by Philip Roth
“Oh, yeah,” Fish said. “I manage. I go upstairs, sure. I manage to walk up. My bedroom is upstairs. So I gotta go upstairs. Sure. I go up once a day. I go up and come down.”
“Do you sleep much?”
“No, that’s my trouble. I’m a very poor sleeper. I hardly sleep. I never slept in my life. I can’t sleep.”
Could this be everything that Sabbath thought it was? It wasn’t considered characteristic of him to extend himself this way. But he hadn’t had as interesting a conversation—barring last night’s in the hallway with Michelle—in years. The first man I’ve met since going to sea who doesn’t bore me stiff.
“What do you do when you don’t sleep?”
“I just lie in bed and think, and that’s all.”
“What do you think about?”
A bark came out of Fish, sounding like a noise coming out of a cave. Must be what he remembers of a laugh. And he used to laugh a lot, laugh like mad whenever he won that pot. “Oh, different things.”
“Do you remember anything, Fish, about the old days? Do you remember the old days at all?”
“Such as what?”
“Yetta and Sam. My parents.”
“They were your parents.”
“Yes.”
Fish was trying hard, concentrating like a man at stool. And some shadowy activity did appear momentarily to be transpiring in his skull. But finally he had to reply, “I swear I don’t remember.”
“So what do you do all day, now that you don’t sell vegetables?”
“So I walk around. I exercise. I walk around the house. When the sun is out, I’m outdoors in the sun. Today is the thirteenth of April, right?”
“Right. How do you know the date? Do you follow the calendar?”
The indignation was genuine when he said, “No. I just know today’s the thirteenth of April.”
“Do you listen to the radio? You used to listen to the radio with us sometimes. To H. V. Kaltenborn. To the news from the front.”
“Did I? No, I don’t. I got a radio in there. But I don’t bother with it. My hearing is bad. Well, I’m getting on in years. How old do you think I am?”
“I know how old you are. You’re a hundred years old.”
“So how do you know?”
“Because you were five years older than my father. My father was your cousin. The butter-and-egg man. Sam.”
“He sent you over here? Or what?”
“Yeah. He sent me over here.”
“He did, eh? He and his wife, Yetta. Do you see them often?”
“Occasionally.”
“He sent you over to me?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that remarkable?”
The word gave Sabbath an enormous boost. If he can deliver “remarkable,” then it, the brain, can come up yet with the things I want. You are dealing with a man on whom his life has left an impression. It’s in there. It’s just a matter of staying on him, staying with him, until you can take an impression of the impression. To hear him say, “Mickey. Morty. Yetta. Sam,” to hear him say, “I was there. I swear I remember. We all were alive.”
“You look pretty good for a man who’s a hundred years old.”
“Thank God. Not bad, no. I feel all right.”
“No aches or pains?”
“No, no. Thank God, no.”
“A lucky man you are, Fish, not to have pain.”
“Thank God, sure. I am.”
“So what do you enjoy to do now? Do you remember the card games with Sam? Do you remember the fishing? From the beach? From the boat with the goyim? It used to give you pleasure to visit our house at night. You would see me sitting there and you would squeeze my knee. You would say, ‘Mickey or Morris, which is it?’ You don’t remember any of this. You and my father used to speak Yiddish.”
“Vu den? I still speak Yiddish. I never forgot that.”
“That’s good. So you speak Yiddish sometimes. That’s good. What else do you do that gives you pleasure?”
“For pleasure?” He is astonished that I can ask such a question. I ask about pleasure and for the first time it occurs to him that he may be dealing with a crazy person. A madman has come into the house and there is reason to be terrified. “What kind of pleasure?” he said. “I’m just around the house and that’s all. I don’t go to see no movies or anything like that. I can’t. I wouldn’t be able to see anything anyway. So what’s the use?”
“Do you see any people?”
“Ummm.” People. There is a big blot there, obscuring the answer. People. He thinks, though what that entails I have no idea—like trying to get wet kindling to light. “Hardly,” he says at last. “I got my neighbor next door I see. He’s a goy. A Gentile.”
“Is he a nice fellow?”
“Yeah, yeah, he’s nice.”
“That’s good. As it should be. They’re taught to love their neighbors. You’re probably lucky it’s not a Jew. And who cleans for you?”
“I have a woman cleaning up a couple of weeks ago.”
Yeah, well, she is out on her ass when I take over. The filth. The dirt. The living room is little more than a floor—besides the sofa and the coffee table there is only a broken, armless upholstered chair by the stairs—and the floor is like the floor of a monkey’s cage I once saw in a zoo in a town in the boot of Italy, a zoo I’ve never forgotten. But the debris and the dust are the least of it. Either the woman is blinder than Fish or she is a crook and a drunk. She goes.
“There’s nothing here to clean,” Fish said. “The bed, it’s in good shape.”
“And who does your washing? Who washes your clothes for you?”
“The clothes . . .” That’s a hard one. They’re getting harder. Either he is tiring or he is dying. If it’s death, Fish’s long-deferred death, it wouldn’t be inappropriate if what he hears last is “Who washes your clothes?” Tasks. These men were tasks. The men and the tasks were one.
“Who does your laundry?”
“Laundry” works. “A few little things. I do it myself. I haven’t got much laundry. Just an undershirt and the shorts, and that’s all. There isn’t much to do. I wash it out in the basin, in the sink. And hang it on the line. And—it dries!” For comic effect, a pause. Then triumphantly—“it dries!” Yes, Fish is coming over; he always says something to make Mickey laugh. It didn’t take much, but there was humor in him, all right, about the miracles and the gifts. It dries! “But he’s so stingy. Before she passed away, poor woman, he never bought her a thing.” “Fischel is a lonely man,” my father says; “let him enjoy a family for ten minutes at night. He loves the boys. More than his own. I don’t know why it’s so, but he does.”
“You ever go and take a look at the ocean?” Sabbath asked.
“No. I can’t go anymore. That’s out now. Too far to walk. Good-bye, ocean.”
“Your mind’s all right, though.”
“Yeah, my mind is all right. Thank God. It’s okay.”
“And you still have the house. You made a good living selling vegetables.”
Indignant again. “No, it wasn’t a good living, it was a poor living. I used to peddle around. Asbury Park. Belmar. Belmar I used to go. In my truck. I had an open truck. All the baskets lined up. Used to be a market here. A wholesale market. And then years ago there used to be farmers. The farmers used to come in. It’s a long time ago. I forgot about it even.”
“You spent your whole life being a vegetable man.”
“Mostly, yes.”
Push. It’s like single-handedly freeing a car from the banked-up snow, but the spinning tires are taking hold, so push. Yes, I remember Morty. Morty. Mickey. Yetta. Sam. He can say it. Get him to do it.
Do what? What can be done for you at this late hour?
“Do you remember your mother and father, Fish?”
“If I remember them? Sure. Oh, yes. Of course. In Russia. I was born in Russia myself. A hundred years ago.”
“You were born in 1894.”
“Yeah. Yeah. You’re right. How did you know?”
“And do you remember how old you were when you came to America?”
“How old I was? I remember. Fifteen or sixteen years old. I was a young boy. I learned English.”
“And you don’t remember Morty and Mickey? The two boys. Yetta and Sam’s boys.”
“You’re Morty?”
“I’m his kid brother. You remember Morty. An athlete. A track star. You used to feel his muscles and whistle. The clarinet. He played the clarinet. He could fix things with his hands. He used to pluck chickens for Feldman after school. For the butcher who played cards with you and my father and Kravitz the upholsterer. I would help him. Thursdays and Fridays. You don’t remember Feldman either. It doesn’t matter. Morty was a pilot in the war. He was my brother. He died in the war.”
“During the war it was? The Second World War?”
“Yes.”
“That was quite a few years ago, isn’t it?”
“It’s fifty years, Fish.”
“That’s a long time.”
A dining room opened out back of the living room, and its windows looked onto the yard. In the winter, on weekends, they used to catalog Irving’s stamps on the dining room table, study the perforations and watermarks for as many centuries as it took before Lois came into the house and went up the stairs to her room. Sometimes she went to the toilet. The sounds of the water flowing through the pipes overhead Sabbath studied harder than he studied the stamps. The dining room chairs on which he and Irv sat were now buried away beneath clothing, draped with shirts, sweaters, pants, coats. Too blind for closets, the old man maintained his wardrobe here.
Against the length of one wall there was a sideboard that Sabbath, who had been staring at it intermittently ever since sitting down beside Fish, at last recognized. Maple veneer with rounded corners—it was his mother’s, his own mother’s treasured sideboard, where she kept the “good” dishes they never ate from, the crystal goblets they never drank from; where his father kept the tallis he used twice a year, the velvet bag of tefillin he never prayed with; and where once Sabbath had found, beneath the pile of “good” tablecloths too good for the likes of them to eat off of, a book bound in blue cloth consisting of instructions on how to survive the wedding night. The man was to bathe, powder himself, wear a soft robe (preferably silk), shave—even if he had already shaved in the morning—and the woman was to try not to pass out. Pages and pages, nearly a hundred of them, in which Sabbath could not find a single word he was looking for. The book was mostly about lighting, perfume, and love. Must have been a great help to Yetta and Sam. I only wonder where they got the cocktail shaker. No smells were involved, according to this book—not a single smell listed in the index. He was twelve. The smells he would have to come by beyond his mother’s sideboard, sometimes grandly called the credenza.
When, four years before her death, his mother had gone into the rest home and he’d sold the house, the stuff must have been distributed around or stolen. He’d thought that lawyer had arranged an auction to pay the bills. Maybe Fish had bought the piece. Out of feeling for those evenings in our house. He would already have been ninety. Maybe for twenty bucks Irving had bought the sideboard for him. Anyway, here it is. Fish here, the sideboard here—what more is here?
“Remember, Fish, how during the war the lights were out on the boardwalk? Remember they had the blackout?”
“Yeah. The lights were out. I also remember when the ocean was so rough it picked up the whole boardwalk and put it on Ocean Avenue. It raised it up twice in my life. A big storm.”
“The Atlantic is a powerful ocean.”
“Sure. Picked up the whole boardwalk and put it on Ocean Avenue. Happened twice in my life.”
“You remember your wife?”
“Of course I remember her. I came down here. I got married. A very fine woman. She passed away, it’s about thirty, forty years ago. Since then I’m alone. It’s no good to be alone. It’s a lonely life. So what are you going to do? Nothing you can do about it. Make the best of it. That’s all. When it’s sunny out, the sun, I go out in the back. And I sit in the sun. And I get nice and brown. That’s my life. That’s what I love. The outdoor life. My backyard. I sit there mostly all day when the sun is out. You understand Yiddish? ‘You’re old, you’re cold.’ Today it’s raining.”
To get over to that sideboard. But by now Fish has put his hands on my thighs, they are resting on me while we talk, and not even Machiavelli could have got up at that moment, even if he knew, as I did, that inside that sideboard was everything he had come looking for. I knew this. Something is there that is not my mother’s ghost: she’s down in the grave with her ghost. Something is here as important and as palpable as the sun that turns Fish brown. Yet I couldn’t move. This must be the veneration that the Chinese have for the old.
“You fall asleep out there?”
“Where?”
“In the sunshine.”
“No. I don’t sleep. I just look. I close my eyes and I look. Yeah. I can’t sleep there. I told you before. I’m a very poor sleeper. I go upstairs in the evening, about four or five o’clock. I go to bed. So I rest in the bed, but I don’t sleep. A very poor sleeper.”
“Do you remember when you first came down the shore by yourself?”
“When I came to the shore? What do you mean, from Russia?”
“No. After New York. After you left the Bronx. After you left your mother and father.”
“Oh. Yeah. I came down here. You’re from the Bronx?”
“No. My mother was. Before she married.”
“Yes? Well, I just got married and I came down here. Yeah. I married a very fine woman.”
“How many children did you have?”
“Two. A boy and a girl. My son, the one who died not long ago. An accountant. A good job. With a retail concern. And Lois. You know Lois?”
“Yes, I know Lois.”
“A lovely child.”
“That she is. It’s very nice to see you, Fish.” Taking his hands in mine. About time.
“Thank you. It’s a pleasure seeing you, I’m sure.”
“You know who I am, Fish? I’m Morris. I’m Mickey. I’m Yetta’s son. My brother was Morty. I remember you so well, on the street with the truck, all the ladies coming out of the houses—”
“To the truck.”
He’s with me, he’s back there—and squeezing my hands with a strength greater even than what I have left in my own! “To the truck,” I said.
“To buy. Isn’t that remarkable?”
“Yes. That’s the word for it. It was all remarkable.”
“Remarkable.”
“All those years ago. Everyone alive. So can I look around your house at the photographs?” There were photographs arranged along the top of the sideboard. No frames. Just propped up against the wall.
“You want to take a picture of it?”
I did want to take a picture of the sideboard. How did he know? “No, I just want to look at the photographs.”
I lifted his hands from my lap. But when I got up, he got up and followed me into the dining room, walked very well, right at my heels, followed me to the sideboard like Willie Pep chasing some little pisher around the ring.
“Can you see the pictures?” he asked.
“Fish,” I said, “this is you—with the truck!” There was the truck, with the baskets lined up along the slanting sides and Fish on the street next to the truck, standing at military attention.
“I think so,” he said. “I can’t see. It looks like me,” he said when I held it up directly in front of his glasses. “Yes. That’s my daughter there, Lois.”
Lois had lost her looks later in life. She too.
“And who is this man?”
“That’s my son, Irving. And who is this?” he asked me, picking up a photograph that was lying flat on the sideboard. They were old, faded photographs, water-stained around the edges and some sticky to the touch. “
That’s me,” he asked, “or what?”
“I don’t know. Who is this? This woman. Beautiful woman. Dark hair.”
“Maybe it’s my wife.”
Yes. The potato then probably no more than a bud. I can’t remember any of those women approaching the beauty of this one. And she’s the one who died.
“And is this you? With a girlfriend?”
“Yeah. My girlfriend. I had her then. She passed away already.”
“You outlive everybody, even your girlfriends.”
“Yeah. I had a few girlfriends. I had a few, in my younger years, after my wife passed away. Yeah.”
“Did you enjoy that?”
The words have no meaning for him at first. In this question he seems to have met his match. We wait, my crippled hands on my mother’s sideboard, which is thick with grease and dirt. The tablecloth on the dining room table bears every stain imaginable. Nothing else here is quite so fetid and foul. And I’ll bet it’s one of the cloths we never got to use ourselves.
“I asked if you enjoyed the girls.”
“Well, yes,” he suddenly replied. “Yes. It was all right. I tried a few.”
“But not recently.”
“What reason?”
“Not recently.”
“What do you mean what reason?”
“Not lately.”
“Lately? No, too old for that. Finished with that.” He waves a hand almost angrily. “That’s done. That’s out. Good-bye, girlfriends!”
“Any more photos? You have a lot of nice old photographs. Maybe there are more inside.”
“Here? Inside here? Nothing.”
“You never know.”
The top drawer, where once one would have found a bag of tefillin, a tallis, a sex manual, the tablecloths, reveals itself, when opened, to be indeed empty. Her whole life was devoted to keeping things in drawers. Things to call ours. Debby’s drawers, too, things to call hers. Michelle’s drawers. All the existence, born and unborn, possible and impossible, in drawers. But empty drawers looked at long enough can probably drive you mad.