Fellow Travelers (32 page)

Even Mama Eva inadvertently did her bit. Instead of settling down in the old Victorian house in the Bronx, she moved into a palatial twelve-room apartment on Central Park West and resumed her old life. She'd never liked being a hostess and housewife in Moscow, and, now that she was back in New York, her life, her concerns, her politics meant something again, and she was happier than she had been in years. If she missed being with Pop she must have missed him in the middle of the night because the rest of her day was full. She once again became active in the Democratic Party, supported Roosevelt in his various runs for the presidency, and became a crony of women who mattered in Democratic politics in New York—women like Eleanor Roosevelt and Frances Perkins. For us—for Faust Brothers, that is—her widening circle of wealthy and influential friends proved useful in developing clients for the gallery and in giving Manny access to politicians and powerbrokers who might otherwise have been beyond his reach.

Things went so well that after a year Manny and I decided that we needed a more fashionable showcase than Tufenkian's rundown gallery on East Thirty Seventh Street. After considerable acrimony we dissolved our partnership with Tufenkian and found a location on Fifty Seventh Street off Park Avenue. In April of 1933, we opened our own gallery, Faust Brothers, with an exhibition and celebratory party that attracted most of the people who were anybody in the art world in New York.

During the decade we spent in Moscow, Manny had somehow managed to maintain his connections with New York's under- and overworlds, so that the parties we threw afforded a raffish and clamorous mixture of the elegant and the notorious—each was intoxicated with the opportunity of ogling the other—and the mixture was considerably upgraded in time by Manny's expanding political and cultural connections. With our Moscow base and Pop's growing expertise we had a supply of priceless tsarist treasures to offer—and a steadily increasing number of customers eager to acquire them. In spite of the difficult economic times the gallery yielded enough for all of us to live in comfort.

Manny went back to living in the carriage house in the Village, but Yelena and little Manny never lived with him. He found them a house in Brooklyn Heights not far from the thriving Russian community in Brighton Beach and distant enough from him and Manhattan to keep her out of his hair. Once he'd accomplished that, he and Yelena scarcely saw each other again. Sometime in the thirties he got around to divorcing her, and that was the end of that.

For a time Yelena made a fitful effort to resume her singing career. She performed her gypsy repertoire at the White Russian nightclub in Manhattan and met with a fairly enthusiastic reception. But Yelena wanted something more electric and the New York Russian community was not large enough to yield her the adulation that she wanted. The truth was that out of nostalgia for a time and place they would never revisit, the audience would have cheered anyone, good. bad or indifferent, who'd just arrived in New York from their homeland. Despite her ambitions she didn't really care to reach for a different and wider American audience, as émigrés like Zorina, Nazimova, Anna Sten, and Maria Ouspenskaya had done. And so her singing career lapsed.

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 his 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.