“Interesting,” my grandfather said.
“Here’s something else you may find interesting: I feel I’d like to inform you that I’m not here for practicing dentistry without a license,” Dr. Storch said. “I thought you should know that. I’ve never told anybody else. I certainly never told Hub Gorman.”
My grandfather waited.
“The reason I’m here is that one day I had a little boy in my chair, a very nice, well-mannered twelve-year-old boy named Walter Onderdonk. And for reasons that remain beyond my understanding, I made a mistake with the gas. A big mistake. A terrible mistake.” Dr. Storch started to cry softly. And even though he was a German, and a nudnik, and a pain in the ass, my grandfather put his arm around the poor bastard.
“Oh,” Dr. Storch said.
He pointed to the northeast. My grandfather felt his heart leap. A star had popped loose from its constellation and gone rolling down the sky. It was falling, but it was not a falling star. It did not flare up and wink out and leave a glowing ghost mark on the retinas. It just kept falling, and falling, and falling, until it disappeared behind the curvature of the earth. It was a prisoner of gravity like everything in the universe. Its orbit would degrade. It would spiral inward until it hit the air and then burn up and break apart and leave nothing but vapor and a memory. And then in time the memory itself would fade like vapor. But to my grandfather, watching secretly from the roof of the Wallkill prison, the passage of that chunk of radiant metal seemed to describe an everlasting arc of freedom. “Wow,” he said. “Look at that.”
“Sputnik!” Dr. Storch said with a childish glee.
My grandfather thought about correcting Dr. Storch. It was not Sputnik itself, which was far too small to be seen by the naked human eye. What they had seen was a section of the rocket that had boosted the satellite into orbit, burnished by the rays of the imminent sun. He decided that for now he would let it pass. “Thanks,” he said instead. “Thank you, Storch, for bringing me to see it.”
“Please,” Dr. Storch said. “It’s the least I could do.”
A feather of blue brushed the bottom of the sky like breath on a mirror. It was time to get back to their cells. Neither of them moved. They stood there on the roof in the darkness. I want to see it again, my grandfather thought.
“Well,” Dr. Storch said. “Shall we . . . What shall we do?”
My grandfather was surprised to find that he had an answer ready for this question, and surprised by the answer itself, though he saw now that it had been percolating inside him since the day of the sugar heist in Dr. Wallack’s office.
“How about we make ourselves a rocket?” said my grandfather.
28
I never knew my other grandfather. One afternoon about a month before I was born, he sat down with his brother—Sam Chabon, my Uncle Sammy—for their weekly lunch at a midtown deli where, on every table in the place of butter, they put out a pot of schmaltz. When they had finished their pastrami sandwiches, my other grandfather walked Sammy back to the latter’s offices, on the fourth floor of the Lincoln Building, a couple of blocks away. One of Sammy’s suppliers had just delivered a sample, a working model of the nuclear submarine Nautilus, which they were planning to bring out in time for Christmas. It was, Sammy said, a marvel. It had functional ballast tanks that operated by means of a pocket-size circular bellows and a length of plastic tubing. A large washtub had been brought in to the office and filled with water. The salesmen had been playing with it all morning. My other grandfather was eager to get a crack at it.
The elevators that served the Lincoln Building’s lower floors were undergoing maintenance that day. Neither brother was a patient man. They took the stairs. As he rounded the third-floor landing, Sammy heard his brother, a flight of stairs below him, cluck his tongue and sigh as if experiencing a moment of regret. An ambulance was sent for, but my other grandfather died on the way to the hospital.
Three weeks later my mother went into labor. She was twenty and made quick work of the job. Eight days after that I exchanged my foreskin for the dead man’s Hebrew name. In my non-memory of my other grandfather, he is a human spaldeen, round and pink. His cheeks and pate shine as if smeared with rich fat.
My other grandfather had made a living all his life as a printer and typesetter. During the thirties he worked for a firm that printed movie posters. In the same West Side loft building as the print shop, there was a company that dealt in cheap novelties and tools for practical jokers. One day he happened to hear that the novelty company had an opening for a salesman. He passed the word to his kid brother, who got the job.
Sam Chabon went on the road selling onion gum, black soap, ink-squirting boutonnieres. He had an affable nature threaded with a strand of cruelty, and like a fat chef he took pleasure in his stock in trade. But by the early fifties his career had stalled. Raises came less frequently. Promotions passed him by. His ideas were ignored or misappropriated. He went through life trying doorknobs on locked doors. One day he found a knob that turned.
On a wet Friday afternoon at Jack Dempsey’s in 1954, he struck up a conversation with his neighbor at the bar. The man, like Uncle Sammy, was nursing a Tom Collins. At his feet in a pool of rain stood a wooden sample case that might hold scientific instruments or specialty glassware. The man turned out to be a chemist for Corning. In his spare time he had designed a process for manufacturing imitation bone from one of the new synthetic plastics that were revolutionizing every field, including cheap novelties, where they made possible gags of great realism like Fake Vomit and Fly in Ice Cube. The chemist showed my uncle what was in the sample case. He stood it upright on the bar and opened it like a book. Nestled in flocked notches on the left side were a human mandible, a femur, two ribs, five vertebrae, and a patella, molded from plastic, all life-size. On the right was a 1:4-scale plastic model of a full human skeleton and a wire stand for displaying it.
Sammy was enchanted by the model skeleton dangling by its three-inch skull from the hook of the wire stand. He shook its little hand. He made it kick a maraschino cherry across the tabletop. He articulated its jaw while talking in the voice of Señor Wences.
“How much do you get for these?” he asked the imitation-bones man. “I love it.”
The imitation-bones man was taken aback and a little offended. His product had serious purpose. It was intended as an educational aid for medical students, biology classrooms. It was a realistic and accurate scientific tool. “I don’t think you understand,” he said. “That’s just a demonstration model. I made it small so it would be portable, fit in a sample case.”
“I don’t think you understand,” Sammy said, knowing a novelty when he saw one. “Make it two inches smaller, I’ll place an order for five thousand of them.”
Two years later he was headquartered in the Lincoln Building and clearing two million dollars a year. His angle was science and educational value. The novelties he sold purported, at least implicitly, to prepare America’s youth for the challenges of a Cold War future. His product list included a Paper Airplane Wind Tunnel and a Pocket Periscope, but the sales leader had remained the Exact Skeleton Model, advertised in national magazines (“Obviously a must for everyone’s closet”), shipped in the hundreds of thousands to purchasers all over the world.
By 1957, however, business had begun to flag. There was competition from Japan, as accurate but cheaply made mini-skeletons flooded the market. Uncle Sammy looked for ways to lower his production costs. He ran into labor trouble, union activity. One day a pinochle crony happened to mention that he played golf with the fellow in charge of a state program that provided prisoner labor to private manufacturers in return for vocational training. That was how the so-called Bone Factory had come to occupy a production floor at the prison where my grandfather served his sentence.
Sammy paid regular visits to Wallkill, keeping an eye on operations. At first he stayed at an inn in the village nearby, but there was a guest room in the warden’s house on the grounds, an
d after Sammy showed up two or three times bearing a bottle of the warden’s brand of rye, he received a standing invitation to sleep there whenever he visited. He could have let his production manager handle the chore, but, like many visitors, he found something soothing in the ambience of the prison with its dairying and forestry, its choral group singing chanteys and spirituals, its population making themselves useful, sweeping the winding paths between ivy-clad buildings. He had come to see himself as harried by work and hectored by his family, and when he visited the prison, he would fantasize that he, too, had been relieved of his burdens along with his liberty. He slept well in the warden’s guest room, waking refreshed, and would return to the city ready to contend with the latest importunements.
He was standing at the window of the guest bedroom early one morning, still in his pajamas, when he noticed a group of men walking across the oval of the running track. Two of the men were uniformed guards, two were prisoners in gray, and one appeared to be the warden, in a plaid hunting jacket and galoshes, walking beside a boy of twelve or so, the grandson. Theodore. One of the prisoners was a fireplug, chesty and bowlegged, humping a large packing crate. The other prisoner was tall and thin and walking backward in front of the prisoner with the big box. He was talking with his hands. Every so often he stumbled, and once he bumped into a guard, but he never stopped walking backward or talking. Even at a distance of a hundred yards, Sammy pegged the guy for a nudnik.
When the five men came to the wire fence that enclosed the dairy pasture, the guards and the warden struggled over it. The nudnik folded himself like a note and slid his body into the slot between the wires. The fireplug hoisted the crate over the fence, consigned it to the guards—it took both of them to hold it—and leapfrogged a fence post with both hands. The guards gave him back the packing crate. The nudnik hung back a moment and then followed the fireplug out into the pasture. It was just past sunrise and there was not a cow to be seen.
Sammy went to his overnight bag and took out his own personal pair of Powerful Pocket Binoculars. He saw the warden holding the boy back, the guards keeping their distance, not going much beyond the fence. The fireplug carried the box deeper into the pasture, coming right into line with the window of the warden’s guest bedroom. He moved fast and the nudnik struggled to keep up.
The two prisoners began to empty and assemble the crate’s contents into a configuration that left Sammy puzzled. As far as he could tell, they had stood a long slender cage of latticework on end in the middle of the field. It reached nearly to the fireplug’s waist and seemed to have been made out of some kind of wire or narrow-gauge pipe. The two men anchored it to the turf with wire cleats. The fireplug removed what appeared to be a length of pipe from the box, fitted at one end with vanes. Some kind of turbine, maybe, or an anemometer. It was lowered into the latticed cage. The prisoners knelt down on either side of the thing, making adjustments. The fireplug had his back to Sammy, and his body blocked the view of whatever they were up to for a good two or three minutes. The warden fit a cigarette to his face and one of the guards lit it for him.
At last the nudnik clambered back, stumbling, in a hurry—afraid, Uncle Sammy almost would have said. The fireplug rose and took ten slow steps backward, then counted another ten. He stopped. The warden and the guards came away from the fence and crowded in behind the fireplug, who seemed to be in charge of the operation.
Toward the bottom of the latticed cage, a light kindled, intense and blue. It was like the powder burst of a camera, but it was not a flash. Its light held as it grew downward toward the ground. Presently, my great-uncle caught the sound of it, even through the window glass. It reminded him of the sound of water spraying from a fire hydrant tapped by street kids on an August afternoon. It was a sound that filled him with a pleasant anticipation of mischief.
With a shimmy and a hesitation, the finned tube that Sammy had taken for a wind gauge peeped its head out from the top of the latticework cage. It took one slow second to climb twenty feet into the air and then two more seconds to streak, an arcing shimmer, into the heavens, canted two degrees off the perpendicular. Sammy lost sight of the thing against some clouds and then, a moment later, in a patch of blue five hundred feet higher, found it again. His heart slipped its accustomed bonds.
“A rocket,” he said to the guest bedroom of the warden’s house.
It burst like a kernel of popcorn, sprouting a sudden white blossom that turned out to be a parachute.*
Thin and high, the boy’s voice carried to Sammy’s ear: Wow! The kid was literally jumping up and down with excitement as the rocket—a rocket!—floated, broken-necked, down from heaven. The nudnik waited for it, drifting now this way, now that way, head tilted back, a center fielder getting under a lazy can of corn. As the rocket slanted past him, he leaped up and snatched at it, and missed it, and fell over, and lost his glasses. The rocket lay down on the grass. The parachute draped itself over the rocket. The nudnik found his glasses. He picked up the rocket and the chute and carried them back to the fireplug. The two prisoners shook hands, without letting go, for as long as it took the warden and the guards to reach them. Pats on the back, more shaking of hands all around.
Sam tried to express, in that moment, the spasm of joy passing through him as he watched the launch of my grandfather’s first model rocket.
“I could sell a ton of those things,” he said, fogging the windowpane, wiping it clean with the cuff of his pajamas.
29
I was stretched out on the sofa in my mother’s living room, reading Nine Stories. It was a sofa of the seventies, covered in synthetic wool of lunar gray, poufy yet severe. Beyond my bare feet, a set of sliding glass doors gave onto a redwood deck. At the back of the house the hillside fell away with alarming verticality. The trees here had been topped to permit constant monitoring, as by some fairy-tale miser, of the two-bridge view in which a puzzling percentage of the house’s value was felt to lie. Down below at the western verge of Oakland, car lights scrolled along the interchanges like cryptic headlines on a zipper. San Francisco was an amber radiance of fog.
I can’t say for sure which of the nine I was reading when my mother came in that night, but my favorite has always been “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor.” From the first time I read it, in high school, this story and its protagonist had reminded me of my grandfather. The scant details I’d been provided at the time about his army career—ETO, a brief stay in London before being shipped over to France, some kind of intelligence work portrayed variously as “clerical in nature” or “nothing too exciting”—seemed to coincide with the situation of Salinger’s autobiographical Sergeant X.* Nobody had ever used the phrase “nervous breakdown” or suggested that my grandfather had not returned from the war with his “faculties intact,” as Esmé puts it in the story. I had never thought of my grandfather as a man suffering from lingering effects of the condition his generation called “combat fatigue.” And yet Salinger’s story seemed to offer an explanation for something about my grandfather that must have felt to me, always, like it needed to be explained.
My mother came in holding a glass of Scotch, which she took poured over a handful of ice. She had on an old pink nightgown, wrapped in a brown chenille robe. It was late. The night nurse had been on the job for a couple of hours, time my mother had spent combing out tangles in my grandfather’s taxes. Apparently, she had found an error in my grandfather’s favor that would save him nearly a thousand dollars. That explained the tumbler of Johnnie Walker. She was holding an old photo album, bound in black cardboard impressed to resemble grained leather. The spine at top and bottom had split and frayed.
“Hey, I wanted to show you this,” she said.
She sat down beside me. Her hair was damp and she smelled of Prell shampoo. It was her essential odor, cool as mint and somehow impervious. The actual fragrance of Prell was not at all minty, but it had a mentholated color and in the old TV commercials, a pearl would be shown descending languid and impervious thro
ugh the green depths of a bottle of Prell. I never figured out what the ability of Prell to retard a pearl’s descent implied about its hair-cleaning power, but the sight of that descent, like my mother, was always quietly impressive. As she sat down beside me on the Herculon sofa, the photo album snowed gray feathers of rotted paper.
“This was your grandmother’s.”
Across the album’s cover in a slab-serif type, the word souvenirs was stamped in gilt that had flaked away. There was a kind of fake-leather strap that wrapped around the album’s front edge from back to front, where it snapped into a clasp, like a diary with no lock. I was pretty sure I had never seen the thing before.
“I don’t know what all he’s been telling you,” my mother said.
I thought her tone held something accusatory, of my grandfather or of me for my narrative appetite. But I might have been wrong about that.
“He’s not telling me anything.”
“I heard him telling you about my mother.”
“Well, yeah.”
“And how I had to go live with Uncle Ray while he was serving time.”
“Yeah, he told me that.”
She had a certain eyebrow arch of her own that she could wield. I acknowledged that my grandfather, come to think of it, might have been telling me some things.
“Well, I just thought you might like to see this. It was one of the two belongings my mother brought over with her.”
“What was the other thing?”
“Me.”
“Oh, right, duh.”
“I took it with me to Baltimore,” she said. “When I went to live with Uncle Ray. I found it in the attic right before we moved.”
“In the house in Ho-Ho-Kus?”
“We were packing to leave. Your grandmother had already gone into the hospital. I found this and just kind of grabbed it. I don’t know why. I’d never seen it before.” She ran a finger across the flaking gilt legend on the cover. “Souvenirs, as in memories in French.” She drank a little of the Scotch. Her eyes widened and she let out a gasp. “Whoa.”