The Crowd Sounds Happy Read online

  Our New Haven backyard turned out to be the furthest thing from Elysium, though there was scarcely time to register the scatter of weeds, rusted cans, and broken glass before my mother made them disappear. Portions of the small asphalt patio near the back steps had shattered into loose pieces. Not much could be done with the patio, but beyond it my mother planted grass and flowers, built a red sandbox with a hinged, green cover to keep the stray cats from using it as a litter box, and she assembled from a kit a dome-shaped red and white climbing gym. Every clear day my shirts and socks flapped on the clothesline high above my head, while even higher, like flags on a halyard, was our neighbors’ laundry. In the summer our yard was shaded by trees whose medium height meant they had grown up after the 1938 hurricane and the subsequent outbreak of Dutch elm disease that together had largely denuded the city’s canopy. I had a toy dump truck and a crane that could do nothing but roll, and a real shovel with which I was digging a hole to China. When I hit a cache of broken dishes, I believed I had reached Peking.

  Every night before bed we huddled in close on either side of our mother in our pajamas on the daybed, close enough to feel the warm, soft flannel of her nightgown while she read to us for hours that might have been days, so intense was the dual experience of sitting there, cushioned as a compass in a binnacle, free to enter all those big, spacious, other worlds. The books she tended to select were historical fictions with titles like The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Calico Captive, Across Five Aprils, and Johnny Tremain. The protagonists were usually young, and there were as many boys for me as there were girls for Sally. Most of the books had been checked out of the public library downtown, but the copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that my mother read from belonged to us, which made it possible, when I became frightened by an illustration of the Wicked Witch of the West, for my mother to go to her sewing basket, remove her pinking shears, snip the plate right out of the book, and show me that she was locking it away in her bureau, beyond my reach. That she had elected to imprison the page was better than throwing it away, because I knew that my mother was in command of that witch. The top bureau drawer, along with my mother’s two desk drawers, were the only places in the house that I had never investigated. They were off-limits to me, my mother’s private spaces.

  My mother read with such clarity and expressiveness from those books that to this day I can bring back long descriptions from them in her voice: Revolutionary Boston stretching itself awake in morning outside as indoors, up in the Lapham family attic, two apprentice silversmiths wallow in the bed they share with Johnny Tremain, while Johnny, seething with energy, gets dressed in his leather britches, orders them to “look sharp,” and then calls the lazier one “a pig-of-a-louse” and the feel of the night when Johnny and Cilla Lapham take Cilla’s feverish baby sister, Isannah, down to the wharf, where in the cool harbor air Johnny tells them about his beautiful mother, who brought him up on her own by sewing and sewing until she coughed herself to death.

  But it was the many Laura Ingalls Wilder books that made the most striking impression. I liked spunky brown-haired pioneer-girl Laura so well I half thought of myself as she—until we got to Farmer Boy, the story of Laura’s future husband, Almanzo Wilder’s, childhood on an upstate New York farm. So many interesting things happened to Almanzo at ages not much more than mine. Prohibited by his stern and distant father, James, from ever handling the family’s sleek Morgan horses, young Almanzo raised instead a clumsy pair of red cattle named Star and Bright, teaching them how to pull and turn together. He milk-fed a huge pumpkin that won a prize at the county fair; he saw his diminutive schoolmaster, Mr. Corse, defeat the lumpen bullies from Hardscrabble Hill with a huge blacksnake ox-whip supplied, Almanzo later learned, by his father, James; he planted corn and potatoes, sheared sheep, hauled timber, pulled molasses candy and then fed it to his pig, which got its mouth stuck shut, made ice cream in a tub using custard and ice chipped off a block by hatchet. But his favorite food, fried apples ’n’ onions, sounded much better than it tasted when my mother cooked some up for us to try. Toward the end of the book, Almanzo discovered a man’s ample pocketbook lying in the road to town, found a way to get it back to the owner, and was rewarded, first in a small, grudging way by that owner, who was a pinchpenny, and then extravagantly by an intervening shopkeeper who indignantly forced the ungrateful miser to give Almanzo a large sum. James Wilder disapproved of this. Then the shopkeeper offered to make Almanzo his apprentice. Back at home, over supper, James listened to Almanzo answer his question about his plans for the reward money by telling his father that he would put it toward buying a young Morgan horse of his own. In a burst of emotion at this day which had made clear that his son was both honest and hoped to follow him in life, James gave Almanzo Starlight, the family’s prize colt. I made my mother read us that book several times, and whenever James Wilder smiled and said, “Son, you leave that money in the bank. If it’s a colt you want, I’ll give you Starlight,” my throat would fill and I would feel unable to speak for many seconds.

  I wanted to be a Farmer Boy too. One summer evening in New Haven, my mother, Sally, and I sat having supper as filmy beams of late-day sunlight streamed through open windows. My mother had cooked mixed frozen vegetables as part of our meal, and after separating the corn niblets from the carrot cubes, peas, lima and green beans, I grouped the corn off to the side of my plate. After dinner I announced that I would now be planting my corn crop in the backyard. My mother said fine. She walked behind me as in my palm I carried my damp yellow hoard through the back hall and down the steps. Then she advised me while I chose an arable-seeming patch of ground over by the fence where with a trowel I dug my furrow. By the time the corn niblets were evenly distributed in the dirt, they’d shriveled so much they were small and wan as baby teeth. I covered them up and watered them over the next few days until it was clear they would not grow. As I got older, I often thought about that evening, what my mother had sought to cultivate by encouraging me. I decided she believed there were things that nobody should tell you about; you had to find out for yourself.

  The sidewalk in front of our house was made of black asphalt, not a smooth tar-surfaced macadam, but a cruder and more astringent hardness that to the bare knee was gritty as black sandpaper. The sidewalk was the crossroads, the railroad tracks, the big Mississippi, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon all together, a twenty-five-foot stretch of epic landscape; it was the whole world delimited—my territory. Close to the ground as I was, I knew every fossa and contour, and thought of them the way a surveyor does his swamps, vales, cliffs, and lakes: the sidewalk’s jagged cracks, the slits of crevasse, the crumbling edgework, the volcanic eruption caused by a bulging tree root, the filmy lagoon of moss in one shallow—it glowed iridescent after a wet spring fortnight—the pale blots of discarded chewing gum that could take months to disappear, the rhododendron that never once flowered, the traces of hopscotch chalk, the dusty red berries fallen from one of the two evergreen bushes next to the porch, and deep beneath those bushes, where a rake could not easily reach, the decomposing tree leaves wadded together and smelling of mellow rot. Here on my sidewalk was the indelible cycle of life, the colored leaves that meant fall; snow and ice in all their frigid winter thicknesses and densities; a scatter of twigs and branches that were the measure of March breezes; the maple samaras that in late May came helicoptering to the ground where I searched for the longest of these winged seedlings to snap in half and stick to my nose—Pinocchio!; and the footsteps that trod to different sounds on each of these accumulations.

  The windfall came from our two tall trees that stood on the dirt meridian between the sidewalk and the street. At the base of one of the trees, a gnarled round burl had formed that resembled a stool seat. I used sometimes to sit on it in summer, resting my feet on the curbstone, taking in a tableau holding the “No Parking Here to Corner” sign across the street, the stout celandine yellow fire hydrant with its valve plugs protruding from either side like hands on hips, a
nd all the houses and sidewalks that faced me. No two houses on Willow Street had the same sidewalk. Though most sections were concrete, they were built with squared integuments that ranged from a smooth milky white to a pebbled putty color, making the block as a whole resemble a boxed assortment of chocolates. The small brass plates sunk into a couple of the concrete slabs by paving firms or city utilities were scarabs to me, and though I didn’t understand why our asphalt should not be adorned in brass, I accepted it as the way of things. Likewise, on a visit to another town I saw a red hydrant and was at first horrified by the lack of uniformity in the world, and then quickly became a backer of yellow, just as I had superior thoughts about New Haven’s fleet of white fire engines when taken to a strange city where I saw a red pumper go by. I was a fierce partisan of my ordered terrain.

  And then something would intervene to disturb the order. One day there was a dead bird lying on the sidewalk, the bird’s dark feathers limp and greasy-slick, its beak a brittle, sickly yellow. I stared at the bird, the swarming insects beginning to devour its eye. “Don’t touch it” I heard my mother say even though I was alone.

  Another afternoon I came outside to find a woman standing in front of our house holding a paper grocery sack out of which the bottom had dropped, leaving her feet surrounded by a turbid pool of oozing eggshells, shattered bottle glass, a splatter of fruits and vegetables. A can had rolled several feet away from her. It was spring, but a bonnet was tied tight under her chin, and she wore taut little rubber boots and a dun-colored trench coat that was too short, revealing ankles no wider in circumference than the riding stick of my hobby horse. Her pallid chin and gray cheeks stretched to a bitter point at her nose, and in her eyes was an expression of such cold, barren despair that I turned and ran without offering to help her.

  In the rambling blue Queen Anne house next door, up under the eaves in the third floor garret lived a mother and her son who was about my age. His name was Lazlo. Once Lazlo came into a bulk package of Kit Kat candy bars, more candy than I had ever seen in one place. He gave me a bar and I ate it while he did the same, the smooth milk chocolate giving way to the pleasingly crinkled crepe-paper-like interior layers of wafer. It was remarkable how quickly you could eat a Kit Kat. That evening I thought of Lazlo up there enjoying as many Kit Kats as he liked, and I craved another with such ardor and pining that I became convinced that I was somehow entitled to more. The next day I hurried to find Lazlo. As we spoke, all I could think of was my worry that there were no remaining Kit Kats. My head throbbed. I hinted. He didn’t offer. I couldn’t hold out anymore. I asked for a second Kit Kat. “What can you give me?” Lazlo wanted to know. I had nothing. In the evenings at home we had been reading Old Peter’s Russian Tales, which were filled with accounts of greedy fools, cunning gluttons, a collection of horn-swogglers, and a talking golden fish who offered the poor fisherman who spared him his life everything he could think to ask for. The simple, virtuous fisherman was unable to come up with a single thing he lacked, but his wife could. Everything she requested she received, and with each largess her life got worse. Old Peter had a homiletic way of speaking. He said that the fish story was about wanting more than enough, but I overlooked that part. To Lazlo, I said, “I have given you my friendship, the rarest gift of all!”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding like a landowner. “And I have given you my friendship and a Kit Kat.”

  My mother had a slim figure with shoulder-length brown hair the color of sunlit brook water, and she appeared tall to others although she was of no more than average height. To work she frequently wore dangling earrings, red kilts, and dark blue sweaters. With the sweater sleeves rolled up, her sinewy arms seemed poised for manual labor. So erect was her posture that her head and collar fitted together like mortise and tenon. When she smiled she looked like a prettier version of her restrained, Austrian-born mother. When she became lost in thought, she resembled her scholarly and outgoing Russian father.

  In our strict household there never really were many rules. My mother’s expectations flowed so logically from her own comportment that they were easy enough to understand without the aid of codes, injunctions, or prohibitions. Perhaps it was that in Washington everything had been so out of control that now everyone was grateful for routine, but, whatever the cause, Sally and I didn’t have to be told twice never to begin eating before everyone else was served. In the morning, as soon as we were tall enough, we made our beds. Then somebody gave me a penny to buy a piece of Bazooka bubblegum, and that first taste was like offering a dog chopped sirloin—I would do anything for more.

  The ensuing bubblegum ban was grounded in a fierce jurisprudence that led my mother to inveigh in screeds meant not only to stigmatize but abominate. Bubblegum was, she lectured, the bottomless perdition, a silent fiend scoring holes into your teeth even as it was capable of far worse, taking incisors and bicuspids within its terrible sticky grasp and yanking them right out. “You don’t want to end up with real dental problems, Nicky,” she warned. “Son, they’ll plague you for life.” The bubbles themselves were offensive to my mother (“It looks so vulgar, that bulbous thing hanging out of your mouth”) as was the coloring (“that lewd pink”). Her contention that there was “something cheap” about bubblegum she buttressed with expressions of contempt for its physical nature (“You are aware you’re chomping on plastic?”) and abstract character (“It’s a gadget-food, Nicky”). When I went through a period of swallowing the gum, she was aghast—“You can’t digest that!”—and her disapproval broadened: to her it was no less than the embodiment of all that was wrong with the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s—we were a nation on the bubble, artificially sweet.

  Her disapproval did no good. I was so mad for the stuff that I thought all the time about how to get some. When I came into a dollar, I committed my first conscious transgression, sneaking down to Cumberland Farms to invest all of it on one hundred penny pieces of Bazooka. You got a larger chunk of gum for your penny then, and the brown bag I brought it all home in would have held both my shoes. After I ate a dozen pieces, I hid the rest in the backyard sandbox. I remember putting the brown bag in there and closing the hinged green top as I thought about all the days and weeks I would now be in supply. Minutes later I was back for a fresh piece. Then five pieces. They were all gone by nightfall because the flavor didn’t last.

  Directly across from us on Willow Street in a Doublemint-green house lived an old Italian couple whose only child was a vigorous young man named Junior. Junior was beginning a life on his own on our side of the street, down the block from us in an attic apartment he shared with his slim, attractive Irish wife, and, soon enough, their infant son, also called Junior. The old father spent hours every warm day sitting watchfully on his front porch, Umbrian style. After work, Big Junior used to cross Willow Street, still in his business trousers and stripped to a white undershirt, to join his father on the porch. Over the weekend he’d wash his car in his father’s driveway or meet up there with his boyhood friends. Big Junior had been a local baseball star, and as Little Junior got older, I used to observe from my burl stool as Big Junior stood him in his father’s driveway and taught his son to catch and throw. Looking on, I felt oddly outside my own self and would think, I am watching Little Junior grow up. On weekends Big Junior, his wife, and Little Junior would join Big Junior’s parents for Sunday dinner, after which his wife jumped up and did the dishes. Big Junior’s mother would wait for them to leave, and then she’d say “Filthy Irish thing” over and over as she rewashed every plate and fork.

  Also across Willow Street from us, a little down the block to the right of the green house, was a red single-family house that belonged to the Orvilles. The Orvilles’ house frequently came up in conversation at our house, its mention always embellished by my mother with phrases like “sweet little red house” and “pretty little red house.” Red was my mother’s favorite color. Whenever I left our house, instead of looking at the green house, I used to look over at th
e Orvilles’ red house, taking in its clean, simple proportions, studying what my mother liked.

  I missed my father. When I now look at snapshots of my father and me as a young boy—in one I am sitting in a toy fire truck, my father crouched behind, his arms circling my shoulder—I am always surprised by how happy we seem. Since I didn’t see much of him anymore, I tried to compensate by spending time with his photograph. It was a formal portrait that he had gone to a studio to have made. I would sit in our new rocking chair and stare at his handsome bald head for what seemed like hours.

  When my father came to New Haven, he took me to George and Harry’s restaurant, where I tasted fried clams and tartar sauce. After I got home my mother said she’d gone with him there on special days when they were first married, and she too had ordered clams. Over and over he brought me to see again the fire trucks at the Whitney Avenue station and, farther down Whitney, the dinosaur room at the Peabody Museum of Natural History. Once he gave me a children’s book called Little Rascal, which was his nickname for me, and I all but memorized this story of a Wisconsin boy and his pet raccoon.

  During those years I also made a few visits to Washington. My father would come to New Haven, and then drive me back down to Washington in the Rover 2000 sports sedan he’d purchased while my parents were still married. My mother had told him that now with two children they needed a larger car than their tiny Volkswagen Bug. They’d discussed a station wagon, and when my father came home from the car dealer with the Rover instead, he had, my mother said, “a funny hostile look in his eye.” The Rover, with its polished wood-grain fixtures and tooled leather upholstery, had been far too elegant for young children to ride in. Now, however, it was bruised and careworn, and I could be in it.