The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) Read online

  There may have been, by now, many things that Wyatt wanted to do to Jesus: emulate was not one of them. Nonetheless it went on. He made drawings in secret, and kept them hidden, terrified with guilty amazement as forms took shape under his pencil. He wrapped some in a newspaper and buried them behind the carriage barn, more convinced, as those years passed, and his talent blossomed and flourished with the luxuriance of the green bay tree, that he was damned. Once, digging back there, he came upon the rotted remains of the bird he had killed that day he had burst into tears at Aunt May’s conjectural challenge and punishment, the vivid details of the Synod of Dort: even that evening he had gone to his father’s study to try to confess it, for it had, after all, been an accident (he had thrown a stone at the wren, and could not believe it when he hit it square, and picked it up dead). But when there was no answer to his first faint tapping on the study door, he retreated. Just as now, he almost went to his father to confess, in a last hope of being saved; but he had since learned from Aunt May that there was no more hope for the damned than there was fear for the Elect. And his father, withdrawing into his study with a deftness for absenting himself at crucial moments akin to that talent of the Lord, had become about as unattainable.

  The earth behind the carriage barn was broken often enough that Wyatt, burying there still another package of drawings, would turn up the moldering guilt of years before. Even as he grew older, and might have burned them, he found himself unable to do so. He continued to bury them, around near the kitchen midden, as though they might one day be required of him.

  Eventually Aunt May permitted him to copy, illustrations from some of the leather-bound marathons of suffering and disaster on her shelf; but even she had no notion of the extent of his work. It was hardly original, but derived from the horror of the Breughel copy in his father’s study, and the pitilessness of the Bosch, promoting an articulate imagination which any Flemish primitive might have plumbed to advantage. Unlike the healthy child who devises ingenious tortures for small animals, Wyatt elaborated a domain where the agony of man took remarkable directions, and the underclothed Figure from the center of the Bosch table suffered a variety of undignified afflictions.

  Transportation and communication advanced, bringing to Aunt May’s door the woes of the world, a world which she saw a worse thing daily.

  She put aside the Bible only for excursions among the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs from the Introduction of Christianity to the Latest Periods of Pagan, Popish, and Infidel Persecutions (“embellished with engravings”), and such recent prophets as stood her in stead of newspapers. She read interpretations of the eleventh-century Malachi prophecy (on the Popes, of which only seven remained to come, and with the seventh the destruction of Rome) with the avidity of someone reading the morning’s news, the same enthusiasm she brought to the Penetralia of Andrew Jackson Davis (who could see the interior of objects), the same hunger that she brought to William Miller, satisfied as he was a century before that the end of the world was at hand, as evidence continued to “flow in from every quarter. ‘The earth is reeling to and fro like a drunkard.’ At this dread moment look! The clouds have burst asunder; the heavens appear; the great white throne is in sight! Amazement fills the Universe with awe! He comes! He comes! Behold the Saviour comes!”

  She waited, thumbing the Revelation of Saint John the Divine, which she read as a literal transcription of the march of science, a parade led off by Darwin which had trod on simian feet throughout her life. She spent more time with Janet; or rather, she had Janet spend more time with her. After her original disapproval of the kitchen girl had been firmly established, Aunt May worked her toward salvation with every discouragement she could supply. Janet was willing. She was, indeed, far on the way to that simple-mindedness which many despairingly intelligent people believe requisite for entering the kingdom of Heaven. This quality might prevent her from grasping some of the more complicated arcana which Aunt May tendered, still there was room for the residence of terror in the collapsing tenement of her mind. Darwin soon became as real to her as the Pope, the one resembling Heracles, the other triple-headed. From the carriage barn, the jingle of sleighbells reached them both. Aunt May, believing that she shut them out, hid them from herself in that part of her mind which turned upon her in dreams; Janet seemed to rush out to meet the hellish tinkling, and it was only on waking that her dreams began. But of all the distress that Janet endured, most persistent was her body’s revenge on her attempt to disdain it. At first, hardly knowing how man and woman differed, she accepted the changes which grew upon her with no more regret than life itself produced. It was Aunt May who called her attention to the darkening of her chin, and asked questions of such profound delicacy that, when confirmed, the consternation which descended upon the questioner was only equaled in that household by her reception of the news of the Scopes trial in distant Tennessee. Of that she could hardly speak, but sat shaking her head over Buffon’s Natural History, reading again and again the article there on the animals called pygmies, and waiting, as though what she was waiting for was a secret from everyone but herself and her Creator.

  Aunt May gradually withdrew from the affairs of the household, reading the Bible aloud to herself in her room, her voice only a sound barely broken by articulation. In this monotone it became so familiar a part of the house, that one paused when it was deflected, hearing it rise in pleading argument to the challenge of absolutes, —I am the Resurrection and the Life . . . , so plaintive that it seemed querulous, fearful not of doubting but of even admitting for an instant such existential possibility. Then the glimpse of humility was done, and the voice recovered the somnambulance of certitude.

  She waited, her hair bobbed (not worn so for fashion from the outside world, where flappers were ushering it into smart society from the bawdy houses, where all fashions originate, but) in the clean shingles of a state hospital, always in the same trim arrangement, raising a clinically unsympathetic mirror to snip hairs from her nostrils. —This would be your grandfather’s birthday, she told Wyatt, on May Day. —He would be eighty-six today, if he were alive, she added. She had been talking about John Huss a minute before, and looking the lean pale boy up and down, when he, for whom King Wenceslaus in that story bore striking resemblance to the Town Carpenter, broke out,

  —But Grandfather, I . . . I saw him yesterday . . .

  —Your father’s father, she corrected him sharply, but her voice broke, almost bitter as she looked away, not for the death of her brother but to insinuate that he had abandoned her in this bondage of mortality. She talked to Wyatt familiarly of death, as though to take him with her would be the kindest expression of her love for him possible: still, she never spoke directly of death, never named it so, but continued to treat it with the euphemistic care reserved elsewhere for obscenity.

  —And this? she appeared one morning in the study door poised rigid, dangling forth a pamphlet between forefinger and opposable thumb, —tell me how this got among my things? As though there might have been movement in the air, the pamphlet fluttered open, quaking its suspended title: Breve Guida della Basilica di San Clemente. In his chair, Gwyon startled, to reach for it, but stayed held at bay by her unpliant arm, and unyielding eyes which had fixed the distance between them. With a single shudder he freed his own eyes from hers and fixed them on the pamphlet, to realize that it was indeed not being offered in return but rather in evidence: not an instant of her stringent apparition suggested surrender. —Another souvenir from Spain! she accused, a page headed in bold face La Basilica Sotterranea Dedicata alla memoria di S Clemente Papa e Martire fled under her thumb. —Pictures of Spanish idols, . . . fragments of Byzantine fresco captioned Nostra Signora col Gesù Bambino almost caught her attention, —Catholic images . . . Another page fell over from the hand quivering at her arm’s length, and bringing her foot a step past the sill she held it out that space closer to him: nothing moved. But the sill’s sharp creak under
foot penetrated, a signal for her to hurl it at him, or down; for him to leap and snatch it. But nothing moved until she retired recovering her advance, and spoke with bitter calm, looking square at the thing, —A nice . . . place of worship! The illustration pinioned by her gaze was captioned Il Tempio di Mitra. —Look at it! a dirty little underground cave, no place to kneel or even sit down, unless you could call this broken stone bench a pew? She got her breath when he interposed, —But . . . —And the altar! look at it, look at the picture on it, a man . . . god? and it looks like a bull!

  —Yes, a pagan temple, they’ve excavated and found the basilica of Saint Clement was built right over a temple where worshipers of . . .

  —Pagan indeed! And I suppose you couldn’t resist setting foot inside yourself? Did you? Again she paused, getting breath she appeared to prepare requital for his answer, admission or denial, and when he withdrew mumbling only —Set foot inside myself . . . ? she snapped immediately, —At least I have finally had the satisfaction of hearing you call the Roman Catholic Church pagan! She filled her grievous gaze a moment longer with the picture, and finishing with —Now that we all know what the inside of a Catholic church looks like, . . . she was gone, holding the abhorrent memento at arm’s length, her eyes alert upon it, as though it might take life and strike.

  Gwyon came slowly forward in his chair, hands clenched on nothing, listening to her sharp footsteps receding toward the kitchen. He waited until he heard them on the stairs, then hurried to the kitchen himself. Janet came in a few minutes later to find him sifting through the kitchen trashbin; but he went out without a word, and empty-handed. And when at lunch he once or twice faltered toward questioning her she looked up and beyond him and the room, as though listening to a confidence, or a summons, from far away.

  For the most part, conversation seemed to pass over her, when she would stop it in its tracks to rescue something which struck her. Few things seemed to stir her pleasantly but news of unhappy occurrences in Italy: whether storms or strikes or railway accidents, she saw imminent in them the fall of Rome. She waited, contemplating wholesale damnation for the whole non-Christian world with an eye as level as that of Saint Bonaventura: no more mother than he, the prospect of eternal roasting for millions of unbaptized children did not bring the flutter of an eyelash: “The sight of the pains of the damned heaps up the measure of the accidental joys of the righteous,” and with his words on her own lips, she firmly expected to see Saint Bonaventura heaping her own measure in the Life ahead. But even that torrid landscape chilled and shattered, pierced by the sleighbells, more pointed for their infrequency, to stop her breath if she were speaking, or raise her voice to the defense when she read.

  —It’s all right indeed, all right for a man who goes to bullfights! she brought out next day at table, summoning this distant detail to interrupt the conversation between father and son. —Bringing a . . . a creature like that back from Africa, there should be a law against it.

  —Creature? Gwyon repeated.

  —That creature you brought back, that’s what you’re talking about isn’t it. Isn’t it?

  —I was telling . . . talking about that painting, there, the table under the window.

  —There ought to be a law against it, bringing back creatures like that.

  —Oh, oh Heracles, yes, you mean, it’s forbidden, yes, taking them from Gibraltar, he commenced, confused, answering.

  —Breaking the law, proud of yourself! Her glasses went blank with light as she returned her attention to her plate; and Wyatt, after the pause of her absenting herself, asked:

  —How were you certain it was the original? Suppose . . .

  —That took some . . . umm . . . conniving, getting it through customs. It’s prohibited, you know, taking works of art out of Italy . . .

  —Italy! Aunt May cut in across the table. —You never told me you had been in Italy! Never. You never told me that!

  —Strange I never mentioned it, Gwyon said.

  —Mentioned! You never told me, she said getting up from the table.

  —What earthly difference . . .

  —Earthly! No earthly difference, as you say. No earthly difference, at all. For someone who tells stories about evil spirits who deceive good people by keeping the path to Paradise littered with filth, no earthly difference at all, she went on nearing the door. —At least you spared Camilla that! she finished, and was gone. Gwyon left the table a moment later, with a mutter of apology to his son, though he did not look up at him, and went out to the porch, where he stood looking straight up at the sun.

  On pleasant days, such as this was, Aunt May still went out to tend her hawthorn tree. This afternoon, when she came in from it, she was impressively silent. Gwyon might have thought it was the Italian incident, but she said quietly, —I saw a moor hen this afternoon. (The moor cock was their family crest.) —And no male anywhere in sight. I have not seen a male moor hen for years.

  Though slow, she still moved with energy. Her world had finally shrunk to her books and her hawthorn tree. When questions of foreign suddenness were asked she looked up startled and afraid, as though some worldly circumstance might intrude upon her preparations for departure. As the days passed, she sang in a weak voice which she believed maintained a tune, a hymn which, as she remembered, came to her from John Wesley, expressing her divine longing, ready sometimes, it seemed, like Saint Teresa, “to die of not being able to die.”

  —O beautiful aspect of death

  What sight on earth is so fair

  What pageant, what aspect of life

  Can with a dead body compare,

  came her wail on the vivid spring air to the ears of living things.

  She put an old smock over her housedress and tied a shielding bonnet to her head. Over the morning grass alive with creatures smaller than its own blades her old garden shoes trod. A robin took to the air before her as she approached the hawthorn tree, torn from the ground and lying flat, pink blossoms among the weeds. Her voice in its singing stopped in disbelief. Frantically she raised the tree and pushed it back into the open earth at a dead angle. Then she came back to the house, and before she reached it the tree had fallen again.

  Heracles had got loose the night before. The Town Carpenter, who met him outside the Depot Tavern, brought him back, and tried to replant the tree. But it was no good. The tree was dead before the week was out, and so was Aunt May.

  She was sixty-three. It was not, in her case, a ripe age, but quite the other way, a systematic reduction of unfertile years and thoughts, disapprobation, generally a life bounded by terms of negation, satisfied with its resistance to any temptation which might have borne fruit. Better to marry than to burn, but she had not been forced to that pusillanimous choice: gnarled, she stepped from one virginity to another without hesitation. Here, three centuries after Dort, her face wore a firm look of Election, as though she knew where she was going, had visited there many times before. She seemed in a hurry to be gone from that body, as any vain soul well might have been, the still fingers faded under the framed flush of NO CROSS NO CROWN. Surrounded by closed books, with Buffon’s Natural History on the floor, they found that body in her chair where she had left it when she fled, unequivocally abandoned, as though not even the last trumpet could summon her to take it up again. Her last words were, —I believe I put it in the top bureau drawer. They looked there afterward, but found only the white round shell box with a hole in its top, into which she had used to put dead hair when she combed it out.

  Wyatt was twelve, and deeply impressed by the funeral sermon his father spoke over that anonymous box where Aunt May, in a lavender gown she had never before worn, lay with the lid closed, a stipulation as importunate as that of the Blessed Umiliana (another devotee of quicklime) having her socks put on, with her last breath, so that the crowd could not venerate her nude feet.

  —“O man, consider thyself! Here thou standest in the earnest perpetual strife of good and evil,” Reverend Gwyon thundered the lines
of William Law down upon the gray faces (whose owners, years later when he was locked up, defenseless, recalled it as the last truly Christian sermon he had ever read). —“All nature is continually at work to bring forth the great redemption; the whole creation is travailing in pain and laborious working to be delivered from the vanity of time; and wilt thou be asleep? Everything thou hearest or seest says nothing, shows nothing to thee but what either eternal light or eternal darkness has brought forth; for as day and night divide the whole of our time, so heaven and hell divide all our thoughts, words, and actions. Stir which way thou wilt, do or design what thou wilt, thou must be an agent with the one or the other. Thou canst not stand still, because thou livest in the perpetual workings of temporal and eternal nature; if thou workest not with the good, the evil that is in nature carries thee along with it. Thou hast the height and depth of eternity in thee and therefore, be doing what thou wilt, either in the closet, the field, the shop or the church, thou art sowing that which grows and must be reaped in eternity.”

  Three years later, that partisan Deity whose most recent attention to the family had been Aunt May’s rescue from mortality, acted in Wyatt’s direction (though, as the boy and his father independently suspected, perhaps it was a different God altogether). Wyatt was taken with a fever which burned him down to seventy-nine pounds. In this refined state he was exhibited to medical students in the amphitheater of a highly endowed hospital. They found it a very interesting case, and said so. In fact they said very little else. Physicians, technicians, and internes X-rayed the boy from every possible angle, injected his arms with a new disease they believed they could cure, took blood by the bottleful from one arm to investigate, and poured the blood of six other people into the other. They collected about his bed and pounded him, tapped his chest, thrust with furious hands for his liver, pumped his stomach with a lead-weighted tube, kneaded his groin, palped his spleen, and recorded the defiant beats of his heart with electric machinery.