Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  Homeless, wifeless, mistressless, penniless . . . jump in the cold river and drown. Climb up into the woods and go to sleep, and tomorrow morning, should you even awaken, keep climbing until you are lost. Check into a motel, borrow the night clerk’s razor to shave, and slit your throat from ear to ear. It could be done. Lincoln Gelman did it. Roseanna’s father did it. Probably Nikki herself had done it, and with a razor, a straight razor very like the one with which she had exited each night to kill herself in Miss Julie. About a week after her disappearance, it had occurred to Sabbath to go to the prop room and look for the razor that the valet, Jean, hands to Julie after she sleeps with him, feels herself polluted by him, and finally asks of him, “If you were in my place, what would you do?” “Go, now while it’s light—out to the barn,. . .” replies Jean, and hands her his razor. “There’s no other way to end. . . . Go!” he says. The play’s last word: go! So Julie takes the razor and goes—and embattled Nikki ineluctably follows. The razor had turned up in the drawer in the prop shop just where it was supposed to be, but there were times, nonetheless, when Sabbath could still believe that the horror was autohypnosis, that their catastrophe stemmed from the selfless, ruthless sympathy with which Nikki almost criminally embraced the sufferings of the unreal. Eagerly she surrendered her large imagination not to the overbearing beastliness of Sabbath’s imagination but to the overbearing beastliness of Strindberg’s. Strindberg had done it for him. Who better?

  “I remember thinking by the third day, ‘If this goes on any longer, I’ll never fuck this woman again—I won’t be able to lie with her in the same bed.’ It wasn’t because these rites she was concocting were strange to me and at cross-purposes with rituals I was accustomed to witnessing among Jews. Had she been a Catholic, a Hindu, a Muslim, guided by the mourning practices of this religion or that; had she been an Egyptian under the reign of the great Amenhotep, observing every last detail of the ceremonial rigmarole decreed by the death god Osiris, I believe I would have done nothing more than watch in respectful silence. My chagrin was over Nikki out there all on her own—she and her mother against the world, apart from the world, alone together and cut off from the world, with no church, no clan to help her through, not even a simple folk formality around which her response to a dear one’s death could mercifully cohere. Two days into her vigil we happened to see a priest walking by, down on South Audley Street. ‘Those are the real ghouls,’ Nikki said. ‘I hate them all. Priests, rabbis, clergymen with their stupid fairy tale!’ I had wanted to say to her, ‘Then get a shovel and do it yourself. I’m no fan of the clergy myself. Get a shovel and bury her in Ned’s garden.’

  “Her mother was laid out on the couch, under an eiderdown. She looked—before the embalmer showed up and, in Nikki’s words, ‘pickled her’—she looked as though she were merely sleeping out the day in our presence, her chin, just as she carried it in life, angled slightly to one side. Beyond the windows it was a fresh spring morning. The sparrows she fed every day were flitting about on the flowering trees and bathing in the gravel on top of the garden shed in the yard, and through the open rear windows you could see down to the sheen on the tulips. A bowl of half-eaten dog food lay beside the door but her mother’s lapdog was gone by then, taken in by Rena. It was from Rena that I later learned what had happened on the morning of the death. Nikki had told me that an ambulance had been sent for by the doctor who had come to view the body and to write up the death certificate but that she had decided to keep her mother at home until the funeral and sent the ambulance away. Rena, who had rushed over to be with Nikki at the time, told me that the ambulance the doctor called had not been ‘sent away.’ When the driver had come through the door and started up the narrow staircase, Nikki had told him, ‘No, no!’; when he insisted he was only doing his job, Nikki struck him across the face so hard that he ran off and her wrist was sore for days. I had seen her rubbing the wrist on and off during the vigil but didn’t know what it meant until Rena told me.”

  And just who did he think he was talking to? A self-induced hallucination, a betrayal of reason, something with which to magnify the inconsequentiality of a meaningless mess—that’s what his mother was, another of his puppets, his last puppet, an invisible marionette flying around on strings, cast in the role not of guardian angel but of the departed spirit making ready to ferry him to his next abode. To a life that had come to nothing, a crude theatrical instinct was lending a garish, pathetic touch of last-minute drama.

  The drive was interminable. Had he missed a turn or was this itself the next abode: a coffin that you endlessly steer through the placeless darkness, recounting and recounting the uncontrollable events that induced you to become someone unforeseen. And so fast! So quickly! Everything runs away, beginning with who you are, and at some indefinable point you come to half understand that the ruthless antagonist is yourself.

  His mother had by now draped her spirit around him, she had enwrapped him within herself, her way of assuring him that she did indeed exist unmastered and independent of his imagination.

  “I asked Nikki, ‘When will the funeral be?’ But she didn’t answer. ‘It’s quite unacceptable,’ she said, ‘it’s quite unacceptably sad.’ She was seated on the edge of the couch where her mother was laid out. I was holding one of Nikki’s hands and with the other she reached over and touched her mother’s face. ‘Manoúlamou, manoulítsamou.’ Greek diminutives for ‘my dear little mother.’ ‘It’s unbearable. It’s dreadful,’ Nikki said. ‘I’m going to stay with her. I’ll sleep here. I don’t want her to be alone.’ And as I didn’t want Nikki to be alone, I sat with her and her mother until, late in the afternoon, a funeral director from a large London firm contacted by Rena’s doctor husband came to discuss the funeral arrangements. I was a Jew accustomed to the dead’s being buried when possible within twenty-four hours, but Nikki was nothing, nothing but her mother’s child, and when I reminded her, while we were waiting for the funeral director, of what Jewish custom was, she said, ‘To put them in the ground the next day? How cruel of the Jews!’ ‘Well, that’s one way of looking at it.’ ‘It is,’ she said, ‘it’s cruel! It’s horrible!’ I said no more. She had confirmed that she didn’t want a funeral ever.

  “The funeral director arrived in striped trousers and a black cutaway at around four. He was extremely polite and deferential and explained that he had rushed over from his third funeral of the day and hadn’t had a chance to change. Nikki announced that her mother was not to be moved but was to stay right where she was. He responded at a very high level of euphemism, one to which he adhered, but for a single lapse, throughout the consultation. He affected an upper-class accent. ‘As you wish, Miss Kantarakis. We won’t want to give offense, however. If mother remains with you, then one of our people will have to come and give her an injection.’ I took him to mean that she would have to be cleaned out and embalmed. ‘Don’t worry,’ he assured us crisply, ‘our man is the best in England.’ He smiled proudly. ‘He does the royal family. A very witty fellow, in fact. You have to be in this business. We couldn’t be a morbid lot.’

  “A fly meanwhile had alighted on the corpse’s face and I was hoping that Nikki wouldn’t see it and it would go away. But she did see and jumped up, and for the first time since I arrived, there was a hysterical outburst. ‘Let her,’ the funeral director said to me. I, too, had jumped up to shoo the fly away. ‘Let it come out,’ he said sagely.

  “After she had been calmed down, Nikki laid a tissue across her mother’s face to keep the fly from returning. Later in the day, at her request, I went out to buy some bug repellant and came back to spray the room—careful not to spray in the corpse’s direction—and Nikki took the tissue and put it in her sweater pocket. Unknowingly—or not unknowingly—around dusk she used the tissue to blow her nose . . . and that seemed to me altogether crazy. ‘At the risk of being indelicate,’ the funeral director asked, ‘how tall was Mother? My associates will be asking when I ring.’

  “He called his off
ice some minutes later and asked what was available at the crematorium on Tuesday. It was still only Friday, and given Nikki’s condition, Tuesday seemed a long way off. But as she would as soon have had no funeral and kept her mother there for good, I’d decided on Tuesday as better than never.

  “The funeral director waited while they checked the crematorium schedule. Then he looked up from the phone and said to me, ‘My associates say there’s a one o’clock slot.’ ‘Oh, no,’ Nikki whimpered, but I nodded okay. ‘Grab it,’ he snapped into the phone, and revealed at last that he was able to speak as though the world were a real place and we were real people. ‘And the service?’ he asked Nikki after he’d hung up. ‘I don’t care who does it,’ she said vaguely, ‘as long as they don’t go on about God.’ ‘Nondenominational,’ he said, and wrote that down in his book, along with her mother’s height and the grade of coffin that Nikki had chosen to have incinerated with her. He then set about to describe, delicately, the cremation procedure and to lay out the options available. ‘You can leave before the coffin disappears or you can wait until it disappears.’ Nikki was too stunned by the thought to answer and so I said, ‘We’ll wait.’ ‘And the ashes?’ he asked. ‘In her will,’ I said, ‘she just asked that they be scattered.’ Nikki, looking at the motionless tissue over her mother’s nostrils and lips, said to no one in particular, ‘I suppose we’ll take them back to New York. She hated America. But I suppose they should come with us.’ ‘You can take them,’ the funeral director replied, ‘you certainly can, Miss Kantarakis. According to the law of 1902, you can do anything you wish with them.’

  “The embalmer didn’t arrive until seven-thirty. The funeral director had described him to me—with a trace of Dickensian enjoyment such as you might not be likely to hear from a funeral director anywhere other than in the British Isles—as ‘tall, with thick spectacles, and quite witty.’ But he wasn’t merely tall when he appeared in the dusk at the downstairs door; he was huge, a giant strongman out of the circus, wearing the thick spectacles and completely bald but for two sprigs of black hair that stuck up at either side of his enormous head. He stood in the doorway in a black suit, bearing two large black boxes, each sizable enough to hold a child. ‘You’re Mr. Cummins?’ I asked him. ‘I’m from Ridgely’s, sir.’ He might as well have said he was from Satan’s. I would have believed him, Cockney accent and all. He didn’t look witty to me.

  “I led him up to where the corpse was tucked in under her eiderdown. He removed his hat and bowed slightly to Nikki, as respectful as he might have been were we the royals themselves. ‘We’ll leave you alone,’ I said. ‘We’ll take a walk and be back in about an hour.’ ‘Give me an hour and a half, sir,’ he said. ‘Fine.’ ‘May I ask a few questions, sir?’

  “As Nikki was sufficiently astonished by his hugeness—by his hugeness on top of everything else—I didn’t think she’d need to hear his questions, which could not be anything but macabre. As it was, she couldn’t lift her gaze from the large black boxes, which he’d now set down. ‘You go outside a moment,’ I told her. ‘Go downstairs and get some air while I finish up with this guy.’ Silently she obeyed. She was leaving her mother for the first time since she’d gone to the toilet the day before and returned to find her dead. But anything rather than to be with that man and those boxes.

  “Back inside, the embalmer asked me how the corpse should be dressed. I didn’t know, but instead of rushing out to question Nikki, I told him to leave her in her nightgown. Then I realized that if he was preparing her for the funeral and the cremation, her jewelry should be removed. I asked if he would do that for us. ‘Let’s see what she has on, sir,’ he said and beckoned for me to examine the body with him.

  “I hadn’t been expecting that, but as it seemed to be a matter of professional ethics for him not to remove valuables without a witness present, I stood beside him while he pulled back the eiderdown to reveal the corpse’s bluish stiffened fingers and, where the nightgown had hiked up, the pipe-thin legs. He removed her ring and gave it to me and then he lifted her head to unscrew her earrings. But he couldn’t manage by himself, and so I held her head while he worked the earrings. ‘The pearls, too,’ I said, and he slid them around on her neck so that the catch was turned to the front. Only the catch wouldn’t come undone. He struggled in vain with his inordinately large circus-strongman fingers while I continued to hold the weight of her head in one hand. She and I were never physically cozy together and this was by far the most intimate we had been. The head seemed to weigh so much dead. She is so dead, I thought—and this is becoming insufferable. Eventually I took a crack at opening the catch myself and after a few minutes of fiddling, when I couldn’t do it either, we gave up and drew the pearl necklace, which was a very tight fit, over her head and her hair as best we could.

  “I was careful not to trip as I stepped back between his black boxes. ‘All right, then,’ I told him, ‘I’ll return in an hour and a half.’ ‘You’d better phone before, sir.’ ‘And you’ll leave her exactly as she is now?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ But then he looked at the windows that faced onto Ned’s garden and the rear windows of the houses on the street opposite and he asked, ‘Can they see in from over there, sir?’ I was suddenly alarmed about leaving this attractive forty-five-year-old woman alone with him, dead though she was. But what I was thinking was unthinkable—I thought—and I said, ‘You better pull the curtains to be safe.’ The curtains were new, a birthday gift from Nikki bought the year before and hung only during the last week of her mother’s illness. Her mother had insisted that she didn’t need new curtains, refused even to unwrap them, and had only accepted them when, at her bedside, Nikki, lying, said to the dying woman that they had cost her less than ten pounds.

  “At Rena’s, where we were staying, Rena and I tried to get Nikki to bathe and to eat. She would do neither. She would not even wash her hands when I asked her to after a day of fondling her dead mother. She waited silently in a chair until it was time to go back. After an hour passed, I phoned to see how far the embalmer had got.

  “‘I’m finished, sir,’ he said. ‘Is everything as it was?’ ‘Yes, sir. Flowers beside her on the pillow.’ They hadn’t been when we left; he must have taken the flowers that Ned had picked earlier in the day and moved them. ‘Had to straighten her head,’ he told me. ‘Best for the coffin.’ ‘All right. When you go, just pull the downstairs door shut behind you. We’ll be right over. Can you leave a lamp on?’ ‘I have, sir. The little lamp by her head.’ He had arranged a tableau.

  “The first thing I saw—”

  It was Sabbath he had meant to smash on the head. Of course! It was Sabbath he had set out to catch desecrating his mother’s grave! For weeks, maybe even for months now, Matthew, on night patrol, must have been observing him from the cruiser. Ever since Sabbath’s monstrous exploitation of Kathy Goolsbee, Matthew, like so many others in the affronted community, had come to lose his respect for Sabbath, and this he made clear, whenever his car happened to pass Sabbath’s on the road, by failing to acknowledge that he recognized the driver. As he drove around, Matthew ordinarily loved to throw a salute to the folks he’d known as a kid in Madamaska Falls, and he was still well known in town for being lenient with townsfolk about their infractions. He had been ingratiatingly lenient once with Sabbath himself, when he was just a few months out of the academy, not very wily yet, and driving a chase car with the traffic squad. He’d gone after Sabbath—who was moving along well over the speed limit after a joyous afternoon up at the Grotto—and forced him, with his siren, to the side of the road. But when Matthew strode up to the driver’s window and looked inside and saw who it was, he blushed and said, “Ooops.” He and Roseanna had become pals during his last year at the high school, and more than once (drunk she said everything more than once) she’d remarked that Matthew Balich was among the most sensitive boys she’d ever had in a class at Cumberland. “What did I do wrong, Officer Balich?” inquired Sabbath, seriously, as every citizen is entitled to do. “Jes
us, you know you were flying, sir.” “Uh-oh,” replied Sabbath. “Look, don’t worry,” Matthew told him, “when it comes to folks I know, I’m not your typical gung-ho trooper. You don’t have to go telling people, but it just isn’t in me to be that way toward somebody I know. I drove fast before I was a trooper. I’m not going to be a hypocrite.” “Well, that’s more than kind. What should I do?” “Well,” said Matthew, grinning broadly with that noseless face—exactly as his mother had earlier in the afternoon, coming for the third or fourth time—“you could slow down, for one thing. And then you could just get out of here. Go away! See ya, Mr. Sabbath! Say hi to Roseanna!”

  So that was the end of that. He could not dare visit Drenka’s grave ever again. He could never return to Madamaska Falls. In flight not just from home and marriage but now from the law at its most lawless.