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 through 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.”