The Crowd Sounds Happy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  My own kickball skills languished, which I found increasingly frustrating. One Tuesday afternoon, sure that I was consigned to a lifetime of Down First futility, I began to cry. When this was noticed and people asked what was wrong, I saw that I was making a spectacle of myself and that undid me further. I ran for the schoolyard gate and, led by Mr. Lucas, players on both teams chased me down. I had long wanted Mr. Lucas to take special notice of me, yet never like this. A sidewalk conference ensued during which I was coaxed back within the fence and installed in left-center-field next to Zito. I had agreed just to end the humiliation of becoming the center of attention, but the falseness of my being out there with Zito smarted like a punishment, and I upbraided myself for desecrating the game and its natural order. I was disgusted with myself, filled with an intensity of self-loathing that I now find startling in a six-year-old. I wanted to be someone who overcame things.

  There were repercussions. Trem wouldn’t talk to me anymore. Ever after, when I passed him on the sidewalk, he looked away from me with contempt on his slender face. I missed him, and I hated him, and I didn’t blame him.

  On a late October Saturday in 1969, we visited Croton. As soon as we arrived, I jumped out of the car and sprinted toward the house as I always did, expecting the usual bountiful outdoor greeting. But not this time. The Little House had a narrow porch running below a length of picture windows, and through the glass I could see Susi, Jody, and Tony seated in the living room, two fair heads and a dusky one bent in mutual concentration. I tapped on the window. Without turning, Susi waved me inside. She appeared to be in a state of high excitement. I passed through the kitchen into the living room doorway where I saw that all three of them were intent upon a small black and white television they’d set up on a piano bench. Again, I greeted them. Nobody looked up. They were entranced. From the doorway I began to speak. “Quiet!” Susi hushed. On the television, there were men playing baseball, and to everything that happened, Susi reacted with little cries of suspense. When my aunt’s heart was in something this was unmistakable—she shimmered with pleasure.

  I had never seen baseball before. Susi kept directing words of encouragement and endearment toward the television, most of it for the benefit of a player named Tom Seaver. Was there some way he could hear her? Eventually, an inning must have ended, because Susi pivoted off the couch and pulled me to her in an enormous hug, dispensing her usual greetings, filling me in on what was going on. It was the World Series, the New York Mets against the Baltimore Orioles, and Susi was rooting for the Mets. Tom Seaver was the Mets’ pitcher and best player. I saw now that the Mets had their nickname inscribed across their shirts in cursive letters. It was only a month since I’d learned to read, and with every pieced-together word still came the thrill of fresh possession. But what, I wondered, was a Met? Play resumed, and immediately Susi was back in the game.

  I recall nothing more of the moment. There was a long time when the faintness of my memories of this day dismayed me, because it seemed vital to remember more fully my first encounter with baseball. But, of course, culturally signified experiences are frequently in themselves banal, and the true meaning often lies in what surrounds them. What I really wish I could more fully bring back is Susi showing baseball to me.

  Later during that visit, Tony, with the assistance of Jody, would outline all the rules for me at the kitchen table. Tony’s descriptions were precise and logical, replete with many diagrams and much attendant use of mugs, the sugar basin, stray pieces of toast, and cereal bowls to illustrate the basic functions and habits of ballplayers. By then I had grasped that kickball and baseball relied on the same template of rules, so it all made quick sense. But even before I understood the specifics, I instantly liked baseball because Susi liked it.

  Baseball was a typical case of my sensual aunt’s resourceful instinct for joy. She had never noticed the game until that summer, when “The Amazin’ Mets,” perennially baseball’s worst team, had suddenly become miraculous winners. Every afternoon, Jody would come home from school to watch the games with her and add to the scrapbook they were filling with news accounts of the Mets. She was caught up in the uncomplicated happiness of the Mets story, both the surprise of all the victories, and the indulgent affection that had enveloped the team long before the players were any good. Many Mets fans were former followers of the Giants and Dodgers, franchises that had uprooted themselves from New York in the 1950s for San Francisco and Los Angeles. The spectators the teams left behind in New York regarded the 1962 arrival of a new franchise for the entire city to share, the Metropolitans (Mets), the way a family cherishes the infant born to them after the death of a previous child; sorrow and gratitude mingled and produced unconditional devotion. For years, the Mets were adored for bumbling. To see them overcoming their traumatic past and playing so successfully was thrilling for Susi. I too was immediately mesmerized by them because Susi was, by the open and uncomplicated way in which she loved them.

  Susi’s was an evanescent fandom, burning so brief that by the following spring she had moved on to other things. Not me. Leaning in the doorway behind Susi at the Little House that afternoon, looking at Tom Seaver and the other pixilated ball-playing figures, I felt myself experiencing such exhilaration that to this moment, whenever my mind refracts back through time into that room, I see the low ceiling, the foreshortened walls, the three heads bunched across the span of the green couch, the clean corners of the black and white screen, and the whole frame reachieves the limpid, time-frozen definition with which my memory preserves the great sentient discoveries of my childhood—archived right there beside my first pomegranate, which, with its plug ends and bulbous contours seemed hideous and unpromising, reminding me of sketches I’d seen for untenable early undersea craft, until the tough pink hide was split revealing the bejeweled catacombs of fruit and underscoring forever in my mind the tendency of sweetness to secrete itself in a bitter husk.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Killer Inside Me

  In the weeks before second grade began, I had been reading crime stories. Earlier, during that first summer I could understand books on my own, I had meandered among Greek myths, Grimm’s fairy tales, and Peter Pan, and all of them had put me off because I wanted to read accounts of real-seeming people, was ready, without, of course, being conscious of it, to begin to make the connections between lives out in the world and my life, to see that other people can illuminate for you and also shadow your own being. Then I came upon Frank and Joe Hardy, teen detectives. A few pages into The Shore Road Mystery, I was trembling with the kind of attention that eliminates sound, time, sleep. The story told of how Frank and Joe, two normal, healthy American high school boys from the city of Bayport where their father, Fenton Hardy, was a famous detective, had spent their own free time uncovering a ring of auto thieves. Cracking the case required some doing. Along the way there were high-speed car chases, frame-ups, submachine guns firing at airplanes, grenades tossed through windows, muggings, roadblocks, evil skindivers and rock climbers, a nervy ploy that involved the Hardys getting their own car stolen with themselves stowed in the trunk, and then a final flurry of capture, imprisonment (in a cave), escape, desperate hand-to-hand combat, and the arrival of the cavalry in the person of their father—disguised as a bargeman—Chief Ezra Collig and the Bayport police force just in time to slap on the handcuffs. I went through The Shore Road Mystery the way I consumed the canned miniature Irish potatoes that were often served that August at my Gerschenkron grandparents’ New Hampshire summer house: I swallowed them down whole. “Nicky, stop that. You’re going to choke yourself to death,” my mother would say with alarm when she caught me bolting, but I kept doing it for that intense moment of concurrent sensation: the slick white orb shooting riskily through my esophagus as it released a frisson of damp, briny potatoeyness. Within the Hardy Boys books, the criminal milieu created sinister, suspenseful situations that were counterbalanced by the reassuring rhythms of the Hardys’ daily life. Cosseted amo
ng friends and family, deliberate Frank and the more impetuous Joe went skylarking around Bayport, playing sports, dating their steady girls, trying out new electronic detective-ware, riding motorbikes and jalopies, taking their speedboat Sleuth out into Barmet Bay, all before coming home to dinners presided over by their indulgent mother, Laura, their proud father, and their spinster Aunt Gertrude whose cooking and conversation both featured a lot of starch. And then on with the mystery where, after numerous close calls and a penultimate moment of peril, the Hardys emerged unscathed and triumphant every time.

  There were dozens of these slim hardcover books, their compact heft and freshwater-blue trim so pleasingly sized that it was a satisfaction just to hold them. They had dramatic full-color illustrations papered right onto the front cover bookboard usually depicting the brothers in a moment of simultaneous revelation and jeopardy: taking cover behind a tree from the glare of somebody’s searchlight; bound and gagged on chairs as a ghastly figure crept toward them; harassed by mountain lions, tumbling boulders, Mexican bandits, or a swarthy thug wielding a boat anchor. In these portraits, the brothers invariably had about them a reliable, just, V-necked-sweater-vest sort of look—a pair of upstanders. As I began to accumulate the books, I lined them up in my new white pine bookshelf, arranging the volumes there in series order. Many of my books were purchased for me secondhand, and eventually I came into a few that were not blue but a tawny clay color and had no cover illustration save a silhouette of two boys. These turned out to be earlier, midcentury editions, when the mysteries had been published with now missing dust jackets, and I took a bibliophile’s pleasure in their tactile qualities. The pages of those brown spines were printed upon thick, pulpy, moldy-smelling paper on which the ink was sometimes smudged, lending, I thought, a certain artifactual authenticity.

  Part of what was attractive about the Hardy Boys stories is that they became a source of expertise. I accumulated a fund of Hardy knowledge, from the name of their chubby friend Chet Morton’s yellow roadster (The Queen) to the phrase the frazzled wannabe detective and Hardy foil Oscar Smuff used for $1,000 (“one thousand iron men”) to expressions that to me were distinctively Hardy (“Suits me!” “That’s swell!” “lie low” “a sinking feeling”) to the spooky locales along the Bayport outskirts the Hardys’ cases took them to (abandoned buildings, deserted islands, hidden inlets, swamps, and shantytowns). It was here that I first encountered everything from rune stones to pea jackets to falcon jesses to lugsailed Chinese junks to the words “ember” and “stevedore.” The series also introduced dozens of thieves, smugglers, safecrackers, counterfeiters, and nearly a kidnapper per volume, yet these were vague culprits, every one a spectral presence so faintly sketched that, once the book was done, I could never remember a thing about them.

  The weather was unusually warm that September of 1970, sultry enough that most of us came to school each morning in faded summer clothes to a beautiful new teacher, Miss Swainbank. Some of the instructors in that school were older women, woolclad duennas with rubber soles on their stalwart black shoes and student-issue nicknames like “Mrs. Crab-Apple,” but Miss Swainbank wore high-heeled boots, miniskirts, and peau-de-soie-like blouses printed in wild paisley-tinted greens against which her lustrous black satin hair poured all the way down to her hips. At the front of the classroom her movements were feline, and as she turned and raised her arm to the chalkboard, shafts of sunlight from the room’s high windows backlit her, the blouse rippling and glimmering as she wrote.

  Something else different that September was that in the morning when I left for the schoolyard I had company. My sister was entering first grade. Sally was not quite six years old, two years younger than I and still a very small girl, but I didn’t see her that way. Four years earlier, no sooner had I gone off to nursery school than she’d become highly indignant, raised such a determined commotion about the unfairness of having to stay home when “Nicky gets to go” that she’d been allowed to enroll the next fall. On school mornings, as soon as Sally and I went out of our house together, I’d go leaping down the sagging front porch steps and charge up the block ahead of her, eager to join other boys in the running races back and forth across the blacktop, eager to be on my own. After dismissal, there had begun to be baseball games on the asphalt, and they were all I could think about. In a hurry to get started playing, I left Sally to walk home by herself.

  Every day after school a crowd of kids would head home up the Canner Street hill, and once in a while I’d go with them, on my way to play with a friend at his house. At first the incline was gradual, but after a crossing guard, my classmate Gordon’s mother, guided us through the intersection of Canner and St. Ronan streets, the hill slanted into an almost rooflike pitch, and as I trudged, I felt the steepness of the drop. Here all the sounds of the city seemed muffled into a motionless calm, and when a landscaping van passed over a loose manhole cover, the two-tone report came loud in double time and then lingered melancholy and reverberating. That part of Canner Street was one of the most solitary stretches of sidewalk in all New Haven, and potentially among the most stirring. From the summit of the hill, the road dramatically fell away as it ran down to Whitney Avenue and the effect was like looking through a gun sight.

  Among the friends I went up the hill to visit was Binder, whose family lived in a large, shingled brown house with an off-center front door on St. Ronan Street. Binder had cheerful black eyes, and, when he giggled, they would shut while his whole body bent over, gleefully bobbing and shaking. At least one of his parents was from New York, and Binder spoke with a slight Bronxian inflection. His last name was pronounced to rhyme with cinder, which meant that during roll call on the first day of school every year, when a new teacher read off Binder with the invariable long “i,” from somewhere in the outer boroughs of the classroom we’d hear a pained cry of “Binn-deh!” He was formidably academic. During math, he went across the hall to join the third graders in Mrs. Arthur’s class. I too had been invited to enlist with Mrs. Arthur for math only to be denied permission by my mother. “But Binder gets to,” I had protested. Without knowing anything about her, I liked Mrs. Arthur because Cousin Arthur was my favorite character in Babar. “Binder’s mother is pushing him,” my mother told me. “You will stay right where you are.” By high school Binder would be shuttling down to Yale to take his math classes with the undergraduates. During kickball, his mastery of the angled narrows of the schoolyard’s short Down First doubles fence revealed something about the resourceful ways he could apply his numerical bent to a sporting competition. While playing with him up in his second-floor room, I learned that he was keeping track of the many doubles he kicked—a previously unconsidered statistic.

  Just across the crest of Canner Street from Day Prospect Hill, the private girls school where my mother taught, was Whitehall, a series of two-story brick apartment buildings for married Yale graduate students. The grounds were always teeming with kids, older boys out on the main lawn playing baseball, their mothers inside changing younger siblings’ diapers, those Moms preparing us snacks—bright orange longhorn cheese, if they were Levi’s mother—and often willing to call mine to see if I could stay on for dinner. Back in the bedroom were the fathers trying to block out the racket and finish their Ph.D. theses. From experience I already knew that once the dissertation was accepted, a moving van would arrive, my pal and I would pledge enduring friendship, and then they’d all get into their car and follow the moving van out of New Haven, bound for a university job somewhere out in the middle of America, never to be heard from again.

  One eighty-degree Tuesday morning late that September, not long after we’d repeated the Pledge of Allegiance, Miss Swainbank let a policeman into our classroom. The two of them walked to the blackboard and faced us. He had on a blue uniform with a service revolver dangling at his hip. He seemed much larger than she did. Miss Swainbank introduced him and then stood back listening as he showed us a photograph of a Worthington Hooker kindergarten student. Did
any of us know her? I don’t remember that anyone did. Then he told us her name, Jennifer Noon. Jennifer was five years old and two and a half feet tall. She had long brown hair with full bangs and large, wide, dark brown eyes. She lived in Whitehall, but she had not come home from school the day before. Had any of us seen her? We should think hard about whether we had. The policeman told us that she had been wearing a white sweater, a checked skirt, and black shoes. She had been somewhere short of the top of the hill when she “got lost.” Had any of us walked up the Canner Street hill yesterday?

  In the Hardy Boys books, policemen only interrogated the bad people. The questions panicked me. I was oppressed by his suspicions, his inability to see me as I aspired to be seen. I felt myself swept into the vortex of a tremendous guilt. I had never heard of Jennifer Noon. Clearly, however, I had done something wrong. Why else was I being confronted in this way? But what had I done? It was agony not to know. All at once I understood what it was to have a sinking feeling. Then, suddenly Gordon was getting up from his seat and leaving the room with the policeman. Relief washed over me.

  At the end of the day, I came outside the school onto the Down First porch, and massed there at the gate in front of me was a swarm of adults. A few parents routinely met their kids after school, but this was different. As mothers and fathers spotted their children coming down the porch steps, they burst forward and grabbed the kid into an enormous hug. Some of the adults were crying. The hysteria made the rest of us look around for our own parents. When one of us saw a mother or father, the kid invariably began crying and ran to be hugged. If a kid didn’t see his or her parents, they stood there uncertainly in the schoolyard and then, very quickly, still standing there, they too began to cry. The policeman had been so deft in class that none of us yet had any full idea of what it meant that a little girl was lost. But by the time we reached that gate, we all knew.