Fellow Travelers (2 page)

Sixty years later, it seems to me rather ironic that the son of one of America's most notorious radicals should be going to a liberal arts college in the mountains of Pennsylvania, a class institution we would have called it then, an elitist one I suppose these days, and Lafayette was just over the mountains from the great steel mills of Bethlehem, which were the focus of my father's outrage for as long as I could remember.

Pop's mother and father had come here from Russia when he was two and wound up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where his father got a job selling insurance. He sold it the rest of his life. But Pop was meant for other things. At fifteen or sixteen, he went to work for a local iron foundry, the Bullard Co., a stocky, barrel-chested young man with a trace of his parents' Russian still on his breath. Working at Bullard changed his life. Pop started organizing the Bullard workers to get them a better deal but he didn't get very far. This was around the time of the great Homestead steel strike, when the local militias mowed down the workers like dogs, and Pop would have taken his men out in a sympathy strike but most of the men wouldn't go. My father always knew he was going to escape from the mill, but most of his coworkers did not, so he got nowhere. The people who worked in the mill put in fourteen hours a day, sometimes more, seven days a week, and got paid what was barely a living wage, not much more than the $1 a week Pop gave each of us as an allowance all during high school. But there I was twenty years later, going to Lafayette, having a hell of a time and not feeling the slightest bit guilty about it.

I'm all for everybody's getting the best deal out of life that he can, but I feel now—I have no idea what I felt then—that most of us make do with the lives life has dealt us. If you're born poor, you manage to salvage at least a modicum of joy out of your life, just as you do if you're born rich, and there's nothing that says you're going to stay that way forever. I'm not sure most people felt that in Europe and Russia but I think that's what most of the people felt in those days in the United States.

This is not a counsel to complacency. It is a recognition that life in itself is a precious gift and most of us find ways of exploiting the miracle, and we're often a lot better off accepting our condition than goading ourselves to discontent with everything. Pop wouldn't have agreed with that, and neither would my half-brother Eddie. I saw more than my share of the unhappiness Pop and Eddie provoked by forcing people to brood on their misery.

Eddie and Pop, after all, had other objectives in mind. I don't think that they were ever really interested in bettering people's lot. They were only interested in undoing the injustices that permeate any society, the class structure, what they liked to call privilege. I have no less difficulty in justifying starving to death three million serfs in the famine of 1923 than I have in justifying the execution of twelve million Jews, Poles, Slavs, homosexuals, and whomever else you wanted to get rid of in Germany back in the Thirties. I don't care if the famine was supposed to cleanse Soviet society for a broad social purpose. Given the way people sentimentalize the crimes of the socialist experiment, I should probably explain that I couldn't justify the execution of any of these people, anywhere, for whatever reason.

ii

That year I spent at Lafayette was for me the time when my life began—when I began to have some sense of who I was, what I wanted to be, and what I was going to become. It didn't happen in quite the way a liberal arts education is supposed to open you up to the world. But then I decided I wanted to be an actor, not the normal career choice for a liberal arts candidate.

I had always liked being in school pageants and theatricals—I had played an ill child in a tableau re-creation of Stevenson's
Child's Garden of Verses
, a demented monk in a homemade dramatization of some popular children's book, and, in high school, Algernon in Wilde's
Importance of Being Earnest
. But when I got involved in the theatre group at Lafayette, I finally discovered myself. I liked the distillation of one's entire being into the spill of a spotlight, discovering one's character, one's mannerisms, movements, posture, dreams, aspirations, disappointments, in the outline of some playwright's imagining, not simply given but made, borrowed, assumed from the lives and characters of people around me. That's not as odd as it seems. It's one of those schemes in which the plan of your life is already determined and you spend your life establishing what it is foreordained that you are going to he.

I was in those days a fairly good-looking fellow—tall, gangling, and awkward I admit, with maybe too large a mouth, too narrow a head, but good-looking all the same, and in time I outgrew the awkwardness. When they decided to do
Seventeen
, one of Booth Tarkington's foolishly-engaging middle-class comedies, I tried out and somehow got the lead role, the part of a muddle-headed adolescent named Willie Baxter. I was transformed into someone or something I had never been. It wasn't as easy as it seemed. I never realized it until I got to Lafayette, but I spoke with a Bronx accent—flat, nasal, assertive—and I set about eliminating every trace of it from my voice. I had a roommate from Syracuse and I spent that fall catching the sound of his voice, his tones, his intonations and gradually got that Bronx accent out of my mouth.

From the time I saw
Peg O' My Heart
, when I was ten, I had always gone to the theatre whenever I could. I didn't care what I saw. Theatre was still a populist art in those days. You could sit in the second balcony for twenty-five cents, and people flocked to do so. But once I got bitten at Lafayette, I began hanging out in the places in New York where theatre people congregated—theatrical bars down Fourteenth Street from Tony Pastor's and the Academy of Music—met a few actors and learned something of the business, and some of them even told me they'd arrange an audition with producers they knew.

But that never happened. Manny came back from Russia that summer and announced that I was going back to the Soviet Union with him. To hell with his medical ambitions, he was going to be an import-export agent dealing in Russian commodities, and he needed someone he could trust, to handle the details of the business for him, keep the books, write the letters, be nice to the commissars or whatever, someone he could rely on, and that was the end of my theatrical career. It didn't happen quite as easily as that, but it was just as inevitable.

In those days, I admired the hell out of my brother. He was four-and-a-half years older than I was, twenty-three to my nineteen. That's not much now that I'm pushing eighty but in those days it made him 25% older than I was and gave him all the edge in the world.

He was a head shorter than I, but a lot more compact, weighing almost as much as I did. He was smart-alecky and brash; he could talk the tin ear off a donkey, whatever that means, and he always seemed pleased with himself in a way I could never be, except maybe sometimes on the stage. At twenty-three he was already a man of affairs. He had taken over Pop's wholesale drug business two or three years before and got his medical degree at the same time—his spare time, for all practical purposes—and still ranked at the top of his class. He had lots of money, was experienced and sophisticated, and he knew all there was to know about business, booze, and girls, or if he didn't I was so inexperienced I would never have known the difference.

When Manny was fifteen, Pop had taken him to a whorehouse in Harlem and introduced him to what the world was all about, what drove everything that people did with their lives—how they dealt with everyone and everybody they came in contact with, how sex shaped everything they did and thought about, whether it was politics or art or just having to work for a living. I was not sure how I felt about any of that; the thought of sticking my thing in a girl unnerved me as much as it excited me—guess I thought it seemed vaguely unsanitary even if it doubled the charge I had already learned to enjoy by other less complicated means. But I wished that I had done that anyway, simply so I would know what the rest of the world was up to. I felt neglected that Pop had never gotten around to completing that part of my education, and I resented it. It was typical somehow of the way he thought about me, as opposed to Manny. He was a busy man, I know that, he didn't have the time, but somehow he found time for Manny, and it never occurred to him to find it for me.

I always liked to hear Manny talk about what happened the summer night nearly a decade before, his first time with that girl in the whorehouse in Harlem, and I'd get a hard-on myself just thinking about it, never mind listening to him telling me about it, how he and Pop sat around in this parlor talking with the girls who came in to talk with the customers. They weren't naked but they were the next best thing. They wore these skimpy clothes you could pretty much see through, or imagined you could, which was just as good.

It was a warm night and a breeze came in the window and lifted the curtains as it lifted the girls' dresses, so you could see almost everything, and Pop told Manny to pick out one that he liked, and he did, and the girl took him off to another room, with a big bed and freshly ironed sheets and a lamp with a rose shade on the table beside it and she took off her dress, her covering, whatever it was, and began undressing Manny, took off his shirt, socks, and pants, and ran her hand over his chest and touched the bulge in his BVD's, and then slipped her hand inside and held him, then stripped his underwear off as well. “And then what did you do?” I remember saying. “The semaphore was saying ‘Clear track ahead,'” I remember his answering. “The semaphore just shot right up and told me what to do after that.”

“What was her name?” I wanted to know.

“I don't know. Why would that matter?”

“I don't know. I guess I'd want to know who she was.”

“I think maybe she said it was Clytemnestra, her name. She said she came from the south and people had names like that.”

That must have been it then.

“Was she black?” I wanted to know. Really black? Was her hair kinky and what did it feel like when you touched it? Not just her head, down there, what did it feel like, but I didn't ask any of those things. I asked, “What was Pop doing while you were with this girl?”

“How would I know,” Manny said. “When I came back to the parlor he wasn't around. Later on he and the woman who ran the place came downstairs and had a glass of wine together. I had one too.”

“Had he been with her?”

“How would I know? But what would you have done?”

I wasn't sure.

I used to tell myself that Pop was different from other fathers. He didn't just have a job. He was someone other people depended on for their lives, their happiness, their future.

We had moved uptown, to the Bronx, around the time I was born and settled into a big sprawling house on a broad tree-lined street with elm trees that met overhead, keeping shade all summer. Our house was a fairly new one; it had a steep slate roof and lots of towers and turrets; inside there was dark wood gleaming everywhere, staircases, banisters, and paneling, with room for us all to live and Pop to maintain his practice.

The Bronx was a grand and beautiful place in those days, with fields spreading out behind the houses, and in many ways it was far more attractive than Manhattan. It was where the city's immigrant population settled once they had made enough money to move into the middle or upper class and wanted to escape the newcomers like themselves who flooded into the city to replace them.

The Grand Concourse was just what its name suggested—the Fifth Avenue of the city, the
Champs Elysee
, the
Unter den Linden
, a rich and stylish community. It was a handsome spacious thoroughfare, with a highway depressed in the middle. There were lines of trees planted down the center with boulevards on either side and big granite-faced townhouses rising behind them. There was a shopping district nearby, with stores at least as posh as Macy's or Saks or any of the Fifth Avenue shops, and Pop lived off its rich and stylish customers. He was also the doctor most members of the immigrant Russian community preferred, never mind their politics. They were newcomers to the Bronx like himself and, increasingly, refugees from the revolution in Russia.

Madame Onegin was one of those—I never knew her first name or why everyone always referred to her as Madame. She was a fulsome blonde who spoke English with a fractured accent, an attractive woman in a frowzy way, with fuzzy yellow curls and heavily made-up eyes, and I suppose you couldn't blame Pop for wanting to help her out. The Onegins were white Russians tzarists, and somehow or other she and her husband had escaped with their fortunes intact. People like that always did, Pop used to say.

It was ironic that a man whose heart bled over the tribulations of the poor spent most of his life serving the lives and wives of the frivolous rich. Raise the subject with Pop as I did a couple of times, and he would explain that it was these poor fools that made everything else possible: generated the money that enabled him to support the cause that would one day liberate all the downtrodden, those who huddled in the tenements on Rivington Street or the shanty towns of Pittsburgh, Homestead, or Canarsie, to say nothing of the hovels of Rome, London, Vienna, Berlin, and Athens, and for all I know Cairo and Bombay and Shanghai.

Pop had never lived off the exploitation of anybody else. What he had he acquired by the sweat of his own brow—and arms and shoulders. I don't know how many times we heard the story of how he had quit his job in the foundry, left his mother and father in Bridgeport, and went off to New York City to make his fortune. He got a job as a clerk in an apothecary shop on the Lower East Side, one of those places that in those days still had the great jars of colored water above the door, rows and rows of ornately-labeled bottles and boxes, drawers with brass handles and leeches swimming oilily in bottles atop the counter.