The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) by William Gaddis Page A

on the floor. —Where did this come from! he demanded snatching it up open on a picture of a wreathed papal monogram tied at the foot with an anchor. —I found it, in the rubbish, on the rubbish heap, Wyatt faltered, —the kitchen midden years ago, behind the carriage barn. He stared at the covetous look on his father’s face. —I didn’t know . . . —And you’ve kept it, yes, all this time, kept it for me? Gwyon brought out without looking up from it, turning the spotted pages. —Didyou read it? —Just, the Italian was difficult, I didn’t know all the words, but the pictures . . . that? that monogram, with the anchor? —Yes, Gwyon murmured catching it under his thumb, —Clement’s monogram, he was martyred, yes here, gettato a mare con un’ancora . . . they tied an anchor to his neck and threw him into the Black Sea.
    —Yes into the sea with an anchor? like the man you told me about? The anchor caught on a tombstone, and the man coming down the rope in the celestial sea to free it, and he drowned? Listen, . . . But Gwyon, fearing the insistent monotone that crept into the boy’s voice for the delirium it might forebode, hurried out of the room studying the picture of the subterranean sanctuary discovered beneath the basilica of Saint Clement of Rome, a sudden light in his eyes as though his senses were afloat with vapors from two thousand years before.
    Gwyon’s entrances were often as precipitous as this escape; and there were times Wyatt pretended to be asleep when he heard his father’s approach upon the stairs.
    When he could not read, he painted, with an extraordinary deftness which consumed his whole consciousness, and often left him so tense that he passed into delirium. —Listen, I . . . what was it? Listen . . .
    It was the deliria that Gwyon feared, which left him doubly helpless, trying to conceal his anxiety behind his back in one hand twisting the other, and he hastened to call Janet who was, a good part of the time now, the only moving thing in the house. She remained, gibbering testimony to Aunt May’s inquisition.
    So far as anyone knew, she never left the house. Her voice had gained the timbre of that of a grown man when she raised it in the full volume of speech. But this was infrequent. She usually spoke in a hoarse whisper, lubricated by a salivary flow which she had difficulty controlling (and caused, though she did not know it, by a medicine compounded of mercury which she’d found in Aunt May’s cabinet, renewed and taken reverently in uniform overdose since Aunt May’s death). Her shoulders were broad, thighs narrowed, and with squarely muscular hands she plied an emery cloth to remove the fine filaments which darkened her chin.
    In any other native household, her regular absences from her work, or those occasions which found her insensibly rigid before an empty window, or prostrate on the kitchen floor, might have been taken for organic disorders; and, like the Venerable Orsola Benincasa, whose sixteenth-century childhood was visited by innumerable misinterpreted ecstasies, she might have been bruised black-and-blue, pricked with needles, and burned with exposedflames to rouse her. But Reverend Gwyon remarked to himself that her derelictions from duty had occurred most notably during Easter week of that year: that about eight o’clock on Thursday evening, in the midst of serving his dinner, she was numbly entranced before the kitchen stove; and the following afternoon at three he almost upset her in the dark passage outside his study door, where she stood limbs immobilely extended before the cruzcon-espejos.
    When modern devices fail, it is our nature to reach back among the cures of our fathers. If those fail, there were fathers before them. We can reach back for centuries. Gwyon appreciated the extended hands of his people less and less as the months passed. The doctors refused him information of any direct nature, guarding the frail secrets of their