The Crowd Sounds Happy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  I was never close to Stanley. Instead I watched him then from a distance, wishing that I could somehow still be myself and yet be like him. I can see him ambling around the old brick campus, sometimes breaking into a lope or a curvet, but never a full sprint, for, although he was fastest among us, the point was not to show it. There was a certain coldness about him that could seem aloof, even insolent, yet it meant that when he decided to be amiable it disarmed people. One delightful female teacher used to become so slack-jawed and adoring in his presence she’d coo, “Oh, Stanley,” when he offered just about anything in class, the rest of us shifting in our seats as he grinned that mirthless smile of his. Yet he was never vindictive, was often genial to a subaltern, had the ability to make you feel special, chosen, even when he was only involving you in connivance. He was powerful in that he made others powerless without trying to; he didn’t recruit or advertise, he didn’t ask—he didn’t need to. Stanley’s presence alone made kids fall in line. By the time we were juniors he captained the basketball team and if I encountered him working alone at a basket in the school’s gym, he always accepted my challenges for a game of one-on-one, chortling from the back of his throat as his shots poured through the rim like milk into a glass. He discussed sporting matters with great seriousness and was willing to be teased, to a point, especially about his farts, which were legendarily plangent and could clear a room. Once, as we encountered each other on a walkway, an inspiration came into my head and I greeted him “Gassius Clay!” At the same time we both saw that I’d crossed a line. I had only a moment to wonder what would happen before the fist thudded hard into my shoulder. Then he nodded once and strode wordlessly away leaving me with my numb arm to marvel at that decisive ability to assess. The kids who were masters of that time in life were the ones who seemed nonchalant about experiences the rest of us couldn’t yet conceive ourselves having. They knew what to do.

  Stanley was probably first in our class to have a girlfriend. She wore Tretorns, a white canvas tennis sneaker with a trademark blue, V-like emblem on the side. Tretorns, along with clogs, were the exclusive footwear of the pretty girls in that school, and I was so shy about all girls that it took only the distinctive, hollow, horseshoe-on-cobblestone clip-clop of the advancing clog for my eyes to go to the floor. I used to wonder how the borderline types knew on which side of the divide they fell, and what might happen if a less attractive girl, an aspirant, appeared in clogs or Tretorns, what delicate taxonomic balance it might disturb, whether she would be rebuked by a true member of the phylum or perhaps reclassified, but it never happened. I could be sure because in that first year when I studied the rules of grammar in three languages, I also learned from memory what every kid in my class wore on her feet.

  This attention to footwear was some residue of kickball days, perhaps, though it had also become natural for me to look downward, and knowing that Dave T. came to school in Puma Baskets, Dave G. in blue Specs track sneakers, Mark in dark blue suede Pro-Keds low-tops, Horace in compost-brown Clarks Wallabees, and Randy in Top-Sider deck shoes was a feat I accomplished effortlessly, without conscious intent. There was much, however, I failed to notice—that, for instance, you never wore white crew socks with brown or black shoes. This wisdom was passed along to me by Randy, the same Randy who showed me how to calculate my batting average, introduced me to Led Zeppelin, and who helpfully clarified that the brown Top-Siders I had on over my white socks were actually Docksider knock-offs, not the authentic Sperry. That fashion relied on a system of inflexible canons was his point, and I was receptive, was all for orderly systems. When I raised my eyes, I took in everywhere around me Lacoste sport shirts with their trademark alligator lying in wait at the breast. I too wanted to walk with reptiles. For the first time ever, from my grandmother I requested garments for my birthday—asked for and received two Lacoste shirts, a blue and green rugby-striped long-sleeved model and a second long-sleeved solid red one. On the evening of my birthday party, when my guests assembled at our house to be taken out for a movie at the Strand, I brought the earlier arrivals into my bedroom, pulled open my dresser drawer and proudly displayed my acquisitions. I was beginning to relate how I’d picked them out myself in New York, with my grandmother, when I noticed the blank, quizzical looks on male faces taking in a boy who still played Show-and-Tell—and with his clothes. I shoved the shirts back in the drawer, having achieved exactly what I was out to avoid: I was not like them.

  I was old enough to go on the train with Sally to New York unescorted to see my father. Once a month on a Sunday morning we boarded the second car of the 9:00 a.m. local, took a seat on the right side, and, as the train pulled out of New Haven, I’d watch the city’s roofs vanish above the track-side walls, and then look out at the crazy fencing atop the embankment, the strew of bottles, clothing, auto parts, toys, and old basinets and washing machines discarded along the frontage, wonder how it all got there, and then my city was gone and we were on our way, moving from town to town down the Connecticut shoreline. From Stamford, it was express to 125th Street and on into Grand Central Terminal, the end of the line. As we departed 125th Street and the train slid out of the morning down under the city streets for the eight-minute tunnel approach to Grand Central, I’d put away my homework, press my face to the window, the tiny tunnel lights twinkling by as I’d brace myself for what was coming.

  I never knew which Dad would be meeting us. He was almost always punctual, but sometimes there’d be a weird defective look in his eye, a tremor in his hands, a bandage over an injury. A couple of days his glasses were broken. I’d look at his large head in a phrenological way, searching for clues so as to assess his mood. They fluctuated through various forms of turbulence: often he was sullen, restive, or agitated, either way an unpromising sign. My goal—it quickly became a policy—was to have my nerves sheathed in distanced calm by the time I reached the information booth, took his hand, and said, “Hi, Dad.” We always met at the information booth, though there were days when he was so up for it, so eager to begin the visit, that he was waiting at the gate grinning a wide grin, and my shoulders would drop at the sight of him there so happy to see me that he was depriving me of those extra seconds I relied on to prepare myself for him.

  His voice always sounded the same, but his speech was often not lucid, his behavior erratic. When he got into altercations with people we encountered on sidewalks or in restaurants, when he told me things I knew he shouldn’t—he liked to describe new women he wanted to “lay”—when he suddenly lashed out at me, I didn’t know what to do. Your father is supposed to protect you, and mine was scaring the hell out of me.

  On the way to his apartment, we’d often take a route passing through Times Square where the raw neon of the peep shows and porn palaces lit up the hustlers and derelicts and shell-game barkers swarming outside on the Forty-second Street sidewalk, lit up all the disappointed faces ducking into all the lousy doorways and dives and the crappy souvlaki joints we ourselves visited once or twice. Smells hung listless, and several times I saw a single shoe abandoned on the pavement, which made me fear for its former occupant; was somebody hopping out there? Even at this hour, on this day, the sidewalks were raucous, noisy with unconcern, the stacks of Sunday papers at the corner newsstands telling about how New York was going bankrupt, telling about Son of Sam, and the murder rate, and strikes and blackouts, telling about a city in manic conflict with itself.

  Even then, at its nadir, New York was still the place that drew so many people from all over America to make their way, where they played in the low-roofed streets of downtown, where everyone from back home came through at least once, because New York was the center of life in America, was, in the just-invented phrase of the time, the Big Apple. I never knew that city. To me, it was a fallen place, only to be endured, gotten over, like a case of food poisoning.

  Up in my father’s neighborhood, the grainy, water-stained light of late Sunday morning on Columbus Avenue seemed to weaken him; even on those days when h
e was abloom with enthusiasm, he couldn’t sustain it for long, and the visit would droop into a lugubrious procession of dejected hours. Sometimes he’d telephone my Aunt Judy, and if he could convince her to leave her own young family and come over, he was relieved, calling his sister “Jude,” as good-natured she strained to salvage the afternoon for his children.

  Across one lunch table, when I was thirteen or fourteen and the Volkswagen Rabbit was a new and popular car, my father declared his intention to buy one. Thoughts of how he was going to pay for a car like that ricocheted through my head as he spoke. Somehow, he’d remained a member of both the Harvard and Yale clubs, “for business,” he said, and once or twice we sat at the Harvard Club on old leather couches under stuffed animal heads, though we didn’t eat anything besides the free pretzels, Ritz crackers, and orange spreading cheese. I saw the way people he greeted there had sized him up, began to edge away at the sight of him, thinking of ways to avoid an interaction. Out in public, with new people, he never spared an opportunity to mention Harvard.

  He was full of a grand past and a grand future, yet undefined in his present. He did no more regular law work that I knew of, yet to all he declared he was an “attorney,” maintaining that august ordinal truth through his refusal to take on any other source of income even as his sparse flophouse furnishings and shabby clothes unmistakably suggested he was on the way down. To look at him standing on a New York street corner was to confront a man with little more status in the city than his street-peddling grandfather.

  By now I knew about many stories of squandered youthful promise, but I never thought of my father that way. In Hemingway or Faulkner the failures were romantic, had the ache of beautiful demise. My father’s was a story nobody wanted to tell. The situation remained so troubling for all concerned that, out of his presence, members of my father’s family hardly ever introduced me to another person as Donald’s son. To those who met me with my grandmother and asked her whose child I was, she always first ignored the question, capitulating only when pressed. I was the same. When I did have to admit that Donald was my father, I felt expression drain from my face.

  With him in New York, there were many meals at a local Chinese restaurant called the Cherry, where no cherries were on the menu, or anything else sweet or fresh. We ate greasy fried rice scattered with red, fat-veined cubes of pork and bowls of wonton soup the temperature of standing water. My father came there frequently, he said, which burned at me as an injustice. Why should he dine out while my mother, counting pennies in New Haven, had never been to Blessings to eat Chinese food, had never been to Louis’ Lunch to try a hamburger? All I was capable of doing then was begrudging him. A long time later it occurred to me that at this place where he claimed to be a regular, nobody on the staff ever seemed to recognize him.

  I didn’t ask him how he was going to pay for the Rabbit, didn’t let him see me flinch when he said he was soon going to open up a savings account for our college education. I just nodded and said, “That’s good, Dad.” I sought never to say anything provocative. When I was talking with other people in a room where he was, I tried not to look as though I was enjoying myself too much, so he wouldn’t feel bad that I never looked like that anymore talking with him. He prickled with sensitivity, and I feared his lack of control, of which I was reminded in even the most tranquil moments by the loud, panting way he took in air, by his laugh, a guttural gooselike honk that erupted in salvos of three; by the third one, I wondered if it would ever stop.

  What more did we talk about on all those Sundays? What did we do? I have no photographs, scant recollections. They were days disowned by memory.

  Sally was listening to Paul Simon’s early solo records in those years, and at the time I dismissed them out of hand as younger sister music. Now when I hear Simon’s overcast outer-borough baritone singing “Still crazy after all these years,” singing “Anyway you choose you’re bound to lose in New York City,” I hear the desperate, sad, and ravaged Ratso Rizzo city I knew, I hear my old times with my old man, and I am back inside that dim and bedraggled West Side apartment with the bars on the windows, confronting my father’s listing posture, the relentless, inexorable, unflagging deathlessness of the afternoons.

  I wondered what my mother did on that single day a month when Sally and I were not around, and once I asked her. She said she spent the morning sitting down at the dining room table slowly drinking a cup of coffee and having a good feeling that the day was spread out before her. She perceived the day in terms of space. The apartment, the room, the table, they all seemed large to her, and she felt that suddenly the space of her life was enlarged across that table. After a while she would catch up on chores. I thought it seemed a shame that on her one free afternoon she was dusting and doing the laundry, but she explained that she liked doing chores. Then she admitted that she always wanted to tell somebody what she’d done. “That’s the fabric of life,” she said, “all those tedious little things that add up to a story that’s almost fun when there’s another grown-up to share it with.”

  When November came, kids at school clothed themselves against the cold in puffy ski jackets made of down-filled pouches that encased the body in plump, tubular layers. The first time I saw a couple of people wearing them I thought they looked like larvae. When everyone began showing up in down, I wanted such a jacket. More than anything I wanted one. My mother didn’t see why I, who didn’t ski, needed such apparel, and, the third time I tried to convince her, she informed me I was “a fop” and “a conformist.”

  “What’s a fop?” I asked, and she told me about the French and the English, that the French were obsessed with clothes and food and as a consequence the English repeatedly had to rescue them from rout during wars. “What about Lafayette?” I pointed out. “He rescued us.”

  “Honestly, Nicky,” she said.

  Just the same, soon we were on our way out to a winter sports shop in Orange. I’d heard about the shop from kids at school. My mother didn’t like Orange because it was a suburb, a word that when she said it sounded lascivious with misplaced values. “I hate the way suburban people live out there in little segregated tribes of their kind only, with their lower taxes and insurance rates,” she’d say. “America is supposed to be a more vital and complex place than that.” To get her to go to Orange I must have spoken about the shop with great authority, conveyed the pressing necessity of going only there, implied that the jacket qualified as gear. Gear was Vibram, drill bits, the Texas Instruments calculators that regular people were just beginning to own. My mother didn’t know a lot about gear. At the ski shop, chalet-like in my memory, with a lot of Colorado-style open-beam work and wide panes of glass, the jackets the salesman showed us cost more than my mother said we could afford. But come over here, my mother was waving. She had discovered a rack of cheaper ones. They had the essential tubular armature, but flatter pouches. Sounding happy that we would not go home empty-handed, my mother said expansively that I should choose any of them, whichever one I liked. “Look, they even have hoods,” she discovered. None of the expensive coats had a hood. Could more mean less? I was also suspicious about the pouches, wondered why they weren’t puffy. I consulted the label inside the collar. These pouches were “fiber filled.” “Mom,” I informed her. “They have polyester in there, not down.” My mother sometimes spoke about polyester as though it were the suburb of fabrics. Tonight, however, she said only “Nicky, come on,” and I could tell that she was suddenly weary in the way exhaustion flooded over her when she took off her sunglasses at the end of a long, hot, summer car ride. It was getting late. The salesman had abandoned us long ago. What was it about clothing that such small variations made all the difference? I went back to the cheap rack, selected a blue coat, and wore it to school the next day, wishing hopelessly that it would look like where it had come from. Each time a kid mentioned my “fake down” jacket, I felt more ludicrous, and by the weekend, which we were to spend visiting in Croton, to have it on my back made me want
to flop around in pain. “What’s the matter with him?” Susi asked in Croton, and when my mother threw up her hands and explained, Susi pulled back her chair and went to the coat closet. “Nicky, come here,” she said. Opening the door, she produced a down jacket she’d recently bought herself. “Try this on,” she said to me. “It’s not a girl’s jacket, it’s unisex!” The jacket fit perfectly. “He can have it,” she said to my mother, “and I’ll wear his.”

  The one thing every other kid had that I could not even aspire to was a television in the house. So opposed was my mother that the year somebody sent us one for Christmas, she packed it up and sent it back. Since TV shows formed such a large part of the American conversation, not to have one at home marked me as the boy who didn’t know. I’d begun to notice on the bedroom walls of several pals the identical poster of a woman in a red swimsuit with an ultrabrite smile and a waterfall of frosty blond curls. I didn’t think she was that pretty, kind of elbowy and having a shampooing problem, and perhaps that’s why it took me a while to ask who she was and finally become aware of Farrah Fawcett-Majors, star of Charlie’s Angels. Not to have lusted after what all of American boyhood had been fantasizing about implied that for me there would be deeper consequences for not having a TV; that I would be left out in big, life ways; that I wouldn’t have the information. Over me swooped a completely new kind of inadequacy—the sort of potent, confusing sensation I would have liked to ask my mother about, except for a further realization: I now had subjects a boy definitely could not take up with his mother.