Authors: Philip Roth
After graduating from the drama school, Nikki returned to New York, but her mother, who could never get over her memories of Cleveland and who found Americans, altogether, loud and barbarous—certainly by comparison with her customers at the up-market hat shop, who were as kind and thoughtful as they could be to the widowed (that was the story) milliner (of aristocratic Cretan lineage, according to Bill and Ned)—her mother stayed in London. The time had come for Nikki to strike out on her own while her mother remained safely among the many good friends she had made through the “boys,” as everyone referred to her bosses—she and Nikki were frequently invited away to somebody’s country house for a holiday weekend, and not a few wealthy customers looked on Mrs. Kantarakis as a confidante. And then there was the security furnished by cousin Rena and the doctor, who had been extraordinarily generous, especially to Nikki. Everyone was generous to Nikki. She was an enchantress, though one who, upon her departure for America, had as yet no sexual experience with men. For that matter, since fleeing her father’s house in her mother’s arms at the age of seven, she’d had hardly any familiarity with men who were not homosexual. It remained to be seen just how much she would enchant them.
“Her mother,” Sabbath told his own mother, “died early one morning. Nikki had flown there to be with her during the last stages of the illness. Her ticket was paid for by Bill and Ned. There was nothing more to be done for her in the hospital, so the mother came back to the rooms over the hat shop to die. As the end approached, Nikki sat beside her mother, holding her hand and making her comfortable for nearly four days. Then the fourth morning she went down behind the shop to use the toilet and when she came back upstairs her mother had stopped breathing. ‘My mother died just now,’ she told me on the phone, ‘and I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there for her. I wasn’t there for her, Mickey!
She died alone!’ Compliments of Bill and Ned, I flew to London on the evening plane. I arrived around breakfast time the next day and made straight for South Audley Street. What I found was Nikki looking calm and unruffled in a chair beside her mother. It was the next day and the corpse was still in her nightgown—and there. And remained there for seventy-two hours more. When I could no longer stand the spectacle of it, I shouted at Nikki, ‘You are not a Sicilian peasant! Enough is enough! It is time for your mother to go!’ ‘No. No.
No!
’ and when she started flailing at me with her fists, I backed away, retreated down the stairs, and wandered around London for hours. What I was trying to tell her was that the vigil she had initiated over the body had exceeded my sense not of what was seemly but of what was sane. I was trying to tell her that her unconstrained intimacy with her mother’s corpse, the chatty monologue with which she was entertaining the dead woman as she sat beside her through each day, knitting at her mother’s unfinished knitting and welcoming the friends of the boys, the fondling of the dead woman’s hands, the kissing of her face, the stroking of her hair—all this obliviousness to the raw physical fact—was rendering her taboo to me.”
Was Sabbath’s mother following this story? He somehow sensed that her interest lay elsewhere. He was down into Connecticut now, driving along a beautiful, creepy stretch of river, and he thought his mother might be thinking, “It wouldn’t be hard out in that river.” But not before I see Line, Ma. . . . He had to see what it looked like before he did it himself.
And this was the first time that he realized or admitted what he had to do. The problem that was his life was never to be solved. His wasn’t the kind of life where there are aims that are clear and means that are clear and where it is possible to say, “This is essential and that is not essential, this I will not do because I cannot endure it, and that I will do because I can endure it.” There was no unsnarling an existence whose waywardness constituted its only authority and provided its primary amusement. He wanted his mother to understand that he wasn’t blaming
the futility on Morty’s death, or on her collapse, or on Nikki’s disappearance, or on his stupid profession, or on his arthritic hands—he was merely recounting to her what had happened before this had happened. That’s all you could know, though if what you think happened happens to not ever match up with what somebody else thinks happened, how could you say you know even that? Everybody got everything wrong. What he was telling his mother was wrong. If it were Nikki listening instead of his mother, she would be shouting, “It wasn’t like that!
I
wasn’t like that! You misunderstand! You always misunderstood! You’re always going at me for no reason at all!”
Homeless, wifeless, mistressless, penniless . . . jump in the cold river and drown. Climb up into the woods and go to sleep, and tomorrow morning, should you even awaken, keep climbing until you are lost. Check into a motel, borrow the night clerk’s razor to shave, and slit your throat from ear to ear. It could be done. Lincoln Gelman did it. Roseanna’s father did it. Probably Nikki herself had done it, and with a razor, a straight razor very like the one with which she had exited each night to kill herself in
Miss Julie
. About a week after her disappearance, it had occurred to Sabbath to go to the prop room and look for the razor that the valet, Jean, hands to Julie after she sleeps with him, feels herself polluted by him, and finally asks of him, “If you were in my place, what would you do?” “Go, now while it’s light—out to the barn,. . .” replies Jean, and hands her his razor. “There’s no other way to end. . . . Go!” he says. The play’s last word: go! So Julie takes the razor and goes—and embattled Nikki ineluctably follows. The razor had turned up in the drawer in the prop shop just where it was supposed to be, but there were times, nonetheless, when Sabbath could still believe that the horror was autohypnosis, that their catastrophe stemmed from the selfless, ruthless sympathy with which Nikki almost criminally embraced the sufferings of the unreal. Eagerly she surrendered her large imagination not to the overbearing beastliness of Sabbath’s imagination but to the overbearing beastliness of Strindberg’s. Strindberg had done it for him. Who better?
“I remember thinking by the third day, ‘If this goes on any longer, I’ll never fuck this woman again—I won’t be able to lie with her in the same bed.’ It wasn’t because these rites she was concocting were strange to me and at cross-purposes with rituals I was accustomed to witnessing among Jews. Had she been a Catholic, a Hindu, a Muslim, guided by the mourning practices of this religion or that; had she been an Egyptian under the reign of the great Amenhotep, observing every last detail of the ceremonial rigmarole decreed by the death god Osiris, I believe I would have done nothing more than watch in respectful silence. My chagrin was over Nikki out there
all on her own
—she and her mother against the world, apart from the world, alone together and cut off from the world, with no church, no clan to help her through, not even a simple folk formality around which her response to a dear one’s death could mercifully cohere. Two days into her vigil we happened to see a priest walking by, down on South Audley Street. ‘Those are the real ghouls,’ Nikki said. ‘I hate them all. Priests, rabbis, clergymen with their stupid fairy tale!’ I had wanted to say to her, ‘Then get a shovel and do it yourself. I’m no fan of the clergy myself. Get a shovel and bury her in Ned’s garden.’
“Her mother was laid out on the couch, under an eiderdown. She looked—before the embalmer showed up and, in Nikki’s words, ‘pickled her’—she looked as though she were merely sleeping out the day in our presence, her chin, just as she carried it in life, angled slightly to one side. Beyond the windows it was a fresh spring morning. The sparrows she fed every day were flitting about on the flowering trees and bathing in the gravel on top of the garden shed in the yard, and through the open rear windows you could see down to the sheen on the tulips. A bowl of half-eaten dog food lay beside the door but her mother’s lapdog was gone by then, taken in by Rena. It was from Rena that I later learned what had happened on the morning of the death. Nikki had told me that an ambulance had been sent for by the doctor who had come to view the body and to write up the death certificate but that she had decided to keep her mother at home until
the funeral and sent the ambulance away. Rena, who had rushed over to be with Nikki at the time, told me that the ambulance the doctor called had not been ‘sent away.’ When the driver had come through the door and started up the narrow staircase, Nikki had told him, ‘No, no!’; when he insisted he was only doing his job, Nikki struck him across the face so hard that he ran off and her wrist was sore for days. I had seen her rubbing the wrist on and off during the vigil but didn’t know what it meant until Rena told me.”
And just who did he think he was talking to? A self-induced hallucination, a betrayal of reason, something with which to magnify the inconsequentiality of a meaningless mess—
that’s
what his mother was, another of his puppets, his last puppet, an invisible marionette flying around on strings, cast in the role not of guardian angel but of the departed spirit making ready to ferry him to his next abode. To a life that had come to nothing, a crude theatrical instinct was lending a garish, pathetic touch of last-minute drama.
The drive was interminable. Had he missed a turn or was this itself the next abode: a coffin that you endlessly steer through the placeless darkness, recounting and recounting the uncontrollable events that induced you to become someone unforeseen. And so fast! So quickly! Everything runs away, beginning with who you are, and at some indefinable point you come to half understand that the ruthless antagonist is yourself.
His mother had by now draped her spirit around him, she had enwrapped him within herself, her way of assuring him that she did indeed exist unmastered and independent of his imagination.
“I asked Nikki, ‘When will the funeral be?’ But she didn’t answer. ‘It’s quite unacceptable,’ she said, ‘it’s quite unacceptably sad.’ She was seated on the edge of the couch where her mother was laid out. I was holding one of Nikki’s hands and with the other she reached over and touched her mother’s face. ‘Manoúlamou, manoulítsamou.’ Greek diminutives for ‘my dear little mother.’ ‘It’s unbearable. It’s dreadful,’ Nikki said. ‘I’m going to stay with her. I’ll sleep here. I don’t want her to be alone.’ And as
I didn’t want Nikki to be alone, I sat with her and her mother until, late in the afternoon, a funeral director from a large London firm contacted by Rena’s doctor husband came to discuss the funeral arrangements. I was a Jew accustomed to the dead’s being buried when possible within twenty-four hours, but Nikki was nothing, nothing but her mother’s child, and when I reminded her, while we were waiting for the funeral director, of what Jewish custom was, she said, ‘To put them in the ground the next
day?
How cruel of the Jews!’ ‘Well, that’s one way of looking at it.’ ‘It
is
,’ she said, ‘it’s cruel! It’s horrible!’ I said no more. She had confirmed that she didn’t want a funeral ever.
“The funeral director arrived in striped trousers and a black cutaway at around four. He was extremely polite and deferential and explained that he had rushed over from his third funeral of the day and hadn’t had a chance to change. Nikki announced that her mother was not to be moved but was to stay right where she was. He responded at a very high level of euphemism, one to which he adhered, but for a single lapse, throughout the consultation. He affected an upper-class accent. ‘As you wish, Miss Kantarakis. We won’t want to give offense, however. If mother remains with you, then one of our people will have to come and give her an injection.’ I took him to mean that she would have to be cleaned out and embalmed. ‘Don’t worry,’ he assured us crisply, ‘our man is the best in England.’ He smiled proudly. ‘He does the royal family. A very witty fellow, in fact. You have to be in this business. We couldn’t be a morbid lot.’
“A fly meanwhile had alighted on the corpse’s face and I was hoping that Nikki wouldn’t see it and it would go away. But she did see and jumped up, and for the first time since I arrived, there was a hysterical outburst. ‘Let her,’ the funeral director said to me. I, too, had jumped up to shoo the fly away. ‘Let it come out,’ he said sagely.
“After she had been calmed down, Nikki laid a tissue across her mother’s face to keep the fly from returning. Later in the day, at her request, I went out to buy some bug repellant and came back to spray the room—careful not to spray in the corpse’s
direction—and Nikki took the tissue and put it in her sweater pocket. Unknowingly—or not unknowingly—around dusk she used the tissue to blow her nose . . . and that seemed to me altogether crazy. ‘At the risk of being indelicate,’ the funeral director asked, ‘how tall was Mother? My associates will be asking when I ring.’
“He called his office some minutes later and asked what was available at the crematorium on Tuesday. It was still only Friday, and given Nikki’s condition, Tuesday seemed a long way off. But as she would as soon have had no funeral and kept her mother there for good, I’d decided on Tuesday as better than never.
“The funeral director waited while they checked the crematorium schedule. Then he looked up from the phone and said to me, ‘My associates say there’s a one o’clock slot.’ ‘Oh, no,’ Nikki whimpered, but I nodded okay. ‘Grab it,’ he snapped into the phone, and revealed at last that he was able to speak as though the world were a real place and we were real people. ‘And the service?’ he asked Nikki after he’d hung up. ‘I don’t care who does it,’ she said vaguely, ‘as long as they don’t go on about God.’ ‘Nondenominational,’ he said, and wrote that down in his book, along with her mother’s height and the grade of coffin that Nikki had chosen to have incinerated with her. He then set about to describe, delicately, the cremation procedure and to lay out the options available. ‘You can leave before the coffin disappears or you can wait until it disappears.’ Nikki was too stunned by the thought to answer and so I said, ‘We’ll wait.’ ‘And the ashes?’ he asked. ‘In her will,’ I said, ‘she just asked that they be scattered.’ Nikki, looking at the motionless tissue over her mother’s nostrils and lips, said to no one in particular, ‘I suppose we’ll take them back to New York. She hated America. But I suppose they should come with us.’ ‘You can take them,’ the funeral director replied, ‘you certainly can, Miss Kantarakis. According to the law of 1902, you can do anything you wish with them.’