Fellow Travelers

by James Cook

  She continued to drink too much; she went through a steady stream of psychiatrists, and eventually took up with some White Russian ne’er-do-well who claimed to have been a prince in the good old days. She lived comfortably on the generous alimony her lawyers had won her, held court in her big house in Brooklyn, and summoned up the memories of days long past.

  Soon after we came back to New York, Manny got involved with another singer, this time a dark-haired one. She was a divorcée and a socialite and called herself Constance Solange. They lived for a while in Manny’s carriage house in the Village. Connie had done well for herself in her divorce settlement, and she and Manny eventually bought an estate together in Connecticut, spending most of their time there. For several years they seemed happy together, so happy that they got married in the late thirties. Like Yelena, she was the next best thing to being an alcoholic, and the relationship didn’t survive the war. In the end they got a messy divorce, each charging the other with adultery, charges I don’t doubt were true for both parties. She wound up with a generous settlement, which included the Connecticut estate. She claimed the estate was hers and that Manny had tried to steal it from her. I didn’t know about that. Manny certainly wouldn’t have needed to steal it, but if he’d decided that doing so posed some sort of challenge he may have tried to all the same.

  More or less by default, Yelena and little Manny became my responsibility. “I hold you responsible for them both,” Manny told me that day he agreed to take them back to New York, and he meant it. He never forgot that and he never forgave me. “You don’t know how much it has cost me,” he said years later, “all that alimony, all those years, all those frantic letters and phone calls and lawyers’ fees.” Yelena may not have liked the United States, but she learned how to manipulate the American legal system.

  So it was I who saw that her bills were paid, who made the decisions on what schools to send little Immanuel to, who later paid her psychiatrists. I wrote her the checks and held her hand for the next thirty years, long after she and Manny were divorced.

  Yelena smothered little Immanuel with too much love and, as far as I could tell, effectively ruined his life. She had stopped calling him Manny, preferring Carl, his first name, as if she wanted to avoid the reverberations set off by his father’s name. But you’d never have mistaken Carl for his father. He either flunked or dropped out of all the schools we got him enrolled in. He drank too much, experimented with drugs, and sponged off his mother as long as she lived.

  Once we got the gallery up and running, brother Eddie came to work with us. But in a pin-striped suit and French cuffs he was not the man who, in khaki pants and a pea jacket, had electrified the Comintern meeting in Moscow. For three or four years we worked together in New York but we were as indifferent to each other as if he were someone we had just hired off the street. I sometimes wondered whether I had not just imagined the closeness we shared those weeks together in Moscow, but if I did, I never let myself believe it. Eddie may have been a figment of my imagination, an invention of my need for heroes, for family solidarity and family devotion, but I was not about to give him up.

  He had never known what to do with his life after he’d returned to New York. He no longer believed in the party or even in the labor movement. If the unions didn’t sell out to the party, he’d say, they’d sell out to the mob the way they had in the twenties to Lepke, Benny the Dope, and Dutch Schultz, and that wasn’t much of an improvement. In the end we found a way out for him. We decided to open a branch in Palm Beach. Manny wanted a place at the far end of the inland waterway to moor his new yacht, and Eddie offered to manage the new gallery for us. Eddie was not a roaring success in Palm Beach but he didn’t need to be. There wasn’t that much competition.

  Yet he hadn’t turned his back completely on his old aspirations. At one point he put up his own money to finance a campaign to organize the hotel workers in Miami Beach. The campaign failed and our clients were not notably impressed by such evidence of his social concerns. He had began to drink heavily and got involved with a series of floozies that he could never bring to the gallery for fear of scandalizing our customers.

  The Depression was in full swing by then, the New Deal had come into power, and all those people who dreamed of violent revolution a decade before had come to see that they might be able to achieve by political means what they once more romantically dreamed would require rivers of blood.

  I was bound to them—by the invisible connections of my family, by my father, mother, and brothers, by the family business. Many of the people we dealt with were, if not members of the party, at least fellow travelers. They carried in their hearts and on their tongues all the fashionable rhetoric of social justice. I always felt I had no choice but to go along with it. Never mind that Faust Brothers were covert sales agents for the Soviet government. I had given hostages to fortune, literal hostages, two children and a woman who would somehow always be my wife, and I could not abandon them.

  For Pop, Moscow had long since lost its savor. Red House was not what it was, and Moscow was sinking into the steely gloom of the Stalin dictatorship. Though he might have consoled himself with the knowledge that Lenin himself had created the Antique Export Fund, we all knew he was functioning as little more than the family’s Moscow purchasing agent.

  After Olga had walked out on him, he had never been able to find a secretary he liked well enough to settle into a room down the hall. There was an actress or two and a noted dancer but more and more his love life expressed itself in those bouts on the town he undertook with Boris. At the time I was inclined to blame his advancing years and fading libido, but I know better now. It may have been lethargy but it certainly wasn’t a diminished libido.

  There were no occasions anymore for the parties that had made Red House famous among the international set and Pop took to opening the house to nonpaying guests. Gene Lyons and his wife and daughter moved in for a while, and a whole slew of visiting dignitaries passed through;. from a tall thin freakish New England poet to a political scientist from the University of California.

  But Pop was no longer an honored and distinguished guest of the Soviet people. He was a relic of a time the current regime would have been happy to forget, and so a year or so after we left, the government announced that it needed Red House for its own purposes, found Pop a fairly sizable apartment somewhere near the Kalinnin Prospect, and left him alone. But the writing was on the wall. It was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the fiction that we were sending our household effects back to the U.S., particularly after we no longer had any household. Finally toward the end of 1932 Pop packed up his things and began a prolonged and reluctant journey back to New York. He spent months in Berlin, Paris, and London and I think he’d as soon have never come back. He was not eager to face the fact that he had lost control of the family’s business. I could sympathize with his feelings. I sometimes imagined I was in the same boat myself.

  Manny had spent a great deal of energy preparing for Pop’s return. He supported the incoming administration promoting this man’s candidacy here and funneling money into that man’s candidacy there. Because Pop’s flight to the Soviet Union after he got out of jail put his citizenship in jeopardy, Manny set out to establish that he had gone, not because he shared the Soviet ideology, but because he wanted to be with his family. With the Roosevelt Administration finally in power, the political climate changed, diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union were finally reestablished, and Pop’s problems disappeared. His citizenship remained intact, and the State Department issued the visa that would enable him at long last to come home.

  He moved into the apartment on Central Park West with Mama Eva but was still at loose ends. He could not practice medicine, and Manny made it clear there was no way we could usefully employ him in the gallery. Pop had let his membership in the Communist Party lapse, and remaining a card-carrying member would have compromised Manny’s position even if it did not compromise Pop’s. In any case h
is commitment to the world revolution had waned. He continued to back various socialist and left-wing causes and pointedly gave his moral support to Ben Gitlow’s new communist splinter group; but he and Gitlow both knew that effort was irrelevant to anything but the past.

  Pop kept busy by seeing his old friends and taking up with a series of young women, most of them involved in the theatre. At the time it never occurred to me that his withdrawal from his old life would be particularly troubling to him. He was what I thought of as an old man by then, in his late fifties, a time when you expected people to withdraw into doddering old age. I know better than that now too.

  Whatever their earlier differences, he and Mama Eva became friends again, became lovers for all I know and in public at least seemed devoted to each other, caring for each other and anticipating the problems advancing age was beginning to inflict upon them—problems with seeing and hearing, forgetfulness, ambiguous aches and undiagnosed pains. I assumed they had reached some kind of armed truce, but every once in a while I would catch glances darting between them filled with a steel and fire that made me think otherwise.

  A month or so before the U.S. got involved in the war Manny pulled off the impossible, and got Pop’s license to practice medicine reinstalled. Pop opened a small practice in the Bronx, offered his services for little or nothing to the indigent and underprivileged in the neighborhood, and kept himself productively busy the rest of his life. At his death, a few months before the end of the war, the obituary in the New York Times reported his interest in liberal causes but overlooked his years in prison, his friendship with Lenin, and his role in founding the U.S. Communist Party. The Times reported his collection of tsarist artifacts but treated his stay in Moscow as the fascination of a particularly avid tourist. I detected the influence of Manny.

  Up until the outbreak of the war Manny continued to handle the negotiations with the Russians over the importation of those mountains of household goods. We had a rough period after Pop left Moscow and we had to get permission from the Museum Administration and the Ministry of Culture to remove our property from the country, but after a bumpy start the arrangement settled down and ran fairly smoothly for several years.

  Manny left the day-to-day operation of the gallery to me. I became something of an expert on Russian art, Fabergé in particular. We learned the trick of repairing damaged art objects so that they looked like new, and even hired some Moscow craftsmen to turn out new tsarist treasures that looked as good as the old. Maybe better. But our Russian supplies could not last forever, and I slowly began the transformation of Faust Brothers into a gallery that specialized in contemporary and, for the most part, socially-conscious art.

  Over the years. Manny had gotten involved in a series of other business ventures on his own, most of them in partnership with some of his old bootlegging buddies—liquor distribution, radio broadcasting, electronic parts, and in the beginning at least he had wanted to involve me too, to handle the dirty work, to get things running on a financially viable basis. But I didn’t like the people he chose to deal with. Running the Faust Brothers galleries had become more than enough to fill my life. And so for a number of years, except on those occasions when Manny used the family business to advance his own enterprises, I saw little of him.

  Manny always promised to give me a piece of the gallery one day, but somehow he never got around to it anymore than he had when he promised me a share in our Soviet trading company. I did think of going out on my own—starting a new gallery with its own cadre of artists—but whenever I mentioned the idea Manny persuaded me that I would have nothing to gain by it. I would cut myself off from the Russian art treasures that were the bread and butter of our business.

  I began to think I could do without the Russian connection. Our arrangements with the Russians were not going to last forever and I had begun to cultivate my contacts in New York’s artistic community—especially those with a leftist point of view—people like Boardmar Robinson and William Glackens, Adolph Dehn, Ben Shahn, Rockwell Kent, and John Sloan. But setting up a gallery of my own?—what did I have to gain, Manny kept saying, except the glorification of my ego? I already had all the prerogatives of an owner. I was free to take whatever funds I needed and I did, but I never accumulated any substantial assets of my own. I bought a townhouse in the eighties, just off the park, a vacation house in the Hamptons, a ski lodge in the Berkshires, and an apartment in Beverly Hills. But it was Faust Brothers that owned them and it was Manny, of course, who owned Faust Brothers.

  I went back to Moscow a few times thereafter to see Tania and the girls but it was clear that my visits were an embarrassment and even a danger to them. When I was there in 1936, I returned to my hotel room and found that my luggage had been gone through, and I decided not to go back. I did not see my daughters again for over twenty years.

  In 1937, along with hundreds of other Soviet industrialists, Boris was charged with counterrevolutionary activity, tried publicly for his crimes in the great hall of Trades Union House, taken out into the courtyard of the Lubianka prison, and shot. It was around that time that the monthly letters Tania had dutifully written me after I left Moscow broke off, and thereafter I kept in touch with her through the American embassy. I tried to persuade her to come to the U.S. with the children, but she would not even discuss the matter. Her father had been guilty of all the things he was accused of, she knew that. But she and the children had nothing to worry about. The party did not hold children responsible for the crimes of their parents and she had long since demonstrated her devotion to the party and its goals.

  The Churnuchins had lost everything, the house in Moscow, the dacha in Nizhi Novgorod. Svetlana was living with three other middle-aged women in a single room not far from the Hunters Market, while Tania and the twins had moved into a one-room apartment somewhere, where they shared kitchen and toilet facilities with a family of eight children next door.

  Somehow Tania held onto her job in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I never did understand what her responsibilities were, but she no longer guided distinguished tourists through the more seductive circles of the Soviet hell. I could not bring myself to ask her how she had managed to survive, but I always suspected that she had testified against her father in the show trials. I never asked her for fear, I suppose, of what I might hear.

  Even before I left Moscow I had recognized that I was never going to be an actor, but I didn’t lose my interest in the theatre. Sometime after I got back to New York I became involved with one of those leftist little theatre groups that seemed to occupy every loft and abandoned warehouse in the city in those days. The most famous was the Group Theatre, but there were others, and for a time I helped finance a group called Tomorrow Today. The company spent its summers on a dairy farm in a place called Sugar Loaf, sixty miles north of Manhattan, and I put up the money to pay the rent. All summer long I would spend my weekends watching a couple dozen young people trying to master the Stanislavki method.

  That first summer I met a tall, slim, austerely beautiful dark-haired actress named Miranda Nickerson, a young New England woman with very serious ambitions in the theatre and even more serious attitudes toward life. She was pliant, interested, and willing, and we became lovers before the summer was over. When we came back to the city she moved into the apartment on the fourth floor of my Twenty Second Street townhouse, moved down a floor or two after the first few months, and eventually married me.

  I was fond of Miranda, she was fun to be with and after a while I fell in love with her. We enjoyed our life together and we made, I suppose, a good team. She lent a certain glamour to the receptions we threw at the gallery, just as I lent a certain financial stability to the theatrical productions she got involved in. She had a modest success at a settlement house on the Lower East Side in a play somebody had written about the Paterson textile strike, and she seemed promising enough to be solicited by Elia Kazan and some of the other cocksmen that ran the Group Theatre. Their political credentials were
impeccable and so was their libido, and Miranda handily outperformed Frances Farmer for the right to appear in what I guess was Clifford Odets’ first flop. She was a magnetic figure on the stage with her flowing dark hair and lissome figure. She had a thrillingly icy voice and a commanding manner, sort of a beautiful Judith Anderson. In the late thirties and early forties she went to Hollywood and appeared as a heavy in a number of antifascist movies.

  I used her West Coast sojourns as an excuse to open a gallery on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, and we very soon had plenty of friends among Hollywood’s leftist elite, ranging from expatriates like Bert Brecht and Gerhart Eisler to internal exiles like Ring Lardner and Lillian Hellman. I disliked the lot of them, but I sat there under the palm trees by the pool at their endless parties listening to the fairy tales they told each other about the socialist paradise that obsessed them all.

  Miranda’s acting career ended in 1952. One of those Paul Revere publications—Red Channels, Counterattack, I forget which after all these years—discovered that Miranda had appeared at a number of leftist rallies in the thirties, supported the sit-down strikers at General Motors, raised money for loyalist orphans during the Spanish Civil War, and in the end opposed the enactment of the Taft-Harley Act.

  Those were difficult days for me though I did not share the views of either the red hunters or those they hunted. I had not spent ten years of my life in the Soviet Union in a state of somnambulism. I had little doubt that in most cases the charges being made against party members and their fellow travelers were essentially true. But these people had never done anything Americans should not be perfectly free to do under any circumstances. I refused to accept the proposition that anyone—the Congress, the FBI, anyone—should have the power to deprive people of such rights along with their reputations, their livelihoods, and their sense of their worth to the world.