The Crowd Sounds Happy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  He was my only father. I continued to see him out of some combination of guilt and also fear at what he might do if I refused. In the world he was ill. To me he had always been threatening, someone who knew where I was and could come after me. It was more. There was the knowledge that whatever he did to me every month or two could not compare with what the typhoons inside his head were doing to him every day. For thirty years he had been a guy whose life was behind him, a guy who stayed too long at community center coffees, ate in lousy restaurants by himself, stopped along city sidewalks to strike up a chat with strangers who looked back uneasily. Even when I was lying exhausted on my bed after a gruesome telephone conversation, I thought about what it must have been like to be a young man of such intelligence, talent, and promise and to have it all washed away like sand on the beach; to confront me, this person formed in his image, and to look at me beginning to make my way free of the impediments that had taken him down.

  By this time, I knew that my father was always comparing us—our looks, our intelligence—and I used to hate that, but in a way he was doing only what I had been doing for a very long time. I had formed myself in terms of him. Not becoming my father became a daily act of will. Through my twenties I remained mostly single. I worked every weekend. I studied people cautiously before I showed them anything of myself. I ate and exercised with care. From the age of twenty-two, I built a savings account for my future children’s college education. I felt I wasn’t entitled to fall in love until I’d proved I could handle the long-range responsibilities that came with it. With women, I tried to be the perfect boyfriend—generous and devoted. All along, it never occurred to me that my self-sufficiency was making it hard for other people. A woman I went out with for a few years told me afterward, “You were so loving and sweet to me, but you were always slipping out of my grasp.”

  My grandmother owned a photograph of my father running in a road race, his head thrust back, mouth hugely agape for oxygen. Out running myself one day, I caught myself with that mouth, that carriage, and had to stop.

  My hair began to thin. I found myself checking my reflection in shop windows, hoping and praying not to see any change. Sitting in the barber stool, I kept my eyes closed. But there were tufts around the drain every time I took a shower. I knew Graham Greene’s view in The Third Man: “There must be something phony about a man who won’t accept baldness gracefully.” But I was upset at this all out of proportion, in a way that other people couldn’t understand. It was that there was nothing I could do about it. I would look like him.

  In 1991, my father came to my grandmother’s house for Thanksgiving. During the meal, there was a conversation about the Supreme Court confirmation of Clarence Thomas. After we’d eaten our turkey, my grandmother brought out a cake for my birthday, which was to be a few days later. My father burst out into a loud chorus of “Happy Birthday.” During moments of celebration, my father often wandered off into puerile or antagonistic terrain. Sure enough, instead of “Dear Nicky,” he sang “Dear Stupid.” His second verse concluded with a crescendo, “Stand up! Stand up! Stand up and show us your ugly face!” I rolled my eyes and blew out the candles, and we resumed our discussion until my father recalled that one of the boys my sister had dated back in college was black. In a sudden fury, he glared at Sally and warned her not to marry “a nigger.” Then he snarled the same instructions at me. I asked him to cut it out. His eyes gleamed with anger and excitement. He said it again: “Listen, Nicky, if you ever marry a nigger, don’t expect me to show up for the wedding.” The futility of investing so much time and thought for so long in him came over me. Lost time was his tragedy, and now it was becoming mine. My friends were all settling down, advancing in their fields, making families, going on with their lives. In many ways, I was nowhere. I didn’t want to be angry; it just wasted you. I got my coat and left. My father followed me out of the building, calling in a soft, almost keening voice, “My son, my son,” as I walked away.

  Those turned out to be the last words he ever said to me. Since I could remember, he had been my duty. Now I decided I couldn’t see him anymore. It was an impulse decision made across a lifetime. I let everyone in my family know my intentions, unlisted my telephone number and hoped for the best. At first, every bald head I saw approaching me on the sidewalk made me want to turn and run. When I came home at night, I half expected to see him waiting for me again in the foyer. I learned later that someone had given him my address, but he never came.

  When I saw movies or heard songs in which relations between fathers and sons were central themes, I would find myself overwhelmed. Father’s Day for me was like Valentine’s Day for the brokenhearted. It would catch me by surprise every year, and I would slump.

  Once I had made him invisible, I found I could begin to admire him. The reason my father been such a successful college lacrosse player was not that he was unusually gifted; he was a plodding runner in a fast game who tried harder than the others. When the Harvard lacrosse team took showers after practice, there was always one member of the squad missing. That was Donald Dawidoff, out on the darkening field, running extra miles, my father preparing himself.

  I don’t know how many breakdowns he had, how many new prescriptions he submitted to with all their devastating side effects, how many times he put all his possessions out on the curb, how many months he spent in mental hospitals, what he did with all his days and nights, but through everything he regained his hope over and over. It had taken real courage to return to Harvard, the scene of his first public breakdown, and courage to get through every hour of his life. In a letter he wrote to my great-aunt Ann after her husband, Sid, died, he warned her of “the vast abyss you will find. This is not to usurp your experience,” he continued, “nor to pain you more than the present. Only to tell you that I’ve been there, for years and years and more years. Only now, awakening to what is in and around me, I can look back to what a great sense of loss is.” My father never stopped telling people how good the future was going to be. On one level he was spinning straw, but on another he was merely saying that he would keep on.

  On the morning of November 3, 1999, I was finishing breakfast when my sister rang my doorbell. She said, “I have to tell you something. Dad died last night.” A massive heart attack had thrown him to the floor. He was sixty-five.

  We went over to my grandmother’s house, where my father’s sister, my Aunt Judy, sat with me on the couch. She watched me trying to be stoic, and she pulled me into a big hug and said, “Nicky, for God’s sake, child, let it out.” And for the first time since I had left Washington thirty-three years before in the rain, I began to sob for my lost father.

  A memorial service was planned, and I knew this would be my last chance to introduce my father to the people I love. I invited my friends and former girlfriends, none of whom had met my father or knew a thing about him. Then I set out to write a eulogy, a tribute that was both kind and true—that told how things really were with him. I described his struggles with mental illness and the things he hadn’t been able to do. I also wanted to show that there was a way in which my father had always loved me, and I searched for a way to explain it. I kept coming back to the last eight years, when we’d lived in New York together, and how he’d let me alone. I had the sense that this was a great gesture on his part. If my father had never been what I’d wanted him to be, in the end he had found a way to take care of me. That seemed eerie, a father expressing his love for his son by avoiding him, but I believe it.

  Confronting the 2004 elimination by the Yankees in four consecutive playoff games, the Red Sox won the fourth game and then the fifth. The games were contested at night, and each lasted more than five hours, the play so intense that one needed the pauses in between every pitch to regroup and ready oneself for the next one. Pacing, shuddering, calling out to my old Chronomatic 9 that was relaying to me the actions of men who could not hear me, I lost track of time; it could have been morning or afternoon. Afterward I’d lie in bed try
ing to come down, running through the events just passed, possibilities for the game to come, my eyes finally closing through fitful sleeps.

  By day I was warlike, giddy, enervated, irritable, and superstitious enough to believe that my irritability might somehow cost the Red Sox. I made a habit of volunteering for other people’s chores. I became an over-thanker and an over-tipper. Was I neglecting my elderly grandmother? One morning, standing over the sink full of coffee mugs and cereal bowls that I wished I could leave until later, I turned on the water, began to scrub, and had an image of myself as a hunter lost in the spinney—a man doing just what he wanted yet disoriented by his pleasure. I felt drenched in baseball, caught up too much in the extremes of vicarious endeavor, the optimism, the dread, the proximity to ecstasy, misfortune, calamity, and despair. The Red Sox won the sixth game.

  During the afternoon, I would think about the players. As an adult, one inevitably saw ballplayers and ballgames differently from the way one had as a child. It was impossible to ignore the limitation, the avarice, the cupidity of the modern game. Yet with a little effort all this could be overlooked. They could remain the cardboard soldiers from my youth that I still enjoyed playing with. Despite the familiarity of their faces, I did not feel I truly knew them, nor did I want to. As a boy, to build strength, the magnificent hitter Manny Ramirez had run up hills dragging behind him an old automobile tire roped to his waist. With his earnings from pitching, the brilliant, soigné Pedro Martinez built homes for the poor in the Dominican Republic. On the mound, Martinez’s lashy, oval eyes were all full of pride and spark and blue notes. And Ramirez, such a serene and enigmatic flyswatter! The fun was that I had these scraps of their biography and no more, just enough to make up the rest of them—to make them into a separate reality known only to me, to make them mine. The experience enabled the creating of a private relationship with something colossally well known. Being a Red Sox fan depended upon what kind of meaning you could make out of them. I still wanted not only to know the players in my own way, but to love them, and the smallest fragment of truth could ensnare me. In those I did love, I saw possibility for myself and others.

  As the afternoon wore on before the seventh game, I was thinking how very much it felt like a holiday to have the Red Sox still playing games at such a late time in the year. It was a windfall, lagniappe, and really I should not expect anything from them tonight. My team was the unrequited team. I loved them for what they were. I refused to imagine them winning.

  The seventh game was not close. The Red Sox batters pummeled the Yankee pitcher Kevin Brown, an aging star, and a succession of relievers. The Red Sox had won four consecutive games against the Yankees. It was the comeback of comebacks, a sporting miracle that brightened even the days of people who didn’t like baseball. “I just wish I could have been the guy I used to be one more time,” said Kevin Brown. How astonishing to hear a Yankee sounding so vulnerable and human. All despots seem infallible until they topple.

  There was immediately the worry that overcoming the Yankees had been such a heroic accomplishment that there would be no energy left for the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals. Yet the Red Sox players had a nonchalant, sunny, carefree collective personality that seemed immune not only to physical duress but ideally constituted to withstand the whole Boston legacy of doom and loss. They were self-proclaimed “idiots,” “a bunch of earth-pigs” according to relief pitcher Curtis Leskanic, and “borderline nuts” in the view of team manager Terry Francona. Francona meant this in an affectionate way, aware as he was that his players were also surprisingly reasoned in their responses to struggle. “When you slump, it’s like a cold: it has to run its course,” said the unflappable first baseman Kevin Millar.

  No danger of slumping now, as the Red Sox won the first two games from the Cardinals in Boston, traveled to St. Louis, and won the third. It was all happening with an alacrity that had nothing to do with my life with the Red Sox. My sleeps were thick with dreams. I dreamed of my grandfather, wanting to help him watch the games too, telling him “look, look there,” and then weeping when I could not make him live again and see. And I dreamed of myself in a train high over a field on which the Red Sox were playing, I struggling still to see them through the window as the train pulled me out of view.

  My grandmother Rebecca was losing her memory. “Who was your father?” she asked me one day when I visited her.

  “Donald,” I told her.

  “My Donald?” she asked.

  “Yes, Grandma.”

  “He weren’t easy,” she said, and we looked at one another and smiled ruefully.

  On the morning of the fourth game I awoke laughing. I ate a bowl of cereal that tasted uncommonly good while enjoying the newspaper. Outdoors, the New York air smelled fresh, better than what was breathed in the mountains. That night there was to be a lunar eclipse, what Russian peasants called a heavenly portent. All day I tried to stave off optimism and then gave up. Today we would not bend. Today we would prevail. Did baseball help you face emotional truths or was it a way of not confronting them? The answer fluctuated over time. Baseball was a way of looking at things, and the way you looked was not fixed, nor was it random; it was up to you.

  The old reverie of a thousand childhood nights resumed. What would it really feel like for the Red Sox to win the World Series? Would it be a bliss equal to life’s rarest epiphanies? The way I’d felt during my second week with my auburn-haired first girlfriend? The feeling of my first day in Paris where everything looked and tasted better than I had known ordinary life could look and taste? But there was no comparable ordeal followed by redemption in any of that, no overcoming time and memory, no emerging from dense wilderness to find oneself at last in the true Arcadia. Maybe it would be a happy golden day of yore, those celebrations long wanted that had never been. Thanksgiving in my home sweet home at a long table filled with an ensemble of family faces, all of us together, the smell of woodsmoke and orchards. Or a Christmas in holly-decked halls, tidings of comfort and joy, all calm, all bright. Life in the imagination, so different from life. The truly killing melancholies cut closer because they were closer. How would life have been for all of us if there had been no war in Russia or Austria? If my father’s father had not died so young? If my father had not fallen apart? If my aunt had lived? If my mourning uncle had not lost himself? If my mother had found love again? What was it like to come from a happy family? Was that not always what I envisioned when I contemplated the Red Sox victorious?

  When they won the fourth game, I was thrilled, of course. I drank champagne. I answered the telephone to hear the euphoric voices of many friends. It was almost as if I myself had done something. One of the callers was Henry, my grandfather’s student, who told me that he didn’t know what to think because “I am attached to tragedy, but I am also attached to triumph over adversity.” Then the telephone stopped ringing and my apartment grew quiet.

  The longed for moment seemed to linger not at all. It turned out that victory defeated the imagination, that the Red Sox had always fallen short for me in all the right ways. Year after year, my flawed team, my lifelong lost cause had provided me with a sustaining form of suffering. Now that they were winners, I saw that happiness cannot exist without sadness. I felt a male regret. Never again would I hold my glove while wearing spiked shoes.

  I had the feeling I should be elsewhere, should be doing something, going to a special destination. But where would I go? Once, after my father died, I had a conversation with my friend Austin in which he described his childhood spent moving from city to city all over America. “We moved at least ten times,” he said. “A new school almost every year. But every summer we always went for a vacation to this little cottage in Rhode Island, so that became the homestead that I’ll always return to. In some way for you, everything was so confusing in your life, walking on glass, your crazy old man screaming at you. I heard him on your answering machine that day. He was completely nuts. In some way you’ll always be inord
inately attached to the Red Sox because when you needed them they were there for you. Maybe they were your homestead. Maybe they saved you.”

  The end of the baseball season always came unannounced, like traveling in the car and having a radio station you were listening to vanish in a sudden instant as you drove out of range. Precipitately uncoupled, you were left alone with yourself, and there was the impulse to slow down the journey, to turn back and hear more, but you never did.

  I gazed across my room at the pictures of my family on the wall. The faces looked tender and peaceful. The black and white print of my father on the lacrosse field was the picture that had been published in Sports Illustrated. Harvard had played the Naval Academy that day, and in the shot the photographer had captured a line of uniformed cadets marching in formation beside the field as the game went on. All of the cadets were in precise formation, eyes forward, rifles on their shoulders, except for one who had turned his head to watch number 42 in the midst of making his beautiful pass, my father giving the glory to somebody else.

  Speaking of my father, my grandmother told me once, “It’s better to lose with a smart person than to win with a fool.” I hadn’t known what to make of that then, and didn’t now. It was men who called themselves “the idiots” who had finally won for Boston.

  I turned off the light. Sitting there in the dark with my old radio, did I miss the story? It had been a beautiful American story, the team that could never win. In many ways it was the story of man, forever fallen, always striving to overcome his demons, doomed in perpetuity to succumb to the drag of failure. I did not miss the beautiful story. What I missed was what I had missed every year when the season ended and abruptly the radio was quiet. I missed them.

  Source Notes and Acknowledgments