The Recognitions

  —Are you . . . have you been working lately?

  —Not lately, no. Not lately.

  Ellery got up suddenly, dropping Dog Days; and he picked up another magazine as he crossed the room. —Esther tells me you’ve done a lot of painting, and I’ve got something for you if you want something like this. He held forth a page of advertisements. —This here, this is one of our accounts. He indicated the largest. Over a saccharine line drawing of a woman, her head covered, eyes raised, YES, the Mother of God WILL relieve Your Pain, Disease, Distress . . . The name of the Virgin Mary is making the headlines in today’s newspapers . . . Write today for your free copy . . .

  Beneath, another ad said, STIR UP YOUR LIVER BILE

  Beneath, another ad said, Are YOU troubled with STICKY HOT SORE FEET?

  —I just thought of this, Ellery went on. —I’ll bet you could do it, and it would pay you good money. They’re spending a hell of a lot on publicity. See, at first here we were going to have reproductions of some old masters, you know, pictures of the Virgin Mary like you see in museums. But this is better. It’s more modern, catches the eye. And if you could paint a couple of pictures for us, the Virgin doing . . . something, whatever the hell she does, but a real arty picture . . .

  —Ellery, please . . . Esther said weakly.

  —They’ve got a lot of money behind them, religion’s getting popular all over again. It would be a good deal for you, and I can . . .

  —Ellery, wait. Let him go, Esther said. —It isn’t . . . he wouldn’t . . .

  —All right, the hell with it, Ellery said, returning to his chair. —I just thought maybe he could do it, but he didn’t need to be so damn rude did he? Ellery picked up Dog Days again, watching the door to the studio come half closed. —I just thought maybe I could help him out. He returned to Ch. Dictator von Ehebruch, and his chest filled as he studied the Doberman.

  Esther did not hear; but sat staring at the door half closed upon her: Persephone then, and Proserpina now, the same queen in another country, she stared at the doorway to his kingdom and faltered forward.

  —What is it? Can I help you? she asked, entering. —Rose has been sleeping in here, that’s why it’s different.

  —Well, I trust Rose then. What are these marvelous things?

  —Oh, those are pictures of eyes. Rose does them. She likes . . . eyes.

  —Somewhere, strips of canvas, somewhere strips of wood, painted upon. Hidden, Rose helped.

  —Then you were here? You were here last night?

  —Or was it?

  —Because she said, Rose, said, she’d seen you in the mirror. And we . . . I didn’t understand. I was worried for Rose.

  —The mirror, there?

  —I’ve seen you in it too.

  —To correct bad drawing. There.

  —Under here? She put the kitten on the floor, stooping, reared the long lines of her thighs, and recovered a package wrapped in newspaper. —This?

  Then face to face so abruptly that she startled back, her lips move before she can speak. —You don’t look well, is all she finds to say.

  —Not myself?

  —Not yourself? When you loved me, then . . .

  —When you loved me?

  —I was a whole dimension larger then, and now . . .

  —This is where I sleep, said Rose putting her head in the doorway. —Because it smells so nice in here. This is where I sleep.

  —Goodbye, for I have to leave.

  —This is . . . you’ve got what you want? Esther asked, following him. —What you came for?

  —And can carry away.

  —Hey wait a minute, before you go, Ellery said, standing, —there’s a book here I wanted to borrow but Esther said it was yours.

  —Ellery, don’t . . .

  —It’s all right, here, Ellery said, raising Aunt May’s copy of the Book of Martyrs. He read from the title page, —A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs from the Introduction of Christianity to the Latest Periods of Pagan, Popish, and Infidel Persecutions . . .

  —But in the name of God . . . ?

  —Another program like this one, see? Ellery waved his hand toward the radio. —But for different denominations, like Catholics and Protestants. Stuff like this. Listen. “In Arethusa, several were ripped open, and corn being put into their . . .” wait, here . . . “scourged, put to the rack, his body torn with . . .” here, “Martha Constantine, a handsome young woman, was treated with great indecency and cruelty by several of the troops, who first ravished her, and then killed her, by cutting off her breasts. These they fried, and set before their . . .”

  —Esther, goodbye, please God . . .

  —Here, there’s another about the guy they tie little bags of gunpowder . . . it’s for kids, this is what kids like.

  —Esther, please God, this man is mad and dangerous.

  Ellery came forward with the book. —What, is he gone? Is he gone already?

  —Yes. Yes, gone.

  —Well what about this book. He is a weirdy, all right. Drunk?

  —Oh take it, take it, take it.

  Ellery returned to say, —Turn the radio up, to Rose, who sat immersed in the sounds it shaped from the silence she maintained.

  —What was it, that phone call, Ellery. You said it was all fixed up. You found a doctor?

  He looked at her, vaguely, shoulders hunched unevenly like a man deformed from holding a plow down in a thousand furrows. —A doctor? Oh, that call, no, I meant it was all fixed up about this guy who jumped out a window.

  —What . . . ?

  —Never mind, it’s something for a TV promotion stunt.

  —Ellery, you’ve got to find one.

  Ellery put down John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. He scratched the back of his head and looked uncomfortable. As he sat down he picked the book up again and said, —Martin Luther was struck by lightning, did you know that? He was knocked down and this guy with him was killed, that’s why he entered the hermits, see? Imagine that on TV, the Combined Electric program . . .

  —Ellery, for the love of God . . .

  He looked up at her, then. —Don’t worry, he said, hunched, perhaps, now like Blessed Catherine de Racconigi, suffering curvature of the shoulder from the blessed burden she was allowed to wield. —Listen.

  —Zap, approved by doctors everywhere. Tell Mummy about Zap, the wonder-wakener, one Zap first thing in the morning and she’ll zip into the day. So don’t forget, gang. Tell Mummy about these new scientific aids to modern family living. Necrostyle, the wafer-shaped sleeping pill, swallowed just like a wafer, no chewing, no aftertaste. Zap, the wonder-wakener. And Cuff. Remember, it’s on the Cuff.

  —Spelled backwards. Spelled backwards, of course, the Holy Sacrament turned inside out, you know. Basil Valentine stood with his eyes closed, the telephone resting on his shoulder. —Yes, the redemption of women, if you like, he went on, forcing a wearied patience in his voice. —Eve, the curse Christianity had put on her. What? . . . Yes, the priestess and the altar too, the Mass performed on her open loins, I’ve come across something about the bread being baked on her loins, the wafer for profaning the Eucharist, but what in heaven’s name do you want to know this sort of thing for? A novel? But . . . yes, perhaps he can, if he thinks it will do any good. But you can tell your friend Willie that salvation is hardly the practical study it was then. What? . . . Why, simply because in the Middle Ages they were convinced that they had souls to save. Yes. The what? The Recognitions? No, it’s Clement of Rome. Mostly talk, talk, talk. The young man’s deepest concern is for the immortality of his soul, he goes to Egypt to find the magicians and learn their secrets. It’s been referred to as the first Christian novel. What? Yes, it’s really the beginning of the whole Faust legend. But one can hardly . . . eh? My, your friend is writing for a rather small audience, isn’t he. Incidentally, the next time you borrow Loyola . . . So I gathered, but that’s hardly the place to read Loyola. Do they have what
in the Vatican? A mold for fig-leaves? . . .

  He stood for a moment, his eyes closed still, after he’d hung up the telephone, and murmured, —What can drive anyone to write novels? but thinking not of novels nor the Black Mass nor even the mold for fig-leaves kept in the Vatican museum; thinking instead and vainly of the dream which this telephone call had broken, though he could not recapture it, re-enter it, could not alter, even in that wishful fabric, events of a quarter-century before.

  Eyes closed, attempting to revive the dream, it shut him out, escaped him; eyes open, he walked into the front room to stare at the face of the Vulliamy clock on the mantel, the gilt cupid atop oriental alabaster, and the dream pursued him. The shade of the boy whom he had not seen since they were boys together (Martin was Father Joseph’s “suck”) lived on the air as though they had parted only minutes before. —It’s true then? We’re not supposed to understand? Whether thirty seconds or thirty years ago he could not tell; and only memory rehearsed his own words spoken in childhood’s shadows under the tower of Saint Ignatius where they met daily, met for the last time when he said, —Weeping will not help you. There is no place for weakness among us. You will grow up to be a fool, Martin, but I shall not. Obedience is the first servant of love. It was for love I did it.

  Basil Valentine forced his feet into the black leather pumps and drew his dressing gown tight. He went into the bathroom where he washed his face with cold water, and stood for a moment looking into his own eyes reflected in the glass as the soft towel revealed them. The clock struck in the other room, and he dropped the towel and returned to the papers spread on his desk. —Idiots, he murmured, gathering papers together. —Ten million babbling idiots. He thrust the papers into a dispatch case and was standing with a cigarette unlit, looking at the gold case absently, when a sharp continuous bell severed the sentence, Much I ponder . . . Basil Valentine muttered, and crossed the room to the telephone connecting the downstairs entrance. —Who is it? he demanded. —The Reverend Gilbert Sullivan? Yes, my dear fellow, come right up.

  Then at the door he said, —Good heavens, come right in. Where have you been?

  —I? With my dear wife, listening to Mozart. Sie kocht schlecht, my wife. It is some time since I have heard music.

  Basil Valentine stood lighting his cigarette, watching the motion before him carefully; care, that is, which extended from every part of himself, to correspond with the movements he repeated, bearing them out, as he followed into the room, weighing the cigarette which distinguished him.

  —I have been in the rotting room, to tell heaven’s truth. The pudridero, where Charles the Second sits out his last days surrounded by his dead and Spanish family. Good God, now, some preservative is indicated.

  —Sit down, my dear fellow. Cognac? Valentine glances at the irregular newspaper-wrapped package laid on the marble top of the coffee table; and hands over the decanter.

  —Precision of shape and smell, and the sixth heaven all enclosed. Basil Valentine watches the decanter tipped over the crystal globe, seconds too long, and his right hand shifts, stopping it; while it continues to pour. —Not the seventh, of shining light, but a cigar, perhaps, to weigh me down.

  —And perhaps some music? Here, do sit down, where I can see you.

  —Music? To leave my heels swinging free in the air? No. I’m obliged to take refuge in fabrication as it is, where I can see you. It’s the accumulation, you see. The accumulation. We are all in the dumps, for diamonds are trumps, the kittens have gone to Saint Paul’s, do you remember that one? The babies are bit, the moon’s in a fit, and the houses are built without walls. Well, you wouldn’t remember it, without a childhood you wouldn’t. As for me, I’ve just left a round dozen of crucifixions. Allegro ma non troppo.

  —Do come over here and sit down.

  —There’s nothing I’d rather do, but it doesn’t help. Here, would you believe me if I told you that Martha Constantine . . .

  —Please, don’t touch anything on that desk.

  —And do you fall in love with the barber when you go for a haircut?

  —My dear fellow . . . Valentine crossed the room quickly. —Put down those papers.

  —Here, here, Hungarian . . .

  —Give me that book.

  —Magyar, isn’t it bad enough without coding it?

  —This . . . a dictionary, obviously, Basil Valentine said, taking the plain-cover book and jamming it into the dispatch case with the papers.

  —Transdanubia . . .

  —Do go over there and sit down, now. Valentine snapped the lock on the case.

  —Buda Pest, they tell me, was the most civilized city in the world. And within living memory.

  —And they are right, Valentine said curtly. Close upon the figure before him, he followed as though to enclose and drive it before him toward the couch. —Now sit down and tell me what you’ve been up to.

  —Down to, consorting with mermaids in the bottom of a tank where the troll king lives (here a cough interrupted; and Basil Valentine held his breath)—God love him. I had willingly fastened the tail to my back, and drank what he gave me, you know, but there, when he tried to scratch out my eyes. “I’ll scratch you a bit till you see awry; but all that you see will seem fine and brave.”

  —So you’ve been to see Brown, have you? Basil Valentine leaned down and pulled open the loose newspaper package. —And this?

  —There they are, from A to izzard, from under the watchful eyes of Rose . . . protected, cautious, circumspect, eyes in every variety, but mostly those of children.

  Valentine looked up from the painted fragments, and poised, the lines in his forehead wove concern. —What’s the matter, what’s the matter? he said suddenly, —groaning like that, what is it?

  —I’ll explain . . . as soon as I . . . yes . . . get settled . . .

  —My dear fellow . . .

  —It’s a liberty I’m taking today, pretending I weigh three hundred pounds. Damn it, will you allow it? “I min Tro, i mit Håb og i min Kjærlighed” . . . eh? No, it didn’t work out that way, I tell you. There’s Solveig locked up with a dangerous man, human and industriously mad, he may save me yet like Luther saved the Papacy. Good God, today I dishonored death for ten thousand dollars. I’ll die like Zeno then, strangling himself at ninety-eight because he fell and broke a finger coming out of school.

  —Now relax a bit, my dear fellow. Tell me, what did Brown say to you.

  —Took the bottle away from me just like you’re doing, and he swore if he were a dog he’d bark at me in the streets. Then he went on to ask me about my liver, and he offered me work selling a bottled chemical in the streets to some lowland consumers dead four centuries. But good God, I’d just come in from the streets, you know. The streets were filling with people like buttons, and you can’t sell anything to them. Someone once told them the best things in life are free, and so they’ve got in the habit of not paying. So I simply warned him and came on my way. He was so kind and fatherly, I left him with a warning and came away.

  —Tell me what you mean, you warned him.

  —Oh yes, yes. Warned him the priests are conspiring against him, and he hasn’t a chance. You, and I, and the Reverend Gilbert Sullivan.

  —Now wait a moment . . .

  —What chance has he, old earth, when hierophants conspire. Especially three like you, and I, and Reverend Gilbert Sullivan. He believes us three, at any rate. How he will dance when he finds that we are projections of the Reverend Gilbert Sullivan’s unconscience. You and I.

  Basil Valentine had been seated. He stood up now, his hands clasped behind him and walked toward the window, his head down (watching the toes of his black shoes on the plain carpet) and back. As the voice sounded he would raise his head, and lower it again immediately.

  —Or like Cleanthes then? Gums swelling, and two days’ laying off from food, the doctors’ orders. With leave to return to his diet, I’m far along on my journey now, he says to them, and starves. There’s dieting to extinction,
that’s the thing. People stop too soon. Doubled in one century, from a billion to two. We’re being devoured. Here, let me walk up and down the room with you. We’ll see better that way.

  —Sit down, Basil Valentine snapped, behind him.

  —I’ve brought my report. In the year two thousand and forty, four billion. Twenty-one forty-one, eight billion. Twenty-two forty-two, sixteen billion. Those are statistics. What are we to do to civilize them? Centuries of art and celibacy, plagues and wars and abusive acts of God, religious ascetics howling in the desert and cultured mermaid men whispering sweet absolutely nothings on the beach, and good God they won’t learn they’re not wanted. One pair of human beings, there, a man and a woman at the rate of love of one per cent per annum, could equal our population in nineteen hundred years. Our work’s laid out for us. Stamp out polygamy, I say. That’s the first thing. Our exemplary African missions have shown us the way. Why, good God, as a result of their fine work we’re able to spend twenty thousand pounds sterling on syphilis in the Uganda alone. Perhaps we should have been doctors then, you and I, instead of what we are. Cardinal Richelieu drinking horse dung in white wine on his death bed, it’s not hard to see why France is first son of the Church. And in Egypt . . .

  —My dear fellow . . .

  —We treated sore eyes with the urine of a faithful wife. Today of course we’re forced to buy drugstore make-shifts.

  Basil Valentine had walked down to the windows and returned to the couch from behind, the fingers of one hand tapping the palm of the other: there was more to it than the agitation his face betrayed, for every moment he seemed to become more aware of his own physique, and the weight of its members extended in space. Most oppressive, however, became the respiratory system; not a sense of constriction (though it might amount to that if it went on so) but an acute sense of what was going on there, among fibro-elastic membranes and cartilaginous rings. He was having difficulty in swallowing. He put his left hand to his throat, manifesting in gold the cricoid cartilage within, its seal turned behind. There was no one on the couch. Basil Valentine swung around. —What . . . what are you doing prancing behind me here. Good . . . good heavens, my dear fellow, come along now, and sit down again.