by James Cook
At the end of the war, every country in the civilized world had embargoed any dealings with the Russians. Pop said they could embargo anything else they wanted but they had no right to deprive the Russian people of food and medical supplies. There were limits to how dehumanizing war could get. And so the Faust pharmaceutical firm proceeded to send drugs and other medical supplies to the Russians all during the years of the embargo. It was quite a merry-go-round—shipments to subsidiaries in Germany and the Netherlands, and then transshipments to Poland, Lithuania, and eventually to Leningrad and Moscow.
I have the impression Pop’s generosity was beginning to strain our finances. In 1921, just around the time Pop went to Sing Sing, Manny decided he was going to go to Russia and try to collect what the government owed us. It was the least the Russians could do, considering all we had been doing for them. It wasn’t quite a money-grubbing expedition. Manny got together an ambulance and a truckload of medical supplies and announced he was delivering them himself, as a mission of mercy. After all, even Herbert Hoover had not hesitated to let humanitarian impulses overwhelm his business instincts.
So Manny took off, sailing on the Berengaria one summer day, a week after Pop went to jail. It was months before we heard anything from him, and then I was away at school. I had long since lost interest in what he was up to.
I had my own life on the fire. After a year at Lafayette, I decided to transfer to Princeton. They had a more ambitious theatre program, the student body was a lot more cosmopolitan, and I liked being only an hour’s train ride from New York. I began hanging around a new theatre company that had opened up on MacDougall Street. in the Village. It was called the Playwrights Company, and it was run by an eccentric old man named Jig Cook and his wife Susan Glaspel. She was a playwright, and she got a lot of talented writers to come write plays for their theatre. One of them was a guy named Gene O’Neill, whom I knew casually for a while. That’s right. The very same one. And I used to go watch some of those early sea plays of his with something akin to awe: The Long Voyage Home, Moon of the Caribbees, Ile.
At the time, Gene was trying to get a new play produced about two brothers on a New England farm, and from what I saw of it the role of one of the brothers would have fit me like a glove, except maybe that I was five years too young. I could have pulled it off, I’m sure of that, if only I’d had the chance.
But I didn’t. I auditioned for a couple of Playwrights Company productions, and though I never got anywhere I did audition for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and got a scholarship. I had transferred to Princeton by then, and there was a flourishing group of theatre people there—Henry Fonda, Josh Logan, Jimmy Stewart. They were all young, though three or four years older than I, and they had their own theatre on the Cape at Dennis, which is where another chapter of theatre history was written. I scarcely knew them, but I’ve never forgotten who they were, what they were like, and what became of them. If I were Manny, I could write a whole chapter about them and what we’d done together in those days, and it wouldn’t matter whether we actually had or not.
So I was all set to make the plunge. I would finish my year at Princeton, head back to New York, and enroll at the American Academy.
And then Manny came back from Russia, talking endlessly about what he’d done there. He hadn’t managed to collect what was owed the Faust pharmaceutical company, but he’d worked out a lot of other deals that promised to be even more lucrative. He was now a five-percenter, just like that Armenian who bought up half the oil fields in the Middle East in those days, Gulbukenian, and that meant he’d be getting 5% of the gross on every deal he pulled off. He just kind of fell into it. He’d gone to Siberia to look at his platinum concession, and discovered that half the population in the region was starving to death. I mean literally starving to death. What the Russians needed was not medicine and pharmaceuticals but grain, food to feed the people, and so Manny worked out a deal to swap U.S. grain for furs, gold, jewelry, and artifacts, anything that looked as if it might have a market in the U.S. He’d written me all about it that winter. “How’d you like to go into the fur business?” he’d said, “Mink, sable, ermine; you’ve never seen such stuff in your life, and they’ve got the women to go with them. We could become the biggest fur dealers in the U.S. if we wanted to.”
Why would I want to do that?
The weekend Manny got back from Russia, we all took the train up to Ossining—Manny, Mama Eva and myself—and went through those great medieval gates of the prison. After what seemed like hours of bureaucratic maneuvers we wound up in a dingy waiting room, filled with rows of long rickety tables and listlessly monitored by no fewer than three security officers. Finally, the windowed door at the end of the room opened, and there was Pop, dressed in convict gray, looking a bit older and thinner but otherwise as vigorous as ever. He gave Mama Eva a big kiss, hugged the three of us, and then got down to business.
I didn’t have any business, I was just there for the ride, but Manny and Mama Eva had a lot on their minds. Manny was kinetic with excitement over what he had seen in Russia, talking a blue streak, sawing the air with his hands, pounding on the table with enthusiasm. He talked about the factories filled with smiling workers, the farm girls on tractors, the palaces taken over by the people, though he didn’t have much to say about the millions starving to death in the Urals. The government had decided to collectivize all the family farms, and when the farmers—the kulaks—refused to give up their farms, the government drove them off the land, shot them, herded them into enclaves and systematically starved them to death. As Manny explained, sometimes you have to make sacrifices today to achieve some great things for tomorrow. “Time,” I heard Pop say approvingly; “everything takes time.”
I guess I decided it wasn’t any of my business. I grew up hearing I had to finish my cereal because of all the starving Chinese, but I could never see how it would make any difference to them whether I ate it or not. They weren’t part of my world, and I couldn’t ship them what I couldn’t stand eating.
Things were changing, and it was men like my father who were changing them, bringing people to understand that we were all part of the same human family, share in the same human condition, and have an obligation, a responsibility to try to improve people’s lot everywhere.
In general I could subscribe to that but I didn’t know that Manny thought I should go to Russia to help him to do it.
Manny had been changed by his trip. In Moscow, he had managed to arrange an interview with Lenin, Russia’s all-powerful president and dictator of the proletariat’s dictatorship. As Manny told it, Lenin had heard of his grain deal and wanted to meet this imaginative partisan of the socialist cause. They sat together in Lenin’s grim spartan office in the Kremlin and talked for two hours, the kid from the Bronx and the man who made the Russian revolution.
Manny was transported and transfixed by the experience. He talked about Lenin in hushed and reverential tones, as if Lenin were some saint, some latter-day messiah, though he had never before been impressed by saints, messiahs, or even Jesus Christ himself. Everything Lenin said was touched with wisdom, and Manny listened. “He listened to everything I said,” Manny said, “and he approved of me. He spoke in English, British English, with only a touch of accent, and he said he had made some disastrous mistakes when he started implementing the revolution, and the result was he had badly crippled the economy. Well, he was going to change that. He could see now that private enterprise on a limited basis could get the country going again, and he was counting on people like Manny to help. He wanted to encourage initiative; he was launching something he called his new economic policy, which would reintroduce private enterprise to the Russian economy, first in agriculture and then in middle-sized industries. He wasn’t turning his back on any Marxist doctrine. The basic industries would continue to be run by the government, but under a system he had begun to call state capitalism.”
I found myself getting irritated just listening to Manny ta
lk. It wasn’t what he was saying, it was that note of reverence in his voice, the same note we used to hear in school from those altar boys and born-again Christians who talked about their devotion to God. I had never heard it in Manny’s voice before, and I didn’t like it. It wasn’t Manny, or it wasn’t the Manny I had grown up with and admired.
Manny hadn’t expected Lenin to be so thin, so cadaverous, as if all earthly desires had been burned away from him. A squat solid man, rather like Manny himself, he had pale, almost ashen skin, a red beard, and an enormous bald head like that bust of the blind Socrates in the Met. Those black eyes squinted into the light, darted and shifted, seemed to peer into the depths of your being. He would put his hands in his armpits under his vest, throw his head back, and let it drop to his shoulder with a cheerful laugh. He remembered Pop. He remembered the times they had spent together in Stuttgart and how Pop was one of those people he was relying on to bring the benefits of socialism to the entire world.
Manny seemed to remember more the longer he lived. Everything came back with perfect clarity, and I didn’t doubt him even later when I discovered a lot of the details had been observed by Maxim Gorky. Manny went on about the things Lenin kept in his office, the knickknacks on his desk, the pictures on the walls, the way the office smelled of cats and carbolic acid, and how cold it was.
When the interview was finished, Manny told us, told everybody then and forever after: Lenin got up from behind his desk, and shook hands with me, and he put his hand on my shoulder, raising the other as if in some sort of benediction, and said, ‘I rely on you. Whatever happens, whatever opposition you run into, I expect to be able to rely on you, the way I rely on your father, even now when he’s rotting in jail. Tell him, I know what he’s going through, I spent three years in jail during the war, but he’ll find the strength to pull through.’
Pop and Manny had some private matter to talk about, so Mama Eva and I left them together and waited outside in the reception room. I thought I knew what it was all about. Manny was trying to work out some deal to get Pop a bodyguard. A fellow inmate had accused Pop of seducing his wife and was threatening to kill him. The guy must have been crazy but I found myself thinking he sure had Pop’s number. Mama Eva gave no sign she had any idea what they were talking about, but I suppose she must have known something of what had gone on.
Once we got back to the city and deposited Mama Eva at the Ansonia, Manny was more nearly his old self. We sat beside that big piano in his house on West Fourth Street and he began talking about the women in Russia and how easy they were. They have a different attitude from what people do here. They’ve got rid of all those bourgeois notions about children and family, you don’t have to marry them in order to lay them, and you don’t lay them because you want to have kids—a proposition that had never been uppermost in my mind—you don’t even have to pretend you’re in love. You go to bed because that’s what in hell you feel like doing. He told me about girls he had had in the Urals, and girls he had had in Moscow, and girls he had had on railway coaches, at the opera, and girls he had had in the shadows of the cathedral in Red Square when it was so cold you thought it was going to freeze off before you got it where you wanted it.
And that was when he told me that he wanted me to go back to Moscow with him and help run the business.
“Business. What business?”
“I told you. We’re setting up a trading company and importing American goods to the Soviet Union—farm equipment and automobiles, grain, gasoline, pharmaceuticals, and we’ll be exporting things that people can use in Europe and the United States. It’s a neat deal, and we get 5% of everything we sell, that’s off the top, and you talk about $100 million a year, that’s $5 million for the two of us.”
“That’s not me,” I told him. “I’m going to the American Academy in the fall, I’m going into the theatre, I’m going to be an actor. I might even try to direct or write. I don’t want to leave New York. I like it here.”
But Manny wouldn’t let it go. “I need somebody I can trust. Russia isn’t the way it is in New York. There are secret police everywhere, and you never know who might be spying for the government.”
“I thought this was the workers’ paradise.”
“Well, it is, but there were snakes even in Eden. You don’t build tomorrow overnight. You have to make sacrifices, that’s what they meant when they talked about the dictatorship of the proletariat. You have to give up a lot of things today in order to build tomorrow.”
I told him I would think about it, but I had already thought. What did I want to do that for? That wasn’t where my talents lay. I wasn’t sure in those days just what my talents were, but I knew they weren’t there.
But Manny wouldn’t leave me alone. “I’ve been looking into things,” he said, “and there are some courses you should take, in typing, shorthand, and accounting, so you can handle a lot of the paperwork that will need to be done.”
“Typing and shorthand? You want me to be a secretary?” Think again, Manny.
“Look, Victor,” he told me, and I could tell by the tone what was coming. “I talked to Pop about this, and he wants you to do it. He wants us to do it. He says it’s important for the party and the cause.”
“Why didn’t he say that to me?”
“We had a lot of other things to talk about.”
“Well, I don’t think I want to do it.”
“Now look, I don’t mean to play the big brother, but when Pop went to jail, he told me to look after you. He told me I was to make all the important decisions for the family, and I’ve decided.”
“Well, you better decide again.”
“I’m in charge here, and you’re going to do it, Do you hear what I’m saying? You’re going to do it, or you’re out on the street.”
“Screw you” I said, “so I’m out on the street.”
“Have you ever been out on the street? Well just take a look at what goes on around you the next time you’re there. Where do you think all your money comes from, the clothes on your back, the money for your theatre tickets and your fancy friends from Princeton, and the money that keeps you in school—it comes from me.”
“It doesn’t,” I said, “it comes from Pop.”
“Pop doesn’t have a cent. When he went to jail, he turned over everything to me. It was my money anyway. I made it. I’m the one who’s been paying all our bills the last two or three years.”
I couldn’t believe it.
“Find out what it’s like to be out on the street. You’ll change your tune.”
“I’ll get a job. I’ll go to work.”
“Doing what? You can’t do anything. You can’t even get an acting job.”
We went on and on like that, and I wouldn’t give in.
But suddenly the money wasn’t there. I had to get the money from Mama Eva to get to the Village on the subway.
Mama Eva told me times were rough, with Pop in jail she couldn’t spare any more. She told me I would have to get a job to supplement our income.
But I knew better.
“Pop doesn’t have anything. Maybe you could get some money from your brother,” she said.
“I’d sooner die,” I answered.
And then she began telling me how much Manny depended on me to support the family, how much he was going to need me to keep the business going in Russia, and it wasn’t just like getting a job, it was doing something for the cause of human solidarity.
I didn’t listen.
I went out and tried to get a job, and nothing I found paid anything.
Then Manny began talking about the Moscow Art Theatre and Stanislavky. He had connections, he announced, he could arrange for me to study acting in Russia. It wouldn’t be all typing and shorthand. Everybody in the business was talking about Stanislavsky in those days. Josh Logan was saying he was even going to go to Russia to study, and I began to see that maybe Manny’s proposition wasn’t as foolish as it seemed. I could be in at the beginning of a bold
new era in the theatre.
I was nineteen. In the end I told him I would do what he wanted.
“Fine,” he said, “You can start taking courses at the Miller School of Typing and Shorthand on Monday.”
Two months later I was on my way—to Russia and the rest of my life.
II: Spring’s Awakening
Platinumgrad, Moscow, 1922–1924
i
We left New York together on August 3, Manny and I, on the Aquitania bound for Southampton, Antwerp, and Bremen. The skies were sunny as we passed through the Narrows and into the open sea, but then the sun faded, the skies turned gray, and it began to rain, a drizzle, a steady downpour, and finally a gale.
On the second day the sea began to mount, the water tilting outside the porthole, tossing and tilting beyond the deck rail, the ship bucking and rolling, and you planted your feet wide and rolled with it. When you stood at the bow, you could see the ship rear up in the driving rain, catch like a held breath, and crash back into the trough of the sea. One by one, most of our fellow passengers disappeared into their staterooms, and for a while I beheld their discomfort with amusement, but then on the third evening, I sat with Manny at dinner in the near-empty dining room watching the floor-length drapes swing and sway at the large picture window, sway and swing like a giant pendulum, sway and tilt, tilt and slide, and my whole inner self began swinging with them, and I fled to my stateroom and stayed there moaning and retching until we reached Southampton.
I thought I was going to die. I was too sick even to imagine myself laid out in my coffin, my hair slicked back, a handkerchief in my breast pocket and my waxen hand resting on my stomach. And in a way I did die on that voyage, at least to the life I had led in New York. I could never go back to it. And not just to the life, to myself. As it seems to me now, the person I was had died and I was only beginning to discover the person I was going to be.
