by Philip Roth
“We can’t. You’re crazy. Matthew knows the car. You’re drunk. I have to go back! I love you!”
“Roseanna may be out tomorrow.”
“But,” she exclaimed, “I thought two more weeks!”
“What am I supposed to do with this thing?”
“You know what.” Drenka leaned in through the open window, squeezed it, jerked it once—“Go home,” she pleaded and then ran for the path back to the house.
On the fifteen-minute drive to Brick Furnace Road, Sabbath saw only one other vehicle on the road, the state police cruiser. That’s why she was up—listening to the scanner. Warming to the biblical justice of being taken in for adulterous sodomy by her son, he sounded his horn and flashed his brights; but for the time being, the run of bad luck appeared to have ended. Nobody came tearassing after the county’s leading sex offender and had him pull over to surrender his license and registration; no one invited him to justify how he came to be driving with a vodka bottle in his steering hand and a dick in the other, his focus not at all on the highway, not even on Drenka, but on that child’s face that masked a mind whose core was all clarity, on that lanky blond with the droopy shoulders and the delicate voice and the freshly sliced wrist,who was just three weeks clear of going completely off the rails.
♦ ♦ ♦
“‘Pray, do not mock me. / I am a very foolish fond old man, / Four score and upward, not an hour more nor less, / I And, to deal plainly, / I fear I am not in my perfect mind. / Methinks . . .’”
Then he lost it, one stop north of Astor Place went completely dry. Yet remembering even that much while begging in the subway on the way to Linc’s funeral after the soft-porn drama with the Cowans’ Rosa was a huge mnemonic surprise. Methinks what? Methinking methoughts shouldn’t be hard. The mind is the perpetual motion machine. You’re not ever free of anything. Your mind’s in the hands of everything. The personal’s an immensity, nuncle, a constellation of detritus that doth dwarf the Milky Way; it pilots thee as do the stars the blind Cupid’s arrow o’ wild geese that o’erwing the Drenka goose’d asshole as, atop thy cancerous Croatian, their coarse Canadian honk thou libid’nously mimics, inscribing ’pon her malignancy, with white ink, thy squandered chromosomal mark.
Back up, back way, way up. Nikki says, “Sir, do you know me?” Lear says, “You are a spirit, I know. Where did you die?” Cordelia says blah, blah; the doctor says blah, blah; I say, “Where have I been? Where am I? Fair daylight? I am mightily abused . . . blah, blah, blah.” Nikki: “O look upon me, sir, / And hold your hand in benediction o’er me. / No, sir, you must not kneel.” And Lear says it was a Tuesday in December 1944, I came home from school and saw some cars, I saw my father’s truck. Why is that there? I knew something was wrong. In the house I saw my father. In terrible pain. In terrible pain. My mother hysterical. Her hands. Her fingers. Moaning. Screaming. People there already. A man had come to the door. “I’m sorry,” he said and gave her the telegram. Missing in action. Another month before the second telegram arrived, a tentative, chaotic time—hope, fear, searching for any story we could get, the phone ringing, never knowing, stories reaching us that he had been picked up by friendly Filipino guerrillas, someone in his squadron said he passed him in the flight, he was going on the last run, the flak got very bad and Morty’s plane went down, but in friendly territory . . . and Lear replies, “You do me wrong to take me out o’ the grave,” but Sabbath is remembering the second telegram. The month before was terrible but not as terrible as this: the death notice was like losing another brother. Devastating. My mother in bed. Thought she was dying, afraid she was going to die too. Smelling salts. The doctor. The house filling up with people. It’s hard to be clear about who was there. It’s a blur. Everybody was there. But life was over. The family was finished. I was finished. I gave her smelling salts and they spilled and I was afraid I killed her. The tragic period of my life. Between fourteen and sixteen. Nothing to compare with it. It didn’t just break her, it broke us all. My father, for the rest of his life, completely changed. He was a reassuring force to me, because of his physique and because he was so dependable. My mother was always the more emotional one. The sadder one, the happier one. Always whistling. But there was an impressive sobriety in my father. So to see him fall apart! Look at my emotions now—I’m fifteen remembering this stuff. Emotions, when they’re revved up, don’t change, they’re the same, fresh and raw. Everything passes? Nothing passes. The same emotions are here! He was my father, a hardworking guy, out in the truck to the farmers at three in the morning. When he came home at night he was tired and we had to be quiet because he had to get up so early. And if he was ever angry—and that was rare—but if he was ever angry, he was angry in Yiddish and it was terrifying because I couldn’t even be sure what he was angry about. But after, he was never angry again. If only he had been! After, he became meek, passive, crying all the time, crying everywhere, in the truck, with the customers, with the Gentile farmers. This fucking thing broke my father! After the shiva he went back to work again, after the year of official mourning he stopped crying, but there was always that personal, private misery that you could see a mile away. And I didn’t feel so terrific myself. I felt I lost a part of my body. Not my prick, no, can’t say a leg, an arm, but a feeling that was physiological and yet an interior loss. A hollowing out, as though I’d been worked on with a chisel. Like the horseshoe-crab shells lying along the beach, the armature intact and the inside empty. All of it gone. Hollowed out. Reamed out. Chiseled away. It was so oppressive. And my mother going to bed—I was sure I was going to lose my mother. How will she survive? How will any of us survive? There was such an emptiness everywhere. But I had to be the strong one. Even before I had to be the strong one. Very tough when he went overseas and all we knew was his APO number. The anxiety. Excruciating. Worried all the time. I used to help my father with the deliveries the way Morty did. Morty did things that nobody in his right mind would have done. Clambering around up on the roof fixing something. On his back, shimmying all the way into the dark crud under the porch, wiring something. Every week he washed the floors for my mother. So now I washed the floors. I did a lot of things to try to calm her down after he shipped out to the Pacific. Every week we used to go to the movies. They wouldn’t go near a war movie. But even during an ordinary movie, when something suddenly cropped up about the war or somebody just said something about somebody overseas, my mother would get upset and I would have to calm her down. “Ma, it’s just a movie.” “Ma, let’s not think about it.” She would cry. Terribly. And I’d leave with her and walk her around. We used to get letters through the APO. He’d do little cartoons on the envelope sometimes. I’d looked forward to the cartoons. But the only one they cheered up was me. And once he flew over the house. He was stationed in North Carolina and he had to make a flight to Boston. He told us, “I’m going to fly over the house. In a B-25.” All the women were outside in the street in their aprons. In the middle of the day my father came home in the truck. My friend Ron was there. And Morty did it—flew over and dipped his wings, those flat gull wings. Ron and I were waving. What a hero he was to me. He was incredibly gentle with me, five years younger—he was just so gentle. He had a real physique. A shot-putter. A track star. He could heave a football almost the whole length of the field; he had a tremendous capacity to toss a ball or to put the shot—to throw things, that was his skill, to throw them far. I would think of that after he was missing. In school I would be thinking that throwing things far might help him survive in the jungle. Shot down on the twelfth of December and died of wounds on the fifteenth. Which was another misery. They had him in a hospital. The rest of the crew was killed instantly, but the plane was shot down over guerrilla territory and the guerrillas got him out and to a hospital and he lived for three days. That made it even worse. The crew was killed immediately and my brother lived three more days. I was in a stupor. Ron came. Usually he as good as lived at our house. He said, “Come on out.” I said, “I ca
n’t.” He said, “What happened?” I couldn’t talk. It took a few days before I could tell him. But I couldn’t tell people at school. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t say it. There was a gym teacher, a big, strong guy who had wanted Morty to give up track and train as a gymnast. “How’s your brother?” he would ask me. “Fine,” I’d say. I couldn’t say it. Other teachers, his shop teacher, who always gave him A’s: “How’s your brother doing?” “Fine.” And then they finally knew, but I never told them. “Hey, how’s Morty doing?” And I perpetuated the lie. This went on and on with the people who hadn’t heard. I was in my stupor for a year at least. I even got scared for a while of girls’ having lipstick and having tits. Every challenge was suddenly too great. My mother gave me his watch. It nearly killed me, but I wore it. I took it to sea. I took it to the Army. I took it to Rome. Here it is, his GI Benrus. Wind it daily. All that’s changed is the strap. Stop function on the second hand still working. When I was on the track team I used to think about his ghost. That was the first ghost. I was like my father and him, always strong up top. Besides, Morty threw the shot, so I had to. I imbued myself with him. I used to look up at the sky before I threw it and think that he was looking over me. And I called for strength. It was a state meet. I was in fifth place. I knew the unreality of it but I just kept praying to him and I threw it farther than I ever did before. I still didn’t win, but I had got his strength!
I could use it now. Where is it? Here’s the watch, but where’s the strength?
In the seat to the right of where Sabbath had gone blank on “Methinks . . .” was what had caused him to go blank: no more than twenty-one or -two, sculpted entirely in black—turtleneck sweater, pleated skirt, tights, shoes, even a black velvet headband keeping her shining black hair back from her forehead. She had been gazing up at him, and it was the gaze that had stopped him, its meek, familiar softness. She sat with one arm resting on the black nylon backpack by her side, silently watching as he worked to recall the last scene of act four: Lear is carried sleeping into the French camp—“Ay, madam; in the heaviness of sleep / We put fresh garments on him”—and there to wake him is Cordelia— “How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty?” And it is then Lear replies, “You do me wrong to take me out o’ the grave. . . .”
The girl with the gaze was speaking, but so softly at first that he couldn’t hear her. She was younger than he’d thought, probably a student, probably no more than nineteen.
“Yes, yes, speak up.” What he was always telling Nikki whenever she said something she was afraid to say, which was half the time she spoke. She had driven him crazier with each passing year, saying things so that he couldn’t hear them. “What did you say?” “It doesn’t matter.” Drove him nuts.
“‘Methinks,’” she said, quite audibly now, “‘I should know you, and know this man. . . .’” She’d given him the line! A drama student, on her way uptown to Juilliard.
He repeated, “‘Methinks I should know you, and know this man,’” and then on his own momentum proceeded. “‘Yet I am doubtful; for I am mainly ignorant / What place this is; and all the skill I have . . .’” Here he pretended not to know what was next. “‘And all the skill I have . . .’” Feebly, twice, he repeated this and looked to her for assistance.
“‘Remembers not these garments,’” prompted the girl, “‘nor I know not . . .’”
She stopped when, with a smile, he indicated that he believed he could himself once again pick up from there. She smiled back. “‘Nor I know not / Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me, / For, as I am a man, I think this lady . . .’”
Is Nikki’s daughter.
Not impossible! Nikki’s beautifully imploring eyes, Nikki’s per-plexingly, perpetually uncertain voice . . . no, she was not merely some tenderhearted, overimpressionable kid who would excitedly tell her family tonight that a white-bearded old bum had been reciting to her from Lear on the Lexington IRT and that she had dared to help him remember the lines—she was Nikki’s daughter. The family she was going home to tonight was Nikki’s! Nikki was alive. Nikki was in New York. This girl was hers. And if hers, somehow his, whoever the father might be.
Sabbath was hovering directly above her now, his emotions an avalanche rolling across him, sweeping him beneath them, uprooting the little rootedness still holding him to himself. What if they were all alive and at Nikki’s house? Morty. Mom. Dad. Drenka. Abolishing death—a thrilling thought, for all that he wasn’t the first person, on or off a subway, to have it, have it desperately, to renounce reason and have it the way he did when he was fifteen years old and they had to have Morty back. Turning life back like a clock in the fall. Just taking it down off the wall and winding it back and winding it back until your dead all appear like standard time.
‘“For, as I am a man,’” he said to the girl, “‘I think this lady / To be my child Cordelia.’”
“‘And so I am, I am.’” Undesigning Cordelia’s unguarded response, the poignantly simple iambic trimeter that Nikki had uttered in a voice one-tenth a lost orphan’s and the rest a weary, teetering woman’s, spoken by the girl whose gaze was Nikki’s exactly.
“Who is your mother?” Sabbath whispered to her. “Tell me who your mother is.”
The words made her go pale; her eyes, Nikki’s eyes, which could hide nothing, were like those of a child who’s just been told something terrible. All her horror of him came right up to the surface, as it would, sooner or later, in Nikki, too. To have been moved by this mad monstrosity because he could quote Shakespeare! To have become entangled on the subway with someone unmistakably crazy, capable of anything—how could she be so idiotic!
Simple as it was to read her thoughts, Sabbath declaimed, no less brokenly than Lear, “You are the daughter of Nikki Kantarakis!”
Frantically pulling open the straps of her knapsack, the girl tried to locate her purse and find money to give him, money to make him go away. But Sabbath had to see once more the fact that was indisputable—that Nikki lived—and turning her face with his crippled hand, feeling Nikki’s living skin, he said, “Where is your mother hiding from me?”
“Don’t!” she screamed, “don’t touch me!” and was swatting at his arthritic fingers as though a swarm of flies had attacked her when somebody came up from behind him and with jarring force hooked Sabbath under the arms.
A business suit was all he could see of his powerful captor. “Calm down,” he was being told, “calm down. You shouldn’t drink that stuff.”
“What should I drink? I’m sixty-four years old and I’ve never been sick a day in my life! Except my tonsils as a child! I drink what I want!”
“Calm down, Mac. Cut it out, calm down, and get yourself to a shelter.”
“I caught lice in the shelter!” Sabbath boomed back. “‘Do not abuse me’!”
“You abuse her—you’re the abuser, chief!”
The train had reached Grand Central. People rushed for the open doors. The girl was gone. Sabbath was freed. “‘Pray you now,’” shouted Sabbath as he wandered off the train alone, looking in all directions for Nikki’s daughter. “‘Pray you now,’” he exclaimed to those standing back from him as he strode majestically along the platform, shaking his cup out before him, “‘pray you now . . .”’ and then, without even Nikki’s daughter to prompt him, he remembered what is next, words that could have meant nothing at all to him in the theater of the Bowery Basement Players in 1961: “‘Pray you now, forget and forgive. I am old and foolish.’”
This was true. It was hard for him to believe that he was simulating any longer, though not impossible.
Thou’lt come no more;
Never, never, never, never, never.
Destroy the clock. Join the crowd.
______________
1 What follows is an uncensored transcription of the entire conversation as it was secretly taped by Kathy Goolsbee (and by Sabbath) and played by SABBATH for whoever dialed 722-2284 and took the thirty minutes to listen. In just the f
irst twenty-four hours, over a hundred callers stayed on the line to hear the harassment from beginning to end. It wasn’t long before tapes reproduced from the original began to turn up for sale around the state and, according to the Cumberland Sentinel, “as far afield as Prince Edward Island, where the tape is being used as an audio teaching aid by the Charlottetown Project on the State of Canadian Women.”
What are you doing right now?
I’m on my stomach. I’m masturbating.
Where are you?
I’m home, I’m on my bed.
You all alone?
Ummmm.
How long are you alone for?
A long time. Brian’s at a basketball game.
I see. How nice. You are all alone and on your own bed masturbating. Well, I’m glad you called. What are you wearing?
(Babyish laugh) I’m wearing my clothes.
What clothes are you wearing?
I’m wearing jeans. And a turtleneck. Standard wear.
Yes, that’s your standard wear, isn’t it? I was very excited after I spoke to you last time. You’re very exciting.
Ummmm.
You are. Don’t you know that?
But I felt bad. I felt like I disturbed you when I called at your house.
You didn’t disturb me in terms of my not wanting to hear from you. I just felt it was a good idea to stop that before it went any further.
Sorry. And I won’t do it again.
Fine. You just misjudged. And why not? You’re new to this. Okay. You’re alone and you’re on your bed.
Yeah, and also, I wanted . . . Last time we talked you said . . . about . . . I told you I felt disgusted, you know, when I get really disgusted . . . and you said about what, and I said whatever I said, like I said, my lack of ability in workshop . . . and then I think I was just very evasive, like, I didn’t really, like, I felt that I couldn’t really tell you (embarrassed laugh). . . . It’s much more specific. . . . I’m just, like . . . well, maybe it’s just now. . . it’s like I think about sex all the time (confessional laugh).