Fellow Travelers (3 page)

Pop used the money he made as a drug clerk to pay his way through Columbia. He lived in a hall room in a cold-water flat on Hester Street, ate practically nothing, and never spent any money on anything that wasn't absolutely essential. He studied by candlelight well into the night, learning the mysteries of the human body and soul. He already had discovered those of the human heart. It was one of those epic stories that haunt, inspire, intimidate, and disgust you all your life, on a par with Abe Lincoln learning law by the light of a log fire in that cabin or Handel destroying his eyesight writing music in Bonn by candlelight. You still hear stories like that, but when you do the heroes are Chinese—Asians I guess people call them these days, we called them Chinks—and they're going to end up on top in a way just as Pop did

My father was a remarkable man, and he played a powerful—I guess commanding—role in New York's leftist politics in the years up until the end of the First World War. He represented the American Socialists in the meetings the international socialists held in Europe, and he held their attention in Geneva, Amsterdam, and Brussels as he did in New York. Though he never achieved much notoriety, he was one of the great ones of the socialist movement, on a par with Bukharin, Rosa Luxembourg, Silone, and Lenin, and all of them recognized it, including Lenin himself.

If in many ways he seems a stranger to me it was due partly to the fact that for five years my brothers and I didn't live with him and Mama Eva in that big house under the trees on Webster Avenue. In 1908, when I was six, he sent all three of us to stay with various friends and supporters in towns in the hinterlands. I wound up with the deLeons in Westchester County, Manny with the Mannesmanns in New Haven, and Eddie with the Nearings in Pennsylvania. We saw Pop and Mama Eva at party meetings and planning sessions, holidays and party caucuses, but they never troubled to write, not to us, though the deLeons heard from Pop fairly frequently on party matters and would always say that he'd asked about me.

I never understood why they sent us away. Pop told us at the time the neighborhood in the Bronx had deteriorated, and it wasn't safe for us to live there anymore. But if so it had recovered enough so that five years later we were living at home again. The truth is I always thought Pop and Mama Eva were simply too much involved in their own lives to be bothered with us. Later on I sometimes thought they were trying to protect us from the ugliness their political commitments sometimes exposed them to.

But that was nothing beside what went on once we came home to live. It was in the middle of all the excitement over the Russian revolution—Lenin in Petersburg taking over the parliament, seizing control in Moscow, making peace with the Germans. However, I paid no more attention to it than I paid to anything else. Less.

The year after the war ended the whole country seemed to have gone crazy. Half of American industry went on strike, the radicals were about to launch a revolution, and the attorney general rounded up radicals and subversives and put them in jail. Five members of the New York Assembly were expelled for being socialist, though they had been elected for that reason, and a paymaster in Braintree, Massachusetts, was shot and killed, supposedly by a couple of anarchists named Sacco and Venzetti. That was one case I paid attention to.

So we were strangers to one another, my brothers and I and our parents. I wasn't even a bystander in their lives, never mind a part of them. Eddie was so much older that I never got to know him, and Manny had just crossed the border to being an adult. As for Pop and Mama Eva, even when we were living at home, other people had always taken care of us, nurses, babysitters, governesses, servants you'd call them if you took a less ideological, more realistic view of the world.

But somehow, our separateness, our alienation, our estrangement from one another didn't do anything to diminish our family feeling. Not just the family feeling my brothers and I had amongst ourselves—the us as opposed to them—but the feeling we had for Mom and Pop. We were the Fausts, so we were in some way the members of an elite, and in the circles in which my father moved we really were. Pop was America's Lenin, and we were his children and even if we had no interest in his politics we never got over that. We were something special. We were the defenders of the disinherited of the earth, whatever they were, and we knew it.

I never really believed in that message or even understood what it was. For years I didn't know who the dispossessed were. We didn't go to school with them or live with them or even run into them on the street, and they certainly weren't among Pop's patients. I always felt a little different from the rest of the family. Sometimes I thought it was because I was the youngest of the three brothers. Sometimes I even thought it was because Manny and I were the only ones born in America. That seems a little silly because Eddie was only two when he came to the United States, but you never know.

Certainly we were never brought up as anything but Americans. Pop wouldn't let Russian be spoken in the house; he did everything he could to get rid of the faint accent in his speech, as much a matter of speech rhythms as it was of anything else. We didn't live in a world of samovars and blintzes, borscht, blackbread, and cabbage soup. Pop had turned his back on the Russian church and on everything else Russian, except its politics and those earth-shaking events that had been reshaping the entire world.

Pop got the money to pay for his medical education not only by working in the drugstore. When he started his medical practice he also began putting money into the business, became a partner, and after a while effectively took over, though his old boss ran the operation. They began acquiring drugstores all over the city—I suppose Faust & Hammer was one of the first drug chains in the country—and as Manny explained it to me later, that made a considerable amount of sense. In those days drugstores were still drugstores—pharmacies, apothecary shops, whatever you want to call them—and you made your money on the drugs you dispensed, not on all the other goods you supply these days, from candy to condoms to combs. If you ran a dozen stores rather than one, you could get volume discounts and pass the savings on to your customers, which gave you a competitive edge, or keep them for yourself, which gave you a financial edge. Sometimes you did one thing, sometimes you did the other. But, again, none of this much interested me. By the time we came back to live with Pop in the Bronx he had sold the drugstore chain for a lot of money, and was devoting himself to his practice in the Bronx and to advancing the aims of international socialism.

It may seem a strange thing to say about one of the founders of the American Communist party, but I think it was from Pop that Manny inherited his business ability. Years later when he became the head of Pacific Petroleum, one of the giants of the American oil industry, people used to wonder how somebody who had come out of a socialist family—he had managed to blur the communist affiliation—somebody who had spent all those years in the Soviet Union and ever after seemed to advance its interests—could have developed the skills of a horsetrader, a snakeoil salesman, and a petty capitalist tool. In my more cynical moments I would whisper to myself that you used the same skills no matter which side of the street you walked—you had no scruples about anything, you put the end before the means, you lied, you stole, you cheated, and all that mattered was what you wanted to achieve—money and power, which as Mama Eva used to explain in later years were really the same thing.

In those years, Pop always appeared to people as a model of ethical conduct. He always seemed ready to sacrifice everything on behalf of his idealistic commitment. And maybe he did. But I never believed that he actually sacrificed as much as some people thought.

When he sold the drug chain, he didn't put all the proceeds at the disposition of the party, whatever he claimed. Sure, he bought them the party headquarters on 13th street, bankrolled their programs and propaganda efforts, and even bailed them out when they wound up in jail. But if I'm right, he gave the party only a fraction of his resources, enough to make it seem that he was one of the movement's great benefactors. You don't grow up as poor and embittered as he was and give it all away when it comes to you.

What I am sure of is he did keep enough back to buy an interest in one of the wholesale drug distributors that supplied the drug stores. I didn't know about any of this until later, when Manny began making a lot of noise about how he had made the family's first million, but Pop must have done nearly as well. However much he amassed, there was always plenty of money for anything we wanted to do, and Pop had no qualms about sharing it with us. He saw to it we had the best of everything. Pop had it himself. He was always carefully turned out. His Vandyke beard was beautifully cut, his doctor's black coat and overcoat sleek and beautifully tailored. He had fur on his overcoat collars and spats on his shoes, and he bought his clothes at places like Brooks Brothers.

And yet he was a real power in the socialist party. Others made a lot more noise, attracted the attention of the newspapers, made speeches at the party meetings, stood up in public in opposition to this, that, and the other thing, went to Washington to protest Wilson's increased involvement in the war, but my father, Jack Faust, was the final arbiter. He was the moderator at the meetings, and he was the one who had the moral authority and, I suspect, in the end the money to make the other people in the party do what he wanted.

iii

He was an impressive man, my father. Never mind those powerful arms, shoulders, and thighs that remained from his days in the foundry—or even the sharpness of those black eyes, striking lightning over his shining black beard. It was his voice that gave him his power. It was deep and clear, a low growl sometimes, a snarl, but never blurred, never soft at the edges as some really deep voices are. His voice was crisp and deep as night, dark as black enamel, almost satanic in its intensity decrying the cruelty and injustice of the universe And yet, Pop never willingly raised his voice. He never needed to.

For all his gentleness and concern, he was a true revolutionary. Except for an occasional Castro or Mao, most revolutionaries these days are little more than reformers. They want to undo segregation or the welfare systems, but they don't aim at remaking the entire structure of society. They're men of peace, Gandhi-style revolutionaries. Not Pop. In those days at least, in the wake of the 1917 Russian revolution, he was committed to the violent overthrow of U.S. society, its government, institutions, the works. He believed that class warfare was just what it said it was. You couldn't hope to overthrow the capitalist system except through violence, the shedding of blood, and he committed most of his life to trying to bring that about. That was the issue that divided the Socialist Party into two wings, and eventually split the Left wing itself into two parties, with the Communist Party eventually emerging triumphant. A wild-eyed bomb-throwing radical? Not at all. As far as I know, Pop never marched in the streets, threw a rock, punched a cop, or hanged a capitalist from a lamppost. Instead, he offered the fierceness of his commitment and the generosity of his bank account.

In those days, my mother was always at his side. His helpmate, his counselor, his other self. She went to the party meetings with him, sat on the podium with him, or in a chair to the rear at council meetings, and talked endlessly with him about those issues that absorbed both of them. I would hear them going at it late at night, in the early hours of the morning, not arguing exactly but bitterly passionate about those things that were really the source of their lives.

She was a large woman, my mother, tall, taller than Pop, heavy and full-breasted, a figure out of Rodin or Henry Moore, or that's how I remember her—not as she was when I was a child, but as she was in her later years, in Moscow, in that palace we had in the Sadovaya Kudrinskaya, when her hair had turned gray and her figure filled out. In pictures taken when I was a child, she is slim and almost pretty, and I sometimes imagine I remember her when she looked like this. But I don't. All I really remember is the pictures.

Not for Mama Eva was the slavery of the kitchen, cooking, and kids. When I was growing up in the Bronx, our house was a mess, the kitchen was worse, and most of the time the three of us lived hand-to-mouth off the intermittent ministrations of servants—Mama Eva's helpers, as we called them—most of them fallen women Mama Eva had rescued from the hands of the White Slavers who in those days seemed to wait for most nubile young women, virtuous or not. Mama Eva was too committedly intellectual to concern herself with how she looked or how she dressed, and as for her sons, Manny and me and to some extent even Eddie, she either sent us off to be brought up by friends and fellow ideologues in the country or she left us to bring up ourselves.

Pop's political commitments aside, Mama Eva was an avid campaigner for women's rights, and in those years when Pop was busy defending the garment workers or the transit motormen, Mama Eva was marching with banners and bunting demanding the vote and equal rights for women. She counted some of the city's most important women as her friends, not because she ranked with them socially, or even financially, but because she ranked or outranked them in her commitment to her cause. Women like Jane Addams and Lilian Wald, Inez Mulholland, Margaret Sanger, Frances Perkins, and in later years even Eleanor Roosevelt. Mama Eva came by her passion legitimately, by way of the experience of her life and the leftwing ideology she shared with my father.

I have heard Mama Eva deliver speeches in which she said she'd been left widowed, with a three-year-old child, and had to fend for herself, but I'd heard her speak often enough to know she made things up when they served her point. She always claimed to have taken in sewing to keep Eddie and her together, but that can't be true. She couldn't sew up a hole in a sock if her life depended on it.