Doubtless because the dinner hour was approaching, the crowd of smokers gathered outside the front door of the Mansion numbered twenty or twenty-five, a handful of them surprisingly young, boys and girls in their teens who were dressed like the students in the valley, the boys with their baseball caps on backward and the girls in college T-shirts, running shoes, and jeans. He asked the prettiest of the girls—who would also have been the tallest if only she had stood up straight—to direct him to Roderick House and observed, when she raised her arm to point the way, a horizontal slash mark across her wrist that looked to be only recently healed.
An ordinary autumn late afternoon—which is to say, radiant and extraordinary. How horrible, how dangerous this beauty must be to someone suicidally depressed, yet the kind of day, thought Sabbath, that perhaps makes it possible for a garden-variety depressive to believe that the cavern through which he is crawling may be leading in the direction of life. Childhood at its very best is recalled, and the abatement, if not of adulthood, at least of dread seems for the moment possible. Autumn at the psychiatric hospital, autumn and its famous meanings! How can it be autumn if I am here? How can I be here if it is autumn? Is it autumn? The year again in magical transition and it does not even register.
Roderick House lay just off the bottom of a turning of the road that ringed the lawn and led back out to the county highway. The house was a smaller, two-story version of the Mansion, one of seven or eight such houses set irregularly back among the trees, each with an open veranda and a grassy front yard. Coming upon Roderick from the rise of the drive, Sabbath saw four women sitting on outdoor furniture pulled close together on the lawn. The one reclining in the white plastic chaise was his wife. She was wearing sunglasses and lying perfectly still, while around her the others were in lively conversation. But then something so funny was said by someone—perhaps even by Roseanna—that she sprang to a sitting position and clapped her hands together with joy. Her laugh was more spontaneous than he’d heard it for years. They were all still laughing when Sabbath appeared, walking across the lawn. One of the women leaned toward Roseanna. “Your visitor,” she whispered.
“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 Scripture2), 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.
We had different women, housekeepers, who would live with us, that would help to make the dinner. My father also did the cooking. A little bit vague in my memory. The housekeeper would sit with us too. I don’t remember the dinners that well.
He was not there after school. I had a key. I would go to the store and buy myself some food. Pea soup. Cake and cookies that I liked. My sister would be home. We would take a snack in the afternoon, and then we would go out and play with our friends.
Recollection of his snoring loudly. Had to do with his drinking. Find him in the morning fully dressed, sleeping on the floor. So drunk he would miss the bed.
He wouldn’t drink during the week but on weekends. We had a sailboat for a while and we would go out in the summertime on the boat. He was overpowering. Wanted his way. And he wasn’t a terrific sailor. As he got a little bit more drunk he would lose control and walk and turn his pockets inside out to show us he had no money. And then he would be clumsy, and if we had a friend along, he embarrassed me terribly. Very disgusted by him physically when he did these things.
I needed clothes so he would take me to the clothing store. I was very embarrassed by having a father to do that. He didn’t have the taste for it and sometimes he made me buy clothes that I didn’t like and forced me to wear them. I remember a loden jacket that I hated. I hated it with a passion. I felt very tomboyish because I didn’t have women who could take care of me and give me advice. That was very hard.
He would have the housekeepers and several of them wanted to marry him. I remember one who was an educated woman and she cooked very well and she wanted so much to marry the professor. But it always ended in catastrophe. Ella and I would listen through the doors to follow the romantic developments. We knew exactly when they were fucking. I don’t imagine he was a good fuck, drunk as he was. But we would always listen from behind the door and were aware of everything going on. But then the reality set in, his bossing them around, telling them even how to do the dishes. He was a professor of geology and so he knew how to wash the dishes better than they did. There would be arguments and screaming, and I don’t think he hit the women but there was always an unpleasant ending. When they left it was always a crisis. And for me there was always the expectation of the crisis. And when I was twelve and thirteen and grew more interested in going out and meeting boys, and I had a gang of girlfriends, he took that very hard. He would sit drinking his gin by himself and fall asleep that way. I can’t think of him, that isolated person who could not manage by himself, without crying, as I am doing now.
She left in 1945, when I was eight years old. I don’t remember when she left, I just remember being left. And then I remember when she came back the first time, 1947, at Christmas. She brought some toy animals that made noises. My sense of desperation. I wanted my mother back. Ella and I were again listening, now to what she and our father were talking about behind the doors. Maybe they were fucking too. I don’t know. But what went on behind the doors we tried to listen to. There were intense whispers and sometimes very loud arguments. My mother was there for two weeks and it was a great relief when she left because the tension was so awful. She was a striking-looking woman, well dressed, so worldly to me from living in Paris.
He used to have a locked desk. Ella and I knew how to open it with a knife, so we always had access to his secrets. We found letters from the different women. We laughed and thought it was a big joke. One night my father came into my room and he said, “Oh, I’m falling in love.” I pretended that I knew nothing. He said he was going to get married. I thought, “Wonderful, now I can be relieved of my duty of caring for him.” She was a widow, already sixty, and he thought she had some money. No sooner had they married than the arguments started, the same as with the other women. This time I felt myself in the middle of the whole thing, responsible for the fact that they had married! My father came to me and said it was terrible because she was older than she said and she didn’t have the money she said she had. An enormous calamity. And she began bad-mouthing me. Complaining that I didn’t study, that I was spoiled, I wasn’t reliable, I was messy, I didn’t clean up my room, a hopeless brat and I never told the truth or listened to what she said.
I was taking a bath in my mother’s place and the phone rang and I heard my mother screaming. My first thought was that my father had killed my stepmother. But my mother came into the bathroom and she said, “Your father is dead. I have to go Cambridge.” I said, “What about me?” She said, “You have to study and I don’t think you should go.” But I insisted that this was important for me and so she let me come with her. Ella didn’t want to come, she was afraid to, but I made her come. He had left a letter to Ella and me. I still have that letter. I have all the letters he sent me when I went to live with my mother. I haven’t read them since he died. When I got them in the mail I couldn’t read them. To receive a letter from my father made me nauseated all day. My mother would finally make me open it. I would read it in her presence or she would read it to me. “Why haven’t you written your father who misses you?” In the third person. “Why haven’t you written to your father who loves you so much? Why did you lie to me about the money?” Then the next day, “Oh, my beloved Roseanna, I did receive a letter from you and I’m so happy.”
I didn’t hate him but he was a giant discomfort for me. He had gigantic power over me. He wasn’t drunk every day because he had to teach. It was when he was drunk that he would come into my room late at night and lie in bed beside me.
In February’50 I moved into my mother’s apartment with Ella. I saw my mother as my rescuer. I adored her and looked up to her. I thought she was beautiful. My mother made me into a doll. Overnight I became a popular young girl, with all the boys after me, and I got tall practically overnight. There was even a “Roseanna Club,” the boys told me. But the attention I got, I couldn’t take in. I wasn’t there. I was someplace else. It was hard. But I do remember that I suddenly became very prim-looking, striped little dresses, and petticoats, and a rose in my hair for parties. My mother’s mission in life was to justify her leaving. She said he would have killed her. Even when she picked up the phone to talk to him, she was afraid of him—her veins would stick out and she’d go white. I think I heard it every day, one way or another, her justification for running away. She too hated when his letters would come but she was too afraid of him not to make me read them. And there was a struggle over money. He didn’t want to pay if I didn’t live with him. It was always me, never Ella. I had to live with him or he wouldn’t pay for me. I don’t know how they resolved it, all I know is that there was always a struggle over money and me.
There was something physically disgusting about him. The sexual part. I had then and I have still a strong physical distaste for him. For his lips. I thought they were ugly. And the way he held me, even in public, like a woman he loved instead of like a young girl. When he took me on his arm to take a walk, I felt I was in a grip I could never get out of.
I got so frantic and busy doing other things that I was able for a while to forget about him. I went to France that next summer after his death and at fourteen I had a love affair. I stayed with a friend of my mother’s and there were all these boys . . . so I did forget him. But I was in a daze for years. I’ve been in a daze always. I don’t know why he comes to haunt me now that I’m a woman in her fifties, but he does.
I prepared myself to read his letters last summer by picking some flowers and making it pleasant and when I started reading I had to stop.
I drank to survive.
On the page following, every line of her handwriting had been scratched out so heavily that barely anything remained legible. He searched for the words to amplify “It was when he was drunk that he would come into my room late at night and lie in bed beside me,” but all he could distinguish, even with microscopic scrutinizing, were the words “white wine,” “my mother’s rings,” “a torture day” . . . and these were part of no discernible sequence. What she’d written here was not for the ears of the patients at that meeting or for the eyes of anyone, herself included. But then he turned the page and found some kind of exercise written out quite legibly, perhaps one she had been assigned by her doctor.
Reenactment of leaving my father at age thirteen, 39 years ago, in February. First as I remember it and then as I would have liked it to happen.
As I remember it: My father had picked me up at the hospital where I’d checked in a few days earlier to have a tonsillectomy. In spite of all my fear of him, I could tell that he was very happy to have me home, but I felt as I often did with him—I can’t quite pinpoint it, but made terribly uncomfortable by his breathing and his lips. I have no recollection of the act itself. Just the vibrations set off in me by his breathing and his lips. I never told Ella. I haven’t to this day. I have told no one.
Daddy told me that he and Irene did not get along very well. That she continued to complain about me, that I was a slob and didn’t study or listen to what she had to say. Best for me to stay away from her as much as possible. . . . Daddy and I were sitting in the living room after lunch. Irene was cleaning up in the kitchen. I felt weak and tired but determined. I had to tell him now that I was leaving him. That everything was already planned. My mother had agreed to take me as long as—she stressed this repeatedly—it was my will to come and not her coercion that had made me. Legally my father had custody over us. Rather unusual at that time. My mother had given up all claims on us, since she felt we children should not be separated and she had few resources to bring us up. Besides, Daddy was likely to kill us all if we all left him. It’s true that he had commented after reading in the newspaper about family tragedies where a husband actually killed everyone, including himself, that that was the right thing to do.
I remember my father standing in front of me looking much older than fifty-six, bushy white hair and a worn face, slightly stooped over but still tall. He was pouring coffee into a cup. I told him boldly that I was leaving. That I had talked to my mother and she had agreed to let me come to her. He almost dropped his cup and his face became ashen. Everything went out of him. He sat down, speechless. He did not frighten me by getting angry, which I had feared. Although I often defied him, I was always deadly afraid of him. But not this time. I knew I had to get out of there. If I didn’t, I was dead. All he could say was, “I understand, but we must not let Irene know. We will only tell her that you are going to your mother to recuperate.” Less than six months later he hanged himself. How could I not believe I was responsible?
As I would have liked it to happen: Feeling rather weak but happy that the surgery was over, I was glad to be going home. My father had picked me up at the hospital. It was a sunny January day. Daddy and I sat in the living room after finishing lunch. With my sore mouth I could only drink liquids. I had no appetite and I was also worried about starting to bleed. I had gotten scared in the hospital seeing other patients being readmitted because of slow bleeding. I was told you could bleed to death if it wasn’t discovered in time. Daddy sat next to me on the sofa. He told me that he wanted to talk to me. He told me that my mother had called and told him that I might want to move to her now that I was a grown girl. Daddy said that he understood I was having a hard time. This had been a difficult year for everyone. There had been a lot of unhappiness between him and Irene and he knew it had spilled over on me. His marriage was not working out the way he hoped, but I, who was his daughter and still a child—now a teenager but still a child—had absolutely no responsibility for the way things were at home. He told me that it was unfortunate that I had been in the middle, with Irene coming to complain about him and he coming to complain about her. He felt guilty about this, and therefore, though it was hard for him to see me go since he loved me dearly, he felt that should I want to go it was probably a good idea. Of course he would pay child support for me if I moved to mother. He truly wanted what was best for me. He went on to tell me that he had not been feeling well for a long time, often suffering from insomnia. I felt enormously relieved that he understood my problems. I would now at last have a mother to guide me. Also I could come back any time I wanted, my room would always be there.
Dear Father,
Today, while waiting for your letters to me to arrive at the hospital, I’ve decided to write a letter to you. The pain I felt then, the pain I feel now—are they the same? I would hope not. Yet they feel identical. Except today I am tired of hiding from my pain. My old hiding skill (being drunk) won’t ever work again. I am not suicidal, the way you were. I only wanted to die because I wanted the past to leave me alone and go away. Leave me alone, Past, let me just sleep!
So here I am. You have a daughter in a mental hospital. You did it. Outside it is a beautiful fall day. Clear blue sky. The leaves changing. But within I am still terrified. I will not say that my life has been wasted but do you know that I was robbed by you? My therapist and I have talked about it and I know now that I was robbed by you of the ability to have a normal relationship with a normal man.
Ella used to say that the best thing you did was to commit suicide. That’s how simple it is for Ella, my unmolested sister with all her lovely children! What a strange family I come from. Last summer when I was at Ella’s I visited your grave. I had never been back since your funeral. I picked some flowers and put them on your stone. There you lay next to Grandpa and Grandma Cavanaugh. I wept for you and for the life that ended so horribly. You nebulous figure, so abstract and yet so crucial to me, please let God watch over me when I have to undertake my task tomorrow night!
Your daughter in a mental hospital,
Roseanna
By eight-ten he had read everything three times over and she still had not returned to the room. He studied the father’s photo, looking in vain for a visible sign of the damage done him and the damage he’d done. In the lips she hated he could see nothing extraordinary. Then he read as much as he could stand of A Step-by-Step Guide for Families of Chemically Dependent Persons, a paperback book on the table beside her pillow that was undoubtedly intended to brainwash him once she had returned home to displace Drenka from their bed. Here he was introduced to Share and Identify, who soon were to become household helpers, like Happy or Sleepy or Grumpy or Doc. “Emotional pain,” he read, “can be broad and deep. . . . It hurts to become involved in arguments. . . . And what about the future? Will things keep getting worse?”
He left on the desk the file cabinet key that he’d found in her riding boot. But before he went down to the nurse’s station to ask where Roseanna might be, he returned to her notebook and took fifteen more minutes to make a contribution of his own directly below the letter she had written to her late father earlier that day. He did nothing to disguise his handwriting.
Dear little Roseanna!
Of course you are in a mental hospital. I warned you again and again about separating yourself from me and separating me from pretty little Helen Kylie. Yes, you are mentally ill, you have completely lost yourself to drink and cannot retrieve yourself on your own, but your letter today still gave me a real shock. If you want to take legal action, go ahead, even though I am dead. I never did expect that death would bring me any peace. Now, thanks to you, my beloved little darling, being dead is as awful as being alive was. Take legal action. You who abandoned your father have no position at all. For five years I lived entirely for you. Because of the expenses of your education and your clothes, etc., I was never able to be secure on a professor’s salary. For my own part, during those years I bought nothing, not even clothes. I even had to sell the boat. Nobody can say that I did not sacrifice everything to taking loving care of you, even though one can argue about different methods of upbringing.
I don’t have time to write any more. Satan is calling me to my session. Dear little Roseanna, cannot you and your husband be happy in the end? If not, the fault is entirely your mother’s. Satan agrees. He and I have talked in therapy about the husband you chose and I know for sure that I have nothing to be guilty about. If you did not marry a normal man it is entirely your mother’s fault for sending you to a coeducational school during the dangerous years of puberty. All the pain in your life is entirely her responsibility. My anxiety, which has its roots way back when I was alive, will not disappear even here, because of what your mother did to you and what you did to me. In our group there is another father who had an ungrateful daughter. He shared about his agony and we identified. It was very helpful. I learned that I cannot change my ungrateful daughter.
Only how much farther do you want to push me, my little one? Didn’t you push me far enough? You judge me entirely by your pain, you judge me entirely by your holy feelings. But why don’t you judge me for a change by my pain, by my holy feelings? How you cling to your grievance! As though in a world of persecution you alone have a grievance. Wait till you’re dead—death is grievance and only grievance. Perennial grievance. It is despicable of you to continue this attack on your dead father—I will be in therapy here forever because of you. Unless, unless, dear little Roseanna, you were somehow to find it in you to write just a few thousand pages to grieving Papa to tell him how remorseful you are for everything you did to ruin his life.
Your father in Hell,
Dad
“Probably still at the Mansion,” said the nurse, consulting her watch. “They hang around to smoke. Why don’t you go over there? If she’s headed this way, you’ll pass her on the drive.”
But at the Mansion, where smokers were indeed gathered once again outside the main door, he was told that Roseanna had gone to the gym with Rhonda to take a swim. The gym was a low, sprawling building down the lawn and across the road—they told him he could see the pool through the windows.
There was no one swimming there. It was a big, well-lit pool, and, after peering through the misty windows, he went inside to see if perhaps she was at the bottom of it, dead. But the young woman attendant, sitting at a desk next to a pile of towels, said no, Roseanna hadn’t been there tonight. She’d done her hundred laps that afternoon.
He proceeded back up the dark hill to the Mansion to look in the lounge where the meeting had been held. He was guided to it by the glazier, who’d been reading a magazine in the parlor while someone at the piano—the Wellesley girlfriend of the Marlboro man—was tapping out “Night and Day” with one hand. The lounge was along a broad corridor with a pay phone at either end. Standing at one of them was a small, skinny Hispanic kid of about twenty who Roseanna had told him at dinner was an addict who dealt cocaine. She was wearing a colorful nylon sweat suit and had a headset over her ears even as she loudly argued over the phone in what Sabbath figured to be either Puerto Rican or Dominican Spanish. From what he understood, she was telling her mother to fuck herself.
In the lounge, a large room with a television screen at the far end, there were couches and lots of easy chairs scattered about, but it was empty now except for two elderly women quietly playing cards at a table beside a standing lamp. One was a gray-haired patient, dumpy but with a becoming air of antique jadedness, whom several of the patients had jokingly applauded when she’d appeared, twenty minutes late, in the dining room doorway. “My public,” she had said grandly in her high-born New England accent, and curtsied. “This is the P.M. performance,” she announced, fluttering into the room on her toes. “If you’re lucky you can come to the A.M. performance.” The woman playing cards with her was her sister, a visitor, who must also have been in her late seventies.
“Have you seen Roseanna?” Sabbath called over to them.
“Roseanna,” replied the patient, “is seeing her doctor.”
“It’s eight-thirty at night.”
“The suffering that is the hallmark of human affairs,” she informed him, “does not diminish at eventide. To the contrary. But you must be the husband who is of such importance to her. Yes. Yes.” Cannily sizing him up—girth, height, beard, baldness, costume—she said with a gracious smile, “That you are a very great man is unmistakable.”
On the second floor of the Mansion, Sabbath made his way past a row of patients’ rooms to the end of the corridor and a nurse’s station that was about twice the size of the one at Roderick, a lot less bright and cheery, but mercifully without the “Peanuts” posters. Two nurses were doing some paperwork, and atop a low file cabinet, swinging his legs and drinking what looked from both the plastic sack full of Pepsis at his side and the wastebasket at his feet to be his sixth or seventh soda, sat a muscular young man with a dark chin beard wearing black jeans, a black polo shirt, and black sneakers, who vaguely resembled the Sabbath of some thirty years ago. He was expounding to one of the nurses in an impassioned voice; from time to time she glanced up to acknowledge what he was saying but then went right back to her paperwork. She herself couldn’t have been more than thirty, chunky, robust, clear-eyed, with dark hair clipped neatly short, and she gave Sabbath a friendly wink when he appeared at the door. She was one of the two nurses who had searched Rosie’s suitcases the afternoon they arrived.
“Ideological idiots!” proclaimed the young man in black. “The third great ideological failure of the twentieth century. The same stuff. Fascism. Communism. Feminism. All designed to turn one group of people against another group of people. The good Aryans against the bad others who oppress them. The good poor against the bad rich who oppress them. The good women against the bad men who oppress them. The holder of the ideology is pure and good and clean and the other is wicked. But do you know who is wicked? Whoever imagines himself to be pure is wicked! I am pure, you are wicked. How can you swallow that stuff, Karen?”
“I don’t, Donald,” the young nurse replied. “You know I don’t.”
“She does. My ex-wife does!”
“I am not your ex-wife.”
“There is no human purity! It does not exist! It cannot exist!” he said, kicking the file cabinet for emphasis. “It must not and should not exist! Because it is a lie! Her ideology is like all ideologies—founded in a lie! Ideological tyranny. It’s the disease of the century. The ideology institutionalizes the pathology. In twenty years there will be a new ideology. People against dogs. The dogs are to blame for our lives as people. Then after dogs there will be what? Who will be to blame for corrupting our purity?”
“I hear where you’re coming from,” mumbled Karen while attending to the work on her desk.
“Excuse me,” said Sabbath. He leaned into the room. “I don’t mean to interrupt a man whose aversions I wholeheartedly endorse, but I am looking for Roseanna Sabbath and I have been told she is seeing her doctor. Any way this can be established as fact?”
“Roseanna’s in Roderick,” said the Donald in black.
“But she’s not there now. I can’t find her. I came all this way and I’ve lost her. I am her husband.”
“Are you? We’ve heard so many wonderful things about you in group,” Donald said, again whacking both sneakers against the file cabinet and reaching into the plastic sack for a Pepsi. “The great god Pan.”
“The great god Pan is dead,” a deadpan Sabbath informed him. “But I see”—stentorian now—“that you are a young fellow unafraid of the truth. What are you doing in a place like this?”
“Trying to leave,” said Karen, rolling her eyes like an exasperated kid. “Donald’s been trying since nine this morning. Donald’s been graduated but he can’t go home.”
“I have no home. The bitch destroyed my home. Two years ago,” he told Sabbath, who by now had come into the room and taken the empty chair beside the wastebasket. “I came back from a business trip one night. My wife’s car isn’t in the driveway. I go into the house and it’s empty. All the furniture is gone. All she left was the album with the wedding pictures. I sat on the floor and looked at the wedding pictures and cried. I came home from work every day and looked at the wedding pictures and cried.”
“And like a good boy, drank your dinner,” said Karen.
“The booze was only to quell the depression. I got over that. I’m in the hospital,” he told Sabbath, “because she is getting married today. Got married today. She married another woman. A rabbi married them. And my wife is not Jewish!”
“But the other woman is Jewish?” asked Sabbath.
“Yeah. The rabbi was there to please the other woman’s family. How’s that?”
“Well,” said Sabbath gently, “rabbis occupy an exalted position in the Jewish mind.”
“Fuck that. I’m Jewish. What the fuck is a rabbi doing marrying two lesbos? You think in Israel a rabbi would do it? No, only in Ithaca, New York!”
“To embrace humanity in all its glorious diversity,” asked Sabbath, professorially stroking his beard, “is that a long-standing peculiarity of the Ithaca rabbinate?”
“Fuck no! They’re rabbis! They’re assholes!”
“Language, Donald.” It was the other nurse speaking now, clearly a tough one—seasoned, hardened, and tough. “It’s time for vital signs, Donald. It’ll be time for meds soon. We’re going to get busy here. What are your plans? Have you made any plans?”
“I’m leaving, Stella.”
“Good. When?”
“After vital signs. I want to be sure to say good-bye to everybody.”
“You have been saying good-bye to everybody all day long,” Stella reminded him. “Everybody in the Mansion has taken you for a walk and told you you can make it. You can make it. You are going to make it. You won’t stop at a bar to have a drink. You will drive straight to your brother’s in Ithaca.”
“My wife is a lesbian. Some asshole rabbi married her today to another woman.”
“You don’t know this for sure.”
“My sister-in-law was there, Stella. My ex-wife stood under the chuppa with this broad, and when the time came she broke the glass. My wife is a shiksa. The two of them are lesbians. This is what Judaism has come to? I can’t believe it!”
“Donald, be kind,” said Sabbath. “Don’t disparage the Jews for wanting to be with it. Even the Jews are up against it in the Age of Total Schlock. The Jews can’t win,” Sabbath said to Stella, who looked to be Filipino and was, like himself, an older and wiser person. “Either they’re mocked because they’re still wearing their beards and waving their arms in the air or they are ridiculed by people like Donald here for being up-to-the-minute servants of the sexual revolution.”
“What if she’d married a zebra?” Donald asked indignantly. “Would a rabbi have married her to a zebra?”
“Zebra or zebu?” asked Sabbath.
“What’s a zebu?”
“A zebu is an east Asian cow with a large hump. Many women today are leaving husbands for zebus. Which did you say?”
“Zebra.”
“Well, I think not. A rabbi wouldn’t touch a zebra. Can’t. They don’t have cloven hooves. For a rabbi to officiate at the marriage of a person to an animal, the animal has to chew its cud and have a cloven hoof. A camel. A rabbi can marry a person to a camel. A cow. Any kind of cattle. Sheep. Can’t marry someone to a rabbit, however, because even though a rabbit chews its cud, it doesn’t have a cloven hoof. They also eat their own shit, which, on the face of it, you might think a point in their favor: chew their food three times. But what is required is twice. That’s why a rabbi can’t marry a person to a pig. Not that the pig is unclean. That’s not the problem, never has been. The problem with the pig is, though it has a cloven hoof, it doesn’t chew its cud. A zebra may or may not chew its cud—I don’t know. But it doesn’t have a cloven hoof, and with the rabbis, one strike and you’re out. The rabbi can marry a person to a bull, of course. The bull is like a cow. The divine animal, the bull. The Canaanite god El—which is where the Jews got El-o-him—is a bull. Anti-Defamation League tries to downplay this, but like it or not, the El in Elohim, a bull! Basic religious passion is to worship a bull. Damn it, Donald, you Jews ought to be proud of that. All the ancient religions were obscene. Do you know how the Egyptians imagined the origins of the universe? Any kid can read about it in his encyclopedia. God masturbated. And his sperm flew up and created the universe.”
The nurses did not look happy with the turn given to the conversation by Sabbath, and so the puppeteer decided to address them directly. “God’s jerking off alarms you? Well, gods are alarming, girls. It’s a god who commands you to cut off your foreskin. It’s a god who commands you to sacrifice your firstborn. It’s a god who commands you to leave your mother and father and go off into the wilderness. It’s a god who sends you into slavery. It’s a god who destroys—it’s the spirit of a god that comes down to destroy—and yet it’s a god who gives life. What in all of creation is as nasty and strong as this god who gives life? The God of the Torah embodies the world in all its horror. And in all its truth. You’ve got to hand it to the Jews. Truly rare and admirable candor. What other people’s national myth reveals their God’s atrocious conduct and their own? Just read the Bible, it’s all there, the backsliding, idolatrous, butchering Jews and the schizophrenia of these ancient gods. What is the archetypal Bible story? A story of betrayal. Of treachery. It’s just one deception after another. And whose is the greatest voice in the Bible? Isaiah. The mad desire to obliterate all! The mad desire to save all! The greatest voice in the Bible is the voice of somebody who has lost his mind! And that God, that Hebrew God—you can’t escape Him! What’s shocking is not His monstrous features—plenty of gods are monstrous, it seems almost to have been a prerequisite—but that there’s no recourse from Him. No power beyond His. The most monstrous feature of God, my friends, is the totalitarianism. This vengeful, seething God, this punishment-ordaining bastard, is ultimate! Mind if I have a Pepsi?” Sabbath inquired of Donald.
“Awesome,” said Donald, and thinking perhaps, as Sabbath was thinking, that this was the way people in a madhouse were supposed to talk, he took a cold can out of the plastic sack and even opened the tab for Sabbath before handing it on to him. Sabbath took a long swig just as the baby cocaine dealer came in to have her vital signs checked. She was listening to the music on her headset and singing along with the lyrics in a flattish, unvarying, throaty tone. “Lick it! Lick it! Lick it, baby, lick it, lick it, lick it, lick it!” When she saw Donald, she said, “Ain’t you goin’?”
“I wanted to see them take your blood pressure one last time.”
“Yeah, that make you hot, Donny?”
“What is her pressure?” asked Sabbath. “What would you think?”
“Linda? Doesn’t make much difference to Linda. Her pressure isn’t the big thing in Linda’s life.”
“How do you feel, Linda?” Sabbath asked her. “Estas siempre enfadada con tu mama?”
“La odio.”
“Por qué, Linda?”
“Ella me odia a mí.”
“Her pressure’s 120 over 100,” said Sabbath.
“Linda?” said Donald. “Linda’s a kid. 120 over 70.”
“Wanna bet the spread?” said Sabbath. “A buck on the spread, another buck if you hit the diastolic or the systolic, three if you nail’em both.” He took a wad of singles out of his pants pocket, and when he smoothed them into a pile on the palm of one hand, Donald took some bills out of his wallet and said to Karen, who was standing holding the blood pressure cuff beside the chair where Linda was seated, “Go ahead. I’ll play him.”
“What’s going on here?” Karen asked. “Play what?”
“Go ahead. Take her pressure.”
“Jesus,” Karen said and put the cuff on Linda, who was singing along with the tape again.
“Shut up,” said Karen. She listened through the stethoscope, made a recording in the ledger, and then took Linda’s pulse.
“What was it?” said Donald.
Karen was silent as she entered the pulse rate in the ledger.
“Oh fuck, Karen—what was it?”
“120 over 100,” Karen said.
“Shit.”
“Four bucks,” said Sabbath, and Donald peeled off the money and gave it to him. “Next.” Sciarappa the barber, back in Bradley.
In the doorway was Ray in his silk robe. He went silently to the chair and rolled up his left sleeve.
“140 over 90,” said Sabbath.
“160 over 100,” said Donald.
Ray nervously tapped the book in his hand until Karen touched his fingers and made him relax them. Then she took his pressure. Linda, leaning against the door frame, was waiting to see who was going to win all the money. “This is great,” she said. “This is crazy.”
“150,” said Karen, “over 100.”
“I got you on the spread,” said Sabbath, “you got me on the diastolic. It’s a wash. Next.”
His next was the young woman with the scar on her wrist, the tall, pretty blond who slouched and who had given Sabbath directions to Roderick House before dinner. She said to Donald, “Aren’t you ever leaving?”
“If you come with me, Madeline. You look good, honey. You’re almost standing straight.”
“Don’t get alarmed—it’s the same old me,” she said. “Listen to what I found in the library today. I was reading the journals. Listen.” She took a piece of paper out of the pocket of her jeans. “I copied it from a journal. Word for word. Journal of Medical Ethics. ‘It is proposed that happiness”’—glancing up, she said, “Their italics”— “‘it is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder and be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type. In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system. One possible objection to this proposal remains—that happiness is not negatively valued. However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant.’”
Donald looked pleased, proud, beguiled, as though the reason for his stalling around was indeed to run off with Madeline. “You make that up?”
“If I’d made it up it would be clever. Nope. A psychiatrist made it up. That’s why it’s not.”
“Oh bullshit, Madeline. Saunders isn’t stupid. He used to be an analyst,” he told Sabbath, “the guy who runs the place, and now he’s, like, this cool-guy psychiatrist who tries to be relaxed about everything—not too analytic. He’s into this big cognitive behavioral thing. Trying to make yourself stop if you’re having obsessive ruminations. Just train yourself to say ‘Stop!’”
“That’s not stupid?” asked Madeline. “And meanwhile, what am I supposed to do about my rage and having no confidence? Nothing is easy. Nothing is pleasant. What am I supposed to do about this idiotic therapist I had this morning for Assertiveness Training? I had her again this afternoon—we had to sit through a videotape on medical aspects of addiction and afterwards she led the discussion. And I raised my hand, I said, ‘There are some things that I don’t understand about this tape. You know, when they have the experiment on the two different mice—’ And the idiot therapist says, ‘Madeline, this is not a discussion about that. This is a discussion about your feelings. How did the tape make you feel about your alcoholism?’ I said, ‘Frustrated. It raised more questions than it answered.’ ‘Okay,’ she said in that perky way she has, ‘Madeline feels frustrated. Anyone else? What do you feel, Nick?’ So we go around the room, and so I raise my hand again and I said, ‘If we could ever just for a minute shift the discussion from the level of feelings to the level of information—’ ‘Madeline,’ she says, ‘this is a discussion of people’s feelings in response to this tape. If you have a need for information, I suggest you go to the library and look things up.’ That’s how I wound up in the library. My feelings. Who cares how I feel about my addiction?”
“If you will only keep monitoring your feelings,” said Karen, “that is what is going to keep you from being addicted.”
“It’s not worth it,” said Madeline.
“It is,” said Karen.
“Yeah,” said Donald, “you’re an addict, Madeline, because you’re not connected to people, and you’re not connected to people because you haven’t told them your feelings.”
“Oh, why can’t things just be nice?” asked Madeline. “I just want to be told what to do anyway.”
“I like when you say that,” said Donald. “‘I just want to be told what to do.’ It’s a turn-on in that little voice.”
“Ignore his negativity, Madeline,” Karen the nurse told her. “He’s just pulling your chain.”
But Madeline appeared unable to ignore anything. “Well,” she said to Donald, “in certain situations I do like to be told what to do. And in certain other situations I like to make demands.”
“So there you go,” said Donald. “It’s all too fucking complicated.”
“I had art therapy this afternoon,” Madeline told him.
“Did you draw a picture, dear?”
“I did a collage.”
“Somebody interpret it for you?”
“They didn’t need to.”
Donald, laughing, started on another Pepsi. “And how’s your crying going?”
“I’m in a real slump of a day. I woke up crying this morning. I cried all morning long. I cried in Meditation. I cried in group. You’d think it would dry up.”
“Everybody cries in the morning,” Karen said. “Just part of getting under way.”
“I don’t know why today should be worse than yesterday,” Madeline told her. “I think all the same dark thoughts but they’re not any darker today than they were yesterday. In Meditation, guess who we read from in our little daily meditation book? Shirley MacLaine. And this morning I went to the sharps nurse to get my tweezers. I said, ‘I need my tweezers out of the sharps closet.’ And she said, ‘You have to use them here, Madeline. I don’t want you to take them back to your room.’ And so I said, ‘If I’m going to kill myself, I’m not going to do it with my tweezers.’”
“Tweeze yourself to death?” said Donald. “Hard to do. How do you do that, Karen?”
Karen ignored him.
“I got very angry,” said Madeline. “I told her, ‘I can crack the light bulb and swallow it, too. Give me my tweezers!’ But she wouldn’t, just because I was crying.”
“At AA,” Donald said to Sabbath, “they go around at the beginning of the meeting. Everybody has to introduce himself. ‘Hi, my name is Christopher. I’m an alcoholic.’ ‘Hi, my name is Mitchell. I’m an alcoholic.’ ‘Hi, I’m Flora. I’m cross-addicted.’”
“Cross-addicted?” Sabbath asked.
“Who knows—some Catholic thing. I think she’s in the wrong group. Anyway, they get to Madeline. Madeline gets up. ‘My name is Madeline. What’s your red wine by the glass?’ How’s your smoking?” he asked her.
“I am basically smoking like a fiend.”
“Tsk-tsk,” said Donald. “Smoking is just another of your defenses against intimacy, Madeline. You know nobody wants to kiss a smoker anymore.”
“I’m smoking even more than when I came in. A couple months ago I really thought I had it . . .”
“Licked?” said Donald. “Could the word be licked?”
“I was going to, but I thought, I’m just not using that word around him. You know, nothing is easy—nothing. And it’s making me nervous. Press 1 for this, press 2 for that. What am I supposed to do about being left on hold all day? Everything is such a fight. I’m still fighting my managed care from the first time I was here. They keep telling me I should have called them when I was admitted to the Poughkeepsie ICU. I was in a fucking coma. It’s hard to push 1 and push 2 when you’re in a coma. And even if you could, they don’t have phones in the ICU.”
“You were in a coma?” asked Sabbath. “What is that like?”
“You’re in a coma. You’re out,” said Madeline in the voice that didn’t sound as though it had seen much change since she was a ten-year-old. “You’re unresponsive. It’s not like anything.”
“This gentleman is Roseanna’s husband,” Donald said to her.
“Ah,” said Madeline, her eyes widening.
“Madeline is an actress. When she’s not in a coma she’s in the soaps. She’s a very wise girl who wants from life no more than to die by her own hand. She left her family an endearing suicide note. Ten words. ‘I don’t know what I did to deserve this gift.’ Mr. Sabbath wants to bet on your blood pressure.”
“Under the circumstances, that is very kind of him,” she replied.
“And what do you bet?” Madeline asked Donald.
“I bet low, honey. I bet 90 over 60.”
“Hardly living,” said Madeline.
“Wait a minute,” said Stella, the Filipino nurse. “What is this?” She got up from the desk to confront the gamblers. “Usher is a hospital,” she said, glaring directly at Sabbath. “These people are Patients. . . . Donald, show a little mental toughness, Donald. Get in your car and go home. And you, did you come here to play games, or did you come here to see your wife?”
“My wife is hiding from me.”
“You get out. You leave.”
“I can’t find my wife.”
“Beat it,” she told him. “Go reside with the gods.”
Sabbath waited around the corner from the nurse’s station until Madeline’s blood pressure had been taken and she appeared in the corridor alone. “Can you lead me to Roderick House again?” he asked her.
“Sorry, I can’t go outside.”
“If you could just get me aimed in the right direction . . .”
Together they walked down the staircase to the first floor; she went as far as the porch, where, from the top of the steps, she pointed to the lights of Roderick House.
“It’s a beautiful fall night,” said Sabbath. “Walk me there.”
“I can’t. I’m a high-risk person. For a psychiatric hospital you have a lot of freedom here. But after dark I’m not allowed outside. I’m only a week out of ACU.”
“What’s ACU?”
“Acute care unit.”
“The place on the hill?”
“Yeah. A Holiday Inn you can’t get out of.”
“Were you the most acute person there?”
“I don’t really know. I wasn’t paying much attention. They won’t let you have caffeine after breakfast so I was busy storing up tea from morning. So pathetic. I was too busy working out the caffeine smuggling to make many friends.”
“Come. We’ll find you a Lipton’s tea bag to suck on.”
“I can’t. I have program tonight. I think I have to go to Relapse Prevention.”
“Aren’t you a bit ahead of yourself?”
“Actually, no. I’ve been planning my relapse.”
“Come with me.”
“I really should go and work on my relapse.”
“Come on.”
She hurried down the steps and started with him along the dark drive to Roderick House. He had to move fast.
“How old are you?” Sabbath asked.
“Twenty-nine.”
“You look ten.”
“And I tried not to look too young tonight. Didn’t it work? I get carded all the time. They’re always asking for my ID. Whenever I have to wait in a doctor’s office, the receptionist gives me a copy of Seventeen. Aside from how I look, I act younger than I am, too.”
“That you can expect to get worse.”
“Whatever. The harsh reality.”
“Why did you try to kill yourself?”
“I don’t know. The only thing that doesn’t bore me. The only thing worth thinking about. Besides, by the middle of the day I think the day has just gone on long enough and there’s only one way to make the day go away, and that is either booze or bed.”
“And that does it?”
“No.”
“So next you try suicide. The taboo.”
“I try it because I’m confronting my own mortality ahead of my time. Because I realize it’s the critical question, you see. The messiness of marriage and children and career and all that—I’ve already realized the futility of it all without having had to go through it all. Why can’t I just be fast-forwarded?”
“You’ve got a mind, don’t you? I like the mosaic it makes.”
“I’m wise and mature beyond my years.”
“Mature beyond your years and immature beyond your years.”
“What a paradox. Well, you can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.”
“The too-wise child who doesn’t want to live. You’re an actress?
“Of course not. Donald’s humor—Madeline’s life is soap opera. I think he anticipated something of a romantic nature between us. There was an element of seduction, which was sort of touching in its own little way. He said lots of glowing and flattering things about me. Intelligent. Attractive. He told me I should stand up straight. To do something about my shoulders. ‘Elongate, honey.’”
“What happens when you stand up straight?”
Her voice was soft and the answer that she muttered now he couldn’t even hear. “You must speak up, dear.”
“I’m sorry. I said nothing happens.”
“Why do you speak so quietly?”
“Why? That’s a good question.”
“You don’t stand up straight and you don’t speak loud enough.”
“Oh, just like my father. My high, squeaky voice.”
“Is that what he tells you?”
“All my life.”
“Another one with a father.”
“Yes indeed.”
“How tall are you when you stand up straight?”
“Just under five ten. But it’s hard to stand up straight when you’re at the lowest point of your life.”
“Also hard when you went through high school not only five ten, not only with a conspicuously active mind, but flat-chested to boot.”
“Golly, a man understands me.”
“Not you. Tits. I understand tits. I have been studying tits since I was thirteen years old. I don’t think there’s any other organ or body part that evidences so much variation in size as women’s tits.”
“I know,” replied Madeline, openly enjoying herself suddenly and beginning to laugh. “And why is that? Why did God allow this enormous variation in breast size? Isn’t it amazing? There are women with breasts ten times the size of mine. Or even more. True?”
“That is true.”
“People have big noses,” she said. “I have a small nose. But are there people with noses ten times the size of mine? Four or five, max. I don’t know why God did this to women.”
“The variation,” Sabbath offered, “accommodates a wide variety of desires, perhaps. But then,” he added, thinking again, “breasts, as you call them, are not there primarily to entice men—they’re there to feed children.”
“But I don’t think size has to do with milk production,” said Madeline. “No, that doesn’t solve the problem of what this enormous variation is for.”
“Maybe it’s that God hasn’t made up his mind. That’s often the case.”
“Wouldn’t it be more interesting,” asked Madeline, “if there were different numbers of breasts? Mightn’t that be more interesting? You know—some women with two, some with six . . .”
“How many times have you tried to commit suicide?”
“Only twice. How many times has your wife tried?”
“Only once. So far.”
“Why?”
“Forced to sleep with her old man. As a kid, her father’s girl.”
“Was she really? They all say that. The simplest story about yourself that explains everything—it’s the house specialty. These people read more complicated stories in the newspaper every day, and then they’re handed this version of their lives. In Courage to Heal they’ve been trying for three weeks to get me to turn in my dad. The answer to every question is either Prozac or incest. Talk about boring. All the false introspection. It’s enough in itself to make you suicidal. Your wife is one of the two or three I can even stand to listen to. She’s elegant-minded by comparison with the others. Her desire is passionate to face the losses. She doesn’t back away from the excavation. But you, of course, find nothing redeeming in these reflections back on origins.”
“Don’t I? I wouldn’t know.”
“Well, they’re trying to confront this awful stuff with their raw souls, and it’s way, way beyond them, and so they say all those stupid things that don’t sound much like ‘reflections.’ Still, there’s something about your wife that, in its own way, has a certain heroism. The way she stood up to an excruciating detox. There’s a kind of deliberateness to her that I sure don’t have: running around here collecting the shards of her past, struggling with her father’s letters. . . .”
“Don’t stop. You get more and more elegant-minded by the moment.”
“Look, she’s a drunk, drunks drive people nuts, and to the husband that’s the crux. Fair enough. She’s putting up a struggle that you disdain for its lack of genius. She doesn’t have your wit and so forth and so she can’t have the penetrating cynicism. But she has as much nobility as someone can within the limits of her imagination.”
“How do you know she does?”
“I don’t. I just made it up. I make it up as I go along. Doesn’t everyone?”
“Roseanna’s heroism and nobility.”
“I mean it’s clear to me that she did suffer a great blow and that she earned her pain, that’s all. She came by her pain honestly.”
“How?”
“Her father’s suicide. The awful way in which he suffocated her. Her father’s effort to become the great man in her life. And then the suicide. Wreaking that vengeance on her just for saving her own life. That was a huge blow for a young girl. You couldn’t really ask for a bigger one.”
“So you believe he fucked her or you don’t?”
“I don’t. I don’t believe it, because it’s not necessary. She had enough without it. You’re talking about a little girl and her father. Little girls love their fathers. There’s enough going on there. The courting is all you need. It doesn’t require a seduction. Could be he killed himself not because they had consummated it but so that they wouldn’t. A lot of suicides, gloomy people with guilty ruminations, think their families would be better off without them.”
“And did you think like that, Madeline?”
“Nope. I thought I might be better off without my family.”
“If you know all this,” said Sabbath, “or know enough to make it up, how come I’m meeting you here?”
“You’re meeting me here because I know all this. Guess who I’m reading in the library? Erik Erikson. I’m in the intimacy-versus-isolation stage, if I understand him correctly, and I think really not coming out ahead. You are in the generativity-versus-stagnation stage, but you are very quickly approaching the integrity-versus-despair stage.”
“I have no children. I haven’t generated shit.”
“You’ll be relieved to learn that the childless can generate through acts of altruism.”
“Unlikely in my case. What is it, again, I have to look forward to?”
“Integrity versus despair.”
“And how do things look for me, from what you’ve read?”
“Well, it depends whether life is basically meaningful and purposeful,” she said, bursting out laughing.
Sabbath laughed too. “What’s so funny about ‘purposeful,’ Madeline?”
“You do ask tough questions.”
“Yeah, well, it’s amazing what you find out when you ask.”
“Anyway, I don’t have to worry yet about generativity. I told you: I’m in intimacy versus isolation.”
“And how are you doing?”
“I think it’s questionable how I’m doing on the intimacy question.”
“And on the isolation one?”
“I get the feeling they’re somewhat meant by Dr. Erikson to be polar opposites. If you’re not doing well in one, you must be scoring fairly high in the other.”
“And you are?”
“Well, I guess mainly in the romantic arena. I didn’t realize, until I read Dr. Erikson, that this was my ‘developmental goal,’” she said, starting to laugh again. “I guess I haven’t achieved it.”
“What’s your developmental goal?”
“I suppose a stable little relationship with a man and all his fucking complex needs.”
“When was the last time you had that?”
“Seven years ago. It hasn’t been an abysmal failure. I can’t really tell objectively how sorry I should feel for myself. I don’t give the same credibility to my being that other people give to theirs. Everything feels acted.”
“Everything is acted.”
“Whatever. With me there’s some glue missing, something fundamental to everyone else that I don’t have. My life never seems real to me.”
“I have to see you again,” Sabbath said.
“So. This is a flirtation. I wondered but couldn’t believe it. Are you always attracted to damaged women?”
“I didn’t know there were any other kind.”
“Being called damaged is a lot worse than being called cuckoo, isn’t it?”
“I believe you were called damaged by yourself.”
“Whatever. That’s the risk you take talking. In high school I was called ditsy.”
“What’s ‘ditsy’ mean?”
“Kind of an airhead. Call Mr. Kasterman, my math teacher. He’ll tell you. I’d always be coming in from cooking class with flour all over me.”
“I never slept with a girl who tried to commit suicide.”
“Sleep with your wife.”
“That is ditsy.”
Her laugh was very sly now, a delightful surprise. A delightful person, suffused by a light soulfulness that wasn’t at all juvenile, however juvenile she happened to look. An adventurous mind with an intuitive treasure that her suffering hadn’t shut down, Madeline displayed the bright sadder-but-wiser outlook of an alert first grader who’d discovered the alphabet in a school where Ecclesiastes is the primer—life is futility, a deeply terrible experience, but the really serious thing is reading. The sliding about of her self-possession was practically visible as she spoke. Self-possession was not her center of gravity, nor was anything else of hers that was on display, other perhaps than a way of saying things that was appealing to him for being just a little impersonal. Whatever had denied her a woman’s breasts and a woman’s face had made compensation of sorts by charging her mind with erotic significance—or so at least its influence swept over Sabbath, ever vigilant to all stimuli. A sensual promise that permeated her intelligence disarranged pleasantly his hard-on’s time-worn hopes.
“What would it be like for you,” she asked him, “sleeping with me? Like sleeping with a corpse? A ghost? A corpse resurrected?”
“No. Sleeping with somebody who took the thing to the final step.”
“The adolescent romanticism makes you look like an asshole,” said Madeline.
“I’ve looked like an asshole before. So what? What are you so bitter about at your age?”
“Yes, my retrospective bitterness.”
“What’s it about?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you do.”
“You just like to dig right on in there, don’t you, Mr. Sabbath? What am I bitter about? All those years I worked and planned for things. It all seems . . . I’m not sure.”
“Come down to my car.”
She gave the suggestion serious consideration before she replied, “For a quart of vodka?”
“A pint,” he said.
“In return for sexual favors? A quart.”
“A fifth.”
“A quart.”
“I’ll get it,” he said.
Sabbath ran to the parking lot, in a frenzy drove the three miles to Usher, found a liquor store, bought two quarts of Stolichnaya, and drove back to the parking lot, where Madeline was to be waiting. He’d done the whole thing in twelve minutes but she wasn’t there. She wasn’t among the smokers outside the Mansion, she wasn’t in the Mansion lounge playing cards with the two old ladies or in the parlor, where the battered Wellesley girl was now doggedly trying her luck with “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and, when he retraced their steps, she was not anywhere along the route to Roderick House. So there he was, alone in the shadows on a beautiful fall night, two quarts of the best hundred-proof Russian vodka in a brown paper bag beneath his arm, stood up by someone whom he’d had every reason to trust, when a guard appeared behind him—a very large black man in a blue security officer’s uniform and carrying a walkie-talkie—and asked him politely what his business was. The explanation having proved inadequate, two more guards appeared, and though no one assaulted him physically, there were insults to be endured from the youngest and most vigilant of the guards while Sabbath voluntarily allowed himself to be escorted to his car. There the three examined his license and registration by flashlight, wrote down his name and his out-of-state license number, and then took the car keys and got in the car, two in the back with Sabbath and the Stolichnaya and one up front to drive the car off the grounds. Mrs. Sabbath would be questioned before she went to bed and a report filed with the chief doctor (who happened to be Roseanna’s doctor) first thing in the morning. If the patient had arranged for her visitor to bring her the alcohol, his wife would be ejected on the spot.
He arrived in Madamaska Falls close to one A.M. Exhausted as he was, he drove to the lake and then followed Fox Run Crossing up past the inn to where the Baliches lived atop the hill overlooking the water, in a new house as spacious and lavish as any on the mountain. The house was the realization for Matija of a dream—the dream of a grand family castle that was a country unto itself—and the dream dated back to elementary school, when, for homework, he had to write about his parents and tell the teacher truthfully, like a good Pioneer, what their relationship was to the regime. Matija had even brought a blacksmith over from Yugoslavia, an artisan from the Dalmatian coast, to stay for six months in the inn’s annex and work at a forge near Blackwall where he made the outdoor railings for the vast green terrace that looked onto the sunsets staged at the western end of the lake, the indoor banisters for the wide central staircase that twisted up toward a dome ceiling, and the filigreed iron entrance gates operated electronically from the house. The iron chandelier had come by sea from Split. Matija’s brother was a contractor and he had bought it from gypsies who sold all that kind of antique stuff. The chain forged for the chandelier by the resident blacksmith hung menacingly down the two stories from the sky-blue dome into a foyer where there were leaded stained-glass window panels to either side of a mahogany double door. Through the doorway you could have driven a horse-drawn carriage onto the marble floor (cut especially for the house after Matija had gone to Vermont to inspect the quarry). It seemed to Sabbath—the first day that Matija had taken Silvija to see the sights, and Drenka was fucked on Silvija’s bed in Silvija’s dirndl—that no two rooms in the house were level with each other but had to be reached by going up or down three, four, or five highly varnished, broad steps. And there were wood carvings of kings on pedestals beside the stairways between the rooms. A Boston antiques dealer had found them in Vienna—seventeen medieval kings who, together, had to have beheaded at least as many of their subjects as Matija had beheaded chickens for his popular chicken paprikash with noodles. There were six beds in the house, all with brass frames. The pink marble Jacuzzi could seat six. The modernistic kitchen with the state-of-the-art cooking island at its heart could seat sixteen. The dining room with the tapestried walls could seat thirty. Nobody, however, used the Jacuzzi or entered the dining room, the Baliches slept in just one claustrophobic bed, and the prepared food they carried up from the inn late at night, they ate in front of a TV console installed on four empty egg crates in a room as barren and humble as any you could have found in a worker’s housing block built by Tito.
Because Matija was fearful lest his good fortune arouse envy in his guests no less than in his staff, the house had deliberately been situated behind a triangular expanse of firs said to be as old as any in New England. The stand of trees pointed dramatically heavenward, stately schooner masts that had been spared the colonial ax, and yet the roof lines of Matija’s million-dollar house—conforming to his fanciful immigrant aim—looked at first glance to be going in every direction except up. Strange. The tamed, abstemious, frugal foreigner, beneficiary not merely of his own dedicated hard work but of the fat-cat blowout of the eighties, conceives for himself a palace of abundance, as grand a manifestation as he can imagine of his personal triumph over Comrade Tito, while his wife’s intemperate lover, the native-born American hog, lives in a four-room little box built without a basement in the 1920s, a pleasant enough house by now but one that only Roseanna’s ingenuity with a paintbrush and a sewing machine, and a hammer and nails, had been able to salvage from the dank Tobacco Road horror it was when, in the mid-sixties, Roseanna came up with the bright idea of domesticating Sabbath. Home and Hearth. The woods, the streams, the snow, the thaw, the spring, New England’s spring, that surprise that is among the greatest reinvigorators of humankind on record. She pinned her hopes on the mountainous north—and a child. A family: a mother, a father, cross-country skis, and the kids, a lively, healthy band of shrieking kids, running unmenaced all over the place, enabled, by the very air they breathed, to avoid growing up like their malformed parents, entirely at the mercy of living. Rural domestication, the city dweller’s old agrarian dream of “Live Free or Die” license plates on the Volvo, was the purifying rubric not simply by which she hoped and prayed she could put to rest her father’s ghost but by which Sabbath could silence Nikki’s. Little wonder Roseanna was in orbit from there on out.
There were no lights on at the Baliches’, at least not that Sabbath could see through the fir-tree wall. He tapped twice on the horn, waited, tapped twice, and then sat for ten minutes till it was time to tap the horn once again and allow her five minutes more before driving away.
Drenka was a light sleeper. She’d become a light sleeper when she became a mother. The smallest noise, the tiniest cry of distress from little Matthew’s room, and she was out of the bed and had him in her arms. She told Sabbath that when Matthew was a baby she would lie down and sleep on the floor beside his crib to be certain that he didn’t stop breathing. And even when he got to be four and five, she would sometimes be seized in her bed by fears for his safety or his health and spend the night on the floor of his room. She had done her mothering the way she did everything, as though she were breaking down a door. Lead her into temptation, into motherhood, into software, you got the impress of all of her, all that rash energy without a single restraint. In full force this woman was extraordinary. To whatever was demanded, she had no aversion. Fear, of course, plenty of fear; but aversions, none. An amazing experience, this thoroughly unaloof Slav for whom her existence was a great experiment, the erotic light of his life, and he had found her not dangling a little key from her finger on Rue St. Denis between Châtelet and the archway of the Porte St. Denis but in Madamaska Falls, capital of caution, where the local population is content to be in raptures about changing the clock twice a year.
He rolled down the window and heard the Baliches’ horses breathing in the paddock across the road. Then he saw two of them looming up by the fence. He opened a Stolichnaya bottle. He’d been drinking some since he went to sea but never like Roseanna. That moderation—and circumcision—were about all he had to show for being a Jew. Which was probably the best of it, anyway. He took two drinks and there she was, in her nightgown, with a shawl drawn around her shoulders. He reached out the window and there they were. Two hundred and sixty miles round-trip, but it was worth it for Drenka’s breasts.
“What is it? Mickey, what’s wrong!”
“Not much chance of a blow job, I guess.”
“Darling, no.”
“No. No. Tomorrow.”
He took her flashlight out of her hand and shined it into his lap.
“Oh, it’s so big. My darling! I can’t now. Maté—”
“If he wakes up before I come, fuck it, we’ll run away, we’ll do it—I’ll just turn on the motor and off we go like Vronsky and Anna. Enough of this hiding-out shit. Our whole lives are hiding.”
“I mean Matthew. He’s working. He could come by.”
“He’ll think we’re kids necking. Get in, Drenka.”
“We can’t. You’re crazy. Matthew knows the car. You’re drunk. I have to go back! I love you!”
“Roseanna may be out tomorrow.”
“But,” she exclaimed, “I thought two more weeks!”
“What am I supposed to do with this thing?”
“You know what.” Drenka leaned in through the open window, squeezed it, jerked it once—“Go home,” she pleaded and then ran for the path back to the house.
On the fifteen-minute drive to Brick Furnace Road, Sabbath saw only one other vehicle on the road, the state police cruiser. That’s why she was up—listening to the scanner. Warming to the biblical justice of being taken in for adulterous sodomy by her son, he sounded his horn and flashed his brights; but for the time being, the run of bad luck appeared to have ended. Nobody came tearassing after the county’s leading sex offender and had him pull over to surrender his license and registration; no one invited him to justify how he came to be driving with a vodka bottle in his steering hand and a dick in the other, his focus not at all on the highway, not even on Drenka, but on that child’s face that masked a mind whose core was all clarity, on that lanky blond with the droopy shoulders and the delicate voice and the freshly sliced wrist,who was just three weeks clear of going completely off the rails.
♦ ♦ ♦
“‘Pray, do not mock me. / I am a very foolish fond old man, / Four score and upward, not an hour more nor less, / I And, to deal plainly, / I fear I am not in my perfect mind. / Methinks . . .’”
Then he lost it, one stop north of Astor Place went completely dry. Yet remembering even that much while begging in the subway on the way to Linc’s funeral after the soft-porn drama with the Cowans’ Rosa was a huge mnemonic surprise. Methinks what? Methinking methoughts shouldn’t be hard. The mind is the perpetual motion machine. You’re not ever free of anything. Your mind’s in the hands of everything. The personal’s an immensity, nuncle, a constellation of detritus that doth dwarf the Milky Way; it pilots thee as do the stars the blind Cupid’s arrow o’ wild geese that o’erwing the Drenka goose’d asshole as, atop thy cancerous Croatian, their coarse Canadian honk thou libid’nously mimics, inscribing ’pon her malignancy, with white ink, thy squandered chromosomal mark.
Back up, back way, way up. Nikki says, “Sir, do you know me?” Lear says, “You are a spirit, I know. Where did you die?” Cordelia says blah, blah; the doctor says blah, blah; I say, “Where have I been? Where am I? Fair daylight? I am mightily abused . . . blah, blah, blah.” Nikki: “O look upon me, sir, / And hold your hand in benediction o’er me. / No, sir, you must not kneel.” And Lear says it was a Tuesday in December 1944, I came home from school and saw some cars, I saw my father’s truck. Why is that there? I knew something was wrong. In the house I saw my father. In terrible pain. In terrible pain. My mother hysterical. Her hands. Her fingers. Moaning. Screaming. People there already. A man had come to the door. “I’m sorry,” he said and gave her the telegram. Missing in action. Another month before the second telegram arrived, a tentative, chaotic time—hope, fear, searching for any story we could get, the phone ringing, never knowing, stories reaching us that he had been picked up by friendly Filipino guerrillas, someone in his squadron said he passed him in the flight, he was going on the last run, the flak got very bad and Morty’s plane went down, but in friendly territory . . . and Lear replies, “You do me wrong to take me out o’ the grave,” but Sabbath is remembering the second telegram. The month before was terrible but not as terrible as this: the death notice was like losing another brother. Devastating. My mother in bed. Thought she was dying, afraid she was going to die too. Smelling salts. The doctor. The house filling up with people. It’s hard to be clear about who was there. It’s a blur. Everybody was there. But life was over. The family was finished. I was finished. I gave her smelling salts and they spilled and I was afraid I killed her. The tragic period of my life. Between fourteen and sixteen. Nothing to compare with it. It didn’t just break her, it broke us all. My father, for the rest of his life, completely changed. He was a reassuring force to me, because of his physique and because he was so dependable. My mother was always the more emotional one. The sadder one, the happier one. Always whistling. But there was an impressive sobriety in my father. So to see him fall apart! Look at my emotions now—I’m fifteen remembering this stuff. Emotions, when they’re revved up, don’t change, they’re the same, fresh and raw. Everything passes? Nothing passes. The same emotions are here! He was my father, a hardworking guy, out in the truck to the farmers at three in the morning. When he came home at night he was tired and we had to be quiet because he had to get up so early. And if he was ever angry—and that was rare—but if he was ever angry, he was angry in Yiddish and it was terrifying because I couldn’t even be sure what he was angry about. But after, he was never angry again. If only he had been! After, he became meek, passive, crying all the time, crying everywhere, in the truck, with the customers, with the Gentile farmers. This fucking thing broke my father! After the shiva he went back to work again, after the year of official mourning he stopped crying, but there was always that personal, private misery that you could see a mile away. And I didn’t feel so terrific myself. I felt I lost a part of my body. Not my prick, no, can’t say a leg, an arm, but a feeling that was physiological and yet an interior loss. A hollowing out, as though I’d been worked on with a chisel. Like the horseshoe-crab shells lying along the beach, the armature intact and the inside empty. All of it gone. Hollowed out. Reamed out. Chiseled away. It was so oppressive. And my mother going to bed—I was sure I was going to lose my mother. How will she survive? How will any of us survive? There was such an emptiness everywhere. But I had to be the strong one. Even before I had to be the strong one. Very tough when he went overseas and all we knew was his APO number. The anxiety. Excruciating. Worried all the time. I used to help my father with the deliveries the way Morty did. Morty did things that nobody in his right mind would have done. Clambering around up on the roof fixing something. On his back, shimmying all the way into the dark crud under the porch, wiring something. Every week he washed the floors for my mother. So now I washed the floors. I did a lot of things to try to calm her down after he shipped out to the Pacific. Every week we used to go to the movies. They wouldn’t go near a war movie. But even during an ordinary movie, when something suddenly cropped up about the war or somebody just said something about somebody overseas, my mother would get upset and I would have to calm her down. “Ma, it’s just a movie.” “Ma, let’s not think about it.” She would cry. Terribly. And I’d leave with her and walk her around. We used to get letters through the APO. He’d do little cartoons on the envelope sometimes. I’d looked forward to the cartoons. But the only one they cheered up was me. And once he flew over the house. He was stationed in North Carolina and he had to make a flight to Boston. He told us, “I’m going to fly over the house. In a B-25.” All the women were outside in the street in their aprons. In the middle of the day my father came home in the truck. My friend Ron was there. And Morty did it—flew over and dipped his wings, those flat gull wings. Ron and I were waving. What a hero he was to me. He was incredibly gentle with me, five years younger—he was just so gentle. He had a real physique. A shot-putter. A track star. He could heave a football almost the whole length of the field; he had a tremendous capacity to toss a ball or to put the shot—to throw things, that was his skill, to throw them far. I would think of that after he was missing. In school I would be thinking that throwing things far might help him survive in the jungle. Shot down on the twelfth of December and died of wounds on the fifteenth. Which was another misery. They had him in a hospital. The rest of the crew was killed instantly, but the plane was shot down over guerrilla territory and the guerrillas got him out and to a hospital and he lived for three days. That made it even worse. The crew was killed immediately and my brother lived three more days. I was in a stupor. Ron came. Usually he as good as lived at our house. He said, “Come on out.” I said, “I can’t.” He said, “What happened?” I couldn’t talk. It took a few days before I could tell him. But I couldn’t tell people at school. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t say it. There was a gym teacher, a big, strong guy who had wanted Morty to give up track and train as a gymnast. “How’s your brother?” he would ask me. “Fine,” I’d say. I couldn’t say it. Other teachers, his shop teacher, who always gave him A’s: “How’s your brother doing?” “Fine.” And then they finally knew, but I never told them. “Hey, how’s Morty doing?” And I perpetuated the lie. This went on and on with the people who hadn’t heard. I was in my stupor for a year at least. I even got scared for a while of girls’ having lipstick and having tits. Every challenge was suddenly too great. My mother gave me his watch. It nearly killed me, but I wore it. I took it to sea. I took it to the Army. I took it to Rome. Here it is, his GI Benrus. Wind it daily. All that’s changed is the strap. Stop function on the second hand still working. When I was on the track team I used to think about his ghost. That was the first ghost. I was like my father and him, always strong up top. Besides, Morty threw the shot, so I had to. I imbued myself with him. I used to look up at the sky before I threw it and think that he was looking over me. And I called for strength. It was a state meet. I was in fifth place. I knew the unreality of it but I just kept praying to him and I threw it farther than I ever did before. I still didn’t win, but I had got his strength!
I could use it now. Where is it? Here’s the watch, but where’s the strength?
In the seat to the right of where Sabbath had gone blank on “Methinks . . .” was what had caused him to go blank: no more than twenty-one or -two, sculpted entirely in black—turtleneck sweater, pleated skirt, tights, shoes, even a black velvet headband keeping her shining black hair back from her forehead. She had been gazing up at him, and it was the gaze that had stopped him, its meek, familiar softness. She sat with one arm resting on the black nylon backpack by her side, silently watching as he worked to recall the last scene of act four: Lear is carried sleeping into the French camp—“Ay, madam; in the heaviness of sleep / We put fresh garments on him”—and there to wake him is Cordelia— “How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty?” And it is then Lear replies, “You do me wrong to take me out o’ the grave. . . .”
The girl with the gaze was speaking, but so softly at first that he couldn’t hear her. She was younger than he’d thought, probably a student, probably no more than nineteen.
“Yes, yes, speak up.” What he was always telling Nikki whenever she said something she was afraid to say, which was half the time she spoke. She had driven him crazier with each passing year, saying things so that he couldn’t hear them. “What did you say?” “It doesn’t matter.” Drove him nuts.
“‘Methinks,’” she said, quite audibly now, “‘I should know you, and know this man. . . .’” She’d given him the line! A drama student, on her way uptown to Juilliard.
He repeated, “‘Methinks I should know you, and know this man,’” and then on his own momentum proceeded. “‘Yet I am doubtful; for I am mainly ignorant / What place this is; and all the skill I have . . .’” Here he pretended not to know what was next. “‘And all the skill I have . . .’” Feebly, twice, he repeated this and looked to her for assistance.
“‘Remembers not these garments,’” prompted the girl, “‘nor I know not . . .’”
She stopped when, with a smile, he indicated that he believed he could himself once again pick up from there. She smiled back. “‘Nor I know not / Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me, / For, as I am a man, I think this lady . . .’”
Is Nikki’s daughter.
Not impossible! Nikki’s beautifully imploring eyes, Nikki’s per-plexingly, perpetually uncertain voice . . . no, she was not merely some tenderhearted, overimpressionable kid who would excitedly tell her family tonight that a white-bearded old bum had been reciting to her from Lear on the Lexington IRT and that she had dared to help him remember the lines—she was Nikki’s daughter. The family she was going home to tonight was Nikki’s! Nikki was alive. Nikki was in New York. This girl was hers. And if hers, somehow his, whoever the father might be.
Sabbath was hovering directly above her now, his emotions an avalanche rolling across him, sweeping him beneath them, uprooting the little rootedness still holding him to himself. What if they were all alive and at Nikki’s house? Morty. Mom. Dad. Drenka. Abolishing death—a thrilling thought, for all that he wasn’t the first person, on or off a subway, to have it, have it desperately, to renounce reason and have it the way he did when he was fifteen years old and they had to have Morty back. Turning life back like a clock in the fall. Just taking it down off the wall and winding it back and winding it back until your dead all appear like standard time.
‘“For, as I am a man,’” he said to the girl, “‘I think this lady / To be my child Cordelia.’”
“‘And so I am, I am.’” Undesigning Cordelia’s unguarded response, the poignantly simple iambic trimeter that Nikki had uttered in a voice one-tenth a lost orphan’s and the rest a weary, teetering woman’s, spoken by the girl whose gaze was Nikki’s exactly.
“Who is your mother?” Sabbath whispered to her. “Tell me who your mother is.”
The words made her go pale; her eyes, Nikki’s eyes, which could hide nothing, were like those of a child who’s just been told something terrible. All her horror of him came right up to the surface, as it would, sooner or later, in Nikki, too. To have been moved by this mad monstrosity because he could quote Shakespeare! To have become entangled on the subway with someone unmistakably crazy, capable of anything—how could she be so idiotic!
Simple as it was to read her thoughts, Sabbath declaimed, no less brokenly than Lear, “You are the daughter of Nikki Kantarakis!”
Frantically pulling open the straps of her knapsack, the girl tried to locate her purse and find money to give him, money to make him go away. But Sabbath had to see once more the fact that was indisputable—that Nikki lived—and turning her face with his crippled hand, feeling Nikki’s living skin, he said, “Where is your mother hiding from me?”
“Don’t!” she screamed, “don’t touch me!” and was swatting at his arthritic fingers as though a swarm of flies had attacked her when somebody came up from behind him and with jarring force hooked Sabbath under the arms.
A business suit was all he could see of his powerful captor. “Calm down,” he was being told, “calm down. You shouldn’t drink that stuff.”
“What should I drink? I’m sixty-four years old and I’ve never been sick a day in my life! Except my tonsils as a child! I drink what I want!”
“Calm down, Mac. Cut it out, calm down, and get yourself to a shelter.”
“I caught lice in the shelter!” Sabbath boomed back. “‘Do not abuse me’!”
“You abuse her—you’re the abuser, chief!”
The train had reached Grand Central. People rushed for the open doors. The girl was gone. Sabbath was freed. “‘Pray you now,’” shouted Sabbath as he wandered off the train alone, looking in all directions for Nikki’s daughter. “‘Pray you now,’” he exclaimed to those standing back from him as he strode majestically along the platform, shaking his cup out before him, “‘pray you now . . .”’ and then, without even Nikki’s daughter to prompt him, he remembered what is next, words that could have meant nothing at all to him in the theater of the Bowery Basement Players in 1961: “‘Pray you now, forget and forgive. I am old and foolish.’”
This was true. It was hard for him to believe that he was simulating any longer, though not impossible.
Thou’lt come no more;
Never, never, never, never, never.
Destroy the clock. Join the crowd.
______________
1 What follows is an uncensored transcription of the entire conversation as it was secretly taped by Kathy Goolsbee (and by Sabbath) and played by SABBATH for whoever dialed 722-2284 and took the thirty minutes to listen. In just the first twenty-four hours, over a hundred callers stayed on the line to hear the harassment from beginning to end. It wasn’t long before tapes reproduced from the original began to turn up for sale around the state and, according to the Cumberland Sentinel, “as far afield as Prince Edward Island, where the tape is being used as an audio teaching aid by the Charlottetown Project on the State of Canadian Women.”
What are you doing right now?
I’m on my stomach. I’m masturbating.
Where are you?
I’m home, I’m on my bed.
You all alone?
Ummmm.
How long are you alone for?
A long time. Brian’s at a basketball game.
I see. How nice. You are all alone and on your own bed masturbating. Well, I’m glad you called. What are you wearing?
(Babyish laugh) I’m wearing my clothes.
What clothes are you wearing?
I’m wearing jeans. And a turtleneck. Standard wear.
Yes, that’s your standard wear, isn’t it? I was very excited after I spoke to you last time. You’re very exciting.
Ummmm.
You are. Don’t you know that?
But I felt bad. I felt like I disturbed you when I called at your house.
You didn’t disturb me in terms of my not wanting to hear from you. I just felt it was a good idea to stop that before it went any further.
Sorry. And I won’t do it again.
Fine. You just misjudged. And why not? You’re new to this. Okay. You’re alone and you’re on your bed.
Yeah, and also, I wanted . . . Last time we talked you said . . . about . . . I told you I felt disgusted, you know, when I get really disgusted . . . and you said about what, and I said whatever I said, like I said, my lack of ability in workshop . . . and then I think I was just very evasive, like, I didn’t really, like, I felt that I couldn’t really tell you (embarrassed laugh). . . . It’s much more specific. . . . I’m just, like . . . well, maybe it’s just now. . . it’s like I think about sex all the time (confessional laugh).
Do you?
Yes, I do. I just feel I can’t do anything about it. It’s very. . . I mean, it’s very . . . It’s very good, sometimes. (Laugh)
You masturbate a lot?
Well, no.
No?
Well, I don’t really have the opportunity. I’m in class. And it’s all so boring and my mind is just elsewhere completely. And ummmm . . .
You have sex thoughts.
Yeah. Constantly. And I just . . . I think it’s normal but sort of extreme. And I feel—guilty, I guess.
Really? What do you feel guilty about? Having sex thoughts all the time? Everybody does.
You think so? I don’t think most people think like that.
You’d be surprised at what most people think like. I wouldn’t worry about it. You’re young and you’re healthy and you’re lovely and so why shouldn’t you? Right?
I guess. I don’t know. Sometimes I read in psych about people, you know, diagnosed, like, “hypersexual,” and I’m, like, “Hey.” Now I feel I’m just gunna, like, you’re gunna think I’m a nymphomaniac and I’m not. I don’t . . . whatever . . . like, I’m not out having sex. I don’t know. I think I just sexualize every interaction I have with people, and I feel guilty. I feel like this is . . . you know . . . no good.
You feel that with me?
Well, ummmm . . .
You sexualized our phone calls, I sexualized our phone calls—nothing wrong with that. You don’t feel guilty about that, or do you?
Well, I mean . . . I don’t know. I guess I don’t feel guilty. I feel very empowered. But, nevertheless, I’m just, like, saying, like, in general I don’t sit around thinking I lack ability. I sit around thinking, What is going on in my head? I can’t stand it.
So you’re going through the time when you’re obsessed with sex. It happens to everybody. Especially as nothing in school is interesting you.
I think that’s the problem. It’s like I react to it. I have to rebel or something.
It doesn’t engage your mind. And so your mind is empty and something moves in and what moves in—because you’re frustrated, the thing that can answer the frustration is sex. It’s very common. There’s nothing on your mind, and it’s filled by this thing. Don’t worry about it. Okay?
(Laugh) Yeah. I’m glad. . . . You see, I feel like I could tell you this but
I couldn’t tell anyone else.
You can tell me and you have told me and it’s fine with me. You’re in Levi’s and you’ve got on your turtleneck shirt.
Yeah.
Yeah?
Yeah.
You know what I want you to do?
What?
Unzip your Levi’s.
Okay.
Undo the button.
Okay.
And unzip it.
Okay. . . . I’m in front of the mirror.
You’re in front of the mirror?
Yeah.
Lying down?
Yeah.
Now pull your Levi’s down. . . . Pull ‘em down around your ankles.
(Whispered) Okay.
And take them off. . . . I’ll give you time. . . . Did you get them off?
Yeah.
What do you see?
I see my legs. And I see my crotch.
Do you have bikini underpants on?
Yes.
Take your hand and put your finger right on the crotch of your underpants. Just on the outside of the underpants, rub it up and down. Just rub it gently up and down. How does that feel?
Good. Yeah. It feels real good. It feels so nice. It’s wet.
Is it wet?
It’s really wet.
You’re still outside the underpants. Just on the outside rub it. Rub it up and down. . . . Now move the underpants aside. Can you do that?
Yeah.
And now put your finger on your clitoris. And just rub it up and down. And tell me how that feels.
It feels good.
Make yourself excited that way. Tell me how that feels.
I’m putting my finger in my cunt. I’m on top of my finger.
You on your belly or on your back?
I’m sitting up.
You’re sitting up. And looking in the mirror?
Yeah.
And you’re going in and out?
Yeah.
Go ahead. Fuck it with your finger.
I want it to be you, though.
Tell me what you want.
I want your cock. I’ll get it really, really hard.
Want me to stick it in you?
I want you to stick it into me hard.
A nice stiff cock inside you?
Ummmm. Oh, I’m touching my breasts.
You want to take your turtleneck off?
I’m just lifting it up.
You want to put the nipple between your fingers?
Yeah.
How about wetting it? Wet it with your fingers. Wet your fingers with your tongue and then wet the end of your nipple. Is that good?
Oh, God.
Now fuck your cunt again. Fuck your cunt.
Ummmm.
And tell me what you want. Tell me what you most want.
I want you on top of my back. Your cock inside me. Oh, God. Oh, God, I want you.
What do you want, (bleep) ? Tell me what you want.
I want your cock. I want it everywhere. I want your hands everywhere. I want your hands on my legs. On my stomach. My back. On my breasts, squeezing my breasts.
Where do you want my cock?
Oh, I want it in my mouth.
What are you going to do when it’s in your mouth?
Suck it. Suck it really hard. I want to suck your balls. I want to lick your balls. Oh, God.
And what else?
Oh, I just want you to squeeze me. Then I want you to start pumping me.
Pump you? I’m pumping you right now. Tell me what you want.
I want you to pump me. Oh, I want you inside me.
What are you doing now?
I’m on my stomach. I’m masturbating. I want you to suck my breasts.
I’m sucking on them right now. I’m sucking your tits now.
Oh, God.
What else do you want me to do to you?
Oh, God. I’m going to come.
You’re going to come?
I want to. I want you here. I want you on top of me. I want you on top of me right now.
I’m on top of you.
Oh. God. Oh, God. I have to stop.
Why do you have to stop?
Because—I’m afraid. I’m afraid to not be able to hear.
I thought no one was coming back. I thought he was playing basketball.
Well, you never know. Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God, this is awful. I have to stop. I want your cock. Pumping me hard. Digging into me. Oh, God. What are you doing right now?
I have my cock in my hand.
You squeezing it and rubbing it? I want you to rub it. Tell me. I want my mouth on it. I want to suck it. Oh, God, I want to kiss it. I want to put your cock in my ass.
What do you want to do with my cock right now?
I want to suck it right now. I want to be between your legs. You pull my head.
Hard?
No. Just gently. And then I’ll move around. Let me suck you.
I’ll let you. If you say please, I’ll let you.
Oh, God. This is torture.
Is it? You got your finger in your cunt?
No.
It’s not torture. Put your finger in your cunt, (bleep). Put your finger in your cunt.
Okay.
Put your finger right up inside your cunt.
Oh, God, it’s so hot.
Put it up there. Now move it up and down.
Oh, God.
Move it up and down, (bleep). Move it up and down, (bleep). Move it up and down, (bleep). Fuck it, (bleep). Come on, fuck it. Come on, fuck it.
Oh, God! Oh, God!
Go ahead, fuck it.
Oh! Oh! Oh! Mickey! Oh, my God! Ahh! Ahh! Ahh! Jesus Christ! Oh, my God! Jesus Christ! I want you so bad! Uhhh! Uhhh! Oh, God. . . . I just came.
Did you come?
Yeah.
Was that good?
Yeah.
Want to come again?
Uh-uh.
No?
No. I want you to come.
You want to make me come?
Yeah. I’m gunna suck your cock.
You tell me how you’re going to make me come.
I’m gunna suck you. Slowly. Up and down. Slowly move my lips up and down your cock. Move my tongue. I’m gunna suck off the top of your cock. Really slowly. Ummm. Oh, God. . . . What do you want me to do?
Suck my balls.
Okay. Okay.
I want you to put your tongue on my ass. Want to do that?
Okay.
Make my asshole very excited with your tongue.
Yeah. I can do that.
Put your finger up my ass.
Okay.
Did you ever do that?
Nooo. Uh-uh.
Take your finger while we’re fucking. Gently put it on my asshole. And then fuck my ass with your finger. Do you think you’d like that?
Yeah. I want to make you come.
Play with it with your hand. And when a little drop comes out, you can smear the head of it with the drop. You like that?
Yeah.
Did you ever fuck a woman?
No.
Didn’t you?
No.
No? Just have to ask, you know.
(Laughter)
Nobody at school ever tried to fuck you? No woman ever tried to fuck you in the four-college program?
Ummm, no.
Really?
Ummm, no. Not that I haven’t thought about it.
You have thought about it?
Yeah.
What do you think?
I think about being on top of a woman and sucking her breasts. And putting our cunts together—and rubbing. Kissing.
Never did it?
Uh-uh.
Did you ever fuck two men?
Uh-uh.
No?
Uh-uh. (Laughing) Did you?
Not that I recall. You ever think about that?
Yeah.
About fucking two men.
Yeah.
You have fantasies about it?
Yeah. I guess so. I think about just sort of anonymous men. Fucking.
Did you ever fuck a man and a woman?
No.
Did you ever think about that?
I don’t know.
No?
Maybe. Yeah. I guess so. Why are you asking all the questions?
Well, you can ask me questions if you want.
Did you ever fuck a man?
No.
Never?
No.
Really?
Yes.
Did you ever fuck two women?
Uh-huh.
Did you ever fuck a prostitute?
Uh-huh.
You did? Oh, my God (laughing).
Yeah, I fucked two women.
Did you like it?
I loved it. I love it.
Really?
Yeah. They loved it, too. It’s fun. I fucked the two of them. They fucked each other. And they both sucked me. And then I would suck one of them. While the other sucked me. That was good. I had my face in her cunt. And the other one would be sucking on my cock. And then the first one would be sucking on the other one’s cunt. So everybody would be sucking everybody else. And sometimes one of them sucks you and makes you hard and then she puts it in the other one’s cunt. How does that strike you?
It’s good.
I like to watch them suck each other. That’s always exciting. They make each other come. There are lots of things to do, aren’t there?
Yeah.
Frighten you?
Yeah.
Does it really?
A little bit. But I want to fuck you. I want to fuck you. I don’t want to fuck you with someone else.
I’m not asking you to. I’m just answering your questions. I just want to fuck you. I want to suck your cunt. Suck your cunt for an hour. Oh, (bleep), I want to come all over you.
Come on my breasts.
You like that?
Yes.
You’re a very hot girl, aren’t you? Tell me what your cunt looks like now.
Uh-uh.
No? You’re not going to tell me what it looks like?
Uh-uh.
I can imagine it.
(Laughter)
It’s a beautiful cunt.
You know what happened?
What?
I had a gynecologist appointment. And I thought the gynecologist was coming on to me.
Was he?
She.
She was?
It was very different from anything that had ever happened to me before.
Tell me.
I don’t know. She was just, like . . . She was very pretty. She was beautiful. She put the speculum in and she said, “Oh, my God, you have so much stuff in here.” And she kept saying it. And she sort of lifted out this huge glob. I don’t know. It was weird.
She touch you?
Yeah. She put her hand in me. I mean her fingers to do the exam.
Make you excited?
Yeah. She touched this . . . I have a little burn on my thigh, and she touched it, and she asked me what happened. I don’t know. It was different. And that’s when . . .
That’s when what?
Nothing.
Tell me.
I just felt really good. I thought I was crazy.
You thought you were crazy?
Yeah.
You’re not crazy. You’re a hot kid from Hazleton and you’re excited. Maybe you should fuck a girl.
Uh-uh (laughing).
You can do whatever you want, you see? You want to make me come now?
Yeah. I’m all sweaty. It’s cold here, too. Yeah, I want you to come. I want to suck your cock. I want it so bad.
Keep going.
You have your hand on it?
You bet.
Good. Are you rubbing it?
I’m jerking it.
You’re jerking it?
I’m pumping it up and down. I’m pumping it up and down. I’m going to take my balls out. Oh, it feels good, (bleep), it feels good.
Where do you want me?
I want your cunt to sit right down on my cock. To slide on top of it. And to just start pumping up and down. To sit on it and go up on it.
Squeeze my breasts?
I’ll squeeze’em.
Squeeze my nipples?
Oh, I’ll bite on your nipples. Your beautiful pink nipples. Oh, (bleep).
Oh, it’s filling up with come now. It’s filling up with hot, thick come. It’s filling up with hot white come. It’s going to shoot out. Want me to come in your mouth?
Yeah. I want to suck you right now. Very fast. I want to put you in my mouth. Oh, God. I’m sucking it hard.
Suck it, (bleep). Suck me.
Faster and faster?
Suck me, (bleep).
Oh, God.
Suck me, (bleep). Want to suck my dick?
Yes, I want to suck you. I want to suck your cock.
Suck my stiff cock. Hard, stiff cock. Suck my hard, stiff cock.
Oh, God.
Oh, it’s full of come, (bleep). Oh, (bleep), suck it now. Ahha! Ahh! Ahh! Ahh! . . . Oh, my goodness. . . . Are you still there?
Yeah.
That’s good. I’m glad it’s you who’s still there.
(Laughter)
Oh, sweetheart.
You’re an animal.
An animal? You think so?
Yeah.
A human animal?
Yeah.
And you? What are you?
A bad girl.
That’s a good thing to be. It’s better than the opposite. You think you have to be a good girl?
Well, it’s what people expect.
Well, you be realistic and let them be unrealistic. Jesus. There’s a mess here.
(Laughter)
Oh, lovely (bleep).
Are you still alone?
Yes. I’m still alone.
When’s your wife coming back?
2 “Give strong drink unto him that is perishing, and wine unto the distressed in soul: Let him drink and forget his misery and remember his sorrow no more!” (Proverbs 31.6-7)