The Crowd Sounds Happy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  She believed in taxes, considered everyone doing his part for the greater good the essence of a progressive society. In 1974, the year after she wrote letters to the entire Connecticut congressional delegation urging them to vote for Richard Nixon’s presidential impeachment, she received an official letter of inquiry from the Internal Revenue Service. It is the most ethical among us who take accusation the hardest. Heart pounding, she jumped onto her bicycle and pedaled downtown without even taking the time to call for an appointment. By then her salary was $7,000, of which she had paid more than $2,000 in taxes. Inside the offices of Braverman and Hoffenberg CPA, she found herself on the other side of the desk from a tender-faced older man named Hoffenberg, who took one look at her and wordlessly handed across a box of tissues. After she calmed down, she described her predicament. Mr. Hoffenberg reached out, touched her hand, and said he would be glad to advise her right then. “But, you know, Mrs. Dawidoff,” he said, leaning back in his chair, “there are a lot of other very intelligent people in New Haven who think it’s a good idea for me to help them with their taxes because then they have me behind them.” He told her how to respond to the letter, refused to charge her for the visit, and sent her home. In fact, she had overpaid, as she would continue to do annually, liking to have a late spring infusion to look forward to, liking to be on the side of right.

  Seven days a week I went to the Worthington Hooker schoolyard to prepare for my life in baseball. Mostly, we kids played games, using tennis balls because the blacktop destroyed what we called “real baseballs.” Even so, when one of us came into a real baseball, we never could resist bringing it along for the one or two afternoons of authentic play before the cover scuffed up so much it fell off. Soon afterward the interior yarn wrapping unraveled all over the playground leaving the impression of the aftermath of slaughter, with the empty cover lying over there, picked clean as a vultured pelt. Eventually, I even submitted my facsimile Mets autographed ball from Shea Stadium for use in a game, and once those inscribed surfaces gave way, I was astonished to discover a heart not built of wound yarn, but a dense clot of Chinese newsprint.

  Of the kids who played in the schoolyard, the best fighter was named Jeff. I never saw him strike anyone, but such was his reputation, and I believed it. He had swept-back, sandy hair, intelligent eyes that narrowed into chilly slits as he sized up a situation, and a lupine manner of stalking down his part of Livingston Street that projected the capacity for efficient, raw-boned violence. His way of speaking was calm and supple with a measured strength, though once, when he wanted his younger brother, Peter, to come home from the schoolyard and Peter, always a handful, was resisting, Jeff barked “Peter!” and Peter was in instant motion, his feet moving before any of the defiance had left his face, so that you could see him registering both moods. When I thought of Jeff provoked, I imagined a flurried combination of direct blows punishing the windpipe and the eye socket. He didn’t seem malicious, just capable of harm, the way you know a whirring fan blade is capable of harm, which is exactly what makes you, in a certain mood, want to reach through the screen and touch it.

  One day, talking with my friend Vogel, I mentioned that I wasn’t afraid of Jeff. What had gotten into me I couldn’t have said. Nobody held any brief for my fists; I was still thin enough at the chest and arms that my future dimensions remained under seal, could not yet be foretold. Given the cosmology of our neighborhood, in which Vogel’s older brother, David, was Jeff’s best friend, I was as good as talking to Jeff when I said this, and I must have known it. A day later I was walking down the sidewalk near my house when a quiet, skeptical voice at my right ear said, “Hey, Nicky, I hear you’re saying you’re not afraid of me.” I turned. The eyes were winter.

  There was no time to think. I said, “I know you could kick my ass anytime you wanted to, Jeff, but that doesn’t make me afraid of you. You could hit me and hit me and hit me and hit me and beat the shit out of me until you probably even killed me, but I still wouldn’t be afraid of you.” He stood looking at me during this little outburst with a kind of disbelief. When I was done, he seemed almost to sigh. After a moment he shook his head and walked away.

  From then on I developed a great private admiration for Jeff, would have done a lot for him. Things were going on in Jeff’s life, you could just tell, but there was a stoic dignity to the way he carried whatever his burden was. He handled himself, gave his best self to our street hockey and baseball games in a way that seemed to embody the heroic conception I had of schoolyard affairs. His friend David possessed a similar regal composure, and watching the two of them made me hopeful that one day I would have it too. Sometimes, late in an afternoon, I’d look out across the schoolyard and see a democracy, all of us engaged in the mutual endeavor, trying to improve, preparing for the day when at least one of us would be cheered on by tens of thousands, Jeff, David, all of them part of the hardcover story that would be written about me in some future edition of Great Shortstops of the Major Leagues.

  When there was nobody to play with, I practiced by myself, spending many afternoons alone in the schoolyard throwing a ball at a targeted brick on the schoolhouse wall, scooping it up on the rebound and throwing it at the brick again, inventing games in which I was each member of the Mets infield, angling my throws as I moved around the defensive crescent from Milner to Boswell to Harrelson to Garrett. In the evenings, after supper, I went out to our backyard to resume my apprenticeship in the twilight, throwing now against the side of our house, forcing myself to cleanly field one hundred consecutive grounders along the chapped asphalt surface before I could go inside. I was pretty dedicated; once my underpants were soaked before I’d caught my limit. After nightfall, I threw a tennis ball against the wall of my room until I made a hole in the seaport section of the felt mural. My mother bought a can of Spackle, filled in the hole, and told me “no more playing ball in the house.” The hole reemerged, and again she applied Spackle and admonishments. In time, there was a grayish abscess bulging out of the wall and various other threatening tumidities. It looked as though the whole wall might collapse on me as I slept. So my mother had to hire a man named Mr. Jackson to tear down the wall and put up a new one. When I found out his first name was Reggie, making his the same name as the Oakland Athletics All-Star outfielder, it mattered to me, seemed significant, a portent.

  On the morning of my father’s New Haven visiting days, I began to listen for the telephone. If it rang my mother would answer and I could hear from my room her clipped, uninflected responses: “Yes,” “Yes,” “Okay,” “I’ll tell them.” Going into Sally’s room, I’d announce, “Dad’s not coming again.” By the time my mother joined us, while she’d be saying “Your father isn’t feeling well,” I was seeing the whole day in front of me desolate as the scrapyards out by the highway, all the hours now empty of pancakes, empty of bubblegum cigars, empty of “So it does that, does it?” Why did I have to have a father who got the flu so often? The year after we went to Bermuda, my father planned to take Sally and me to the Virgin Islands for another holiday long weekend, a trip he then called up and canceled after we’d packed our suitcases and gone to bed the night before we were to leave.

  When he did come for visits in New Haven, I watched him carefully as he arrived. Blinking uncertainly, he stood above me in the front hallway, absorbing the improvements and additions to the house and, it occurred to me one day, the changes in me. The expression that would come over his face was slack-jawed, both baffled and forsaken, and also a little pissed off. My father was the father of children for whom everything was happening without him. Partly, this was a function of distance, but there was also an unmistakable change in how I felt about him. That shift was gradual, a slow, organic conversion, but it was there, and he must have known. He spanked me once. I had that hiding coming. During one of his visits, I’d been a punk to Sally, telling her she didn’t know anything, making her feel foolish, and when he called me on it, I asked him who he was to show up and start telling
me how to behave. So he took me across his knees. I had begun to be afraid of him, but after he actually hit me I was in a fury, though not so much that I could miss the defeat in his shoulders as he turned away from me once the job was done. I wasn’t a Rascal anymore.

  During another visit to New Haven, he sat on my mother’s red couch with his loafers resting on her brown pine coffee table. The sight of those dirty New York shoes with sidewalk on the bottom of the soles and their hard leather heels splayed out on the pristine varnished surface worried me. “Dad,” I finally said, “maybe you should take your shoes off of Mom’s new table.” He turned his head toward me. A crude, slovenly glint came into his eye. “I’ll do what I want, Nicky,” he said. Then slowly he dragged the shoes off the table leaving a pair of long, parallel blond gashes in the wood like tire tracks across a squishy lawn.

  As I grew older, in the late morning of his visits there’d be action audible from the schoolyard and suddenly the prospect of spending an entire Sunday with my father was too much to bear. So I began to do what I normally did on weekends. I said, “I’m going to go play baseball for a while in the schoolyard,” and I’d slip out of the house, leaving him with Sally. Once he did come with me for a father-and-son game of catch, but only once. By the time we might have done it a second time, I’d decided that I didn’t want that guy throwing things at me.

  At school, a girl named Joanie brought in a mechanical family heirloom to show our class, an Edison-era phonograph that played cylinder-shaped recordings and had, as part of its apparatus, a tripod. We listened to some brief, scratchy recordings and there was a discussion of the process of invention. Later, during the rush out of the classroom for recess, I brushed against the tripod and it came apart in two pieces. Horror sliced through me. “Ooh, Nicky, you broke it,” sang out pudgy Felice, who never missed anything. “No, I didn’t, Felice,” I said quickly, and in haste began screwing the thing back together, hoping nobody else saw, especially yellow-haired Christine with that liquid gaze of hers that remained composed and farsighted even when she laughed. Christine wore quilted jumpers and had a desert-boot-clad older brother named Steve, known to other kids only by his and Christine’s last name, Berman, and revered by me because he was related to Christine, could talk to her every day, a privilege he seemed to handle with remarkable composure—I had seen him consulting with her in the school hallway. I used to imagine myself in his place, seated at supper in the Berman house on Everit Street, asking her to pass the peas.

  Joanie brought the phonograph home and the next few days went by without any mention of the tripod. But maybe it had simply been placed in a closet, the damage still waiting to be discovered. Joanie had been in my class every year, a kind, understated, knee-socks sort of girl with black hair and a smile that made her seem unprotected and shy because she half closed her eyes and hung her head when she did it. Nobody could have had a thing against her, except now me. I feared and avoided her. I avoided Christine too. I was unworthy. For many months I tried to resolve the situation in my mind, some days standing by the front window in our house and agreeing that if, say, seven cars went by before I took another breath, all was well with the tripod. If that was too easily accomplished, it became seven cars with out-of-state license plates. Tripod. Tripod. Tripod. Tripod. I reviled the sound. When Uncle Tony happened to mention his telescope’s tripod, at the word I startled, felt something wormwoody in my belly. Finally, after the school year ended, I confessed to my mother. She walked over to the telephone and called Joanie’s parents. The tripod was fine. But now Christine’s family was moving away from New Haven. More than anything I wanted to say goodbye to Christine, to talk to her, to tell her…tell her what? I hadn’t the words. Falling back on my bookshelf for guidance, I thought of Tom Sawyer doing handstands in front of Becky Thatcher’s house after which she tossed him a pansy. Soon enough Tom had proposed and Becky had accepted. I left our house and walked over to Everit Street. That I did not know how to do a handstand failed to occur to me then. When I reached Christine’s white house, I slowed a little as I passed by. Nothing happened. At the corner, I reversed course for a second lap, and this time, feeling braver, I stopped in front of the picture window. No lights were on, all was still in there, and the lawn, I noticed, wanted cutting and weeding. Christine, it turned out, had already left town. When I got older, I used to find myself awakening from pleasant dreams in which my head had rested on a lap of quilt.

  All day I was hungry, wanted to eat everything. During school I buried my nose in the purple chemical scent of freshly mimeographed classroom assignments and was also drawn to dipping my licking finger into the sultry, fragrant murk of the paste jar. At home, where there were no snack foods, I resorted to drinking pickle juice and eating uncooked egg noodles—they crunched down to a tasty mulch. Visiting my mother’s friends the Pollaks over on Everit Street, I sampled everything the older Pollak girls said was good, including dog biscuits. That a dog would enjoy them made sense to me; I did too, especially the green ones.

  To pay for better snacks, I began to work. Through my grammar school years, I mowed grass, raked leaves, and shoveled the snow off walks in my January boots, and with my take went hurrying down to the corner commissaries along Orange Street where I spent everything I’d earned on more bubblegum than ever—pounds of it—and now also Creamsicles, fruit pies shaped like my grandfather’s tobacco pouch, Slim Jim sausages with their list of ingredients filled with long words I could not pronounce, coffee cakes, Good & Plenty, Red Hot Dollars—quarter-sized and not hot at all—Danish pastries laden at the center with enormous ponds of sweet cheese, honey-flavored cough drops, milk-chocolate-covered shortbreads, a radioactive-orange-colored cheese puff called Jax, and barbecued potato chips, unbearably delectable with their blackened edges and fiery-red-dusted surfaces. All of it was washed down with bottles of red cream soda—identical in flavor to regular cream soda, yet somehow superior—and then, in an instant, everything was gone, leaving a moraine of empty bags, bottles, wrappers, and split plastic straws.

  It was an itch, a yearning, a voracious, insatiable desire for salt and sugar that could be truly satisfied only when I discovered a source that seemed in some mysterious way to modify those cravings—a little store we called Cheap Joe’s. Cheap Joe’s was beyond our neighborhood, down past Orange Street at the end of a long block of resigned little green and off-white houses with their curtains pulled and oil spots in the narrow driveways. The faltering porches smelled of old cooking, and many of the people I passed outside on the sidewalk were edgy, dead-eyed. Behind locked backyard gates, barking dogs strained on rusty chains. I used to feel excited going along the route, thinking that there was an unexplored world out there that had a truthfulness entirely its own.

  Cheap Joe’s was all ramshackle integrity and vague disrepute, had the corn-syrupy, cheap commercial glamour of a crossroads grocery in the rural South. On the shabby sign outside was painted a bottle of 7-Up, and a jumble of other garish advertisements were plastered up on the washed-out interior walls. As I came through the door into the dim, mildewy room, I could make out all manner of groceries crowded right up to the ceiling, from rolls of chicken loaf to cans of coffee, bottles of Wink soda, and faded boxes of detergent. No doubt they sold milk and all the other staples, though I never saw anyone buy anything there except candy. Why would they? A scarred wooden counter was to the left of the entrance and behind the counter were sagging shelves jammed with a sugary convergence, a florid, glittering display of tantalizing confection that was so much in contrast with the dank surroundings that it transcended what it was, bringing to mind an arcade or a holiday carnival. Guarding the treasure was Joe, a well-fed man in a beef-stained white apron with a pecuniary glint in his eye, who must have won his nickname by taking his place in the lineage of kid-hating candy store owners, though I always admired him: all this was his. There was a conformity to the candy sold at most stores, a selection of the same brand-name mints, gums, and chocolates. Nobody went to Jo
e’s for Life Savers or a Hershey Bar. What he offered was louche, decadent, original. There was Gold Rush and Rain-Blo, crystal chunks of rock candy, enormous, confetti-colored jawbreakers, wax lips, wax soda bottles filled with colored goop, and the flat, round, soda-flavored Bottle Caps. You could buy Mexican Hats and Hot Tamales, Mike and Ikes, Now and Laters, Squirrel Nuts, Tart ’n’ Tinys, Ice Cube chocolates, which were misleading because there was nothing cold about them, and long dowels of bubblegum wrapped in colorfully striped plastic. Over here were Kits and down there Tangy Taffy and Sky Bars and Pixy Stix and Lemonheads and Boston Baked Beans and giant SweeTarts, which made your tongue bleed when you licked them, and, speaking of licking, Lik-M-Aids, a high-concept, labor-intensive operation involving the use of the applicator, a chalky white candy stick you dampened in your mouth and then plunged into the sleeves of sour fruit powder before sucking off the clinging filaments. There was candy named after cows and weapons, and candy-shaped jewels and candy-shaped pacifiers. There was more, much more, new varieties on every visit, and, though I could never try it all, I wanted to: the fundamental attraction was the excitement of becoming a connoisseur of my own particular vice.

  There was a time in my life when I put every cent I had into the pinguid palm of Cheap Joe right down to the silver Kennedy half-dollars my Grandma Rebecca had given me for an early birthday with instructions that “you should save them because they will be worth something someday.” The ache for candy really was semihysterical—beyond reason.