by Philip Roth
Beloved wife and mother Fannie. Beloved wife and mother Hannah. Beloved husband and father Jack. It goes on. Our beloved mother Rose. Our beloved father Harry. Our beloved husband, father, and grandfather Meyer. People. All people. And here is Captain Schloss and there . . .
In the earth turned up where Lee Goldman, another devoted wife, mother, and grandmother, had just been united with one of her family, a beloved one as yet unidentified, Sabbath found pebbles to place on the stones of his mother, his father, and Morty. And one for Ida.
Here I am.
♦ ♦ ♦
Crawford’s office was barren of everything except a desk, a phone, a couple of battered chairs, and, inexplicably, a contentless vending machine. A smell of wet dog fur soured the air, and there was no reason not to think that the desk and two chairs had been culled from the inventory of the improvised dump across the way. On the desk a piece of glass, crisscrossed with masking tape to hold it together, served the cemetery superintendent as a writing surface; a slew of old business cards had been pushed beneath the glass along its four edges. The card that Sabbath saw first read, “The Good Intentions Paving Company, 212 Coit Street, Freehold, New Jersey.”
To enter the brick tomblike building, Sabbath had had to shout for Crawford to come out and calm the dogs. April 13, 1924—December 15, 1944. Morty would be seventy. Today would be his seventieth birthday! He’ll be dead in December fifty years. I won’t be here for the commemoration. Thank God none of us will.
The funeral was by then long over and the rain had stopped. Crawford had phoned Mrs. Weizman to get the costs for Sabbath and to see if the single was reserved, and for nearly an hour now he had been waiting for Sabbath to come to the office so he could report her prices, as well as the good news about the single. But each time Sabbath started away from the family plot, he’d turn around and go back. He didn’t know whom he would be depriving of what by walking away after ten minutes of standing there, but he couldn’t do it. The repeated leaving and returning did not escape his mockery, but he could do nothing about it. He could not go and he could not go and he could not go, and then—like any dumb creature who abruptly stops doing one thing and starts doing another and about whom you can never tell if its life is all freedom or no freedom—he could go and he went. And no lucidity to be derived from any of this. Rather, there was a distinctly assertive quickening of the great stupidity. If there was ever anything to know, now he knew he never had known it. And all this while his fists had been clenched, causing arthritic agony.
Crawford’s face didn’t make as much sense indoors as it had outside. Without his Phillies cap, he was revealed to be all burgeoning chin, bridgeless nose, and narrow expanse of forehead—it was as though, having given him this chin curved unmistakably in the shape of a shovel, God had marked baby Crawford at birth as a cemetery superintendent. It was a face on the evolutionary dividing line between our species and the subspecies preceding ours, and yet, from behind the desk with the fractured legs and the broken glass top, he established quickly a professional tone appropriate to the gravity of the transaction. To keep pictorially at the forefront of Sabbath’s mind all the impertinences in store for his carcass, there was the wild snarling of the dogs. Rattling their chains beneath Crawford’s window, they sounded all stoked up with Jew-hating dreams. Moreover, there were dog chains and leashes scattered about on the unswept, beat-up floor of dark checkerboard linoleum, and on Crawford’s desk, to hold his pencils, his pens, his paper clips, and even some paperwork, he used the empty Pedigree dog food cans from which the dogs had been fed. A carton half full of unopened dog food had to be removed from the seat of the room’s other chair before Sabbath could sit down across from Crawford’s. Only then did he notice the transom over the front door, a rectangular window of colored glass scribed with the Star of David. This place had been built as the cemetery prayer house where the mourners gathered with the casket. It was a doghouse now.
“They want six hundred dollars for the single,” Crawford told him. “They want twelve hundred for the two graves over there, and I chopped them down to eleven hundred. And I would suggest that the two graves would be the best thing for you over there. A nicer section. You’ll be better off. The other you got the gate swinging next to you, you got the traffic in and out there—”
“The two graves are too far away. Give me the one next to Captain Schloss.”
“If you think you’ll be better off…”
“And a monument.”
“I don’t sell ’em. I told you.”
“But you know somebody in the business. I want to order a monument.”
“There are a million kind.”
“Just like Captain Schloss’s will do. A simple monument.”
“That’s not a cheap stone. That’s about eight hundred. In New York they would charge you twelve hundred. More. There is a matching base. There is the foundation fee—concrete feet. The lettering I gotta bill you separate, a separate charge.”
“How much?”
“Depends how much you want to say.”
“As much as Captain Schloss says.”
“He’s got a lot written there. That’s gonna cost you.”
Sabbath removed from his interior pocket the envelope with Michelle’s money, feeling to be sure the envelope of Polaroids was still there as well. From the money envelope he took six hundred for the plot and eight for the stone and put the bills on Crawford’s desk.
“And three hundred more,” asked Sabbath, “for what I want to say?”
“We’re talkin’ over fifty letters,” said Crawford.
Sabbath counted out four hundred-dollar bills. “One is for you. To take care that everything is done.”
“You want planting? On top of you? Yeco trees is two hundred and seventy-five dollars, for the trees and the work.”
“Trees? I don’t need trees. I never heard of yeco trees.”
“That is what is on your family plot. That is yeco trees.”
“Okay. Give me the same as theirs. Give me some yeco trees.”
He reached in for three more of the hundreds. “Mr. Crawford, all my next of kin are here. I want you to run the show.”
“You’re ill.”
“I need a coffin, buddy. One like I saw today.”
“Plain pine. That one was four hundred. I know a guy can do the same for three fifty.”
“And a rabbi. That short guy will do. How much?”
“Him? A hundred. Let me find you somebody else. I’ll get you somebody just as good for fifty.”
“A Jew?”
“Sure a Jew. He’s old, that’s all.”
The door beneath the Star of David transom was pushed open, and just as the Italian kid came walking in, one of the dogs darted in alongside him and surged on his chain to within inches of Sabbath.
“Johnny, for Christ’s sake,” said Crawford, “shut the door and keep the dog outside.”
“Yeah,” said Sabbath, “you wouldn’t want him to eat me yet. Wait’ll I sign on.”
“No, this one here won’t bite you,” Crawford assured Sabbath. “The other one, he can jump on you, but not this one. Johnny, get the dog out!”
Johnny dragged the dog backward by the chain and forced him, still snarling at Sabbath, out the door.
“The help. You can’t sit here and say, ‘Here, go do this job over there.’ They don’t know how. And now I’m going to have to get a Mexican? And he’s gonna be any better? He’s gonna be worse. Did you lock your car?” he asked Sabbath.
“Mr. Crawford, what am I leaving out of my plans?”
Crawford looked down at his notes. “Burial costs,” he said. “Four hundred.”
Sabbath counted out four hundred more and added the bills to the stack already on the desk.
“The instructions,” Crawford told him. “What you want on the monument.”
“Give me paper. Give me an envelope.”
While Crawford prepared the bills—everything with carbon and in trip
licate—Sabbath outlined on the back of Crawford’s paper (the front was an invoice form, “Care of Grave,” et cetera) the shape of a monument, drew it as naively as a child draws a house or a cat or a tree and felt very much the child while he did it. Within the outline he arranged the words of his epitaph as he wished them to appear. Then he folded the paper in thirds and slipped it into the envelope and sealed it. “Instructions,” he wrote across the face of the envelope, “for inscription on the monument of M. Sabbath. Open when necessary. M.S. 4/13/94.”
Crawford, contemplative, was a long time completing the paperwork. Sabbath enjoyed watching him. It was a good show. He formed every letter of every word on every document and receipt as though each were of the utmost importance. Suddenly he seemed to be inspired by a profound reverence, perhaps only for the money he had overcharged Sabbath but perhaps a little for the ineluctable meaning of the formalities. So these two shrewdies sat across that battered desk from each other, aging men mistrustfully interlinked—as one is, as we are—each of them drinking whatever still bubbled into his mouth out of the fountain of life. Mr. Crawford carefully rolled up the office copies of the invoices and filed the neat cylinder of papers in an empty dog food can.
Sabbath returned one last time to stand at the family plot, his heart both leaden and leaping, and tearing from within him the last of his doubt. At this I will succeed. I promise you. Then he went to look at his own plot. On the way there, he passed two gravestones he hadn’t seen before. Beloved son and dear brother killed in action at Normandy July 1, 1944 age 27 years you will always be remembered Sergeant Harold Berg. Beloved son and brother Julius Dropkin killed in action Sept. 12, 1944 in southern France age 26 years always in our heart. They got these boys to die. They got Dropkin and Berg to die. He stopped and cursed on their behalf.
Despite the dump across the street and the damaged fence to the back and the corroded, fallen-down iron gate to one side, pride of ownership welled up in him, however mean and paltry that sandy bit of soil happened to look, there at the edge of the line of singles consigned to the cemetery’s fringe. They can’t take that away from me. So pleased was he with a prudent morning’s work—the scrupulous officializing of his decision, the breaking of bonds, the shedding of fear, the bidding adieu—he whistled some Gershwin. Maybe the other section was nicer, but if he stood on his toes he could see through from here to his family’s plot, and there were all the inspiring Weizmans just across the path, and immediately to the right of him—to his left, lying down—was Captain Schloss. He slowly read once again the substantial portrait of his eternal neighbor-to-be. “Holocaust Survivor, VFW, Mariner, Businessman, Entrepreneur. In Loving Memory Relatives and Friends May 30, 1929–May 20, 1990.” Sabbath remembered only some twenty-four hours earlier reading the sign in the window of the salesroom abutting the funeral home where Linc had been eulogized. A nameless gravestone stood on display, beside it was a sign, headed “What Is a Monument?” and, beneath that, simple, elegant script avowing that a monument “is a symbol of devotion . . . a tangible expression of the noblest of all human emotions—LOVE . . . a monument is built because there was a life, not a death, and with intelligent selection and proper guidance, it should inspire REVERENCE, FAITH and HOPE for the living . . . it should speak out as a voice from yesterday and today to the ages yet unborn. . . .”
Beautifully put. I’m glad they have clarified for us what is a monument.
Beside the monument to Captain Schloss, he envisioned his own:
Morris Sabbath
“Mickey”
Beloved Whoremonger,
Seducer,
Sodomist, Abuser of Women,
Destroyer of Morals, Ensnarer of Youth,
Uxoricide,
Suicide
1929–1994
♦ ♦ ♦
. . . and that was where Cousin Fish lived—and that finished the tour. The hotels were gone, replaced along the oceanfront by modest condos, but back down the streets the little houses still squarely stood, the wooden bungalows and stucco bungalows where everyone had lived, and as though on the recommendation of the Hemlock Society, he had driven past them all, final remembrance and farewell. But now he could think of no further procrastination that he might construe as a symbolic act of closure; now it was time to get a move on and get the damn thing done, the great big act that will conclude my story . . . and so he was leaving Bradley Beach forever when there on Hammond Avenue materialized the bungalow that had been Fish’s.
Hammond ran parallel to the ocean but up by Main Street and the railroad tracks, a good mile or so from the beach. Fish must be dead many years now. His wife got the tumor when we were boys. A very young woman—not that we grasped that then. On the side of her head, a potato growing beneath the soil of her skin. She wore kerchiefs to hide the unsightliness, but even so, a sharp-eyed kid could see where the potato was flourishing. Fish sold us vegetables from his truck. Dugan for cake, Borden for milk, Pechter for bread, Seaboard for ice, Fish for vegetables. When I saw the potatoes in the basket, I would think of you-know-what. A dead mother. Inconceivable. For a while I couldn’t eat a potato. But I got older and hungrier and it passed. Fish raised the two kids. Brought them with him to the house the nights the men played cards. Irving and Lois. Irving collected stamps. Had at least one from every country. Lois had boobs. At ten she had them. In grade school, boys used to throw her coat over her head, squeeze ’em, and run. Morty told me I couldn’t do it, because she was our cousin. “Second cousin.” But Morty said no, it was against some Jewish law. Our last names were all but the same. Thanks to the alphabet, I sat a mere eighteen inches away from Lois. Very trying, those classes. The pleasure was difficult—my first lesson in that. At the end of the hour I had to carry my notebook in front of my pants while leaving the room. But Morty said not to—even at the height of the sweater era, no. The last person I ever listened to in that department. Should have told him off at the cemetery: “What Jewish law? You made it up, you son of a bitch.” Would have handed him a laugh. Rapture itself, to reach out my hand and give him a laugh, a body, a voice, a life with some of the fun in it of being alive, the fun of existing that even a flea must feel, the pleasure of existence, pure and simple, that practically anyone this side of the cancer ward gets a glimmer of occasionally, uninspiring as his fortunes overall may be. Here, Mort, what we call “a life,” the way we call the sky “the sky” and the sun “the sun.” How nonchalant we are. Here, brother, a living soul—for whatever it’s worth, take mine!
