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 Se?or 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, and 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.