Authors: Philip Roth
All in all, things couldn’t have worked out better for everyone. Drenka had found the means by which to be her husband’s dearest friend. The one-time puppet master of the Indecent Theater of Manhattan made more than merely tolerable for her the routines of marriage that previously had almost killed her—now she cherished those deadly routines for the counterweight they provided her recklessness. Far from seething with disgust for her unimaginative husband, she had never been more appreciative of Matija’s stolidity.
Five hundred was
cheap
for all that everyone was getting in the way of solace and satisfaction, and so, however much it disturbed him to fork over those stiff, new banknotes, Sabbath displayed toward Drenka the same sangfroid that she affected as, lightly enjoying the movie cliché, she folded the bills in half and deposited them into her bra, down between the breasts whose soft fullness had never ceased to captivate him. It was supposed to be otherwise, with the musculature everywhere losing its firmness, but even where her skin had gone papery at the low point of her neckline, even that palm-size diamond of minutely crosshatched flesh intensified not merely her enduring allure but his tender feeling for her as well. He was now six short years from seventy:
what had him grasping at the broadening buttocks as though the tattooist Time had ornamented neither of them with its comical festoonery was his knowing inescapably that the game was just about over.
Lately, when Sabbath suckled at Drenka’s uberous breasts—uberous, the root word of
exuberant
, which is itself
ex
plus
uberare
, to be fruitful, to overflow like Juno lying prone in Tintoretto’s painting where the Milky Way is coming out of her tit—suckled with an unrelenting frenzy that caused Drenka to roll her head ecstatically back and to groan (as Juno herself may have once groaned), “I feel it deep down in my cunt,” he was pierced by the sharpest of longings for his late little mother. Her primacy was nearly as absolute as it had been in their first incomparable decade together. Sabbath felt something close to veneration for that natural sense of a destiny she’d enjoyed and, too—in a woman with as physical a life as a horse’s—for the soul embedded in all that vibrating energy, a soul as unmistakably present as the odorous cakes baking in the oven after school. Emotions were stirred up in him that he had not felt since he was eight and nine years old and she had found the delight of delights in mothering her two boys. Yes, it had been the apex of her life, raising Morty and Mickey. How her memory, her
meaning
, expanded in Sabbath when he recalled the alacrity with which she had prepared each spring for Passover, all the work of packing away the year-round dishes, two sets of them, and then lugging in their cartons, from the garage, the glass Passover dishes, washing them, shelving them—in less than a day, between the time he and Morty left for school in the morning and they returned in midafternoon, she’d emptied the pantry of
chumitz
and cleansed and scoured the kitchen in accordance with every last holiday prescription. Hard to determine from the way she tackled her tasks whether it was she who was serving necessity or necessity that was serving her. A slight woman with a large nose and curly dark hair, she hopped and darted to and fro like a bird in a berry bush, trilling and twittering a series of notes as liquidly bright as a cardinal’s song, a tune she exuded no less naturally than she dusted, ironed,
mended, polished, and sewed. Folding things, straightening things, arranging things, stacking things, packing things, sorting things, opening things, separating things, bundling things—her agile fingers never stopped nor did the whistling ever cease, all throughout his childhood. That was how content she was, immersed in everything that had to be done to keep her husband’s accounts in order, to live peaceably alongside her elderly mother-in-law, to manage the daily needs of the two boys, to see to it, during even the worst of the Depression, that however little money the butter-and-egg business yielded, the budget she devised did not impinge on their happy development and that, for instance, everything handed down from Morty to Mickey, which was nearly everything Mickey wore, was impeccably patched, freshly aired, spotlessly clean. Her husband proudly proclaimed to his customers that his wife had eyes in the back of her head and two pairs of hands.
Then Morty went off to the war and it all changed. Always they had done everything as a family. They had never been separated. They were never so poor that they would rent out the house in the summer and, like half the neighbors living as close to the beach as the Sabbaths did, move in back to a shitty little apartment over the garage, but they were still a poor family by American standards and none of them had ever gone anywhere. But then Morty was gone and for the first time in his life Mickey slept alone in their room. Once they went up to see Morty when he was training in Oswego, New York. For six months he trained in Atlantic City and they drove to see him there on Sundays. And when he was in pilot school in North Carolina, they took the drive all the way down south, even though his father had to turn the truck over to a neighbor he paid to run deliveries the days they were gone. Morty had bad skin and wasn’t particularly handsome, he wasn’t great in school—a B-C student in everything but shop and gym—he had never had much success with girls, and yet everybody knew that with his physical strength and his strong character he would be able to take care of himself, whatever difficulties life presented. He played clarinet in a dance band in
high school. He was a track star. A terrific swimmer. He helped his father with the business. He helped his mother in the house. He was great with his hands, but then, they all were: the delicacy of his powerful father candling the eggs, the fastidious dexterity of his mother ordering the house—the Sabbath digital artfulness that Mickey, too, would one day exhibit to the world. All their freedom was in their hands. Morty could repair plumbing, electrical appliances, anything. Give it to Morty, his mother used to say, Morty’ll fix it. And she did not exaggerate when she said that he was the kindest older brother in the world. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps at eighteen, a kid just out of Asbury High, rather than wait to be drafted. He went in at eighteen and he was dead at twenty. Shot down over the Philippines December 12, 1944.
For nearly a year Sabbath’s mother wouldn’t get out of bed. Couldn’t. Never again was she spoken of as a woman with eyes in the back of her head. She acted at times as though she didn’t even have eyes in the front of her head, and, as far as the surviving son could still recall while panting and gulping as though to drain Drenka dry, she was never again heard to whistle her signature song. Now the seaside cottage was silent when he walked up the sandy alleyway after school, and he could not tell till he got inside if she was even in the house. No honey cake, no date and nut bread, no cupcakes, nothing ever again baking in the oven after school. When the weather turned nice, she sat on the boardwalk bench overlooking the beach to which she used to rush out with the boys at dawn to buy flounder off the fishing boats at half what it cost in the store. After the war, when everybody came home, she went there to talk to Mort. As the decades passed, she talked to him more rather than less, until in the nursing home in Long Branch where Sabbath had to put her at ninety she talked to Morty alone. She had no idea who Sabbath was when he drove the four and a half hours to visit her during the last two years of her life. The living son she ceased to recognize. But that had begun as long ago as 1944.
And now Sabbath talked to
her
. And this he had not expected.
To his father, who had never deserted Mickey however much Morty’s death had broken him too, who primitively stood by Mickey no matter how incomprehensible to him his boy’s life became when he went to sea after high school or began to perform with puppets on the streets of New York, to his late father, a simple, uneducated man, who, unlike his wife had been born on the other side and had come to America all on his own at thirteen and who, within seven years, had earned enough money to send for his parents and his two younger brothers, Sabbath had never uttered a word since the retired butter-and-egg man died in his sleep, at the age of eighty-one, fourteen years earlier. Never had he felt the shadow of his father’s presence hovering nearby. This was not only because his father had always been the least talkative one in the family but because no evidence had ever been offered Sabbath to persuade him that the dead were anything other than dead. To talk to them, admittedly, was to indulge in the most defensible of irrational human activities, but to Sabbath it was alien just the same. Sabbath was a realist, ferociously a realist, so that by sixty-four he had all but given up on making contact with the living, let alone discussing his problems with the dead.
Yet precisely this he now did daily. His mother was there every day and he was talking to her and she was communing with him. Exactly how present
are
you, Ma? Are you only here or are you everywhere? Would you look like yourself if I had the means to see you? The picture I have keeps shifting. Do you know only what you knew when you were living, or do you now know everything, or is “knowing” no longer an issue? What’s the story? Are you still so miserably sad? That would be the best news of all—that you are your whistling old self again because Morty’s with you. Is he? Is Dad? And if there’s you three, why not God too? Or is an incorporeal existence just like everything else, in the nature of things, and God no more necessary there than he is here? Or don’t you inquire any further about being dead than you did about being alive? Is being dead just something you do the way you ran the house?
Eerie, incomprehensible, ridiculous, the visitation was nonetheless
real: no matter how he explained it to himself he could not make his mother go away. He knew she was there in the same way he knew when he was in the sun or in the shade. There was something too natural about his perceiving her for the perception to evaporate before his mocking resistance. She didn’t just show up when he was in despair, it didn’t happen only in the middle of the night when he awoke in dire need of a substitute for everything disappearing—his mother was up in the woods, up at the Grotto with him and Drenka, hovering above their half-clad bodies like that helicopter. Maybe the helicopter had
been
his mother. His dead mother was with him, watching him, everywhere encircling him. His mother had been loosed on him. She had returned to take him to his death.
♦ ♦ ♦
Fuck others and the affair is over.
He asked her why.
“Because I want you to.”
“That won’t do.”
“Won’t it?” said Drenka tearfully. “It would if you loved me.”
“Yes, love is slavery?”
“You are the man of my life! Not Matija—you! Either I am your woman, your
only
woman, or this all
has
to be over!”
It was the week before Memorial Day, a luminous May afternoon, and up in the woods a high wind was blowing sprigs of new leaves off the great trees and the sweet scent of everything flowering and sprouting and shooting up reminded him of Sciarappa’s Barber Shop in Bradley, where Morty took him for his haircuts when he was a small kid and where they brought their clothes to be fixed by Sciarappa’s wife. Nothing was merely itself any longer; it all reminded him of something long gone or of everything that was going. Mentally he addressed his mother. “Smell the smells, can you? Does the out-of-doors register in any way? Is being dead even worse than heading there? Or is it Mrs. Balich that’s the awfulness? Or don’t the trivialities bother you now one way or the other?”
Either he was sitting in his dead mother’s lap or she was sitting in his. Perhaps she was snaking in through his nose along with the scent of the mountain in bloom, wafting through him as oxygen. Encircling him and embodied within him.
“And just when did you decide this? What has happened to bring this on? You are not yourself, Drenka.”
“I am.
This is myself
. Tell me you will be faithful to me. Please tell me that that’s what you will do!”
“First tell me why.”
“I’m
suffering
.”
She was. He’d seen her suffer and this was what it looked like. The blurriness broadened out from the middle of her face rather like an eraser crossing a blackboard and leaving in its wake a wide streak of negated meaning. You didn’t see a face any longer but a bowl of stupefaction. Whenever the rift between her husband and their son erupted in a screaming fight she invariably wound up looking just this awful when she ran to Sabbath, numb and incoherent with fear, her sprightly cunning having evaporated before their improbable capacity for rage and its vile rhetoric. Sabbath assured her—largely without conviction—that they would not kill each other. But more than once he had himself contemplated with a shudder what might be roiling away beneath the lid of the relentlessly genial good manners that made the Balich men so impenetrably dull. Why
had
the boy become a cop? Why did he want to be out risking his life looking for criminals with a revolver and handcuffs and a lethal little club when there was a small fortune to be made pleasing the happy guests at the inn? And, after seven years, why couldn’t the amiable father forgive him? Why did he wind up charging his son with wrecking his life every single time they met? Granted that each had his own hidden reality, that like everyone else they were not without duality, granted that they were not entirely rational people and that they lacked wit or irony of any kind—nonetheless, where
was
the bottom in these Matthews? Sabbath privately conceded that Drenka had good reason to be as agitated as she was by the tremendous force of their antagonism (especially as one of them
was armed), but since she was never remotely their target, he advised her neither to take a side nor to intercede—in time the heat would have to die down, et cetera, et cetera. And eventually, when her terror had begun to lift and the liveliness that was Drenka repossessed her features, she told him that she loved him, that she couldn’t possibly live without him, that, as she so spartanly put it, “I couldn’t carry out my responsibilities without you.” Without what they got up to together, she could never be so good! Licking those sizable breasts, whose breastish reality seemed no less tantalizingly outlandish than it would have when he was fourteen, Sabbath told her that he felt the same about her, allowed it while looking up at her with that smile of his that did not make entirely clear who or what precisely he had it in mind to deride—confessed it certainly with nothing like her declamatory ardor, said it almost as though deliberately to make it appear perfunctory, and yet, stripped of all its derisive trappings, his “Feel the same way about you” happened to be true. Life was as unthinkable for Sabbath without the successful innkeeper’s promiscuous wife as it was for her without the remorseless puppeteer. No one to conspire with, no one on earth with whom to give free rein to his most vital need!