Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  The fainting was a little like the begging, however, neither wholly rooted in necessity nor entirely unentertaining. At the thought of all that the cup had destroyed, two broad black strokes did indeed crisscross his mind from one edge of the canvas to the other—yet there was also in him the wish to faint. There was craft in Sabbath’s passing out. The tyranny of fainting did not escape him. That was the last observation integrated into his cynicism before he hit the floor.

  Things wouldn’t have worked better had he planned them down to the smallest detail—a “plan” wouldn’t have worked at all. He found himself laid out, still living, amid the pale plaids of the Cowans’ room. It was criminal for his un-dry-cleaned beggar’s jacket to be flush with their bedcover, but then, it was Norman who had put him there. Drizzle beading the big windows and a mist whose milkiness obliterated everything above the treetops of the park: a rumble not quite so low as the rumble in Michelle’s laugh rolled in from beyond the windows, thunder summoning up for Sabbath his years and years of exile beside the Madamaskas’ sacred falls. The haven of the Cowans’ bed made him feel oddly lonely for Debby’s and the barely discernible (perhaps even imaginary) impress of her torso along the mattress’s spine. Only a day, and Debby’s bed had become a home away from home. But her room was shut down like La Guardia. No more flying in and out.

  Sabbath could hear Norman on the phone with Dr. Graves, talking about getting him into the hospital, and it did not sound as though he was encountering opposition. Norman couldn’t bear to see what he was seeing, this guy now on the heels of Linc. . . . Sounded as though he’d set his mind to taking charge of Sabbath’s deformities and restoring to him a harmonious being such as Sabbath had last known in third grade. Forgiving, compassionate, determined, indefatigable, almost irrationally humane—every person should have a friend like Norman. Every wife should have a husband like Norman, revere a husband like Norman instead of battering on his decency with her low-minded delights. Marriage is not an ecstatic union. She must be taught to renounce the great narcissistic illusion of rapture. Her lease on rapture is hereby revoked. She must be taught, before it’s too late, to renounce this callow quarrel with life’s limits. Sabbath owed Norman no less than that for sullying the Cowan home with his piddling vices. He must think selflessly only of Norman now. Any attempt to save Sabbath would plunge Norman into an experience he hardly deserved. The man to save was Norman—he was the indispensable one. And the power to save him is mine. The deed will crown my visit here, repaying as straightforwardly as I know how my debt for all the unwise ardor with which he invited me in. I am called to enter the realm of virtue.

  Nothing was clearer to Sabbath than that Norman must never lay eyes on those Polaroids. And if ever he were to come upon the cash! On the heels of this friend’s suicide and that friend’s collapse, finding the pictures or the money or both would turn the last of his illusions to ashes, smash his orderly existence to bits. Ten thousand in cash. For buying what? For selling what? Who and what is she working for? Her pussy photographed for posterity by whom? Where? Why? To commemorate what? No, Norman must never know the answers, let alone get round to the questions.

  The maneuverings necessary to hospitalize Sabbath were being finalized on the phone when he crossed the carpet to Michelle’s dresser, reached into the bottom drawer and, from beneath the lingerie, removed the manila envelopes. He stuffed both into his jacket’s big, waterproof interior pocket and, in their place, stowed his beggar’s cup, change and all. When she next wished to bestir herself with a reminder of the other half of her story, it would be his cup that she’d find secreted in her drawer, his cup to shock her with the horrors she’d been spared. She’d count her blessings when she saw that cup . . . and cleave unto Norman, as she ought.

  Seconds later, speeding out the apartment door, he ran into Rosa arriving for the day. He pressed his fingertip to the raised curve of her lips and signaled with his eyes that she should be quiet—the señor was home, on the phone, important trabajo. How she must love Norman’s suave civility—and hate Michelle’s betrayal of him. Hates her for everything. “Mi linda muchacha— adiós!” and then, even while Norman was nailing down a bed in Payne Whitney for him, Sabbath made haste for his car and the Jersey shore, to arrange there for his burial.

  TUNNEL, TURNPIKE, parkway—the shore! Sixty-five minutes south and there it was! But the cemetery had disappeared! Asphalt laid over the graves and the cars parking there! A cemetery plowed under for a supermarket! People were shopping at the cemetery.

  His agitation did not compel the manager’s attention when he rushed through the outer door and made directly past the long daisy chain of empty shopping carts (the century was nearing its end, the century that had virtually reversed human destiny, but the shopping cart was what still signified to Sabbath the passing of the old way of life) for the crow’s nest office overseeing the registers, to find out who was responsible for this insane desecration. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the manager said. “What are you shouting for? Look in the yellow pages.”

  But it was a cemetery, didn’t have a phone. A phone at a cemetery would be ringing off the hook. If you could get them on the phone . . . Besides, my family lies beneath that spit where you are roasting chickens. “Where the hell did you put them?”

  “Put who?”

  “The dead. I am a mourner! Which aisle?”

  He drove in circles. He stopped to inquire at gas stations, but he didn’t even know the place’s name. Not that B’nai This or Beth That would have enlightened the black kids manning the pumps. He only knew where it was—and there it wasn’t. Here, at the outlying frontier of the county, where as recently as when his mother had died there’d been miles of sea-level brush, there was now risen everywhere something with which somebody hoped to advance his interest, and nothing that didn’t say, “Of all our ideas, this is the worst,” nothing that didn’t say, “The human love for the hideous—there is no keeping up with it.” Where’d they put them? What a demented civic project, to relocate the dead. Unless they’d obliterated them totally, to end the source of all uncertainty, to dispose of the problem entirely. Without them around, maybe it won’t be so lonely. Yes, it’s the dead who are standing in our way.

  Only through the lucky accident of getting caught in a turning lane behind a car full of Jews on their way to bury someone did Sabbath find it. The chicken farmers were gone—that explained how he’d got so lost—and the triangular site half the size of an oil tanker was now bounded along its hypotenuse by a sprawling one-story “colonial” warehouse erected back of a high chain fence. An ominous conglomeration of pylons and power cables had been massively raised along the second side, and on the third a final resting place had been established by the local populace for box springs and mattresses that had met a violent end. Other household remains were scattered across the field or lying, just dumped there, at the edge of it. And it hadn’t stopped raining. Mist and a drizzling rain to ensure the picture’s permanent place in the North American wing of his memory’s museum of earthly blight. The rain bestowed more meaning than was necessary. That was realism for you. More meaning than was necessary was in the nature of things.

  Sabbath parked close beside the rusted picket fence opposite the pylons. Beyond a low iron gate hanging half off its hinges there stood a red brick house, a tilting little thing with an air conditioner that looked itself to be somebody’s tomb.

  ATTENTION GRAVEOWNERS

  Leaning or incorrectly

  set headstones are

  DANGEROUS

  Repairs must be made or

  headstones will be removed

  WARNING

  Lock your car and protect your

  valuables while visiting cemetery

  Two dogs were chained to the house, and the men standing and talking beside them were all three wearing baseball caps, maybe because it was a Jewish cemetery or maybe because that is what gravediggers wear. One, who was smoking, threw away his cigarette
as Sabbath approached—gray hair brutally cut, a green work shirt and dark glasses. His tremor suggested that he needed a drink. A second guy, in Levi’s and a red and black flannel shirt, couldn’t have been more than twenty, a kid with the big-eyed, sad-eyed Italian face of all the Casanova types at Asbury High, the lovers in the Italian crowd who probably wound up selling rubber tires for a living. They considered it a great coup to grab a Jewish girl, all the while the Asbury High Jewboys were thinking, “The little wop girls, the ginzo cheerleaders, those are the hot ones, the ones that, if you’re lucky . . .” The Italians used to call the colored kids moolies, moolenyams—Sicilian dialect, Calabrian maybe, for eggplant. Hadn’t been tickled by the comical dumbness of that word for years, not until he’d pulled up at the Hess station to ask where there was a Jewish cemetery nearby, an inquiry the mooly working there had taken for some bearded white guy’s weirdo joke.

  The boss was obviously the big older man with the belly, who walked with a limp and waved his arms about in dismay and whom Sabbath asked, “How do I find Mr. Crawford?” A. B. Crawford was the name affixed to the two warning signs nailed up on a post by the gate. Identified as “Superintendent.”

  The dogs had begun needling Sabbath as soon as he entered the cemetery and didn’t let up while he spoke. “Are you A. B. Crawford? I’m Mickey Sabbath. My parents are over there somewhere”—he pointed to a distant corner across from the dump, where the paths were wide and grassy and the stones didn’t yet look weatherworn—“and my grandparents are over in there.” Here he motioned to the other end of the cemetery, backing now onto the storage facility across the road. The graves in that section were laid out in tightly interlaced, unbroken rows. The detritus, if that, of the shore’s first Jews. Their stones had darkened decades ago. “You’ve got to find a place for me.”

  “You?” said Mr. Crawford. “You’re young yet.”

  “Only in spirit,” replied Sabbath, feeling suddenly very much at home.

  “Yeah? I’ve got sugar,” Crawford told him. “And this place is the worst place in the world for it. Constant aggravation. This is the worst winter we ever, ever put in.”

  “Is that right?”

  “The frost in the ground was sixteen inches deep. This,” he gestured dramatically across his domain, “was a sheet of ice. You couldn’t get to a grave over there that somebody’ll fall down.”

  “How did you bury people?”

  “We buried ’em,” he answered wearily. “They gave us a day to knock out the frost and then we bury them the next day. Jackhammers and stuff. Rough, rough winter. And water in the ground? Forget it.” Crawford was a sufferer. The métier made no difference. Someone who cannot get out from under. A problem of disposition. Unalterable. Sabbath sympathized.

  “I want a plot, Mr. Crawford. The Sabbaths. That’s my family.”

  “You hit me at a bad time because I’m gonna have a funeral pretty soon.”

  The hearse had arrived and people were assembling around it. Umbrellas. Women carrying infants. Men with yarmulkes on. Children. Everyone waiting back in the street only yards away from the cables and pylons. Sabbath heard a chuckle from the crowd, somebody saying something funny at a funeral. It always happens. The small man who’d just arrived must be the rabbi. He was holding a book. Immediately he was offered shelter beneath an umbrella. Another chuckle. Hard to tell what that meant about the person who died. Nothing probably. It was just that the living were living and couldn’t help it. Wit. As delusions go, not the worst.

  “Okay,” said Mr. Crawford, quickly estimating the size of the crowd, “they’re still coming. Let’s take a walk. Rufus,” he called to the trembling drunk, “watch the dogs, huh?” But the going-over they’d been giving Sabbath erupted into vicious snapping when their master limped off with him. Crawford swiftly turned back and aimed a threatening finger toward the sky. “Stop it!”

  “Why do you have dogs?” Sabbath asked as they resumed along a path that led around the gravestones to the Sabbath plot.

  “They broke into the building four times already. To steal equipment. They robbed all the tools. Machinery that costs three, four hundred dollars. Gasoline-driven hedge shears and all that other kind of stuff that’s over there.”

  “Don’t you have insurance? ”

  “No. No insurance. Forget about that. It’s me!” he said excitedly. “It’s me! It’s out of my pocket! I buy all the equipment and all that. This association here gives me nine hundred dollars a month—see? I have to pay all the help out of that—see? In the meantime, I just turned seventy and I dig all the graves, I put in all the foundations, and it’s an absolute joke. The help you get today—you have to tell them every goddarn thing to do. And nobody wants to do this work anymore. I’m one man short. I’m going over to Lakewood and bringing a Mexican down here. You got to get a Mexican. It’s a joke. Six months ago somebody was up here visiting a grave and a schvartze goes ahead and puts a gun to the people’s head. Ten o’clock in the morning! That’s why I got the dogs over here—they warn me if somebody is outside, if you’re sittin’ here by yourself.”

  “How long have you been here?” Sabbath asked, though he knew the answer already: long enough to learn to say schvartze.

  “Too long,” replied Crawford. “I been here I would say maybe close to forty years. I’ve had it right to here. The cemetery is broke. I know they’re broke. There ain’t no money in the cemetery business. The money is in the monument business. I got no pension. Nothin’. I just juggle back and forth. When I have a funeral, see, that you get a few extra dollars, and that goes toward the payroll, but it’s just a, just a . . . I don’t know, a problem.”

  Forty years. Missed Grandma and Morty, but got everybody else. And now he gets me.

  Crawford was lamenting, “And nothing to show for it. Nothin’ in the bank. Nothin’.”

  “There’s a relative of mine right there.” Sabbath pointed to a stone marked “Shabas.” Must be Cousin Fish, who’d taught him to swim. “The old-timers,” he explained to Crawford, “were Shabas. They wrote it all kinds of ways: Shabas, Shabbus, Shabsai, Sabbatai. My father was Sabbath. Got it from relatives up in New York when he came to America as a kid. We’re over here, I think.”

  In search of the graves he was growing excited. The last forty-eight hours had been replete with theatrics, confusion, disappointment, adventure, but nothing with a power as primary as this. His heart had not sounded as loud even while he was stealing from Michelle. He felt himself at last inside his life, like someone who, after a long illness, steps back into his shoes for the first time.

  “One grave,” Crawford said.

  “One grave.”

  “For yourself.”

  “Right.”

  “Where did you want this grave?”

  “Near my family.”

  Sabbath’s beard was dripping, and after wringing it out with one hand, he left it looking like a braided candlestick. Crawford said, “Okay. Now where is your family?”

  “There. There!” and walls of embitterment were crashing down; the surface of something long unexposed—Sabbath’s soul? the film of his soul?—was illuminated by happiness. As close as a substanceless substance can come to being physically caressed. “They’re there!” All in the ground there—yes, living together there like a family of field mice.

  “Yeah,” said Crawford, “but you need a single. This here is the single section. Against the fence here.” He was pointing along a portion of badly neglected wire-mesh fence across the road from the worst of the dump. You could crawl through the fence, step right over it, or, without even wire cutters or a pliers, just peel away with your hand what remained affixed to the railings. A standing lamp had been pushed out of a car across the way, so that the lamp was not even in the dump but lying in the gutter like somebody gunned down in his tracks. Probably it needed nothing more than new wiring. But its owner obviously hated that lamp and drove it out to do it in across from the Jews’ cemetery.

  “I don’t
know if I can give you a grave here or not. This last one by the gate here is the only space I see and it could be reserved, you know. And from here on, the other side of the gate, there’s four-grave plots. But maybe you got a grave over with your folks and don’t even know it.”

  “That’s possible,” said Sabbath, “yes,” and now that Crawford had raised that possibility he remembered that when they buried his mother there was an empty plot beside her.

  There had been. Occupied. According to the dates on the stone, two years back they had put Ida Schlitzer in the family’s fourth plot. His mother’s maiden sister from the Bronx. In the whole of the Bronx no room left, not even for a half-pint like Ida. Or had everybody forgotten the second son? Maybe they thought he was still at sea or already dead because of his way of life. Buried in the Caribbean. In the West Indies. Should have been. On the island of Curaçao. Would have liked it down there. No deep-water port in Curaçao. There was a long, long pier, seemed like a mile long then, and at the end of it the tanker tied up. Never forget it, because there were horses and there were runners—pimps, if you like—but they were kids, little kids who had the horses. And they swat the goddamn horse and the horse takes you right to the whorehouse. Curaçao was a Dutch colony, the port called Willemstad, a bourgeois colonial port, men and women in tropical gear, white people in pith helmets, a pleasant little colonial town, and the cemetery just down from those beautiful hills where there was a complex of whorehouses bigger than any I had ever seen in all my days at sea. The crews of God knows how many ships tied up at this port, and all of them up there fucking. And the good men of the town up there fucking. And me asleep in the pretty cemetery below. But I missed my chance at Willemstad by giving up the whores for puppets. And so now Aunt Ida, who never dared say boo to anyone, has screwed me out of my plot. Displaced by a virgin who typed all her life for the Department of Parks and Recreation.