The Crowd Sounds Happy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  I was given by Uncle Tony a colorful cardboard box emblazoned with NFL logos containing a Baltimore Colts football suit complete with pants, jersey, shoulder pads, and helmet. The white jersey had a blue 19 on it for the Colts’ valiant quarterback, Johnny Unitas, but I did not think of myself as Unitas or a Baltimore Colt when I wore it. I was a football player, just as a few years before, in an earlier hard plastic helmet, I’d been simply a fireman. The packaging warned in several places that my football uniform was not designed for contact play, but why else would someone own a helmet and pads? I was excited by the equipment, the shoulder pads thrusting up beneath the shirt, the skintight knee britches with their voluptuous padding at the thigh and waist, the foam-lined white helmet and its big hard blue horseshoe on either side. I wanted to dive, plunge, rut around, and scrum, to have the snowy whiteness gloriously smeared with badges of dirt and sod. Every time someone called to round up numbers for a neighborhood game, breathlessly I’d ask, “Touch or tackle?” Always it was touch. Then, finally, one day through the receiver came a kid named Dave’s grave voice saying, “Tackle at East Rock Park.” I arrived in full regalia to discover that they were all tossing the ball around in jeans and shirts as usual. “Just kidding,” said Dave, and everyone laughed. They had been waiting for me. I stripped off the shoulder pads and set the helmet aside. But afterward I went off by myself, put the full uniform back on, and rolled around in the dirt. Over and over I spun, dizzying myself enough that when I stopped, I noticed only a blurry half-present flicker of limbs and faces above me. “What are you doing?” I heard from some distant precinct. I became still. Familiar faces floated hazily into focus, one of them Dave’s. I had nothing to say for myself. Finally “I’m getting dirty” came out. This was the funniest thing yet. I hated Baltimore.

  One October Saturday, my father took me to watch Columbia’s college football team play against Harvard in New York. My father himself had once been a Harvard athlete. He played high school football, basketball, and lacrosse with the future NFL Hall-of-Famer Jim Brown, and then at Harvard he was number 42, one of the stars of the lacrosse team. At home I had an old issue of Sports Illustrated he’d given me in which there was a photograph of number 42 making a crisp feed against Navy. Now we had come to see his old school team. Somehow this Harvard, his Harvard, was not the same Harvard that I saw when I visited my grandfather in Cambridge; when my father talked about Harvard, not even Massachusetts came to mind.

  The game was played in a large and drafty old stadium with wooden bleachers set on a promontory overlooking the confluence of the Hudson and Harlem rivers. You could see boats going by. Because we were part of a sparse crowd of spectators, in every direction there was row after row of vacant planks stretching out toward the river, and all the empty space and water created in my mind a sprawling sense of possibility that extended right down onto the field. Harvard’s team featured many excellent players and was expected to win easily. Yet during pregame warm-up drills, after my initial surprise at the sight of football players meekly turned out in the baby blue and white of my mother’s summer bathrobe, the Columbia squad began to seem very impressive to me, sleek and shifty as they ran five-yard outs in their polished white shoes. Why shouldn’t they win? Swept up, I bet my father a quarter that they would. To that point I hadn’t decided which team I wanted to win. My college football loyalties were to New Haven—to Yale. Now, with money on Columbia, I was pulling for them. The game began, with the home team faring so poorly so quickly that eventually I grew frustrated at the waste of it all, how inevitable the futility had turned out to be. Gesturing down toward the players, I told my father, “You should get out there, Dad, you could do better than them,” and then was startled when an utterly forlorn look crossed his face.

  It was baseball that I truly loved, in particular the Red Sox and Mets—especially the Mets. Only one team could be your team. I didn’t know much about what the Mets looked like. There was still no television at home and never to be one because my mother believed “television is idiotic,” and there wasn’t a newspaper either. My mother said she wanted to read books with any free time she had and that, anyway, the newspaper was too expensive, but my newspaper-loving grandfather didn’t read it anymore either, and, as I got older, I believed they both felt that as refugees they had lived through enough history. Whatever the reasons, the result was that most of my knowledge of current ballplayers came from my collection of baseball cards. In the early 1970s, “bubblegum cards” were not yet a commodity with value to anyone besides children. There were no card shops or dealers, and given the modest wherewithal of all the kids I knew, the players whose cards we acquired were a matter of pure chance. Increasing the aleatory complexion of the hobby, in my neighborhood, the one store that sold baseball cards, the Whitney Pharmacy, had an erratic stock. Local card supplies were so lean that when Binder was taken to visit relatives in New Rochelle, a town outside New York, and returned to New Haven with a wad of cards bought there for him in a variety store, I ever after thought of New Rochelle as a Land of Plenty, a spangled city of statuary, flags, gold turrets, balconies, and minarets. Meanwhile, at the Whitney Pharmacy, I’d look in the candy display beside the slender deep green and rose-colored boxes of Canada Mints and sometimes those gleaming wax-paper packages of cards were there and sometimes not. Even when I did buy a new pack, there was no guarantee I’d get any of the players I wanted, and the fickle odds against actually acquiring what I was trying to pay for suffused the transaction in suspense. I’d finger each package, trying to divine which one held Mets. After finally making my selection and relinquishing my dime at the lunch counter, I wanted right there to find out what I had, but I’d heard that patience was a virtue, so superstitiously I’d always take the cards outside the store before opening them up. This futile desire to coax fate with a display of restraint occasionally led me to hold out until I got back home.

  The cards had a fresh design every year, something I never remembered until I tore open the first package of spring and saw that they were different. In 1970, the players had been surrounded by a soft gray border; a year later the thick black outline lent a starker, apertural effect. Enclosed was the regulation brittle rectangle of bubble gum and hastily I’d slide it into my mouth, feeling it disintegrate in pink shards as I began thumbing my way through Rick Auerbach, Billy Champion, and Wayne Twitchell, but, alas, not a Tom Seaver, a Bud Harrelson, or a Luis Aparicio in the deck. The many disappointments meant that when I did get a coveted card, it seemed destined, enhancing the sense of connection with the player that came with my ownership of his picture. To possess their cards was to know them a little. That illusion of interaction was fortified by the tangible qualities of the cards, how gratifying they were to hold, the surface roughened with a scrim of gum dust. A couple of packs’ worth fit tight as a wallet into a rear pants pocket meaning that I could keep my favorites close to me at all times. I took them out so frequently for inspection that as the cardboard bent to the contours of my hip, the colors faded, the corners frayed.

  For a while, my collection was modest. Then came a mysterious day at the schoolyard when an older boy enlisted me to help him with some spade and shovel work. He led me to a neighboring backyard where he began digging a hole in the ground in which he intended to conceal a brown shopping bag filled with what turned out to be all of his baseball cards. I think he’d been seized by the idea of creating buried treasure. I remember my ecstasy at the enterprise, the admiring disbelief I felt that he would be willing to sacrifice his entire collection for the sake of a deed. I stood by him as he lifted out the dirt, nestled the bag in place, and then began to feather the dirt back on it like a mourner at a grave. Once the hole was refilled, soon enough I forgot all about the cache of cards until, over a year later, after the boy had moved away, I suddenly remembered them. Had it really happened? I located a shovel, found the spot, and began to dig. Soon enough, I hit paper. It was like recovering Injun Joe’s ironbound box of yellow coins. The sho
pping bag had begun to disintegrate, but once the cards were brushed clean there was Mickey Mantle, Sandy Koufax, and, far better from my point of view, the Mets’ long reliever Cal Koonce paused at the end of his pitching follow-through and forever destined to smell like damp earth.

  All I really knew about any of the Mets was that they were Mets, and that blue and orange imprimatur was enough to regard them with overwhelming solicitude. Unburdened by information about their lives, I could gaze at their photographs on these cardboard talismans and make them be who I wanted them to be, could believe, after a while, that there was rapport. Even today I experience a surge of well-being when I hear the name Cal Koonce, whose musty likeness I once scrutinized with enough care to remember forever the steady blue-eyed gaze and matching blue-sleeved right arm that won six games for the Mets in 1969. To love every Met was my first great act of faith, and one that made me forever understand the pull of ignorance, how seductive is the logic of tautology. They were supposed to be heroic, and so they were.

  By the winter of 1971, I was an eight-year-old Mets fan of such avid dimension that Uncle Tony gave me the best day of my life to that point by taking me for my birthday to a charity basketball game near Croton in which a group of local athletes competed in a small-town gym against a team of professional baseball players, among them a couple of Mets including the first baseman Ed Kranepool and outfielder Ron Swoboda. They were all marginal major leaguers playing basketball that day, but centurions to me, especially Swoboda. He was a large, somewhat ungainly slugger, known to teammates as “Rocky,” whose miraculous, full-out flopping catch of a sinking fly ball had saved a game for the Mets in the 1969 World Series. At the basketball contest, I remember the expectant buzz in the gym as we all filed in and filled the wooden bleachers. I sat one row up from the court, wearing my royal blue crewneck shirt in Metsian homage. When Swoboda, reprising his World Series turn, sprawled into the stands after a loose basketball, he came to rest on top of me, such a magical occurrence that back in New Haven I had not since permitted my mother to wash the shirt. From time to time I took it out from my dresser drawer and buried my face in the essence of great man.

  One day, after Binder had been visiting me at my house, his mother came to pick him up. At the front door, I asked his mother to wait, ran back to my room, got my baseball cards, and presented the entire collection to Binder, telling him, as I pressed the cards into his hands, how much I was going to miss him after he went home. A moment later he was gone with what had taken me years to accumulate. This unplanned bestowal happened with such decisive impulsion that later in the evening, overcome by the loss of all the players, I couldn’t imagine what I’d been thinking. But after that, I was more at peace when I thought about the reading contest the year before.

  For somebody still new to life, the meaningful world extends only as far as you can see. Where once my view of New Haven had carried to the edges of our property, now it was as though the front sidewalk had unfurled into many sidewalks coursing out in every direction all through the city. Yet part of what made New Haven so appealing was that it had natural limits. Bounded by Atlantic Ocean estuaries and the twin russet trap rock ridges of East Rock and West Rock, the blocks of Carpenter Gothic houses lining our streets felt as self-contained as the schoolyard used to. Those houses with their cupolas and punch bowl turrets never looked better than on Halloween with all their jack-o’-lantern–filled first-floor windows aglow in the crisp October night air. Densely settled as the city was, you could move efficiently from address to address, a few steps to a fresh porch light, accumulating Three Musketeers bars at high speed. And such are the imprinted criteria of childhood, that through life, whenever I encounter a residential neighborhood in a new town my first thought is “good for trick-or-treating?”

  Within four blocks, New Haven neighborhoods changed from mansions on the hill to ghetto hovels so that you knew a little bit of everybody. On our part of Willow Street alone lived laborers, pensioners, assorted professionals, unemployed single mothers, a Beacon Hill heiress, an Alexander Pope scholar, and Eleanor Estes, the author of a series of children’s books about a New Haven family called the Moffats. For a succession of Christmases, Sally and I helped the author trim her tree, and then were rewarded with one of her books inscribed “From your friend Eleanor Estes.” There was the Italian section around Wooster Square, the many Poles down by State Street, and an old Irish enclave up on Cedar Hill where increasingly at dusk men were welcomed home from work in Spanish. Fair Haven, Newhallville, and the Hill “out Congress Avenue” were Puerto Rican or black neighborhoods, and riding the Yale Shuttle buses around the campus were representatives of just about every country found in my Atlas of the World.

  My Every-City had all seasons, all weathers, climates, and temperatures. In the morning the air hung heavy with the ocean tides of the Long Island Sound. Into warm afternoons seeped the sluggish, putrid stink of the chemical-green Mill River, a surprisingly evocative smell because of all the forbidden places you could imagine that river had come through. Our brownest river was the bottom-of-Mom’s-coffeepot-colored Quinnipiac, which flowed even slower than the Mill. Elsewhere there were assorted streams, rills, and freshets, the Lake Whitney reservoir with its waterfall pooling just beyond the Hamden flank of East Rock parkland, cattailed marshes, ponds, sawgrass-bordered swamp, forest glades, copses, foothills, the gas-tank-lined harbor, and Chatfield Hollow out Route 80 where you could walk on silky brown pine needles and swim in stilled amber-lit water. None of these were outsized formations. The terrain, like the city itself, was simultaneously comprehensive and scaled down, had the incipient gradations of childhood.

  New Haven could not be fully experienced. Frequently we drove past the South Seas, a low-slung restaurant and lounge marked by a hot pinkish–red neon sign emblazoned with green neon palm trees promising exotic cuisine and cocktails of the Asian tropics. We never once went there, or to Blessings for Chinese, or to Louis’ Lunch, the little Hansel and Gretel house on Crown Street where in 1895 Louis Lassen invented the hamburger, or to Pepe’s or Sally’s, the famous Wooster Square apizzas. There was no sense of deprivation, but rather the understanding that everything was not supposed to come to you at once, and that New Haven would always provide things to look forward to. It was the holding place for all of life’s mysteries.

  That fall of 1971, Jennifer Noon’s murderer remained uncaptured—there was never an arrest—and yet my determination was to see the city as the haven it had been when I first came there, and I willed it to be so again. At eight and nine years old, such was my attachment to my hometown that it was as much a fundamental part of me as my mother and my sister. I loved the city with a pure, unquestioning affection. My early New Haven expressed itself as the powerful desire to reject experience in order to remain innocent, the compulsion to look past any obstacles to love in order to love.

  Other places existed relative to New Haven. My Elm City sat positioned there at the hub of the solar system, at the heart of the universe, at the very fulcrum of the world. Everything New Haven was iconic—the one. Downtown stood Macy’s department store, which remained the flagship even after I saw Herald Square. Our Broadway was the Broadway. It was the same way with Sears Roebuck and the International House of Pancakes. To encounter them in other places was to mark them as provincial and inferior versions. Before I’d ever been inside, I knew that the Spirit Shop was the place for wine, Kebabian’s for carpets. Out near the Yale–New Haven Hospital there was Pete’s bicycle shop, where the long, shiny rows of silver chrome handlebars all seemed to reach out to me. For years the prayer point for all my material desires was the jeep, tank, airplane, and war-game-cluttered shelves at Hull’s Hobbies on Chapel Street. No other place had what New Haven had for the simple reason that no other place was New Haven. And so it was that we were out driving along Whalley Avenue where I saw a new yellow sign that said Subway. That we should now have a supplement to our fleet of blue and white city buses seemed unsurprising, unti
l I discovered it was merely a sandwich shop, whereupon a bias hardened against underground transit.

  A city is never fixed in time but the accumulation of all its times, except to a child. To me, New Haven was inviolate, an unalterable place forever anchored in its present manifestation. There was no old, lost New Haven; it was only I who was leaving myself behind, growing into what was. Then one day Paul Baer retired and his gloomy grocery store dematerialized into a law firm. Next, the A&P on Orange and Linden closed, whereupon Cumberland Farms abandoned our corner and its blue and white signage went up where Atlantic and Pacific had been before. A man named Hall opened Hall of Books for business at Willow and Orange. Somehow, though, despite these disappearances and arrivals, everything remained intact. It was the perpetual rediscovering of the fixed landscape. The new installations were written on top of something vanished that was yet present—a dendrite with the old marks righteously there and still capable of explaining what was becoming of my life. The city hadn’t changed because I didn’t want it to change. My father had changed. That was enough.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Flushing

  In 1971, when I was eight years old, my father lost his job enforcing anti-fraud statutes for the Securities and Exchange Commission, whereupon he left Washington, leased a garden flat on New York’s Upper West Side, and opened up his own legal practice, renting a room from a small law firm that had its suite of offices on Madison Avenue between Fortieth and Forty-first streets above a Chock full o’Nuts coffee shop.