Sabbath’s Theater (34 page)

♦ ♦ ♦

The only communication Sabbath received during the two weeks before he was allowed to visit Roseanna was a resoundingly factual postcard sent to him from Usher at the end of her first week there: no salutation and mailed simply to their street address in Madamaska Falls—she would not even write his name. “Meet me at Roderick House, 23rd, 4:30 p.m. Dinner at 5:15. I have AA meeting 7-8 p.m. Stay Ragged Hill Lodge in Usher if you don’t want to drive home same night. R.C.S.”

Just as he was getting into the car at 1:30 on the 23rd, the phone rang in the house and he raced back through the kitchen door, thinking that it must be Drenka. When he heard Roseanna, reversing the charges, he figured she was calling to ask him not to come. He’d phone Drenka with the news as soon as she hung up.

“How are you, Roseanna?”

Her voice, never highly inflected, was ironed flat, stern and angry and flat. “Are you coming?”

“I was just getting into the car. I had to run back to the house to get the phone.”

“I want you to bring something. Please,” she added, as though someone were there instructing her on what to say and how to say it.

“Bring something? Of course,” he said. “Anything.”

Her reply to this was a harsh, unscripted laugh. Followed icily by “In my file. Top drawer at the back. A blue three-ring binder. I have to have it.”

“I’ll bring it. But I’ll have to get into the file.”

“You’ll need the key.” More icily still, if that could be possible.

“Yes? Where would I find it?”

“In my riding boots. . . . The left boot.”

But over the years he’d searched through all her boots, shoes, and sneakers. She must have moved it there recently from wherever it had been hidden from him before.

“Go get it now,” she said. “Find it now. It’s important. . . . Please.”

“Sure. Okay. The right boot.”

“The
left!
”

No, it wasn’t hard to make her lose hold. And that was with two weeks already under her belt and only two to go.

He found the key and, from the file, got the blue three-ring binder and came back to the phone to assure her he had it.

“Did you lock the file?”

He lied and said yes.

“Bring the key with you. The file key. Please.”

“Of course.”

“And the binder. It’s blue. There are two elastic bands around it.”

“Got it right here.”

“Please don’t lose it!” she exploded. “It is a matter of life or death!”

“Are you sure you really want it?”

“Don’t
argue
with me! Do as I ask you! It’s not easy for me even to
talk
to you!”

“Would you rather I didn’t come?” He wondered if it would be safe at this hour to drive by the inn and blow the horn twice, their signal for Drenka to meet him at the Grotto.

“If you don’t want to come,” she said, “don’t. You’re not doing anyone a favor. If you’re not interested in seeing me,
that is fine with me
”

“I am interested in seeing you. That’s why I was in the car when you called. How do you feel? Are you any better?”

She answered in a wavering voice, “It isn’t easy.”

“I’m sure it isn’t.”

“It’s damn hard.” She began to cry. “It’s
impossibly
hard.”

“Are you making headway at all?”

“Oh, you don’t understand! You’ll never understand!” she shouted, and hung up.

In the binder were the letters that her father had sent her after she had left him to go to live with her mother, following her mother’s return from France. He’d written a letter to Roseanna every single day right up to the evening that he killed himself. The suicide letter was addressed both to Roseanna and to the younger sister, Ella. Roseanna’s mother had gathered the letters to her daughters together and had kept them for them until she herself had died after a long ordeal with emphysema the year before. The binder had been bequeathed to Roseanna along with her mother’s antiques, but she had never been able even to remove the elastic bands holding it shut. For a while she was determined to throw it out, but she could not do that either.

Halfway to Usher, Sabbath stopped at a highway diner. He held the binder in his lap until the waitress brought him coffee. Then he removed the elastic bands, placed them carefully in his jacket pocket, and opened to the letters.

The letter written only hours before he hanged himself was headed “My beloved children, Roseanna and Ella,” and dated “Cambridge, Sept. 15,1950.” Rosie was thirteen. Professor Cavanaugh’s last letter Sabbath read first:

Cambridge, Sept. 15,1950

My beloved children, Roseanna and Ella,

I say
beloved
in spite of everything. I have always tried to do my best, but I have failed completely. I have failed in my marriages and I have failed in my work. When your mother left us, I became a broken man. And when even you, my beloved children, abandoned me, everything
ended. Since then I have had total insomnia. I have no strength any longer. I am exhausted and I am ill from all the sleeping pills. I cannot go on any longer God help me. Please do not judge me too harshly.

Live happily!

Dad

Cambridge, Feb. 6,1950

Dear little Roseanna!

You cannot imagine how I miss my beloved little darling. I feel completely empty inside and I don’t know how I’ll get over it. But at the same time I feel that it was important and necessary that it happen. I have seen the change in you since May of last year. I was terribly worried since
I could not help you
and you did not wish to confide in me. You bottled yourself up and pushed me away. I did not know that you had such a hard time in school but I suspected as much since your classmates never visited you. Only pretty little Helen Kylie came sometimes and picked you up in the morning. But my little dear one, the fault was yours. You felt superior and you showed it maybe more than you knew yourself. This is exactly the same thing that happened to your mother with her friends here. Dear little Roseanna, I do not say this to accuse you but so that you can think through all of this and eventually discuss it with your mother. And then you’ll learn that in life one must not be selfish. . . .

Cambridge, Feb. 8,1950

. . .you had lost contact with your father and I could no longer penetrate the armor by which you surrounded yourself. It worried me so deeply. I understood that you needed a mother I even tried to get you one but that failed totally. Now you have your real mother back, whom you so long have missed. Now you have all the possibilities again to become well. This will give you new courage to live. And you’ll be happy again with school. In intelligence you are way, way above the average. . . .

Your father’s home remains open for you, whenever you want to return, for a shorter or longer period of time. You are my most beloved child and the emptiness is enormous without you. I shall try to gain solace thinking that what happened was best for you.

Please write me something as soon as you are settled. Good-bye, my little darling! A thousand loving kisses from your lonely

Dad

Cambridge, Feb. 9,1950

Dear little Roseanna!

I ran into Miss Lerman on the street. She was sad that you left the school. She said that all the teachers liked you so much. But she understood that you had a difficult time lately, infections, et cetera, which forced you to be absent for long periods. She also noted that lately you hadn’t been together with Helen Kylie or your other nice friends, Myra, Phyllis, and Aggie. But she said these girls were committed to their studies while Roseanna has lost the desire to succeed. She hoped that you would get over your difficulties in a few years. She had seen many similar cases, she said. She also felt strongly, as I do, that a girls’ school is better for girls in puberty. Unfortunately your mother does not seem to share Miss Lerman’s opinion. . . .

. . .yes, dear little Roseanna, I hope you’ll soon be as happy as when you were my sunshine, truthful and straightforward. But then our problems began. I wanted to help you but I couldn’t since you didn’t want my help. You couldn’t confide your worries to me any longer. Then you needed a mother but then you did not have a mother unfortunately. . . .

A huge hug from

Dad

Cambridge, Feb. 10,1950

Dear Roseanna!

You promised to call and write often to me when you left. You were so sweet and open and I believed you. But
love is blind. Now five days have passed since you left and I have not had one line from you. Neither did you want to speak to me last night, even though I was home. I am beginning to understand, my eyes are opening. Do you have a bad conscience? Can you no longer look your father in the eye? Is that the thank-you for all I have done for you during these five years when I alone had to take care of my children? It is cruel. It is horrible. Can you ever again come home to your father and look him in the eye? I can hardly grasp this. But I do not judge you. I understand that lately you have been under hypnosis. Your mother seems to have made it her mission to harass me to the utmost. Her only interest is my defeat. She does not seem to have changed as much as you children seem to think.

Maybe you will write a few lines and tell me what I should do. Shall I clean out your room and try to forget that you ever existed?

Why did you lie to me at the stationery store about the ten dollars? It was unnecessary. Not a beautiful last memory.

Dad

Cambridge, Feb. 11,1950

Dearest little Roseanna!

A thousand thank-yous for your longed-for letter today! It made me so happy that I now feel like another person. The sun is shining again over my broken life. Please forgive my last letter. I was so depressed when I wrote it that I barely believed I could stand up again. But today everything feels different. Irene has now become so kind that I would even say she is
sweet
. She has probably helped me over the worst crisis—your departure. . . .

Of course you are welcome so long as you do not completely cut off contact with your father. And now, since things here at home are calm and peaceful again, your letters will be heartily welcome to us
all
. Please write as often as you can to us. It doesn’t have to be a long epistle but just a short greeting that you are fine. Though some
times you must write some lines to your father telling him how you feel in the depths of your soul, especially when sorrows drag you down.

Dearest dearest dearest regards from us all, but especially from your loving

Dad

This was the way the letters went from the February day in 1950 when Roseanna moved from Cambridge with Ella to live with her mother through the end of April, which was as far as Sabbath was able to read if he intended to be on time for dinner at the hospital. And he was sure to hear the same despondent message being beeped right on down to the end anyway—the world against him, obstructing him, insulting and crushing him.
Shall I clean out your room and try to forget that you ever existed?
From bleeding Professor Cavanaugh to his thirteen-year-old beloved after not having heard from her for five days. The suffering, crazy drunk—couldn’t have been battle-free one day of his life, until the day the stone was lifted.
Please do not judge me harshly. Live happily! Dad
. And then, no longer out of tune with a thing. Everything at last under control.

Sabbath pulled into the hospital parking lot just before five. On foot he made his way up a circular drive that separated a wide bowl of green lawn from a long three-storied white clapboard house with black-shuttered windows at the top of the hill, the hospital’s main building, designed, coincidentally enough, very much in the style of the Baliches’ colonial-style inn overlooking Lake Madamaska. In the last century there’d been a lake here, too, where now there was the lakelike lawn, and looming above it a massive Gothic mansion that had fallen into ruin after the death of the childless owners. First the roof gave way, then the stone walls, until, in 1909, the lake was drained and the spookily picturesque pile was pushed into the hole with a steam shovel and covered over to make way for a TB sanatorium. Today the old sanatorium was the main building of Usher Psychiatric Hospital but continued to be referred to as the Mansion.

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.