The Recognitions by William Gaddis Read Free Book Online Page A

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