William Gaddis - The Recognitions

The text for the following Sunday's sermon was taken from the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 7:1), and Janet became kitchen girl in Reverend Gwyon's household.

There were a few, of an intuitive nature seldom bred in such a community, who suspected his charity to be a mask behind which he dissembled a sense of humor to mock them all. The Town Carpenter was one of these. He commenced to appear regularly on Sunday mornings in the dimmer sections of the church, dressed in policeman suspenders and shirts so respectfully modest that they even concealed the usually prominent top button of his underwear.

The parsonage was a clapboard house whose interiors were done in dark paper and wainscoting. Most of the downstairs windows were darkened by outside trees. As the master unpacked, its character changed, realizing itself for the first time in sympathy with the obscurity. Watts's painting of Sir Galahad, in the hall leading to the study, was replaced by a small cross bearing a mirror in each extremity. A robin, a thrush, and a bluejay (mounted by a distant cousin who had found taxidermy the Way Out and was last seen in the Natural History Museum in Capetown, South Africa, drinking himself to death in a room full of rigid hummingbirds he had stuffed himself) gave up their niche to the defaced stone figure of a Spanish saint, Olalla. A picture of an unassuming elk skulking among empty trees was replaced by a copy of a painting by the elder Breughel; and Saint Anthony's insanity manifest in the desert was hung over the unfaded square caused and covered by a painting of Trees (done by a maiden relative long since gone to earth, and rescued now by Aunt May).

A large low table appeared under the window in the dining room. It was the prize of this incipient collection, priceless, although a price had been settled which Gwyon paid without question to the old Italian grandee who offered it sadly and in secret. This table top was the original (though some fainaiguing had been necessary at Italian customs, confirming it a fake to get it out of the country), a painting by Hieronymus Bosch portraying the Seven Deadly Sins in medieval (meddy-evil, the Reverend pronounced it, an unholy light in his eyes) indulgence. Under the glass which covered it, Christ stood with one maimed hand upraised, beneath him in rubrics, Cave, Cave, D' videt …

— Catholic! said Aunt May, sounding anathema in her voice. She added something about Catholic, or Spanish, vanity anent the mirrors in the arms of the cross. Reverend Gwyon thought it best not to explain their purpose. As for the distinctly heathen monkey, it was forced to live in the carriage barn.

It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least. In the medievally construed parsonage Wyatt graduated from the potty to more exalting porcelain eminence, and learned to pick his nose with his forefinger instead of his thumb. He spent more time indoors than out, and there was a chill in those dim corridors which no change of season dispelled, passages where he was often found wandering aimlessly, or simply standing still, gazing at the grooves in the wainscoting or up at the concave molding, to listen to the creaks that came from the sharp angles of woodwork, to talk to himself repeating words and phrases over and over, and then to move as though he were being watched. He could stand until interrupted by the opening of the study door behind him, and his father's garbled exclamation of surprise at finding him there staring up at the cross mounting the four small mirrors, though he never asked about it; and there was only one hall he avoided, or hurried when he had to pass through it to the dining room, even then with a quick look over his shoulder at Olalla watching, noseless, from her niche, the hand upraised, which he fully expected to strike him from behind as he passed.

— Al-Shira-al-jamânija., he whispered.

— What? What is it you're saying? Aunt May demanded, rounding a corner.

— Al-Shira-al-jamânija. the bright star of Yemen.

— Where do you hear things like that? she scolded. — Yemen indeed! And she turned him toward the stairs, and sent him up to read in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, one of the books provided to prepare him for the Lord's work. From the first time he was asked, — Do you love the Lord Jesus? he was uncomfortably embarrassed; and since hate is an easier concept to embody than love, the Pope trod in far more substantial reality through the frightened corridors of his mind than did the Lord. At such an age, the Blood of the Lamb provoked no pleasant prospect for bathing; and resurrection a dispensable preoccupation for one who had not yet lived. If it was (as she said) in the way of God that he walked with Aunt May, he might only have protested that her horny feet prepared her where his did not: only the exclusive atmosphere of this thorny expedition proved for a time unwholesomely attractive, that, and promise that his mother had already arrived in that intermediate Elysium where he would join her, whither, even then, Aunt May led by a dead reckoning of Orphic proportion. To say nothing of fear, and less of terror, for the jealous God wielded by Aunt May made the sinner's landscape of after-Death more terrible even than his happy life on earth. — The devil finds work for idle hands, she taught him, and — In Adam's fall / We sinned all, with the grim penitence of one who had never had opportunity.

The two of them, father and son, grew away from her in opposite directions. Wyatt grew forward, escaping for the most part in casual innocence any who would hold him back with the selfish nostalgia of love. And his father seemed to find the adventure of daily life more and more trying. Reverend Gwyon retreated from it, by centuries, whenever he could escape to his study, where he sank, inhumed until her voice struck with the sharpness of a gravedigger's pick. As men whose sons are born to them late in life do often, he regarded Wyatt from a wondering distance, saw in his behavior a phantasy of perfect logic demonstrating those parts of himself which had had to grow in secret. It is true they shared confidences, but even these usually centered about oddments from the forepart of Gwyon's mind, topics he might have left a minute before in his study, from Ossian, or Theophrastus, to the Dog Star, a sun whose rising ushered in the inundation of the Nile, Al-Shira-al-jamânija, the star of heat and pestilence, which Gwyon spoke of familiarly when he found himself forced to conversation by the abrupt and even more shy presence of this fragment of himself he kept encountering. He even spoke his son's name unfamiliarly. (But there was reason for that. Months before the boy's birth, he and Camilla had agreed, if it were a son, to name him Stephen; and not until months after their son was born, and Aunt May had peremptorily supplied the name Wyatt from somewhere in the Gwyon genealogy, did they remember. Or rather, Camilla remembered, and though it might have been a safe choice, for the name's sake of the first Christian martyr, even to Aunt May, neither of them mentioned it to her, for baptism had already taken place.)

When questions of discipline arose, Gwyon's face took the look of a man who has been asked a question to which everyone else in the room knows the answer. Or when his son sat whining in disobedience Gwyon stood over him clutching his hands as though restraining the impulse to kill the child, then took him up foreignly by a hand and a foot and swung him back and forth in labored arcs until Wyatt shouted with pleasure.

It was Aunt May who kept the stern measure of the present, unredeemed though it might be, alive to practical purposes, binding the two of them together like an old piece of baling wire.

— Go and ask your father, she said often enough, when questions came up in the reading she thrust upon him. — Ask your father what Homoousian means. But a good half-hour later she found him, standing still in the hall outside the study door, whispering, — Homoousian?. Homo-oisian?.