Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  As I would have liked it to happen: Feeling rather weak but happy that the surgery was over, I was glad to be going home. My father had picked me up at the hospital. It was a sunny January day. Daddy and I sat in the living room after finishing lunch. With my sore mouth I could only drink liquids. I had no appetite and I was also worried about starting to bleed. I had gotten scared in the hospital seeing other patients being readmitted because of slow bleeding. I was told you could bleed to death if it wasn’t discovered in time. Daddy sat next to me on the sofa. He told me that he wanted to talk to me. He told me that my mother had called and told him that I might want to move to her now that I was a grown girl. Daddy said that he understood I was having a hard time. This had been a difficult year for everyone. There had been a lot of unhappiness between him and Irene and he knew it had spilled over on me. His marriage was not working out the way he hoped, but I, who was his daughter and still a child—now a teenager but still a child—had absolutely no responsibility for the way things were at home. He told me that it was unfortunate that I had been in the middle, with Irene coming to complain about him and he coming to complain about her. He felt guilty about this, and therefore, though it was hard for him to see me go since he loved me dearly, he felt that should I want to go it was probably a good idea. Of course he would pay child support for me if I moved to mother. He truly wanted what was best for me. He went on to tell me that he had not been feeling well for a long time, often suffering from insomnia. I felt enormously relieved that he understood my problems. I would now at last have a mother to guide me. Also I could come back any time I wanted, my room would always be there.

  Dear Father,

  Today, while waiting for your letters to me to arrive at the hospital, I’ve decided to write a letter to you. The pain I felt then, the pain I feel now—are they the same? I would hope not. Yet they feel identical. Except today I am tired of hiding from my pain. My old hiding skill (being drunk) won’t ever work again. I am not suicidal, the way you were. I only wanted to die because I wanted the past to leave me alone and go away. Leave me alone, Past, let me just sleep!

  So here I am. You have a daughter in a mental hospital. You did it. Outside it is a beautiful fall day. Clear blue sky. The leaves changing. But within I am still terrified. I will not say that my life has been wasted but do you know that I was robbed by you? My therapist and I have talked about it and I know now that I was robbed by you of the ability to have a normal relationship with a normal man.

  Ella used to say that the best thing you did was to commit suicide. That’s how simple it is for Ella, my unmolested sister with all her lovely children! What a strange family I come from. Last summer when I was at Ella’s I visited your grave. I had never been back since your funeral. I picked some flowers and put them on your stone. There you lay next to Grandpa and Grandma Cavanaugh. I wept for you and for the life that ended so horribly. You nebulous figure, so abstract and yet so crucial to me, please let God watch over me when I have to undertake my task tomorrow night!

  Your daughter in a mental hospital,

  Roseanna

  By eight-ten he had read everything three times over and she still had not returned to the room. He studied the father’s photo, looking in vain for a visible sign of the damage done him and the damage he’d done. In the lips she hated he could see nothing extraordinary. Then he read as much as he could stand of A Step-by-Step Guide for Families of Chemically Dependent Persons, a paperback book on the table beside her pillow that was undoubtedly intended to brainwash him once she had returned home to displace Drenka from their bed. Here he was introduced to Share and Identify, who soon were to become household helpers, like Happy or Sleepy or Grumpy or Doc. “Emotional pain,” he read, “can be broad and deep. . . . It hurts to become involved in arguments. . . . And what about the future? Will things keep getting worse?”

  He left on the desk the file cabinet key that he’d found in her riding boot. But before he went down to the nurse’s station to ask where Roseanna might be, he returned to her notebook and took fifteen more minutes to make a contribution of his own directly below the letter she had written to her late father earlier that day. He did nothing to disguise his handwriting.

  Dear little Roseanna!

  Of course you are in a mental hospital. I warned you again and again about separating yourself from me and separating me from pretty little Helen Kylie. Yes, you are mentally ill, you have completely lost yourself to drink and cannot retrieve yourself on your own, but your letter today still gave me a real shock. If you want to take legal action, go ahead, even though I am dead. I never did expect that death would bring me any peace. Now, thanks to you, my beloved little darling, being dead is as awful as being alive was. Take legal action. You who abandoned your father have no position at all. For five years I lived entirely for you. Because of the expenses of your education and your clothes, etc., I was never able to be secure on a professor’s salary. For my own part, during those years I bought nothing, not even clothes. I even had to sell the boat. Nobody can say that I did not sacrifice everything to taking loving care of you, even though one can argue about different methods of upbringing.

  I don’t have time to write any more. Satan is calling me to my session. Dear little Roseanna, cannot you and your husband be happy in the end? If not, the fault is entirely your mother’s. Satan agrees. He and I have talked in therapy about the husband you chose and I know for sure that I have nothing to be guilty about. If you did not marry a normal man it is entirely your mother’s fault for sending you to a coeducational school during the dangerous years of puberty. All the pain in your life is entirely her responsibility. My anxiety, which has its roots way back when I was alive, will not disappear even here, because of what your mother did to you and what you did to me. In our group there is another father who had an ungrateful daughter. He shared about his agony and we identified. It was very helpful. I learned that I cannot change my ungrateful daughter.

  Only how much farther do you want to push me, my little one? Didn’t you push me far enough? You judge me entirely by your pain, you judge me entirely by your holy feelings. But why don’t you judge me for a change by my pain, by my holy feelings? How you cling to your grievance! As though in a world of persecution you alone have a grievance. Wait till you’re dead—death is grievance and only grievance. Perennial grievance. It is despicable of you to continue this attack on your dead father—I will be in therapy here forever because of you. Unless, unless, dear little Roseanna, you were somehow to find it in you to write just a few thousand pages to grieving Papa to tell him how remorseful you are for everything you did to ruin his life.

  Your father in Hell,

  Dad

  “Probably still at the Mansion,” said the nurse, consulting her watch. “They hang around to smoke. Why don’t you go over there? If she’s headed this way, you’ll pass her on the drive.”

  But at the Mansion, where smokers were indeed gathered once again outside the main door, he was told that Roseanna had gone to the gym with Rhonda to take a swim. The gym was a low, sprawling building down the lawn and across the road—they told him he could see the pool through the windows.

  There was no one swimming there. It was a big, well-lit pool, and, after peering through the misty windows, he went inside to see if perhaps she was at the bottom of it, dead. But the young woman attendant, sitting at a desk next to a pile of towels, said no, Roseanna hadn’t been there tonight. She’d done her hundred laps that afternoon.

  He proceeded back up the dark hill to the Mansion to look in the lounge where the meeting had been held. He was guided to it by the glazier, who’d been reading a magazine in the parlor while someone at the piano—the Wellesley girlfriend of the Marlboro man—was tapping out “Night and Day” with one hand. The lounge was along a broad corridor with a pay phone at either end. Standing at one of them was a small, skinny Hispanic kid of about twenty who Roseanna had told him at dinner was an addict who dealt cocaine. She was wearing a
colorful nylon sweat suit and had a headset over her ears even as she loudly argued over the phone in what Sabbath figured to be either Puerto Rican or Dominican Spanish. From what he understood, she was telling her mother to fuck herself.

  In the lounge, a large room with a television screen at the far end, there were couches and lots of easy chairs scattered about, but it was empty now except for two elderly women quietly playing cards at a table beside a standing lamp. One was a gray-haired patient, dumpy but with a becoming air of antique jadedness, whom several of the patients had jokingly applauded when she’d appeared, twenty minutes late, in the dining room doorway. “My public,” she had said grandly in her high-born New England accent, and curtsied. “This is the P.M. performance,” she announced, fluttering into the room on her toes. “If you’re lucky you can come to the A.M. performance.” The woman playing cards with her was her sister, a visitor, who must also have been in her late seventies.

  “Have you seen Roseanna?” Sabbath called over to them.

  “Roseanna,” replied the patient, “is seeing her doctor.”

  “It’s eight-thirty at night.”

  “The suffering that is the hallmark of human affairs,” she informed him, “does not diminish at eventide. To the contrary. But you must be the husband who is of such importance to her. Yes. Yes.” Cannily sizing him up—girth, height, beard, baldness, costume—she said with a gracious smile, “That you are a very great man is unmistakable.”

  On the second floor of the Mansion, Sabbath made his way past a row of patients’ rooms to the end of the corridor and a nurse’s station that was about twice the size of the one at Roderick, a lot less bright and cheery, but mercifully without the “Peanuts” posters. Two nurses were doing some paperwork, and atop a low file cabinet, swinging his legs and drinking what looked from both the plastic sack full of Pepsis at his side and the wastebasket at his feet to be his sixth or seventh soda, sat a muscular young man with a dark chin beard wearing black jeans, a black polo shirt, and black sneakers, who vaguely resembled the Sabbath of some thirty years ago. He was expounding to one of the nurses in an impassioned voice; from time to time she glanced up to acknowledge what he was saying but then went right back to her paperwork. She herself couldn’t have been more than thirty, chunky, robust, clear-eyed, with dark hair clipped neatly short, and she gave Sabbath a friendly wink when he appeared at the door. She was one of the two nurses who had searched Rosie’s suitcases the afternoon they arrived.

  “Ideological idiots!” proclaimed the young man in black. “The third great ideological failure of the twentieth century. The same stuff. Fascism. Communism. Feminism. All designed to turn one group of people against another group of people. The good Aryans against the bad others who oppress them. The good poor against the bad rich who oppress them. The good women against the bad men who oppress them. The holder of the ideology is pure and good and clean and the other is wicked. But do you know who is wicked? Whoever imagines himself to be pure is wicked! I am pure, you are wicked. How can you swallow that stuff, Karen?”

  “I don’t, Donald,” the young nurse replied. “You know I don’t.”

  “She does. My ex-wife does!”

  “I am not your ex-wife.”

  “There is no human purity! It does not exist! It cannot exist!” he said, kicking the file cabinet for emphasis. “It must not and should not exist! Because it is a lie! Her ideology is like all ideologies—founded in a lie! Ideological tyranny. It’s the disease of the century. The ideology institutionalizes the pathology. In twenty years there will be a new ideology. People against dogs. The dogs are to blame for our lives as people. Then after dogs there will be what? Who will be to blame for corrupting our purity?”

  “I hear where you’re coming from,” mumbled Karen while attending to the work on her desk.

  “Excuse me,” said Sabbath. He leaned into the room. “I don’t mean to interrupt a man whose aversions I wholeheartedly endorse, but I am looking for Roseanna Sabbath and I have been told she is seeing her doctor. Any way this can be established as fact?”

  “Roseanna’s in Roderick,” said the Donald in black.

  “But she’s not there now. I can’t find her. I came all this way and I’ve lost her. I am her husband.”

  “Are you? We’ve heard so many wonderful things about you in group,” Donald said, again whacking both sneakers against the file cabinet and reaching into the plastic sack for a Pepsi. “The great god Pan.”

  “The great god Pan is dead,” a deadpan Sabbath informed him. “But I see”—stentorian now—“that you are a young fellow unafraid of the truth. What are you doing in a place like this?”

  “Trying to leave,” said Karen, rolling her eyes like an exasperated kid. “Donald’s been trying since nine this morning. Donald’s been graduated but he can’t go home.”

  “I have no home. The bitch destroyed my home. Two years ago,” he told Sabbath, who by now had come into the room and taken the empty chair beside the wastebasket. “I came back from a business trip one night. My wife’s car isn’t in the driveway. I go into the house and it’s empty. All the furniture is gone. All she left was the album with the wedding pictures. I sat on the floor and looked at the wedding pictures and cried. I came home from work every day and looked at the wedding pictures and cried.”

  “And like a good boy, drank your dinner,” said Karen.

  “The booze was only to quell the depression. I got over that. I’m in the hospital,” he told Sabbath, “because she is getting married today. Got married today. She married another woman. A rabbi married them. And my wife is not Jewish!”

  “Ex,” said Karen.

  “But the other woman is Jewish?” asked Sabbath.

  “Yeah. The rabbi was there to please the other woman’s family. How’s that?”

  “Well,” said Sabbath gently, “rabbis occupy an exalted position in the Jewish mind.”

  “Fuck that. I’m Jewish. What the fuck is a rabbi doing marrying two lesbos? You think in Israel a rabbi would do it? No, only in Ithaca, New York!”

  “To embrace humanity in all its glorious diversity,” asked Sabbath, professorially stroking his beard, “is that a long-standing peculiarity of the Ithaca rabbinate?”

  “Fuck no! They’re rabbis! They’re assholes!”

  “Language, Donald.” It was the other nurse speaking now, clearly a tough one—seasoned, hardened, and tough. “It’s time for vital signs, Donald. It’ll be time for meds soon. We’re going to get busy here. What are your plans? Have you made any plans?”

  “I’m leaving, Stella.”

  “Good. When?”

  “After vital signs. I want to be sure to say good-bye to everybody.”

  “You have been saying good-bye to everybody all day long,” Stella reminded him. “Everybody in the Mansion has taken you for a walk and told you you can make it. You can make it. You are going to make it. You won’t stop at a bar to have a drink. You will drive straight to your brother’s in Ithaca.”

  “My wife is a lesbian. Some asshole rabbi married her today to another woman.”

  “You don’t know this for sure.”

  “My sister-in-law was there, Stella. My ex-wife stood under the chuppa with this broad, and when the time came she broke the glass. My wife is a shiksa. The two of them are lesbians. This is what Judaism has come to? I can’t believe it!”

  “Donald, be kind,” said Sabbath. “Don’t disparage the Jews for wanting to be with it. Even the Jews are up against it in the Age of Total Schlock. The Jews can’t win,” Sabbath said to Stella, who looked to be Filipino and was, like himself, an older and wiser person. “Either they’re mocked because they’re still wearing their beards and waving their arms in the air or they are ridiculed by people like Donald here for being up-to-the-minute servants of the sexual revolution.”

  “What if she’d married a zebra?” Donald asked indignantly. “Would a rabbi have married her to a zebra?”

  “Zebra or zebu?” asked Sab
bath.

  “What’s a zebu?”

  “A zebu is an east Asian cow with a large hump. Many women today are leaving husbands for zebus. Which did you say?”

  “Zebra.”

  “Well, I think not. A rabbi wouldn’t touch a zebra. Can’t. They don’t have cloven hooves. For a rabbi to officiate at the marriage of a person to an animal, the animal has to chew its cud and have a cloven hoof. A camel. A rabbi can marry a person to a camel. A cow. Any kind of cattle. Sheep. Can’t marry someone to a rabbit, however, because even though a rabbit chews its cud, it doesn’t have a cloven hoof. They also eat their own shit, which, on the face of it, you might think a point in their favor: chew their food three times. But what is required is twice. That’s why a rabbi can’t marry a person to a pig. Not that the pig is unclean. That’s not the problem, never has been. The problem with the pig is, though it has a cloven hoof, it doesn’t chew its cud. A zebra may or may not chew its cud—I don’t know. But it doesn’t have a cloven hoof, and with the rabbis, one strike and you’re out. The rabbi can marry a person to a bull, of course. The bull is like a cow. The divine animal, the bull. The Canaanite god El—which is where the Jews got El-o-him—is a bull. Anti-Defamation League tries to downplay this, but like it or not, the El in Elohim, a bull! Basic religious passion is to worship a bull. Damn it, Donald, you Jews ought to be proud of that. All the ancient religions were obscene. Do you know how the Egyptians imagined the origins of the universe? Any kid can read about it in his encyclopedia. God masturbated. And his sperm flew up and created the universe.”

  The nurses did not look happy with the turn given to the conversation by Sabbath, and so the puppeteer decided to address them directly. “God’s jerking off alarms you? Well, gods are alarming, girls. It’s a god who commands you to cut off your foreskin. It’s a god who commands you to sacrifice your firstborn. It’s a god who commands you to leave your mother and father and go off into the wilderness. It’s a god who sends you into slavery. It’s a god who destroys—it’s the spirit of a god that comes down to destroy—and yet it’s a god who gives life. What in all of creation is as nasty and strong as this god who gives life? The God of the Torah embodies the world in all its horror. And in all its truth. You’ve got to hand it to the Jews. Truly rare and admirable candor. What other people’s national myth reveals their God’s atrocious conduct and their own? Just read the Bible, it’s all there, the backsliding, idolatrous, butchering Jews and the schizophrenia of these ancient gods. What is the archetypal Bible story? A story of betrayal. Of treachery. It’s just one deception after another. And whose is the greatest voice in the Bible? Isaiah. The mad desire to obliterate all! The mad desire to save all! The greatest voice in the Bible is the voice of somebody who has lost his mind! And that God, that Hebrew God—you can’t escape Him! What’s shocking is not His monstrous features—plenty of gods are monstrous, it seems almost to have been a prerequisite—but that there’s no recourse from Him. No power beyond His. The most monstrous feature of God, my friends, is the totalitarianism. This vengeful, seething God, this punishment-ordaining bastard, is ultimate! Mind if I have a Pepsi?” Sabbath inquired of Donald.