William Gaddis - The Recognitions

— Yes, thank God, who led you there.

— But Stanley dear. .

— You were at Mass, he said.

— I'm not a Catholic any more, I tell you.-

— You will always be a Catholic. It is not for you to say. But why have you strayed so far? he asked, sitting beside her.

— Even when I was a child, I was frightened out of it, it seemed. Once in my convent school, I remember when we were all sent to look at a reliquary. It was… I don't know, a splinter of the Cross, or a crumb of something. They even had one that they said contained a bit of the original darkness that Moses called down on the world, imagine. Yes, I think it was a crumb, from the biscuit that bled when it was trampled by Zwingli's soldiers. But I didn't go, I went to a movie instead. The next day in class I was told to get up and describe the reliquary, and I gave a wonderful description, about it being big and fancy and gold, with a peep-hole and a magnifying lens so you could see the speck inside. Then they whipped me, and told me that it hadn't even been on exhibit, it was away being cleaned. .

— But these things are our trials as children to prepare us…

— And I used to chew the wafer, she went on, almost somnilo- quent, in an arrested whisper. — I couldn't hold it in my mouth without chewing it. The more I knew it was sinful, the more I chewed His Body, I had to chew it…

— These sins we commit as children. .

But now Agnes had breathed deeply and sat back. She glimpsed her face in a boudoir mirror and said, — Don't I look awful, my eye…

— What happened to it?

— At that party, that terrible party, in the ladies' room, another woman hit me with her hand bag. This has gone far enough, she said. She didn't think I was really a… she thought I was one of the people in costume. Agnes was staring at the floor. Then she sniffed and turned to Stanley with a smile forcing her lips. — But analysis is safer, and you have the same confessional.

— But don't you understand what happened this morning? he brought out fervently. — You didn't know you were coming to Mass, but you were directed there, as I was, as He led me there to…

She put an arm around his shoulders, and her strap came undone. Mickey Mouse pointed to 6:45. —Stanley, she said. — You're such a boy.

Dawn, somewhere beyond the incinerator plant which had won first prize in functional architecture a decade before: Fuller was busy in Mr. Brown's bathroom, picking up every piece of Mr. Brown's hair he could find and putting it into an envelope. Esme wakened for a moment in a strange bed, looked at the arm round her, could identify neither its owner nor its sex, and went back to sleep. Esther woke, hearing sounds which seemed to have been going on for a long time; as though she'd heard a key turn in the lock hours before, and footsteps, and the sound of a voice, or voices. But she lay still, and closed her eyes, as she did always on the dull sounds of Rose's dreams. In the street below, young policemen raced the engines of their motorcycles to arrogant pitch, and roared to duty. In the East Fifty-first Street station-house, Big Anna sat on a bench weeping. — But nobody even saw my gown, he cried. — We saw it, Jack, said the man behind the desk, turning to another policeman in shirtsleeves, — Is he known? Anselm was descending the steps of the I.R.T. West Side subway, on all fours. Adeline had just closed a door behind her, having wakened beside someone with short-cut hair and heavy hands, whom she remembered having taken for a man the night before. Herschel was not to be wakened until some hours later, by two sailors in a Chelsea hotel room, where he lay bandaged over chest and back, the protective gauze of Dutch Siam, tattoo artist.

Dawn, just as it came to Australian skies, a woman of bad character in a cloak of red possum skins.

What Stanley marveled at most was the wealth, of her that had appeared as her garments came off. There was so much of her. She stood, wiping the make-up from her face turned away, and he stared at her thighs from behind, as a collector stares at the fine patina glazed over the courses of worms, for those vast vermiculated surfaces were furrowed so. Terror struck him. He started to rise from the bed and reach for his shirt. Too late. She was there, tumbling the marvelous cucumiform weights down upon a chest which looked as though it would cave in under such manna. — Look, she said, joy of this world recovered, raising herself so that her front swung pendulant over him, unequaled, and unequal lengths untouched by baby's hand, — you can play telephone with them.

Trains from great distance over barbarous land, ships from civilized shores and airplanes from nowhere aimed at the island, dived at it, into it, unloaded lives upon it. Far uptown Mr. Pivner lay, unconscious arabesque in nervous imitation of sleep (he was, in fact, enduring a train wreck in Rajputana), that part of him already vigilant which would reach the control of the alarm clock an instant before it went off.

In Harlem, walking alone, Otto looked at his watch, forgot to see the time and looked again, as he sought the scene of Saturnalia where he hoped to recover the pigskin dispatch case.

The streets were filling with people whose work was not their own. They poured out, like buttons from a host of common ladles, though some were of pressed paper, some ivory, some horn, and synthetic pearl, to be put in place, to break, or fall off lost, rolling into gutters and dark corners where no Omnipotent Hand could reach them, no Omniscient Eye see them; to be replaced, seaming up the habits of this monster they clothed with their lives.

The newspaper quivered in Basil Valentine's hands, clasped behind him. Music, from another corner, plucked at his back. It was a pavan by a dead Spaniard.

Hungary to Sell Famed Paintings. . Vienna. . Diplomatic sources here said today that Hungary was attempting to sell in the West masterpieces from Budapest's National Art Gallery. The Gallery included paintings by Raphael, Tintoretto, Murillo, and others collected by the Austro-Hungarian emperors and princes. The informants said some of the paintings were being shipped to the United States as diplomatic luggage in the hope o£ interesting American art collectors.

He brought the newspaper up before him and read that again in the dull light of the dawn where he stood at the windows.

The desk in the far corner of the room was still littered with the papers he had spent the night over, finally snapped off the light and sat in a deep chair with his fingertips resting against his eyelids, and his head erect. The Vulliamy clock on the mantel had struck three times gently, at regular intervals, before he moved; and then, only his fingers moved, to remain arched before his face, meeting their tips in gothic contemplation, his eyes clear as though he'd done no more than blink them.

Now he gave an impatient sigh, dropped the newspaper on the window shelf, and stood looking straight out at the gray sky. — Another blue day? he murmured, as the stately strokes of the harp came to an end, and he turned from the window.

The letterheads among the sheaf of papers on his desk witnessed important oppositions in the world, languages as various as the devices and crests which adorned them. He sat down and hurriedly checked over a coded message against its original, — Put Inononu in touch immediately, have received necessary information. . which he crumpled in his hand. He slipped the rest of the papers into a dispatch case, and was gone for a moment into the bedroom to lock it in a wall safe behind the chest. Then he went to the bathroom, dropped the crumpled note into the basin and put a match to it, washed the ashes down the drain, washed his hands slowly and with care, and went in to make tea.