The government wasn’t making any money on the venture and couldn’t figure out why. Manny and I went there to see if we couldn’t get the thing running profitably again. The government had taken over the mine in the early days of the revolution, and it had gone downhill ever since. You didn’t have to be a managerial genius to figure what had gone wrong. The price of platinum had collapsed at the end of the war, and if you had any hope of making money at current levels you had to find a way to cut back your costs correspondingly.

We were there on our own. The year before, Pop had exhausted all his legal appeals and gone off to prison. He’d been charged with performing an illegal abortion on a patient of his—Pop claimed the abortion was therapeutic of course—but the woman subsequently died, and her husband complained. They charged Pop with manslaughter, found him guilty, and sentenced him to three years in Sing Sing. That was the summer of the Palmer Raids, when the U.S. Attorney General rounded up 3,000 pro-Communist subversives and got two or three hundred deported. We all said he’d been railroaded, and a bungled abortion, if that’s what it was, was as good a reason as any to put away a man for three years if you wanted to be rid of him. I have my own ideas of what happened, but nobody ever asked me, and I see no reason to tell anyone now.

The district attorney described Pop as one of the country’s most dangerous radicals. At the time, the U.S. and much of the world seemed on the verge of revolution, so that in itself was enough to prejudice any jury. We saw the whole thing as a cause célèbre but looking back on it now, I realize that nobody paid much attention except us and a few of Pop’s friends, patients, and supporters. Pop was there during Richard E. Lawes’ 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, but he never made enough of an impression to make even a footnote in the book.

Pop went to jail the spring before Manny graduated from Columbia—Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, that is—almost twenty years to the day after Pop had gotten his own medical degree. Manny was supposed to start his internship at Bellevue the following January, but he didn’t like being at loose ends, so instead of hanging around New York he went to Russia. We never talked about why, but I think he was so ashamed and humiliated that they had put Pop in jail that he couldn’t bear to stay in New York and face the people he knew. Not just his fellow students, but everyone else. I sometimes thought he knew anybody who was anybody in New York, especially if they were young and adventurous and ready to give life a whirl.

I had enrolled at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, the previous fall, with the idea of majoring in fine arts. I don’t think I ever wanted to be a museum curator or an art dealer, but the visual arts—painting and sculpture and what not—had always intrigued me, and when other kids were off raising hell in Hell’s Kitchen or the Five Points, I was finding my way into New York’s art scene. I was too young for earthshaking events like the 1912 Armory Show (and probably wouldn’t have liked it if I had), but I went to the Steiglitz gallery a few times before it closed, and I began hanging around the new theatres that were springing up in Greenwich Village and elsewhere in the city.

In the circumstances maybe a fine arts major made sense. But there may have been more to it than that. Maybe I wanted to dissociate myself completely from Pop and from politics, from the Left Wing Socialists and what people were beginning to call the Communist Party, and a fine arts major was as decisive a break as I could think of at the time.

Pop was not one of your garden-variety radicals. His hair wasn’t long, or his eyes fiery; he didn’t throw bombs or start riots in the street. He was as subdued and sedate as a university professor. He looked like one and even sounded like one. And yet he was one of the principal organizers of the Socialist Labor Party. I grew up with all the cant of the movement ringing in my ears—worker exploitation, class warfare, worker solidarity, capitalist greed, and the dictatorship of the proletariat, but none of it much interested me.