The Crowd Sounds Happy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  The Crowd Sounds Happy

  A Story of Love, Madness and Baseball

  Nicholas Dawidoff

  PANTHON BOOKS

  New York

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  ONE Relievers

  TWO Game Called on Account of Darkness

  THREE Things First

  FOUR The Killer Inside Me

  FIVE Safe Havens

  SIX Flushing

  SEVEN Adventures in the Loss Column

  EIGHT Parade’s End

  NINE Grief

  TEN My City in Ruin

  ELEVEN Next to Love

  TWELVE Leaving

  EPILOGUE Listening to a Ballgame, I Hear My Life

  Source Notes and Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Nicholas Dawidoff

  Copyright

  For Rebecca W. Carman

  And for Dan Frank, Sue Halpern, and Ginger Young

  Cherished friends who are family to me

  “I guess everybody thinks about the old times, even the happiest people.”

  —WILLA CATHER, My Ántonia

  “Next to love is the desire for love.”

  —WALLACE STEVENS,

  “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”

  “The secret of happiness (they say) is to live in the imagination.”

  —V. S. PRITCHETT, Midnight Oil

  CHAPTER ONE

  Relievers

  I grew up in a city of dying elms called the Elm City, on a street with no willows named Willow Street. Uncelebrated trees shaded our part of the road, sturdy oaks and mature maples, their branches so thick with leaves that they created a blind curve just before the intersection where the street straightened past our house and made its hard line for the highway. Cars traveled at a clip down Willow Street, especially at night, and because of the curve it was impossible to see them until they’d nearly reached the streetlight glowing out beyond my bedroom window. Yet lying awake under the covers I could hear those cars coming, and never more distinctly than on rainy fall evenings when the wind had blown a scatter of acorns across the pavement. I’d be tensed against my pillow, listening to the whoosh of tires closing fast over wet asphalt, and then, an instant later, a brief, vivid flurry of noise, the rapid, popping eruptions of a dozen flattened acorns, before the whoosh receded into traceless silence as someone else hurried out of town. Long before I knew that I came from a place people wanted to leave, I saw how eager they were to get away.

  Every so often a car wouldn’t make it to the highway. From my bed I’d hear the familiar swelling murmur of onrushing rubber—it was like nearing a riverbank through parted woods—and I’d be picturing the car flowing through the blind curve just as the night detonated in a cry of brakes and tremendous thudding impact. I’d crawl to the end of my bed where I could peer at the window glass, but all I could see was the fine silvery mist of rain drifting past the street lamp. Retreating, I’d tug the blankets over my face as my bedroom filled with the hiss of punctured radiators and revolving flashes of hot red light. My mother would come through my door and sit by my side for a few minutes. Then she would run her hand through my hair, give me a pat, tell me to sleep tight, and the door would close. My room felt remote, bigger than usual, and every shadow playing along the ceiling terrified me. By morning, when I went outside for a look, all remnants of the accident would have been swept away so that I might have doubted that anything had truly happened were it not for the chips of headlight glass or the laciniated chunk of engine grille that I’d find in the gutter with the acorns.

  But before any of those investigations, there were hours of the night still to go, and as I tried to calm myself with less upsetting thoughts, invariably my mind turned to my favorite baseball team, the Boston Red Sox. There in the dark I evaluated the feats and virtues of the players I liked best. This was the early and mid-1970s, and their names were Griffin, Siebert, Tiant, Aparicio, and Yastrzemski. We had no television, did not subscribe to the newspaper, and my bedtime was not long after the evening broadcasts of games began on the radio, so I knew very little about the Red Sox. In those days, everybody knew less about ballplayers. Yet my desire for familiarity with them was intense, and I arrived at strong impressions, most of which placed peculiar emphasis on the players’ own boyhoods. Griffin, for instance, I had heard was nicknamed “The Dude,” which led to my belief that he’d grown up playing second base in cowboy boots. Because Siebert was always called “Sonny,” my illogical conviction was that he’d been taught to pitch by his father, out beyond the barn stalls on the family farm. The musically cadenced name Tiant led to my certainty that the pitcher had taken fife lessons as a child and entertained his teammates after games with Cuban melodies. The diminutive Aparicio, I knew, played shortstop by creeping forward on tiptoes as each pitch was released, an eccentric technique I supposed he had first employed in youth to make himself seem taller, and one that I—tinier than he and intimidating to nobody on the playground—sedulously imitated. I had yet to visit Fenway Park where the Red Sox played their games, and I thought of it as a public greensward, not unlike East Rock Park in my neighborhood, dappled with shade trees, seesaws, basketball courts, picnickers, the ball field itself surrounded by slatted city benches from which cheering citizens took in the game. Because very few of the player names on my baseball cards presented challenges to pronunciation, as a Dawidoff I was grateful to Yastrzemski. That someone had become the leader of the Red Sox despite that less-than-sibilant thicket soothed my concerns that I might somehow be held back in life on nominal grounds. I used to repeat Yastrzemski over and over, always with the tongue-rolling inflection that my Russian-born grandfather, Alexander Gerschenkron, used to make a diphthong.

  Naturally, I wanted the best for all these Red Sox men, which in baseball terms meant winning the World Series. I spent a lot of time imagining how it would feel when this baseball apotheosis happened. The Red Sox had not won the World Series in a very long time and by now had something of an accumulating reputation for disappointment, but I was not deterred. Like most people who believe they are awaiting a miraculous occasion, my anticipation took on exalted forms. As I think back now on those moments, mysterious to me is the extent to which my private worldly desires were infiltrated by my aspirations for the Red Sox, how the team brought up the fundamental questions of possibility. At various moments of my early youth, the great victory was conflated with the news that a traveling circus with clowns, trapeze artists, and a sword-swallowing lady was coming to town to perform for an audience of one—me; word that my younger sister, Sally, would be going off to live elsewhere permanently, with another family; a declaration of love from a succession of adored female personages including: Mary Elizabeth, a girl I first encountered on the swings at nursery school and after whom I’d named my tabby cat; the haughty Claire, who had French parents and a propensity to be “out jump-roping” when I called up on the telephone to invite her over to play; and yellow-haired Christine, who wore colorful jumpers and, to my sorrow, moved away after third grade. The most recurrent of my Red Sox World Series reveries made me part of a large, noisy family gathered around a laden table for Thanksgiving dinner with a cheerful father at the head to say the blessing and carve my mother’s turkey.

  There were plenty more variations on this theme, and on those sleepless nights, no matter what bumped and rolled outside my window, the Red Sox were there to stand by me. If things grew truly desperate, I had a fail-safe. I was no tabulator of sheep; I counted Yastrzemskis, a brief doxology that never amounted to much of a total before all anxieties faded and the terrible wakefulness was gone.

  CHAPT
ER TWO

  Game Called on Account of Darkness

  All the way from Washington to New Haven it rained, I three years old and unsurprised to find that the sky should share my mood. What did I know of how life worked, what was custom or coincidence? To me, everything new that happened was the norm. That afternoon I had gone to visit my friend Felix, a Saturday like any other until the sudden solemnity of being told by my mother to say goodbye to dark-haired Felix because we were “going away.” Felix lived along the crest of a hilly road out beyond Georgetown with chips of mica embedded in the sloping street pavement on which I concentrated while my mother spoke with his mother, I following that shining line of road until it descended into the sky at the end of the world. And then we were crossing over, leaving everything known behind as we went cannonading north along the expressway in our Volkswagen Bug while the day grew black and water covered the surface of the window glass in tandem with the stream running down my face.

  When a child thinks, I have never felt this way before, the expectation is that now that you have, you will again. I did in the future leave my father, Donald Dawidoff, many times, but those later departures never in any way resembled the day we first moved away from him. I cannot bring back his Washington face, cannot see him as someone with whom I shared life. My first memory of him, my first life’s memory, is the feeling of losing him for good. “By the time you were old enough to remember your father,” my mother, Heidi, said to me once, “he was a different person.”

  I know a few other details from my brief time in Washington, and since they were told to me a long time ago, when I was very young, not so long after I lived them, I recall them as my own memories. In our two and a half Washington years as a family, we had three different addresses, though in my recollection the trio has become fused into only one white clapboard house. Out our front picture window, across the street, was an insurance company parking lot. At the end of the afternoon it was my habit to stand on the couch in front of the window, bracing myself against the back cushions, and recite the makes of all the cars as they came in a procession out of the parking lot, the hearty Buicks and Chevys, the Morris Minors, which looked flimsy and often had dents, and especially the sports cars, the Saab with its hubcaps studded with interesting punch holes, the low, long-hooded Volvo coupé, and the spoke-wheeled British racing green MG. Our house had a front porch and a staircase inside leading up to the second floor. Out back was a spacious yard with trees and also a thick tree stump, as well as many ground squirrels that would scamper across the stump and sometimes pause to perch on it with a nut. At a certain point my father began talking to the squirrels, and he believed that even the dead ones were initiating conversations, communicating with him on urgent matters, instructing him when to strike, and whom.

  Just as my changed father looked to me as he always had, my mother, too, remained the same in my eyes but appeared different to the world. The day before we were to leave Washington, she asked my friend Peter’s mother if I could stay at their house while my mother packed up our belongings. I had been to Peter’s house many times. Now, however, because my parents were getting divorced, Peter’s mother said that we were no longer welcome inside their door. “I can’t have you in my house anymore, but I guess I could meet you at a motel and look after him there,” she told my mother. My mother said not to worry, she would make other arrangements. It was around the same time that my mother’s mother, my Grandma Erica, fell into the habit of freckling her conversation with remarks about the unseemly ways of “divorced women.” Twenty years later, when my Grandma Erica was dying, out of the blue she told my mother, “You know, when I said all those things about divorced women, I didn’t mean you.”

  We arrived in New Haven at night. Our new house, a husky, gray, two-family structure, had only one floor for us this time, a ground-level railroad layout with a branch line to the dining room and kitchen, but there were high ceilings and not much furniture, making it feel rangy and limitless. I ran along bare wooden floors through four rooms, all the way to the very rear window, where I looked out and, unable to see anything of the backyard through the night-darkened glass, believed the unseen perimeters must be huge—big as a meadow. I was imagining a paradise of grass, bosky field, jungle gym, and fountain when my mother told me it was time to go to sleep. I still had my old crib and Sally, sixteen months old, had hers. That first floor of 292 Willow Street would be my home for the rest of my childhood.

  I learned a lot of things later than most people, but something I understood early was how small a hold I would have on determining my own history. My mother says that when at first we came to Willow Street, I feared departures, didn’t ever want to leave home. My mother had resumed teaching high school English at Day Prospect Hill, the private girls school up on top of the Canner Street hill where she’d worked before I was born, from 1960 to 1962, while my father was a student at Yale Law School. One day, not long after we arrived back in New Haven, an older teaching colleague of my mother’s came over to Willow Street, presented her with a rocking chair as a housewarming gift, and then took me out for a short drive alone with her in her car, just so I’d see I could go away and would return.

  Not wanting to empty my father’s life completely, my mother had left almost all of our possessions behind with him in Washington, so initially our New Haven furnishings were mostly unwanted hand-me-downs from my mother’s older sister, Susi. My mother slept in the living room on a rust-orange upholstered daybed that doubled as our couch. A skewbald rug spread over the floor. The daybed faced a nonworking fireplace that had no andirons, yet, nonetheless, was protected by a metal screen that often buckled and tipped over. A wooden mantel rose above the fireplace, while the apron in front of it was a mosaic of lacquered greenish orange tiles, several of them broken or permanently dislodged. We ate meals at what would one day become the basement laundry table, seated on heavy brown wooden chairs. My mother had a sewing machine and a radio, which, along with two or three lamps, one of them built out of an old coffee mill, were our only electronic devices.

  We visited a lumberyard and bought pine planks to build cases for my mother’s books. She painted the dining room floor blue—it looked to me like a calm upside-down sky—the walls were whitewashed, and one day the brown wooden dining room chairs became golden yellow. Another morning, my mother appeared with an artist’s palette on which she dabbed a small brush in oils as she covered the kitchen cabinets with sprays of painted flowers. For our bedroom walls she designed huge felt murals, cutting the pieces of colored fabric into shapes and gluing them into place as she constructed a farm scene with barns, livestock, and a duck pond for Sally, and for me a felt city with skyscrapers, vehicular traffic, and freighters docking down at the seaport. It could only have been inspired by New York, where I was born and lived for a year until my father was told he would “not be retained” at his job “because,” said his boss, “you’re a lame horse and I wouldn’t keep a lame horse in my stable.”

  Sally and I were each given a new unfinished pinewood shelf by my father’s mother, my Grandma Rebecca, which my mother painted white and then filled with our books and toys, though not my big teddy bear. Beary slept with me and I faithfully kissed him good night until his face collapsed, clots of blue stuffing leaking out everywhere. My mother made him a new mouth.

  My bedroom was filled with the noises of others. It stood at the junction of three rooms, Sally’s bedroom, the bathroom, and the living room, and because a fourth door opened into my narrow closet, which my mother had entirely filled with her clothes, I grew so used to the sound of turning doorknobs that from anywhere in my room I could hear the spindle threads catch and the knobs beginning to shift. Whether they rotated slowly or briskly, I knew that a moment later I would have company.

  The ceiling light fixture in my room had two semi-flush bell-shaped frosted glass shades and a socket where there should have been a third bell, meaning that one bulb always hung naked. Suspended up there, the light look
ed to me like a three-legged stool with one short leg. Upstairs, our neighbors’ passages through their apartment made all three lightbulbs flicker and wink.

  Through my lone window came footfalls heading up the exterior staircase of the yellow house next door, those neighbors so close to me that if I looked out through the glass on a stormy day I could see the drops of water fall to the ground as they removed and shook out their rain hats. Drifting in from the street came music from cars, motorcycle engines, voices moving along the sidewalk in conversation. When my mother went into the kitchen, spoons echoed against the sides of metal pots; from the living room came the news on my mother’s radio, the five CBS bell tones at the top of each hour reaching an appoggiatura before backfalling into resolution. Sometimes above the radio my mother sang verses of songs from her youth: “Just around the corner there’s a rainbow in the sky / So let’s have another cup of coffee / Let’s have another piece of pie.” As my mother moved around the front of the house, there was the alighting-bird flutter of shades being pulled. Sink water ran, metal and wooden drawers opened and shut, a chair scraped as my mother seated herself before the sewing machine, which whirred, stopped, and whirred countless times as she made herself dresses from parch-paper patterns. Other times she was pulling the chair up to her typewriter with keys she struck so true and fast the house rippled with little impacts. At night I could hear her removing the daybed cushions as she prepared to go to sleep. She had organized our house so that she was for Sally and me our portcullis; we were quite literally behind her, although the broader truth is that she was also behind us, always, and when all her sounds ran together and became one, I could hear her commitment to our lives. I could also hear the telephone and the doorbell, though they seldom rang.