The Crowd Sounds Happy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  Thanksgivings I dreaded. We’d stay Wednesday nights at my father’s, and then on Thursday we’d go over to my grandmother’s or to Judy’s to celebrate. My grandmother never lost her immigrant enthusiasm for Thanksgiving, the only holiday I ever knew her to care about. Yet this day, which demanded only that we be grateful for what we had, invariably confronted us with what was lacking, and nobody felt the family disappointments more acutely than the most disappointed of us. My father was at his worst from Thanksgiving Day until after New Year’s, and while Christmas and New Year’s Day tended to leave him lonely and hopeless, Thanksgiving infuriated him. The enforced levity in overheated rooms seemed to make him think the relatives were laughing at him, the family stain, for he often excluded himself, searching out a slight and leaving early, his voice bellowing threats as he retreated: “I’m warning you, I’m not going to take it much longer.” All these episodes passed without comment from everybody else, though, after one of them, two different older relatives pulled me aside, withdrew their wallets, and wordlessly handed me money.

  A couple of times, my father refused to come at all, and everyone seemed relieved except my grandmother, to whom the perfect algebra of a fully present family meant everything. It was usually late in November that she, who the rest of the year told me never to criticize my mother, who never otherwise failed to underline “the great respect I have for Heidi,” fell back on lamenting to me my mother’s decision “to leave him.” Speaking to me, my grandmother would then refer to him pointedly as “your father,” emphasizing my filial obligation, emphasizing that you can’t escape your past and you can’t escape your family. I ascribed some of this to her desire to have me share what I was sure she must be feeling, the constant worry that the telephone would ring to tell her he was in trouble again. He was her lifelong responsibility because she was his mother, and, as she soon began more emphatically to explain to me, he was mine because I was his son.

  My birthday came right after Thanksgiving, and from my grandmother I’d receive my card in an envelope inevitably addressed to “Master Nicholas Dawidoff.” In what way at eight, eleven, or fourteen was I master of anything? Enough to master the knowledge that there was something unseemly in the family “we don’t talk about.” My grandmother told me, “life isn’t supposed to be easy,” and I accepted that, but at a certain point I, who ate everything, became suddenly unable to stand yams or cranberry sauce and never could stomach them again.

  One Thanksgiving, my father showed up at my grandmother’s dressed as a rabbi and carrying an old black King James Bible in both hands, the book outstretched like an offering. The strangeness of this entrance, with its twining of faiths and assertion of doctrine in a family that didn’t talk about religion, didn’t talk about creed, didn’t talk about madness, cut through the room. Everyone winced. As he made his rounds, his hands convulsively shaking, each person he greeted just said “Hello, Donald, happy Thanksgiving.” When he approached me, I studied the fibers of the rug fabric. After he finally left, a great-aunt collapsed into an armchair with a huge glass of gin.

  The pain he caused could never keep pace with the pain he felt, no matter how vigorously he expelled it. He emanated pain, and it crackled through him like a shorting circuit, crushing him and also keeping him alive. With his infected brain he broke everybody’s heart, because it was as though he wanted all of us to be as wretched as he was so we could feel for a brief time, on this special day, what he always felt.

  Eventually there were two Thanksgiving dinners. Early in the day, Sally and I would meet Dad at our grandmother’s for turkey. Then, in the late afternoon, he’d go home, and the three of us would head off uptown to join everyone else for the real party. We never told him that we had further plans, but he must have known.

  All conformists are the same; they think they’re not conformists. It seemed to me a cruel and cynical turn of chance that my mother, who cared not at all about fitting in, could have a son who cared so much. When my mother talked about conformists, I shared her cutting opinion of them, agreed that people of worth went their own way. Yet when I watched the conformists at school, in them I saw the confidence and composure of people who knew that they wanted what the world wanted. I thought of the conformists’ lives proceeding at a steady velocity, their always knowing what to do because it was time, having jobs and families and dining rooms that nobody ever set foot in, were left fallow and immaculate in favor of the cozy eat-in kitchen nook right up to the move to Florida, where they’d play golf and drive white Oldsmobiles through the changeless weather. There was an attraction to how naturally everything came to them, would always come to them, how they blended without effort. Because it was tacit that I was not going to have a life like that, the future Floridians I went to school with came to represent a standard against which I tested myself. I knew now what I’d been fearing, that I might well be mutilated at the core, peculiar, some kind of invisibly palsied freak-boy. As simultaneously I tried to sort out whether something devastating had already happened with my own chemistry or whether I might still fend it off, my tireless efforts at assimilation were a gambit whereby, if others thought I was okay, more or less like them, I too could believe it to be so. It never would have occurred to me that those others around me might be exercising some variation of this same logic, and I wouldn’t have liked it if I had known they were. I was invested in everybody else’s stability, couldn’t handle any more deviance. I was out to convince myself of who I wasn’t, to fit in with myself, to be certified right in the head, to feel like an American boy.

  That thirteenth year I got a new orange and white cat and I named him Teddy after Ted Williams. By this time we’d had so many cats I had trouble remembering them all. We got them as kittens and raised them as indoor cats. For a while they were content to roam the house, to sleep on my bed and be petted. But then, as they grew older, they would sit in the window and mew so pitifully that eventually my mother would succumb and announce that it was “inhumane to prevent an animal from going outside.” She’d let them out the back door and once they’d tasted the fresh air, they could never be denied it again. Two months or half a year would pass before brakes would squeal on Willow Street and we’d have no cat. Each death was so upsetting to us that my mother would eventually give in and allow Sally and me to have another cat, vowing never to let this one go outside. Teddy lasted longer than most, in part because he was tough. The first time he was hit, my mouth fell open as I saw him come streaking along the side of the house and accelerate out into the street where he bounced headlong off the right front hubcap of a delivery van, went pinwheeling into the gutter, and survived. Half a year later, he darted back into the road for the last time. It was a brutal thing all that cat death, and the only way I can explain its recurrence is that my mother felt there was so much she could not give Sally and me, and because a new kitten was something she could give us, she did.

  On the way home from visiting my father, back in the Grand Central tunnel, I’d look in the window at my reflected face, checking to make sure there were no resemblances. Then Sally and I, unwinding, relieved, might burst together into giddy laughter. My sister and I spent a lot of time going our separate ways, staking out our own territory. Yet these rides home from visiting our father were some of the best moments of my childhood, the relief we shared, the way she liked me to make her laugh—some days I had only to look at her and move an eyebrow, and she’d dissolve into giggles, and then I would too.

  We had a private system of communication. Our hometown was Na Have. Somebody dishonest was a cheat bomb. She herself was Allende, the end of a nominal progression that had gone from Sal to Salvador to the surname of Salvador Allende, the leftist Chilean politician whose name was often on the radio during our childhood until after he was martyred in a military coup. People then had recently begun to exchange high fives, and Sally and I sometimes greeted each other by holding open a palm and saying, “Slap me five!” When the slap came, the recipient would avoid i
t by turning the waiting hand over and saying, “My dog’s that high!” This amused us endlessly. At other times, when we sensed the other really needed a laugh, we’d meet eyes, one of us would say “Heinhein! Nurl-nurl!” and we’d both crack up. Relatives who gave us a hard time were called “Tives,” which rhymed with hives. During especially stressful family moments, we’d meet eyes and quietly mouth, “Tively Times!” We had a name for all this: we called it Nerd Lingo.

  Even though it was already evening when we got to New Haven, because New York seemed to ferment under a coat of grime, I always changed my clothes, washed away all the accumulated fetors and distillations. As I held my palms under the tap, dark water flowed into the drain. Then for three weeks I wouldn’t think about New York until, on a Sunday or Monday, I’d remember the upcoming Sunday and feel glum, and then I’d put it out of my mind so successfully that later in the day I’d try to remember what had made me glum, and it would come back to me and I’d feel glum again.

  To me my father was easiest just to ignore. He was confusing in a way that I did not want to work out because nothing good had ever come of those calculations. Very rarely, in spite of myself, he did spring into my head. On the highway we passed a warning sign, “Falling Rock Zone,” and I had the image of him, as I did when I read in a news magazine about foreclosed farmers, heard someone describing what ends up on the bottom of the harbor. As I puzzled over how he occupied himself through the day, the impossibility that a man could remain forever inactive with no purpose made it seem inevitable that he would become a criminal, disgrace us all. My expectations of him were completely random; at any time he might do anything. Though my father never hit me in New York, as the day of the visit approached, my fantasies were filled with scenes of him going berserk and I fought to obliterate them. What would keep a man like that from lashing out at everyone? Why wouldn’t he turn to crime? I feared him with a mortal dread. To me he was a speckled person, my unlucky draft number. I could see that my mother and just about everybody else was at least a little afraid of him too and I sensed he could see this—made use of it. He was so sick, and because of that so strong. He used his weakness as a weapon.

  Many times I told my mother I didn’t want to go see him, but she never made our visits optional. “It’s important for you to have a relationship with your father,” she’d say over and over. On the appointed Sunday morning, before she put us on the train, my mother would call around New York to get reassurances about what kind of shape my father was in and, as far as I know, nobody ever told her “Don’t send them.” I was shackled to him. From the time I’d been a small boy I was bothered that he was my responsibility, and not the reverse. It was my duty to go, in the same way that I must do my chores, attend church. Only he could get out of our visits—and anything else he wanted. Since I didn’t want to go, and had to, the clear implication was that I was doing it for him, that it would be hurtful to him if I failed to show up. As I got older, I saw that my grandmother was right; it was my moral obligation to spend time with this person I had begun to loathe.

  A friend from my school came along with me once to New York and met my father. We had become close midway through that seventh grade year. My friend was very intelligent, jovially sarcastic, and filled with a range of interests unlike that of other kids I knew at our school: together in his basement we watched the endless procession of college football bowls during Christmas vacation, played board games reenacting Napoleonic battles, used to trade each other the black-spined Penguin paperback classics we bought and read for fun, dealing a Froissart’s Chronicles straight up for a Bede’s A History of the English Church and People, and bought records by America and Queen, groups we adored one day and disowned the next. It seems to be true that we briefly formed a club we called the WORM Association. With his family I went to the shore, to the mountains, to the Yale Bowl. For a time we spoke on the telephone every night in a heightened state of eighth grade consciousness, discussing for hours Horatio Hornblower’s rise through the British navy. These conversations persisted until, right about the time it began to seem funny to be talking so much to another boy, he had his first girlfriend and the calls all but ceased. By then we had known each other for years, and when someone else in our class told me my friend was adopted I refused to believe it, could not imagine that he would have withheld such fundamental information. There was a developing uneasiness, a sense I would have explained then by saying that a best friend should have everything in common with me and that my friend and I were on diverging paths. Maybe it’s that out-of-it kids always half resent those willing to become their companions. For years my friend’s running joke had been that I was a simpleton, but now all at once I didn’t think it was funny anymore to be “Nick the Nerd,” didn’t think birthday cards on which he drew a picture of a bomb and wrote “This card will self-destruct in five seconds. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough T.N.T. to blow you up with it” were amusing. My friend had grown mordant, unpredictable, and that his temperament seemed to have shifted alienated me, as did his new interests: listening to him talk with enthusiasm about anarchy or the virtues of the Soviet Union, I felt horrified, like a matron clenching at her stole as she hears bright talk from a back-door man. During those years I was always attracted to and then worried by high-strung, vulnerable people. In a published photograph taken of our high school newspaper staff working on the Thanksgiving issue, my friend and I are seated beside one another in the foreground. I am looking straight at the camera and haven’t noticed that my friend is holding up a picture of a turkey in one hand and with the other he is pointing at me. He seemed increasingly strident and bizarre. I was afraid of what was happening to him, afraid he would snap. Every morning before school assembly, leaning against the hallway wall, I would speak guarded sentences to my friend until my teammates from baseball came up, whereupon I would greet them with affection as my friend relinquished his place and walked away. One Friday night, following a screening in the school auditorium of the Hitchcock film Psycho, I needed a ride home. My friend offered me one. I got into the car feeling I had to, even as I thought that he was the second-to-last person in the world I wanted to leave that particular movie with. Soon after that, one evening he tracked me down by telephone at a house where I was baby-sitting, said he was in trouble, needed my help now or he didn’t know what would happen to him, what he would do to himself. I wanted to help, to take care of my friend, and I wanted no part of whatever was happening. In a panic, I telephoned my mother, who said, “You are not to leave those children.” Back at school, there my friend was, unscathed. Back when my friend met my father, Dad was having a good day and there was an instinctive warmth between them. After that, my friend occasionally asked after Dad, and my deflecting answers eventually led him to burst out, “Why do you hate your father?”

  Besides that friend, I never talked about my father with anybody in New Haven. I hoped people would assume that I just didn’t have a father. To casual queries about him, I left it that he was a lawyer in New York and a bachelor. “Like in The Odd Couple!” someone said. I’d seen that show, and the idea that my father could be taken for a charmingly neurotic Upper West Side bon vivant with an interesting job, a regular poker game, wit, charisma, and attractive girlfriends in go-go boots momentarily stunned me. I’m not sure what I eventually replied—something deprecating. Rarely were there questions about him. It never seemed to occur to anyone to ask, and those that did found the subject unfruitful. I was sure that if anyone knew of my background I would be as ostracized as he was. I put my secret father in a compartment of my brain and locked it up tight.

  I’d begun to come home from New York more terrified than ever that what had happened to him would be my fate as well. After one upsetting visit with Dad, my mother and I came as close as we ever did during my childhood to really discussing the situation. She looked me over and asked me if I had read Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. I hadn’t. She told me about Septimus Smith, who is mad and const
antly destroys life—“makes everything terrible” as his wife, Lucrezia, says. My mother showed me the part where Septimus lolls on a bench in Regent’s Park and gazes at the clouds, the leaves, and the trees that he believes are signaling to him. Then my mother looked at me and said, “You don’t do that, Nicky. You don’t distort things.” I understood what she was trying to tell me, but nothing ever completely convinced me.

  As a fourteen-year-old junior high school student, I now felt antipathy for everything I associated with my father—from the city of New York to lacrosse to womanizing. I made sure that I breathed noiselessly and vowed never to be fat, bald, or a loud laugher. When my father told me his favorite novel was Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, and urged me to read it, I ignored him, feeling that, if I did read it, somehow he would rub off on me. People from time to time assumed I was Jewish—“your last name”—and I quickly explained that I was a churchgoer, and then I took further measures. Until then I had been the child my mother had to drag to Sunday school. Now I allowed the church to baptize me and I joined the confirmation class, was the class member to give the confirmation sermon to the full congregation, whom I informed that “As Simon went to Jesus, we come to you to join the family of the Christian church.” Following the service, I was presented a Bible by Reverend Bradley with my name embossed on it in gold. I never attended services again. Sally, meanwhile, without saying a word to anyone, scheduled a private appointment with Reverend Bradley, explained to him her doubts about the existence of God, and came home afterward to tell us at dinner they’d agreed she should not be confirmed.