Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  “Would you rather I didn’t come?” He wondered if it would be safe at this hour to drive by the inn and blow the horn twice, their signal for Drenka to meet him at the Grotto.

  “If you don’t want to come,” she said, “don’t. You’re not doing anyone a favor. If you’re not interested in seeing me, that is fine with me”

  “I am interested in seeing you. That’s why I was in the car when you called. How do you feel? Are you any better?”

  She answered in a wavering voice, “It isn’t easy.”

  “I’m sure it isn’t.”

  “It’s damn hard.” She began to cry. “It’s impossibly hard.”

  “Are you making headway at all?”

  “Oh, you don’t understand! You’ll never understand!” she shouted, and hung up.

  In the binder were the letters that her father had sent her after she had left him to go to live with her mother, following her mother’s return from France. He’d written a letter to Roseanna every single day right up to the evening that he killed himself. The suicide letter was addressed both to Roseanna and to the younger sister, Ella. Roseanna’s mother had gathered the letters to her daughters together and had kept them for them until she herself had died after a long ordeal with emphysema the year before. The binder had been bequeathed to Roseanna along with her mother’s antiques, but she had never been able even to remove the elastic bands holding it shut. For a while she was determined to throw it out, but she could not do that either.

  Halfway to Usher, Sabbath stopped at a highway diner. He held the binder in his lap until the waitress brought him coffee. Then he removed the elastic bands, placed them carefully in his jacket pocket, and opened to the letters.

  The letter written only hours before he hanged himself was headed “My beloved children, Roseanna and Ella,” and dated “Cambridge, Sept. 15,1950.” Rosie was thirteen. Professor Cavanaugh’s last letter Sabbath read first:

  Cambridge, Sept. 15,1950

  My beloved children, Roseanna and Ella,

  I say beloved in spite of everything. I have always tried to do my best, but I have failed completely. I have failed in my marriages and I have failed in my work. When your mother left us, I became a broken man. And when even you, my beloved children, abandoned me, everything ended. Since then I have had total insomnia. I have no strength any longer. I am exhausted and I am ill from all the sleeping pills. I cannot go on any longer God help me. Please do not judge me too harshly.

  Live happily!

  Dad

  Cambridge, Feb. 6,1950

  Dear little Roseanna!

  You cannot imagine how I miss my beloved little darling. I feel completely empty inside and I don’t know how I’ll get over it. But at the same time I feel that it was important and necessary that it happen. I have seen the change in you since May of last year. I was terribly worried since I could not help you and you did not wish to confide in me. You bottled yourself up and pushed me away. I did not know that you had such a hard time in school but I suspected as much since your classmates never visited you. Only pretty little Helen Kylie came sometimes and picked you up in the morning. But my little dear one, the fault was yours. You felt superior and you showed it maybe more than you knew yourself. This is exactly the same thing that happened to your mother with her friends here. Dear little Roseanna, I do not say this to accuse you but so that you can think through all of this and eventually discuss it with your mother. And then you’ll learn that in life one must not be selfish. . . .

  Cambridge, Feb. 8,1950

  . . .you had lost contact with your father and I could no longer penetrate the armor by which you surrounded yourself. It worried me so deeply. I understood that you needed a mother I even tried to get you one but that failed totally. Now you have your real mother back, whom you so long have missed. Now you have all the possibilities again to become well. This will give you new courage to live. And you’ll be happy again with school. In intelligence you are way, way above the average. . . .

  Your father’s home remains open for you, whenever you want to return, for a shorter or longer period of time. You are my most beloved child and the emptiness is enormous without you. I shall try to gain solace thinking that what happened was best for you.

  Please write me something as soon as you are settled. Good-bye, my little darling! A thousand loving kisses from your lonely

  Dad

  Cambridge, Feb. 9,1950

  Dear little Roseanna!

  I ran into Miss Lerman on the street. She was sad that you left the school. She said that all the teachers liked you so much. But she understood that you had a difficult time lately, infections, et cetera, which forced you to be absent for long periods. She also noted that lately you hadn’t been together with Helen Kylie or your other nice friends, Myra, Phyllis, and Aggie. But she said these girls were committed to their studies while Roseanna has lost the desire to succeed. She hoped that you would get over your difficulties in a few years. She had seen many similar cases, she said. She also felt strongly, as I do, that a girls’ school is better for girls in puberty. Unfortunately your mother does not seem to share Miss Lerman’s opinion. . . .

  . . .yes, dear little Roseanna, I hope you’ll soon be as happy as when you were my sunshine, truthful and straightforward. But then our problems began. I wanted to help you but I couldn’t since you didn’t want my help. You couldn’t confide your worries to me any longer. Then you needed a mother but then you did not have a mother unfortunately. . . .

  A huge hug from

  Dad

  Cambridge, Feb. 10,1950

  Dear Roseanna!

  You promised to call and write often to me when you left. You were so sweet and open and I believed you. But love is blind. Now five days have passed since you left and I have not had one line from you. Neither did you want to speak to me last night, even though I was home. I am beginning to understand, my eyes are opening. Do you have a bad conscience? Can you no longer look your father in the eye? Is that the thank-you for all I have done for you during these five years when I alone had to take care of my children? It is cruel. It is horrible. Can you ever again come home to your father and look him in the eye? I can hardly grasp this. But I do not judge you. I understand that lately you have been under hypnosis. Your mother seems to have made it her mission to harass me to the utmost. Her only interest is my defeat. She does not seem to have changed as much as you children seem to think.

  Maybe you will write a few lines and tell me what I should do. Shall I clean out your room and try to forget that you ever existed?

  Why did you lie to me at the stationery store about the ten dollars? It was unnecessary. Not a beautiful last memory.

  Dad

  Cambridge, Feb. 11,1950

  Dearest little Roseanna!

  A thousand thank-yous for your longed-for letter today! It made me so happy that I now feel like another person. The sun is shining again over my broken life. Please forgive my last letter. I was so depressed when I wrote it that I barely believed I could stand up again. But today everything feels different. Irene has now become so kind that I would even say she is sweet. She has probably helped me over the worst crisis—your departure. . . .

  Of course you are welcome so long as you do not completely cut off contact with your father. And now, since things here at home are calm and peaceful again, your letters will be heartily welcome to us all. Please write as often as you can to us. It doesn’t have to be a long epistle but just a short greeting that you are fine. Though sometimes you must write some lines to your father telling him how you feel in the depths of your soul, especially when sorrows drag you down.

  Dearest dearest dearest regards from us all, but especially from your loving

  Dad

  This was the way the letters went from the February day in 1950 when Roseanna moved from Cambridge with Ella to live with her mother through the end of April, which was as far as Sabbath was able to read if he intended to be on time for dinner at the h
ospital. And he was sure to hear the same despondent message being beeped right on down to the end anyway—the world against him, obstructing him, insulting and crushing him. Shall I clean out your room and try to forget that you ever existed? From bleeding Professor Cavanaugh to his thirteen-year-old beloved after not having heard from her for five days. The suffering, crazy drunk—couldn’t have been battle-free one day of his life, until the day the stone was lifted. Please do not judge me harshly. Live happily! Dad. And then, no longer out of tune with a thing. Everything at last under control.

  Sabbath pulled into the hospital parking lot just before five. On foot he made his way up a circular drive that separated a wide bowl of green lawn from a long three-storied white clapboard house with black-shuttered windows at the top of the hill, the hospital’s main building, designed, coincidentally enough, very much in the style of the Baliches’ colonial-style inn overlooking Lake Madamaska. In the last century there’d been a lake here, too, where now there was the lakelike lawn, and looming above it a massive Gothic mansion that had fallen into ruin after the death of the childless owners. First the roof gave way, then the stone walls, until, in 1909, the lake was drained and the spookily picturesque pile was pushed into the hole with a steam shovel and covered over to make way for a TB sanatorium. Today the old sanatorium was the main building of Usher Psychiatric Hospital but continued to be referred to as the Mansion.

  Doubtless because the dinner hour was approaching, the crowd of smokers gathered outside the front door of the Mansion numbered twenty or twenty-five, a handful of them surprisingly young, boys and girls in their teens who were dressed like the students in the valley, the boys with their baseball caps on backward and the girls in college T-shirts, running shoes, and jeans. He asked the prettiest of the girls—who would also have been the tallest if only she had stood up straight—to direct him to Roderick House and observed, when she raised her arm to point the way, a horizontal slash mark across her wrist that looked to be only recently healed.

  An ordinary autumn late afternoon—which is to say, radiant and extraordinary. How horrible, how dangerous this beauty must be to someone suicidally depressed, yet the kind of day, thought Sabbath, that perhaps makes it possible for a garden-variety depressive to believe that the cavern through which he is crawling may be leading in the direction of life. Childhood at its very best is recalled, and the abatement, if not of adulthood, at least of dread seems for the moment possible. Autumn at the psychiatric hospital, autumn and its famous meanings! How can it be autumn if I am here? How can I be here if it is autumn? Is it autumn? The year again in magical transition and it does not even register.

  Roderick House lay just off the bottom of a turning of the road that ringed the lawn and led back out to the county highway. The house was a smaller, two-story version of the Mansion, one of seven or eight such houses set irregularly back among the trees, each with an open veranda and a grassy front yard. Coming upon Roderick from the rise of the drive, Sabbath saw four women sitting on outdoor furniture pulled close together on the lawn. The one reclining in the white plastic chaise was his wife. She was wearing sunglasses and lying perfectly still, while around her the others were in lively conversation. But then something so funny was said by someone—perhaps even by Roseanna—that she sprang to a sitting position and clapped her hands together with joy. Her laugh was more spontaneous than he’d heard it for years. They were all still laughing when Sabbath appeared, walking across the lawn. One of the women leaned toward Roseanna. “Your visitor,” she whispered.

  “Good day,” said Sabbath and formally bowed to them. “I am the beneficiary of Roseanna’s nest-building instinct and the embodiment of all the resistance she encounters in life. I am sure that each of you has an unworthy mate—I am hers. I am Mickey Sabbath. Everything you have heard about me is true. Everything is destroyed and I destroyed it. Hello, Rosie.”

  It did not astonish him when she failed to pop up out of the chair to embrace him. But when she took off the sunglasses and shyly said, “Hi,” . . . well, the voice on the phone had not led him to expect such loveliness. Only fourteen days off the sauce and away from him, and she looked thirty-five. Her skin was clear and tawny, her shoulder-length hair shone more golden than brown, and she seemed even to have recovered the width of her mouth and that appealing width between her eyes. She had a notably broad face but her features had been vanishing within it for years. Here lay the simple origin of their suffering: her knockout girl-next-door looks. In just fourteen days she had cast off two decades of bungled life.

  “These,” she said awkwardly, “are some residents of the house.” Helen Kylie, Myra, Phyllis, Aggie . . . “Would you like to see my room? We’ve got a little time.” She was now an utterly disconcerted child, too embarrassed by a parent’s presence to be anything but miserable so long as he remained among her friends.

  He followed Roseanna up the stairs to the veranda—three smokers out there, youngish women like the ones on the lawn— and into the house. They passed a small kitchen and turned down a corridor lined with notices and newspaper clippings. To one side the corridor opened onto a small, dark living room where another group of women were watching TV, and to the other onto the nurse’s station, partitioned in glass and cheerily hung with “Peanuts” posters above the two desks. Roseanna pulled him halfway through the door. “My husband’s here,” she said to the young nurse on duty. “Fine,” replied the nurse and nodded politely to Sabbath, whom Roseanna immediately dragged away before he told the nurse, too, that everything was destroyed and he had destroyed it, right on the money though that indictment might be.

  “Roseanna!” a friendly voice called from the living room. “Roseanna Banana!”

  “Hi.”

  “Back to Bennington,” said Sabbath.

  Bitterly she jumped on him. “Not quite!”

  Her room was small, freshly painted a sparkling white, with two curtained windows looking onto the front yard, a single bed, an old wooden desk, and a dresser. All anyone needed, really. You could live in a place like this forever. He stuck his head into the bathroom, turned on a tap—“Hot water,” he said approvingly— and then, when he came out, saw on the desk three framed photographs: the one of her mother wrapped in a fur coat in Paris just after the war, the old one of Ella and Paul with their two plump, blond children (Eric and Paula) and a third (Glenn) plainly on the way, and a photograph that he had never seen before, a studio portrait of a man in a suit, tie, and starched collar, a stern, broad-faced middle-aged man who did not look at all “broken” but could be no one but Cavanaugh. There was a composition notebook open on the desk, and Roseanna closed it with one quivering hand while she nervously circled the room. “Where’s the binder?” she said. “You forgot the binder!” She was no longer the sylph in sunglasses he’d seen on the lawn, merrily laughing with Helen, Myra, Phyllis, and Aggie.

  “I left it locked in the car. It’s under the seat. It’s safe.”

  “And what,” she cried in all seriousness, “if somebody steals the car?”

  “Is that likely, Roseanna? That car? I was hurrying to be on time. I thought we’d get it after dinner. But I’ll leave whenever you want me to. I’ll get the binder and leave now if you want me to. You looked great until two minutes ago. I’m no good for your complexion.”

  “I planned to show you the place. I wanted to take you around. I did. I wanted to show you where I swim. Now I’m confused. Terribly. I feel hollow. I feel awful.” Sitting on the edge of her bed, she began to sob. “It’s, it’s a thousand dollars a day here” were the words she managed finally to utter.

  “Is that what you’re crying about?”

  “No. The insurance covers it.”

  “Then what is making you cry?”

  “Tomorrow . . . tomorrow night, at the meeting, I have to tell ‘My Story.’ It’s my turn. I’ve been making notes. I’m terrified. For days I’ve been making notes. I’m nauseated, my stomach hurts. . . .”

  “Why be terrif
ied? Pretend you’re talking to your class. Pretend they’re just your kids.”

  “I’m not terrified of speaking,” she replied angrily. “It’s what I’m saying. It’s my saying the truth.”

  “About?”

  She couldn’t believe his stupidity. “About? About? Him!” she cried, pointing to her father’s picture. “That man!”

  So. It’s that man. It’s him.

  Innocently enough, Sabbath asked, “What did he do?”

  “Everything. Everything.”

  The dining room, on the first floor of the Mansion, was pleasant and quiet and bright with light from the bay windows that looked out across to the lawn. The patients sat where they liked, mostly at oak tables large enough for eight, but a few stayed apart at tables along the wall that seated two. Again he was reminded of the inn at the lake and the pleasant mood of the dining room there when Drenka officiated as high priestess. Unlike the customers at the inn, the patients served themselves from a buffet table where tonight there were french fried potatoes, green beans, cheeseburgers, salad, and ice cream—thousand-buck-a-day cheeseburgers. Whenever Roseanna got up to refill her glass of cranberry juice, one or another of those drying out and crowded together at the juice machine smiled at her or spoke to her, and as she passed with yet another full glass, someone at a table took hold of her free hand. Because tomorrow night she had to tell “My Story” or because tonight “he” was here? He wondered if anybody at Usher—patient, doctor, or nurse—had as yet dialed across the state line to get an earful of what had put her here.

  Only it was the father who had done everything who had put her here.

  But how come she’d never told him of this “everything” before? Hadn’t she dared to speak of it? Hadn’t she dared to remember it? Or did the charge so clarify for her the history of her misery that whether it was truly rooted in fact was a cruelly irrelevant question? At last she possessed the explanation that was at once exalted and hideous and, by Zeitgeist standards, more than reasonable. But where—if anywhere any longer—was a true picture of the past?