The Crowd Sounds Happy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  Unexpected things had begun to occur with some frequency during my visits to my father in New York. One weekend we went to the circus where my father drank a large green and white paper cup of beer and a few minutes later we had to leave right in the middle of the elephants, excusing ourselves down the row. It happened again when he began nodding and shaking partway through a Knicks basketball game. On the way home, in the frigid winter air outside Madison Square Garden, I smelled the sweet char of roasting chestnuts and pulled on his coat until he bought me a paper bag–full from the vendor. Once shelled, they were mushy and sour, cold at the center, nothing like what they promised.

  One time, in a summer before I was ten, my father and I went to visit some guy at his house out on the edge of the countryside. There were fields, space, beating heat, bugs. It felt like I was exiled on an atoll, far away from anything, but probably it was just a new subdivision outside a New York or Connecticut town. I was put in front of a television by myself where I watched The Electric Company while my father talked with the man in another room. I thought something called The Electric Company would have men climbing poles and construction trucks and cranes. It didn’t; the show was educational. It got dark. Sequestered in there, I was bored, then restless. I began to wonder if I would ever get home. Through the window I could see lights way out across the fields. Much later, we left.

  My father was putting on more and more weight, his belly now a globe straining at his shirts, and whatever he was eating wasn’t agreeing with him because at his apartment, after he used the bathroom, the stuffy air told of his gastric distresses. Otherwise it had the stricken smell of unwashed clothes. My life slowed down within those suffocating rooms, and a creeping paralysis would come over me. I can remember little of what we did or what we talked about. I knew never to mention my mother, and increasingly I told him as little as possible about myself or my life in New Haven. He, on the other hand, told me more than I wanted to know about himself, especially on the occasions when I stayed overnight. It was as though he couldn’t resist the little eruptions of inappropriateness that came over him. Out in the main room he would make up the sofa with sheets and blankets, giving me his bed in the back room, and then, as if in recompense for my putting him out of his room, he served up disturbance. Lying next to me he’d tell me about swimming nude with other men at the Yale Club swimming pool, and he would talk about women. Once, when I was nine, at my bedtime my father was sitting on the bed next to me, and he wanted to recount his youthful experiences with Italian prostitutes. I managed to put all the details out of my head except for a description of a Roman bordello decorated in red velvet. For years, every time I entered his apartment, I winced, expecting to see red velvet.

  Another day, my father related the story of his mugging. He said he’d seen a group of black guys coming toward him and made a break for his apartment building, trying to get away, but they cut him off halfway down the block, grabbed him, roughed him up, and took his wallet. There seemed to be no point to the story other than that he’d been victimized, was prey.

  Unless he was telling again about his old high school teammate Jim Brown, my father didn’t seem to like black people very much. One night we’d been visiting my father’s sister, Judy, and her husband, Bob, gave me a treasure, a real baseball signed by Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, and every other member of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers, the only Brooklyn team ever to win the World Series. It was an incredible gesture, but Bob knew how much I loved baseball, and, as we left, he took me aside and presented me with the ball. I was nine. We rode in a taxi back to my father’s, and, after we got out of the cab and it drove off, I realized that I no longer had the Dodger baseball. Horrified, I told my father. Looking down at me, my father said, “Well, Nicky, you’ve made some little nigger kid up in Harlem very happy.”

  Now I was afraid of New York. On our way in from New Haven in the red Dodge, nearing the city the expressways grew loud and smoky with the exhaust clouds that came spurting out of trucks in rapid belches. As we drove through the Bronx, the highway shoulders were cluttered with abandoned cars that right there in full view had been stripped clean of their hubcaps, tires, and anything else that could be moved by thieves who then often set the bare frame that was left on fire. After emptying out the engine cavity, the thieves didn’t bother to lower the hoods, making the cars look as though they were calling out in pain for a dentist.

  The roadway swung up high, right alongside the heart of the South Bronx, a bleak, leaden moonscape of rubble-strewn lots and shattered apartment houses with skeletal fire escapes zigzagging up the facades, many of them, like the cars, burned-out, deserted, cratered. Seen from our car, all the broken windows looked like chapfallen eyes staring back at me. There in the Dodge I became convinced that my luck was about to change. Horrible things were going to happen. I would soon end up down there in the abyss.

  On my father’s West Seventy-fifth Street block, at one end was a news and soda shop with a rickety gumball machine outside that was chained up so nobody would steal it. Behind their little window, the gumballs were losing color. Down at the other corner were the soot-brown walls surrounding Central Park, a place created for the mingling of classes where my father said nobody went because it was full of muggers. At night the whole neighborhood was dark under a sulfurous sky. Plumes of steam rose from the streets making everything seem part of a night never to become day again. Was something burning under there? Korean delis had not yet come to light up New York’s evening corners, and, as we walked down my father’s block, I held his hand tight so as to feel less vulnerable.

  Being in that city was like being thrust into some other side of the world that looked to me like a ransacked room, every drawer hanging open, belongings scattered, spilled, broken. None of the usual rules or considerations applied: things were expected to be dirty, dented, bashed in, and not to work. Everywhere there was trash strewn around, garbage swelling out of cans, a veneer of dog shit so you had to be vigilant about watching out where you were stepping. When I looked at other people, the faces I saw along the sidewalk seemed to be up to no good and angry with me for noticing. Nothing was ever going to get better for anybody in my father’s city, and because in my New Haven life I did not share this outlook, here the people resented me, might set upon me at any moment. What did madness look like to me? This harsh, putrefying, spookily shadowed place was madness.

  I didn’t want to go there anymore. And yet I did want to. That was where he lived, and without him I would be without any father at all. Down into the subway we’d go. The stations were filthy, the wall tiles dripping with moisture, the express banging past us waiting on the local platform, the express’s lights flickering manically on and off, its gray-metal sides coated in spray-painted graffiti, overdrawn ganglions of green, pink, orange, hot red, and purple that were more evidence to me that New York was mayhem, a place where people could get away with whatever they wanted. My insides would freeze up as our train arrived and a crowd massed at both sides of the doors. I knew I would have to be quick to get on or those doors would slam shut and I would be left behind. I tried to make an emergency plan with my father, to decide what to do if we were separated, but one could never get worked out.

  The night in 1974 when Hank Aaron of the Braves was likely to hit his 715th home run to break Babe Ruth’s all-time record, the game against the Dodgers was nationally televised, and I was upstairs on the second floor of our New Haven house, at the Sullivans’ apartment, watching with Mr. Sullivan. He was a retired aircraft engine factory worker who had fought during World War II, which I knew although he wouldn’t talk about it. Mr. Sullivan didn’t care for baseball, but here he was with me, wearing a V-neck white undershirt, his feet in soft shoes on which he’d used a knife to cut away the portion of the top covering the toes so I could see white-sock-covered toes protruding. His unshaven face was bristly, his fingers yellow from the cigarettes he rolled by hand and smoked, and he smelled of man. Hank Aaron hit th
e home run, but the picture of the slumped Dodgers pitcher Al Downing made me sad that everyone was celebrating his humiliation, until Mr. Sullivan started talking. I don’t remember what he said, just the realization that he was sensing my mood, and in that moment, in an unspecified and inchoate way, I became aware that somebody who was not your father could briefly feel like one, might even want that as much as you did, and that it might be okay to reveal yourself a little.

  Another day, Mr. Sullivan suddenly gave me some of his battle-field souvenirs from the war, including a Nazi officer’s Iron Cross, an eagle breast patch, some kind of artillery projectile. He still wouldn’t discuss any of it. Was there ever a truly heroic veteran who liked to tell his war stories? When I was too sick to go to school, I went up and watched television with Mr. Sullivan all morning. I was also welcome in the evening.

  One night when I climbed the back stairs to visit him, Mr. Sullivan was sitting at his kitchen table with his outdoor nylon jacket on. He was unshaven and raving, talking wildly and nonsensically, calling me “Mick,” trying to hug me, his voice slurred and his breath reeking of whiskey. After that I liked him less; for all his kindnesses, I couldn’t quite forgive him. It wasn’t just his weakness. It was that with people like him, like my Uncle Tony, like my baseball coach, all the nice moments weren’t sufficient. I always wanted more from them, and when inevitably I touched their limits, the disappointment was outsized. I wasn’t theirs.

  In my neighborhood, though almost every boy I played baseball with wished to be a professional, I believed I was different, that of all of us I was the one who had it. The reality was that it mattered most to me; I was unique only in the intensity of my affection for the game. I crouched there at shortstop thinking Hit it to me, Hit it to me, really wanting the ball, but also influenced by my knowledge that these were the exact words that went through the mind of the old Dodger Pete Reiser when he was out in center field. Had someone told me then that those who made it to the major leagues were a drop in the ocean compared to all the boys in America who’d hoped to play for a living, it wouldn’t have dampened my ambitions; part of childhood is the ease with which you can see yourself as the future exception. So many American men spend some portion of their youth aspiring to be major leaguers, making the stories that become the biographies of real major leaguers the few completed drafts of narratives begun by countless boys contemplating how the world will look back on them when they are a Phillie, a Brave, or a Detroit Tiger.

  Among those whom I envisioned someday testifying to my ten-year-old promise was a high school athlete named Bambi, who’d one day let me join the big kids on the schoolyard infield as he hit them ground balls for fielding practice. I made play after play on harder and harder-struck balls until Bambi began hitting only to me, trying to make me miss. I didn’t miss. Suddenly he stopped and alerted the entire schoolyard to what was happening, calling out, “Hey! Hey! Look at this little kid! Look!” and then they were all watching as I became a seine net, floating before every ball, allowing none to avoid capture. Another afternoon, during a summer softball game at Erich’s Day Camp, the camp director, Mr. Brown, passed by the ball field just as I, on a dead run from shortstop, crossed to the second base side of the bag to stab a grounder, transfer, and throw out the runner at first. Mr. Brown looked out at me and said, “Nicky, that’s as good a play as I’ve ever seen made on this field.” I replied, “You should’ve seen the one I made yesterday.” I meant that the historiography needed to be accurate, that he should know the truth, that the pop fly I’d caught from shortstop all the way out near the small basketball court in left field after the softball fell through a tree had caused me much more difficulty, but before I could launch into a full corrective, Mr. Brown gave me a funny look and resumed walking.

  One summer, my cousin Jody came to New Haven to join me at day camp. For two weeks he would be the one to sleep on my floor next to my bed. Our counselor that fifth grade year was a tall, dark, splay-legged man named Frank who had a little Broadway Joe about him with his mod tumble of black curls, mustache, Bermuda shorts, and pair of old white step-in loafers that he always wore without socks. Frank was a man of spontaneous actions, and I could tell that he thought it was good to be up for anything. Because around him I was, he seemed especially to enjoy doing things with me. When he proposed going for a trek out across the island toward the haunted house or cliff diving off the high rocks at the far end of the long beach, sometimes only the two of us went. Frank had once been such a promising young catcher that he told me he was approached by the San Francisco Giants. He still carried the scout’s business card, which he showed me. During the school year, Frank was the coach of the varsity baseball team at the public high school in my part of New Haven. At Erich’s Day Camp he paid a lot of attention to our softball games. One day Frank brought in some baseballs and announced a camp-wide contest to determine the camper who could hit and throw the farthest. First, on the diamond, I hit one off a center field tree, and then, down on the beach, my peg made the farthest mark in the sand. Frank then added a third element of competition, a pitching accuracy contest, open only to me and the kid whose throw had gone second farthest. Frank would umpire. I hummed one in. “Ball!” cried Frank. Then the other kid wound and threw. “Strike!” cried Frank and awarded the other kid the baseball.

  Frank took an increasing interest in me after that contest, and his way of doing so was to tweak me about my fielding errors, to act loudly unimpressed by anything I did well, even critiquing how much Beefaroni I ate at lunch, telling other kids I’d be three hundred pounds at thirty if I kept up eating so much. This all seemed to be his way of urging me to improve myself, and I went along with it. He even came to one of my Little League games. No man had ever come to watch me play before.

  But after a while, all the attention from Frank began to make me feel like it was hard to breathe. It got so oppressive that I confided in my cousin how much I hated it. Jody also liked to play shortstop. Cousinhood, said Tolstoy, is a dangerous neighborhood. The next day Frank came up to me and said that he understood that I hated him. I was horrified, couldn’t speak. It was okay if I felt that way, Frank continued, but he wanted me to know how much he still liked me. Numb, I just nodded. Later I asked my cousin why he’d done this to me. “We were talking and it just came out,” he said. Then he added, “I wanted to help you.” It felt as though in one day I’d lost both of them.

  In the aftermath I believed what had happened could have been avoided, that there would have been no problem if I hadn’t complained. I was increasingly attuned to what authority figures wanted of me, my wish to be responsive far exceeding anything else. I was no sycophant, but I never crossed any of them, no matter what. I didn’t have it worked out why I was so committed to pleasing everybody. I notice now that the stranger my father grew, the more bewildered and powerless I felt in the world, to which my impulse was to try as hard as I could to mollify any potentially unsettling forces around me, making myself impervious to them by being attentive to what would smooth all roads. Back then there was the vague, pressing feeling that if I left the straight and narrow, I risked more than what anybody else would.

  The fall of 1973 had begun what was to be the last year of Worthington Hooker kickball. Down by the highway exit, the new East Rock Community School was nearing completion, and kids from all the local school districts would go there. I was now almost eleven, a fifth grader, and had been looking forward to what I imagined as the lordly feeling of being a Worthington Hooker sixth grader, to enjoying the run of the place, savoring the admiration of the young, the confidence of authority, and maybe even acquiring a real nickname. We all wanted one. “Call me Red from now on,” Vogel told me one day. Ballplayers and boys in adventure stories always had nicknames.

  The one looming change spurred many changes. I’d arrive in the schoolyard with my fielder’s glove to discover spray paint on those previously sacrosanct red-brick walls. Somebody lit the trash bin on fire, and local stores bega
n to put up signs warning about the consequences of shoplifting. For the first time my mother locked our car door after parking for the evening. People just passing through our neighborhood didn’t think to do that. Standing next to a car one day, a kid tried to get me to rob it. The car was a tannish green sedan, American-made. Looking through the window, on the back seat I could see books, papers, clothing, and a fresh can of white Spalding tennis balls. “The door’s unlocked,” he suggested. “You could get those tennis balls easy.” I looked inside. The thought of it had an intimate appeal. It was as though I was about to enter someone else’s life for a moment without his knowing.

  “You do it if you want them so much,” I said.

  “Just take them, Nicky. It’s easy.”

  “Why don’t you take them if it’s so easy?”

  “Because I want you to.”

  “But why does it matter to you what I do?”

  “It just does. Come on.” The voice was pleading now, but there wasn’t ever any question.

  Walking along Livingston Street with my good friend Brad not long after he’d confided in me that he, like every boy at Worthington Hooker, thought strawberry blond Nellie was a fox, Nellie glided by on the opposite side of the street. “Hey, Brad,” I told him, “there goes your girlfriend!”—which inspired him to take my hockey stick and sail it into the middle of Livingston Street; which caused me to give him a shove; which led him to grab me around the throat and throw me down; which led to an astonishing event. A yellow Volkswagen screeched to a halt next to my hockey stick. The Volkswagen’s door flew open, a man got out and ran toward us yelling that he was an off-duty policeman and we’d better break it up right now. We were instructed to keep out of fights in the future or we’d be getting ourselves into a lot of trouble. I gaped at my savior. He was telling me how to stay on the lighted path.