Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family (17 page)

For eight or nine years, we might as well have been six brothers with two sets of parents. The experience taught us that we could be close to people outside our family and that common ground isn’t hard to find.

In 1966 television was relatively new, so it was a big deal to see someone you recognized on the screen. Rarer still was the chance to actually be invited to be on TV. When one of the Chicago stations sent a truck plastered with its call letters down our block it instantly attracted attention. When it stopped in front of our building and the crew rang the buzzer for our apartment the sound created a wave of excitement through our family.

Although we had been instructed to “behave and be quiet,” we were not barred from the living room, where the crew set up a film camera on a tripod and placed their lights on telescoping stands on either side of it. After the reporter positioned my parents on the sofa he sat down beside them with a big microphone in his hand and began asking questions. The subject was the lead paint that had been used in thousands of Chicago apartments and the danger it posed to young children.

As my father explained for the camera, and all of the station’s viewers, babies and toddlers will pick up almost anything and put it in their mouths. In older, poorly maintained buildings—like the one we lived in on Broadway—crawling kids could find lots of peeling and chipped-off bits of paint that were as colorful and chewy as gumballs.
It only took a little lead to do a lot of damage to their bodies. Chronic low-level exposure causes gradual kidney damage, neurological deficits, and hearing loss. Swallowing larger amounts could lead to sudden organ failure and death.

Every year thousands of American kids were injured, and hundreds died, from poisoning that occurred when they chewed on chips of paint they either picked off deteriorating walls or found loose in substandard housing. Even greater numbers suffered from lowered intelligence and learning disabilities that would never be recognized or connected with the lead contamination. Many of these kids also came from poor Hispanic and African-American households, which meant they began life two steps behind kids who did not have to deal with poverty or prejudice. Lead could add a burden they might never overcome.

Never the policy maker, always the doctor, my father viewed the threat posed by lead paint not as a matter of statistics but as a matter of his patients. He had seen kids suffering from lead poisoning and administered chelation therapy to get the lead out of their bodies. As he answered the reporter’s questions I noticed the pride on my mother’s face. Rahm, Ari, and I were awestruck by the fact that our father was the focus of so much attention and technology. We got the same feeling on the night the interview was broadcast, right along with the rest of the important news of the day, and Benjamin Emanuel, MD, was identified as a medical expert.

At age nine, I was old enough to understand that my father was standing up for children in his practice and across the city. I also knew he was sticking his neck out a bit as he blamed city slumlords who were maiming infants and children as they refused to maintain their buildings. In calling them out, he was making it clear that they were bad guys, and that good people had no choice but to stand against them. It’s not that he made himself out to be a hero. The way he explained it was: “When you have a choice, you do the right thing. Every time. Even if it makes you uncomfortable.”

Because our parents got directly involved, it seemed perfectly normal to us that the issues covered on the nightly news and in the magazines that came to our home—
Newsweek, The New Republic
, and
Ramparts
—were active subjects of everyday conversation. We assumed that everyone took great personal interest in civil rights, the needs of the poor, and the growing American involvement in Vietnam. These were not abstractions to us but, rather, personal concerns. Positive news, like the passage of LBJ’s Great Society programs, made us feel inspired. Troubling developments, like the violent backlash against the civil rights campaign, were a real worry especially for our mother, who had to think more carefully about what she did on behalf of the cause. When members of the Chicago movement decided to send people to march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, my mother contributed money but did not go herself. Her fears were confirmed when a white marcher and mother of three from Detroit named Viola Liuzzo was murdered days after the Selma march.

Because my mother had children, she declined the more dangerous forms of activism. But as a protofeminist she chafed at the ways that she occasionally found her options limited. Despite some advances, women were still expected to sacrifice more than men in order to serve their families, and when they considered questions of “right and wrong” they were expected to give more weight to the needs of others. Men, on the other hand, had much more leeway to follow their own dreams and desires. Occasionally the inequity caused real friction between my mother and my father.

In one instance, my father objected when she wanted to accept an invitation to attend Lyndon Johnson’s presidential inauguration in January 1965. At first the issue was framed as a matter of money. My father said we just could not afford to send my mother to Washington, D.C., for three or four days. When she questioned my father’s math—in fact they did have the money to send her—he then said that attending that type of celebration, though an honor, did not really count as doing something of value that would benefit anyone. With this point, my father pushed the argument in a moral direction. Here again, he was wrong. The trip may not have accomplished anything
for suffering people in need, but it would have benefited my mother. She would have seen a new corner of the world and, perhaps, would have encountered new people and ideas that could help her grow stronger, more experienced, and more competent. But it was hard for her to say this without seeming selfish.

When it came time to decide about the inauguration, my mother weighed my father’s objections and actually considered taking the trip against his wishes. Ultimately, she stayed in Chicago, but she would never be completely comfortable with the choice. She believed that a man in her position would have found a way to attend the inauguration and that no one would have thought he was selfish for doing so.

The unfairness my mother experienced around the inauguration echoed her experience as a girl, when her father asked her to give up her dream of college simply because she was female. It also reminded her of the sacrifices she had made when she accepted the traditional role of full-time mother. Her life revolved around caring for three wild kids while her husband went to work earning the money that supported the family and the social prestige, achievement, and satisfaction that come with a career in medicine.

During the years when she did not work, and cut back on her activism, my mother was fully devoted to raising us boys. In exchange she assumed almost full authority over domestic affairs. Even though her husband was a pediatrician, she was the expert on child development, nutrition, discipline, education, and enrichment. My father seemed happy to let her take this leading role, and for the most part they functioned well as a parenting team. Occasionally they might argue about money, especially when my cheapskate father was flipping through his checkbook on Sunday mornings, trying to balance it and determine where all the money was going. But for the most part they agreed, and they shared the same fundamental priorities for spending. How you spend money says a lot about your values.

To begin with, neither one of our parents ever cared much about stylish clothes, or getting fancy stuff for the apartment. In my friends’ homes, the living room was the best place to hide during a game of hide-and-seek because no one was supposed to go in there. There was
no “stay out of the living room” in our home because my parents did not believe in buying expensive furniture or carpets, or anything else that needed to be protected from children (except for my dad’s stereo). Instead they filled our house with ordinary things that they expected would suffer scratches, dents, and stains.

The money they saved on stuff was used to pay our tuition at Anshe Emet, which was important to my parents. They were also willing to spend on anything that would make us boys a bit more educated, worldly, and cultured. For a trio of antsy little boys, we spent an extraordinary amount of time squirming around in the nosebleed seats at the ballet or Chicago Symphony. Ironically, on those trips I looked around and learned to appreciate the architectural beauty of the stunning Auditorium Theatre and Symphony Hall more than the actual dance or classical music. We spent many of our other Sunday afternoons at free concerts in Grant Park or viewing exhibits at the Field Museum or the Art Institute of Chicago. When the musical
Hair
came to Chicago, we not only attended dressed in striped bell-bottom pants and white turtleneck sweaters but we got up on stage to dance when the audience was invited to join the finale.

Our parents also took us with them to clubs where we could hear live music. Often we were the only kids in sight at places like Amazing Grace and the Old Town School of Folk Music, where Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Joan Baez, and every other important folk act of the era played to packed crowds. They took us to hear music when we traveled, too. On a West Coast road trip in 1965 we saw Janis Joplin at a little place in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.

It was an unusual thing for American kids to accompany their parents to clubs and coffeehouses, especially when these outings lasted into the late hours of the night. Even as a kid I knew this was true because none of my friends and classmates even knew about these places. (My buddy Skippy Shein’s weekend outings revolved around sitting in the boxes on the first-base line at White Sox games at the old Comiskey Park.) We knew nothing else. So it seemed perfectly normal to go to these clubs, especially since the music was infused with political
and moral values and the people in attendance talked about the same issues we debated at home.

The one thing my parents disagreed about when it came to money was my father’s desire to buy a house in the suburbs. To him, owning his own suburban home represented both status and security and, most important, fulfillment of the American dream. To her, a house in the suburbs meant death. Moving into a whites-only, middle-class fantasyland was the antithesis of the vibrant city life in which my mother found it easy to make friends and find outlets for her liberal political views. Suburbia meant selling out and was, therefore, unthinkable. “Go ahead,” she would say to him. “You’ll live there by yourself.”

The disagreement over the suburbs revealed one of the flaws in the unstated agreement that governed my parents’ marriage. They both talked about equality of the sexes and when it came to respect and honor my mother was supposed to get an equal share. But as the so-called breadwinner, my father harbored the belief that in the end, the big financial decisions were his to make. This meant he never gave up on his dream of a house in the suburbs and every once in a while he tried to deliver some sort of edict on spending. I suspect this was because he was secretly saving up for a down payment.

Deep down, my father understood that my mother worked very hard and made plenty of sacrifices to keep our household running. Unlike most wives and mothers, her burden also included caring for a darkly judgmental mother-in-law and the occasional extra boy, who needed to be fed and decently clothed. Given her limited budget, my mother was forever stitching up rips in our shirts and ironing in patches on the knees of our pants. She also devoted an extraordinary amount of time to purchasing and preparing food, which we consumed so voraciously that my father would call us “the locusts.” It was my mother’s careful shopping that enabled my parents to fill us up with the type of wholesome foods—lots of fresh fruits, vegetables, and salads—that cost more and were supplanted, in many homes,
with stuff that was canned or frozen. “You could not keep them in clothes and feed them decent food with what I have to spend,” she would say during their disputes over spending.