The Crowd Sounds Happy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  The Mets scored one early run against the Pirates’ pitcher, Bob Johnson, the Pirates immediately responded in kind, and then nothing. Inning after inning passed with the game tied at one. How hungry a person got at a ballgame. While I stayed in my seat so as not to miss anything, my father trotted back and forth to the concession stand ferrying me hot dogs and peanuts and drinks. Overhead, jet airplanes were taking off from neighboring La Guardia Airport and passing low over the stadium lip as they gathered altitude. Ordinarily airplanes would have been only slightly less interesting to me than ballplayers and yet not here, not now. I believed that airplanes did not belong at the ballpark, but each time the day filled with engine noise, I would be unable to resist looking up to see, right there, a mammoth winged metal underbelly with the landing gear not yet retracted, the tiny rubber clusters of tires dangling plump like Concord grapes, tantalizingly close.

  I remember also a trip to the restroom, standing before a stained trough beside men smelling of something sour. I remember the sight of the Mets’ mascot Mr. Met, an antic figure with a swollen baseball for a head who worked the crowd between innings. And I remember my growing anxiety about Mom and Sally in their apartment dry dock as the game completed the ninth inning still tied at one, and then crossed over the Rubicon into extra innings.

  The teams kept sending up substitute hitters, but nobody had any luck in his bat. A tenth inning passed, then an eleventh and a twelfth. It had become Sunday evening. People seemed of two minds about what to do. Some of those around us were giving up and heading for home, and I asked my father if we should do the same. “Rascal,” he told me, “a real fan stays for the whole game.” I had hated to leave, and now felt pleased to know the protocol. One of the qualities of baseball that brought me instinctive satisfaction was that fidelity to long-standing form and etiquette, how the deliberate pace of this particular game only emphasized its connection with a slower age. Many years later when I thought about what my father had said, it would occur to me that it was one of the last times he ever tried to impart wisdom to me. What to do when father doesn’t know best? If you were me, quietly you stopped asking him things.

  The thirteenth inning went by without a run and the fourteenth too. I had long since given up scoring the game in my program, which had fallen beneath my seat and come to rest near a puddle of soda. We had been there for hours. The field was shrouded in shadows, evening was approaching, I was far from New Haven. And then, in a sudden flurry of events, Mets second baseman Tim Foli got a single and soon was turning for home on another single by pinch-hitter Aspromonte. The throw was coming in on a line to the Pirates’ catcher, Sanguillen, straddling at the plate, Foli was sliding, the umpire flung his palms wide, and the game was over—Aspromonte had won it for the Mets. I must have been thrilled. Strangely, though, I recall no ecstasy. I stooped to collect my glove, program, and yearbook from the ground. All along the row there was garbage mounding under the seats. It had all begun in my imagination as something so glorious, and now it was the furthest thing. The pages of my program were sticky and the cover had torn away from its staples. My glove held no foul ball—we’d been far too high up even to hope—and for the same reason my sheet of paper contained no Mets signatures. As we made our way down the concrete ramps, my father took me over to a souvenir man and bought me an autographed baseball. It came enclosed in a dome of clear styrene plastic and was stamped “facsimile,” which I took to be a special big league kind of horsehide.

  Then boarding a train more densely packed with riders than the one that had borne us out, and while the crowd must have endured these conditions well—the home team had won a satisfying game—I can recall only my sense of useless confinement standing there on a swaying floor during this return subway trudge, the fear that at any moment my face might slam into the strange torsos looming everywhere around me, the feeling of being yoked to an uncomfortable emotion I had no name for, the way my heart seemed to hurry as at last my father’s key jangled at the door of his apartment and we went back down the gloomy hallway into the living area where the sight of my mother and Sally, obviously weary of captivity, filled me with shame. I had known this was happening and yet had gone on sacrificing them for my surplus of enjoyment. Greeting my sister, I was much nicer to her than I usually was, covered her in improvised enthusiasm as though we’d been apart for months and I’d missed her terribly. And then suddenly it wasn’t improvised, I was desperately glad to see her. There in that darkening room, that old Susisense of myself as a creature impelled by greed and self-interest returned, and with it a helplessness as I wondered how I had gotten this way, the dread that I was soon to have horrible experiences because I deserved them.

  They were good sports about it, though, not resentful or aggrieved at all, appeared glad that I’d had a big time, had been treated to so much baseball. It was my father who seemed injured. At that age I couldn’t yet measure his moods, could only intuit them, but thinking back, it seems likely that by asking about leaving the game I had changed the day for him. My father, who found more occasion to take things personally than any man I ever met, probably absorbed the question as a rebuke, as the expression of a concern for my mother that I did not extend in kind to him, possibly even as evidence that his son was choosing between parents. So he made up a code of baseball conduct to give me what I wanted—which was to stay until the end—just as he did everything in his power to make the afternoon special for me. He did not even really like baseball.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Adventures in the Loss Column

  By the early 1970s, when I was completing grammar school, my father’s alimony and child-support payments had dwindled to nothing, leaving my mother to bring us up on her annual teaching salary of $5,000. That my father was not providing for us was never something my mother discussed with me then. She still never said a thing against him. But I almost knew something was wrong. I say almost because if it is possible to force something out of your mind while also still being aware that it exists, that is what I did.

  In New Haven we lived a life without ornament. Once a month we drove to the ShopRite supermarket to buy ninety meals. Under ideal circumstances my mother never would have patronized an institution that intentionally disregarded standardized spelling, but ShopRite’s motto, Why Pay More?, accurately reflected its business plan. While Sally and I set off to beachcomb in the candy aisle, casing the bulk packages of Almond Joy and six-pack boxes of white candy cigarettes with the painted red-flame tip that passing miscreants sometimes tore open, making them fair game to our thinking for scavengers like us, my mother wheeled up and down the aisles, filling her shopping cart with everything necessary to make thirty breakfasts, thirty lunches, and thirty dinners. As she paid the cashier, I’d go stand by the plaza of gumball machines beside the exit door, looking through the glass at the little balloon-colored balls as my mother’s cart full of brown paper bags rolled by behind me and I turned and followed her to the car. I never expected her to offer; even our loose change was strictly accounted for.

  Back at home, daily allotments of hamburger patties and meatballs, fish sticks, chicken legs, hot dogs, and stew beef were tightly packeted in foil, marked with a label, and placed in the freezer. Powdered milk was mixed by my mother in an old Cumberland Farms half gallon plastic jug with a light red handle that in the store cooler had designated whole milk. It wasn’t so bad after you got used to it, though gradually the sides of the jug became so gray with use that, when friends came over and wrinkled their noses at the watery, mildly rancid taste and looked questioningly at the jug, it was no use pretending anymore that “Cumbies must have gotten a lousy batch.”

  Early on workday mornings when she thought I was still sleeping, my mother would enter my room on tiptoes, open the closet door, stand before her skirts and dresses, so many of which she’d sewn, and sigh aloud to herself, “I have nothing to wear.” In winter, I ate breakfast to the predawn rasp and flutter of the twin clothesline pulleys as my mother sent my
laundry out on frozen rope. After work she’d retrieve the clothes, iron out the pale, rimed slipcover of ice now encasing the fabric, fold everything, and put it all away. At night, as out in the living room she made up her bed, hearing her struggle made me want to grow up fast. Not that she would have permitted assistance. She told us that as a girl her parents had forced her “to wait on them hand and foot,” and she swore, “I’ll never do that to you.” My mother managed on her own, was exceptionally good at the rigors of this kind of constricted life, in part because it suited her frugal nature.

  There was no clothes dryer, no dishwasher, no air conditioner, no electric can opener or power lawnmower, not a foot scale or even an umbrella. “I won’t melt,” my mother used to say when she left the house on a rainy day. She was a person with categories for all of what life presented, and umbrellas were grouped under things even a careful person eventually lost. When I got older, during a downpour I once offered to run inside a store and buy an umbrella for her. “You can get me one for my birthday,” she countered. Her birthday was eight months in the future. The rain was falling in sheets, “really coming down,” as my mother said. I had an old unnerved feeling. She was resisting what would make her life better. Why was it so crucial to resist?

  “Mom, you don’t need to wait,” I told her, hearing how urgent my voice sounded. “It’s raining really hard right now.”

  “I want to wait,” she said. Now she sounded upset. “Why can’t I wait? Please, don’t buy me one now. I like to have something to look forward to.”

  Although she hated the cold, in the winter my mother kept the thermostat all the way to the left and wore two sweaters around the house along with the sealskin slippers she had received as a present long ago, before her marriage. They were luxuriantly warm and also stylish with their silvery black niello-shaded fur. Eventually, the sealskins began to fall apart, the delicate leather soles separating themselves from the furry uppers, and my mother restiched them together herself using a ball of thick white string.

  The machines we did own seemed to share her stamina. They lasted throughout my childhood so that they became signature accessories, from the green push lawnmower to the dented percolator coffeepot to the brown clock radio. The one time in my boyhood when my mother bought a new car, she chose the Dodge station wagon. Tomato-sauce-red with its six-cylinder manual transmission and neither a radio nor an air conditioner, it arrived from Detroit with a piece of blank black plastic bolted across the dash. The gear shift emerged from the right side of the steering column, slim as the return lever on her manual typewriter. I never saw another car like ours; there was no difficulty locating it in even the largest parking lots. My mother seemed to associate modern conveniences with a loss of control. Machines broke, they went out of date, made those who used them helpless and dependent. “People have too many machines they don’t really need,” my mother would sometimes say. It was most comfortable for her to live in a simple, abstemious way that gave other people the impression that she took pleasure from making things hard on herself.

  She had a lithe build and did not possess great physical strength, but she could make people believe she was strong because she had enormous willpower. She was also the most efficient person I have ever known. All the clocks in our home were set ahead on a graduated system my mother had designed to startle herself into varying degrees of urgency. The electronic wall clock back in the kitchen, for instance, glowed a panic-inducing fifteen minutes fast. On the bookshelf next to the couch, another clock warned my mother that her present was eleven minutes into her future. Nearer to the front door, the small clock on top of the bookcase told her to leave eight minutes before anyone else’s clock hands would have thought it necessary. As well aware as she was of the altered denominations that were, after all, her own doing, glancing at something she knew to be untrue created in her a shadow of temporal doubt that propelled her. Not that there was any need for these spurs and stratagems. The moments of confusion that other people experienced when they forgot about the shift to Daylight Savings Time or failed to notice that a brief power outage during a thunderstorm had made mischief with the clock radio never affected my mother because she was always early, had a heightened sense of departure. Standing amidst a group of people having a conversation, she’d announce “Gotta go” in a way that could make merely punctual men and women reexamine themselves—feel suddenly dilatory. Like her father, a man willing to awaken at three in the morning to ensure that he got to the office first, before any of his colleagues, she enjoyed creating unlikely challenges for herself involving productivity, duty, and fortitude, and she found it gratifying to create and then exceed rugged expectations. Timetables were her adversaries, and she fought them bare-wristed. Although she owned a watch, she never wore it. Her contention was that watches were uncomfortable, but Sally and I knew the real truth: she didn’t need one.

  My mother finished every book she began and she remembered everything she read. She could tell you scene by scene the plots of dozens of movies from her youth. She was intensely interested in discussing the world of ideas. And yet she did not attend first-run films, purchase hardcover books or periodical subscriptions, or go to restaurants. I can remember very few outings. One evening, when I was eight and Sally six, she took us to the new A-frame Presbyterian church on Huntington Street to hear a free performance of chamber music featuring a harpsichord. We sat in smooth pews where I saw her excitement as she told us what to expect from a harpsichord, an eager enthusiasm in her face that I noticed again, around that same time, when she brought us down to a Yale lecture hall for a student film series screening of The Third Man. In those pre-video days, a revival screening was the only chance she had to watch vintage films, and in the car she prepared us, humming The Third Man’s famous musical theme, explaining that the black market sold products of all colors, and exulting, “You kids are going to see Vienna, where I was born.” The film bewildered me, just as the concert had. I had considered the sound of chamber music excruciating, and was similarly oppressed by what my mother called “a thriller” it seemed to me that nothing was happening and half of it in a foreign language. I was disturbed by the occupying Russians and by dismal Vienna, and since now she’d told me that my family came from these ominous places, what did that suggest about us? It seemed meaningful that for these outings we went to venues that were somehow subordinated, not being used for their primary function. Yet, even as I shifted in my seat to let my mother know that I didn’t understand and wanted to go home, I was aware that she was enjoying herself, and I knew that my behavior was costing her something. When I thought back on those two nights, I felt the same way as I had when I looked at that white string holding her sealskin slippers together, the despair of its coarse utility clashing with the worn but still glistening fur.

  Sometimes I’d see her during one of her rare moments of leisure reading Trollope or looking at the photographs of 1930s and 1940s movie stars in the book her father had given her as a girl. She never went on dates anymore with men. On her bookshelf were the stories of Hawthorne about whom she had begun a graduate dissertation, a project abandoned when she became pregnant with me. Did she regret she could not go back and start over? When I asked her about it, she said, “All I ever wanted was to have children,” and mostly I believed her.

  My mother seemed to think all of life through in advance, to have a perpetual running list for everything she would do, and it was my job to be satisfied, not to propose revisions. When we went to stores, there really was a list, neatly printed in blue pen on white paper, and up and down the aisles she never deviated from it, despite me. Each time I opened my mouth I could feel the stiffening wariness spread across her collarbones, and her grip on the handle of the shopping cart tightened: I was going to ask for something. If I did, words would come bursting out of her the way they did when a dish fell to the kitchen floor: “God almighty, Nicky. I’m at my wit’s end with you. You think I’m made of money. Just lay off.”

&nbs
p; But I desired so many things. I wanted to play in the youth ice hockey league down at the Yale rink. I knew kids who did. In the street hockey games we had in the schoolyard I was a better player than they. My mother said that the required ice hockey equipment was too costly for us, and, even if we were able to afford skates and gloves and pads, the ice times were prohibitively early; she could not get up before dawn, leave Sally alone, and take me to hockey. Come on! What was I thinking! I understood, and yet did I nag and pester her about it anyway? I did. And I wanted a new baseball bat, and to order from the Arrow Book Club catalogue at school, and I could not stop hankering for that cunningly detailed plastic haystack I’d seen in Malley’s department store downtown, and what about a new bike? In the bounteous American way, there was not one kind of bicycle to pine after, but a whole opaline progression of them to advance through, so that no sooner did you own one model than you’d go to another kid’s house where something more desirable—and more costly—made itself known. I did not get a Big Wheel tricycle with its two fat black rear racing slicks or a purple banana seat bike with a sissy bar or a Huffy dirt bicycle, and when my mother bought me a two-wheeler for my tenth birthday in 1972, it was a used red upright pedal brake model, what elderly Yale professors rode. On my birthday morning I saw it there waiting for me in the dining room and I felt my face falling and I could barely look at that bike. In a labored way I thanked her, and she could tell I was disappointed, and wondered why. I let her know that I had hoped for a new bike—and one with gears and handbrakes. She threw up her arms. When I finally grew out of that red bike, she got me the new bike with gears, a Raleigh, the brand, she told me, she herself had coveted as a child. But it was only an upright three-speed, another professor bike. Now I was disappointed because it wasn’t a ten-speed racer.