The Crowd Sounds Happy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  After one of these visits to my father’s, my nursery school teacher, Mrs. Nover, took my mother aside and said that “something” was happening down there “that’s upsetting him.” My mother explained to Mrs. Nover about my father. “You need to tell him,” Mrs. Nover said. My mother said she felt she couldn’t tell me because, “I don’t think it would be right for me to say anything to the children against their father.” As she spoke, my mother could tell that Mrs. Nover was “appalled,” thought “I was a sensible person doing an incredibly stupid thing.”

  “When will the children find out about me,” my father asked my mother.

  “Don’t worry,” my mother told him. “Not until they’ve grown up.”

  When I was six, my father took me to Washington’s National Zoo, where he got angry and walked away from me. Only by running along after him was I able to keep him in sight. He went up a sloping walkway and I followed until, finally, he slowed enough for me to catch him. My father didn’t look at me, but he let me follow two steps behind. Later we stopped by an office building. I remember the closed newsstand, the immaculate marble floor of the empty weekend lobby, him waiting for the elevator, stiff with mood. The elevator door opened, he entered, and I made it too, just slipping in between the closing doors.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Things First

  My mother, Sally, and I made frequent weekend overnight visits to see my mother’s older sister, Susi. Susi lived an hour and a half away in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, with her husband, Tony, and my coeval cousin, Jody, in a small, white hillside Colonial home that we all called the Little House, although it was much larger than our home in New Haven. Typically when we drove to Croton, my mother liked to be on the road first thing, for, once we had a destination confronting us, she was impatient to be there, and a Saturday split into fragments displeased her, as did any kind of lassitude about time.

  On the nights before travel, from the moment we’d eaten our supper my mother was “racing,” as she put it, washing the dishes, hauling the laundry up from the basement to hang out overnight on the clothesline, caroming a dust cloth through all five rooms so that we’d return from our trip to a spotless house, setting up the ironing board for upcoming early morning duty, and at last pulling out the convertible sofa bed from the new red couch in the living room. From my bed sometimes I could hear her through the closed door to my room, gasping as she hoisted.

  Before dawn she was up again, folding back the sofa bed and smoothing the cushions. By the time Sally and I were awake, there was no sign that my mother had rested. After taking in the laundry and ironing, all of it, even the dish towels, she roused us. While Sally and I ate breakfast, my mother was remaking the beds we’d stripped, with fresh sheets and hospital corners, loading the car, clearing off the table while reminding us to visit the toilet for a final time—we were not a family that willingly made rest stops—leading us out across our busy street, and pulling into the gas station just before it opened at seven.

  We went to the Arco station where the proprietor’s navy blue work shirt had “Vic” scripted in red within a white oval above the right pocket. That was still the full-service era, when the small business proprietors around New Haven knew all of their steady customers and, as we especially learned a few years later, during the long gas lines of the OPEC oil embargo, all of the gossip. With Vic my mother needed to do what she so rarely did, rely on somebody else, place herself in his care. Vic must have intuitively understood that for a schoolteacher with two young children in the backseat and the wedding ring gone from her finger, the open road could seem threatening. He scrutinized the oil level on the dipstick, looked carefully at our tires without being asked to, and on a hot July day might spend an extra moment saying reassuring things to my mother about the impeccable condition of her radiator. Then, when the gas tank was full and the windshield sparkling, we were off with our clean bill of transit. I often had the feeling about my mother in those years that the only two times she could relax were when she was safely in interstate motion and while visiting her sister.

  Croton was less than two hours from New Haven, and, since we traveled there frequently and to few other places, I remember the details of the journey with the clarity of successive landmarks, the way the parkway narrowed, the paving surface abruptly becoming gaunt and pellagrous as we crossed over the Connecticut border into New York, a drive-in movie theater, a Carvel ice cream stand, a pizza parlor named Honey’s. We never paused to inspect any of these attractions. It never would have occurred to my mother, and I knew that it should not be occurring to me. We proceeded steadily until turning onto the Old Post Road where smiling Uncle Tony, Jody, and Aunt Susi would come bursting out of the Little House to greet us.

  The two sisters set eyes on one another and immediately they would begin talking. It was as though they were making up for lost conversations, which, in a way, they were. Susi was nine years older than my mother, and, in Susi’s childhood, day after day her mother, Erica Gerschenkron, felt “busy” or “tired” or “unwell” and had put Susi in charge of the baby; soon Susi was all but raising my mother. It was an enormous burden for a young girl, and Susi took it out on my mother, finding ways to undermine her appearance, her abilities, her mind, habitually referring to her as “Stupid Sister.” My mother was already, by nature, the more sensitive of them, and these years wore abrasions and fissures that began to mend only when the two sisters became simultaneously pregnant with their first children. In sharing that intimate experience, they began to share other intimacies. My mother tried to explain how it felt to be rejected first by your mother, and then by your sister, who was acting in your mother’s place. Susi, not yet thirty-five, confessed to my mother that she now lived in a constant state of weariness: “I feel like a horse that was asked to pull too soon.”

  That wasn’t how she ever seemed to me. Susi was short, curvy, and blond, with eyes of lapis blue and a smile so warm and wide it made me think of a sound—the midday whistle in Croton. I’d overhear her conversations with my mother, so full of lively cadences and frequent laughter, and I could tell, above all things, how happy my mother always became when she was sitting across a table drinking coffee and talking with her sister.

  When you are young and living with a single parent, you are always on the lookout for the way people in more traditional families comport themselves. In Croton the rules changed, and what was frivolous or tawdry or too expensive in New Haven became acceptable across state lines, with television and restaurants and the new movie at the drive-in resurrected as “Susi things to do.” Susi would lead us all upstairs to watch The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour on television, or she’d strum a guitar and sing folk songs like “I Never Will Marry,” “Amazing Grace,” and “Daddy, You Been on My Mind” in a deep-voiced way that would make me well up with a good kind of sadness. One year, in honor of my visit in early December, she began what became an annual celebration of St. Nicholas Day, setting out our shoes along with food for Saint Nick the night before in front of their Franklin stove. In the morning, our shoes were filled with candy and dried fruits while most, but not all, of the food on Saint Nick’s plate was gone. At home, in New Haven, we didn’t have dessert. In Croton, midway through dinner you’d begin to wonder what day-ending flourish Susi had waiting. She thrived on the gratifications of hue, shape, and texture, was a person who, after buying Popsicles by the box for a while, decided that she could do better than Good Humor and made her own in deep, enamel colors, was a person who preferred to bake an apple strudel rather than an apple pie because everybody already knew about apple pie. Another evening she might say “Let’s jump in the car and go to Carvel and get bonnets,” and just like that we’d be standing in a parking lot licking soft cones of ice cream dipped in chocolate syrup, my mother happily among us, relieved from her own sense of stricture and regulation.

  Uncle Tony also was a glimpse of another way of being. He was the man I saw most frequently in the world, and I liked to watch him i
n action, though on Saturdays the actions were delayed. Well past midday most of Tony remained supine under quilts, with only his dark hair and stubbled cheeks peeping out from beneath a ridge of newspapers. Eventually he added the paper to one of the many piles of newsprint high as my shoulder that were threatening to submerge the bed. He kept all editions, insisting on their necessity for future reference, though to locate any paper dated much past a couple of weeks would have required a messy strip-mining operation of a sort that was never attempted. One year at Christmas, Tony gave me a book of amusing headlines that had appeared in American newspapers, and after that I used to imagine how it would be reported if at last the floor collapsed taking Tony and the bed with it: “Man Succumbs to Weight of His Times.” When Susi and my mother mentioned this bracken of information, they used to refer to “those newspapers,” with an inflection that expressed equal parts horror and helplessness.

  In our bookish family, because so many of his concerns were conspicuously masculine, Tony was known as the soul of practicality, and my mother referred me to him for the resolution of my technical quandaries. “Ask your uncle next time you see him,” she’d say when I wondered about assembling a toy, what a secant did, or how to shave my face. He had a workshop and liked speedy cars and large cameras and safari jackets and the outdoors—was the sort of gadget-loving man who finds joy in reading maps, consumer guides, and instruction manuals. But Tony was not vigorous so much as he understood vigor; his workshop was filled with uncompleted projects, and his pragmatism was, if anything, conceptual. He was happier to explain things than to do them. Before we visited the White Mountains one summer, Tony spent a lot of time showing me how to read the Appalachian Mountain Club’s guide to the trails of the Presidential Range. Then we drove up the mountains. On the day we took a sailboat out onto the Hudson, there were excellent seminars on rigging and the boom, but very little sailing. Tony worked at a think tank as a political and economic futurist, making forecasts and predictions about how Americans would one day live, and right down to the household quotidian he was a believer in capitalist technology as the source of daily progress, someone who seemed almost to look forward to his personal machines becoming obsolete, so eager was he to discover what was coming next to make his life more efficient and comfortable.

  I remember many firsts. There was the first day of school at Worthington Hooker Elementary; the day I first read from a book, sounding out the name “Tip” from a paperback primer that told the life and times of Tip, a puppy, and Mitten, a kitten; the day I crouched on the floor of my bedroom and first tied my right shoelace; the day I learned to write, to add, subtract, and sight-read musical notation, skills that made the world seem like a place all made of codes; and because there I was penetrating so many of them so quickly, life seemed to promise a future forever filled with momentous new disclosures. Thinking back later, these firsts seemed crucial, the stuff of myth, and I wanted to believe that there was retrospective significance in them, and to remember all the meaningful details. Yet when I couldn’t reclaim anything further from the mists, I would wonder why, simply because it was the first time, an experience should command such weight.

  At home, learning some things required, in my mother’s judgment, “a man to teach you,” and so a succession of independent masculine contractors was called in: a high school boy to show me how to ride a bicycle—“Now, whatever you do, don’t stop pedaling or you’ll fall over,” he warned as his steadying hand left my back; a work colleague’s husband to sled with me down steep Divinity Hill (we crashed into an iron fence and saw that a Flexible Flyer would bend but not break); and even an affable stranger conveniently encountered on the beach who explained how to swim, but not when to stop—I went and went until plowing into a rock and slicing open my scalp.

  Another day I hiked. Hiking turned out to be only another word for walking, but the day seemed worthy of elevation because of who took me. It was while on a weekend picnic to a state park on the Connecticut River with a man my mother dated. I became quickly attached to him, as I was drawn to all the guys who came to take her out. She was less impressed, and none of those relationships developed. “Some of them preferred doing things with you than with me,” she once said.

  I liked to be around men and older boys, used to visit the firemen at our local stationhouse, and to try to get Chipper, the kid brother of one of my baby-sitters, to play with me. Although he was several school grades ahead, sometimes he would, and we’d roam the neighborhood. We were both preoccupied with the people who lived in those houses along highways into whose lamp-lit rooms you could see as you drove past at night. Their existences seemed thrilling to us, possibly lurid, and there was a lot of speculating about what had brought the residents there. Chipper even slept over once, and from a sleeping bag on the floor in the dark he thought up and lobbed math problems to me in my bed to solve, lengthy equations that called for the addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of a protracted sequence of multi-digit numbers, some of them in the tens of thousands, others in the high millions. He’d finally finish. I’d make a guess. The answer would be zero. The answer was always zero, but I never wanted to guess it because with so many numbers in the air, it couldn’t all add up to nothing.

  My locus was kitty-corner from our house, the fenced-in asphalt schoolyard of Worthington Hooker. Soon enough, I spent all my afternoons there. At age six, I was simply going along with time, heading out into days where everything I came upon still seemed flawless and magnificent, not its best self but its only self—the way it was supposed to be. I did not yet measure existence, only looked to it to present me with endless perfections, and one of the qualities of the schoolyard that drew me there day after day was that on blacktop, between diamonds of wire, there was just enough constraint to open everything up.

  We played a lot of kickball. The schoolhouse itself was a rambling, late-Victorian structure built of sun-baked pink bricks, with jagged wall excrescences and two back porches that would pinball a cleverly placed line drive. Anything kicked over the high fence that ran from the left field foul line to deep center field was a home run, while a ball kicked over the short fence beyond the tiny right field area “Down First” was a double. The rest of right field and right center didn’t exist; there were only those carom-causing brick walls and the mesh-protected windows of the school building. Drooping over the left field line behind third base was a mulberry tree whose seasonal groundfall sent many a pop-fly-pursuing shortstop skidding off course. For a while, a large tree stood incongruously at second base, but it was chopped down, leaving behind only a slight commemorative rise in the asphalt.

  During the school day, at class recess time, red rubber balls were produced, and a group of us kickball players shared the field with a chaos of bouncing, skipping, hop-scotching, hula-hooping, jump-roping children. There were horse-crazed girls galloping astride phantom mounts, wild games of tag, and teachers pursuing future chemists who’d been observed concocting bizarre compounds with paste, crayon shavings, and the lunch milk. We players were eager to refine our kicking and catching to make a good showing in the ongoing, weekly, after-school kickball games between the Raiders and the Vikings. That was serious kickball, presided over by a man named Mr. Lucas, who appeared in the schoolyard each Tuesday afternoon through the fall and then again when the temperatures warmed in the spring to pitch for both teams. Any Worthington Hooker student was welcome to play. At age six, I began my career assigned to the Raiders, my first experience with the chanciness of sporting affiliations and the unswerving covenants that come with them. Immediately, I could never have been a Viking, and to be a Raider was no less than an expression of self.

  Before every game, Mr. Lucas selected the week’s captain for each team. When we Raiders were up, our captain created a batting order. Out in the field, we would gather around the captain and plead for positions. There was some uncertainty as to who would receive the coveted shortstop and left-center-field spots. There was no chance t
hat I would be playing anywhere but tucked safely out of the way, alongside the near porch, Down First. Yet this was a highly ritualized process, and, like everyone else, I made a mendicant of myself, yelling “Down First! Down First!” until the magic face of destiny met my eyes, solemnly pointed and intoned “Nicky! Down First!” and away I went at a delighted scurry for another week of futility.

  When I was at the plate, as Mr. Lucas dipped his arm and released the ball, the entire infield and outfield would creep toward me, converging like high tide, smothering my most vigorous dribbles and throwing me out at first. When I was in the field, if a ball was kicked in my direction I would set for the catch, only to have a teammate drift in front of me and make the play. On the whole, though, more cruising butterflies came near me than balls, so I was left with plenty of time to study Mr. Lucas and the older players.

  Mr. Lucas had a taut, kinetic bearing that heightened the pulse of our games even as it kept them moving in an efficient way. He was friendly, but a little aloof, and all this, and the snappy warm-up pants striped down the side that he wore, made me assume that he was a touring kickball professional. Some of the older Raiders were more accessible, especially a tall, lean lord of the blacktop named Trem, whose line drives made thwacks when the ball glanced off the mesh window screens. Among the tips and counsel Trem gave me for success in the asphalt world was to pull my laces so tight “it hurts.” Footwear being a player’s only essential equipment, thereafter I scrutinized the choices of the Raiders stars, such as Zito, who was always calm and smiling as he glided around the outfield making cinematic catches in green low-tops. One winter, J.B. wore his father’s high black leather infantry boots to school every day, along with five extra pairs of socks so the boots would stay on. The purpose of this, he explained to me, was to “get fast.” When spring came, on the first kickball Tuesday, J.B. changed into sneakers, and then dashed around the playground bases like a hamster.