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

sharpness of a gravedigger’s pick. As men whose sons are born to them late in life do often, he regarded Wyatt from a wondering distance, saw in his behavior a phantasy of perfect logic demonstrating those parts of himself which had had to grow in secret. It is true they shared confidences, but even these usually centered about oddments from the forepart of Gwyon’s mind, topics he might have left a minute before in his study, from Ossian, or Theophrastus, to the Dog Star, a sun whose rising ushered in the inundation of the Nile, Al-Shira-al-jamânija, the star of heat and pestilence, which Gwyon spoke of familiarly when he found himself forced to conversation by the abrupt and even more shy presence of this fragment of himself he kept encountering. He even spoke his son’s name unfamiliarly. (But there was reason for that. Months before the boy’s birth, he and Camilla had agreed, if it were a son, to name him Stephen; and not until months after their son was born, and Aunt May had peremptorily supplied the name Wyatt from somewhere in the Gwyon genealogy, did they remember. Or rather, Camilla remembered, and though it might have been a safe choice, for the name’s sake of the first Christian martyr, even to Aunt May, neither of them mentioned it to her, for baptism had already taken place.)
    When questions of discipline arose, Gwyon’s face took the look of a man who has been asked a question to which everyone else in the room knows the answer. Or when his son sat whining in disobedience Gwyon stood over him clutching his hands as though restraining the impulse to kill the child, then took him up foreignly by a hand and a foot and swung him back and forth in labored arcs until Wyatt shouted with pleasure.
    It was Aunt May who kept the stern measure of the present, unredeemed though it might be, alive to practical purposes, binding the two of them together like an old piece of baling wire.
    —Go and ask your father, she said often enough, when questions came up in the reading she thrust upon him. —Ask your father what Homoousian means . . . But a good half-hour later she foundhim, standing still in the hall outside the study door, whispering, —Homoousian? . . . Homo-oisian? . . .
    —What’s the matter? Why haven’t you . . . what is the matter?
    And a few minutes later Wyatt was sent to bed for saying he could not move, as though the mirrors in the arms of the cross on the wall had gripped him from behind.
    Gwyon came out looking confused, and she explained petulantly. —He comes up with all sorts of fabrications, she went on, seeing her chance, —things he invents and pretends they are
so
, things he picks up Heaven knows where. He’s told me about seven heavens, made out of different kinds of metal, indeed! Last night he said the stars were people’s souls, and sorcerers could tell the good from the bad. Sorcerers! He must pick up this drivel from that dirty old man, that . . . grandfather, indeed! Telling him all sorts of things, witches drawing the moon down from the heavens . . .
    —Umm . . . yes, Gwyon muttered, his hand on his chin, looking down thoughtfully. —In Thessalonica . . .
    —What?
    —Eh? Yes, the umm . . . Thessalonian witches, of course, they . . .
    —Do you mean to say you . . . you’re telling him this . . . filling him full of this nonsense?
    —Well, it’s . . . Vergil himself says umm . . . somewhere in the
Bucolics
 . . .
    —And I suppose that you told him that pearls are the precipitate of sunlight, striking through the water . . .
    —The eighth
Bucolic
, isn’t it, Carmina vel caelo . . .
    —And he has you to thank, she went on, raising her voice in the dim hall, —for that idiotic story about the Milky Way being the place where light shows through because the solid dome of heaven is badly put together?
    —Theophrastus, yes, umm . . .
    —And that tale about the sky being a sea, the celestial sea, and a