The Crowd Sounds Happy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  My mother hated how much I hungered for things she couldn’t provide. “I want, I want, I want, I want,” she’d chant at me. “Nothing I do is ever enough for you,” and nothing was. I could also tell that she worried that I was greedy, had a petty sense of deprivation. I remember how she’d looked at me after I’d returned from running an errand for her at the corner store and showed her that I had been given too much change. “You have to go back down there right now because it’s not our money,” she’d instantly said. “Someone will have to pay for the discrepancy and it’ll probably be the poor cashier, the person who has the least.”

  I had no understanding of how money worked. As I watched my mother write checks, I didn’t see why she couldn’t just fill in a high enough number on the line to take care of everything. Or why not ask the drive-through teller behind the green-tinted window at the bank to put more bills in the withdrawal drawer. I decided that three of four things I desired I wouldn’t mention. The fourths were still too much. If I caught my mother in the wrong mood with a request, for the rest of the day she was a fallen electric wire, emitting little sparks of rage. Through my closed door I could hear what I’d turned her into as she stormed around the house getting things done. “Ye gods,” she’d tell the air, “it just never ends with that damned Nicky. It never stops. No matter how much I do for him, it’s never enough. The lap of luxury wouldn’t be good enough for him. I’ve had it. I’ve just had it up to here. I’m going like crazy all the time, doing everything I can for that spoiled-rotten kid, and he’s sitting in there with his wants.”

  She gave me a pizza birthday party, kept me in baseball gloves, did so many nice things. Why couldn’t it be enough for me? Why couldn’t I, as she sometimes suggested, “look to your own star”? I could tell that it was because she was such a conscientious person that the idea that she was failing to do all that I expected of her was overwhelming to her. She often told me how much she wanted to be a good mother to my sister and to me, and, because I wanted to support her in this ambition, when I asked her for things she could not give, I used to feel ashamed of myself for putting her in the position of disappointing me. I wished for many things as a child and regretted wanting almost all of them. There was a gaping rictus of need.

  The Orvilles’ red house across the street from us went up for sale. The Orvilles were moving because they required more space, but that house had more than enough room for three. Each of us would have our own room. For weeks my mother thought aloud about how we might somehow find a way to afford the red house. “I could do extra tutoring,” she mused one day. “I could teach more summer school,” she proposed on another. The “For Sale” sign out in front of the Orvilles’ house was like a person you are too much attracted to without knowing yet how they feel about you; you are always meeting their eyes and then jerking your head hurriedly away. There it was: privacy, sanctuary, a piece of the American Dream. Finally someone else bought the Orvilles’ house. “I should have just done it,” my mother said. “I was afraid I might lose my job at school.” Day Prospect Hill had merged by then with the city’s leading secondary school for boys, and my mother said that “they” were “firing all the women.” Most unfulfilled desires are kept at a remove, but over the ensuing years, every day we would walk out onto the porch and confront the red house. It was an enduring rebuke to my mother, the inability to have the life she’d always thought she’d have, the life she wanted us to have.

  The radio kept my mother constant company. It went on in the morning and stayed on until night, always tuned to the same station. That was all-news WCBS out of New York, suffusing our house in a daily thrum of elsewhere that drifted over us in the level masculine elocution of a full roster of anchormen whose voices I couldn’t tell apart. This uniform, ambient presence was punctuated only occasionally by a burst of impacted rage from my mother at news of President Nixon, whom she loathed as “That stinkin’ Nixon!” for being partial to the wealthy, for lying about the war in Vietnam, for being generally deficient in morals. “There’s nothing worse,” she said, “than someone like that who grows up poor and then when they have some good fortune, they forget what poverty feels like for other people. That man is indecent.”

  News radio led to some confusions, particularly regarding the traffic and stock market reports. I couldn’t grasp why Neil Bush up in the Traffic Watch helicopter so frequently referred to problems involving tractor-trailers loaded with jackknives, and I misunderstood the fundamental Wall Street term to be not “share” but “chair,” an error that metastasized the Dow into a symbolic operation in which the operative idiom was the four-legged chair. I imagined a man standing in a room filled with chairs that were the fungible property of each stock market company. As a company’s fortunes improved, it was awarded more chairs. When things declined, chairs were taken away from them. And when the chairs declined in fractions, legs of a chair were removed, one leg chopped off, say, when a stock went “down a quarter,” a leg and a half cut away for “down three eighths.”

  Besides the radio, another great constant in my mother’s day was ketchup. She liked it with just about everything, and it was her usual practice to drench whatever meat, potato, and vegetables were on her plate with ketchup before mixing everything together into a single garnet glob that she then ate with appetite. She applied sweetness in similar bulk, adding as many as ten teaspoons of sugar to a cup of tea or coffee.

  My mother always remained slender and trim, but it was a matter of pride for her to be the same weight year after year when she made her annual visit to the gynecologist. Because we owned no foot scale, this was a matter of instinct, and one year, two weeks before the day of the checkup, she decided she had gained five pounds. Immediately, she cut herself off the ketchup, the sugar, and just about everything else, and for fourteen days she followed a strict diet consisting entirely of hard-boiled eggs and grapefruit. I learned about this project belatedly, when, in my usual way, I jerked open the refrigerator to hear a rumbling sound. I looked down and saw the lower shelves entirely filled with dislodged and shifting big yellow balls. A moment later, an avalanche, and the fruits came bouncing off my shins onto my feet and rolling all over the kitchen. Sally and I survived the stench of all those eggs by feeling invested in our mother’s quest. Without a scale, what would happen at her appointment was a source of suspense. Day after day I looked at her and wondered. When at last she came home from the doctor, triumphant, we ate victory bowls of ice milk, which was cheaper than ice cream.

  A result of my mother’s stringent economizing on ephemeral items was that she was slowly filling our house with pine furniture. Over the years, the deliverymen brought us six brown pine dining room chairs, a brown pine coffee table, a brown pine kneehole desk, and a brown pine Welsh dresser, the latter a tall hutch with a fretworked display shelf on which my mother eventually placed her set of Spode blue and white dinnerware ordered from London. It took her more than eight years to save up for that set of eight plates, bowls, cups, and saucers, and while she dusted them every week, I don’t ever recall an occasion where she actually used any of it. The day a saucer chipped was one of mourning in our household.

  In the living room where she slept, my mother added new red cotton upholstery for the convertible couch and a red-patterned carpet so that between them, our living room looked sunburned. My grandmother Rebecca’s annual gift to her former daughter-in-law was a subscription to The New Yorker. On the new coffee table my mother kept a stack of back-issue magazines, four of which at night she put under the folded-out legs of the convertible sofa to protect the new rug. In every one of those New Yorkers was an advertisement placed weekly by The Homestead, a resort hotel in the mountains of Virginia. The advertisement featured an aerial illustration of an elegant brick building that, with its elaborate Georgian-style architecture, resembled a cross between a Shropshire estate and the administration building on a university quadrangle. People went to The Homestead to swim, ride, play golf and tennis, and to eat f
ine food, but what made my mother want to go was the name and the fact that guests could receive massages. “I’d give anything to go someday to The Homestead and get a back rub,” she’d say.

  In the summer of 1972, she took me to Cooperstown to see the Baseball Hall of Fame. I was nine. First we drove to Francestown, where Sally was to stay with my grandparents. After breakfast the next morning, we set off, driving for hours across New Hampshire, through Vermont into rolling New York farm country, my mother and I on a road trip, our first big expedition alone together. On the way she told me about Natty Bumppo the Deerslayer from the James Fenimore Cooper Leatherstocking novels, who walked beside the Glimmerglass in Cooperstown. Cooperstown was on the far shore of this Glimmerglass—Lake Otsego—and as we came near, my mother was very pleased, pointed out that it really did look as flat and silvery-clear as an enormous mirror.

  Cooperstown was a one-stoplight, tree-shaded hamlet built on a scale ideal for a nine-year-old tourist. From our red-brick inn we needed only to walk around the corner to be on the three-block-long commercial stretch of Main Street where the Hall of Fame stood at the opposite end. Along Main Street there was a scatter of shops that did some trade in collectibles, but Cooperstown was the furthest thing from a baseball theme park and had, as my mother noticed, a stately, civic integrity of its own. Nonetheless, you could walk into a luncheonette called the Shortstop for a grilled cheese sandwich that tasted better because of the sign outside. Then my mother and I were hurrying down Main Street to the Hall. Because I had read so much about Ruth and Williams and Mathewson and Robinson and Crawford, to see the spikes that carried them, the bats they swung, the jerseys they wore was to add shape and color to the cloth of stories I already knew. There were early gloves no larger than a waffle, lopsided old baseballs under glass, paintings, photographs, and artifacts enough to last a dedicated patron the full afternoon, which they did.

  After closing, we visited the hotel swimming pool. By the pool I fell into conversation with a boy from Ohio and his father. Quickly it became clear that the boy and I both felt sure we knew more about baseball than the other. A game was devised. We would each, in turn, name players who the other must identify. The boy’s father would umpire. I went first. “Mike Corkins,” I said. The boy knew he was among the most undistinguished of the San Diego Padres’ many undistinguished pitchers. Now it was the boy’s turn to choose a player for me to recognize. “Buddy Bell,” he said. I had never heard of him. “You don’t know who Buddy Bell is?” the boy said with disbelief, and the boy’s father too seemed aghast, as though we were naming dictators and I had shrugged and shaken my head at Mussolini. That ended the game. I wanted to continue but, backing away, they waved off the idea with promises of trying again “another year.” Buddy Bell turned out to be the Cleveland Indians’ rookie third baseman, already famous because of primogeniture: he was the son of the former Reds outfielder Gus Bell. I didn’t know who Gus was either. Mortified by my ignorance, I could not escape the conclusion that while I might have more baseball knowledge than any kid I’d ever met, in the end I was just local talent. I looked at the many people crowded around the pool, the bathers splashing in the water. Almost all of them, I saw, were fathers and their sons. Suddenly I felt diminished at having come to such a place with my mother.

  For the next two days I was angry and sullen, sulked when I was told we were eating lunch at the diner instead of the more costly Shortstop, had to be dragged through the Fenimore House and then the Farmer’s Museum where the early agricultural implements were another rebuke; scythes and plows weren’t what we had come here for. “Leave me alone,” I told my mother when she asked if I was okay. Everywhere I turned there were men walking beside boys. I hated Cooperstown, hated it all the way back across to New Hampshire, where we pulled into the driveway to discover that a severe episode of arrhythmia had put my grandmother in the intensive care unit of the Peterborough hospital. My grandfather, with his own serious heart condition, had been caring for Sally by himself. Proudly they both told of how, after spending the day at the hospital, for supper every evening he’d cooked the two of them hot dogs prepared the way he said “they eat them in Vienna”—until they were black on all sides. “I made Sally charcoal,” he elaborated, and it came to me that by staying home she was the one who’d gone on the adventure.

  If my mother was not feeling pressed, she was the most enthusiastic person I have ever known, but each day was a succession of the needs and desires of other people’s children and her own. She lived in a society that did not think well of single mothers or divorcées, and, on her own and marginalized throughout our years in New Haven, she was often, as she’d say, “just frantic.” Once I told her, “My friends don’t like to come over to my house because we don’t have a TV, we never have any snacks, and they don’t like how much you yell.”

  “Oooh,” she said to me. “Are they afraid?” Maybe a little.

  Her unhappy moods bubbled and steamed as she stalked about the house, expressing irritation and distress with noisy intakes and exhalations of breath, a symphony of sighs that in summer were supported by the beat of her Dr. Scholl’s sandals slapping out their angry tempo against the wooden floors. This might have been a more irenic way of getting things off her chest than yelling or throwing things, except that the lack of explosion built and built the tension in the house. She muttered about her exertions, wondering “How the hell can I be expected to get everything done for these damned, ungrateful, spoiled-rotten kids” as she slammed around the house getting everything done. I heard most of her discontents from the next room, through my wall and doorway, though, even if she was speaking aloud in my presence, she seemed removed to another place, to an under-her-breath existence which suggested that what was quite possibly most distressing to her was that she had nobody to share her distress with. Later, she might say, “It had nothing to do with you, Nicky,” and once she told me, “I can churn up enough anxiety all by myself, it’s just my awful nature.” I wanted to believe her, to remember what she was like when she was my sweet mom, but in the balled-up emotional moment it was hard to.

  The phrase that seeped most frequently into my room was “all I want is a little peace and quiet.” I’d do my best to be still, but it wasn’t only me. When our telephone did ring, more often than not it was my mother’s mother calling to ask her favors, requests that my mother could never quite complete without hearing about the surprising incompetence of American teachers, how “the stupidest people all turn out to be English majors,” or the “immorality” of this country where so many women had children but no husbands. It was as though having to ask her busy daughter favors was such an indignity that it required a little animus, a chaser of revenge. I used to worry that my mother was lonely even when Sally and I were at home, and it turned out she was. Neither of my mother’s parents ever knew about what had happened to her marriage—“Never once did either of them ask me anything or say so much as ‘are you all right’?”

  My father was working the phones too, and the mails, insisting “I know my rights and I want to see more of my children,” demanding the addresses of school principals and camp directors, which meant that my mother would have to call these officials and explain that if my father tried to come and get us, they shouldn’t let us go. It was only harassment, for he never made good on any of these threats, but she could never be sure. After all, he was a lawyer with a lot of time on his hands. Whenever he called, I could tell who was on the line because my mother became expressionless, locked herself into a hyper-controlled state. He was so unpredictable that she didn’t want to do anything to provoke him.

  Even when calm, my mother’s anxiety was subcutaneous; I could sense it throbbing just below the surface. Often, through some kind of wireless transmission, I’d begin to feel anxious too. Because she emanated such competence, the anxiety suggested misgivings about others, implied that the world was a harsh and entropic place, and that you had to strain against the seething disorder out there,
take measures or all would come to grief. For a while she’d smoked Marlboros heavily. Then she saw Sally pick up a Crayon and mime taking a puff from it. My mother never lit another cigarette. After that she vexed more easily, would combust into screaming rages. When her anger cooled, she comforted us with deeply felt remorse.

  Living with such an agitated person might occasionally be difficult, but the alternative was chaos, enough of which I’d glimpsed to feel grateful to her temperament, to regard it as my fortification, with her fits of hostility and despair, her rigid codes of order, and her sharp probity functioning for the greater good as so many merlons, spikes, and corbels. Life lived in the shade of the ramparts increases the awareness of danger, but it also makes a person feel insulated and protected, and I could not have been very old before I saw that to be perpetually on edge was her way of maintaining command of a very tenuous situation. We were not fashionably down on our luck, we were just poor, had no assets, no equity, except her. In the dominion of anxiety, it was choice that was the impossible luxury. She was a pretty, smart, decent young woman whose life had been stripped of alternatives. When, despite my mother’s intricately calculated budgets, her accounts ran low two weeks before payday, she used to press her hands into her face—I remember the skin of her fingers, the veins running down them like turbulent blue rivers—and moan, “How am I going to make it through the month?” Then, because all the worry had readied her for peril, she’d wipe her eyes and find a way. Although our landlord was responsible for the repair and upkeep of the house, my mother maintained everything herself, doing her best never to call the landlord for anything because she didn’t want to give him incentive to raise the rent. That rent check was always on time, as were her taxes, paid in full.