Sabbath’s Theater (56 page)

And he’d come back because after two hours of staring into the sea and up at the sky and seeing nothing and everything and nothing, he’d thought that the frenzy was over and that he had regained possession of 1994. He figured the only thing that could ever swallow him up like that again would have to be the ocean. And all from only a single carton. Imagine, then, the history of the world. We are immoderate because grief is immoderate, all the hundreds and thousands of kinds of grief.

The return address was Lieutenant Morton Sabbath’s APO number in San Francisco. Six cents via airmail. Postmarked November and December 1944. In a brittle rubber band that broke into bits the moment Sabbath slipped his finger beneath it, five letters from the Pacific.

To get a letter from him was always powerful. Nothing mattered more. The insignia of the U.S. Army at the top of the page and Morty’s handwriting underneath, like a glimpse of Morty himself. Everybody read them ten times, twenty times, even after his mother had read them aloud at the dinner table. “There’s a
letter from Morty!” To the neighbors. Over the phone. “A letter from Morty!” And these were the last five.

Dec. 3,1944

Dearest Mom, Dad & Mickey,

Hello everyone, how is every little thing at home. Some mail came in today & I thought sure that I had some however I was wrong. I think someone screwed up somewhere and I think I will try to locate it. If I can I am going to fly to New Guinea and check up.

I awoke at 9:20 this morning and shaved and then made some breakfast. It began raining again so I went down to my navigator tent and painted our Group insignia on my B.4 bag. It is an indian head and I am going to print the name Air Apaches. If you ever read about the Air Apaches you will know that it is our Group. I spent most of the afternoon painting and then we brewed up some tea and cookies for a “nosh.”

Mom has anything ever been cut of my letters that I have been writing. I ate supper and then checked to see whether I was flying for tomorrow.

We played cards tonight and listened to the radio. We got some jazz. Incidently we won the game.

I got a bread from the mess hall and we have grape jelly so we made hot chocolate & ate bread & jelly this evening.

Well folks I guess thats about all for now so I will sign off with all my love. Don’t work too hard & take good care of yourselves. Give everyone my love & Be Good.

May God Bless & keep you well.

Your loving son,

Mort

Dec. 7,1944

Dearest Mom, Dad & Mickey,

Hi folks well another day is almost over and I am operations officer tonight. We have been flying pretty often around here as you probably have been reading in the newspaper.

There isn’t much new around here that I haven’t already told you. By the way if you read about the “Air Apaches” thats our Group so you will know that it was us on the mission. The war began three years ago today.

We put up our tent today and tomorrow I am going to try and put a wooden floor in. Wood is scarce around here but if you know where to go you can usually get some. We are fixing up a shower and a lot of odds and ends to make it homelike. The natives are eager to help us. They haven’t much clothes for the Japs took most of it so we give them a few articles of clothes & they will do almost anything for us.

We have air raids quite often but they don’t amount to much.

How are things going at home? The food here has gotten better & we had turkey for dinner & get plenty of vegetables.

Well folks since there isn’t much more to write about so I will sign off for tonight. Take good care of yourselves & May God Bless you. I love you very much & think of home always.

Heres a big hug a kiss folks.

Good night.

Your loving son,

Mort

Dec. 9,1944

Dearest Mom, Dad & Mickey,

Hi folks I received your v-mail the other day dated the 17th of Nov. and it sure was grand hearing from you. Mom don’t use v-mail for it takes longer to get here then air-mail letters and you can write more in a letter. Your mail comes through now in a little over 14 days so things have straightened out. Let me know where Sid L. is as soon as you find out for if he comes over here I would like to look him up. As yet I haven’t received your packages but they should arrive soon.

A few days ago I flew back to our old field to bring back a new plane. I have been here two days waiting and I again looked up Gene Hochberg and we had a good time seeing each other. I bought a new pair of GI shoes and mattress covers that I needed. I found my clothes here and picked up the laundry that I left when I went. Everything was intact and I bought more articles while here. I also purchased a case of grapefruit juice for they are good on a mission when you are thirsty. Last night I saw “When Irish Eyes are smiling” and it was very enjoyable. It rained last night and I was lazy and didn’t get up until 10:30 AM.

I am glad to hear that everyone at home is feeling fine. I think I will see how Eugene is doing today. I gave him a wooden floor for his tent yesterday.

Well folks thats about all the bull for now. Be good & May God Bless you. I think of you always.

Your loving son,

Mort

Dec. 10,1944

Dearest Mom, Dad, & Mickey,

Hello folks well we are still waiting for a new airplane. Yesterday I went to see Gene but I didn’t stay long for I had to bring the jeep back to the squadron. I read Bob Hopes book “I never left home” and it was very good. It began to rain about then and kept up until chow time. I went to a friends tent and we played bridge for a few hours. Then we cooked up a little “nosh” of ham & eggs & onions & bread & hot chocolate.

I went to sleep quite late and got up for breakfast at 7:10 AM. Most of the morning I spent cleaning my moccasins with oil and then my co-pilot and I took our pistols and practiced firing at bottles and cans. When I returned I took my gun apart and oiled it. I finished reading my book and then ate dinner. I practised my clarinet.

In the evening I went to see one of our boys who is in the hospital and he should be getting out in a few days.
Right now I am listening to the radio and writing to you.

How are things going at home? I sent home about $222 about a month ago and you haven’t said anything about receiving the money-orders. If you received them let me know. And also if you are getting my bonds and $125 allotment every month.

Well folks be good and take good care of yourselves. I miss you a lot & sure hope the war ends soon.

Good night and May God Bless you.

Your loving son,

Mort

Dec. 12, 1944

Dearest Mom, Dad & Mickey,

Well I finally returned today and I ferried a new ship here. I saw a good movie last night and when I returned to my tent we shot the bull for a few hours and hit the sack. I packed our ship in the morning and took off. We flew formation up and the new ships are a lot faster than the others.

The food here is very good and we are still working on our tent. We should have a wooden floor in soon.

We had fresh lamb for supper and good coffee. I picked up a lot of equipment for our tent while at our old field. Things are going quite well around here and I guess you read about the invasion up here. Naturally we participated in it.

How are things going at home? I haven’t received mail for the last few days but there should be some tomorrow.

I’m sure glad to hear that Mickey is doing so well with the discus and the shot. Just keep after him and make him practice and who knows he might be in the Olympics.

Let me know whether you have received my money-order of $222 and war bond.

I guess we will be going on leave in a few months.

Well folks that’s about all for now. I will keep on writing as often as I can when I have something to write.

Well Good night and May God Bless you. I think of you all often and hope to see you soon.

Your loving son,

Mort

The Japs shot him down the next day. He would be seventy. We would be celebrating his birthday. Only for a while was all this his, a very little while.

T
HE B-
25
D
had a maximum speed at 15,000 feet of 4848 miles per hour. It had a range of 1,500 miles. Empty it weighed 20,300 pounds. Wingspan of those flat gull wings 67 feet 7 inches. Length 52 feet 11 inches. Height 15 feet 10 inches. Two .5-inch nose guns and twin .5-inch guns in both the dorsal and the retractable ventral turrets. The normal bomb load was 2,000 pounds. Maximum permissible overload 3,600 pounds.

There was nothing Sabbath hadn’t known about the North American Mitchell B-25 medium bomber and little that he couldn’t remember, and remember precisely, while driving north in the dark with Morty’s things beside him on the passenger seat. He remained wrapped in the American flag. Never take it off—why should he? On his head, the red, white, and blue
V
for Victory, God Bless America yarmulke. Dressing like this made not a scrap of difference to anything, transformed nothing, abated nothing, neither merged him with what was gone nor separated him from what was here, and yet he was determined never again to dress otherwise. A man of mirth must always dress in the priestly garb of his sect. Clothes are a masquerade anyway. When you go outside and see everyone in clothes, then you know for sure that nobody has a clue as to why he was born and that, aware of it or not, people are perpetually performing in a dream. It’s putting corpses into clothes that really betrays what great thinkers we are. I liked that Linc was wearing a tie. And a Paul
Stuart suit. And a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. Now you can take him anywhere.

Jimmy Doolittle’s raid. Sixteen B-25s, land-based planes, taking off from a carrier to drop their bombs 670 miles away. From the USS
Hornet
, April 18, 1942, fifty-two years ago next week. Six minutes over Tokyo, followed by hours of pandemonium in our house, two glasses of schnapps for Sam, the annual intake in a single night. Flew right over the palace of the God Emperor (who could have stopped his nutty admirals before it even began if God had given God Emperor just an ordinary commoner’s pair of balls). Only four months after Pearl Harbor, first raid on Japan of the war—ten, eleven tons of a medium-range bomber lifting off the deck sixteen times. Then in February and March ’45, the B-29s, the Superfortresses, out of the Marianas, burning them to a crisp at night: Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe—but the biggest and best of the B-29s, which did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were eight months too late for us. The date to end the fucking thing was Thanksgiving 1944
—
that
would have been something to be thankful for. We played cards tonight and listened to the radio. We got some jazz. Incidentally we won the game.

The Jap bomber was the Mitsubishi G4M1. Their fighter was the Mitsubishi Zero-Sen. Sabbath worried every night in bed about the Zero. A math teacher at school who’d flown in World War I said the Zero was “formidable.” In the movies they called it “deadly,” and when he lay alone in the dark beside Morty’s empty bed, he couldn’t do anything to get “deadly” out of his head. The word made him want to scream. The Jap carrier plane at Pearl Harbor had been the Nakajima B5N1. Their high-altitude fighter was the Kawasaki Hien, the “Tony” that gave the B-29s a hard time until LeMay moved from Europe to XXI Bomber Command and switched from day to nighttime fire raids. Our carrier planes: Grumman F6F, Vought 54U, Curtiss P-40E, Grumman TBF-1— the Hellcat, the Corsair, the Warhawk, the Avenger. The Hellcat, at 2,000 horsepower,
twice
as powerful as the Zero. Sabbath and Ron could identify from cutout models the silhouettes of every plane the Japs put up against Morty and his crew. The P-40
Warhawk, Ron’s favorite American fighter, had a shark’s mouth painted under its nose when they used them as Flying Tigers in Burma and China. Sabbath’s favorite was Colonel Doolittle’s plane and Lieutenant Sabbath’s, the B-25: two 1,700-horsepower Wright R-2600-9 fourteen-cylinder radial engines, each driving a Hamilton-Standard propeller.

How could he kill himself now that he had Morty’s things? Something always came along to make you keep living, god-damnit! He was driving north because he didn’t know what else to do but take the carton home, put it in his studio, and lock it up there for safekeeping. Because of Morty’s things he was headed back to a wife who had nothing but admiration for a woman in Virginia who had cut off her husband’s dick in his sleep. But was the alternative to return the carton to Fish and then go back down to the beach and charge out into the rising tide? The blade head of the electric shaver contained particles of Morty’s beard. In the case with the clarinet pieces was the reed. The reed from Morty’s lips. Only inches from Sabbath, in the toilet case stamped “MS,” was the comb with which Morty had combed his hair and the scissors with which Morty had clipped his nails. And there were recordings, two of them. On each, Morty’s voice. And in his Ideal Midget Diary Year 1939, under August 26, “Mickey’s birthday” written in Morty’s hand. I cannot walk into the waves and leave this stuff behind.

Drenka.
Her
death. No idea that would be her last night. Every night saw pretty much the same picture. Got used to it. Visiting hours over at eight-thirty. Get there a little after nine. Wave to the night nurse, a good-natured buxom blond named Jinx, and just keep going down the hall to Drenka’s darkened room. It’s not allowed, but it is allowed if the nurse allows it. The first time Drenka asked, and after that nothing more had to be said. “I’m leaving now.” Always mouthed this to the nurse on the way out: meaning,
There’s no one with her now
. Sometimes when I left, she’d already be asleep from the morphine drip, her dried-out lips open and her eyelids not completely closed. Could see the whites of her eyes. Either leaving or coming I was sure that she was dead
when I saw that. But the chest was moving. It was just the drugged-out state. The cancer everywhere. But her heart and her lungs were still okay, and I never dreamed she would go that night. Got used to the oxygen prong in her nose. Got used to the drainage bag pinned to the bed. Her kidneys were failing, yet there was always urine there when I checked the bag. Got used to that. Got used to the IV pole and the morphine drip hooked to the pump. Got used to the upper part of her no longer looking like it belonged to the bottom part. Emaciated from a little above the waist, and from the waist down—boy, oh boy—bloated, edemic. The tumor pressing on the aorta, decreasing the blood flow—Jinx explained it all, and he got used to the explanations. Under the blanket, out of sight, a bag so that the shit could come out somewhere—ovarian cancer hits the colon and bowel fast. If they’d operated she’d have bled to death. Cancer too widespread for surgery. I’d got used to that, too. Widespread. Okay. We can live with widespread. I’d show up, we’d talk, I’d sit and watch her breathing through that open mouth, asleep. Breathing. Yes, oh yes, how I had got used to Drenka breathing! I’d come in, and if she was awake she’d say, “My American boyfriend is here.” Eyes and cheekbones beneath a gray turban appeared to be what was speaking to him. Patches of hair all that was left. “I failed chemotherapy,” she told him one night. But he’d got used to that. “Nobody passes everything,” he told her. She’d just go on sleeping a lot with her mouth open and her eyelids not completely closed, or she’d be waiting, propped up on her pillow, comfortable on the morphine drip—until she suddenly wasn’t and she needed a booster. But he’d got used to the booster. It was always there. “She needs a little morphine booster” and Jinx was always there to say, “I have your morphine, honey,” and so that was taken care of, and we could go on like this forever, couldn’t we? When she had to be turned and moved, Jinx was always there to move her, and he was there to help, cupping the tiny cup of cheekbones and eyes, kissing her forehead, holding her shoulders to help move her; and when Jinx lifted the blankets to turn her, he saw that the sheets and the pads were all yellow and wet, the fluid just seeping
out of her. When Jinx turned her, to move her onto her back, onto her side, the indentations of her fingers showed on Drenka’s flesh. He’d even got used to that, to that’s being Drenka’s flesh. “Something happened today.” Drenka always told them a story while they were repositioning her. “I thought I saw a blue teddy bear playing with the flowers.” “Well,” laughed Jinx, “it’s just the morphine, honey.” After the first time, Jinx whispered to Sabbath in the hallway, to calm him down. “Hallucinating. A lot of them do.” The flowers where the blue teddy bears played were from clients of the inn. There were so many bouquets the head nurse wouldn’t allow them all in the room. There were often flowers without cards. From the men. From everybody who had ever fucked her. The flowers never stopped coming. He’d got used to
that
.