The Recognitions (138 page)

made real to him for the first time by the experiences which had suddenly brought him into his new estate, experiences which had raised the childish masks of anxiety from the face of the resident dread, exposing conflicts he did not yet understand, posing questions he could not answer now, and he sensed, might never. The two tragedies had occurred so close that they might have been coupled; so they were, in him, and here was the unforeseen conflict in the demands of his new manhood, in that he had suffered directly from neither. Ashamed at having run out of the place in the Via Flaminia that night, after all she had done for him, the weight of the letter to Fenestrula she'd procured for him heavy in his pocket with his show of ingratitude, he'd pulled himself together and gone back, though this time it was the woman who wept through his broken apologies. First thing, he'd got his hair cut, to please her. It was that same day he learned of the first tragedy. With it, all of his anxieties returned redoubled, his uncertainties flared in every direction, his fears for every moment of the past and future worked upon each other, and his guilt reared through him more oppressively than it had ever. In one of the first moments of distraction, whether to confirm the one certain prospect he had left, or to confirm the apprehension he suddenly felt for even that, he opened the letter to Fenestrula himself, and found there nothing but a grocery list. At that point he tried to force himself to think of nothing, to try to understand and solve nothing, until he could find Father Martin, as he was fortunate enough to do, and he confessed everything which his evasion of just such an encounter had intensified in every detail of the past few weeks. The priest was obviously busy, and it was quickly apparent that his work concerned more than mere shepherding of Pilgrims from one shrine to another, that the questions which concerned him embraced broader problems than the confessional. Still an hour passed, possibly two, as Father Martin listened, his face losing its joviality, recovering it for a moment, returning to its lines of medieval sternness, while Stanley told him of every detail he knew since he had boarded the Conte di Brescia. Every detail, even to the broken crucifix, the beads rolling on the floor, the fat woman, Stanley's teeth chattered sometimes while he talked, and in the midst of narrative he might break off for some urgent incoherence like, —Sorcery, maléfice, is it from maleficiendo, is that from male de fide sentiendo, I mean does that mean is ill doing from ill thinking on matters of faith? . . . And now this last tragedy; and his work, and Fenestrula. Father Martin listened to him, and talked to him, with an extraordinary gentleness and sternness at once, with a calmness which was never complacent, a strength of understanding (though he never

said he understood), an interest which was not patent curiosity to excuse pat answers (for he gave none), and a patient sympathy with the figures Stanley spoke of, a quality which showed itself the deepest aspect of his nature, the most hard earned and rarely realized reality of maturity, which was compassion. He was an extraordinary man, as the later event might attest. The longer Stanley went on, the more frequently he returned to his work, and its importance to him. Father Martin did not come all out in encouragement, though finally he said, —We live in a world where first-hand experience is daily more difficult to reach, and if you reach it through your work, perhaps you are not fortunate the way most people would be fortunate. But there are things I shall not try to tell you. You will learn them for yourself if you go on, and I may help you there. He arranged things for Fenestrula immediately, and Stanley left with that assurance to steady the bewilderment of his heart at everything else, a bewilderment exactly doubled, as Fenestrula became the only possible position left, when Father Martin was shot and killed in broad daylight, later in the day. Even now, as he entered the Via Umiltà, a song danced through his bowed head and he could not shake it out. Every word brought with it the shades of anxiety in the sea washing up to him again, the shuddering decks, and even now, walking, he sought the tooth in his pocket and remembered it was gone: in an instant, the end of his tongue found the healing hole on his jaw, and someone leaped from a lime-green convertible at the curb and caught his arm. —God damn it, I'm glad I found you. It was the man in the green silk necktie, though today, the silk was yellow. There were pictures of nuts and bolts on it. —I've got to find that girl, that kind of skinny girl you were looking for that night, I've got to find her. Where is she? —She's dead, Stanley said clearly, and the two of them stood there for a moment looking at each other as though someone else had said it. —Wait, she can't . . . What did you say? —She died. Stanley spoke more faintly, and he looked down from the man's face to the nuts and bolts. —She . . . she can't do that. I've got to find her, she won this contest for the B.V.M., just like I told her she would, she can't . . . just . . . skip out, she . . . she have an accident? —An accident? Stanley repeated. The strain of calm in his voice, instead of breaking, had driven it down to a dumbness. He stared. —This is serious, now listen, she ... —She was going to marry me. —O.K., but a chance like this, she couldn't just . . . she would have been made. -Made? —I told you, 1 told her, she . . . we've rented a whole town for this thing. Even if they changed the story line around on us a little, they're going to make it the Divine Comedy by Dante now, instead of a straight life of the B.V.M., see? So maybe she'll only have a bit-part at the end, but that's all right. The whole thing builds up to that anyway, see? Where he meets her at the end. I haven't read the script yet, but they got a shooting script all ready for this thing, see? This Divine Comedy by Dante . . . —She's dead, Stanley insisted suddenly, then was silent again. —But . . . what happened? What happened? —She died, she . . . she had a place on her lip, a sore, a ... and it got infected, it was something like . . . staphylococcic infection, and it happened just like that almost, in a couple of days, she . . . —How'd she pick up something like that just like that, she . . . —She wasted away, so quickly as though she . . . she had no will to live, and she . . . she said, Stanley shuddered, —from kissing Saint-Peter-in-the-Boat, she said, For some fishes, the sea, the sea . . . —Come on, get hold of yourself, you can't . . . The man took his shoulder, nodded and muttered, —Yeah, she . . . God damn it. He looked at Stanley, who stood staring dumbly at the pictures on the silk necktie. —And . . . God damn it, we've got it all tied in, this contest, we've got it all tied in with this canonization that's coming up, and this Assumption thing, all this God-damned publicity for this contest, God damn it, she was the B.V.M. incarnate, she had it in the bag. Now it's too late to do a God-damned thing. Then as Stanley's eyes remained fixed on a brown silk nut, he took Stanley's shoulder and said, —Christ. Come on. Come in and have a drink. We'll bounce back. —No, I have to leave. I have to get a train. —Come on in for one drink. Christ. Look, this little jerk in the car with me, he's this ex-king who wants his God-damned throne back, I've got to have lunch with him. But come on in for a drink with us. You can meet the little jerk. It's lousy luck. You'll bounce back . . . Then he looked down at the pavement between himself and Stanley. —God damn it, he said, —I had a friend, a guy who was in college with me, he just got killed in a plane accident, he used to say the whole thing is like this handkerchief and this cannon ball falling in this vacuum, they fall the same speed, you know? And every God damn place you go, and every God damn thing you do, it's still this same God damn handkerchief and this same God damn cannon ball falling in this same God damn vacuum. On the afternoon train, Stanley saw Don Bildow too late to avoid him. Don Bildow had a big box under his arm. He stayed Stanley for long enough to tell him he was on his way to Paris, and ask Stanley where he was going, but gave him no chance to answer. —That was lucky, he went on, —the boy from the tailor just got to the train with this in time, this is my new suit and I almost missed the train. I'm going to put it on before we get to the Swiss border so I won't have to pay duty. —Yes but, excuse me, Stanley said, possibly the first time he had ever spoken to Bildow with such sharp dismissal, —I'm tired. Excuse me. —What's the matter? You, I'm surprised you're not staying in Rome, for that thing tomorrow? The canonization of that saint? The train roared northward. Second Class was no dirtier than most trains, but Don Bildow kept on his spotted threadbare old suit, dirty shirt and tie, until the last bit of Lago Maggiore disappeared from the passing landscape. Then he went into the men's room, and got out of his clothes. He washed as best he could, though his plastic-rimmed glasses kept falling down into the basin. Then he put on a new Italian part-silk shirt from a small rolled package in his pocket. All his property: his money, passport, testosterone tablets and contraceptives, and a few letters, was folded into a copy of a stiff-covered magazine on the floor. He had got a new yellow and brown tie looped round his collar, when he realized he must dispose of the evidence of the old clothes somehow. The window would not open, so one by one with his new sleeve rolled up, he pushed them down through the hopper. By the time he reached his jacket, it went through quite easily, for by then the hopper was fairly clean. Then he opened the box from the tailor in Rome. All it contained was a sailor suit made for a boy of seven, with short pants. Nonetheless the hand stitching was fine, the double seams drawn with exquisite care. There was even a little round hat with ribbons, and the name of the first Italian dreadnought, Dante Alighieri, embroidered in gold round the band. —Maybe ... he gasped, looking at it. Then he put on his glasses and looked at it. —Stanley, maybe Stanley would . . . have something . . . But his friend had got off some time before, at Milan, to change for Fenestrula and he stood unsteadily on the shifting floor, holding the blouse at a rolled-sleeved arm's length, and staring at it through the plastic rimmed lenses. The whole outfit was made as carefully as any tailoring for a real grownup, he could see, even in that light, as his train roared toward the Simplon. In the next morning's light, the church looked much smaller than he had imagined it would be, and different than Stanley had pictured it the night before, when he arrived in the dark and walked up to look at it immediately after he'd got his few possessions set- tied in a pension room in the town. The whole town was different than he'd imagined in the darkness. The masses and shadows were gone, and he found nothing to suggest what they might have been. In one entirely different direction from where he thought he had walked, he came upon what he had taken for an enclosed, dimly lighted and possibly private chapel of some sort: it turned out to be a public convenience. And the church itself was a good deal smaller, its single spire a good deal more modest against the vast consciousness of the lighted sky, than undefined shadows had raised it at night, and as, once he'd seen it in daylight, he realized he would never see it again. The walls of the church were heavy, and furrowed apart in places. At one end near the ground, he could see the rubble core. Stanley was dressed, that morning, in his best suit, the blue one, and the second time worn. He walked with hands clasped low in front of him; for, putting on the trousers, he'd been dismayed to find moth holes round about the crotch. He wore a white shirt, and a red necktie, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, the way he had thought it would be. He came back to his room from early Mass, where he had also got a look at the gigantic organ (for it was the gift of an American), and confirmed his arrangement to play it later in the morning, and also, or rather first off, sought the intervention of that saint still to be rung in that morning on behalf of three souls equally dear, and equally beautiful. And it was those he thought of, and not the work he thought of, as he stood alone in his room and looked at the work, which was all that was left. He looked at it with sudden malignity, as though in that moment it had come through at the expense of everything, and everyone else, and most terribly, of each of those three souls: but there was this about him, standing, running a hand through his short hair, pulling up his belt, and staring at that work, which since it was done, he could no longer call his own: even now, it was the expense of those three he thought of, and not of his own. He was standing as though he expected something to move; and nothing did. Nothing moved in the room, until a chill shook his shoulders, and he turned to look behind him, his lips ready to speak, but no one was there. Nonetheless, he was still standing, poised, half turned, waiting, when the bells released him, and he quickly gathered up the pages he needed, and hurried down to the street. He carried them clasped before him, and did not look up until he had reached the church itself, There he explained he had come early, to play through this one part he would play later, explained as best he could, that is, with his hands, the pages, pointing to the organ, to himself (the red necktie), for this priest understood no English, and spoke to him in Italian, a continuous stream of it as he conducted Stanley to the keyboard, leading him with a hand on his arm, then on his shoulder, and Stanley came on head bowed, closely attending the words he did not understand, as he seated himself and touched the keys, pulling out one stop and another as he listened, and why the priest shook his head and pushed two of them back as he spoke, Stanley did not understand (and he pulled them back out when the priest was gone, apparently in a hurry to be off somewhere before the next service called him back). —Prego, fare attenzione, non usi troppo i bassi, le note basse. La chiesa è così vecchia che le vibrazioni, capisce, potrebbero essere pericolose. Per favore non bassi . . . e non strane combinazioni di note, capisce . . . When he was left alone, when he had pulled out one stop after another (for the work required it), Stanley straightened himself on the seat, tightened the knot of the red necktie, and struck. The music soared around him, from the corner of his eye he caught the glitter of his wrist watch, and even as he read the music before him, and saw his thumb and last finger come down time after time with three black keys between them, wringing out fourths, the work he had copied coming over on the Conte di Brescia, wringing that chord of the devil's interval from the full length of the thirty-foot bass pipes, he did not stop. The walls quivered, still he did not hesitate. Everything moved, and even falling, soared in atonement. He was the only person caught in the collapse, and afterward, most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played.