The Crowd Sounds Happy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  My sister, I slowly discovered, had qualities that were redoubtable and unique. Intrinsically she was organized in creative ways, understood foreign literatures, music and poetic meter, designed and made everything from cakes to wrapping paper to sweaters from scratch; she could sing, had wit and an instinct for cutting through cant. She also persevered. When given the choice, most people in high school tend to seriously engage only in their strengths. Sally, gifted at so many things, also took on difficult endeavors that didn’t come naturally to her. She was not a fast runner at all, but she joined the cross-country team, and stuck with it despite finishing last in races, always completing the course, always improving her times. Then one summer she up and decided to run three hundred miles. Every day I watched as she set out to log her daily total, saw her run through storms and heat waves. Sometimes my mother would be out there with her, accompanying Sally by bicycle. There was a sheet of paper on which her distances were tallied. What made it all even more admirable to me was that she did not give the impression of being very impressed with herself and the many unusual things she could do. I thought, How can she not know?

  After dinner Sally and I went to our rooms and closed our doors. Living just a few feet from each other, my sister and I each became skilled at creating privacy, especially Sally. One year at Christmas someone gave her a silver Cross pen, the sort of luxury item that neither of us had ever owned. When I wondered who it was from, she refused to tell me. Quickly I was desperate to know, worked every maneuver I could think of to wheedle it out of her, offered to cut deals, tried to tempt her with my own secrets, but she had me and she knew it. All she did for months was laugh and shake her head until I forgot about the pen. Once in a while, I’d remember. “Nope,” she say, and around again we’d go. More than a dozen years later, at Christmas, I opened a slim package for me from Sally to find inside it a tarnished metal pen and a slip of paper on which she’d written the name of one of my friends from the neighborhood. I’d always assumed he came over so much because he liked playing Dungeons & Dragons with me.

  On the telephone I didn’t want my father to know me, and parried his questions with monosyllabic evasions.

  “How are you, Nicky?”

  “Fine.”

  “What’s new?”

  “Not much.”

  “How’s school going?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  Soon he’d resort to telling me in detail what he’d had for dinner that night or he’d feed me anecdotes, some of which later sounded familiar when I read a book he’d given me of Theodore Roosevelt’s letters to his children, rafts of words I listened to with a mixture of disbelief and queasy alarm, the way I did the first time a telephone drummer called the house with a new product to sell. Did this person really think we would buy anything from him? Eventually my father would give up and ask for Sally.

  Then one night he said he had been offered a job teaching law in Cleveland. A miraculous hope lifted in me. I told him how wonderful this was, told him he had to take the position, told him that Cleveland, where I’d never gone, where the downtown river had been on fire, was the land of possibility, the city of dreams. As I spoke, he was pretty quiet. After that I never heard anything more about Cleveland. He would never leave New York, and our conversations soon reverted to the familiar pattern. Occasionally, however, after saying “Goodbye, Nicky,” he’d add also “I love you.” Nothing anyone ever said to me upset me more. I’d want to tell him to prove it, tell him how cheap his words were, tell him to leave me alone, tell him that I despised and detested him, but I never said any of this and I never lied either. “Thanks,” is what I’d reply.

  When I finally did read Parade’s End, I discovered this memorable line: “It is probably only God who can, very properly, devise the long ailings of mental oppression.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Grief

  I was at home one evening in eighth grade when my mother came into my room to tell me that we were leaving immediately for Croton, that Susi, only forty-eight, had suffered one heart attack at the wheel of her car, and then a second, more serious episode back inside her house and might not live through the night. When we drove up to that big white house where I’d spent so many Christmases and vacations, Susi’s green Plymouth station wagon stood right outside where it always was, looking nothing like an accomplice. The telephone kept ringing. When my grandparents arrived from Cambridge, I was even given a present, a book about Napoleon. I slept that night, as I always did, in a sleeping bag on the floor beside Jody’s bed, and I slept soundly. I had no experience with the death of someone I knew, did not yet fantasize about death and loss in the way that provokes the troubling sense of déjà vu when the outcome eventually comes to pass.

  The next morning, I awakened to hear Tony sitting beside Jody on the bed, calmly telling my fourteen-year-old cousin that his mother had died. I lay still, my eyes closed as they spoke. When Tony left the room, on his way to give six-year-old Liesi the same news about her mother, Jody and I began to speak, he methodically calculating the mathematical odds of himself, me, and other family members being prematurely struck down until he gave up and began to weep. I wanted to comfort him. “It will be okay,” I told him. “I haven’t got a father and it’s okay.”

  “But he’s alive,” my cousin cried, and the irrevocable totality asserted itself.

  In June, I returned to Croton, where Jody and I spent every day of that long, horrible summer playing tennis for hours, walking two miles across hills into town beneath trees drooping in the humid heat to the clay public courts. I beat him every time, which I did not want to do because his mother had died. His strokes were clean and polished while mine were unkempt, but I would somehow win more points. He said once that what he liked most about tennis was the chance every shot gave you to express yourself with perfect form. For him to win without correct execution would have been a false victory. Each afternoon, when he tired and his shots began soaring long or colliding with the net, his frustration would mount, and he would fiercely mime the proper form, and still the shots would spray in all directions, and I would feel culpable although I knew that all he wanted from me was my companionship, not my pity. Each morning we went back and played again. It was all we did, running and hitting on the hot dirt until clay stained our socks the color of rust, clung to the runnels of sweat on our calves. After breakfast, we didn’t ever eat during the day, and we drank only from the large bottle of lemon-flavored Pepsi Light we always had with us. Finally, at night, we gorged ourselves with meat at supper and fell exhausted into sleep. There was never any question of just hitting for fun. Always we kept score. It was unbearable.

  My cousin was a serious competitor. He had joined the debate team at school and was quickly a champion. Now the model airplanes were put away, and the surfaces of his room were crosshatched with index cards, scholarly books, journal and periodical articles highlighted in yellow Magic Marker, and bulky briefcases from which he was always extracting thick documents. His conversation was scattered with words and phrases like “counter-plan,” “the turnaround,” “crush the affirmative,” and “the Depo-Provera argument,” and his descriptions of the actual competitions made debaters sound like glorious gladiators of an intellectual gridiron, martial artists of the mind—an impression buttressed by the fact that most of the time I didn’t know what any of it meant.

  Once I let him win at tennis. On the walk home, sitting on a short retaining wall next to the sidewalk, midway up the steep hill on the Old Post Road where we always rested together and drank Pepsi Light, he turned to me and asked me if I’d let him win, and when I hesitated, fury and anguish passed across his face and he screamed at me for the betrayal. Something fell through my body and froze inside my chest, and I sat silent in my shame wondering why I’d done it.

  Another time, on that same walk, sitting on that same wall, I asked Jody what he would choose if he could have anything in the world, and he stared at me in disbelief and said, “What do y
ou think?” Horrified, hurriedly I tried to amend matters, told him, “No, no, not that, things a person really could have,” which only made him more upset.

  The death had taken a corrosive hold on me. Not only was the world a far worse place without Susi; I was a far worse person. It was as though my soul were fraying as our whole family was fraying. Tony spent his days in bed or eddying around the rooms of the house, floating in anchorless circles of grief. Nobody paid enough attention to Liesi. A succession of housekeepers hired to help Tony came and went until he married one of them. I saw my uncle less and less after Susi died, and each time we visited he was harder to recognize as I used to know him. He seemed scarcely to notice as we all grew up and went on into life without him.

  My mother, in the grip of a heartbreak that remained fresh for years, put up a shrine of photographs to her sister on her living room dresser top in New Haven. My mother stopped going to church because she could not forgive God for taking her sister, and for a while she measured her friends by how sympathetic they were about her loss. “All they want is for me to get over it,” she’d say. She seemed to measure me that way as well. That I had not cried right after Susi died I knew gave my mother pain. I did not understand why I hadn’t cried. I wished I had. None of us knew how much we had loved her until she was gone, how much she had held us all together, how supportive and fragile a thing is family.

  One day that summer I was in Croton, and opening a closet door I happened to come upon the fake down blue coat Susi had traded with me for her real one. I was surprised and then embarrassed; it was like encountering someone in front of whom I’d once misbehaved. Meeting eyes with coat hangers, slickers, windbreakers, and mufflers, I was unsure of what to do. The coat was bluer than I remembered. There was the simultaneous impulse to try it on and to close the door. I kept standing there looking in. Suddenly I could tell that Susi had never worn it.

  The Christmas after Susi died, we were in Cambridge, visiting my grandparents, when deep in the middle of the night the telephone rang. It rang and rang until someone answered it. Then my mother was at my bedside, telling me to come downstairs. There was tension on her face. When I reached the first floor, I saw my grandparents standing near the telephone with sweaters over their pajamas, looking concerned, which made them also look very old. “Let him talk to Nicky,” my grandfather told my mother, and I was handed the phone. I put it to my ear and heard screaming. It took a moment for me to recognize my father. Over and over he was ranting “I want to see more of my children.” Terror shot through me. It was unbearable to visit him as often as I did and now I would have to go more often. Nobody ever said no to him. “Hi, Dad,” I said. I don’t remember what we talked about, just the howling voice, the bellowing demands. It was peculiar to me at times like that how he could seem both all-powerful and persecuted.

  Even though I was going to a new school, in the late afternoon I still came to the Worthington Hooker schoolyard to throw a ball against the wall, get up a baseball game if enough players for one could be found. Lately this was more of a challenge. On the “play machine” jungle gym, kids huddled together, dragging on cigarettes, burning their initials into the wooden surfaces with lighters. Sometimes the play machine would be empty and plumes of sweet, sapid smoke arose from the hidden cantonment of the back porch. Most of the kids out on the back porch didn’t play much baseball anymore, and the ballplayers tended to keep out in the open until, one day, a freckled kid who was an excellent infielder suddenly announced that he wanted to get stoned. Nobody could believe it, least of all the back porch regulars, who, you could tell, saw this conversion almost as a validation. They led him off for his first time with great ceremony, and something behind my ribs gave way and a hole opened up in me as I watched him going back there to light up.

  A procession of hard new faces was gathering at the schoolyard in the evening, kids called Dino and Loot and Burn, all of them drawn to this sudden zone of disrepute. Some of them were toughs from the Saint Francis home for children with behavioral problems, others were up to no good from down by the highway, and several of them lived in the mansions of Livingston Street, including a pale, Luciferian figure who wore a long trench coat and had a lidded, untrustworthy way of looking people over that made me think of dirty work. Word had it he kept getting kicked out of the private schools his parents sent him off to every September. To amuse themselves, they all played with firecrackers. The most common firecrackers were the candy striped salutes that could blow off a finger, kids said. When the whole pack was lit at once, it sounded the way the background noises in news reports from Vietnam used to on the radio. More powerful than salutes was an M-80, a genuine explosive; you could hear them mortar-thudding deep into the night. Our neighborhood had become a force field of gunpowder and broken glass. On trash collection nights, no garbage can was safe. Paper bags and money were changing hands regularly in the schoolyard, and police cars began cruising by.

  One day I came upon a group of the tougher kids having a football game on the schoolyard pavement. It took a moment to register that they were playing tackle football, smashing one another into the asphalt at full speed. They made primal noises, roaring and grunting and snarling, and their eyes had the fog of hot-shower-heated glass as they hurled themselves into the line, causing collisions that were so violent it was quickly apparent that they had no interest in scoring, they just wanted pain. None of them took any notice of me. Finally I understood that they were all high out of their minds.

  Those kids rarely spoke to me, but there was the day one of them said, “All you ever do is play baseball.” It sounded like an accusation, and, when I thought about it that night, I decided he was right: all I did was play baseball and read books, many of them about baseball, and I felt how limited I was, that I did not have adventures. Now when I hear his voice, what he is also saying is “You’re not like us,” and it was true, I was no longer part of the neighborhood. There I was privileged, the kid going to a private school—where I felt different because my family had less than most of my classmates. My position felt perpetually out of step; I didn’t exactly fit in anywhere. Even after schoolyard curfews were established, a Block Watch created, and things calmed down almost as quickly as they’d flared into disorder, I rarely went there anymore. The grandeur of it was gone.

  Everything was changing except for me. The telephone would ring and I’d answer it to hear someone on the line greeting me, “Hello, ma’am!”

  “Sir!” I’d protest. “I’m sir!” Sometimes, especially when they had called with something to sell, I’d get an apology: “Sir! Of course. So sorry, sir.” But as the conversation resumed, I trilled at such an acute frequency that a moment later they’d forget and I’d be “ma’am” again. It wasn’t a stranger’s fault that my voice wouldn’t break, that I was “Little Nicky,” a high school freshman with long, skinny arms attached to a torso smooth and narrow as a windshield wiper. When I turned fifteen that November, my mother hired a plumber to install a showerhead above the tub in our bathroom, explaining that “an active man needs to take showers,” and I was both flattered and confused to be now considered a man, since nothing about me had changed to suggest to me that I was anything more than what I had always been.

  There seemed to be so many different ways to be a man. Men camped, they walked their dogs, they tied knots, they built fires, they fixed toasters in their workshops and bent over car engines in the driveway. Men went hunting and trapping, received goodbye kisses and left on business trips. Men knew about the night; in books that was when they visited pool halls and bars, gave one another nicknames, talked politics, and “chased women”—which I imagined as a ritual game of tag. I had no idea about any of these things. Fuse boxes were a particular mystery to me—something about the shiny and intricate way they looked, what they seemed to promise. I didn’t understand how to knot a necktie or carve. I wanted to test my skills, my courage. But who would guide me, prepare me for all that? It occurred to me that I was gettin
g only half the data in life I was supposed to have. All these questions and doubtful concepts coalesced into my idea of what it meant to have a father at home. Then, many years later, when, in a magazine story, I read the clause “Dadly noises arose from the stair” I realized that I still had no idea how those would sound.

  In a world filled with truths regarding things I knew nothing about, like topo-maps and oil pans and springer spaniels, I was always alert, tried to take initiative. At the drugstore on Orange Street I bought several bottles of English Leather male cologne and lined them up along my dresser top. I never wore any of it. I went and stood outside Archie Moore’s, the bar on our street, and looked in at the men perched on stools, imagining them all talking in a gruff, guylike way, off-loading their distant, heavy memories. I climbed up to the attic and watched beside Mr. Sullivan as he refinished a piece of furniture, too held back to ask for instruction, just hoping the knack of it would sink in. When I heard someone describe a dead fish handshake, I firmly grasped the point. Soon somebody told me with approval that I had “a good strong grip,” and I thought, the eye seeks what the eye requires.

  New Haven in March was a dreary wind in your face, the gutters ponding with slushy water, dirty snow at the edges of lawns, precisely the conditions that had bred the baseball tradition of spring training in Florida. Spring training was the baseball time of possibility, the season of augur and optimism when even the difficulties, something called visa trouble, were nothing that a little front office pettifogging couldn’t solve. In spring Tommie Aaron might become his brother Henry, losses were meaningless, unheralded youth made its name, and sportswriters, their typewriters sanguine in the tenor of things, dispatched soft, breezy notices that might—and did—introduce the week’s promising rookie like this: “He embodies all that’s special about the National Pastime and the American spirit.” (Three weeks later that rookie would be sent down to the minors.)