The Crowd Sounds Happy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Next to Love

  It was the end of a mild Tuesday in the middle of May. All through the morning and afternoon at school I had been contemplating doing something that would require such strong purpose I tried to make myself unaware that anything was on my mind. I attended my eleventh grade classes and a baseball practice, went through my daily routines. Afterward, hurrying back across town for a new baby-sitting job on Linden Street, I stopped off at home. Coming through the living room, I put my books down on my desk and then I stood there in the quiet room with a blue rug on the floor. Whenever that day comes into my memory, the rug spreads aqueous and still, and I am looking down upon it from high, high above. I opened the door, walked out of the room, and found my mother. I heard myself say to her that I was thinking about inviting a senior named Annette Hamburger to the school prom. As I spoke, some throttle in my chest opened up and through the window beyond the curtain rods, clouds began accelerating across the sky in rapid formation. I had never before asked a girl on a date, had never asked one to dance. It was to be everything all at once. I felt the possibility of becoming someone else, and as I resisted the telephone, there was an inevitability both intolerable and electric.

  Annette and I had attended the same school for five years, during which what I knew of her blurred indistinct from what I knew of her group of friends, a circle of viola players and cross-country runners and debaters, most of them studious, many named Sue. Our paths had seldom crossed because they were all a year older, such a vast interval in the early grades of high school. Yet there had been a long chat about high school cliques with one on a lunch line, a tradition of greeting another by his unusual middle name (Southerton), so that without much effort I now took for granted a shared outlook. For that morning, Annette and I had fallen into a conversation. She laughed as she stood there in Levi’s, a Shetland sweater, and sneakers telling me how foolish I was, couldn’t I see? What fun to be teased! How wonderful to be the object of sly little quips—quips made by someone with flashing dark eyes and a laugh like a clear chime. On what thickly misted longitudes had I been dwelling not to have noticed her before? She would graduate in short weeks and become a Yale student. I had nearly missed her.

  My mother was taking care not to look too overjoyed as she told me that inviting Annette Hamburger to the prom was a good idea, but she said “good idea” with such conviction that for an instant it crossed my mind that this had been her idea, that I was acting at my mother’s suggestion, that I was doing it for her. I had known she would approve. Just as the minister’s children can tell who in the congregation their parent is most pleased to have knocking at the rectory door, high school teachers’ kids grow up aware of how their mother sees the faces in her classroom. My mother always contended about her many students that, “I love all of them equally,” and while nobody ever doubted she was fair and impartial and really did care about every one of them, it seemed impossible to me that someone who had such strong feelings for the characters in the books she taught wouldn’t also have a soft spot for real people who had the qualities of Horatio, Prospero, Isabel Archer, Emma Woodhouse, and Jo of the dust pile at Tom-all-alone’s. In rare instances she had shown her hand. Two of them were Annette’s clever older twin brothers—“that Philip Hamburger” and “that Jeffrey Hamburger,” who sometimes also became “those adorable Hamburger boys!” Another was “that Annette Hamburger.”

  I went back to my room and busied myself. Time went by. My mother called, “Sally and I are going out!” A moment passed. I heard her again: “Nicky, we’re leaving now and you’ll have the house to yourself!” Another pause, and then a singsong, “Before we get back I want you to have called her!” Finally I heard, “Faint heart never won fair lady!” and at last the heavy echo of the front door meeting its frame, followed by the slow hydraulic release of the storm door before it too bumped shut. In the sudden silence I imagined that people must see my mother as the parent of a child who was falling behind in life.

  I went into the dining area, looked up the number, and stared at the telephone on the wall. A band of something was restricting my chest. Everything was slowing down and speeding up again. Maybe Annette was already going to the prom with somebody else. Who was I to be proposing this? I could just leave now. But it was a chance I felt doomed to take. I lifted the receiver off the hook and dialed the number. In recent weeks, my voice had begun without warning to make alarming, pitched treble sounds, like a radio veering erratically between frequencies. I feared an episode. A grown-up answered and I asked if I might please speak to Annette. Who was calling? I confessed. I heard “Netty, it’s for you,” and then at the sound of my name being announced, sensations described so frequently in books—weak knees, a roaring in the ears, shortness of breath—achieved sudden purchase. Annette came onto the phone, we greeted one another, and she sounded just as friendly and poised as she had in the morning. I went into a deep body bend. From somewhere down near the blue dining room floor I invited her. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “but that will mean I’ll need another dress and we just went through so much buying one for graduation.” That there might be practical impediments had never occurred to me. I had not known that a new dress would be necessary. Then she said, “I’ll have to ask my mother.” I thought she would go and speak with her mother right then, but she meant that she would need to call me back. I explained that I would be baby-sitting and gave her the number where she could reach me.

  On my way out of the house there was an elation to have done it and also the anxiety of now being in the balance. It was dusk. I remember the tree branches, how in the fading light they seemed sharpened with heft and texture, somehow more present against the air than usual. As I walked, I imagined a discussion of fashion beginning in the Hamburger house, a conversation involving a yellow silk ball gown, sleeveless, with a big yellow bow at the rear waist, saw Annette crouched at her mother’s feet like Maroosia from Old Peter’s Russian Tales pleading with her grandfather for another story. My mother usually said no at first to unexpected requests. Days later she might come around.

  The father of the couple whose child I was baby-sitting was a young Yale English professor. I remember nothing about the family or the home except, after the child’s bedtime, too restless to study, getting up and beginning to roam along the many handsome bookcases where The Age of Johnson caught my eye. I could think of no Johnson of such consequence. Surely not Andrew who took over for Lincoln and was soon all but removed from office in disgrace. I took the book down and began reading about Samuel Johnson, who by himself had written the first comprehensive English dictionary, authored essays and poems, and was eighteenth-century London’s most revered figure, the man who knew the most—something to be in what was described as a palimpsest of art and history and pamphlets and conversation. I read further. Johnson was hideous to look at, pockmarked, ursine, squalid in his grooming habits—and beloved because he was so human. His own flaws made his understanding of the flaws of others more penetrating. He had the strength to look at the world and see it as it was, and the compassion to feel sympathy for wayward and undone people. In that moment, it seemed to me that I had discovered not only the most interesting man ever to have lived, but that there was a whole refulgent world out there waiting. The telephone rang. Her mother had agreed to a dress. We could go to the prom. But we didn’t know one another very well, Annette continued. So in the interim we should do things together. We agreed to Saturday evening. My good fortune seemed endless.

  When I came home, my mother had gone to bed, so to get to my room I had to walk sideways through the tight channel between the coffee table and the pullout where she lay on her back under a green, blue, and white quilt. If Sally or I was out at night, my mother never slept soundly until we came home, and now, though I tiptoed, she stirred. “Did you call her?” she asked drowsily. She was propped on her pillow, looking at me. I told my mother what had happened. She closed her eyes, smiled, and said, “There! Oh, t
hat’s wonderful, honey.” Then she congratulated me, told me how much she liked Annette, that “Annette is a lady,” and “a person out of Jane Austen,” and I went on to bed completely glad.

  The next morning I awoke to air that was radiant and warm. Filled with vigor, I got into the car to go to school and looking out the window as we passed across town, I found myself absorbing far more than I usually did of the natural surroundings I went by every day, the damp bark of an oak on somebody’s Westville lawn, the crenate shapes of leaves, the painted-egg-blue wash of the sky, the last sprays of the forsythia, and the willow and dogwood osiers bending in a pinkish blaze along the West River gullies down in Edgewood Park. All my life since, when I have thought of spring colors, I have reclaimed the shades of that day, perhaps because of the way they seemed to me at that instant to reveal both what they had been and what they were about to be, the tentative yellows, watchets, and creamy pinks of April steadily gaining brilliance until now the once diluted hues had reached the verge of luster.

  For much of the morning I didn’t see Annette and was beginning to wonder if she was absent from school, when there, across the crowded student lounge, I caught sight of her brightly colored skirt glinting through the throng like a shard of glass catching the sunlight. Tense with dishevelment, I turned away before our eyes could meet. Something about the skirt made me uneasy. I had been expecting the usual Levi’s. Had she considered me as she put it on?

  Late in the morning, I spotted Annette sitting by herself out on one of the benches along the patio between the two main classroom buildings. The baseball team had a game at another school that day, and I was soon due to board the team bus. It was ridiculous to have avoided her for so long. I went out onto the patio. The bench was a large solid block of unpainted wood stamped “Gift of the Class of 1976,” and I looked mostly at the stiff, weather-beaten surface as we made it through the conversation. She did not tease me this time, I did not laugh, and neither did she.

  On the bus, I told one of my teammates that I was going to the prom. The news went down the aisle, and soon a couple of them began to make fun of Annette’s name, calling her Annette Cheese-burger and Annette Funicello. A senior named Sully interrupted them. “No, no,” he said. “She’s quiet, but she’s really pretty and nice. Nicky, that’s great. You’re lucky.” It was as though she were my discovery. As the conversation turned to other things, I expanded in my seat with gratitude.

  I called Annette to make plans for Saturday night. When she suggested a student performance of something I didn’t catch down at Yale followed by pizza, I immediately agreed. When she learned that I did not drive, I heard her pause for an instant before saying she would see if she could borrow the family car. She could.

  On Saturday, I confronted the problem of what to wear. How did people dress to go on dates? I had the idea that I must present myself differently, that I should put on clothes that reflected the occasion. I didn’t want to involve my mother anymore, but the need was urgent enough that I compromised, mentioning in an asking way “I was thinking about wearing good pants.” My mother was in the middle of a chore. She said, “Just choose something that makes you feel comfortable.” I went back to my room and surveyed my wardrobe. My brown sweater seemed to call out to me.

  Right on time I heard a car horn. “Have fun and be a gentleman,” my mother said as I headed for the door. In front of our house was a large, dark green, American-built station wagon. It looked like a big, haunchy animal that wasn’t sure about how it felt about my coming near it. I climbed into the passenger seat. We continued down Willow, turned right at Orange. Even as we chatted, I was too shy to look at her and instead gazed intently out the window where what I saw brought over me again the protean tension of being two people—me as I knew myself to have always been and this reinvented person I had just become, a boy in a car with a girl. As I kept lurching back and forth between versions, through the window all the familiar New Haven places had somehow become monuments of a past life—the barber shop where, while waiting for my first haircut, I opened a comic book and read a Charles Atlas advertisement featuring a weakling getting sand kicked on him at the beach; the law firm that had once been the meat and produce shop owned by stern old Paul Baer with a pencil behind his ear; the shabby porticoes where now rested former living-room couches; the firehouse with its pumpers and hook and ladder painted white; the dentist’s office where I always refused Novocain because afterward you weren’t allowed to eat for hours until it wore off; the museum with its dinosaurs; the Lawn Club driveway; an attic apartment window near the Yale School of Music where I had once taken cello lessons. My heart was going out to all of them, to life itself, life so grand, so full of slow-revealing centripetal bliss. After a right on Grove Street, we were parking near the cemetery. In line at the ticket window, I saw money in Annette’s hand. The sky darkened. “I’ll pay,” I said quickly. “No,” she told me. I tried to insist. It was my role. “No,” she said again, and there was firm purpose to the way she reached forward and put enough money for her half in front of the ticket seller. As I replaced the bills for her ticket back in my wallet, I felt that we had abandoned the world of protocol, and I did not understand.

  The performance was a medley of songs by Cole Porter and other professional songwriters who had gone to Yale. In my memory, the program cover had on it an illustration of a sophisticated man and a woman dancing close, and all of the songs sung that night were about love.

  Afterward, we drove east toward Wooster Square, the old Italian section of the city where there were New Haven’s famous Neapolitan pizzerias, Sally’s and Pepe’s. Annette said that which of the two restaurants you preferred defined you as a person. She’d heard that Frank Sinatra favored Sally’s. Hers, she said, was a Pepe’s family. In that instant I too wanted such affiliations. I had never been to Sally’s and only once to Pepe’s. The Wooster Square streets were lined with low buildings, many of them emblazoned with old neon. We parked, then waited in line for a long time. At last we were given a booth, ordered an extra large, and when it came, enormous and oblong on a dented tin tray, we were so hungry we both burned our mouths on the molten puddles of sweet tomato and cheese. We ate at great speed and had no trouble finishing all of it.

  I said, “You’re not going to let me pay for the pizza, are you?” and admitting she wasn’t, she smiled, and I smiled too. We walked back to the green station wagon, got in, and Annette began to talk. “I don’t think I can go to the prom with you,” she said. The shame was immediate and crushing, as though a crate had dropped from a gantry crane onto my chest. I stared at the dashboard. Tuesday it had been yes. Now four days later it was no. What had I done wrong? What ugly quality had slipped out and revealed itself for her to see in me? I looked through the window to my right. The parking lot was blurred and shadowy. Traces of tangerine light glowed from a distant and flagging street lamp. All at once I was furious. I had never heard of someone rescinding an acceptance. Where were the rules? There should be rules. Otherwise, what was the point of taking the trouble to ask? I wanted to climb out of that car, get away from the catastrophe. But I had promised to be a gentleman, and she was still talking: “I’d like to keep doing things with you, but if you want to go to the prom you should ask another person. I’m afraid that I’m just really not a polyester dress and corsage sort of girl.” Now I aspired to see it her way, to be as she was, not to be a boy who went to proms. “I know,” I said, still looking straight at the dashboard. I wanted to tell her I was like her, to tell her about yellow silk. Instead I said, “Fanning goes to the prom.” Fanning was a tall, blond, handsome, self-assured student government leader, and now, for me, because I was none of those things, Fanning was also a prom king. Sitting there, I saw generations of Fanning men in their black velvet britches and gold doublets at the lead of dance lines, confident and expressive in their easy mastery of polkas, waltzes, jigs, and quadrilles. When Jim Burden described dancing with Ántonia, the steps to a new outlook seemed so simp
le. But here, finally in the reality, I did not know how to dance—had no idea what dances they did at proms, what else they did besides dance. My sweater felt hot. “You wore that brown sweater a lot,” Annette would tell me years later. “You hadn’t filled out yet. You were a shrimpy little uncombed fellow.” I said to Annette, “It’s okay.” It was not okay. Why had I told the baseball team? I hated being me even though I did not want to be anybody else. She drove me home.