Free The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) by William Gaddis

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 spiritswho 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 vacantlyover 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