by James Cook
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.
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—A
sians 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 over
coat 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.