by James Cook
Miranda never worked in motion pictures again. She hung on for a while doing voices on spooky radio programs like Lights Out and Inner Sanctum, but when even they no longer wanted her, she wasn’t devastated. She expected to be persecuted for her beliefs and accepted her lot, and so while friends like Eddie Blomberg developed psychosomatic heart trouble or, like Gale Sondergaard, drank themselves to death, Miranda and I just went on with our lives, finding each other more and more satisfying as the years went on.
We led a good life. We were involved in all the right liberal causes, we ate in the best restaurants and went to the most fashionable parties, vacationed in all the new places, and hobnobbed with the glamorous people who imagined they ran New York. Everyone thought of me, or us, as wealthy, but we weren’t at all. We just lived on the edge of desperation like everyone else, except at a much higher socioeconomic level.
We never had any children and I’m not sure we cared whether we did or not. We had the girls, my Russian twins, and that was probably quite enough. Miranda seemed more interested in them than I was. She would have liked them to live with us.
I lost touch with Tania and the twins for nearly ten years after the Hitler-Stalin pact. Then sometime after the war, in the early fifties, I managed to get a visa and went back to Russia for the first time in nearly twenty years. Tania was older. She was still thin and wiry, only sinewy now, rather than fragile, and her honey-colored hair was streaked with gray, but she was as handsome and elegant as ever and still had her job with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Our girls were all grown up. They were in their twenties, identical as always, but the softness had gone from their faces, and so had the curls; they dressed in the same mannish style their mother affected. But on them it had none of the allure and glamour it gave Tania. I didn’t like them, to be honest about it, not as individuals, though I loved them extravagantly. I was happy just to be with them; but they seemed harsh and acerbic where they should have been gentle and sweet.
Several years later I managed to get them visas to come to New York but the trip was a fiasco. They found nothing they liked anywhere. New York was dirty and noisy and ugly, as Moscow was not, New York was filled with the poor, the underprivileged, and the desperate, as Moscow was not. They were especially upset by the constant intrusion of advertising on people’s lives in the U.S., Buy Buy Buy—that was what America was all about—from the signs on the buses and subways, to the ads in the newspapers, the commercials on radio and television, the shop signs hanging over the streets, the neon, the displays in the store windows, even the dazzle and glitter of Times Square.
They were not enchanted by the city’s renowned skyscrapers. They couldn’t enjoy the theatre, because, of course, they had never learned English, and they didn’t think the opera or ballet was anywhere near as good as what they were used to. They dismissed the innovativeness of people like Menotti, Britten, Agnes DeMille, and George Balanchine, never mind Martha Graham and José Limón. As for painting, I who had never been all that taken with abstract expressionism, found myself defending the verve and imagination of our artists. If I had any notion that the twins might want to stay and be a comfort to us in our old age I was mistaken.
In the fifties Manny married his third wife—Genevieve Anderson, a wealthy widow he had had a fling with in the thirties—and moved to Houston, where she lived, and began raising Angora sheep. He learned to ride a horse and played Tom Mix for a while on a 10,000-acre ranch in the Texas Panhandle. But he needed more than chaps, spurs, and a Stetson to make him feel he was proving his worth to the world. He needed to wheel and deal, to rub elbows with the people who moved and shook the world, and sheep ranching didn’t afford that to him. And then he made his investment in Pacific Petroleum, got into the oil business, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Manny got into the oil business on Genevieve’s money and over the years parlayed Pacific Petroleum into one of the giants of the oil business. He set out to create a big company and he did. For a while he dumped everything but the kitchen sink into the company—not just oil, but gold, silver, fertilizers, electronics, you name it. By then he had started calling himself CPI Faust, not because Pop had named him after Carl Phillip Immanuel Bach but, as Manny liked to explain, because Pacific Pete was as broadly based as the Consumer Price Index. The mix eventually changed, but the moniker lingered on.
Once he took the company public, all those fast buck boys on Wall Street began to go for whatever he did. He was selling himself, his charm, his get-up-and-go, his outrageous imagination. He’d reinvent the company at a moment’s notice, lay out a bold plan for the future, devise mergers, takeovers, and acquisitions, and if none of them ever materialized, who cared, as long as something else did, so Pacific Pete stock went through the roof.
If people suggested Manny had bought or bribed his way into his good fortune, he didn’t apologize. He’d explain that that was the way the world worked—not just in Um al Quayamm and Venezuela, but in the U.S. and U.K. as well. And who could maintain he was wrong?
Though he sold off most of his stock over the years, Manny nonetheless ran Pacific Petroleum as if it were his own private fiefdom. He packed the board with his friends, and the board rubberstamped whatever he wanted to do—acquire a yacht, a helicopter, a private jet for his personal use, put up the money to advance his private enthusiasms, his art museums, cultural centers, symphony orchestras, and international fellowships.
After the death of Stalin, he began rebuilding his Russian connections, shuttling between the U.S. and the USSR, making. friends, making deals, no longer as the son of his father, but as a power in his own right, an oil man and international capitalist. He was not just a link with the glorious socialist past, a man who had known Lenin and been blessed by him, but also a friend, defender, and advocate of the Soviet Union.
Doors opened that had never swung open before. When he came to Libya or Sharjah or Brunei, he came as the equal of kings, sheiks, presidents and prime ministers. He wasn’t just a businessman, he was an international statesman, an apostle of world peace, and to advance that dream he worked out a series of major development schemes with the Russians, the Poles, the Chinese, and the Roumanians. You wanted to avoid war between the Soviet Union and the West? Well you did that not by building nuclear arsenals but by promoting trade between East and West. Even the Russians would think twice about shooting nuclear missiles at some of their best customers.
“My father was a socialist,” he liked to explain, “and the socialists have always been peacemongers. I never wanted to be a businessman or a millionaire. But the opportunity was there and I went for it. I wanted to be a doctor, the way my father was a doctor, but I had a flair for business. I am a capitalist and always have been but capitalism involves taking risks and sometimes you lose your shirt.”
And everybody believed him.
He set out to dissolve the bonds that separated commerce from politics and counted among his friends every president since Hoover, every Russian president since Stalin. Those friendships sometimes never went much beyond a chat in a White House reception line or a quick handshake in an airport corridor. You never knew when Manny Faust’s money or his backing might come in handy.
I continued to live in his reflected glory. Journalists liked to call me for the lowdown on how Manny got where he was, and on at least one occasion Manny returned the favor. “My brother Victor?” he told one television interviewer. “I’ve taken care of him all his life. Victor’s a sweet man. and I love him dearly but without me he’d be out on the street. The truth is he never did anything on his own in his life.”
Truth, I suppose, is where you find it.
And Genevieve, his beloved wife of the past twenty years? In the beginning she went with him everywhere around the world, to the ends of the earth, but in the end she tired of all that traveling and, for all I know, got tired of Manny. His private self had long since disappeared in an unending whirl of diplomatic missions, corporate shenanigans,
and media flashbulbs, and there wasn’t much of anything left over. Manny went off on his own with a series of secretaries, Hollywood stars and starlets, while Genevieve developed a crippling arthritis, took to a wheelchair at her estate in Houston, and never got up again. Manny probably couldn’t have cared less.
Miranda and I traveled with him to Russia a few times on his private jet, but I didn’t enjoy going back. I hated the new mood of Moscow, all the more so because all the blemishes had been patched up and repaired, the slums removed and the streets widened, whole blocks reduced to rubble and anonymous housing, the entire city renewed and redesigned, so that the settlement that had nestled there on the river for nearly a thousand years no longer existed.
As Manny’s star rose in the world of oil, his connections with the gallery became closer and closer. He began arranging a series of exhibitions of Russian art, of paintings from Russian collections that had not been seen in New York or in the West since before the revolution. But the past had lost its resonance for me; these people did not summon up a time that had vanished.
Which may be why a year or so back I began putting these recollections down. I had no idea of what I was going to do with them, and still haven’t. Give them to my daughters, perhaps, as a record of the world they came from. Leave them for the scavengers to dispose of along with everything else when they move in to clean out what remains of me after my death. I suppose nobody wants to disappear into the dark without leaving a trace, however light he prefers to travel.
They are curious things, these memories. Sometimes they come rushing back as fresh as the time they encompass, at other times they seem to have been lost entirely, then begin creeping back out of the dark bit by bit so that I seem to remember this, or it must have happened that way, and I even hired a part-time researcher to provide the details my memory lost long ago. More often than not I’ve discovered that the historical record is wrong and my memory is truer than the history that’s been left behind.
As always, in thinking of those days, I come back to the mountains towering over that place in the Urals like some primeval force. That May morning when I took the sledge to Sverdlovsk to catch the train to Moscow, the sky was gray and overcast. You looked up to where the mountain-tops should be, and there was nothing, only those smothering clouds hanging low over the valley. But you knew the mountains were there. They would always be there. You could never escape them. They remained with you all the rest of your life, threatening, overpowering—like something out of a dream or nightmare from which, struggle as you might, you would never again awake.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2000 by James Cook
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1246-1
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