The Recognitions by William Gaddis Page B

suggestion that their bloody sacraments might have known other voices and other rooms. They could hardly know that the Reverend's powers of resistance were being taxed more heavily than their own, where he withstood the temptation to tell them details of the Last Supper at the Eleusinian Mysteries, the snake in the Garden of Eden, what early translators of the Bible chose to let the word 'thigh' stand for (where ancient Hebrews placed their hands when under oath), the symbolism of the Triune triangle and, in generative counterpart so distressing to early fathers of the Church, the origin of the Cross. 
    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