The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (97 page)

—Do you want some spaghetti? Maude said vaguely.

—Spaghetti in the middle of the afternoon? he mumbled, as she went toward the kitchen. But what Maude thought was spaghetti turned out to be a box of waxed paper. She offered salad; but they were out of whisky. When he went out for some, she sped him with, —But get a quart, there’s something sinful about a pint of whisky.

—Sinful?

—Well, naughty . . . She sat down wearily, and had hardly managed to assume that suspended look of a passenger on a railway train which came over her when alone, when the telephone and the doorbell both rang at once. She shuddered right through her frame, put out a hand in each direction, and finally got to the door. But when she’d let Herschel in, and picked up the telephone, all she could say was, —What?

(—Baby do you know a doctor? I need a doctor.

—A bone doctor? Maude managed. She looked helplessly at Herschel.

(—I’ve just had the most terrible accident . . .

—Baby are you in the hospital? Herschel answered, taking the thing.

(—No but I will be, if you’ll just tell me a doctor.

—But where are you, baby? I always told you this would happen, no one can drive the way you do and go on living in
this
world . . .

(—But it isn’t an automobile accident, I have sunstroke.

—Who
is
this?

(—It’s
me
.

—Oh you! I thought it was you-know-who.
Sun
stroke? Are you drinking?

(—Second-degree burns at the very least, stop asking sillies.

—Listen baby we’re going to a party. You just come there and we’ll find you the cutest little doll-doctor you
ever
! Now listen, here’s the address . . .

And when he’d hung up, Herschel turned to Maude. —And
I
’ve had the most . . . just
most
day, you cannot dream where I woke up! Can you tell I have this shirt on inside out?

—Who was that? Maude asked, motioning at the telephone.

—It was Rudy, I think he’d been in an auto crash, or something. He said the strangest things, he must have hit his head, and so I just told him to come right along to Esther’s cocktail, baby is there a clean shirt? Because I can’t possibly go anywhere in this. He followed her into the bedroom, where Maude opened a bureau drawer and took out Arny’s last clean shirt.

When Arny arrived, with a full quart by the throat, Herschel was already revealing his latest arcanum: —Chavenet. It really doesn’t mean anything, but it’s familiar to everybody if you say it quickly. They mention a painter’s style, you nod and say, Rather . . . chavenet, or, He’s rather derivative of, Chavenet wouldn’t you say? Spending the summer? Yes, in the south of France, a little villa near Chavenet. Poets, movie stars, perfume . . . shavenay, Herschel brayed becomingly.

The evening of this feast day, for so it was, perennially addressed to SS Adam and Eve, and the 40 Maidens martyred at Antioch, was brisk or cold, according to one’s resources. The people in the streets had not changed; most of them, certainly, were the same people who might be seen passing the same points with the same expressions at the same hour on almost any of the three hundred sixty-five feast days of the year. Nevertheless, something had happened. There was a quality in the air which every passing figure seemed to intensify,
a professional quality, as everyone became more consciously, more insistently, what the better part of the time he either pretended, or was forced to pretend himself to be. This was as true for each quantum in the bustling stream of anonymity, moving forth in an urgency of its own, as it was for such prodigies of the tyranny of public service as the policemen offering expressionless faces cut and weathered in the authority of red stone, and their contraries, a porous group in uniforms of low saturation and low brilliance gathered round something on the sidewalk before the American Bible Society, an object so compelling that it gave their diligent chaos the air of order. It appeared to be a gigantic male Heidi.

—Cross the arms on the chest, Maurice. All right there, get his feet. Wait a minute, don’t lift yet until I tell you.

The policemen, busy elsewhere attending the smooth functioning of that oppressive mechanism which they called law and order, looked as unlikely of ever being seen in any other combination of lip, nostril, and cold eye, badge, uniform, and circumstance, as Saint-Gaudens’ statue of the Puritan; in the same way the Boy Scouts hazarded neither past nor future, heirs to all the ages and the foremost files of time notwithstanding, they composed and expressed a pattern endowed with permanency.

—Look out f’his head, you want to break something?

—How’d it get so red?

—He’s red all the way down. I looked.

—So how’d he get that way?

—You tell us, your father’s a doctor.

Be Ye Doers of the word, and not hearers only
, said a lighted sign behind them. In the window was a large loose-leaf book, whose lined pages were filled in a cramped round hand. A sign beside it said,
It took Mrs. Gille / 15 years to / copy the Bible // The Bible / was presented / to her son / at Christmas
. There was a picture of Mrs. William Gille, of New York City, and her hand-copied Bible.

—You passed First Aid, Maurice?

—Merit badge.

—What do you say?

—Artificialresperation?

—Right. Take his feet there and twist.

—He won’t roll. He’s big.

—
Twist
.

They stepped back, as the hulk rolled, and the nose hit the pavement.

—Cup the face in the arm, there.

—O.K. Get on him.

—
You
get on him.

—I’ll get on him.

—We’ll both get on him.

—O.K. Ready with your side? One two three go . . .

—Ughhh

—two, three . . . 
push
, two, three . . . push,

—Sweet little boys.

—He’s talkin. He said somethin.

—He’s got me by the knee.

—Sweet little boys.

The police too were busy, in as serious, if less concerted pursuits. In the Fourteenth Street I.R.T-B.M.T. subway station one of them reached Hannah. A policewoman handed that nomadic laundress over to the stronger arm of the law.

—You might at least have given me time to rinse them, Hannah said, a note of hauteur distinct in her voice as she gathered the wet clothes up under her arm. Earlier, she had gone to see Stanley. She had knocked at his door and found him not at home. Even going round to the front and peering through the bars of the grating and the dirty window, all she had been able to see was in order, that silent patient order of things abandoned. She could make out the picture of the cathedral at Fenestrula, the stacks of paper, palimpsests on the left, untouched to the right, twelve empty staves to a page but already dedicated and, she realized with a twinge of cold, as though the cold brought it to her clearly for the first time, not to her. Peering in she saw all this, even enough of the bed to ascertain that it, too, was empty. She could see everything in his room, in fact, except the crucifix, for it hung above the bed, next to the window through which she peered.

This willful insistence of finality was so pervasive that, on those occasions which seemed to resist, an element which might too easily have been called fateful intruded, heavy-handed some wheres as though fate had become exasperated; in others, no more than the cajoling hand of co-operation.

Stanley’s mother had been transferred to a first-floor room in a large municipal hospital, pleading, the entire journey, for her possessions. After Stanley’s visit, her attendants might have noted that there was something more than the usual immediate anxiety in her voice, which had deepened with her demands to a tone which implied that they would never have opportunity to separate her from another of them. Had they brought her appendix? her tonsils? her severed limb . . . and her teeth?

The denture was put into a clean glass on the bedside table,
where the nurse, watching the doctor leave, poured the wrong solution into the glass without spilling a drop, and left her old patient gazing at that submarine chimera. Stanley’s mother gazed. It moved gently, suspended, as though melting there before her eyes. She dug nut-sized knuckles into her eyes, and looked again. Gumming imprecations of an exhausted nostology, she slept.

She woke, jolted into consciousness by a belch, pulling her three limbs toward her, startled. What was it? She looked into the glass. There was nothing in the glass but a placid clear solution with a slight pink precipitation on the bottom. It was too much. She must get where she was going while there was still time.

Who but a priest, dead for a thousand years, could have read the words which formed themselves on those remnants of lips, as she made her way informally across the room, moving as though encouraged by fitful gusts of wind, weightless, like a sail without a ship, toward the windowsill. The window slid up easily; the shade rolled up like a shot. The forceps shifted, the music began, and she crossed herself, nightmare of the girl she had been two generations before, running to the water’s edge, stopping for a breathless instant there to commend her own salvation before she dove in.

Transfixed below, the darkness unfurled upward, pierced by lights at each point in its ascendance until it hung, impaled, on the city. Over and under the ground he hurried home.

Mr. Pivner’s lips moved as he walked. Perhaps it was this complement which gave him, as the seasonal festoons gave the pitted face of the city, this intense quality of immediate realization, real no longer opposed to ostensible but now in the abrupt coalescence of necessity, real no longer opposed to factitious nor, as in law, opposed to personal, nor as in philosophy distinguished from ideal, nor the real number of mathematics having no imaginary part, but real filled out to embrace those opponents which made its definition possible and so, once defined, capable of resolving the paradox in the moment when the mask and the face become one, the eternal moment of the Cartesian God, Who can will a circle to be square.

Mr. Pivner’s monologue was neither gibberish nor absent mumbling. In a clear, if inaudible voice he was accounting for every one of his movements. It was difficult to know (and he might have had difficulty himself, saying) whether he was carefully preparing an explanation, or believed himself actually before a Tribunal where he had been summoned to account for his movements. What had once been anxious inclination was become severe practice; it might have been brought on by the hours he had so recently suffered at
the hands of the police, an inquiry which had been, by the standards of almost everyone else who passed through the station house that day, an indifferent, even tedious procedure, in light of the compass of their own applied, and again detected, talents. For Mr. Pivner, it worked quite the other way; and it was, perhaps, just this quality of merciless boredom with which his captors treated him, the entirely disinterested manner with which their relentlessness pursued him, that impressed his own impersonal presence in the world most deeply upon him. Under their questioning, he began to see himself capable of almost anything, someone to be watched, and accounted for after those awkward incidents which composed the biography of the city whose turbulent diary he was accustomed to following in the newspapers.

He looked at his wrist watch, lowered it as his lips kept moving, and abruptly raised it again, first to his eyes, then his ear, and walked faster. He bought a newspaper, turned his corner, and it was not until he was mounting, motionless, in the elevator, that his lips stopped, finishing his account to the Tribunal as he approached his own door, and the locked-up disposal of witnesses waiting to confirm him. The key half in the lock, he paused, listened, and moved frantically, shaking the door to get it open and himself through, to strike at the light switch and reach the telephone which he seized and raised so quickly that it hit him in the eye. —Hello? hello? He heard that sound of patient vacancy which is called the “dial tone.” —Hello? hello, operator? His hand quivered over the dial: he spun it all the way:

(—What number were you calling, ple-ase.)

—Operator? Oh, didn’t this . . . I’m sorry, I thought I heard it ring.

He moved more slowly, returning to the hallway to remove his hat and coat, and pick up his newspaper. He placed the newspaper on the table beside his chair, turned on the radio, and went into the bathroom.

He came back carrying his medicine and a syringe, paused to change the station on the radio for no reason but to change it, and returned to his chair to relax into that state of spiritual unemployment which he called leisure.

Then her eyes caught his, staring out at him wistfully from the harsh newspaper reproduction where she stood patient in long white stockings; and Mr. Pivner looked confused, as though he’d been abruptly handed back among the classic peoples of pre-Christian times, whose dates, declining with the advance of time, had always given him the feeling that they had lived backwards. He picked up the paper, and his eyes followed automatically the feature story
account of the little Spanish girl soon to be canonized, while his mind rummaged its rich embarrassment of glories and defeats no longer news, for recognition. He opened the page, and saw the headline on the bus gone down a Chilean ravine, killing one American and eleven natives, before he realized it was an old paper, and looked at the date to be sure. He folded it quickly and thrust it at a wastebasket behind him. He found the newspaper he’d just brought in, and settled back with a sigh, a weary sound suggesting a suspicion, if he had stopped to reconnoiter, that if the evil thereof is sufficient unto the day, so is it to a place. For had he known, no great disaster had occurred in that region of Chile where the bus crashed since the nineteenth century, when the cave-in of a burning church gave hundreds of bereaved families grief sufficient for decades; and these eleven new and sudden deaths were enough to be mourned for another score of years, deeply felt without publicity, realized in their full right as suffering and death, ungalled by the attrition of a world’s tragedies circulated elsewhere on what had been, but remained, there, hectares of green trees.