The Recognitions by William Gaddis William H. Gass

Author:William Gaddis, William H. Gass
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2012-01-18T16:00:00+00:00

V

“The trust of our people in God should be declared on our national coins. You will cause a device to be prepared, without unnecessary delay, with a motto expressing in the fewest and tersest words possible, this national recognition.”

—Abraham Lincoln’s Treasurer, to the director of the Mint.

—I can’t live with you and be a Christian, shouted the woman clinging to the edge of the dirty sink, answering the moaning from the next room, she whose ancestors had gathered at the foot of the Janiculum in ancient Rome, and sold whatever was for sale in the garlic-reeking interior of the Taverna Meritoria, that squalid inn on the Tiber bank.

—You’re not a Christian, never were. And the moaning resumed.

—When are you going to stop that awful noise, she demanded, she whose ancestors strove with one another, asking, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

—Be quiet. It’s the only reason you married me. You wanted to marry a Christian, you wanted to marry a good Catholic. Well, leopards can’t change their spots.

—Shut up! She turned the volume control of her hearing aid down.

Then there was silence. It lasted for a full minute, when both rooms were filled with a scream so ghastly as to stop the novice heart and breath and blood for the full eternal instant of its duration; a sound which, as the book said, once heard, can never be forgotten. The woman at the sink (she whose ancestors were kidnaped as children, to be brought up in the Faith, A.M.D.G.) clung to its slopped edge. The lines of her face were fallen, not in terror, but in weariness. Too late, she turned the volume control of her hearing aid down still further.

—How did that sound? asked her husband behind her, triumphant in the doorway. —That was an epileptic. I’m practicing.

—Oh Jesus and Mary, you’ve only been home this time for three weeks, and you’ve started again.

—What’s the matter with it? Saint Paul was an epileptic.

—Can’t you do anything else, Frank? Are you too old to do anything else?

It was true. Mr. Sinisterra was becoming an old man. Although he had been heard to say that he resented prison years no more than Saint Augustine resented the withdrawal he had made from the world when living near Tagaste; had, indeed, embracing the words of Saint Gregory (“the Contemplative Life is greater in merit and higher than the active”), spent a fair amount of time in solitary confinement (“the hole,” as it was called, a place which, though cleaner and more dry, corresponded to the in pace of the convent, where, for their own good, medieval religious were occasionally immured for life), in spite of all this, and his commendable approach, prison years had not softened him, nor prolonged his youth. Life at Atlanta was not, as his son had been told on occasion, “a long vacation for Daddy,” any more than Saint Giles’s retirement to the desert resembled a tour from a travel folder. Now the retirement was

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