Free Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth Page A

came on her grave many nights.
    The old cemetery was six miles out of town on a little-used road that curved up into the woods and then zigzagged down the western side of the mountain, where it emptied into a superannuated truck route to Albany. The cemetery was set into an open hillside that rolled gently up to an ancient stand of hemlock and white pine. It was beautiful, still, aesthetically charming, melancholy perhaps, but not a cemetery that made you downhearted when you entered it—it was so charming that it sometimes looked as though it had nothing to do with death. It was old, veryold, though there were some even older in the nearby hills, their eroded tombstones, fallen aslant, dating back to the earliest years of colonial America. The first burial here—of a certain John Driscoll—had been in 1745; the last burial had been of Drenka, on the last day of November 1993.
    Because of the seventeen snowstorms that winter it was often impossible for him to make his way up to the cemetery, even on nights when Roseanna had hurried off to an AA meeting in her four-wheel drive and he was all alone. But when the roads were plowed, the weather was good, the sun down, and Roseanna gone, he drove his Chevy up to the top of Battle Mountain and parked at the cleared entrance to a hiking path about a quarter mile east of the cemetery and made his way along the highway to the graveyard and then, using a flashlight as sparingly as he could, across the treacherous glaze of the drifted snow to her grave. He never drove out during the day, however much he needed to, for fear of running into one of her Matthews or, for that matter, anyone who could take to wondering why, at the coldest spot in the state’s “icebox” county, in the midst of the worst winter in local history, the disgraced puppeteer was paying his respects to the remains of the innkeeper’s peppy wife. At night he could do what he wished to do, unseen by anyone but his mother’s ghost.
    “What do you want? If you want to say something . . .” But his mother never did communicate with him, and just because she didn’t he came dangerously close to believing that she was not a hallucination—if he was hallucinating, then easily enough he could hallucinate speech for her, enlarge her reality with a voice of the kind with which he used to enliven his puppets. These visitations had been going on too regularly to be a mental aberration . . . unless he was mentally aberrant and the unreality was going to worsen as life became even more unendurable. Without Drenka it
was
unendurable—he didn’t have a life, except at the cemetery.
    The first April after her death, on this early spring night, Sabbath lay spread-eagled atop her grave, reminiscing with her about Christa. “Never forget you coming,” he whispered into the dirt,“never forget you begging her, ‘More, more. . . .’” Invoking Christa did not exacerbate his jealousy, remembering Drenka lying back in his arms while Christa maintained the steady pressure of the point of her tongue on Drenka’s clitoris (for close to an hour—he’d timed them) only intensified the loss, even though, shortly after the three had first got together, Christa began taking Drenka to a bar in Spottsfield to dance. She went so far as to make Drenka the gift of a gold chain that she’d lifted from her former employer’s jewelry drawer on the morning she’d decided she’d had enough of looking after a kid so hyperactive that he was about to be enrolled in a special school for the “gifted.” She told Drenka that the value of
everything
she’d walked off with (including a pair of diamond stud earrings and a slithery little bracelet of diamonds) didn’t come to half of what she was entitled to for having been stuck, sight unseen, with that kid.
    Christa lived in an attic room on Town Street, overlooking the green, just above the gourmet food shop where she worked. Her rent was free, lunches were free, and in addition she was