The Crowd Sounds Happy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  Now I saw him regularly. Once a month, on a Sunday, he’d ride the train up to New Haven to spend the afternoon with Sally and me. Then, I never thought back on any of the unhappy times with him; I only looked forward to his Sunday, anticipated it for weeks. Early on those mornings I’d go bursting into my sister’s room and jump around her bed as she lay there under the covers, telling her, “Sally, Sally, Dad’s coming!” until a small, sleepy smile spread across her face and her eyes opened. My mother would meet my father’s train at the railroad station, bring him home, and then she’d go off on foot for the day, leaving him the use of the house and the car. He always drove us out to Hamden for lunch at the International House of Pancakes, and then we went on to the Ridge View Pharmacy for bubblegum cigars. Down the road was the Spring Glen Pharmacy. The three of us always referred to the Ridge View as the Spring Glen, a willful misidentification that my father seemed to enjoy as much as Sally and I did. That we had familiar patterns was our effort to inject a sense of circadian regularity into the relationship, our attempt to make my father seem like a normal dad.

  Back at the house, my father could be a lot of fun. He invented a belly-tickling game called “So it does that, does it?,” and whenever he called me Rascal I got a shiver of pleasure. He was the sort of man who preferred nicknames, perhaps because they individuated, were truer to what a person was turning out to be. My father liked absurd rhymes: “Ladies and gentlemen take my advice, pull down your panties and slide on the ice!” He was also fond of working out puns. After Zbigniew Brzezinski got a job in the government, my father’s response was to ask me what a jailed national security adviser was. “I don’t know,” I said. “A Zbig in a poke.” During those afternoons he spent a lot of time playing with the English language, frolicking and cavorting with syntax, neologisms, and unusual nomenclature the way some people I knew amused themselves with Play-Doh. When the basketball star Lew Alcindor changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, my father was ecstatic at the possibilities. “Say it, Dad, say it,” I would plead, and he’d grin and repeat the name again and again for me, lingering on the long vowels like an auctioneer. I’d always ask him to sing “It Was Sad When That Great Ship Went Down,” in his beautiful tenor, and to tell me about seeing Mel Ott at the Polo Grounds. I wanted to hear all of it every time, was outraged when Sally spoke up with preferences of her own. Allegiance to the routine was essential. In fact, these Sunday visits had the quality of a long-distance love affair: each one came after such a lengthy interlude that they felt like occasions, not ordinary life.

  Every time he saw me I had new preoccupations, and there was a period when my chief concern lay in road construction. One day, my father took me to visit the Leonard Concrete Pipe Company, in Hamden, where I somehow persuaded him to buy a souvenir for me: a three-foot section of gray concrete sewer pipe. My hazy idea was to submerge it in dirt and then send hose water through the tube to, well, where? That was as far as I’d planned. I have no idea how we got the thing home, but I know that when my mother saw Dad and me staggering toward her porch, she redirected us around to the cellar entrance, at the rear of the house. As my father, the pipe, and I went by, I remember the fresh powdery lime-smell of the new concrete, and then hearing our next-door neighbor, outdoors in her pink slippers, remark, “Now I know why she divorced him.” Down the cellar steps we went, carrying the pipe, and when we reached the floor we set the pipe upright on its fat end. For the next thirty-six years, as long as my mother lived in New Haven, the pipe remained by the bottom of the cellar steps, exactly where Dad and I had left it. It might still be standing there.

  His other gifts to me were mostly books, and looking at them now reminds me of the interest he took in my interests. Best of all there was a secondhand copy of Lawrence Ritter’s The Glory of Their Times, an oral history of the early days of professional baseball, in which a succession of old-time players including Heinie Groh, Rube Marquard, and Goose Goslin told about all the rutted roads they had taken to the major leagues. Hall of Fame outfielder Sam Crawford was so poor that he and his friends in Wahoo, Nebraska, had to make their own baseballs out of whatever scraps of string, yarn, and cloth they could find in the streets. Then one of their mothers would sew it all together for them. I told my mother about it and she said, “That was before the Depression; almost everyone was poor then compared to now.”

  In 1972, Sally and I went on vacation with my father for a long weekend in Bermuda, my first time away from America. Once we got there I was fascinated by the Englishness of the place, and my father spent a lot of time standing next to me at an intersection watching a bobby directing traffic in his tall helmet. I was just getting over a bad case of mononucleosis. Thin to begin with, I had lost a great deal of weight, and when I wanted to investigate the grottoes along the shore, run on the pink sand, and splash in the quiet turquoise water, all forbidden because I’d been so sick, though my father said “No,” he seemed to understand how it was to be inhibited from doing what you expected of yourself.

  During school vacations there were trips to New York to spend time with my father. It was a lot like going to visit my grandmother, the same heightening of perception as our car crossed into Manhattan over the Triborough, and yet it was even better because I loved him so much, he had been so far away for so long, and now, miraculously, he was near and soon he would be pulling me into a hug: “Rascal!”

  If we were in New York on weekdays, my father might take us to the office. How transporting it was to be in the middle of everything in the center of Manhattan, moving alongside the early crowds, going to work with my father. From the sidewalk outside my father’s building I saw the men in business suits surging uphill from Forty-second Street, many of them carrying a folded-over newspaper and a briefcase as they went ducking into Chock full o’Nuts, emerging a minute or two later with a steaming paper cup in hand. They were all in a hurry. There was a delicatessen across the street, and at lunchtime through the window I could see them rushing in, yelling out their sandwich orders, and rushing out. It seemed to me that in these rhythms of the masculine professional day, I was watching how my father lived without me around.

  My father worked on the eighth floor. Bolted to the wall in the corridor beside the entrance door to the suite were engraved, burnished-brass nameplates for each of the lawyers in the firm. There was not a nameplate for my father. Inside were the firm’s lawyers with their suit jackets off and ties loosened, clients waiting to see the lawyers, a secretary, and the braying visitors paying calls to the other room that the firm rented out in the suite—a succession of enormously obese men rushing in and out from consultations with the tenant who turned out to be a parking garage tycoon, a man so wealthy he could have bought an entire office building for himself.

  My father was tucked in the back of the suite, near the emergency exit and across from a wall lined with shelves holding leatherbound legal casebooks. He had a heavy desk, an extra chair, and one window with no screen that in summer was kept open a crack so that you could hear the M-1 Madison Avenue bus exhaling into second as it rumbled slowly uptown, could smell the city, which in those months had a pleasantly rank bouquet like the one that enveloped a kitchen when someone ran hot sink water into a pot after overcooking a meaty stew. Once the M-1 had crossed Forty-second Street, aside from the soft toots of horns and the anguish of a distant siren, it was quiet in my father’s office. The olive green rotary dial telephone seldom rang unless it was my grandmother checking in on us, and nobody came inside, though once in a while, if we’d closed the door, I’d open it to encounter a lawyer consulting a casebook. Those lawyers would seem startled to see me, and it would take a second before they said, “Well hi there, young feller.”

  In 1971, for Father’s Day, I built a pipe rack that I constructed by hammering lines of lost head nails into an unfinished scrap of wooden board. I’d intended the nails to fulfill the silhouette of a pipe shape, the idea being that the pipes could rest on the nails, but my hammering skills were such
that some of the nails bent or got inexpertly aligned, and since a few were also rusted, upon completion they looked like the ragged prongs of rebar protruding from concrete slabs on one of the many stalled building projects you could then see around New York. After I presented the rack to my father, he tilted it against the wall on top of his filing cabinet where it became, along with a coat-stand, a clear, cut-glass ashtray, a few yellow legal pads, last week’s issues of the Times, and loose papers on the desk, the only things in the room. “Thanks, Rascal,” he told me. He said the same thing when, in August, for his thirty-seventh birthday, I ventured across the street to the tobacconist. My mother had given me money to buy my father a gift from me, and, having supplied him with storage capacity, I thought that the way you now treated a father was to give him something to smoke. My father accompanied me and then stood off to the side as I began my errand. The store was hushed and smelled of cedar. On the narrow walls hung pipes of various woodland hues made from what must have been meerschaum, briar, calabash, and walnut. They were all too expensive. I shifted my attention to the cigar cases. Gazing at the array of brown cylinders under glass, I was astonished that even something that would disappear so soon could be so costly. A feeling of consumer inadequacy came over me. I had wanted to have a triumph by finding him something that showed I knew who he was. After much deliberation, I selected four short, lean cigars that fit in their white box prim as Crayons. My father put the cigars in his desk drawer and later, during one of his twice-monthly telephone calls from New York to me in New Haven, he told me he’d smoked each after the next until they were all gone. He rented that office for seven years, and it always had the look of belonging to someone who was new in town.

  His apartment over on the West Side was the rear flat on the first floor of a five-story walk-up on Seventy-fifth Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, now a fashionable district but then a battered, somewhat ramshackle part of the city. People who lived in the plush apartment buildings lining Central Park West did not tend to walk west after dark. The brief lobby of my father’s West Seventy-fifth Street building was gloomy and close, smelling of many pasts. Entering his apartment, you walked down a hallway, dim as an alley when he didn’t change the lightbulb, past the tiny, baby-blue-tiled bathroom and then the galley kitchenette with its brown electric stove, brown cabinets, and brown refrigerator, into a living area where there was a sofa, a slatted coffee table, a portable Sony black-and-white television, and a table with two chairs by the window. Back in the bedroom he had a closet, a bed, and a bureau. There was exposure to the west, though the angle of neighboring roofs and patio walls meant that only a low slant of late afternoon sunlight ever penetrated. The windows had bars on them. My father, pale to begin with, always seemed paler in these tenebrous rooms. It happened with his eyes too, which became the color of the bathroom tiles and uncalm. Outside the bedroom was the garden, an urban designation since it was no more than a fifty-foot oblong cement apron. Over by the wall there were the remnants of a more agrarian-minded previous tenant, a few flowerpots with nothing in them but shriveled brown stalks in parched soil.

  On a late September Saturday in 1971, I came to New York to go with my father to my first baseball game. The Mets were playing the Pittsburgh Pirates. I had awakened before dawn in a fever. Was it raining? It was not raining. The game would be played. Crossing Willow Street from our house to the car with my mother and Sally, I had with me a pen and sheet of paper for autographs and was dressed in the blue shirt once touched by Ron Swoboda. Swoboda, alas, was no longer with the team, traded off to Montreal, but Ed Kranepool remained on the roster, as did Bud Harrelson, the sideburned Texan catcher Jerry Grote, and the two estimable Toms, center fielder Agee and Seaver, who’d become the best pitcher of his time. The Pirates would be challenging opposition. They had the magnificent right fielder Roberto Clemente and so many other forceful hitters, including outfielders Willie Stargell and Al Oliver, that they would win the World Series that year. All the anticipated hitting led to a last-minute inspiration: if I brought my glove I’d have an advantage over others in catching a foul ball. The glove was on my hand as I sat in the backseat hoping Seaver would be pitching, that he would have his way with Clemente. By the time we reached Bridgeport I was aflame with so many expectations I struggled to breathe.

  The plan was that we would go to my father’s apartment where my mother and Sally would make themselves comfortable and wait for us to return after the game. Both had books to amuse them—Sally at six was already a formidable reader—and there was also the television set. Once we got to New York, everything slowed down. We did not take the East Side Drive, instead working our way west across the width of the city. It took time to find parking in my father’s neighborhood, and then a while longer to execute the hand-off at his apartment; he wanted to spend time with Sally. When we finally did leave for the ballpark, my father neglected to provide my mother with a key so that she and Sally could freely come and go. Why I cannot say, but he didn’t.

  To get to Shea Stadium required a subway trip involving transfer to the IRT Number 7 train that then made endless above-ground stops as it trundled its way out toward Flushing, the section of Queens where Shea Stadium is. Every time I heard the name Flushing mentioned, I expected people to giggle and prepared to myself, though when they didn’t, I didn’t either. Outside the subway windows on both sides was such unrelenting commercial expanse that I began to despair that a green field would ever appear out of the solid seam of graffiti-smeared brick buildings with endless TV antennas crowding their flat roofs, warehouses, heavy industry, and tied-up traffic. Why had they decided to place a ballpark here? Were they right? Couldn’t they have made mistakes? And what if, say, New Haven was not ideally situated? People had come by ship from distant shores to settle New Haven. Maybe its true location was meant to be somewhere else. Could the world’s rigidity be resisted?

  As we continued our sluggish progress, more and more people boarded the train wearing blue and orange Mets caps including many boys around my age, all of them carrying baseball gloves. Seeing this I felt thwarted and foolish—an inventor who’d dreamed up what the world already had in plenty—until then finally, on the left, rising out of a vast spread of parking lots there appeared the rim of an immense, ringed, steel structure that formed most of a circle before abruptly truncating at the far ends like an urban renewal project that had run out of funds. We left the train. From the platform, visible through the open back side of the stadium were vertiginous tiers of seats slowly filling with specklike people. All of it cupped what were unmistakably ballplayers on a ball field. Looking at them from the distance I thought of scattered leaves.

  Then we were walking toward the stadium. As full as I was with anticipation, most of my recollections have faded or merged with the flow of all the many subsequent days and nights spent at ballparks across the years, but because there can only be one first game, and, because I was there with my father, there has long been the urge to recall more of it, to make it a memorable experience and a happy one. Traces of it come back the way the words do when I am trying to recall a villanelle I memorized as a child. Despite the fact that I was a boy who, without effort, remembered a surfeit of base-ball statistics, I never was a person who recalled every line of a poem for long. Yet if no full tercet returns, certain lines always stay with me, as do fragments of that afternoon. I was only eight, but the art of losing isn’t hard to master.

  Outside the stadium were throngs of people massing around the ticket booths and a midway of vendors selling pretzels and hot dogs as well as baseballs inscribed with the autograph of every Met in identical blue ink. I pictured them all sitting there in their spikes and caps passing around the pen to write on each ball. I hadn’t known such an item existed, also hadn’t known you could purchase miniature wooden bats or “player quality” Mets caps, but no sooner were they seen than they were craved. My father bought me only literature: both a Mets team yearbook and a game program with
which to keep score. Once we were at the turnstiles, an old man tore our tickets in half and directed us toward broad concrete ramps that took us climbing beyond the field level, the loge, the mezzanine, and finally to our upper-level seats. Then, at last, I was sitting in the sky looking down at the green and brown field, which seemed to me then to be simultaneously man-made and natural—sitting in the sky looking down at real ballplayers. They were busy with pregame rituals, loping around the bases, ruminating together in groups, hitting, fielding, and throwing. I remember marveling at their distant movements, how different it all was from my prior experience of baseball. The spectator’s routine was not yet routine to me, and I had to adjust to the compact hydraulics of swings that sent balls tumbling into space, just as I had to get used to how fluid and easy were the gaits crossing the grass in pursuit of those same fly balls. The players and the descending balls usually merged into coincident vectors, as though the hitter had sent out advance word where his drives would fall. I couldn’t distinguish their facial features, but I knew most of them by the numbers on their uniforms—Tom Seaver was 41, Tommie Agee 20—and from my familiarity with their baseball cards I could apply the faces myself. A check of the program told me that the unknown 11 belonged to third baseman Wayne Garrett. On my Bob Aspromonte baseball card he was an Atlanta Brave, but here, in the countervailing moment, the program revealed that he was now wearing number 2 for the Mets. Not yet ready to believe my eyes, I felt toward Aspromonte the coolness one reserves for an interloper. How surreal the proximity was, how difficult to believe that of all the places in the world they might be, every Met was right there in front of me. And how jarring to realize that it was a public spectacle, that those around me also loved the Mets, and that I must share them.

  The opposing Pirates lingered at the edges of the field in gray and black uniforms looking bigger than the Mets, foreign, and predatory. Among them was Richie Hebner, whose baseball card one year informed me that he worked off-season as a grave digger. When the day’s lineups were announced, I learned that Hebner would not be playing. Neither would Al Oliver, Clemente, or Seaver. It was a rookie left-hander named Jon Matlack who was to pitch for the Mets. A baseball game is a long-awaited event that happens every day. When this one began, Matlack threw a strike and everyone cheered, me among them.