Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  “They wanted to give Linc electric shock treatment but he was too frightened and he refused. It might have helped, but whenever it was suggested, he curled up in a corner and cried. Whenever he saw Enid he broke down. Called her, ‘Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.’ Sure, Linc was one of the great Jewish criers—they play the national anthem out at Shea and he cries, he sees the Lincoln Memorial and he cries, we take our boys up to Cooperstown and there’s Babe Ruth’s mitt and Linc starts crying. But this was something else. This was not crying, this was bursting. This was bursting under the pressure of unspeakable pain. And in that bursting there wasn’t anything of the man I knew or you knew. By the time he died, the Linc we’d known had been dead for seven years.”

  “The funeral?”

  “Riverside Chapel, tomorrow. Two P.M. Amsterdam and 76th. You’ll see some old faces.”

  “Won’t see Linc’s.”

  “Can, actually, if you want to. Somebody has to identify the body before the cremation. The law in New York. I’m doing it. Come along when they open the coffin. You’ll see what happened to our friend. He looked a hundred years old. His hair completely white and his face just a terrified, tiny thing. One of those skulls the savages shrink.”

  “I don’t know,” Sabbath replied, “that I can make it tomorrow.”

  “If you can’t, you can’t. I thought you should know before you read about it in the papers. In the papers the cause of death will be a heart attack—that’s the cause the family prefers. Enid wouldn’t have an autopsy. Linc was dead some thirteen or fourteen hours before he was found. Dead in his bed, the story goes. But the housekeeper tells a different story. I think by now Enid has come to believe her own. All along she honestly expected him to get better. She was sure of it down to the end, even though he had already slashed his wrists ten months ago.”

  “Look, thanks for remembering me—thanks for calling.”

  “People remember you, Mickey. A lot of people remember you with great admiration. One of the people Linc got teary about was you. I mean back when he was still himself. He never thought it was a great idea to take a talent like yours out to the boondocks. He loved your theater—he thought you were a magician. ‘Why did Mickey do it?’ He thought you never should have left to live up there. He talked about that often.”

  “Well, that’s all long ago.”

  “You should know that Linc never for a moment considered you responsible in any way for Nikki’s disappearance. I certainly didn’t—and don’t. The fucking well poisoners—”

  “Well, the well poisoners were right and you boys were wrong.”

  “Standard Sabbath perversity. You can’t believe that. Nikki was doomed. Tremendously gifted, extremely pretty, but so frail, so needy, so neurotic and fucked-up. No way that girl would ever hold together, none.”

  “Sorry, can’t make it tomorrow,” and Sabbath hung up.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Roseanna’s uniform these days was a Levi’s jacket and washed-out jeans as narrow as her cranelike legs, and recently Hal in Athena had cut her hair so short that at breakfast that morning Sabbath intermittently kept imagining his be-denimed wife as one of Hal’s pretty young homosexual friends from the college. But then, even with shoulder-length hair she’d emanated the tomboyish aura; ever since adolescence she’d had it—flat-chested and tall, with a striding gait and a way of cocking her chin when she spoke that had its appeal for Sabbath well before the disappearance of his fragile Ophelia. Roseanna looked to belong to another group of Shakespearean heroines entirely—to the saucy, robust, realistic circle of girls like Miranda and Rosalind. And she wore no more makeup than Rosalind did attired like a boy in the Forest of Arden. Her hair was still its engaging golden brown and, even clipped short, had a soft, feathery sheen that invited touching. The face was an oval, a wide oval, and there was a carved configuration to her small upturned nose and her wide, full, unboyishly seductive mouth, a hammered-and-chiseled look that, when she was younger, gave the fairy-tale illusion of a puppet infused with life. Now that she was no longer drinking, Sabbath saw traces in the modeling of Roseanna’s face of the lovely child she must have been before her mother left and the father all but destroyed her. She was not only thinner by far than her husband but a head taller, and what with daily jogging and the hormone replacement therapy, she looked—on those rare occasions when the two of them were out together—less a fifty-six-year-old wife than an anorexic daughter.

  What did Roseanna hate most about Sabbath? What did Sabbath hate most about her? Well, the provocations changed with the years. For a long time she hated him for refusing even to consider having a child, and he hated her for incessantly yammering on the phone to her sister, Ella, about her “biological clock.” Finally he had grabbed the phone away from her to communicate directly to Ella the degree to which he found their conversation offensive. “Surely,” he told her, “Yahweh did not go to the trouble of giving me this big dick to assuage a concern as petty as your sister’s!” Once her childbearing years were behind her, Roseanna was able better to pinpoint her hatred and to despise him for the simple fact that he existed, more or less in the same way that he despised her for existing. In addition was the predictable bread-and-butter stuff: she hated the unthinking way he brushed the crumbs onto the floor after cleaning the kitchen table, and he hated her unamusing goy humor. She hated the conglomeration of army-navy surplus he had been wearing for clothing ever since high school, and he hated that, for as long as he’d known her, she would never, even during the adulterous phase of glorious abandon, graciously swallow his come. She hated that he hadn’t touched her in bed for ten years and he hated the unruffled monotone in which she spoke to her local friends on the phone—and he hated the friends, do-gooders gaga over the environment or ex-drunks in AA. Each winter the town road crew went around cutting down 150-year-old maple trees that lined the dirt roads, and each year the maple-tree lovers of Madamaska Falls lodged a petition of protest with the first selectman, and then the next year the road crew, claiming the maples were dead or diseased, would clear another sylvan lane of ancient trees and thereby pick up enough dough—by selling the logs for firewood—to keep themselves in cigarettes, porn videos, and booze. She despised his inexhaustible bitterness about his career the way he had despised her drinking—how she would be drunk and argumentative in public places and, whether at home or out, speak in an aggressively loud and insulting voice. And now that she was sober he hated her AA slogans and the way of talking she had picked up from AA meetings or from her abused women’s group, where poor Roseanna was the only one who’d never been battered by a husband. Sometimes when they argued and she felt swamped Roseanna claimed Sabbath was “verbally” abusing her, but that didn’t count for much with her group of predominantly uneducated rural women, who’d had their teeth knocked out or chairs broken over their heads or cigarettes held to their buttocks and breasts. And those words she used! “And afterward there was a discussion and we shared about that particular step. . . .” “I haven’t shared that many times yet. . . .” “Many people shared last night. . . .” What he loathed the way good people loathe fuck was sharing. He didn’t own a gun, even out on the lonely hill where they lived, because he didn’t want a gun in a house with a wife who spoke daily of “sharing.” She hated that he was always bolting out the door without explanation, always leaving at all hours of the day and night, and he hated that artificial laugh of hers that hid both so much and so little, that laugh that was sometimes a bray, sometimes a howl, sometimes a cackle but that never rang with genuine pleasure. She hated his self-absorption and the outbursts about the arthritic joints that had ruined his career, and she hated him, of course, for the Kathy Goolsbee scandal, though had it not been for the breakdown brought on by the disgrace of it she would never have been hospitalized and begun her recovery. And she hated that, because of the arthritis, because of the scandal, because of his being the superior, impossible failure that he was, he earned not a penny and she alone was the breadwinner, but
then Sabbath hated that too—that was one of their few points of agreement. They each found it repellent to catch even a glimpse of the other unclothed: she hated his increasing girth, his drooping scrotum, his apish hairy shoulders, his white, stupid biblical beard, and he hated the jogger’s skinny titlessness—ribs, pelvis, sternum, everything that in Drenka was so softly upholstered, skeletonized as on a famine victim. They had remained in the house together all these years because she was so busy drinking that she didn’t know what was going on and because he had found Drenka. That had made for a very solid union.

  Driving home from her job at the high school, Roseanna used to think about nothing but the first glass of Chardonnay when she hit the kitchen, a second and third glass while she prepared dinner, a fourth with him when he came in from the studio, a fifth with dinner, a sixth when he went back to his studio with his dessert, and then, the rest of the evening, another bottle all for herself. As often as not, she woke up in the morning as her father used to—still dressed—and in the living room, where the night before she had stretched out on the sofa, glass in hand, the bottle beside her on the floor, to watch the flames in the fireplace. In the mornings, dreadfully hung over, feeling bloated, sweating, full of shame and self-loathing, she never exchanged a word with him, and rarely did they have their coffee together. He took his to the studio and they did not see each other again until dinnertime, when the ritual began anew. At night, though, everybody was happy, Roseanna with her chardonnay and Sabbath off in the car somewhere, going down on Drenka.

  Since her “coming into recovery,” all had changed. Now seven nights a week, directly after dinner, she drove off to an AA meeting from which she returned around ten with her clothes stinking of cigarette smoke and her mood decisively serene. Monday evenings there was an open discussion meeting in Athena. Tuesday evenings there was a step meeting in Cumberland, her home group, where she had recently celebrated the fourth anniversary of her sobriety. Wednesday evenings there was a step meeting in Blackwall. She didn’t like that meeting much—tough-guy workers and mental hospital attendants from Blackwall who were so aggressive, angry, and obscene that it made Roseanna, who’d lived until she was thirteen in academic Cambridge, very nervous; but, despite all the angry guys screaming at one another, she went because it was the only Wednesday meeting within fifty miles of Madamaska Falls. Thursdays she went to a closed speaker meeting in Cumberland. Fridays to another step meeting, this one in Mount Kendall. And Saturdays and Sundays there were meetings in both the afternoon—in Athena—and the evening—in Cumberland—and she went to all four. Generally an alcoholic would tell his or her story and then they would choose a discussion topic such as “Honesty” or “Humility” or “Sobriety.” “Part of the recovery principle,” she told him, whether he wished to listen or not, “is that you try to become honest with yourself. We talked a lot about that tonight. To find out what feels comfortable within yourself.” He also didn’t own a gun because of the word comfortable. “Isn’t it tedious feeling so ‘comfortable’? Don’t you miss all the discomforts of home?” “I haven’t found it so yet. Sure, there are drunkalogs where you fall asleep when you listen to them. But what happens with the story format,” she went on, oblivious not merely to his sarcasm but to the look in his eyes of someone who had taken too many sedative pills, “is that you can identify. ‘I can identify with that.’ I can identify with the woman who didn’t drink in bars but sat secretly drinking at home at night and had similar sorts of suffering, and that’s a very comfortable sort of feeling for me. I’m not unique, and somebody else can understand where I’m coming from. People that have long sobriety, that have this aura of inner peace and spirituality—that makes them appealing. Just to sit with them is something. They seem to be at peace with life. That’s inspiring. You can get hope from that.” “Sorry,” mumbled Sabbath, hoping himself to deal her soberalog a deathblow, “can’t identify.” “That we know,” said Roseanna, undaunted, and continued speaking her mind now that she was no longer his drunk. “You hear people at meetings say over and over that their family is what exacerbates everything. At AA you have a more neutral family that is, paradoxically, more loving, more understanding, less judgmental than your own family. And we don’t interrupt each other, which is also different from at home. We call that cross-talk. We don’t use cross-talk. And we don’t tune out. One person talks and everybody listens until he or she is finished. We have to learn not just about our problems but how to listen and to be attentive.” “And is the only way to get off the booze to learn to talk like a second grader?” “As an active alcoholic I compromised myself so horribly hiding alcohol, hiding the disease, hiding the behavior. You have to start all over, yes. If I sound like a second grader, that’s fine with me. You’re as sick as your secrets.” It was not for the first time that he was hearing this pointless, shallow, idiotic maxim. “Wrong,” he told her—as if it really mattered to him what she said or he said or anyone said, as if with their mouthings any of them approached even the borderline of truth—“you’re as adventurous as your secrets, as abhorrent as your secrets, as lonely as your secrets, as alluring as your secrets, as courageous as your secrets, as vacuous as your secrets, as lost as your secrets; you are as human as—” “No. You’re as unhuman, inhuman, and sick. It’s the secrets that prevent you from sitting right with your internal being. You can’t have secrets,” she told Sabbath firmly, “and achieve internal peace.” “Well, since manufacturing secrets is mankind’s leading industry, that takes care of internal peace.” No longer so serene as she would have liked to be, glaring at her beast with the old engulfing hatred, she went off to immerse herself in one of her AA pamphlets while he returned to his studio to read yet another book about death. That’s all he did there now, read book after book about death, graves, burial, cremation, funerals, funerary architecture, funeral inscriptions, about attitudes toward death over the centuries, and how-to books dating back to Marcus Aurelius about the art of dying. That very evening he read about la mort de toi, something with which he had already a share of familiarity and with which he was destined to have more. “Thus far,” he read, “we have illustrated two attitudes toward death. The first, the oldest, the longest held, and the most common one, is the familiar resignation to the collective destiny of the species and can be summarized by the phrase, Et moriemur, and we shall all die. The second, which appeared in the twelfth century, reveals the importance given throughout the entire modern period to the self, to one’s own existence, and can be expressed by another phrase, la mort de soi, one’s own death. Beginning with the eighteenth century, man in western societies tended to give death a new meaning. He exalted it, dramatized it, and thought of it as disquieting and greedy. But he already was less concerned with his own death than with la mort de toi, the death of the other person. . . .”

  If they ever happened to be together on a weekend, walking along the half mile of Town Street, Roseanna had a hello for just about everybody passing or driving by—old ladies, delivery boys, farmers, everyone. One day she even waved to Christa, of all people, who was standing in the window of the gourmet shop sipping a cup of coffee. Drenka and his Christa! The same happened when they went to see a doctor or the dentist down in the valley—she knew everybody there, too, from the meetings. “Was the whole county drunk?” Sabbath asked. “Whole country’s more like it,” Roseanna replied. One day in Cumberland she confided that the elderly man who’d just nodded at her when he passed by had been a deputy secretary of state under Reagan—he always came early to meetings so as to make the coffee and put out the cookies for the snack. And whenever she went up to Cambridge to visit Ella overnight—great days, those, for Sabbath and Drenka—she’d return ecstatic about the meeting there, a women’s meeting. “They fascinate me. I’m amazed how competent they seem to be, how accomplished, how self-assured, how well they look. Adjusted. They’re really an inspiration. I go in there and I don’t know anybody and they ask, ‘Anybody from outside?’ and I raise my hand and I say
, ‘I’m Roseanna from Madamaska Falls.’ Everybody claps and then if I have a chance to talk, I talk about whatever is on my mind. I tell them about my childhood in Cambridge. About my mother and father and what happened. And they listen. These terrific women listen. The sense of love that I experience, the sense of understanding of my suffering, the sense of great sympathy and empathy. And accepting.” “I understand your suffering. I have sympathy. I have empathy. I’m accepting.” “Oh, yeah, sometimes you ask how did your meeting go, that’s true. I can’t talk to you, Mickey. You wouldn’t understand—you couldn’t understand. You can’t begin to understand it innately, and so it becomes boring and silly to you. Something more to satirize.” “My satire is my sickness.” “I think you liked it better when I was an active drunk,” she said. “You enjoyed the superiority. As if you’re not superior enough, you could look down on me for that, too. I could be responsible for all your disappointments. Your life had been ruined by this fucking disgusting falling-down drunk. One guy the other night was talking about how degraded he became as an alcoholic. He was living then in Troy, New York. On the streets. They, the other drunks, just stuck him in a garbage pail and he couldn’t get out of the garbage pail. He sat there for hours and people would walk by on the streets and wouldn’t care about this human being who was sitting there with his legs scrunched up, in a garbage pail, and who couldn’t get out. And that’s what I was for you when I was drinking. In a garbage pail.” “I can identify with that,” Sabbath said.

  Now that she was four years out of the garbage pail, why did she go on with him? Sabbath was surprised by how long it was taking Barbara, the therapist in the valley, to get Roseanna to find the strength to strike out on her own like the competent, accomplished, self-assured women in Cambridge who showered her with so much sympathy for her suffering. But then her problem with Sabbath, the “enslavement,” stemmed, according to Barbara, from her disastrous history with an emotionally irresponsible mother and a violent alcoholic father for both of whom Sabbath was the sadistic doppelgänger. Her father, Cavanaugh, a geology professor at Harvard, had raised Roseanna and Ella after their mother could stand his drinking and his bullying no longer and, in terror of him, abandoned the family to run off to Paris with a visiting professor of Romance languages to whom she remained quite miserably bandaged for five long years before returning alone to Boston, her own birthplace, when Roseanna was thirteen and Ella eleven. She wanted the girls to come live on Bay State Road with her, and shortly after they decided that they would and left their father—of whom they, too, were terrified—and his new second wife, who couldn’t stand Roseanna, he hanged himself in the attic of their Cambridge house. And this explained to Roseanna what she was doing all these years with Sabbath, to whose “domineering narcissism” she had been no less addicted than to alcohol.