straw, I… I can scarcely repeat his words. Though Heaven knows how they are engraved on my memory. He knew I was in the room, he was sitting on the floor with his last toy, this rabbit, and he said. your son said, as clearly as I'm speaking now, he said, "You're the by-Goddest rabbit I ever damn saw!" At which, hearing herself speak this, Aunt May almost sobbed crying out, — What kind of a Christian mi… mish. minister do you think he will make?

Wyatt was, in fact, finding the Christian system suspect. Memory of his fourth birthday party still weighed heavily in his mind. It had been planned cautiously by Aunt May, to the exact number of hats and favors and portions of cake. One guest, no friend to Wyatt (from a family "less fortunate than we are"), showed up with a staunchly party-bent brother. (Not only no friend: a week before he had challenged Wyatt through the fence behind the carriage barn with — Nyaa nyaa, suckinyerma's ti-it-ty.) Wyatt was taken to a dark corner, where he later reckoned all Good works were conceived, and told that it was the Christian thing to surrender his portion. So he entered his fifth year hatless among crepe-paper festoons, silent amid snapping crackers, empty of Christian love for the uninvited who asked him why he wasn't having any cake.

On Sunday mornings he would sit tugging buttons or strands of horsehair from the pew's upholstery, trying to work out a way to circumvent surrender of the coin in the wet palm of his hand. But the untoward moment always arrived, heralded by a voice singing, he believed, from Heaven, — All things come of Thee O Lord and of Thine own give we back to Thee. He later learned that it was no heavenly voice at all, but Mrs. Dorman, a dumpy deep-chested boarding-house keeper, strategically placed somewhere up in the vicinity of the bell tower. The rest of the congregation was being victimized by this ruse, and he might have enlightened them but for the prospect of the yellow bar of laundry soap. And aside from the actual buying power of five cents, it was the notion that it had once belonged to the Lord he resented: what use that covetous heavenly host could have for a nickel. — Praise God from whom all blessings flow, burst the choir, and the money was carried away in a wicker basket never to be seen on earth again.