Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  “The first thing I saw when we got back was that the vacuum cleaner was out of the closet and in a corner of the larger room. Had he used it to clean up? Clean what up? Then I smelled the awful chemicals.

  “The woman under the eiderdown was no longer the woman we had been with all day. ‘It’s not her,’ Nikki said and broke into tears. ‘It looks like me! It’s me!’

  “I understood what she meant, insane as her words first sounded. Nikki possessed a severe, spectacular variant of her mother’s refined good looks, and so whatever resemblance there had been before the embalming was now even chillingly stronger. She walked back to the body and stared at it. ‘Her head is straight.’ ‘He straightened it,’ I told her. ‘But she always carried her head on the side.’ ‘She doesn’t anymore.’ ‘Oh, you’re looking awfully stern, manoulítsa,’ Nikki said to the corpse.

  “Stern. Sculpted. Statuelike. Very officially very dead. But Nikki nonetheless sat back down in her chair and set about resuming the vigil. The curtains were closed and only the little light was glowing and the flowers were on the pillow beside the embalmed head. I had to suppress an impulse to grab them and throw them into the wastebasket and put a stop to the whole thing. All her fluid self is gone, I thought, suctioned into those black cases and then—what? Down the toilet bowl at the back of the shop? I could just see that giant in his black suit tossing about the naked body once it was the two of them alone in the room with the curtains drawn and there was no longer any need to be as dainty as he’d been with the jewelry. Evacuating the bowels, emptying the bladder, draining the blood, injecting the formaldehyde, if formaldehyde was what I smelled.

  “I should never have allowed this, I thought. We should have buried her in the garden ourselves. I was right to begin with. ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked. ‘I’ll stay here tonight,’ she said. ‘You can’t,’ I said. ‘I don’t want her to be alone.’ ‘I don’t want you to be alone. You can’t be alone. And I’m not going to sleep here. You’re coming back to Rena’s. You can return in the morning.’ ‘I can’t leave her.’ ‘You have to come with me, Nikki.’ ‘When?’ ‘Now. Say good-bye to her now and come.’ She got out of the chair and knelt beside the couch. Touching her mother’s cheeks, her hair, her lips, she said, ‘I did love you, manoulítsa. Oh, manoulítsamou.’

  “I opened a window to air the place out. I began to clean the refrigerator at the kitchen end of the parlor. I poured the milk that was in an open carton down the drain. I found a paper bag and put the contents of the refrigerator into the bag. But when I came back to Nikki, she was still talking to her. ‘It’s time to go for tonight,’ I said.

  “Without resisting me, Nikki got up from the floor when I offered to help her. But standing in the doorway to the stairwell, she turned back to look at her mother. ‘Why can’t she just stay like that?’ she asked.

  “I led her down the stairs to the side door, carrying the garbage out with us. But again Nikki turned around and I followed her back up into the parlor with my bag of garbage. Again she went up to the body to touch it. I waited. Ma, I waited and I waited and I thought, Help her, help her out of this, but I didn’t know what to do to help her, whether to tell her to stay or to force her to go. She pointed to the corpse. ‘That’s my mother,’ she said. ‘You have to come with me,’ I said. Eventually, I don’t know how much later, she did.

  “But the next day it was worse—Nikki was better. In the morning she couldn’t wait to get to her mother’s and when, after dropping her off there, I phoned an hour later and asked, ‘How is it?’ she said, ‘Oh, very peaceful. Sitting here knitting. And we had a little chat.’ And so I found her at the end of the afternoon when I came to take her back to Rena’s. ‘We had such a nice little chat,’ she said. ‘I was just telling Momma . . .’

  “On Sunday morning—finally, finally, finally—in a heavy rain-storm, I went around to open the door for the hearse that had come to take her away. ‘It’s another twenty-five pounds,’ the funeral director warned me, ‘to get the staff out on Sunday, sir—funerals are expensive enough already.’ But I said to him, ‘Just get ’em.’ If Rena wouldn’t pay, I would—and I had then, as now, not a dollar to spare. I didn’t want Nikki to come with me, and only when she insisted that she had to did I raise my voice and say, ‘Look, start thinking. It’s pissing rain. It’s miserable. You’re not going to like it at all when they carry your mother out of that room and into this storm in a box.’ ‘But I must go to see her this afternoon.’ ‘You can, you can. I’m sure you can.’ ‘You must ask them if I can come this afternoon!’ ‘Whenever they have her ready, I’m sure you can go there. But the scene this morning you can skip. Do you want to watch her leave South Audley Street?’ ‘Maybe you’re right,’ she said, and, of course, I was wondering if I was and if watching her mother leave South Audley Street might be just what she needed for reality to begin to seep in. But what if keeping reality at bay was all that was keeping her from coming completely apart? I didn’t know. No one knows. That’s why the religions have the rituals that Nikki hated.

  “But at three she was back with her mother at the funeral home, which happened to be not far from the flat of an English friend I had arranged to visit. I had given her the address and the phone number and told her to come to his house when she was finished. Instead she called me to say that she would stay until my visit was over and that I should then come to pick her up at the funeral home. It wasn’t what I’d had in mind. She’s stuck, I thought, I cannot unstick her.

  “I had lingering hopes that she would show up at my friend’s anyway, but when it got to be five o’clock, I walked over and, at the front door, asked the on-duty officer, who appeared to be alone on a Sunday, to call her. He said that Nikki had left a message for me to be brought to where she was ‘visiting’ her mother. He led me along the corridors and down a long stairway and into another corridor, lined with doors, which I imagined issued onto cubicles where bodies were laid out to be seen by relatives. Nikki was in one of those tiny rooms with her mother. She was seated in a chair drawn up beside the open coffin, working at her mother’s knitting again. When she saw me she laughed lightly and said, ‘We had a wonderful chat. We laughed about the room. It’s just about the size of the one in Cleveland the time we ran away. Look,’ she said to me, ‘look at her sweet little hands.’ She turned back the lace coverlet to show me her mother’s intertwined fingers. ‘Manoulítsamou,’ she said, kissing and kissing them.

  “I think even the on-duty officer, who had remained in the open doorway to accompany us upstairs, was shaken by what he’d just seen. ‘We have to go,’ I said flatly. She began to cry. ‘A few more minutes.’ ‘You’ve been here for over two hours.’ ‘I love I love I love I love—’ ‘I know, but we have to go now.’ She got up and began kissing and stroking her mother’s forehead, repeating, ‘I love I love I love I love—’ Only gradually was I able to pull her out of the room.

  “At the door she thanked the officer. ‘You’ve all been so kind,’ she said, looking a bit dazed, and then, as we came outside, she asked if the next morning I would mind if she just stopped by first thing with some fresh flowers for her mother’s room. I thought, We are dealing here with death, fuck the flowers! but I did not really cut loose until we were back in the room at Rena’s. We walked silently through Holland Park on a beautiful May Sunday, past the peacocks and the formal gardens, then down through Kensington Gardens, where the chestnut trees were blossoming, and finally we got to Rena’s. ‘Look,’ I said to her, closing the door to our room, ‘I can’t stand by and watch it anymore. You are not living with the dead, you are living with the living. It’s as simple as that. You are alive and your mother is dead, very sadly dead at forty-five, but this has all become too much for me. Your mother is not a doll to play with. She is not laughing with you about anything. She is dead. Nobody is laughing. This must stop.’

  “But she did not seem yet to understand. She replied, ‘I’ve seen her pass through each stage.’ ‘There are no sta
ges. She is dead. That is the only stage. Do you hear me? That is the only stage, and you are not on the stage. This is no act. This is all becoming very offensive.’ There followed a befuddled moment and then she opened her purse and took out a prescription bottle. ‘I should never have taken these.’ ‘What are they?’ ‘Pills. I asked the doctor. When he came for Momma, I asked him to give me something to get through the funeral.’ ‘How many of these have you been taking?’ ‘I had to’ was all she answered. And then she wept all evening and I threw the pills down the toilet.

  “The next morning, after coming out of the bathroom, where she’d been brushing her teeth, she looked at me—looked at me exactly like herself—and said, ‘That’s over. My mother’s not there anymore,’ and she never went back to the funeral home, or kissed her mother’s face again, or laughed with her, or bought her curtains, or anything else. And she missed her every single day thereafter—missed her, cried over her, talked to her—until she herself disappeared. And that’s when I took on the job and began a life with the dead that has, by now, put those antics of Nikki’s to shame. To think how repelled I was by her—as though it were Nikki and not Death who had overstepped the limits.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  In 1953—nearly ten years before the notoriously histrionic decade when jugglers, magicians, musicians, folksingers, violinists, trapeze artists, agitprop acting troupes, and youngsters in odd costumes with little to go on other than what they were high on began to exhibit themselves all over Manhattan—Sabbath, twenty-four and recently returned from studying in Rome, set up his screen on the east side of Broadway and 116th, just outside the gates to Columbia University, and became a street performer. Back then his street specialty, his trademark, was to perform with his fingers. Fingers, after all, are made to move, and though their range is not enormous, when each is moving purposefully and has a distinctive voice, their power to produce their own reality can astonish people. Sometimes, just drawing the length of a woman’s sheer stocking over one hand, Sabbath was able to create all sorts of lascivious illusions. Sometimes, by piercing a hole in a tennis ball and inserting a fingertip, Sabbath gave one or more of the fingers a head, a head with a brain, and the brain provided with schemes, manias, phobias, the works; sometimes a finger would invite a spectator close to the screen to punch the little hole and then to assist further by affixing the brainy ball over the fingernail. In one of his earliest programs Sabbath liked to conclude the show by putting the middle finger of his left hand on trial. When the court had tried the finger and found it guilty—of obscenity—a small meat grinder was rolled out and the middle finger was tugged and pulled by the police (the right hand) until its tip was forced into the oval mouth at the top of the meat grinder. As the police turned the crank, the middle finger—passionately crying out that it was innocent of all charges, having done only what comes naturally to a middle finger—disappeared into the meat grinder and spaghetti strands of raw hamburger meat began to emerge from the grinder’s nether spout.

  In the fingers uncovered, or even suggestively clad, there is always a reference to the penis, and there were skits Sabbath developed in his first years on the street where the reference wasn’t that veiled.

  In one skit his hands appeared in a close-fitting pair of black kid gloves, each with a fastener at the wrist. It took ten minutes for him to slip the gloves off, finger by finger—a long time, ten minutes, and when finally the fingers had all been exposed, each by the others—and some not at all willingly—more than a few young men in the audience could have been found to be tumescent. The effect on the young women was more difficult to discern, but they stayed, they watched, they were not embarrassed, even in 1953, to drop some coins into Sabbath’s Italian peaked cap when he emerged from behind the screen at the conclusion of the twenty-five-minute show, smiling most wickedly above his close-clipped black chin beard, a small, ferocious, green-eyed buccaneer, from his years at sea as massive through the chest as a bison. He had one of those chests you don’t want to get in the way of, a squat man, a sturdy physical plant, obviously very sexed-up and lawless, who didn’t give a damn what anybody thought. He appeared rapidly babbling bubbly Italian and broadly gesturing his gratitude, giving no indication that holding your hands up uninterruptedly for twenty-five minutes is hard work requiring endurance and frequently painful, even for someone as strong as he was in his twenties. Of course, all the voices in the show had spoken English—Sabbath spoke Italian only afterward, and simply for the fun of it. The very reason he had established the Indecent Theater of Manhattan. The very reason he’d signed on six times for the Romance Run. The very reason he’d done just about everything since leaving home seven years earlier. He wanted to do what he wanted to do. This was his cause and it led to his arrest and trial and conviction, and for precisely the crime he’d foreseen in the meat-grinder skit.

  Even from behind the screen, it was possible from certain angles for Sabbath to catch a glimpse of the audience, and whenever he spotted an attractive girl among the twenty or so students who had stopped to watch, he would break off the drama in progress or wind it down, and the fingers would start in whispering together. Then the boldest finger—a middle finger—would edge nonchalantly forward, lean graciously out over the screen, and beckon her to approach. And girls did come forward, some laughing or grinning like good sports, others serious, poker-faced, as though already mildly hypnotized. After an exchange of polite chitchat, the finger would begin a serious interrogation, asking if the girl had ever dated a finger, if her family approved of fingers, if she herself could find a finger desirable, if she could imagine living happily with only a finger . . . and the other hand, meanwhile, stealthily began to unbutton or unzip her outer garment. Usually the hand went no further than that; Sabbath knew enough not to press on and the interlude ended as a harmless farce. But sometimes, when Sabbath gauged from her answers that his consort was more playful than most or uncommonly spellbound, the interrogation would abruptly turn wanton and the fingers proceed to undo her blouse. Only twice did the fingers undo a brassiere catch and only once did they endeavor to caress the nipples exposed. And it was then that Sabbath was arrested.

  How could they resist each other? Nikki was just back from RADA and answering audition calls. She lived in a room near the Columbia campus and, several days running, was among the pretty young women beckoned toward the screen by that sly, salacious middle finger. For the first time in her life she was without mother and therefore petrified on the subway, frightened on the street, fiercely lonely in her room but scared stiff about going out. She was also beginning to despair as audition after audition led nowhere, and was probably less than a week from returning across the Atlantic to the kangaroo pouch when that middle finger fingered her to join the fun. It could not have done otherwise. He was five feet five and she was nearly six feet tall, black as black can be where she was black and white as white can be where she was white. She smiled that smile that was never insignificant, the actress’s smile that aroused the irrational desire to worship her even in sensible people, the smile whose message, oddly enough, was never melancholy but that said, “There are absolutely no difficulties in life”—however, she would not move an inch from where she was rooted at the far edge of the crowd. But after the show, when Sabbath burst forth with that beard and those eyes, spinning Italian sentences, Nikki had not left and did not look as though she intended to. When he approached her, begging, “Bella signorina, per favore, io non sono niente, non sono nessuno, un modest’uomo che vive solo d’aria—i soldi servono ai miei sei piccini affamati e alla mia moglie tisica—” she placed the dollar bill that was in her hand—and that represented one one-hundredth of what she had to live on per month—into his cap. This was how the couple met, how Nikki became the leading lady of the Bowery Basement Players, and how Sabbath got his chance not only to play with his fingers and his puppets but to manipulate living creatures as well.

  He’d never before been a director but he was afraid of nothing,
even when—especially when—he emerged guilty, with a suspended sentence and a fine, from the obscenity trial. Norman Cowan and Lincoln Gelman put up production money for the ninety-nine-seat theater on Avenue C, as poor a street as there was then in lower Manhattan. Indecent Theater finger and puppet shows were presented from six to seven three nights a week and then at eight the Bowery Basement productions, in repertory, with a company all about Sabbath’s age or younger and working virtually for nothing. No one over twenty-eight or -nine was ever on stage, even in his disastrous King Lear, with Nikki as Cordelia and none other than the rookie director as Lear. Disastrous, but so what? The main thing is to do what you want. His cockiness, his self-exalted egoism, the menacing charm of a potentially villainous artist were insufferable to a lot of people and he made enemies easily, including a number of theater professionals who believed that his was an unseemly, brilliantly disgusting talent that had yet to discover a suitably seemly means of “disciplined” expression. Sabbath Antagonistes, busted for obscenity as far back as 1956. Sabbath Absconditus, whatever happened to him? His life was one long flight from what?

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  At just past 12:30 A.M. Sabbath arrived in New York and found a spot for the car a few blocks from Norman Cowan’s Central Park West apartment. He hadn’t been back to the city in nearly thirty years, yet upper Broadway in the dark of night looked much as he remembered it when he used to set up his screen outside the 72nd Street subway station and put on a rush-hour finger show. The side streets seemed to him unchanged, except for the bodies bundled up in rags, in blankets, under cardboard cartons, bodies encased in torn and shapeless clothing, lying up against the masonry of the apartment buildings and along the railings of the brownstones. April, yet they were sleeping out-of-doors. Sabbath knew about them only what he’d overheard Roseanna saying on the phone to the do-gooding friends. For years he had not read a paper or listened to the news if he could avoid it. The news told him nothing. The news was for people to talk about, and Sabbath, indifferent to the untransgressive run of normalized pursuits, did not wish to talk to people. He didn’t care who was at war with whom or where a plane had crashed or what had befallen Bangladesh. He did not even want to know who the president was of the United States. He’d rather fuck Drenka, he’d rather fuck anyone, than watch Tom Brokaw. His range of pleasures was narrow and never did extend to the evening news. Sabbath was reduced the way a sauce is reduced, boiled down by his burners, the better to concentrate his essence and be defiantly himself.