The Crowd Sounds Happy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  I wanted badly to know about these men, just as I wanted to have them to myself. Nobody else I knew had heard of Rabbit Maranville or Dazzy Vance or Hippo Vaughn or Kiki Cuyler. Though I did not ever lack for companionship and got along with every kid at school, I felt increasingly like a loner, and these men filled up my room. I’d walk in, see those books with their cracked spines, and a happiness would come over me. The players in them seemed to me to come from a better time in a better America, one that was simpler, pastoral, a paradise where heaven was a ball field. If it was possible to feel no longer innocent, no longer naive, that’s the way I was after Jennifer Noon. My instinct was to want still to be innocent and naive, and in that desire I experienced a peculiar nostalgia for those distant days and distant games I had never lived through, a wistful sense that it had all happened only yesterday and a long time ago. I wanted to go back. There I imagined myself in a vast, happy country connected by ball fields.

  And then it was early spring, and from my bedroom I could hear the four-bar clatter of a wooden bat falling to hard pavement, and out of the house I soared to play in the shadow of bricks on days so hot the blacktop became pillowy underfoot, on days still cold enough that grape soda froze solid in the can—sometimes bursting the metal to reveal a purple chunk that tasted so good a couple of kids tried it at home in the freezer, treating whoever next opened the door to a blaze of icy heliotropes. We named captains, chose up sides, made bases with our shirts, and then time lost its interstices, hour after hour, nothing more on my mind in my elation than the thought of being there, hitting and throwing until well past the time when daylight failed.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Safe Havens

  That August, we arrived to spend our annual month in the country with my mother’s parents. My grandfather Alexander Gerschenkron was born in Odessa, and to him it was natural, in the bourgeois Russian way, to retreat from the city during the heat of the summer. As soon as he finished the year’s teaching duties at Harvard, where he was an economics professor, he and my grandmother Erica hurried up to Windswept, my grandparents’ snug, two-hundred-year-old white clapboard farmhouse built on a hillside in Francestown, New Hampshire. Windswept was out of view from any other houses, two miles from Francestown’s lone store, surrounded by fields and forests, tucked beside a road on which traffic seldom passed. Here, after a little morning target shooting with his rifle, my grandfather spent the day under low Colonial ceilings writing scholarly essays about European economic history and puffing on his pipe, while my grandmother gardened and wove rugs on her loom. In the evening, she made dinner and he reread Pushkin, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Pasternak. They had met in Vienna in 1920 after my grandfather and his family fled Russia during the Revolution and always spoke to one another in my grandmother’s native German though both knew many languages. For them there was no question of complete solitude since the small towns and villages of that part of New Hampshire were well sprinkled with my grandfather’s summering Harvard colleagues, but most of my grandparents’ days seemed to pass in contented, bucolic seclusion. The Gerschenkrons were the sort of people who relaxed by reading Dickens or Montesquieu, though they saw no point to reading Dickens or Montesquieu unless they read all of Dickens or Montesquieu, the latter, it went without saying, in the original French. Their idea of summer fun was to spend the free hours together analyzing one hundred translations of Hamlet’s “Doubt thou the stars are fire” quatrain to Ophelia in languages ranging from Catalan to Serbo-Croatian to Icelandic, all in the service of an essay in which they argued that translation inevitably distorts meaning. Aside from one another, they seemed to require no other stimulation.

  As a young grade school boy, August in Francestown to me felt like being marooned in the antipodes. With no other children nearby and scarce entertainments besides a tire swing and the possibility that if the weather held we’d visit the town lake around three, I spent many of my mornings in an idle torpor, staring up at those low ceilings, unable to think of what to do with myself. Getting to my feet, I’d look through the window at the thick stands of trees drooping in the heat or wander to the end of the dirt driveway to stare gloomily down the empty road and wonder where my past city life had gone, wonder how I was going to fill all the listless, rural hours. The air itself was so still that it induced strange lethargies. I was drawn to the floor, to pressing my cheek against cool wood. Once I lay down in the middle of the road just to see what would happen. Nothing did. The rustic landscapes, so compelling to the adults with the old cattle pastures overgrown in a blaze of burdock, gorse, wild strawberries, and black-eyed Susans, the abandoned barns swooning beside roads that went nowhere, the endless brooks, elderly stone walls so precisely fitted it seemed nature had rolled them into place, the mastic smells of pine sap and telephone pole creosote, the lichen-scabbed rocks, and the infrequent breezes murmuring through groves of white birch trees making them sway like disapproving fingers—it all seemed dull. Nothing lifted me; I was a coiled spring gone slack.

  There were no indications in that house that anyone had ever been young. Portions of the brown kitchen floor linoleum had decayed into brittle slivers, the dining room chairs were in such fragile condition you had to sit down carefully so they wouldn’t collapse, the refrigerator chugged and listed, and on the pantry shelf was proof that saltines had once come in metal tins instead of cardboard boxes. In the back of the hall leading from the house to the barn, I opened a door to discover the retired outhouse complete with the half-moon sign that had been used to display occupancy. Spiderwebs traversed the seat. Both of my grandparents were in frail health, so the house was overrun with the fortifications of infirmity: pillboxes, prescription bottles, balms, salves, extra quilts and blankets even in summer, the need for complete silence from children during adult naptimes. My grandparents were not unaware of how these conditions might seem to us and made efforts. I loved my grandmother, who gave me marzipan fruits and jelly-candy slices, called Sally and me Putzi (baby), and told me about Austria where she’d lived until “the war,” and I adored my grandfather, who sat me astride Hoxie, his right knee, and Sally aboard Moxie on the left, and related another picaresque adventure in the lives of Hooey and Mooey, the two naughty children he made up. They often fell on their heads.

  One day he greeted us by saying, “Hello, GFNs.” We wanted to know what that meant. “Good for Nothings,” was the answer.

  “We’re not GFNs,” we told him.

  “You most certainly are GFNs.”

  “No, we are not GFNs,” we insisted.

  “Are you not Grandchildren from New Haven?”

  But a little kid held only so much interest for them; they wanted to have lengthy afternoon grown-up conversations with my mother and she with them. She was a different person in their company, less available because they were always getting her to do things for them, long lists of errands and favors that had her driving all over the Monadnock Region. She’d get back and they’d settle in for epic conversations touching on politics and literature and films. How happy she looked during these sessions that could go on for hours, how animated and unencumbered. As the three of them spoke, I would sit on the white hassock listening to them for as long as I could stand it. Often that wasn’t very long; I had no idea what they were saying. My mother replied to their German in English because, Sally and I knew, as a child in Washington during the war against Hitler, to be the little German-speaking girl had been such a mortifying experience for her. Now, she had no interest in our learning the language, so I didn’t know any German except a handful of words I heard my grandparents use frequently such as nein (no) and warum (why). As a result, my contributions to these discussions were exclusively non sequiturs. After too long a spate of oberdeutsch, sometimes I’d look up from my plate, feign a puzzled expression, and interject a “Warum, Putzi?” This was briefly endearing. More usually I’d get distracted. Once, as they talked, I examined a shelf of my grandfather’s books where I found myself mysteriously drawn to the
pale violet dust cover jacketing his copy of Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Looking up, I interrupted what they were saying to ask, “When you die, Grandpa, can I have this book?” Everyone was awkwardly silent, and then they went back without comment to their conversation. For Christmas, they gave me my own copy.

  At mealtimes, in deference to Sally and to me, my grandparents always communicated in English unless they didn’t want us to understand what they were saying, in which case they’d switch to German. At such times I’d listen carefully though all I could glean were the proper names. My father’s came up from time to time, but it never seemed strange to me that for the duration of that month we did not call or hear from him. It was just the way of things, like the German.

  My grandmother clung to spoken German as she clung to her memories of Austria. She’d left in 1938, because her husband was wanted by the occupying Nazis for having a Jewish father, for being an active anti-Nazi, and for being stateless, and her two children were in similar danger because of their Jewish grandfather. Their escapes had been harrowing, and they never spoke of them. All I knew was that my grandmother seemed to wish I was Austrian. She ordered from Vienna lederhosen for me and a dirndl for Sally that we were expected to wear upon arrival and from time to time afterward through the month. That we were so isolated up on that hill made it easier to ignore the fact of myself turned out in suspendered leather shorts and white high-tops. One of the reasons I looked forward to the annual Francestown Labor Day Parade was that it meant the summer was ending.

  As I grew older, when I got home from swimming my grandfather would no longer simply ask how it had gone. Now if I told him the water had been cold, a subtle look would come into his eye and he might address me: “Nicky Boy, swimming is best when the water is too cold for other people.” This sort of swaggering counterintuition had immediate appeal to me, and soon all manner of my activities were saturated with what amounted to challenges from him, many of them implied. I began to have secret accomplishments—to let only him know that I’d climbed that high in the big pine tree, that I’d descended the second floor staircase without touching any of the ten steps, that my reading pace was nearing a page and a half a minute, that I’d stayed underwater at the lake for that many seconds, meeting the lifeguard’s eyes when I surfaced. The idea with lifeguards, as I now understood it, was to make them nervous, but not enough to come after you.

  When he gave me a copy of David Copperfield, one of his favorite books, though to me it might as well have been printed in German, I read through all 825 unillustrated pages just so I could tell him that I had. As soon as I made this disclosure, my grandfather eagerly leaned forward in his white chair, saying, “Is that so, Nicky Boy,” and began very seriously to talk over the book with me, a brief discussion, as it turned out, that derailed when I had no idea what a Ham Peggotty was. “Some kind of casserole?” I suggested. He sighed and shrugged. Ham was one of his favorite characters in the novel. My mother, looking on in amazement, later informed me that such a display of incompetence would not have gone so easily for his daughters when they were young. Though his rancor was notorious, I only ever knew of it by reputation. Instead, when I announced that I had broken the page-and-a-half-a-minute barrier, he said, in effect, “We’ll see about that.” Then, from the bookshelf he plucked a copy of Trevelyan’s History of England, which he opened to a random page and handed over to me. Taking out his pocket watch, he put me on my mark and then sent me off. “Oh, Daddy, what are you doing to him?” my mother cried as I began frantically reading about the inept and cowardly tenth-century King Ethelred the Unready, a task my grandfather may have believed himself to be abetting by calling out my time splits. When the minute was up, the book was taken away from me and I was the recipient of an oral examination relating to the reign of the “Redeless.” There was by now a considerable amount of tension in the room, so that when at last he looked at my mother and exclaimed, “The boy can do it!” I soared into the air.

  He was my only grandfather. My father’s father, my grandpa Teddy, had died before I was born, and although my given name was Theodore Nicholas, in his honor, the name was unused, dormant in me, just as nobody ever talked about him; I knew nothing about that other grandfather, had never seen his photograph, saw only the face of Beary, my teddy bear, when I imagined what he had looked like.

  In a way my one grandfather and I were on equal footing since his difficult, unspecific Russian and European pasts were unknown to me, and I had no past, leaving us free to experience the present together. He taught me to shoot the rifle and to play chess, and always wearing his red and black plaid lumber jacket he took me to a sporting goods dealer to buy red and white boxes of rifle bullets (on the living room mantel he made castles out of the empty boxes) and, another time, to lunch at a diner in Brookline—road trips that featured a constant stream of banter and gamesmanship about who could see what marvel or curiosity out the window, and also a certain amount of suspense; he drove like a bobsledder, though an inattentive one. When we got to our destinations, his hand went onto my shoulder and he introduced me to proprietors, and to other people we met, as “my grandson,” a designation that, whenever he said it, made me feel the way a corpsman must when his commission is at last conferred, and by the brigadier himself. He was fundamentally alongside me, and such was my adoration that beyond repeating his convictions and emulating his habits, it occurs to me now that I never thought of his gun as a weapon, never conceived of his tobacco as a vice.

  My grandmother did not share this benign outlook on another of my grandfather’s avocations to which he introduced me, listening to the Boston Red Sox on the transistor radio. She seemed to regard baseball with derision, never referring to it by name, but instead as “that game,” or even simply as “that,” and because he was susceptible to her judgments, he looked stung when she entered his study and discovered something untrustworthy in the air: “Oh,” she’d say. “You’re listening to that again.” Even so, from time to time my grandfather and I tuned in together, usually on Saturdays because on weekdays the Red Sox played at night, after my bedtime. With the transistor positioned between us and the volume kept low so as not to arouse dissent, we would lean toward the speaker while the broadcasters described the unfolding events, and, when something seemed about to happen in the Red Sox’s favor, my grandfather would reach over and turn up the sound a bit. Then, if the good did come to pass, he might reclaim the pronoun by saying, “Well, how about that, Nicky Boy?”

  There he sat, an elderly professor dressed, besides his lumber jacket, in some rumpled combination of light fabrics for the heat, potentially including a gabardine overshirt, white linen trousers, or yellow cotton dress shirts that Sally, learning to embroider, had embellished on the breast pocket with initials and sometimes also farm animals. He did not look like a baseball fan and he did not speak like one; in his Russian inflection the name of his team came out as Thread-sooks. Yet when I was older, I would understand that baseball helped my grandfather feel assimilated into his third city within his third country. The moments before a game where the Boston crowd came together to rise as one and sing the National Anthem and then rose again before the bottom of the seventh inning to stretch while singing “Take Me out to the Ballgame,” were especially affecting for someone who’d grown up in politically volatile places where many people made a habit of leaving soccer matches two thirds of the way through because riots so often broke out. Here was a happier crowd, one that felt welcoming to him even though he only joined them by ear.

  I can no longer recall the particulars of those occasional games, possibly because my grandfather did not concern himself with the moment-to-moment minutiae of mingled names, numbers, and outcomes. Instead I remember the way he listened. Certainly he reveled in the dramatic crescendos, but for the most part with baseball, he preferred to take a longer view. There are men who disappear from life into baseball. My grandfather disappeared into baseball to conjure with life. He implie
d it was good to be a baseball fan because you became a person capable of admiring what others did well. To him Carl Yastrzemski and the other Red Sox were characters in a narrative that was theirs to create and his freely to interpret. As we listened, when he said something about Yastrzemski or Luis Aparicio or Sonny Siebert, he invoked them by surname only in the same tone of intimate masculine familiarity that he used for Copperfield and Zhivago—and for Hooey and Mooey. He told me about the prodigious Red Sox hitter Ted Williams, whose career my grandfather followed through the 1950s, speaking of Williams as a fellow man of letters and seeing to it that I read the scholarship on the subject—Williams’s autobiography, My Turn at Bat. (My mother broadened the portrait, confiding that as a girl she’d once watched Williams play, and from that moment on “he was the handsomest man I ever saw.”) And my grandfather told me the story of the muscular young outfielder Tony Conigliaro, first crumpling to the ground after being hit in the eye by a rising fastball, only to rise again himself years later, now recovered from his wounds, to face down the fastball and hit the first one he saw for a home run. My grandfather related these events as allegory. To him major league baseball was a highly symbolic world in which men like Williams and Yastrzemski and Conigliaro were knights-errant, giant killers, young men of magical valor roaming through the American League, seeking somehow to return honor and light to the northern shires of their followers, who had resided in shadow for the half century since the Red Sox had last been World Series champions. The New York Yankees, meanwhile, were horrible Gilgameshian obstacles to glory, and he detested them in a vindictive way that felt exhilarating; on my own, I was never sure that it was possible to be a good person and to hate. Listening to a ballgame with my grandfather was, in short, to hear a nine-inning fairy tale. Eventually, seated at his side, I became a little like Schiller, who once reflected that “deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told to me in my childhood than in the truth that is taught by life.”