The Recognitions (5 page)

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 (though some fainaiguing had been necessary at Italian customs, confirming it a fake to get it out of the country), a painting by Hieronymus Bosch portraying the Seven Deadly Sins in medieval (meddy-evil, the Reverend pronounced it, an unholy light in his eyes) indulgence. Under the glass which covered it, Christ stood with one maimed hand upraised, beneath him in rubrics,
Cave, Cave, D' videt
... 

—Catholic! said Aunt May, sounding anathema in her voice. She added something about Catholic, or Spanish, vanity anent the mirrors in the arms of the cross. Reverend Gwyon thought it best not to explain their purpose. 

As for the distinctly heathen monkey, it was forced to live in the carriage barn. 

It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least. In the medievally construed parsonage Wyatt graduated from the potty to more exalting porcelain eminence, and learned to pick his nose with his forefinger instead of his thumb. He spent more time indoors than out, and there was a chill in those dim corridors which no change of season dispelled, passages where he was often found wandering aimlessly, or simply standing still, gazing at the grooves in the wainscoting or up at the concave molding, to listen to the creaks that came from the sharp angles of woodwork, to talk to himself repeating words and phrases over and over, and then to move as though he were being watched. He could stand until interrupted by the opening of the study door behind him, and his father's garbled exclamation of surprise at finding him there staring up at the cross mounting the four small mirrors, though he never asked about it; and there was only one hall he avoided, or hurried when he had to pass through it to the dining room, even then with a quick look over his shoulder at Olalla watching, noseless, from her niche, the hand upraised, which he fully expected to strike him from behind as he passed. 

—Al-Shira-al-jamânija . . . , he whispered. 

—What? What is it you're saying? Aunt May demanded, rounding a corner. 

—Al-Shira-al-jamânija . . . the bright star of Yemen . . . 

—Where do you hear things like that? she scolded. —Yemen indeed! And she turned him toward the stairs, and sent him up to read in Foxe's
Book of Martyrs
, one of the books provided to prepare him for the Lord's work. From the first time he was asked, —Do you love the Lord Jesus? he was uncomfortably embarrassed; and since hate is an easier concept to embody than love, the Pope trod in far more substantial reality through the frightened corridors of his mind than did the Lord. At such an age, the Blood of the Lamb provoked no pleasant prospect for bathing; and resurrection a dispensable preoccupation for one who had not yet lived. If it was (as she said) in the way of God that he walked with Aunt May, he might only have protested that her horny feet prepared her where his did not: only the exclusive atmosphere of this thorny expedition proved for a time unwholesomely attractive, that, and promise that his mother had already arrived in that intermediate Elysium where he would join her, whither, even then, Aunt May led by a dead reckoning of Orphic proportion. To say nothing of fear, and less of terror, for the jealous God wielded by Aunt May made the sinner's landscape of after-Death more terrible even than his happy life on earth. —The devil finds work for idle hands, she taught him, and —In Adam's fall / We sinned all, with the grim penitence of one who had never had opportunity. 

The two of them, father and son, grew away from her in opposite directions. Wyatt grew forward, escaping for the most part in casual innocence any who would hold him back with the selfish nostalgia of love. And his father seemed to find the adventure of daily life more and more trying. Reverend Gwyon retreated from it, by centuries, whenever he could escape to his study, where he sank, inhumed until her voice struck with the 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 found him, 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 man coming down a rope to undo an anchor that's gotten caught on a tombstone? . . . 

Gwyon had been attending her with the expression of a man who's come on a bone in a mouthful of fishmeat; now he looked up as though understanding the tenor of her conversation for the first time. He began in a defensive mutter, —Gervase of Tilbury . . . 

—His own father! and a Christian minister, telling him . . . and I've blamed that foolish old man. 

—Why . . . 

—Yes, why shouldn't he be foolish? Falling down a well, and coming up to say he'd seen the stars in broad daylight. Indeed! Of course I thought I had him to thank for that story about evil spirits who keep the path to Paradise dirty, and the path to ... to Hell clean to fool good people! 

Gwyon, backing into his study, commenced, —Among the Wathi-wathi . . . 

—Wathi- ... wathi! she cried out. —Is that a thing for a Christian . . . 

—Is it any worse, Gwyon broke out suddenly, his back to the door, his figure filling the doorway; then he lowered his head and spoke more evenly, —any worse than some of the things you give him to read, the man who jumps into the bramble bush and scratches out both his eyes ... 

—Children . . . 

—The man of double deed, who sows his field without a seed . . . 

But she'd turned away, her heels already in piercing conflict with the sharp creaks of the wood around her: so her trenchant mumbling almost soothed the chill it rode on, summoning not this but fragments of an earlier conversation she'd luckily interrupted, the Town Carpenter with the boy cornered on the porch, confiding —Your Father thinks the Dog Star is a sun, but I've seen it, of course. I've seen it in daylight. I've seen it in broad daylight, I've seen all the stars in broad daylight, that day I fell into the well. There's too much light during the day, the air's full of it, but get to the bottom of a well, why, I go there still, to look at them, one day I'll take you down with me and you can see them too, the stars in broad daylight . . . 

She got up the stairs, passed a closet jammed with the empty square tin boxes made and stamped with the labels of better days, when the family oatmeal factory had flourished, there she sniffed, settling the glasses on her nose, but did not pause, to enter her room, steady herself in her chair with the first book to hand, and she called Janet, for supper to be brought her there. The book unfortunately proved to be Buffon's
Natural History
, but she sat bound to it, sprung open upon the magot, "generally known by the name of the Barbary Ape. Of all the Apes which have no tail, this animal can best endure the temperature of our climate. We have kept one for many years. In the summer it remained in the open air with pleasure; and in the winter, might be kept in the room without any fire. It was filthy, and of a sullen disposition: it equally made use of a grimace to show its anger, or express its sense of hunger: its motions were violent, its manners awkward, and its physiognomy rather ugly than ridiculous. Whenever it was offended, it grinned and showed its teeth . . ." 

That evening Reverend Gwyon ate alone, staring out vacantly over the large dining-room table toward the low table under the window, where his son had finished a little while before. 

Unlike children who are encouraged to down their food by the familiar spoon-scraped prize of happy animals cartooned on the bottom of the dish, Wyatt hurried through every drab meal to meet a Deadly Sin. Or occasionally he forgot his food, troubled by the presence of the underclothed Figure in the table's center, which he would stare at with the loveless eyes of childhood until interrupted. After he had been told the meaning of the rubric, he could be heard muttering in those dark hallways, —Cave, cave, Dominus videt. 

Even Aunt May, despite her closely embraced anti-Papal inheritance, did not dispute this litany, for she still, like all the women before her, planned another respectable minister in the family. Recent revelations had only prompted her to renew her efforts. Wyatt overheard her one day discussing his future with Janet. The question was whether he would grow up sturdy enough to weather the winters of Lapland, where he would be carrying the Gospel. After that, he never asked the Lord to make him strong and healthy again. 

There were several sides she found herself obliged to shield for him, and possible influences to anticipate and combat, in addition to Rome, which he was taught was the greatest agent of evil, poison, and depravity on earth (Aunt May seemed to know the full history of the Papal court at Avignon, the only time she was ever known to use the word brothel). She rehearsed him in the exquisite careers from the
Book of Martyrs
, read aloud to him from Doctor Young's
The Last Day
, and had him read aloud
The Grave
of Blair. Together, they read aloud Bishop Beilby Porteus,
Death
, while she discouraged him from spending time with Janet, from visiting the tenant in the carriage barn, and from going for walks with his grandfather. The parsonage was not a door or two from the church, as is usual, but exposed on a rise almost two blocks away, at the opposite end of town from the direction of the Depot Tavern, an approach guarded by a curve in the highway whose warning arrow pointed the wrong way. It was almost a mile from there to the parsonage, through the short decorous nave of the main street, a mile which the Town Carpenter accomplished quite often and, when he was able and permitted, took his grandson on walks to a recently abandoned bridge works, managing, on these brief excursions, to contribute heavily to the store of "nonsense" which Aunt May battled so valiantly. Between the two men, she could never be quite sure where Wyatt picked up his prattle about griffins' eggs, alchemy, and that shocking, disgusting story about the woman and the bull; but when his curiosity turned upon great voyages, and figures like Kublai Khan, Tamerlane, and Prester John, she knew she had the Town Carpenter to thank.