The Crowd Sounds Happy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  All summer I counted the hours. It was tedium, actually watching ink dry. And yet I knew others had it much worse. We were manufacturing premium merchandise for some of the country’s leading corporations, banks, and investment houses, and people worked hard to do it well. But in making these diplomas, business cards, and certificates, we at Lehman were flywheels to these testaments to other people’s progress, and the contrast between the lives of people with expensive diplomas and business cards and those who made them hung in the air. There was no way to think that most of my colleagues had once walked into a third grade classroom aspiring to spend their lives feeding thousands of sheets of paper into a press all day, every day. They did it because they had to.

  That’s what would be on my mind at night when the telephone rang and I heard my father’s voice asking how work was going. I’d tell him about it with hard pride, thinking to myself that he was goldbrick-lazy, that if all of us could do this, why couldn’t he? I was disgusted by how peppy he sounded. I wanted to lay into him, but, as I spoke to my father, I’d be thinking of what my grandmother told me every time she set out to convince me that I shouldn’t hold anything he did against him, that I was his and it was up to me to make his life better. “He’s a sick man, he can’t help it, he’s not himself,” she’d tell me. That was one of the hardest things about having such a troubled father: because he was unwell, he wasn’t accountable for anything. Whatever he said to me, it was always the illness talking, not he, and I was expected to forgive him, to let him off in a way that left him his dignity, that protected him.

  I didn’t want to protect him. As I told him about my job, I wanted to draw blood with my descriptions. I wanted my father to sound ashamed because for anybody but a grifter it was normal to want to work, to want to provide. If he loved me, why would he not work for me? Why was he never by my side? Why did he never sound ashamed? If he had been ashamed, I would have felt pity for how helpless he was, felt sorry that he should be so disliked by the world, and I would have kept hoping for him. I wanted to keep hoping for him. I’d spent so much of my childhood hoping and hoping and hoping for him, but it never did any good. You could give and give and give to a person, and it could make no difference. In the end, I never knew whom to feel sorry for, him or me.

  What I heard in my father’s voice on the telephone was a stubborn, relentless faith that what he had been he might be again, that he would rise to claim the illustrious career in America that had rightfully been his. They were telling him his life was over, that all he had in front of him was the grave? Well, don’t believe it, bud. I wasn’t the only one embarking on something new. It was his new beginning too; we were beginning together. His certainty about all this seemed ominous, and it was also chilling to me that he was hitching his hopes to my experience. As the sharp feeling of danger coursed through me, I also found it motivating. I knew exactly how I didn’t want to end up.

  The summer went on and I noticed that increasingly everyone was nice to me at the factory. They recounted their weekends, the fifths of Jack Daniel’s they’d put away without effect at the motel bar out by the interstate, the new girlfriend who was an assistant manager at Caldor, the outings to county fairs. A mechanic with feathered red hair named Mike kept telling me about the connection he had who was going to get him some Coors beer. Coors wasn’t then available in the East, which gave it an element of forbidden mystery because nobody knew what it tasted like. Mike knew. He made Coors sound like some kind of ambrosial nectar. When his shipment finally came in, he gave me a can to take home. It really did taste sweet. “You paid your dues,” my mother said.

  Yet I was a Harvard freshman, and every once in a while I would act like one. Two of the machine operators near me were women, including a beautiful Puerto Rican who dressed well and swung her hips to dance music on the radio as she fed her press. Sometimes in the afternoons she used to pop shiny pills she told me were black beauties—speed. I liked her and worried about her, and one day I told her very earnestly that the drugs would get her sick. She froze, rigid with resentment. Then she burst out, “This dull shit is what I have to look forward to every day of my life, and if these things make me feel good and get me through the afternoon, how the fuck are you gonna tell me I shouldn’t take them?” I didn’t have an answer for that, nor did I when an alert young black woman whom I’d grown very fond of suddenly said she wasn’t going to miss me after I went to school. When I asked her why, she said, “You ain’t gonna miss me. You’re going to college. So why should I miss you?”

  By then I had begun to dread that standing at the end of a conveyor belt would be my life. Later, in university libraries, I would think of the factory and study harder. For years I made myself work every day at least an hour longer than factory hours, fending off the hand of fate that could pick me up and drop me back there to lose my eyes reading thousands of sheets of paper embossed with the name of the same J.P. Morgan vice president, a razor blade in my hand.

  After work, some nights I’d put on a shirt that said “New Haven” across the chest, and I played shortstop for the city’s Senior Babe Ruth team in games against surrounding communities like Oxford and Cheshire and Seymour. There, on burned grass under the green and white bill of my cap, the idea of being a member of the town team thrilled me, for this was what I liked best about baseball, how flexible it was in time, another generation of the local nine playing the same game as previous generations, making a visible connection between my team and our forebears. The New Haven reality, however, wasn’t much like those early town teams I’d read about from Lucasville, Ness City, and Wahoo. I had no stories of sleeping in fields and barns on my way from game to game, filling up on apples borrowed from some farmer’s orchard, making friends for life. I had, in fact, no stories at all. That is the only team I ever played on where I can bring back none of the names. I remember diving to catch a fly ball in short left field during a game played out under a big country sky, and I remember coming very close to killing myself and some teammates with an ill-timed second gear merge onto a crowded highway in the red Dodge, but what was most remarkable to me about the experience was how unremarkable it seemed. It also felt a little pathetic to want so much to come from somewhere even as I was leaving it. There was altogether too much negativity and what I’d really finished with was all that.

  I spent a lot of my evenings that summer in a gym lifting weights with my cheerful friends Passarelli and Merchant. Those evenings passed the way my mornings and afternoons had, with endless up-down mechanical repetitions. I was glad for the company of those friends because otherwise it was a dull, menial time of pure preparation. I had spent my youth projecting life, waiting for life to happen, envisioning high school as the slow rehearsal for the act of becoming myself, believing that right about now I would finally get there—that this post-graduation summer would be an afterglow of resolution. But the past months had instead been shot through with anticlimax, which puzzled me. You imagined the horizon, you moved toward the horizon, and the horizon moved away from you. Realizing certain goals and aspirations settled nothing. Perhaps life’s succession of days involved no true vanishing points until the final one. And maybe preparation was not preliminary but the essential gesture—all you could wish for. Life was possibility and it was desire; the imagination required no more. Everything was out there to be endlessly rediscovered.

  In bed at night, I did the summer reading Harvard had assigned, The Education of Henry Adams, and saw that Adams had arrived at my moment in life only to realize that the education he had received bore little relation to the one he needed, that he had no education yet at all, that he knew not even how to begin his education.

  And then it was time to leave. On my early September visit to New York, my grandmother bought me a striped tie to take to college, and soon I was back at home in my room, packing it in my mother’s old student steamer trunk. I was going now to where my grandfather had lived, where the Red Sox played, where my cousin Jody was a sophomore,
and I was looking forward. Never had I looked forward to something so much. In many ways, the looking forward had always been the best part for me, and I wondered if that would always be true.

  EPILOGUE

  Listening to a Ballgame, I Hear My Life

  Another lifetime later, in July 2004, visiting my mother for a week in New England from my home in New York as she recovered from cataract surgery, we followed the Red Sox together on the television she’d acquired for herself the week after Sally left home for college. We were annoyed by how complacent the Red Sox seemed as they lost game after game to the Orioles. During one broadcast, when the name Cal Ripkin, the former Oriole who played in more consecutive games than any other player, was mentioned, my mother said, “Oh, him, the guy people made a fuss about because he came to work every day.” The Red Sox’s next opponent was the Yankees, and when the Red Sox squandered a three-run, mid-game lead, my mother stood up, said, “Maybe they’ve all got some kind of disease,” and went to bed. I stayed immobile in my chair for the whole game, an 8–7 Red Sox loss. Afterward I felt like a pollarded tree. It took me a while to get to sleep. The following morning, I looked out on grim, overcast New England weather and reported to my mother that I was tired of the Red Sox. “I have to question why I spend so much time thinking about them,” I said.

  “They’re exasperating,” my mother agreed mildly. “That’s what you get with the Red Sox.”

  “Too exasperating,” I said. “It’s like something out of Irish literature.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, suddenly engaged. “Those attractive characters filled with potential and then they fall apart. Why does it happen? Why? It’s deep. The Red Sox have flawed human personality. They’re not a well-oiled machine. You want that, fine, go be a Yankee and win. The Red Sox are about something to hope for, something to look forward to.”

  “Sometimes I feel worse than I think I should when they lose,” I confessed. It felt ridiculous to hear myself talking that way. She was the one who had just come out of the hospital. It was only baseball.

  “But you haven’t failed, a team has failed,” she said. “All a team can give you is what any entertainment can give you, good stories. They try and they try, but they can’t pull it off. That’s interesting.” She was looking genuinely excited. “Why can’t they pull it off? What happens to them? Your grandfather believed it was a morale problem. Who knows. Whatever it is, it’s a fascinating mystery.” Then she felt compelled to defend them. The Red Sox were her team too; had been for more than fifty years. “They are not ridiculous,” she said. “They are never ridiculous. Even the poor guy whose name has turned into a verb.”

  “Buckner,” I said. “Bill Buckner.”

  “Yes, Buckner. They rise again and again. They give you so much in character. Baseball satisfies more than your desire to win. You have moments when you think ‘Why am I doing this?’ but then you are part of the crowd walking down Commonwealth Avenue after a game at Fenway Park and you’ve got something out of it even if they didn’t win. All the good stories aren’t about winning,” she said. “The good stories are about struggle.”

  My irresistible team. They were artists of doom, a member of the pantheon of heroic debacles, from Hamlet to the Russians to Robert Scott’s South Pole expedition during which one of the fated explorers, Lawrence Oates, provided an epitaph for stoic lost causes everywhere by saying, as he made his final exit from his tent into the Antarctic freeze, “I am just going outside and may be some time.”

  Now, in the new century, the Red Sox had a new management group that slowly had been reconfiguring the team with a more limber and progressive outlook heavily grounded in the unemotional, scientific projection of performance—a search for order. Gradually, that August, the Red Sox began to play better, and then much better.

  At the beginning of October they reached the playoffs and crisply defeated the Angels in the first round. In the American League Championship Series, a four-out-of-seven competition, they opposed the Yankees, who immediately beat them once, twice, and then three times. I wanted to get away from the annual vortex of bitterness and gloom. Leaves were falling. Soon it would be November and the first frost. I was born in November, but disliked the month. It felt arid to me, wind-scarred, the loneliest month of the year. As a child, my holidays divided, when I’d gone riding on the train into New York from New Haven for Thanksgiving, the last stop before Grand Central Terminal was 125th Street. One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street was November. The expectation of winter was colder than winter itself.

  The previous year, when the Red Sox had squandered a three-run, eighth-inning lead and lost to the Yankees in the decisive game of the playoffs, Henry, one of my grandfather’s favorite former students, had called to tell me in his own Slavic accent, “Courage, boy!” Henry was a Red Sox fan who always sounded a little happy when things went badly for the Red Sox. Then my Uncle Robert, my father’s brother, telephoned me from the West. I was ashen when he reached me and he could tell. “After they lost it never occurred to me that you’d feel anything but grief,” he said. “In our family, grief keeps us connected to ourselves. Do you know what I’m talking about?” This was my father’s brother. Of course I knew. They could not win. Failure was the team’s distinction, what made them unique—and it was the same with us. If we won, we’d lose our true selves.

  One day in the year she died, my Aunt Susi took me alone with her on an errand to Brooklyn Heights, a New York City neighborhood of low nineteenth-century roofs, flower boxes, handsomely forged ironwork, and sedate streetscapes. Montague Street, the main boulevard in Brooklyn Heights, was dense with cafés and we went into one for lunch. We were right across the river from Manhattan, but I had no idea of my coordinates, had never been to Brooklyn, had never been in a café. Susi led me down two or three steps, found us a table, and told me I could choose my lunch from what was listed on the chalkboard. Then she suggested an omelet. I didn’t know what an omelet was. She urged me to try it, and suggested that, if I didn’t enjoy it, she’d eat it and I could order a hamburger. At close-by tables, other people were drinking wine even though it was the middle of the day. Up on the sidewalk, I could see feet passing at a leisurely gait. I had the sudden sense of not only having fun myself, but that everyone around me must be sharing my mood. When my omelet came, goldenrod yellow and browned to a crisp on the edges, Susi turned a pepper shaker over it until the surface was well dusted, and I liked that omelet before I tasted it. That nothing else really happened was the point. Susi elevated ordinary time. Later, in college, I fell in love with someone who had grown up in Brooklyn Heights, a romance that was never happy for me, never fulfilling, though for years it always felt as though it was about to be, and never more so than when I came out of the subway and went hurrying up Montague Street, more convinced with each passing block that now, finally, when I got to her house, I would be loved.

  There was some of that in Susi too. Her enormous desire to live and experience the world struck me on some instinctive level as coming from a place of suffering. As a child I could somehow tell that grown-up painful things had happened in Susi’s life, that her sorrows had given her life an urgency, that she carried a memory of sadness with her always, and drew on it in search of joy. She was not a brooding person in the least; it was that intimacy with disappointment informed her enormous desire for happiness. This understanding of feelings had been what led her to psychology, just as it motivated her rich sympathy for the misfortunes of others. That it had been she, not a father playing catch with me, who had led me to baseball, now, all these years later, made perfect sense.

  After college I was offered a good job in New York. In my first office, I opened my first box of business cards and gazed at my name. The letters were bright and bold; there was a well-etched texture to them. I ran my finger across the good paper, then looked at the box. Lehman Brothers, New Haven, it said. I didn’t know how to feel about this. Suddenly I had the idea that somebody might have left me a note inside the b
ox. It had only been a few years. I looked to see, but there was none, for so many reasons there could not have been.

  It had been a difficult decision to come and live in my father’s city and I worried that I might not be able to handle it. Each time my father and I got together, something always seemed to go awry. He asked me to meet him one day at the Yale Club, where he was still a member “for professional reasons,” and I was talking with him in the middle of the lobby when, suddenly, his eyes went strange, and he began screaming at me, telling me—and the cocktail hour throng—what a horrible person I was. I ran out of there. I always needed days to prepare myself before I saw him, but at times I didn’t have the chance. Some nights, I’d arrive home to encounter my father standing in front of my apartment building, waiting there to let me know what a pathetic excuse for a son he had. He sent enraged letters to me, wrote them about me to my employer, left screeds on my telephone answering machine, which I always erased before roommates and other people heard them. Almost always. Once, I walked into the house with my friend Austin, and I remember the surprise registering on Austin’s face after I saw the blinking red light, forgot myself, and played the new message. Austin was my first adult friend to hear my father’s voice, and what he heard was my father yelling into the tape that I’d never make it in the world, that I better give up, try something else, better hurry too, because you never knew what might happen. The next time I saw my father he asked me for money. “He takes all the help he can get, and it never does any good,” my mother said. “You have to decide if you want to help him. You have your own life to lead.”