Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  Okay. Time to marshal the state of mind necessary to carry it off. That it would require of him a state of mind and more—littleness, greatness, stupidity, wisdom, cowardice, heroism, blindness, vision, everything in the arsenal of his two opposing armies united as one—this he knew. Swill about the fun that even a flea must feel was not going to make it any easier. Stop thinking the wrong thoughts and think the right one. And yet Fish’s house—of all the houses! His own family’s house, fussily kept up now by a Hispanic couple whom he had seen gardening on their knees along the edge of the driveway (no longer sand but asphalt), had worked beautifully on his resolve, causing all his misery to cohere around his decision. The new stuff, the glass sunporch and the aluminum siding and the scalloped metal shutters, made it ludicrous to think of the house as theirs, as ludicrous as to think that the cemetery was theirs. But this ruin, Fish’s, had significance. That unaccountable exaggeration, significance: in Sabbath’s experience invariably the prelude to missing the point.

  Where there were shades, they were torn; where there were screens still hanging, they were rent and slit; and where there were steps, they did not look as though they could support a cat. Fish’s badly dilapidated house looked to be uninhabited. How much, Sabbath wondered—before committing suicide—to buy it? He did have seventy-five hundred dollars left—and he had life left, and where there’s life there’s mobility. He got out of the car, and, grasping a railing that looked to be adhering to the steps by nothing more solid than a thought, he made his way to the door. Cautiously—lacking utterly the freedom of a man for whom the preservation of life and limb had ceased to be of concern.

  Like Mrs. Nussbaum from the old Fred Allen Show—Fish’s favorite—he called out, “Hello, is anybody?” He knocked on the living room windows. It was difficult to see inside because of the dreary day and because hanging across each window were mummy wrappings that had once been the curtains. He went around to the side and into the backyard. Splotches of grass and weed, nothing there but a beach chair, a sling beach chair that looked as though it had not been taken in out of the weather since the June afternoon he’d gone over to see Irving’s stamps (purportedly) and from Irving’s upstairs window watched Lois sunning below in her swimsuit, her body, her body, the vineyard that was her body taking up every inch of that very chair. The sun cream. Come from a tube. She rubbed it all over herself. It looked like come to him. She had a husky voice. Covered with come. His cousin. When someone only twelve has to live with all that, it is almost too much to ask. There was no Jewish law, you bastard.

  He came around to the front to look for a For Sale sign. Where could he inquire about the house? “Hello?” he shouted from the bottom step, and from across the street he heard a voice call back, a woman’s voice, “You looking for the old man?”

  There was a black woman waving at him—youngish, smiling, nice and round in a pair of jeans. She was standing on the top step of the porch, where she’d been listening to the radio. When Sabbath was a boy the few blacks he saw were either in Asbury or over in Belmar. The blacks in Asbury were mostly dishwashers at the hotels, domestic servants, menial odd-jobs people, living over by Springwood Avenue, down from the chicken markets, the fish markets, and the Jewish delis where we went with an empty jar my mother gave us and they filled it up with sauerkraut when it was in season. A black bar there,too, a hot place during the war, Leo’s Turf Club, full of bimbos and dandies in zoot suits. The guys stepped out in their fine duds on Saturday night and got shicker. The best music around at Leo’s. Great sax players, according to Morty. Blacks weren’t antagonistic to whites in Asbury then, and Morty got to know some of the musicians and took me there a couple of times when I was still a kid to hear that jivey jazz stuff. My appearance used to crack up Leo, the big Jewish guy who owned the place. He’d see me coming in and he’d say, “What the hell are you doin’ in here?” There was a black saxophonist who was the brother of the star hurdler on the Asbury track team that Morty threw the discus and the shot for. He’d say, “What’s happenin’, Mort? What’s up wit dju?” Dju! I loved dju for every possible reason and drove Morty crazy repeating it all the way home. The other black bar had the dreamier name—The Orchid Lounge—but it didn’t have live music, only a jukebox, and we never went inside. Yes, Asbury High in Sabbath’s day was Italian, some djus, these few blacks, and a smattering of what the hell do you call ’em, Protestants, white Protestants. Long Branch strictly Italian then. Longa Branch. Over in Belmar a lot of the blacks worked at the laundry and lived around 15th Avenue, 11th Avenue. There was a black family across the street from the synagogue in Belmar who came over for Shabbos to turn the lights on and off. And there was a black iceman around for a few years, before Seaboard monopolized the summer trade. He always puzzled Sabbath’s mother, not so much because he was a Negro selling ice, the first and last anyone ever saw, but because of how he sold it. She would ask for a twenty-five-cent piece of ice and he would cut a piece and put it on the scale and say, “Dat’s it.” And she would bring it inside and over dinner that evening she would say to the family, “Why does he put it on the scale? I never see him add a piece or chop off a piece. Who is he fooling putting it on the scale?” “You,” Sabbath’s father said. She would get ice from him twice a week until one day he just disappeared. Maybe this is his granddaughter, the granddaughter of the iceman Morty and I called Dat’s It.

  “We ain’t seen him in a month,” she said. “Somebody ought to check him. You know?”

  “That’s what I’m here to do,” Sabbath said.

  “He can’t hear. You got to bang real hard. Don’t stop bangin’.”

  He did better than bang hard and long—he pulled open the rusted screen door and turned the knob of the front door and walked inside. Unlocked. And there was Fish. There was Cousin Fish. Not at the cemetery under a stone but sitting on a sofa by the side window. Clearly he neither saw nor heard Sabbath enter. Awfully small for Cousin Fish but that was who it was. The resemblance to Sabbath’s father was still there in the wide bald skull, the narrow chin, the big ears, but more so in something not so easily describable—the family look that that whole generation of Jews had. The weight of life, the simplicity to bear it, the gratitude not to have been entirely crushed, the unwavering, innocent trust—none of that had left his face. Couldn’t. Trust. A great endowment for this mortuary world.

  I should go. He looks as though to extinguish him it wouldn’t take more than a syllable. Whatever I say is liable to kill him. But this is Fish. Back then I thought that he got his name because he sometimes dared to go out at night on the party boats with the working-class goyim to fish. Not many Jewish guys with accents went out with those drunks. Once, when I was a little kid, he took Morty and me. Fun to go out with a grown man. My father didn’t fish or swim. Fish did both. Taught me to swim. “Fishing you usually don’t catch,” he explained to me, the smallest person on the boat. “You don’t catch more than you catch. Every once in a while you get a fish. Sometimes you get a school and you get a lot of fish. But that don’t happen much.” One Sunday early in September there was a terrific thunderstorm, and as soon as it was over, Fish raced up in the empty vegetable truck with Irving and told Morty and me to get in the back with our rods, and then he drove like mad down to Newark Avenue beach—he knew just which beach to go to. In the summertime, when there’s a thunderstorm and the water temperatures change and the water gets very turbulent, the schools come in after the minnows and you can see the fish; they’re right out there in the waves. And they were. And Fish knew. See them on the waves coming out of the water. Fish caught fifteen fish in thirty minutes. I was ten, and even I caught three. 1939. And when I was older—this was after Morty went away; I was about fourteen—I was missing Morty, and Fish learned about it from my father and took me out on the beach for the whole night with him one Saturday. After blues. He had a thermos of tea that we shared. I cannot commit suicide without saying good-bye to Fish. If my speaking up startles him and he drops dead, they c
an just carve “Geriacide” on the stone.

  “Cousin Fish—remember me? I’m Mickey Sabbath. I’m Morris. My brother was Morty.”

  Fish hadn’t heard him. Sabbath would have to approach the sofa. He’ll think, when he sees the beard, that I’m Death, I’m a thief, a burglar with a knife. And I have not felt less sinister since I was five. Or happier. This is Fish. Uneducated, well mannered, something of a jokester, but stingy, oh so stingy, said my mother. True. The dread about money. But the men had that. How could they not, Mom? Intimidated, outsiders in the world, yet with wellsprings of resistance that were a mystery even to them, or that would have been, had they not been mercifully spared the terrible inclination to think. Thinking was the last thing they felt to be missing from their lives. It was all more basic than that.

  “Fish,” he said, advancing with his arms extended, “I’m Mickey. It’s Mickey Sabbath. Your cousin. The son of Sam and Yetta. Mickey Sabbath.” His shouting got Fish to look up from two pieces of mail that he was fiddling with in his lap. Who mailed him anything? I hardly get mail. More proof he’s not dead.

  “You? Who are you?” Fish asked. “Are you from the newspaper?”

  “I’m not from the newspaper. No. I’m Mickey Sabbath. Sabbath.”

  “Yes? I had a cousin Sabbath. On McCabe Avenue. That’s not him, is it?”

  The accent and syntax the same, but no longer the muscular voice for shouting from the street into the houses and all the way back to the yards, “Veg-e-tables! Fresh veg-e-tables, ladies!” In the tonelessness, the hollowness, you heard not only how deaf he was and how alone he was but that this was not one of his life’s great days. A mere mist of a man. And at those card games, when he won, the delight was violent—repeatedly he smacked the oilcloth of the kitchen table as he laughed and raked in the dough. Later my mother explained that this was because of how greedy he was. Flypaper dangled from the kitchen fixture. The short-cir-cuited bzzz of a fly fitfully dying over their heads was all that was to be heard in the kitchen while they concentrated on what they’d been dealt. And the crickets. And the train, that not very sonorous sound which can strip a youngster in his bed right out of his skin and down to his nerve endings—in those days, at least, peel a boy down to expose every inch of him to living’s high drama and mystery—the whistle in the dark of the Jersey Shore freight line tearing through the town. And the ambulance. In the summertime, when the old people were in for their week to escape the North Jersey mosquitoes, the ambulance siren every night. Two blocks south, over at the Brinley Hotel, somebody dying just about every night. Splashing with the grandchildren by the water’s edge at the sunny beach and, at night, talking in Yiddish on the benches at the boards and then, stiffly, together, back to the kosher hotels, where, while getting ready for bed, one of them would keel over and die. You’d hear it on the beach the next day. Just keeled over on the toilet and died. Only last week he saw one of the hotel employees shaving on Saturday and complained to the owner—and today he’s gone! At eight and nine and ten I couldn’t stand it. The sirens terrified me. I’d sit up in bed and holler, “No! No!” This would wake Morty in the twin bed beside mine. “What is it?” “I don’t want to die!” “You won’t. You’re a kid. Go to sleep.” He’d get me through it. Then he died, a kid. And what in Fish so antagonized my mother? That he could survive and laugh without a wife? Maybe there were girlfriends. Mingling on the street with the ladies all day long, bagging vegetables, maybe he bagged a couple of them ladies. This could explain why Fish is still here. A gonadal disgrace can be a dynamic force, hard to stop.

  “Yes,” said Sabbath. “That was my father. On McCabe. That was Sam. I’m his son. My mother was Yetta.”

  “They lived on McCabe ?”

  “That’s right. The second block. I’m their son Mickey. Morris.”

  “The second block on McCabe. I swear I don’t remember you, honest.”

  “You remember your truck, don’t you? Cousin Fish and his truck.”

  “The truck I remember. I had a truck then. Yes.” He seemed to understand what he’d said only after he said it. “Hah,” he added—some wry recognition of something.

  “And you sold vegetables from the truck.”

  “Vegetables. Vegetables I know I sold.”

  “Well, you sold them to my mother. Sometimes to me. I came out with her list and you’d sell them to me. Mickey. Morris. Sam and Yetta’s son. The younger son. The other was Morty. You used to take us fishing.”

  “I swear I don’t remember.”

  “Well, that’s all right.” Sabbath came around the coffee table and sat beside him on the sofa. His skin was very brown, and behind large horn-rimmed glasses, the eyes looked to be getting signals from the brain—up close Sabbath saw more clearly that somewhere back there things still converged. This was good. They could actually talk. To his surprise, he had to overcome a desire to take Fish and pick him up and put him on his lap. “It’s wonderful to see you, Fish.”

  “Nice to see you, too. But I still don’t remember you.”

  “It’s okay. I was a boy.”

  “How old were you then?”

  “At the vegetable truck? It was before the war. I was nine, ten years old. And you were a young fellow in your forties.”

  “And I used to sell vegetables to your mother, you said?”

  “That’s right. To Yetta. It doesn’t matter. How do you feel?”

  “Pretty good, thank you. All right.”

  That politeness. Must have got the ladies, too, a virile specimen with muscles, manners, and a couple of jokes. Yes, that’s what made my mother angry, no doubt about it. The ostentatious virility.

  Fish’s pants were streaked with urine stains and his cardigan sweater was a color that was indescribable where it was thickly caked with food at the front—particularly rich it was along the ribbon of the buttonholes—but his shirt seemed fresh and he did not smell. His breath, astonishingly, was sweet: the smell of a creature that survives on clover. But could those big, crooked teeth be his own? Had to be. They don’t make dentures that look like that except maybe for horses. Sabbath again overcame the impulse to bodily lift him onto his lap and contented himself with swinging an arm around the back of the sofa so that it rested partly on Fish’s shoulder. The sofa had much in common with the cardigan. Impasto, the painters call it. The way a young girl might present her lips—or did in a fashion long out-of-date—Fish offered his ear up to Sabbath, the better to hear him when he spoke. Sabbath could have eaten it, hairs and all. He was getting steadily happier by the moment. The ruthless hunger to win at cards. Fondling a customer behind the truck. The gonadal disgrace with the teeth of a horse. The incapacity to die. Sitting it out instead. This thought made Sabbath intensely excited: the perverse senselessness of just remaining, of not going.

  “Can you walk?” Sabbath asked him. “Can you take a walk?”

  “I walk around the house.”

  “How do you eat? You make your own food?”

  “Oh, yeah. I cook myself. Sure. I make chicken . . .”

  They waited while Fish waited for something to come after “chicken.” Sabbath could have waited forever. I could move in here and feed him. The two of us having our soup. That black girl from across the street coming over for dessert. Don’t stop bangin’. Wouldn’t mind hearing that from her every day.

  “I have, what you call it. Applesauce I have. For dessert.”

  “What about breakfast? Did you eat breakfast this morning?”

  “Yeah. Breakfast. I made my cereal. Cook my cereal. I make oatmeal. The next day I make . . . what you call it. Cereal—what the hell you call it?”

  “Cornflakes?”

  “No, I don’t have cornflakes. No, I used to have cornflakes.”

  “And Lois?”

  “My daughter? She died. You knew her?”

  “Of course. And Irv?”

  “My son, he passed away. Almost a year ago. He was sixty-six years old. Nothing. He passed away.”

&n
bsp; “We were in high school together.”

  “Yes? With Irving?”

  “He was a little ahead of me. He was between my brother and me. I used to envy Irving, running from the truck to carry the bags for the ladies right to their doors. When I was a kid, I thought Irving was somebody because he worked with his father up on the truck.”

  “Yes? You live here?”

  “No. Not now. I did. I live in New England. Up north.”

  “So what made you come down here?”

  “I wanted to see people I knew,” Sabbath said. “Something told me you were still alive.”

  “Thank God, yes.”

  “And I thought, ‘I would like to see him. I wonder if he remembers me or my brother. My brother, Morty.’ Do you remember Morty Sabbath? He was your cousin too.”

  “A poor memory. I remember little. I been here about sixty years. In this house. I bought it when I was a young man. I was about thirty. Then. I bought a home and here it is, the same place.”

  “Can you still manage stairs by yourself?” At the other end of the living room, by the door, was a stairway Sabbath used to race up with Irving so he could look down from the back bedroom on Lois’s body. Sea & Ski. Was that what she squirted out of the tube, or was Sea & Ski later? It’s a shame she didn’t live to know how it nearly killed me to watch her rub it on. Bet she’d like to hear it now. Bet our friend decorum doesn’t mean much to Lois now.