Sabbath’s Theater (35 page)

“Good day,” said Sabbath and formally bowed to them. “I am the beneficiary of Roseanna’s nest-building instinct and the embodiment of all the resistance she encounters in life. I am sure that each of you has an unworthy mate—I am hers. I am Mickey Sabbath. Everything you have heard about me is true. Everything is destroyed and I destroyed it. Hello, Rosie.”

It did not astonish him when she failed to pop up out of the chair to embrace him. But when she took off the sunglasses and shyly said, “Hi,” . . . well, the voice on the phone had not led him to expect such loveliness. Only fourteen days off the sauce and away from him, and she looked thirty-five. Her skin was clear and tawny, her shoulder-length hair shone more golden than brown, and she seemed even to have recovered the width of her mouth and that appealing width between her eyes. She had a notably broad face but her features had been vanishing within it for years. Here lay the simple origin of their suffering: her knockout girl-next-door looks. In just fourteen days she had cast off two decades of bungled life.

“These,” she said awkwardly, “are some residents of the house.”
Helen Kylie, Myra, Phyllis, Aggie
. . . “Would you like to see my room? We’ve got a little time.” She was now an utterly disconcerted child, too embarrassed by a parent’s presence to be anything but miserable so long as he remained among her friends.

He followed Roseanna up the stairs to the veranda—three smokers out there, youngish women like the ones on the lawn— and into the house. They passed a small kitchen and turned down a corridor lined with notices and newspaper clippings. To one side the corridor opened onto a small, dark living room where another group of women were watching TV, and to the other onto the nurse’s station, partitioned in glass and cheerily hung with “Peanuts” posters above the two desks. Roseanna pulled him halfway through the door. “My husband’s here,” she said to the young nurse on duty. “Fine,” replied the nurse and nodded politely to Sabbath, whom Roseanna immediately dragged away before he
told the nurse, too, that everything was destroyed and he had destroyed it, right on the money though that indictment might be.

“Roseanna!” a friendly voice called from the living room. “Roseanna Banana!”

“Hi.”

“Back to Bennington,” said Sabbath.

Bitterly she jumped on him. “Not
quite!
”

Her room was small, freshly painted a sparkling white, with two curtained windows looking onto the front yard, a single bed, an old wooden desk, and a dresser. All anyone needed, really. You could live in a place like this forever. He stuck his head into the bathroom, turned on a tap—“Hot water,” he said approvingly— and then, when he came out, saw on the desk three framed photographs: the one of her mother wrapped in a fur coat in Paris just after the war, the old one of Ella and Paul with their two plump, blond children (Eric and Paula) and a third (Glenn) plainly on the way, and a photograph that he had never seen before, a studio portrait of a man in a suit, tie, and starched collar, a stern, broad-faced middle-aged man who did not look at all “broken” but could be no one but Cavanaugh. There was a composition notebook open on the desk, and Roseanna closed it with one quivering hand while she nervously circled the room. “Where’s the binder?” she said. “You forgot the binder!” She was no longer the sylph in sunglasses he’d seen on the lawn, merrily laughing with Helen, Myra, Phyllis, and Aggie.

“I left it locked in the car. It’s under the seat. It’s safe.”

“And what,” she cried in all seriousness, “if somebody steals the car?”

“Is that likely, Roseanna? That car? I was hurrying to be on time. I thought we’d get it after dinner. But I’ll leave whenever you want me to. I’ll get the binder and leave now if you want me to. You looked great until two minutes ago. I’m no good for your complexion.”

“I planned to show you the place. I wanted to take you around. I
did
. I wanted to show you where I swim. Now I’m confused. Terribly. I feel hollow. I feel awful.” Sitting on the edge of her bed,
she began to sob. “It’s, it’s a thousand dollars a day here” were the words she managed finally to utter.

“Is that what you’re crying about?”

“No. The insurance covers it.”

“Then what is making you cry?”

“Tomorrow . . . tomorrow night, at the meeting, I have to tell ‘My Story.’ It’s my turn. I’ve been making notes. I’m terrified. For days I’ve been making notes. I’m nauseated, my stomach hurts. . . .”

“Why be terrified? Pretend you’re talking to your class. Pretend they’re just your kids.”

“I’m not terrified of
speaking
,” she replied angrily. “It’s what I’m
saying
. It’s my saying the
truth
.”

“About?”

She couldn’t believe his stupidity. “About?
About?
Him!” she cried, pointing to her father’s picture. “That man!”

So. It’s
that
man. It’s
him
.

Innocently enough, Sabbath asked, “What did he do?”

“Everything.
Everything
.”

The dining room, on the first floor of the Mansion, was pleasant and quiet and bright with light from the bay windows that looked out across to the lawn. The patients sat where they liked, mostly at oak tables large enough for eight, but a few stayed apart at tables along the wall that seated two. Again he was reminded of the inn at the lake and the pleasant mood of the dining room there when Drenka officiated as high priestess. Unlike the customers at the inn, the patients served themselves from a buffet table where tonight there were french fried potatoes, green beans, cheeseburgers, salad, and ice cream—thousand-buck-a-day cheeseburgers. Whenever Roseanna got up to refill her glass of cranberry juice, one or another of those drying out and crowded together at the juice machine smiled at her or spoke to her, and as she passed with yet another full glass, someone at a table took hold of her free hand. Because tomorrow night she had to tell “My Story” or because tonight “he” was here? He wondered if anybody at Usher—patient, doctor, or nurse—had as yet dialed across the state line to get an earful of what had put her here.

Only it was the father who had done everything who had put her here.

But how come she’d never told him of this “everything” before? Hadn’t she dared to speak of it? Hadn’t she dared to remember it? Or did the charge so clarify for her the history of her misery that whether it was truly rooted in fact was a cruelly irrelevant question? At last she possessed the explanation that was at once exalted and hideous and, by Zeitgeist standards, more than reasonable. But where—if anywhere any longer—was a true picture of the past?

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 Scripture
²
), 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.