The Crowd Sounds Happy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  One night I had a dream in which all of the Red Sox players were spread along the foul line at Fenway Park and we fans were permitted to line up in front of one of them for an autograph. Most of the fans chose the famous players, with thousands of people waiting to get a signature from Carl Yastrzemski or Carlton Fisk. I chose a reserve player positioned way out in right field, and because nobody else stood in front of him, there was time for him to talk to me. The dream was so vivid that I thought about it often. I wanted something more personal from the players, something absolute.

  I scarcely knew the Red Sox at all. The faint silhouettes limned by Ned Martin meant that beyond their play, they were blank to me, had no tangible inner qualities. That situation had advantages. There was nothing to stop me from filling them in myself, seeing them with the same mysteriously resilient clarity of perception in which in my mind I saw places I’d heard about but had never been to, images that, once formed, I retained for years, such as my Minnesota: dark green and hoar-frosted with a lot of cabinlike structures surrounded by fir trees. In my imagination the ballplayers were strong and friendly and kind and benevolent and much given to easy laughter, and I interacted with them, by which I mean that I half thought I could bring them into my room and learn from these men how to live by listening to their games. Because they were so skilled at baseball, I had the idea that the Red Sox knew all the important things, had mastered life, had secrets to tell me about existence that nobody else could. That I was close to them, in turn, made it easier for me to disclose to the Red Sox the emotions that in the rest of my life were not easily expressed. To me, in a small apartment I lived in with women, the Red Sox became the men in my house. There was a game every day, and that schedule created a mutual constancy of commitment. I did not feel fully alive until I had gone off to be with them and hear whatever story they had for me that night. There on my knees, I poured myself out to them, loving them as though they were one with me. When it was time to be under the covers, I set the “sleep” switch on thirty minutes and allowed these Red Sox players to be, with a little help from Ned Martin, the ones putting me to bed every night—the present but nonexistent men I wanted around me to make up for the absent but existing father whom I no longer wanted at all, except in ways that he could not be.

  I shared the Red Sox with nobody, not even my grandfather. That they were his team had drawn me to the Red Sox, but I still rarely visited him, and the Gerschenkrons did not make long-distance telephone calls. The truth is that I knew him from a remove similar to the way I knew the Red Sox, and because those had always been the terms, I accepted them without question. That, and the fact that my grandfather lived in another city, made it easy to idealize him. It was in some ways enough that he was up there in Massachusetts with the Red Sox, all of them watching over me from afar, present always in my imagination.

  Only once did I visit my grandfather on my own. One spring weekend the year I was fifteen, I took a train to Boston and I remember the excitement of coming out of the subway at the Harvard Square stop, the sidewalks full of college students, the streets clogged with honking vehicles tagged with red and white license plates, the pace of my walk hurrying into a run as at last I neared the house, the sight of him opening the door to greet only me, the wide welcoming smile under the thick crest of gray hair and glasses that pressed against my cheek as he drew me into an embrace. Up in my room there was a pair of royal blue Adidas sport socks waiting for me on the pillow. I visited for two or three days during which there was no discussion of the Red Sox. Instead he talked with me about Tolstoy and my schoolwork, took me to a cocktail party where I watched his colleagues flock to him with an enthusiasm that didn’t surprise me because it matched my own.

  The next fall I was visiting a school friend on the October day my grandfather died. The news seemed impossible, all out of rhythm from the new, more reciprocal friendship we had just begun. I remember, in the starkness of the moment, everything rushing around me, the feeling of trying to focus, hearing a loud ringing in my ears that lasted until I wept. I wept and wept until my mother looked at me and said in reproach, “You didn’t cry at all when Susi died.”

  Most distressed was my grandmother, who could not live without him, and died herself within short months, though not before being flimflammed out of thousands of dollars by a young confidence man she had hired to help her with household tasks. To see what the loss of my grandfather did to her, the listless despair that she wore ever after like a scarf, it was impossible not to believe that a person could die of grief. For my mother, it had been a merciless procession of loss. She now had no husband, no sister, no father, no mother—no background. There was only Sally and me.

  That summer of 1978, the year my grandfather died, the year after Susi died, was the apogee of my fandom. I was becoming aware of how summer was supposed to be for teenagers, the hot, fun, sweet, endless August days they sang about on the radio. But I didn’t know any night moves, had never been under a boardwalk. Instead, in my room, I lay sweating beneath the sheet, motionless, in a thrall, as on my radio the Red Sox won night after night.

  This was by far the best Red Sox team I had followed. By the middle of July they led the Yankees by fourteen and a half games, the fleet of Boston sluggers, Fisk, Scott, Hobson, Evans, Lynn, Yastrzemski, and especially Jim Rice, bludgeoning the opposition with Precambrian brutality.

  Then, as the first day of school approached, the Red Sox began to founder. Such an enormous lead vanishing felt like seeing a glass bottle full of juice falling from a table to the stone floor. You could watch it all happening there, so slowly and in no time at all. There were injuries to several players and terrible pitching, but what in particular ate at me was the deficient fielding, so many errors that, if somebody had told me that the Fenway Park clubhouse was infested with leather-eating moths, I would have believed it, would have demanded to know why somebody hadn’t hurried out to buy cedar. I was in nightly genuflection with my radio, encouraging, imploring, coercing, scolding, reproaching, and cursing as the Yankees overtook them. Anybody who read about baseball knew that nothing was so predictable in life as Yankee victories, and that was what was most hard to take, the inevitability. How I detested the Yankees for their smugness, their grandiosity, their chesty, insatiable greed, the way they salted Octobers with opportunism. The very existence of the Yankees and their monochrome flow of victories jeered and ridiculed me—as though the Red Sox defeat was also my own.

  Just as suddenly, the Red Sox revived. There were days when I hadn’t listened to the broadcast and felt the muscles in my arms straining with exertion as I stood by the radio awaiting a result from Boston and from New York. When the news was good I never felt so happy as relieved, and the news was good just enough times that on the final day of the season, Boston was behind by only one game. And then miraculously the season ended with the two teams tied as Luis Tiant shut out Toronto while Rick Waits of bottom-feeding Cleveland was outpitching New York’s Catfish Hunter. After all the months of baseball, there was to be a playoff the next day, October 2, at Fenway Park, to decide who would qualify for the postseason. One game, winner-take-all. That the Red Sox had been so down and then recovered their spirit made me forgive them all the squandered days of August, made me anticipate the playoff with an incalescent throbbing of joy that tingled because almost instantly it was cut with pessimism and doubt.

  It was an endless Monday morning of school, and then I had soccer practice. When finally we were released, I came running into the athletic building and down the concrete corridor, which was slippery in cleats, skidding into the office where Mr. Porter, the athletic director, had for the day installed a black and white television. I had never seen a television at school and that Mr. Porter had gone to the trouble of hauling one in, setting it up, manipulating the rabbit ear antennas into credible reception underscored what a day of unusual moment it was.

  The office couch, chairs, and floor space were crowded with coaches and sweaty boys and girls s
taring at a black and white screen that looked bleached, so bright was the afternoon sun in Boston. The Red Sox were winning 1–0 in the sixth inning when I found a wall space to lean against near the doorway, and now the lead improved to 2–0 as Jim Rice singled in a run. I remember standing there, rigid with attention, my concentration so instantly focused that it was as though I were alone in the room filled with others, others who were all Yankee fans, for New Haven was a Yankee town then, and mine a Yankee school. I recall it so well, for after all the months of hearing them, there the Red Sox were in the flesh—and they were winning.

  With two outs in the seventh inning and two Yankee base runners, the Yankee shortstop, Bucky Dent, was up. Catcher Fisk had been running back and forth from the plate to the mound to counsel our pitcher, Mike Torrez, through this crisis, and I think he visited again for another delivery of pep as they went to work on Dent. There were two strikes before Dent lofted a pop fly that seemed soft, tender, and vulnerable even after it plopped like a fallen tightrope walker into the net just above the massive wall in left field. It was to become a famously dispiriting home run, but I experienced it first as something absurd. That counted? A moment later the Yankees scored a fourth run and then, in the eighth inning, Reggie Jackson hit another home run to make it 5–2 New York. A fatal melancholy settled over me. Mr. Porter had periodically adjusted the rabbit ears as we watched, and here he did so again, or at least I remember it that way, and I remember the bright green of the floor tiles and also the sudden pungent odor of electric burning.

  The Red Sox scored twice in the eighth. In the last of the ninth, the score 5–4, Burleson walked and second baseman Remy lined a hit to right. On the television, the screen briefly went a monochrome white as the camera searched for the ball. We couldn’t tell what was happening and then it was clear that right fielder Piniella couldn’t either. Blinded by the sun, his body tensed with the danger of an invisible hard object approaching with surface-to-air valence that might be taking it anywhere until, by pure chance, the ball came out of the sky right next to him. Piniella held out his palm and the rent money found it. Next, Rice hit a mighty but just barely insufficient sacrifice fly so that Burleson was at third base, Remy still at first, as Yastrzemski came up with two outs. When you are a child, a ballplayer in his late thirties seems incredibly old, and the memory of Yastrzemski’s final swing remains as indelible an insight into mortality as the sight of my aged grandfather shuffling on his way to bed. Pitcher Rich Gossage’s fastball came vibrating toward the player whose name my grandfather had loved to say, Yastrzemski’s torso twisted with the futile effort of his swing, an agony of burdened recognition blighting his face as this pop fly did what they usually do.

  I felt boned like a fish. The others in the office were celebrating, and yet as I walked out into the cement hallway, I knew that they were also gaping at my misfortune. My hopes, how much I cared, were exposed for all to see. It was embarrassing to feel so humiliated in front of everyone, and to be made foolish by baseball. The end was so precipitate, like a lamp clicking off. Suddenly there was no more Red Sox, and I was back on my own without them. I don’t remember anything else except an old inadequacy—and the new sense that the inadequacy of the Red Sox exactly matched my own.

  That game was the moment that codified a public awareness of a titillating historical baseball truth, for suddenly everyone seemed to know that the Red Sox had not won the World Series in seventy years, since 1918. Further, throughout that long malaise there was now a litany of expressive Red Sox failures to think back upon, in particular the near-misses of 1946, 1948, 1967, 1975, and now 1978, and here the name Torrez was added to the corresponding Foxeian catalogue of martyrs: Pesky, Galehouse, Lonborg, and Burton. My Red Sox had become the iconic losers, the team that couldn’t win.

  That I had unconditionally given myself over for life to a doomed pursuit was not news to me. Long before anybody talked about all the lamentable decades, just by following the Red Sox you could feel how imperiled they were. That I was asking for happiness and diversion from such a fouled-up institution made no sense to me then. But this latest garish loss only deepened my love for the team, and, as the winter of 1979 began, my first winter without my grandfather, I felt oddly consoled by their pursuit of failure. Could I have intuited that my full-hearted, yet distant grandfather would enjoy a baseball association appropriate to the lines of his own history of wandering and loss? Not likely. But I had sensed that they conformed to something deeper in him than mere habitual attachment, and that his approach to being a baseball fan had been passed on to me. There was a madness to the Red Sox, to be sure, yet they were also healthy and unthreatening, not crazy at all, but irresistibly forsaken—like the Chekhov plays I had begun to read where the impending sorrow was tolerable because it was related with such beautiful ennui. It had been a horrible year, and I was grateful to the Red Sox for taking me out of myself, giving me something to anticipate, for not being too happy themselves.

  In each ensuing year of high school, the Red Sox fielded promising teams that lost in the end, and yet I don’t think I ever truly felt ashamed of them. I was frustrated by their fuddled, fizzling breakdowns, just as I often was frustrated by my life, in which everybody close to me seemed either sick or dying or tormented with grief, and that commonality of experience made the wistful pleasures the Red Sox provided accessible to me. At sixteen I had come to believe that nothing worthwhile comes without great suffering; there was deeper meaning for me in catastrophes. It was because of the Red Sox that I began to understand about people and personal history, that while everyone wants a radiant history he can be proud of, he also wishes for an apposite past that he can imagine replicating his own true experience. That I now had a group of men to embrace in my life whose cause was noble, interesting, vital, and yet weighted by the long drag of failure made it easier to go forward. As a child, if your life story contains sordid elements, you believe yourself to be unique. It’s a relief to discover that something you admire without reservation is also flawed. Because they were so conspicuously imperfect, the Red Sox were always there for me.

  CHAPTER TEN

  My City in Ruin

  I grew up between two great cities in the seaboard purlieu of a waning port town, its drowsy streets laid out by Puritans below now crumbling twin monoliths of red basalt, one to the east, one to the west, my daily transits taking me past the crested gates of the eminent university and those chained outside the closed factories, I neither of the university nor of the town, the son of divorced parents with different faiths, a scholarship student at a school of privilege, my address the first floor of a two-family house where I lived juxtaposed in narrow rooms by two strong women, in the middle of things and completely out of it. As I went through the last grades of high school, more than ever I hoped people would think of me as an upstanding young man, and I strove to be obedient and well-mannered, following rules, telling the truth, trying to adapt to what others valued, but because different people valued different things, it was hard to keep up with them all, and I expended such effort in this pursuit, that wherever I went during my middle-teenaged years, I felt like an imposter, and in my shame I acted like one.

  I did not have a driver’s license, and, because my school was miles across the city, at the end of the day I became reliant upon others for rides home, schoolmates or their parents who had never seen where I lived, who required directions from me. Approaching from the west, there were a number of possible paths to numbers 290/292 Willow Street with its bruised face of chipping gray paint, clapboards chewy under the tar-shingled roof from the drip-drip of hundreds of vernal rains, the front yard a brief dusty scrabble of rhododendron, three tired front steps climbing past a splintered banister to parallel doors calipered so close together that at first ours, 292, seemed superfluous, a fistula, the gibbous ceiling porch light kept in darkness through the blackest January evenings because the on switch tracked to our power bill. I never chose the direct route. Instead, I wound my
deliverer through a sequence of rights and lefts designed to put my surroundings to the most picturesque effect, avoiding the cadaverous lowland districts east of Orange Street, avoiding the prosaic rumble of Orange as well, if I could help it, setting instead a more scenic compass north along broad, stately Whitney Avenue, until a right turn, not down Willow, but before, at handsome Edwards Street or shady Lawrence Street, there to the Livingston Street intersection and then left onto that grand and majestic thoroughfare honoring in name an heiress, which I allowed to reflect grandly upon me right up to Livingston’s corner with Willow, where I hopped out before there was any question of the right turn signal, insisting “I live only a couple of houses down and it’ll save you going all the way around the block.” Some days I guided a course that cruised along the higher ground of Prospect Street, and then made a right turn down Canner Street, where the car windows produced a glorious sweep of rambling Victorian and Queen Anne houses on either side and also out along the leafy perpendicular vistas of Loomis Place, St. Ronan, Autumn, and Everit streets, an enfilade of regal dwellings lasting right through to the corner of Canner and Livingston, where I alighted, over a block from humble 292. “It’s no problem from here,” I’d call, relieving an imposition no driver ever gave signs of feeling. “Thanks for the ride.” Often there were other passengers to drop off, and since my destination seemed inevitably to lie farthest afield, it made small sense that I should be keen to be helpful, more than glad to be deposited along the near, Canner Street end of Everit Street, or the very top of Willow Street, at Whitney Avenue, even in winter, after sundown. And, indeed, with these abbreviating gestures nobody seemed to think me guilty of anything more than consideration. It was late, everyone was hungry for supper, eager to be home, and if Mrs. Gifford or Mrs. Lovejoy did wonder later about a boy so willing to walk long blocks to save them short seconds, something told them that I was probably more comfortable being left in the dark.