Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  Driving slowly up toward the cemetery, he calculated that he had seventeen dollars in his pocket and three hundred in the joint checking account. At a New York bank he’d have to write a check first thing in the morning. Get the dough out before Rosie did. Had to. She was pulling down a salary check twice a month and it would be a year before he qualified for Social Security and Medicare. His only talent was this idiotic talent with his hands, and his hands were no damn good anymore. Where could he live, how would he eat, suppose he got sick? . . . If she divorced him for desertion, what would he do for medical insurance, where would he get money for his anti-inflammatory pills and for the pills he took to keep the anti-inflammatory pills from burning out his stomach, and if he couldn’t afford the pills, if his hands were in pain all the time, if there was never again to be any relief . . .

  He had caused his heart to begin palpitating. The car was nosed into the usual hideaway, a quarter of a mile from Drenka’s grave. All he had to do was to calm down and back out and head home. He wouldn’t have to explain himself. He never did. He could sleep on the sofa and tomorrow resume reveling in his old nonexistence. Roseanna could never throw him out—her father’s suicide wouldn’t permit it, no matter what rewards Barbara promised in the way of inner peace and comfort. As for himself, however hateful life was, it was hateful in a home and not in the gutter. Many Americans hated their homes. The number of homeless in America couldn’t touch the number of Americans who had homes and families and hated the whole thing. Eat her pussy. At night, when she gets in from the meeting. It’ll astonish her. You become the whore. Not as good as having married one, but you’re six years from seventy so do it—eat her for money.

  By this time, Sabbath was out of the car and prowling with his flashlight along the road to the cemetery. He had to find out if there was somebody there.

  No limousine. Tonight a pickup truck. He was afraid to cross over to look at the plates, in case somebody was at the wheel. Could be just the local boys holding a moonlight circle-jerk up on the hill or sitting around on the tombstones smoking grass. Mostly he’d run into them over in Cumberland, on the checkout line at the supermarket, each with two or three little kids and a little underage wife—who already looks as though life has passed her by—with poor coloring and a pregnant belly pushing a cart piled with popcorn, cheese bugles, sausage rolls, dog food, potato chips, baby wipes, and twelve-inch-round pepperoni pizzas stacked up like money in a dream. Could tell them by the bumper stickers. Some had bumper stickers that read, “Our God Reigns,” some had bumper stickers that read, “If You Don’t Like The Way I Drive Dial 1-800-EAT-SHIT,” some had both. A psychiatrist from the state hospital in Blackwall who ran a private practice a couple of days a week once told Sabbath, who’d asked what it was he treated people for up here in the mountains, “Incest, wife beating, drunkenness—in that order.” And this was where Sabbath had lived for thirty years. Linc had it right: he should never have left after Nikki’s disappearance. Norman Cowan had it right: nobody could blame him for her disappearance. Who remembered it, other than him? Maybe he was headed for New York to confirm, after all this time, that he had no more destroyed Nikki than he had killed Morty.

  Nikki—all talent, enchanting talent, and absolutely nothing else. She couldn’t tell her left from her right, let alone add, subtract, multiply, or divide. She could not tell north from south or east from west, even in New York, where she had lived much of her life. She couldn’t bear the sight of ugly people or old people or disabled people. She was afraid of insects. She was afraid to be alone in the dark. If something made her nervous—a yellow-jacket, a Parkinson’s victim, a drooling child in a wheelchair—she’d pop a Miltown, and the Miltown made her a madwoman with a wide, vacant stare and trembling hands. She jumped and cried out whenever a car backfired or someone nearby slammed a door. She knew best how to yield. When she tried to be defiant it was only minutes before she was in tears and saying, “I’ll do anything you want—just don’t go at me like this!” She did not know what reason was; either she was childishly obstinate or childishly submissive. She would startle him by wrapping herself in a towel when she came out of the shower and, if he was in her path, rushing past him for the bedroom. “Why do you do that?” “Do what?” “What you did—hide your body from me.” “I didn’t do any such thing.” “You did, under the towel.” “I was keeping warm.” “Why did you run, as though you didn’t want me to see?” “You’re mad, Mickey, you’re making this up. Why do you have to go at me all the time?” “Why do you act as though your body is ugly?” “I don’t like my body. I hate my body! I hate my breasts! Women shouldn’t have to have breasts!” Yet she could not walk by any kind of reflecting surface without taking a quick look to see if she was as fresh and lovely as in the photos displayed outside the theater. And once she was on the stage the million phobias vanished, all the peculiarities simply ceased to exist. The things that frightened her most about life she could pretend to face in a play with no difficulty at all. She did not know which was stronger, her love of Sabbath or her hatred of him—all she knew for sure was that she could not have survived without his protection. He was her armature, her coat of mail.

  In her early twenties, Nikki was already as malleable an actress as a willful director like Sabbath could want. On stage, even just in rehearsal, even standing around and waiting to be given notes, there was not a sign of her jitteriness, all that fidgeting with her ring, the tracing of the fingers around the collar, the tapping on a table with whatever was at hand. She was calm, attentive, tireless, uncomplaining, clear-minded, intelligent. Whatever Sabbath asked of her, minutely pedantic or over the top, she could reproduce on the spot, exactly as he’d imagined it for himself. She was patient with the bad actors and inspired with the good ones. At work she was never discourteous toward anyone, whereas at a department store Sabbath had seen her display a snobbish superiority toward the salesgirl that made him want to slap her face. “Who do you think you are?” he asked her once they were back out on the street. “Why are you going for me now?” “Why treat that girl like shit?” “Oh, she was just a little tramp.” “And who the fuck are you? Your father owned a lumberyard in Cleveland. Mine sold butter and eggs from a truck.” “Why do you dwell on my father? I hated my father. How can you dare bring up my father!” Another of the women in Sabbath’s life who reckoned her father a flop. Drenka’s was a stupid party member whom she scorned for his gullible fidelity. “I can understand if you’re an opportunist—but to be a believer.” Rosie’s was an alcoholic suicide who terrified her, and Nikki’s was a bullying, vulgar businessman to whom cards, taverns, and girls meant rather more than his responsibility to a wife and child. Her father had met her mother when he was in Greece with his parents for the funeral of his grandmother and afterward went traveling around the country by himself, primarily to see what the pussy was like. There he courted his wife-to-be, a bourgeois girl from Salonika, and a few months later he brought her back to Cleveland, where his own father, an even more bullying and vulgar businessman, owned the lumberyard. The old man’s people had been country people, and when he spoke in Greek it was with a terrible village dialect. And the cursing over the phone! “Gamóto! Gamó ti mána sou! Gamó ti panaghía sou!” Fuck it! Fuck your mother! Fuck your Holy Mother! . . . And pinching her behind, his own daughter-in-law! Nikki’s mother fancied herself a poetic young woman, and her philandering husband, the coarse in-laws, provincial Cleveland, the bouzouki music these people loved—all of it drove her mad. She couldn’t have made a bigger mistake than marrying Kantarakis and his horrible family, but at nineteen she was of course in flight from a domineering, old-fashioned father she loathed, and the high-spirited American who made her blush so easily—and, for the first time in her life, come so easily—seemed to her at the time a man called to great things.

  Her salvation was the beautiful little Nikoleta. She doted on her. She took her everywhere. They were inseparable. She began to teach Nikki, who was musical, to sing in G
reek and English. She read to her aloud and taught her to recite. But still the mother wept every night, and finally she moved with Nikki to New York. To support them, she worked in a laundry, then as a mailroom sorter, and eventually for Saks, first selling hats and, a few years later, as head of the millinery department. Nikki went to the High School of Performing Arts—it was she and her mother against the world until, in 1959, an obscure blood disease abruptly ended her mother’s struggle. . . .

  Sabbath made his way parallel to the cemetery’s long stone wall, low to the ground and moving as quietly as he could over the soft earth at the margin of the road. There was somebody in the cemetery. At Drenka’s grave! In jeans—lanky, pigeon-toed, his hair in a ponytail. . . . It was the electrician’s pickup. It was Barrett, whom she’d loved to fuck in the bathtub and lather in the shower. You start at the face and then the chest and the stomach and then you come down to the dick, and that gets big, or it is big already. Yes, it was Barrett’s night to pay his respects to the dead, and he was indeed big already. Sometimes he will lift my legs up and he carries me like that in the shower. Once again Sabbath was searching for a rock. Since he was a good fifteen feet farther from Barrett than he’d been from Lewis, he looked for a light rock that he might have a chance of pitching somewhere near the strike zone. It took time in the dark to locate something the right weight and size, and all the while Barrett stood at the foot of her grave silently beating off. To bean him one right on the cock just as he started to come. Sabbath was trying to gauge the advent of the orgasm by the speed of Barrett’s stroke when he saw a second figure in the cemetery, slowly ascending the hill. In a uniform. The sexton? The uniformed figure moved stealthily, unnoticed and unseen, until he was just about three feet behind Barrett, who was oblivious by now to everything except the impending surge.

  Deliberately, almost languidly, the uniformed figure raised his right arm, degree by degree. In the hand he was holding a long object that culminated in a bulge. A flashlight. A drone arose from Barrett, a steady monotonous drone that suddenly terminated in a fanfare of incoherent babble. Sabbath held his fire, but the ecstatic climax turned out to be the cue as well for the man with the flashlight, who brought it down like an ax on Barrett’s skull. There was a muted thud when Barrett hit the ground, then two swift thumps—the young electrician . . . you are somethin’, you are really somethin’ else . . . getting it twice in the balls.

  Only when the assailant hopped into his own car—he had slipped it in just behind the pickup—and turned on the engine did Sabbath realize who it was. Out of arrogant, open defiance or plain unquenchable rage, the state trooper’s cruiser pulled away, all lights flashing.

  THAT NIGHT, on the drive to New York for Linc’s funeral, he thought only of Nikki. All he could talk about with his mother, who was gliding about inside the car, drifting and plunging like debris in the tide, was what had led to Nikki’s disappearance. During his four years of marriage, his mother had seen Nikki only five or six times and said little or nothing to her when she did, could hardly comprehend who Nikki was or why she was there, however earnestly, with the brokenhearted naiveté of a bright, kindly child, Nikki tried to make conversation with her. What with her terror of the aged and the deformed and the ill, Nikki was scarcely up to the ordeal of Sabbath’s suffering mother and she invariably got stomach cramps driving to Bradley. Once, when Mrs. Sabbath was looking particularly gaunt and unkempt as they came upon her dozing in a kitchen chair with her teeth beside her on the table’s oilcloth covering, Nikki couldn’t help herself and ran out the back door. From then on, Sabbath would go alone to see his mother. He took her for lunch to a Belmar seafood restaurant that served Parker House rolls, once a favorite of hers, and back in Bradley, at his insistence, he held her by the arm and they strolled on the boards for ten minutes. Much to her relief, he then took her home. He did not press her to say anything, and over the years there were visits when he said only, “How are you, Ma?” and “So long, Ma.” That and two kisses, one coming, one going. Whenever he brought a box of chocolate-covered cherries he would find it the next time unopened and exactly where she’d put it down after taking it from his hand. He never considered staying the night in Morty and his old room.

  But now that she was fluttering invisibly about in his dark car, shed of affliction, drained of grief, now that his little mother was purely spirit, purely mind, an imperishable being, he reckoned she could endure to hear the full story of the catastrophe in which the first marriage had perished. No doubt she had been present earlier to observe the ending of the second marriage. And wasn’t she there whenever he awoke at four A.M. and couldn’t fall back asleep? Hadn’t he asked her in the bathroom that very morning, while he trimmed the fringe of his beard, if his was not a replica of the flowing beard worn by her own father, the rabbi for whom he was named and whom he had apparently resembled from the moment of birth? Wasn’t she regularly at his side, in his mouth, ringing his skull, reminding him to extinguish his nonsensical life?

  Nothing but death, death and the dead, for three and a half hours, nothing but Nikki, her unaccountability, her strangeness, her appearance, the hair and the eyes primordial in their blackness, the skin ethereal, maidenly, an angelic, powdery white . . . Nikki and her talent to embody everything in the soul that is contradictory and unfathomable, even the monstrousness that paralyzed her with fear.

  When Nikki was awarded a full scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, she moved there with her mother. At first they relied on the generosity of a first cousin of Nikki’s mother who was married to an English physician and lived comfortably in Kensington. Her mother found work in an expensive hat shop on South Audley Street, and the gracious owners, Bill and Ned, having fallen for timorous Nikki’s eloquent delicacy, allowed them to rent the two small rooms above the store for virtually nothing. They even supplied furniture from the attic of their country house, including a small bed on which Nikki slept in the minute “extra” room and the couch in the “parlor” where her insomniac mother, with the help of a novel, chainsmoked herself through each night. The toilet was downstairs, at the back of the shop. The place was so small that Nikki could as well have been a kangaroo in her mother’s pouch. She wouldn’t really have minded if it had been smaller still, with but one bed for the two of them.

  After graduating from the drama school, Nikki returned to New York, but her mother, who could never get over her memories of Cleveland and who found Americans, altogether, loud and barbarous—certainly by comparison with her customers at the up-market hat shop, who were as kind and thoughtful as they could be to the widowed (that was the story) milliner (of aristocratic Cretan lineage, according to Bill and Ned)—her mother stayed in London. The time had come for Nikki to strike out on her own while her mother remained safely among the many good friends she had made through the “boys,” as everyone referred to her bosses—she and Nikki were frequently invited away to somebody’s country house for a holiday weekend, and not a few wealthy customers looked on Mrs. Kantarakis as a confidante. And then there was the security furnished by cousin Rena and the doctor, who had been extraordinarily generous, especially to Nikki. Everyone was generous to Nikki. She was an enchantress, though one who, upon her departure for America, had as yet no sexual experience with men. For that matter, since fleeing her father’s house in her mother’s arms at the age of seven, she’d had hardly any familiarity with men who were not homosexual. It remained to be seen just how much she would enchant them.

  “Her mother,” Sabbath told his own mother, “died early one morning. Nikki had flown there to be with her during the last stages of the illness. Her ticket was paid for by Bill and Ned. There was nothing more to be done for her in the hospital, so the mother came back to the rooms over the hat shop to die. As the end approached, Nikki sat beside her mother, holding her hand and making her comfortable for nearly four days. Then the fourth morning she went down behind the shop to use the toilet and when she came back upstairs her mother had
stopped breathing. ‘My mother died just now,’ she told me on the phone, ‘and I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there for her. I wasn’t there for her, Mickey! She died alone!’ Compliments of Bill and Ned, I flew to London on the evening plane. I arrived around breakfast time the next day and made straight for South Audley Street. What I found was Nikki looking calm and unruffled in a chair beside her mother. It was the next day and the corpse was still in her nightgown—and there. And remained there for seventy-two hours more. When I could no longer stand the spectacle of it, I shouted at Nikki, ‘You are not a Sicilian peasant! Enough is enough! It is time for your mother to go!’ ‘No. No. No!’ and when she started flailing at me with her fists, I backed away, retreated down the stairs, and wandered around London for hours. What I was trying to tell her was that the vigil she had initiated over the body had exceeded my sense not of what was seemly but of what was sane. I was trying to tell her that her unconstrained intimacy with her mother’s corpse, the chatty monologue with which she was entertaining the dead woman as she sat beside her through each day, knitting at her mother’s unfinished knitting and welcoming the friends of the boys, the fondling of the dead woman’s hands, the kissing of her face, the stroking of her hair—all this obliviousness to the raw physical fact—was rendering her taboo to me.”

  Was Sabbath’s mother following this story? He somehow sensed that her interest lay elsewhere. He was down into Connecticut now, driving along a beautiful, creepy stretch of river, and he thought his mother might be thinking, “It wouldn’t be hard out in that river.” But not before I see Line, Ma. . . . He had to see what it looked like before he did it himself.

  And this was the first time that he realized or admitted what he had to do. The problem that was his life was never to be solved. His wasn’t the kind of life where there are aims that are clear and means that are clear and where it is possible to say, “This is essential and that is not essential, this I will not do because I cannot endure it, and that I will do because I can endure it.” There was no unsnarling an existence whose waywardness constituted its only authority and provided its primary amusement. He wanted his mother to understand that he wasn’t blaming the futility on Morty’s death, or on her collapse, or on Nikki’s disappearance, or on his stupid profession, or on his arthritic hands—he was merely recounting to her what had happened before this had happened. That’s all you could know, though if what you think happened happens to not ever match up with what somebody else thinks happened, how could you say you know even that? Everybody got everything wrong. What he was telling his mother was wrong. If it were Nikki listening instead of his mother, she would be shouting, “It wasn’t like that! I wasn’t like that! You misunderstand! You always misunderstood! You’re always going at me for no reason at all!”