Read Online The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) by William Gaddis - Free Book Online

Eucharist, rousing his flock one sunny morning with the words, —Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities. That upset Aunt May, and though she could not presume to argue with Saint Paul the Apostle, it was at moments like this that she suspected him of never having really got over being Saul the Jew of Tarsus, with a nose like Saint Edmund, and those dirty intemperate habits Jews are famous for. Unlike her charity and that of her Societies, which never ventured south of the sixtieth parallel except for forays into darkest Africa, Gwyon’s troubled everyone by reaching no further than the sound of his own voice for objects worthy of mercy. Janet, a girl with a tic which drew her head to one side in bright affirmative inclinations of idiocy, exemplar of a lapse from Puritan morality on the part of her mother (done in by a surgical belt salesman from New York), was found sharing a slap and tickle with the church janitor behind the organ one night after choir practice. Janet had been born a number of minutes after her mother’s death, which some including Aunt May regarded as a bad sign from the start. The incident behind the organ proved it, and Aunt May said something about the stocks and the pillory, a shame they’d gone out of fashion. —A shame to deprive us all of that satisfaction, Gwyon agreed. She was wary. —What do you mean? —The great satisfaction of seeing someone else punished for a deed of which we know ourselves capable. —But I . . . —What is more gratifying than this externalizing of our own evils? Another suffering in atonement for the vileness of our own imaginings . . . —Stop it! cried Aunt May, —I’m sure I have never had such thoughts. —Then how can you judge her crime, if you have never been so tempted? he asked quietly. —You . . . you are speaking like a heretic, Aunt May broughtout, —a heretic from your church and your . . . and from your family . . . ! and she left the room.
    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