Home from the Vinyl Cafe (36 page)

He snorted and wheeled back toward the basement where the kids were. When he opened the basement door, the sound of boisterous children singing Christmas carols came wafting up the stairs.

Dave headed back to the punch bowl and poured himself another glass of eggnog—his fifth. He couldn’t seem to loosen up.

Half an hour later, Bernie Schellenberger lurched by Dave on his way upstairs. Bernie looked like he was being chased by wolves. He was holding his five-month-old daughter in his arms. The baby was howling.

“Every night,” said Bernie.

“When you try to put her down,” said Dave.

“She screams for two hours,” said Bernie.

“You ever try the car?” asked Dave.

“What?” said Bernie.

Dave, who was looking for any excuse to leave the Andersons’, said, “Get your coat.”

Sam had come out of the womb screaming, and every night at bedtime, for the first year of his life, he would lie in his crib and scream.

Morley and Dave would sit in the kitchen, rigid as lumber, and listen to him. They would say things to each other like “We are not going in there. Not tonight. He has to learn.”

Other parents in the neighborhood would find excuses to drop in on Dave and Morley around bedtime, because listening to Sam scream made them feel better about their own children. If mothers were becoming short-tempered with their children, fathers would say, “Could you nip over to Morley’s and see how things are coming with …” and they’d make something up. And their wives would go, because they knew it would do them good.

People who didn’t have children were horrified with the way Dave and Morley could offer them coffee and carry on a conversation while Sam raged against sleep. They would keep glancing toward the stairs. When they left, they would say things like “That was unbelievable. Our children will never do that.”

On the rare nights when Sam stopped crying within an hour, Dave and Morley would glance at each other nervously, and one of them would say, “Maybe I should check him.”

As soon as they opened the bedroom door, he would start crying again.

Once, Dave crawled into Sam’s room on his belly and pulled himself up the side of the crib like a snake, only to come face-to-face with his son. They stared at each other for an awful minute. Then Dave slid back down. Sam smiled and waved. Dave had crawled halfway out of the room before Sam started to cry.

They lived like this for a long time before Dave discovered the car. He took Sam with him to the grocery store one night, and Sam drifted off to sleep in his car seat. And was so soundly asleep he didn’t wake when Dave got him home and carried him to bed.

The next night Dave drove around the neighborhood for an hour before Sam conked out, but it beat sitting at the kitchen table. So every night Dave loaded Sam into the car and drove around until Sam fell asleep. He had to drive less and less each night. Soon Sam was falling asleep within a block of the house. One night he nodded off before Dave got out of the driveway. Eventually, Dave could put Sam in the backseat, start the car, and idle it in the driveway. It was something about the sound of the engine.

One night, instead of putting him in the car, Dave put Sam in his crib and said to Morley, “Watch this.”

He got the vacuum cleaner and carried it into Sam’s bedroom and turned it on and left the room, shutting Sam’s door behind him. Five minutes later, when they opened his door, Sam was out cold.

By the time he was fourteen months, they could put him to sleep by waving the hair dryer over him a couple of times.

Bernie Schellenberger was standing on the stairs at the Andersons’ party, his screaming daughter in his arms, listening intently to Dave’s story.

“Get your coat,” said Dave again. “You’ll see.” Then he said, “I’m going to bring Sam.”

He was thinking, after all those years Sam should see what he put his father through.

When Dave went down the back staircase into the Andersons’ basement, the television was on, but none of the kids were watching it. The videos Polly Anderson had rented to
keep them amused were still piled on top of the TV. The TV was flickering like a yawning eye at a bunch of empty chairs. The twenty kids were at the other end of the room, pressed around the upright piano. Sam, to Dave’s astonishment, had his arms draped around the shoulder of a girl Dave had never seen before. Dave couldn’t see who was at the keyboard, but he recognized the tune. It was “The North Atlantic Squadron”:

Away, away, with fife and drum
Here we come, full of rum,
Looking for women to …

Someone noticed Dave, and the piano stopped abruptly.

Sam said, “Hi, Dad.”

He jumped toward his father and caught his foot on the edge of the piano stool and came down hard on middle C with his face leading. All the kids applauded, and Sam bowed, blood dripping from his nose. He said, “Our family motto is ‘There are sewers aplenty yet to dig.’” Then he wiped his nose, smearing blood across his face and shirt.

Dave said, “I’d like you to come with me in the car. Where is your other shoe?”

Sam looked around. “Beats me,” he said.

Dave held out his hand. “Forget it,” he said. He picked up his son and carried him out to the car.

It took only twenty minutes before the Schellenberger baby was snoozing comfortably.

Bernie couldn’t believe it. “Geez. I’m going to have to buy a car,” he said.

“Try a vacuum first,” said Dave.

Bernie said, “We have central vac.”

“Then move her crib to the basement,” said Dave.

From the back of the car, Sam said, “It’s the physics of baseball that has always fascinated me.”

Dave looked at his boy in the rearview mirror.

Sam waved absently at his father, then pressed his face to the window and started to sing something that sounded like opera.

Carmen?
thought Dave.

Then something awful occurred to him.

Dave slammed on the brakes and squealed to the side of the road. He twisted around in his seat and stared at Sam. “What have you been drinking?” he asked.

“Eggnog,” said Sam.

“From which bowl?”

“From the bowl in the basement, of course,” Sam replied.

Uh-oh, thought Dave.

Bernie Schellenberger said, “Dave?”

Dave looked at Bernie, then he looked at Sam, then he looked at Bernie again. Bernie was pointing. Dave peered into the darkness and spotted three police officers standing on the edge of the road half a block away.

They were manning a roadside check for drunk drivers, and Dave had just fishtailed to a stop in front of them. The cops all had their hands on their hips. The streetlight shining from behind them made them look ominous. The only thing Dave could do was put his car into gear and creep toward them.

Sam pulled himself forward so his head was beside his father’s. “This,” he said, “is an area of jurisprudence that has always interested me.”

Dave pulled up beside the police and rolled down his window. He smiled.

Two of the cops took a step back from the car. The third was shining his flashlight in Dave’s face. He didn’t try to engage
in small talk. He said, “Could I please see your license?” He peered at the license and then looked at Dave and said, “Where are your glasses?”

Without waiting for an answer, he handed Dave a little machine and said, “Blow.”

Dave is not sure who was more surprised to find there was no alcohol in his bloodstream. Dave had, after all, drunk six cups of eggnog.

Dave and the cop were both squinting at the machine when Sam joined the conversation from the back. “Can I blow, too?” he asked.

Dave said, “Maybe that’s not a good idea.”

But the cop, who was friendlier now, said, “It’s okay. I don’t mind.”

Dave said, “Oh, well.”

Sam blew into the little machine.

The cop pointed at it and said, “See, son, if you had been drinking, the arrow would be …” His voice trailed off. He squinted at his machine and took a step backward. He looked at Dave, who shrugged and smiled. He opened the back door of Dave’s car and looked closely at Sam, with the streaks of dried blood across his face, and said, “Is that blood, son?”

Sam said, “Our family motto is ‘There are sewers aplenty yet to dig.’”

The cop frowned and said, “Son, I want you to get out of the car.”

Sam slid over to the far side of the backseat and said, “Come and get me, copper.”

Then he threw up.

Dave folded his head into his arms and rested it on the steering wheel.

The Schellenberger baby started to cry.

So did Dave.

Bernie Schellenberger called a taxi from the police station.

By the time Dave had explained everything and gotten back to the party, the Andersons’ house was dark and locked up. Sam was asleep in the backseat. He didn’t stir when they got him home, and Dave carried him upstairs.

Just like the old days, thought Dave.

Morley was waiting in the living room. The whole house was dark except for the colored lights glowing on the Christmas tree.

“I love it like this,” she said. She was sitting with her legs up on the sofa, an empty cognac glass beside her.

Dave sat at the other end of the couch so their feet met in the middle. They compared stories.

“It took five minutes for the police to get Sam out of the car,” said Dave. “They wouldn’t let me help. When they got him out, he had blood all over him, and he didn’t have a winter coat, and he was missing a shoe, and he was drunk.”

Morley told Dave what he had missed at the Andersons’. “It was like homecoming at a frat house,” she said. “Pia Cherbenofsky got herself into the Christmas tree, and no one saw her until Ted Anderson began to light the candles for the carol sing. Pia was hidden in the branches halfway up the tree, and she started blowing the candles out as fast as Ted could light them.

“At one point,” said Morley, “there were ten adults trying to coax her down with candy.”

Then she told him about the McCormick baby.

“He was missing for half an hour,” she said. “He finally turned up asleep in a laundry hamper with the youngest Anderson boy squatting beside him.”

Bobby Anderson had wrapped himself in an large green terry-cloth towel.

“I’m the three wise men,” burped Bobby. “That’s the baby Jesus.”