Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  Beloved son and brother

  Killed in Action in the

  Philippines

  April 13, 1924—December 15, 1944

  Always in our hearts

  Lt. Morton Sabbath

  Dad to one side of him, Mother to the other, and, to Mother’s side, Ida instead of me. Not even the memories of Curaçao could compensate for this. King of the kingdom of the unillusioned, emperor of no expectations, crestfallen man-god of the double cross, Sabbath had still to learn that nothing but nothing will ever turn out—and this obtuseness was, in itself, a deep, deep shock. Why does life refuse me even the grave I want! Had I only marshaled my abhorrence in a good cause and killed myself two years ago, that spot next to Ma’s would be mine.

  Looking over the Sabbath burial plot, Crawford suddenly announced, “Oh, I know them. Oh, they were good friends of mine. I knew your family.”

  “Yes? You knew my old man?”

  “Sure, sure, sure, a good guy. A real gentleman.”

  “That he was.”

  “In fact, I think the daughter or someone comes out. You have some daughters?”

  No, but what was the difference? He was only salving emotional wounds and trying to pick up a few bucks on the side. “Sure,” said Sabbath.

  “Well, yeah, she comes out a lot. See that,” said Crawford, pointing to the shrubbery thickly covering all four graves, evergreen crew-cut to about six inches high, “you don’t need work on that plot, no sir.”

  “No, that’s nice. It looks very nice.”

  “Look, the only possible thing is if I can give you a grave over there.” Where the triangle came to a point and the two potholed streets beyond intersected, there was an empty expanse within the sagging wire fence. “See? But you’d have to go for two graves up there. Anyplace but the single section you have to buy at least two graves. Want me to show you where the two-graves are?”

  “Sure, why don’t we do that, since I’m here now and you’ve got the time.”

  “I ain’t got the time but I’ll make the time.”

  “That’s good, that’s kind of you,” Sabbath said, and together they started off through the drizzle toward where the cemetery looked like an abandoned lot, already in mid-April choked with unmown weeds.

  “This is a nicer section,” Crawford told him, “than with the singles. You’d be facing the road. Somebody going past would see your stone. Two roads join up there. Traffic from two directions.” Banging the wet ground with the muddy boot on his good leg, he proclaimed, “I would say right here.”

  “But my family is way over there. And my back would be to them, right? I’m facing the wrong way here.”

  “Then take the other ,with the singles. If it’s not reserved.”

  “I don’t have that good a shot at them from there either, frankly.”

  “Yeah, but you’re across from a very fine family. The Weizmans. You’re looking onto a very good family over there. Everybody’s proud of the Weizmans. That woman that’s in charge of this cemetery, her name is Mrs. Weizman. We just put her husband in here. Her whole family is buried in there. We just buried her sister in there. It’s a good section, and right across from them is the single section.”

  “But how about along the fence over there, where it’s not that far from my family? You see where I mean?”

  “No, no, no. Them graves is sold to somebody already. And that’s a four-grave section. You follow me?”

  “Okay, I do,” said Sabbath. “The single section, the two-graves, and the rest is all four-grave plots. I get the picture. Why don’t you look and see whether that single is reserved or not? Because that’s a little closer to my folks.”

  “Well, I can’t do it now. I got a funeral.”

  Together they worked their way back through the rows of graves toward the little brick house where the dogs were chained up.

  “Well, I’ll wait,” said Sabbath, “till the funeral is over. I can visit with my family, and you can tell me after if it’s available and what the cost is.”

  “The cost. Yeah. Yeah. They ain’t really that much. How much could it be? Four hundred, something like that. The most it could be. Maybe four fifty. I don’t know. I have nothing to do with selling the graves.”

  “Who does?”

  “The lady at the organization. Mrs. Weizman.”

  “And that’s who pays you, the organization?”

  “Pay me,” he said in disgust. “It’s a joke what they pay me. A hundred and a quarter a week I clear for myself. And from there over to there, it takes a man three days to cut the grass without anything else. For a hundred and a quarter a week, that’s all. I’ve got no pension. I got sugar and no pension and all this aggravation. Social Security and that’s all. So what do you want, do you think—the one grave or the two? I would rather see you up with the two. You won’t be crammed in up there. It’s a nicer section. But it’s up to you.”

  “There’s definitely more legroom,” said Sabbath, “but it’s so far from everyone. And I’m going to be lying there a long time. Look, see what’s available. We’ll talk together after you’re done. Here,” he said, “thanks for making time.” He’d changed a hundred of Michelle’s to get gas from the moolies, and he handed Crawford twenty bucks. “And,” he said, slipping him a second twenty, “for taking good care of my family.”

  “My pleasure. Your father was a real gentleman.”

  “So are you, sir.”

  “Okay. You just look around and see where you’ll be comfortable.”

  “That’s what I’ll do.”

  The lone plot that might or might not be available to him in the single section was beside a tombstone with a large Star of David carved at the top and four Hebrew words beneath it. Interred there was Captain Louis Schloss. “Holocaust Survivor, VFW, Mariner, Businessman, Entrepreneur. In Loving Memory Relatives and Friends May 30, 1929–May 20, 1990.” Three months my senior. Ten days shy of sixty-one. Survived the Holocaust but not the business. A fellow mariner. Mickey Sabbath, Mariner.

  They were rolling the plain pine box in now, Crawford pulling at the front, in the lead, limping at a rapid pace, and the two helpers at either side steering, the drunk with the green work shirt checking his pockets for the cigs. It hasn’t even begun and he can’t wait till it’s over to light up. The smallish rabbi, his hands in front of him holding the book, was talking to Mr. Crawford as he hastened to keep abreast of him. They brought the box up to the open grave. Very clean, that wood. Must put in my order. Pay for that today. Plot, coffin, even a monument—get everything in order, courtesy of Michelle. Buttonhole this rabbi before he leaves and slip him a hundred to come back for me and read from that book. Thus do I cleanse her money of its frivolous history of illicit gratification and reintegrate this stash of bills into the simple and natural business of the earth.

  The earth. Very much in evidence here today. Only a few steps behind him there was a raw mound of the earth piled up where somebody had recently been buried in it, and across the way from that were two graves freshly dug into the earth, side by side. Expecting twins. He walked over to take a look inside one, a little window-shopping. The clean way each was cut into the ground smacked of a solid achievement. The sharp spaded corners and the puddly bottom and the ripply deep sides—you had to hand it to the drunk, the Italian kid, and Crawford: there was the magnificence of centuries in what they did. This hole goes all the way back. As does the other. Both dark with mystery and fantastic. The right people, the right day. This weather told no lies about his situation. It put to him the grimmest of questions about his intentions, to which his answer was “Yes! Yes! Yes! I will emulate my failed father-in-law, a successful suicide!”

  But am I playing at this? Even at this? Always difficult to determine.

  In a wheelbarrow left out in the rain (more than likely by the drunk—Sabbath knew this from living with one) there was a conical pile of wet dirt. Sabbath, with a tinge of ghoulish pleasure, forced his fingers through the gritty goop unti
l they all disappeared. If I count to ten and then extract them, they’ll be the old fingers, the old, provocative fingers with which I pulled their tail. Wrong again. Have to go down in the dirt with more than these fingers if I hope ever to make straight in me all that is crooked. Have to count to ten ten billion times, and he wondered how high Morty had counted by now. And Grandma? And Grandpa? What is the Yiddish for zillion?

  Getting to the old graves, to the burial ground established in the early days by the original seashore Jews, he gave the funeral in progress a wide berth and was careful to steer clear of the watchdogs when he passed the little red house. These dogs had not yet been made conversant with the common courtesies, let alone the ancient taboos that obtain in a Jewish cemetery. Jews guarded by dogs? Historically very, very wrong. His alternative was to be buried bucolically on Battle Mountain as close to Drenka as he could get. This had occurred to him long before today. But whom would he talk to up there? He had never found a goy yet who could talk fast enough for him. And there they’d be slower than usual. He would have to swallow the insult of the dogs. No cemetery is going to be perfect.

  After ten minutes of rambling about in the drizzle, searching for his grandparents’ graves, he saw that only if he traveled methodically up and down, reading every headstone from one end of each row to the other, could he hope to locate Clara and Mordecai Sabbath. Footstones he could ignore—they mostly said “At Rest”—but the hundreds upon hundreds of headstones required his concentration, an immersion in them so complete that there would be nothing inside him but these names. He had to shrug off how these people would have disliked him and how many of them he would have despised, had to forget about the people they had been alive. Because you are no longer insufferable if you are dead. Goes for me, too. He had to drink in the dead, down to the dregs.

  Our beloved mother Minnie. Our beloved husband and father Sidney. Beloved mother and grandmother Frieda. Beloved husband and father Jacob. Beloved husband, father, and grandfather Samuel. Beloved husband and father Joseph. Beloved mother Sarah. Beloved wife Rebecca. Beloved husband and father Benjamin. Beloved mother and grandmother Tessa. Beloved mother and grandmother Sophie. Beloved mother Bertha. Beloved husband Hyman. Beloved husband Morris. Beloved husband and father William. Beloved wife and mother Rebecca. Beloved daughter and sister Hannah Sarah. Our beloved mother Klara. Beloved husband Max. Our beloved daughter Sadie. Beloved wife Tillie. Beloved husband Bernard. Beloved husband and father Fred. Beloved husband and father Frank. My beloved wife our dear mother Lena. Our dear father Marcus. On and on and on. Nobody beloved gets out alive. Only the very oldest recorded all in Hebrew. Our son and brother Nathan. Our dear father Edward. Husband and father Louis. Beloved wife and mother Fannie. Beloved mother and wife Rose. Beloved husband and father Solomon. Beloved son and brother Harry. In memory of my beloved husband and our dear father Lewis. Beloved son Sidney. Beloved wife of Louis and mother of George Lucille. Beloved mother Tillie. Beloved father Abraham. Beloved mother and grandmother Leah. Beloved husband and father Emanuel. Beloved mother Sarah. Beloved father Samuel. And on mine, beloved what? Just that: Beloved What. David Schwartz, beloved son and brother died in service of his country 1894–1918. 15 Cheshvan. In memory of Gertie, a true wife and loyal friend. Our beloved father Sam. Our son, nineteen years old, 1903–1922. No name, merely “Our son.” Beloved wife and dear mother Florence. Beloved brother Dr. Boris. Beloved husband and father Samuel. Beloved father Saul. Beloved wife and mother Celia. Beloved mother Chasa. Beloved husband and father Isadore. Beloved wife and mother Esther. Beloved mother Jennie. Beloved husband and father David. Our beloved mother Gertrude. Beloved husband, father, brother Jekyl. Beloved aunt Sima. Beloved daughter Ethel. Beloved wife and mother Annie. Beloved wife and mother Frima. Beloved father and husband Hersch. Beloved father . . .

  And here we are. Sabbath. Clara Sabbath 1872–1941. Mordecai Sabbath 1871–1923. There they are. Simple stone. And a pebble on top. Who’d come to visit? Mort, did you visit Grandma? Dad? Who cares? Who’s left? What’s in there? The box isn’t even in there. You were said to be headstrong, Mordecai, bad temper big joker . . . though even you couldn’t make a joke like this. Nobody could. Better than this they don’t come. And Grandma. Your name, the name also of your occupation. A matter-of-fact person. Everything about you—your stature, those dresses, your silence—said, “I am not indispensable.” No contradictions, no temptations, though you were inordinately fond of corn on the cob. Mother hated having to watch you eat it. The worst of the summer for her. It made her “nauseous.” I loved to watch. Otherwise you two got along. Probably keeping quiet was the key, letting her run things her way. Openly partial to Morty, Grandpa Mordecai’s namesake, but who could blame you? You didn’t live to see everything shatter. Lucky. Nothing big about you, Grandma, but nothing small either. Life could have marked you up a lot worse. Born in the little town of Mikulice, died at Pitkin Memorial. Have I left anything out? Yes. You used to love to clean the fish for us when Morty and I came home at night from surf casting. Mostly we came home with nothing, but the triumph of walking home from the beach with a couple of big blues in the bucket! You’d clean them in the kitchen. Fillet knife right at the opening, probably the anus, slit it straight up the center till you got behind the gills, and then (I liked watching this part best) you would just put your hand in and grab all the good stuff and throw it away. Then you scaled. Working against the scales and somehow without getting them all over the place. It used to take me fifteen minutes to clean it and half an hour to clean up after. The whole thing took you ten minutes. Mom even let you cook it. Never cut off the head and the tail. Baked it whole. Baked bluefish, corn, fresh tomatoes, big Jersey tomatoes. Grandma’s meal. Yes, yes, it was something down on the beach at dusk with Mort. Used to talk to the other men. Childhood and its terrific markers. From about eight to thirteen, the fundamental ballast that we have. It’s either right or it’s wrong. Mine was right. The original ballast, an attachment to those who were nearby when we were learning what feeling was all about, an attachment maybe not stranger but stronger even than the erotic. A good thing to be able to contemplate for a final time—instead of racing through with it and getting out of here—certain high points, certain human high points. Hanging out with the man next door and his sons. Meeting and talking in the yard. Down on the beach, fishing with Mort. Rich times. Morty used to talk to the other men, the fishermen. Did it so easily. To me everything he did was so authoritative. One guy in brown pants and a short-sleeve white shirt and with a cigar always in his mouth used to tell us he didn’t give a shit about catching fish (which was lucky, since he rarely pulled in more than a sand shark)—he told us kids, “The chief pleasure of fishing is getting out of the house. Gettin’ away from women.” We always laughed, but for Morty and me the bite was the thrill. With a blue you get a big hit. The rod jolts in your hand. Everything jolts. Morty was my teacher fishing. “When a striper takes the bait, it’ll head out. If you stop the line from paying out it’ll snap. So you just have to let it out. With a blue, after the hit, you can just reel in, but not with a striper. A blue is big and tough, but a striper will fight.” Getting blowfish off the hook was a problem for everybody but Mort—spines and quills didn’t bother him. The other thing that wasn’t much fun to catch was rays. Do you remember when I was eight how I wound up in the hospital? I was out on the jetty and I caught a huge ray and it bit me and I just passed out. Beautiful, undulating swimmers but predatory sons of bitches, very mean with their sharp teeth. Ominous. Looks like a flat shark. Morty had to holler for help, and a guy came and they carried me up to the guy’s car and rushed me to Pitkin. Whenever we went out fishing, you couldn’t wait for us to get back so you could clean the catch. Used to catch shiners. Weighed less than a pound. You’d fry four or five of them in a pan. Very bony but great. Watching you eat a shiner was a lot of fun, too, for everyone but Mother. What else did we bring you to clean? Fluke, flounder, when we fished Shark River inlet. Weak-fish. That’s a
bout it. When Morty joined the Air Corps, the night before he left we went down to the beach with our rods for an hour. Never got into the gear as kids. Just fished. Rod, hooks, sinkers, line, sometimes lures, mostly bait, mostly squid. That was it. Heavy-duty tackle. Big barbed hook. Never cleaned the rod. Once a summer splashed some water on it. Keep the same rig on the whole time. Just change the sinkers and the bait if we wanted to fish on the bottom. We went down the beach to fish for an hour. Everybody in the house was crying because he was going to war the next day. You were already here. You were gone. So I’ll tell you what happened. October 10, 1942. He’d hung around through September because he wanted to see me bar mitzvahed, wanted to be there. The eleventh of October he went to Perth Amboy to enlist. The last of the fishing off the jetties and the beach. By the middle, the end of October the fish disappear. I’d ask Morty—when he was first teaching me off the jetties with a small rod and reel, one made for fresh water—“Where do the fish go to?” “Nobody knows,” he said. “Nobody knows where the fish go. Once they go out to sea, who knows where they go to? What do you think, people follow them around? That’s the mystery of fishing. Nobody knows where they are.” We went down to the end of the street that evening and down the stairs and onto the beach. It was just about dark. Morty could throw a rig a hundred and fifty feet even in the days before spin casting. Used the open-faced reels. Just a spool with a handle on it. Rods much stiffer then, much less adroit reel and a stiffer rod. Torture to cast for a kid. In the beginning I was always snarling the line. Spent most of the time getting it straightened out. But eventually I got it. Morty said he was going to miss going out fishing with me. He’d taken me down to the beach to say so long to me without the family carrying on around us. “Standing out here,” he told me, “the sea air, the quiet, the sound of the waves, your toes in the sand, the idea that there are all those things out there that are about to bite your bait. That thrill of something being out there. You don’t know what it is, you don’t know how big it is. You don’t even know if you’ll ever see it.” And he never did see it, nor, of course, did he get what you get when you’re older, which is something that mocks your opening yourself up to these simple things, something that is formless and overwhelming and that probably is dread. No, he got killed instead. And that’s the news, Grandma. The great generational kick of standing down on the beach in the dusk with your older brother. You sleep in the same room, you get very close. He took me with him everywhere. One summer when he was about twelve he got a job selling bananas door-to-door. There was a man in Belmar who sold only bananas, and he hired Morty and Morty hired me. The job was to go along the streets hollering, “Bananas, twenty-five cents a bunch!” What a great job. I still sometimes dream about that job. You got paid to shout “Bananas!” On Thursdays and Fridays after school let out for the day, he went to pluck chickens for the kosher butcher, Feldman. A farmer from Lakewood used to call on Feldman and sell him chickens. Morty would take me along to help him. I liked the worst part best: spreading the Vaseline all the way up our arms to stymie the lice. It made me feel like a little big shot at eight or nine not to be afraid of those horrible fucking lice, to be, like Mort, utterly contemptuous of them and just pluck the chickens. And he used to protect me from the Syrian Jews. Kids used to dance on the sidewalk in the summertime outside Mike and Lou’s. Jitterbug to the jukebox music. I doubt you ever saw that. When Morty was working at Mike and Lou’s one summer he’d bring home his apron and Mom would wash it for him for the next night. It would be stained yellow from the mustard and red from the relish. The mustard came right with him into our room when he came into our room at night. Smelled like mustard, sauerkraut, and hot dogs. Mike and Lou’s had good dogs. Grilled. The Syrian guys used to dance outside Mike and Lou’s on the sidewalk, used to dance by themselves like sailors. They had a little kind of Damascus mambo they did, very explosive steps. All related they were, clannish, and with very dark skin. The Syrian kids who joined our card games played a ferocious blackjack. Their fathers were in buttons, thread, fabrics then. Used to hear Dad’s crony, the upholsterer from Neptune, talking about them when the men played poker in our kitchen on Friday nights. “Money is their god. Toughest people in the world to do business with. They’ll cheat you as soon as you turn around.” Some of these Syrian kids made an impression. One of them, one of the Gindi brothers, would come up to you and take a swing at you for no reason, come up and kill you and just look at you and walk away. I used to be hypnotized by his sister. I was twelve. She and I were in the same class. A little, hairy fireplug. Huge eyebrows. I couldn’t get over her dark skin. She told him something that I said, so once he started to rough me up. I was deathly afraid of him. I should never have looked at her, let alone said anything to her. But the dark skin got me going. Always has. He started to rough me up right in front of Mike and Lou’s, and Morty came outside in his mustard-stained apron and told Gindi, “Stay away from him.” And Gindi said, “You gonna make me?” And Morty said, “Yes.” And Gindi took one shot at him and opened up Morty’s whole nose. Remember? Isaac Gindi. His form of narcissism never enchanted me. Sixteen stitches. Those Syrians lived in another time zone. They were always whispering among themselves. But I was twelve, inside my pants things were beginning to reverberate, and I could not keep my eyes off his hairy sister. Sonia was her name. Sonia had another brother, as I recall, Maurice, who was not human either. But then came the war. I was thirteen, Morty was eighteen. Here’s a kid who never went away in his life, except maybe for a track meet. Never out of Monmouth County. Every day of his life he returned home. Endlessness renewed every day. And the next morning he goes off to die. But then, death is endlessness par excellence, is it not? Wouldn’t you agree? Well, for whatever it is worth, before I move on: I have never once eaten corn on the cob without pleasurably recalling the devouring frenzy of you and your dentures and the repugnance this ignited in my mother. It taught me about more than mother-in-laws and daughter-in-laws; it taught me everything. This model grandmother, and Mother had all she could do not to throw you out into the street. And my mother was not unkind—you know that. But what affords the one with happiness affords the other with disgust. The interplay, the ridiculous interplay, enough to kill all and everyone.