Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  You cannot imagine how I miss my beloved little darling. I feel completely empty inside and I don’t know how I’ll ever get over it. You are my most beloved child and the emptiness is enormous without you. Only pretty little Helen Kylie came sometimes. When you were my sunshine, truthful and straightforward. You were so sweet and open and I believed you. But love is blind. Do you have a bad conscience? Can you no longer look your father in the eye? Your longed-for letter. The sun is shining again over my broken life.

  Who had hanged himself in that Cambridge attic, a bereft father or a spurned lover?

  At dinner, by talking continuously, she seemed able to pretend that Sabbath wasn’t there or that whoever was sitting opposite was somebody else. “See the woman,” she whispered, “two tables behind me, petite, thin, glasses, early fifties?” and she synopsized the story of her marital disaster—a second family, a twenty-five-year-old girlfriend and two little children three and four, the husband had secretly stashed away in the next town. “See the girl with the braids? Red-haired . . . lovely, smart kid . . . twenty-five . . . Wellesley . . . construction worker boyfriend. Looks like the Marlboro man, she says. Throws her up against the wall and down the stairs, and she can’t stop phoning him. Phones every night. Says she’s trying to get him to feel some remorse. No luck yet. See that dark, youngish guy, working-class? Two tables to your left. A glazier. Sweet guy. Wife hates his family and won’t let him take the children to see them. Wanders around all day talking to himself. ‘It’s useless . . . it’s hopeless . . . it’s never going to change . . . the shouting . . . the scenes . . . can’t take it.’ All you hear in the morning are people crying in their rooms, crying and saying ‘I wish I were dead.’ See the guy there? Tall, bald, big-nosed guy? In the silk robe? Gay. Room full of perfumes. Wears his robe all day. Always carrying a book. Never comes to program. Tries to kill himself every September. Comes here every October. Goes home every November. He’s the only man in Roderick. One morning I passed his room and heard him sobbing inside. I went in and sat down on the bed. He told me his story. His mother died three weeks after he was born. Rheumatic heart. He didn’t know how she died until he was twelve. She was warned beforehand about pregnancy but had him anyway and died. He thought he killed her. His first memory is of sitting in a car with his father, being driven from one home to another. They changed residences all the time. When he was five his father moved in with a couple, friends. His father stayed there thirty-two years. Had a secret affair with the wife. The couple had two daughters he considers his sisters. One is his sister. He’s an architectural draftsman. Lives by himself. Sends for pizza every night. Eats it watching television. Saturday nights he makes himself something special, a veal dish. He stammers. You can barely hear him when he speaks. I held his hand for about an hour. He was crying and crying. Finally he says, ‘When I was seventeen, my mother’s brother came, my uncle, and he . . .’ But he couldn’t finish. He can’t tell anybody what happened when he was seventeen. Still can’t, and he’s fifty-three. That’s Ray. One person’s story is worse than the next. They want internal quiet and all they get’s internal noise.”

  So she continued till they had finished their ice cream, whereupon she jumped to her feet, and together they headed for her father’s letters.

  Walking rapidly beside her down the drive to the parking lot, Sabbath spotted a modern building of glass and pink brick on a crest off to the back of the Mansion. “The lockup,” Roseanna told him. “It’s where they detox the ones that come in with d.t.’s. It’s where they give you shock. I don’t even like to look at it. I said to my doctor, ‘Promise me you’ll never send me to the lockup. You can’t ever send me to the lockup. I couldn’t take it.’ He said, ‘I cannot make you any such promise.’”

  “Surprise,” said Sabbath. “They only stole the hubcaps.”

  He opened the car door, and the moment he took the binder (with the thick elastic bands back in place) out from under the front seat and handed it to her, she was sobbing again. Somebody else every two minutes. “This is hell,” said Roseanna, “the turbulence doesn’t stop!” and, turning away from him, she ran back up the hill, clutching the binder to her chest as though it alone would spare her from the lockup. Should he spare her the further agony of his presence? If he left now he’d be home before ten. Too late to get to Drenka, but how about Kathy? Take her to the house, dial S-A-B-B-A-T-H, listen to the tape while they went down on each other.

  It was twenty to seven. Roseanna’s meeting began in the Mansion “lounge” at seven and ran until eight. He strolled across the green bowl of the lawn, still impersonating—though for how much longer who could tell?—a guest. By the time he had got to Roderick, Roseanna had called the nurse on duty from a Mansion phone to ask her to tell him to wait in the room until she got back from AA. But that had been his plan, whether he was invited or not, ever since he’d seen on her desk the composition notebook in which she was readying her revelation for the next night.

  Maybe Roseanna had forgotten where she’d left it; maybe from merely having to lay eyes on him again (and here, without the helping hand of the drink whose beneficent properties as a marital booster are celebrated even in Holy Scripture2), she’d been unable to think straight and had left a message with the nurse that made no sense at all. Or maybe she actually wanted him to sit alone in her room and read all that her agony had written there. But to get him to see what? She had wanted him to provide her with this while she provided him with that, and, of course, he had no intention of being party to any such arrangement, because, as it happened, he had wanted her to provide him with that while he provided her with this. . . . But why, then, remain married? To tell the truth, he didn’t know. Sitting it out for thirty years is indeed inexplicable until you remember that people do it all the time. They were not the only couple on earth for whom mistrust and mutual aversion furnished the indestructible foundation for a long-standing union. Yet, how it seemed to Rosie, when her endurance had reached its limit, was that they were the only ones with such wildly contradictory cravings, they had to be: the only couple who found each other’s behavior so tediously antagonizing, the only couple who deprived each other of everything each of them most wanted, the only couple whose battles over differences would never be behind them, the only couple whose reason for coming together had evaporated beyond recall, the only couple who could not sever themselves one from the other despite ten thousand grievances apiece, the only couple who could not believe how much worse it got from year to year, the only couple between whom the dinner silence was freighted with such bitter hatred. . . .

  He had imagined her journal as mostly a harangue about him. But there was nothing about him. The notes were all about the other him, the professor in the starched collar whose picture she was forcing herself to face in the morning when she awoke and at night when she went to sleep. There was something in her existence worse than Kathy Goolsbee—Sabbath himself was beside the point. The last thirty years were beside the point, so much futile churning about, so much festering of the wound by which— as she portrayed it here—her soul had been permanently disfigured. He had his story; this was Roseanna’s, the official in-the-beginning story, when and where the betrayal that is life was launched. Here was the frightful lockup from which there was no release, and Sabbath was not mentioned once. What a bother we are to one another—while actually nonexistent to one another, unreal specters compared to whoever originally sabotaged the sacred trust.

  We had different women, housekeepers, who would live with us, that would help to make the dinner. My father also did the cooking. A little bit vague in my memory. The housekeeper would sit with us too. I don’t remember the dinners that well.

  He was not there after school. I had a key. I would go to the store and buy myself some food. Pea soup. Cake and cookies that I liked. My sister would be home. We would take a snack in the afternoon, and then we would go out and play with our friends.

  Recollection of his snoring loudly. Had to do with
his drinking. Find him in the morning fully dressed, sleeping on the floor. So drunk he would miss the bed.

  He wouldn’t drink during the week but on weekends. We had a sailboat for a while and we would go out in the summertime on the boat. He was overpowering. Wanted his way. And he wasn’t a terrific sailor. As he got a little bit more drunk he would lose control and walk and turn his pockets inside out to show us he had no money. And then he would be clumsy, and if we had a friend along, he embarrassed me terribly. Very disgusted by him physically when he did these things.

  I needed clothes so he would take me to the clothing store. I was very embarrassed by having a father to do that. He didn’t have the taste for it and sometimes he made me buy clothes that I didn’t like and forced me to wear them. I remember a loden jacket that I hated. I hated it with a passion. I felt very tomboyish because I didn’t have women who could take care of me and give me advice. That was very hard.

  He would have the housekeepers and several of them wanted to marry him. I remember one who was an educated woman and she cooked very well and she wanted so much to marry the professor. But it always ended in catastrophe. Ella and I would listen through the doors to follow the romantic developments. We knew exactly when they were fucking. I don’t imagine he was a good fuck, drunk as he was. But we would always listen from behind the door and were aware of everything going on. But then the reality set in, his bossing them around, telling them even how to do the dishes. He was a professor of geology and so he knew how to wash the dishes better than they did. There would be arguments and screaming, and I don’t think he hit the women but there was always an unpleasant ending. When they left it was always a crisis. And for me there was always the expectation of the crisis. And when I was twelve and thirteen and grew more interested in going out and meeting boys, and I had a gang of girlfriends, he took that very hard. He would sit drinking his gin by himself and fall asleep that way. I can’t think of him, that isolated person who could not manage by himself, without crying, as I am doing now.

  She left in 1945, when I was eight years old. I don’t remember when she left, I just remember being left. And then I remember when she came back the first time, 1947, at Christmas. She brought some toy animals that made noises. My sense of desperation. I wanted my mother back. Ella and I were again listening, now to what she and our father were talking about behind the doors. Maybe they were fucking too. I don’t know. But what went on behind the doors we tried to listen to. There were intense whispers and sometimes very loud arguments. My mother was there for two weeks and it was a great relief when she left because the tension was so awful. She was a striking-looking woman, well dressed, so worldly to me from living in Paris.

  He used to have a locked desk. Ella and I knew how to open it with a knife, so we always had access to his secrets. We found letters from the different women. We laughed and thought it was a big joke. One night my father came into my room and he said, “Oh, I’m falling in love.” I pretended that I knew nothing. He said he was going to get married. I thought, “Wonderful, now I can be relieved of my duty of caring for him.” She was a widow, already sixty, and he thought she had some money. No sooner had they married than the arguments started, the same as with the other women. This time I felt myself in the middle of the whole thing, responsible for the fact that they had married! My father came to me and said it was terrible because she was older than she said and she didn’t have the money she said she had. An enormous calamity. And she began bad-mouthing me. Complaining that I didn’t study, that I was spoiled, I wasn’t reliable, I was messy, I didn’t clean up my room, a hopeless brat and I never told the truth or listened to what she said.

  I was taking a bath in my mother’s place and the phone rang and I heard my mother screaming. My first thought was that my father had killed my stepmother. But my mother came into the bathroom and she said, “Your father is dead. I have to go Cambridge.” I said, “What about me?” She said, “You have to study and I don’t think you should go.” But I insisted that this was important for me and so she let me come with her. Ella didn’t want to come, she was afraid to, but I made her come. He had left a letter to Ella and me. I still have that letter. I have all the letters he sent me when I went to live with my mother. I haven’t read them since he died. When I got them in the mail I couldn’t read them. To receive a letter from my father made me nauseated all day. My mother would finally make me open it. I would read it in her presence or she would read it to me. “Why haven’t you written your father who misses you?” In the third person. “Why haven’t you written to your father who loves you so much? Why did you lie to me about the money?” Then the next day, “Oh, my beloved Roseanna, I did receive a letter from you and I’m so happy.”

  I didn’t hate him but he was a giant discomfort for me. He had gigantic power over me. He wasn’t drunk every day because he had to teach. It was when he was drunk that he would come into my room late at night and lie in bed beside me.

  In February’50 I moved into my mother’s apartment with Ella. I saw my mother as my rescuer. I adored her and looked up to her. I thought she was beautiful. My mother made me into a doll. Overnight I became a popular young girl, with all the boys after me, and I got tall practically overnight. There was even a “Roseanna Club,” the boys told me. But the attention I got, I couldn’t take in. I wasn’t there. I was someplace else. It was hard. But I do remember that I suddenly became very prim-looking, striped little dresses, and petticoats, and a rose in my hair for parties. My mother’s mission in life was to justify her leaving. She said he would have killed her. Even when she picked up the phone to talk to him, she was afraid of him—her veins would stick out and she’d go white. I think I heard it every day, one way or another, her justification for running away. She too hated when his letters would come but she was too afraid of him not to make me read them. And there was a struggle over money. He didn’t want to pay if I didn’t live with him. It was always me, never Ella. I had to live with him or he wouldn’t pay for me. I don’t know how they resolved it, all I know is that there was always a struggle over money and me.

  There was something physically disgusting about him. The sexual part. I had then and I have still a strong physical distaste for him. For his lips. I thought they were ugly. And the way he held me, even in public, like a woman he loved instead of like a young girl. When he took me on his arm to take a walk, I felt I was in a grip I could never get out of.

  I got so frantic and busy doing other things that I was able for a while to forget about him. I went to France that next summer after his death and at fourteen I had a love affair. I stayed with a friend of my mother’s and there were all these boys . . . so I did forget him. But I was in a daze for years. I’ve been in a daze always. I don’t know why he comes to haunt me now that I’m a woman in her fifties, but he does.

  I prepared myself to read his letters last summer by picking some flowers and making it pleasant and when I started reading I had to stop.

  I drank to survive.

  On the page following, every line of her handwriting had been scratched out so heavily that barely anything remained legible. He searched for the words to amplify “It was when he was drunk that he would come into my room late at night and lie in bed beside me,” but all he could distinguish, even with microscopic scrutinizing, were the words “white wine,” “my mother’s rings,” “a torture day” . . . and these were part of no discernible sequence. What she’d written here was not for the ears of the patients at that meeting or for the eyes of anyone, herself included. But then he turned the page and found some kind of exercise written out quite legibly, perhaps one she had been assigned by her doctor.

  Reenactment of leaving my father at age thirteen, 39 years ago, in February. First as I remember it and then as I would have liked it to happen.

  As I remember it: My father had picked me up at the hospital where I’d checked in a few days earlier to have a tonsillectomy. In spite of all my fear of him, I could tell that he w
as very happy to have me home, but I felt as I often did with him—I can’t quite pinpoint it, but made terribly uncomfortable by his breathing and his lips. I have no recollection of the act itself. Just the vibrations set off in me by his breathing and his lips. I never told Ella. I haven’t to this day. I have told no one.

  Daddy told me that he and Irene did not get along very well. That she continued to complain about me, that I was a slob and didn’t study or listen to what she had to say. Best for me to stay away from her as much as possible. . . . Daddy and I were sitting in the living room after lunch. Irene was cleaning up in the kitchen. I felt weak and tired but determined. I had to tell him now that I was leaving him. That everything was already planned. My mother had agreed to take me as long as—she stressed this repeatedly—it was my will to come and not her coercion that had made me. Legally my father had custody over us. Rather unusual at that time. My mother had given up all claims on us, since she felt we children should not be separated and she had few resources to bring us up. Besides, Daddy was likely to kill us all if we all left him. It’s true that he had commented after reading in the newspaper about family tragedies where a husband actually killed everyone, including himself, that that was the right thing to do.

  I remember my father standing in front of me looking much older than fifty-six, bushy white hair and a worn face, slightly stooped over but still tall. He was pouring coffee into a cup. I told him boldly that I was leaving. That I had talked to my mother and she had agreed to let me come to her. He almost dropped his cup and his face became ashen. Everything went out of him. He sat down, speechless. He did not frighten me by getting angry, which I had feared. Although I often defied him, I was always deadly afraid of him. But not this time. I knew I had to get out of there. If I didn’t, I was dead. All he could say was, “I understand, but we must not let Irene know. We will only tell her that you are going to your mother to recuperate.” Less than six months later he hanged himself. How could I not believe I was responsible?