The Crowd Sounds Happy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  At that point in my life, I was drawn to things all the time for good reasons that I rarely recognized. For my birthday I requested the book about Samuel Johnson I’d seen while baby-sitting and was presented with something better—a copy of Walter Jackson Bate’s recent biography. I opened it up and discovered that the saddest part of Johnson’s life, according to Bate, was how disappointed Johnson could be in himself—hostile to the point of inward laceration. An enormous man, all but the larger-than-life embodiment of the Age of Reason, Johnson brought himself to his knees with his diminishing self-doubts. Again and again he reviled himself for his weaknesses, his vanity, his sloth—was frantic to know and to improve himself. All the self-loathing eventually told; Johnson’s brain, the clearest of all brains, became clouded with despair. Bate described Johnson’s attempts to fend away insanity by reasoning himself out of it, and his lifelong need for the constant company of others to stave off his crippling distress. The fear of going mad was Johnson’s terrible secret, a horror so real in him, said Bate, that at age twenty, Johnson crossed briefly over the line. Falling to the floor he began weeping and calling for his understanding, begging God so ardently to make him sane again that a friend bent toward Johnson and closed his mouth. Thirty years later, the ordeal repeated itself. Each time Johnson fought back with a courage so moving in Bate’s description that even now, when I look back at it, I have to struggle not to weep. At the time, though, I read right over it, noticed instead how witty and brave and strong Johnson was.

  My baseball coach that spring was a young teacher with a weed patch of curls and skewed shirt collars named Doyle, who sometimes appeared as though he wished he were still one of us, especially when his mischievous face went wistful at the sight of senior girls or when he did things like pose himself for the yearbook reading the Monarch Notes for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Doyle seemed too recently our age and restless in his own life to be our mentor, but he’d turned down Yale to go to the University of Virginia on a baseball scholarship, and he knew hitting, knew the game, and could talk about it in ways that resonated for me. One day, early on, he described himself standing in right field at college knowing very few balls that mattered would come his way, but that there would probably be at least one, and how he spent the entire game out there hoping for his chance, planning not to waste it. That was just the way the former Dodger outfielder Pete Reiser described his thinking in that old book I’d read. When this sort of conjoining happened a few more times, it seemed to me that all my reading about the game was at last merging into my life. All at once I felt not just prepared for anything on a baseball field, but now capable of responding. “Hit it to me! Hit it to me!” was still what I whispered to myself out in the field, and I meant it as never before. In our first game, I rapped line drive after line drive directly at opposing fielders, after which the coach told me in front of the team, “You keep doing that, you’ll have a great season,” and from then on plenty of hits fell safe. On a day when I felt sick before our game, I remembered the story in a Willie Mays biography of a feverish Mays dragging himself to the ballpark and hitting his record four home runs, and then I hit one that day myself. In Sports Illustrated I’d read about Tim Foli, who once spent the night after a game in uniform at second base, using the bag as his pillow, and now after six years at the school, I was so glad to be batting third and turning double plays at shortstop that there were days when, at the end of a game or practice, I’d be standing out there in the bend of solid dirt between second and third bases and have to resist the impulse to stay right where I was, to curl myself on the ground, press my cheek to the peaceful, quiet loam and just rest, never leave the best place to be.

  A follower of our team was a sophomore with a low voice and high, undulating curves, a mermaid already a little bored with New Haven. From a distance there was nothing captivating about her, but as you moved closer and she kept her mouth closed so that the braces on her teeth didn’t show, she was better than captivating; her gaze was level, bold, and magnetic, and there was an unsettling confidence in the way that, after you had said something, she seemed to decide whether or not to laugh before she did. I became sport for her. The game we played was that we were newlyweds, and she used to ask me “What do you want for dinner, honey?” and to joke about our dessert to follow, about all the ways we could enjoy treats topped with whipped cream together, and I’d be keeping up until she’d look me in the eyes and drawl, “Darling, why won’t you ever just really kiss me?” She also liked to walk up to me during the school day, verbena-spiked in her wardrobe of pinks and reds, and ask “Are you hungry?” just to watch me get so flustered and worked up I’d have to scurry away.

  After a promising start, the school baseball team lost game after game by that telling margin of one run. Our camaraderie never quite prospered either. I wished that we could be achieving a significance, that I might finally be a member of a close-knit group resembling the old clubhouses and Gas House Gangs I’d read about, the photographs of early-century collegiate and town teams, the players, with their long moustaches and short-billed caps, locked in fraternal embrace as they calmly regarded the camera. I wondered if life really could match what was in books.

  One day in the school library, a chum of mine, a shambling, heavy-lidded, rubicund boy who’d embraced the cruel nickname of Vache (cow in French), began teasing me in the way he always teased me, calling me a “gap-toothed, walnut-shaped, square-headed, mongoloid, black sheep of a circus freak family,” going on in this way until he saw that suddenly it was no longer hilarious to me. He wanted me to play. I wouldn’t. A docile plaint came into his voice that made me wince because I hated his need. He lurched forward as if to shake me, make me revert, force me to be like old times, but in his awkwardness my coat was torn. He hadn’t meant any harm, and he knew I knew it, but I decided not to know it, and coldly to hold a grudge, because all at once I resented the responsibility of always being nice to everyone. He was wounded, never understood my sudden shift, and, much as I soon wanted to make up, that would have meant explaining, and I couldn’t explain. Instead, guiltily I worried that now with so many fashionable people being friendly to me, I had become a jerk. Was I the old story, a guy who frowns on the poor behavior of popular kids and yet wants to be them in spite himself? The freight of every spontaneity was always concern about what kind of a person I was turning into.

  As the season and high school neared its end, I began to surprise myself with how much I wanted it all to be over. I was tired of seeing everybody else’s father out there watching us play our games, weary of concealing my New Haven life from New York, and concealing New York from New Haven. When our team photograph was taken, the photographer shot one image for the yearbook and then a second photograph for team members to order as prints. Very few of us bought that photograph though, because one boy in the front row was on his feet to leave as the shutter clicked: I had ruined the picture.

  One day in the boys’ locker room, a kid named Mark gave me the sort of hard intramural punch in the shoulder I’d been absorbing from him and many others for four years. He was, in several ways, the epitome of the hopeful youth in the school’s motto: handsome, studious, popular, athletic, the pride of administrators who were now suffering a bit as, with his long years of upstanding service completed, Mark was letting go by spending most of his free periods with one of the school’s most enticing Tretorn wearers on his lap. The moment he punched me, I snapped. I grabbed him and threw him down to the ground between two rows of lockers, holding him there and screaming at him “Will you stop hitting me?” over and over as a crowd gathered. Here on the cement floor, I watched the event slow into a cinematic pan that took in the press of male faces, eager to see what would happen next, and then Mark, surprised and indignant, larger than me but unable to get me off with his one free arm, he struggling and struggling as I tried to figure out what to do now—did people really say “cry uncle”?—until finally he manipulated his fist around my hips and punched me sq
uare in the balls. I fell back as a low groan passed through the crowd, and from the ground I saw them all backing away. I felt their objurgation of me. Then from out in the hall, I could hear an excited voice passing along the news: “Nicky fought back!” Nobody at that school ever hit me again. I knew then that I had passed over some threshold, and I remember thinking with a flood of consciousness, Is that all there was?

  Mark and I had always been friends of a kind, and we went right on in our former way, as though nothing had happened, a phenomenon that made the expression “high school is hard for everyone” pass through my mind whenever I thought of him. That’s the way the end of that school was; I was participating at some up-close remove.

  Graduation approached with the question of whether my father would insist on attending, the worry that he would show up even if asked not to and make a scene where my mother worked. In the end, my grandmother stepped off the train from New York alone, which was only a partial relief since I knew how very much she had wanted him to be invited. She had told me that she considered it my obligation “as a son and a graduate to include your father.” I wanted to tell her that maybe it was my father who should have been worried about obligations, but, even behind his back, I felt he couldn’t take any criticism. After the graduation ceremony, my mother gave me a watch, and my grandmother treated everyone to a celebratory lunch at an Italian restaurant suggested by Big Steve. We passed between a small pair of sagging Ionic columns with worn volutes into a sky-lit room where opera music played as my grandmother let me know again how disappointed she was that I had traduced my father in this way. I lowered my head. Then, as if now that she’d extracted remorse her duty was done, her brusque tone changed and she told me to order anything I liked from the menu, and that she was proud of me. I had clams.

  That night, Big Steve hosted a party at his family’s beach home on the shore. Disentangled from the school at last, we all walked around wobbly and a little befuddled at the end of a long day of being told we were changed, feeling the way people do when they reach a milestone birthday and are asked how they feel so many times they begin to wonder how they should feel. The sophomore was there, and when she pointed out that I’d promised to kiss her by graduation night, I found myself following her along a path into a large shed and leaning against a rough wooden wall as we held each other and I bent toward lips for the first time. After a little bit I began to think about not wanting to stop, but needing to stop, and then finally stopping. In that calm, smoldering voice of hers she asked what was wrong. “Your braces are cutting up my tongue,” I confessed. Her eyes still only half open, she drawled, “Nobody else complained.”

  The mother of one of my old elementary school friends was out on the sidewalk near our house walking her fluffy white dog, and when I came by and said hello, she stopped me and asked, “You gonna go to Yale, Nicky?” I hadn’t seen her in a long time. When I was younger, while I was visiting her son, she used to ask me questions about my mother, why she never bought us snack foods, why we had no television, why I had to be inside at a certain time. I could tell that the purpose of those questions was to let me know that she thought my mother was too strict, that my mother was a frump, that she believed I should have more fun. Encouraged, I used to report back from the woman’s house to my mother what a good time I had watching television and eating ruffled potato chips, how “with it” the woman was. “Good, Nicky,” my mother would say icily. The woman didn’t like my mother and was unctuously friendly to her in a way that sought to emphasize her disdain, but, because my mother so plainly didn’t care what this woman thought about anything, the disdain wouldn’t hold and inevitably wavered into timidity—which used to frustrate me about the woman. I wanted her to stand up for potato chips. Now there was a resigned sound in the woman’s voice as she asked about my college plans. I told her that I had been admitted to Harvard. As I said this, I felt an expression falling across my face that I knew she would misinterpret as hubris, as evidence that I thought my mother’s methods had been proved correct in the end.

  But what was happening was that a Sunday had suddenly come back to me from my boyhood when my father had been in New Haven for a visit. Sally and I were with him in the backyard, where the woman could see us over the several fences from her yard to ours. The next thing I knew, she was joining us. She had never been in our backyard before and I had the feeling that she would not have come if my mother had been there. At the time, I hadn’t known about flirting, and had wondered why the woman was smiling so much at everything my father said, why she kept touching her freshly dressed and powdered face, and was putting such exaggerated care into her words and gestures—behaving so differently from the way she did when I came by to play with her son. My mother wore only lipstick.

  That day, my sister, about eight at the time, had on a pair of brand-new gum-soled tan suede shoes, and at a certain point Sally asked the woman if she liked the shoes. “They’re beautiful,” she said. The woman had never shown any interest in Sally. I was suddenly sure she had none now either, that everything she was saying was intended for my father. I looked at him. As the object of this attention, there was something about my father’s posture that made me think of zoo cats yawning and flexing. With a quick breath I realized I was seeing him as my mother’s man, and that maybe the woman was too. Soon enough they were discovering that they both had grown up on Long Island.

  Now, out on the sidewalk, I was hearing the woman hear Harvard as my father’s school, hearing her think that I was following in his footsteps. I did not want Harvard to be his school. When I’d sent off my application, I’d worried that they in Cambridge who, no doubt, still knew his secrets, might hold them against me, and I had regarded my acceptance as their judgment that they felt they were in for no future trouble with me, that I wasn’t any risk of becoming another him, that I was more like my grandfather. But here on the sidewalk I was seeing that others would regard my going to Harvard as evidence of how alike my father and I were. Because some part of me knew this was an irrational way to think, I became more upset, began to be afraid I was growing irrational, that I too would crack up in my dorm room, would rave at people, would give away everything I owned, even my beautiful brand-new high school graduation watch.

  For years now I’d known that my father would never fulfill my parents’ divorce settlement, would never pay for Sally’s and my college tuition, that he had no savings, that he would never help me with anything. My mother had been anticipating this as well. By sewing her own clothes, by forsaking pleasure, it turned out that she had managed to bank thousands of dollars for Sally and me. On her tiny salary it represented such a sacrifice that I was as overwhelmed by her thrift as I was by my father’s failure, found them equally upsetting.

  To earn money for college, that summer I found a job as an inspector at Lehman Brothers, a factory that printed custom-quality paper products. The factory was a succession of low white buildings only a few blocks from my house. I had passed those buildings all my life and never noticed them. Lehman Brothers did their work using engraved metal plates. Type was cut into the plates, and then the plates were bolted to a machine press that inked the surface and thrust them down onto the paper that was fed through—up-down, up-down, up-down. An order might be hundreds or even thousands of sheets. After each piece of paper was stamped against the plate, it came out along a conveyor belt as I stood at the far end, waiting to remove the just-printed business cards and letterheads, looking carefully at each one to see that the quality remained perfect. If the ink had run or spurted on the paper, I fixed it with a razor blade.

  It was hot in the factory and loud with the slam of machines, the industrial fans, and the music on radios turned up high. The close air smelled of ink and motors, except in the late morning when Jimmy B. shuffled by. Jimmy B. was a tall, lean-as-leather old black man, up from the Delta I imagined, whose job was to remove the empty ink fountains from the press after a print run and take them away on his metal cart to clean t
hem in a boiling chemical bath. He always wore a chest-to-ankle rubber apron, and his face had a watery glaze even when it wasn’t pooling with sweat, as though he’d spent so many years perspiring it had become a permanent condition. In late morning he’d wrap his plate of lunch in a layer of foil and put it on his cart, right on top of the fountains, which were still searing with heat. Often the foil held something like a squirrel that he’d shot himself, and as the meat cooked on the fountains you could smell the gamey stench long before he came near. Sometimes you also smelled him. Every month or so he’d show up drunk on corn liquor. His eyes were red as embers, and he’d be screaming about “muckin’ ass whitey,” and “the no good muckin’ muckety ass white man,” until Harvey, the all-business foreman, sent him home to sleep it off. Everybody feared Harvey, but some guessed he had a soft heart, and everybody loved Jimmy B., loved to talk about the slick way he dressed when the workday ended, and the flocks of good-looking women they said he stepped out with.