Fellow Travelers (4 page)

Pop was her second husband. Mama Eva had been born in Russia and married there, and that's where Eddie was born. But soon afterward she and her husband emigrated to New York. It was years before I knew who her first husband was, never mind what happened to him. Manny always said the man was a tailor; he was sure Eddie had told him that, but Eddie didn't know everything. He knew a lot less about Mama Eva and the family history than he pretended. He was too young to remember his father, and when he was a kid he didn't even know his real father's name. He was a Faust like the rest of us. He had always been Eddie Faust and always would be. Still I always imagined he found himself at a disadvantage in the family: we were Jack Faust's sons, and he was not.

Eddie was four or five years older than Manny and nearly ten years older than I, which meant for me he was out of reach of much brotherly contact. He was a dour and taciturn man, and in later years he began drinking too much. During those years when Manny and I were in Russia, Eddie became a labor agitator, he called himself Eddie Foss, because he thought Foss sounded more American than Faust, and he wandered around the Midwest trying to organize coal miners and steel workers. He had been beaten and tortured—he bore the scars all over his body—and he had been blacklisted from coast to coast. He never married, he kept to himself, and all his life he was a stranger to me.

Years later, after we had come back from Russia and opened our first art gallery on 57th Street, Manny told me he had come across a neighbor who had known Mama Eva and her first husband when they lived on Rivington Street, and according to his story, our father met Mama Eva at a Socialist Party meeting, fell in love with her, and launched a fevered affair under the nose of her husband.

It was an odd and tempestuous relationship. She was older than Pop by five years, ten years, who knows?—she never told anyone her age. But then the old man got her pregnant, or at least that's how the story went. She left her husband, moved in with Pop, and got married as soon as she got a divorce or her husband died, disappeared or otherwise conveniently passed out of the picture. I never believed that story, even after Manny was able to demonstrate that he had been born only six months after their marriage. Manny liked the idea of having been conceived in the rut and sweat of an adulterous bed, but I thought it was disgusting. I couldn't bring myself to think of Mama Eva like that. And the truth is, I still can't.

Pop is another matter. He played the field all his life. Never mind the trip to the whorehouse with Manny, I saw him and his lady friends in places all over the city, in restaurants, at the theatre, on the street, and never once admitted I recognized him, nor he me. Afterward in Moscow, when he got out of prison in 1923, there was always somebody or other.

I never knew how Mama Eva felt about that. In the beginning maybe she accepted it as part of the freedom the new politics endowed men and women with in those days, her as much as him. And only in later years, when she was beginning to age, when time and familiarity had begun taking their toil, had she begun to realize that maybe there was some sense in conventional relationships after all. But I certainly had no hint of any of this then. Up until the time I was seventeen, I thought we were your traditional American family, devoted mother, hardworking father, loving children—though admittedly committed to wider, more important and idealistic concerns than most other families were interested in.

When I think of Mama Eva even today, what I remember is her warmth, the soft curves and folds of her body, the softness of her breasts, the comfort and enclosure of her arms. I remember especially winter days when I had been skating in Van Cortland Park or sledding in the Botanical Garden, I would come in from the cold, and she would take me in her lap, put my hands in her armpits to warm them and sit there in her rocker and rock, patting my back, surrounding me with her warmth.

But she wasn't like that most of the time. Most of the time she wasn't home at all. She was off somewhere. I have never understood how she could have sent us away from her for five years, and for years I thought she did it because he wanted it, because Jack, my father, wanted it, because he didn't want to be bothered with us. He wanted sons, sure, but not children to love and nurture, and I made up my mind that when I got married and had children I would do everything different. I would find a woman who wanted children as I did, and who would love and cherish them as we would cherish each other. We could hold them between us and bring up some of the finest human beings the world had ever seen.

Of course motherhood wasn't really what drove Mama Eva. She would envelop us whenever we saw her as if she had missed us terribly, maybe because she didn't really think of us as her own children, but somebody else's, to be flattered and spoiled for the occasion because we weren't really any of her responsibility. She may have been happy enough to give birth to the three of us, but once we were born, she was through with us, the way a bitch throws aside her puppies when they are ready to be weaned, nips at them to drive them away, and later, when they have established themselves as separate beings, accepts them as friends, comrades, fellow creatures, but never as her own sons and daughters.

We all called her Mama Eva, my father included. Manny once suggested we called her Mama Eva because Pop wasn't Eddie's father, but I think he was wrong. I think Manny wasn't Pop's son either. We called her Mama Eva because she was a sort of temporary surrogate mother, an older woman named Eva who lived down the hall or across the street, knew us, and felt disinterested affection for us. If we were to have any relation to her, it was Victor and Eva, Manny and Eva, not mama and sonny.

Pop was no better but then I guess I didn't expect any more of him. He was remote and austere and we saw him over dinner or maybe on a stroll down the Grand Concourse. He spent most of his time, it is true, only a flight of stairs away, in his offices on the main floor of that big house in the Bronx. But we went to him only in an emergency. What went on in his waiting room, the office and examination room where he ministered to his patients, was none of our business, and we all understood that the integrity of Pop's workplace was not to be violated except in extremity, on pain of violent expulsion. I knew that. I violated that proscription on one occasion, with results that echoed through my life ever after.

If any one of us got to know Pop, it was Manny. Manny, after all, had decided to follow him into medicine, and it was Manny who had inherited his entrepreneurial bent. Around the end of the war, the first World War, that is, the pharmaceutical supply business my father had taken an interest in ran into trouble.

I have no idea what went wrong—there was talk at one time that his partner was looting the firm. My father was too busy with his medical practice to bother himself with the problem. So he asked Manny to see what could be done, and Manny promptly took care of it. I think now I understood nothing. Whatever he may have said to Manny or the rest of us, I think Pop had decided his moment in history was at hand, the revolution was about to begin and he would be free to rise and play the role in it history had created for him.

But even if I am right, it seems extraordinary that Pop should have handed over the family firm and fortunes to a twenty-one-year-old kid, but at twenty-one, people were older and a lot more mature than they are today. You began living an adult life when you were sixteen or seventeen, a lot younger if you weren't well-off; you didn't wait until you were twenty-five and had spent four years in college and several years in graduate school. You had responsibilities and obligations and nobody thought it at all remarkable that you went out and fulfilled them. I had no delusion I could have done what Manny did in those years, not then, not later, though that's not to say there weren't other things I might have been able to do as well or even better. But Manny was an extremely talented and adaptable guy. He conducted himself as if he were an adult—and people responded as if he were. They had no qualms about his handling our business affairs, entering into contracts, borrowing money, doing all those things we expect adults to be doing. Except that he bought Pop's partner out of the business, I never did understand how Manny got the company back on its feet again. I did understand that he was looking after everybody's best interest, including his own.

Prohibition was on the horizon. For some reason, everybody seemed to think that when Prohibition finally settled in, the demand for booze would vanish into thin air. People believe what they want to believe, I suppose. But Manny believed that the market was going to boom and that people would not only buy anything alcoholic they could get, they would begin drinking more than they had before. Once Manny had bought out his partner, Julius Hammer, he began buying up supplies of something called tincture of ginger wherever he could—and not only that, ginger itself everywhere in the world where it was produced—so that in later years Manny claimed he'd cornered the market. Tincture of ginger was a patent remedy used for almost anything that might ail you—tired blood, sagging spirits, general depression—and it worked because it had about 10% alcohol—that's about as much as red wine and three times as much as beer. Manny bought up whatever supplies were available and set up a factory to turn out the stuff. The brew was called Jakes after the Jamaican ginger that went into making it and if it sometimes paralyzed people who overused it that was their problem.

That's the story Manny always told and that's the story he told Pop. And it was probably true as far as it went. But there was more to it than that, Manny managed to siphon off some money of his own—a commission, a fee? Well, why not? He began buying up all the liquor he could find anywhere, scotch, gin, bourbon, the works, he had whole warehouses full of it all over the New York metropolitan area. He could get the stuff for practically nothing, because people weren't going to be drinking any more and it was from these supplies that he made that fortune he used to boast of.

It was of course perfectly legal for a pharmaceutical house like ours to dispense and sell such products, but those warehouses weren't supplying the legitimate market. I know. He sometimes used me to carry messages around the city to people who later became some of the most famous men in America. Bootleggers like Arnold Rothstein and Frank Costello. I'd wind up in posh apartments on Fifth Avenue and posh hotels on Central Park West as well as in seedy social clubs in Brooklyn and the Village and though Manny never explained what was going on, he did make it clear that he was pulling a fast one.

“Aren't you worried about it being illegal?”

“What do I care about sick birds?” he would say and burst into hilarious laughter. That joke kind of dazed me the first time I heard it, until hours later when I sorted out the ‘ill eagle' pun for myself. He had that sort of sense of humor and I laughed, but it just wasn't mine.

But though Manny would never have conceded such a thing, it cost him a lot in the end. Have you ever wondered what an oil company like Manny's Pacific Petroleum was doing in video games and pari-mutuel tote boards? Well, Manny's old bootlegging buddies were calling in their markers, and Manny didn't have any choice but to take these mob-influenced companies on.

But that was a half century later. A lot of markers would be collected before Manny was through, but not mine. Never mine. I gave him my life and what did I get back for it? Well, even I don't know anymore. It's been a life, and all lives are what you do with what's given you.

iv

Now that he'd made himself rich, Manny was having the time of his life. He bought an old carriage house that ran through the block between West Fourth and Tenth Street in the Village and moved out of the Ansonia for good. It was a great place, with three bedrooms off an upstairs balcony that overlooked the living room. There was a big fireplace, almost big enough to climb into, and Manny had built a raised platform covered with oriental rugs, cushions and bolsters, and anything else that might prove useful and comfortable. He called it the Playground.

Every weekend, he threw parties for the people he was getting to know in the city—friends, hangers-on, wannabes in the theatre, in politics, the mob, the Social Register. There was plenty of food, brought in from the restaurant across the street, and plenty of medicinal booze, brought in from the Faust pharmaceutical supply company. One night Manny did for me what Pop was always too busy to do. He took me out to dinner at a restaurant near Sheridan Square, brought along two dancers from the Follies, and afterward took us back to the carriage house, and there, in the glow of the firelight, with the rhythm of Manny humping and thumping somewhere in the shadows I finally found out what life was all about.

I don't remember the girl at all, except that she was blond, with long curly hair like Mary Pickford's that drove me crazy when she would let it drift over my leaping groin. I don't remember her face or her shape, anything other than that she was blond everywhere, and I hadn't expected that.

This wasn't the beginning of a new life for me as a cocksman. I couldn't afford to get girls for myself, I didn't like the idea of Manny getting girls for me, and I suppose maybe I didn't have the hormones. I wasn't driven the way Manny and Pop were all their lives. I wanted something more than the conquest of the flesh, the explosion in the groin, the flush in the loins, though I didn't know what more I wanted. Next morning after we began putting the place together again, Manny asked me how it was, and I remember myself turning red at the memory. I could get used to it, I said, as casually as I could manage. The truth was it was great, hot and liquescent, like silver, like satin, like the soul, or something, going out of your body, but I came so fast it was over almost as soon as it began. But I didn't tell Manny that.

Manny peeled off a hundred dollar bill from the wad in his pocket and told me the girl's phone number. I couldn't resist the bill, but I never did call the dancer.