Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family (31 page)

Our mother would never forget the gruff way she was treated by her father, but she was even more disturbed by the way Herman treated his sons. They may have been favored over her when it came to education, but decades later she still cringed when she recalled how he disciplined them for merely being high-spirited boys. This harsh treatment trimmed my uncles’ sails, and they never were able to feel supported for being themselves. This outcome seems even sadder when you realize that the man who undermined those boys was a vigorous, can-do kind of person who should have inspired them to be commanding personalities. This was the Big Bangah as my brothers and I were lucky enough to experience him—energetic, engaging, and encouraging. As his grandchildren, we felt his warmth, and very much wanted him to know about—and affirm—our successes. And we usually received that affirmation—along with a loving smack.

When the time came for her to raise a family, our mother was determined to do better. Still wounded by her father’s neglect, she would
set aside any ambitions she had for herself in order to focus her time, intellect, energy, and spirit on her children. She considered it her duty to master the modern art of motherhood and give her boys the best possible start in life. And, because the move out of the city of Chicago to Wilmette deprived her of her ability to fulfill her political ambitions, more of her sense of personal worth was wrapped up in our lives than is probably healthy.

But because she was a human being and not a saint, our mother expected—perhaps even needed—affection and appreciation from her family as compensation for her effort. The part of her that so hungered for rewards was, of course, the girl who never got them growing up.

Her need for affirmation was enormous. And because it was based on losses that were long in the past—which we did not and could not grasp—it was impossible for us to fill. As a result of these misplaced expectations, she was always disappointed by the holidays, vacations, and birthday and anniversary celebrations that were supposed to make her happy. No matter what her husband or sons tried she felt disappointed, cheated, and ultimately angry.

Although she generally kept them at bay, the inner grief and anger our mother acquired as a child lurked beneath the sarcasm she often flashed in conversation and in the depressed mood that could grip her for days on end. In searching for an antidote for her unhappiness she often fixed on what she was “owed” as payment for the time she had invested and the personal dreams and ambitions she had sacrificed for us. The price she had paid was obvious and included forgoing her own education and political ambitions and leaving her beloved Chicago for the suburbs. But these choices were not the ultimate source of her obvious belief that she had been treated unfairly by life. That sense of injustice was born much earlier, in her own childhood, which was as insecure as ours was safe and as constrained as ours was privileged.

Indeed, it was the stark contrast between her own experience and ours that explained the depth of our mother’s resentments. Every moment she spent watching us grow up and explore the world in freedom and security, the child inside my mother was reminded of her own
experience of deprivation. It was not fair that she had been so deprived as a girl and on some level she must have felt sorely cheated by life. The drive for fairness is so deeply ingrained in human beings, and essential to our social nature, that it has been reinforced by natural selection. It certainly helps explain both why my mother readily joined protesters and why she was continually looking for validation from us.

These were not unreasonable expectations, unless you consider that she was relying on some very imperfect fellows to deliver them. Everyday love and affection were no problem, especially when we were young. But lurking in the background remained this sense that we weren’t accomplishing enough to affirm her efforts. I got very good grades in school. Rahm was a gifted and dedicated dancer. Ari would show his grit as he adapted to his dyslexia and, later, as a successful athlete. But none of us were “the best” in our grade or high school class at anything—even at getting in trouble. In any case, a child’s performance inside or outside the family should not be used as a measure of a mother’s success in life. What constitutes an adequate acknowledgment for her efforts?

As we grew older we became frustrated with our own failure to make her happy. Her disappointment, tearfully expressed, made us dread the march of the calendar and feel both guilty and, since guilt works this way, angry about feeling guilty, and about the excessive importance she attached to events like Mother’s Day and anniversaries.

Our mother’s high standards also sparked resentment as we got older. Try as she did to be different than Herman, she could not do it in every way. For instance, while she loved us unconditionally, we were never able to rest on the laurels of our achievements for more than a millisecond.

Straight A’s on your report card, Jonny?

Great. Now what are you doing about the big project due in two weeks?

A victory on the wrestling mat, Ari?

Good going. Now, how are you doing in math?

A standing ovation for a dance recital, Rahm?

Wonderful. Why can’t you turn some of those B’s into A’s?

Besides her demands for performance, our mother also clung to us even as we reached an age when we needed to separate from her. “I was extremely proud of them,” she once said about her sons. “I was in love with them.”

From an adult perspective it’s easy to see how hard it must have been for her to let go of her role—her vocation, really—as a mother. I don’t think it’s possible to invest more in the mother-child bond than my mother invested. We were her life’s focus. As we inevitably pulled away, the pain must have been terrible. I suspect she also feared what we would do if we had full control of our own lives. Adults understand the depth of trouble that waits in the real world. Fortunately or unfortunately, wild teenage boys do not.

I did not try to break my mother’s hold until I was into my first year in high school. The transformative moment came when, in the fall of my freshman year, she accompanied me to a folk-rock concert held at my school’s auditorium. Seated beside her, in a sea of my fellow students, I got the queasy sensation every teenager feels when he realizes, a moment too late, that he has revealed himself to be a dork.

In that moment, I understood that I would have to push back in order to separate from my mother and father. I gradually but inexorably stopped being open about my feelings and my experiences, and started to spend more and more time out of the house with my school friends.

When their turns came, Ari and Rahm would make the same push for independence, letting go of their own close relationship with our mother and connecting to friends at New Trier West. Rahm, who played soccer for a year, would count a few athletes in his group but stuck mainly with creative types in the theater department and some of the free spirits who attended a so-called alternative program within the regular school. Ari became the boy who knew just about everyone in his high school class but was closest to old friends from our neighborhood and his lacrosse and wrestling teammates. I gravitated toward a crowd of kids who, it turned out, were not much different from me. They were nerds who clustered on the debate team and filled advance science and math classes.

When I arrived at New Trier West High School I set myself on a course to be the top nerd in the class. I also was a little bit of a hippie, growing my hair to my shoulders, and wearing jeans and an army jacket decorated by my artistic cousin Gary with beautiful peace symbols on the back and slogans like “Hell no we won’t go” all around. On my feet were a pair of brown Earth Shoes.

Despite having the look of a counterculture kid, I never drifted to the drug scene that was such a part of the 1970s. In the mind of an Emanuel, anything wildly popular is almost by definition worthy of suspicion and probably rejection. This was certainly the case with drugs. When it came to alcohol, I was always afraid of acting the way kids did when they got drunk. I was a control freak and feared what would happen if I was not fully aware and controlling things.

Trite as it might sound, our days were so filled with academics, sports, and extracurricular activities, those distractions just weren’t on our radar. New Trier West never allowed me the idle time. The anti-Semites who gerrymandered the district in order to send the growing number of Jewish kids to a new school on the west side of the district didn’t want the New Trier name sullied by a second-rate spin-off. So, as Rahm would later say, New Trier was probably the only district in the country where people taxed themselves heavily to send “those people” they did not want their own kids to mix with to a gorgeous school that ranked at the top of all high schools in the country. Indeed, Robert Kennedy spoke at the opening ceremony of New Trier West.

The workings of the place depended in part on something they called the advisory system, which assigned a classroom of students—all males or all females—to a single teacher who would serve as academic coach, personal mentor, and sounding board for their entire four years of high school. These “advisories” were more than traditional homeroom assignments. The teachers were required to visit their students’ homes, and meet with their parents or guardians, on a regular basis. They were also the key players on faculty teams set up to
detect and address problems that arose for individual students and set the rolls for different courses.

My advisor was the head football coach, Robert Naughton. He also taught mathematics. Initially I regarded him as a stereotype, the kind of muscle-bound guy who wouldn’t care about politics and would see me only as a scrawny, long-haired loudmouth. I was partly wrong. Bob Naughton did care about politics. He was a pro-Nixon, pro—Vietnam War conservative who believed American business was the cornerstone of society. We would spend four years arguing over everything from war and peace to taxes and the environment.

Placed in the top academic track at New Trier, I met a group of supercompetitive students who would have a lifelong influence on me. We had a strong academic bent, and paid a little less attention to the usual obsessions of adolescence like fashion, sports, and pop culture. The one exception to this rule, for me, was a car I purchased in my junior year shortly after getting my license.

It wasn’t just any car. It was an olive green Volvo 122 stick shift with 130,000 miles on it “but no serious problems,” according to the advertisement in the Chicago
Reader
. The asking price was three hundred dollars. Ari and I took cash from my bank account—my bar mitzvah money—and took the Chicago L to check it out. To some eyes it was ugly. To mine it was peculiar, but in a good way. I had seen Volvos during my family’s trips to Europe and I thought they were pretty cool. And I learned how to drive a stick shift right from the start, and thought they were much cooler than automatics. Ari and I were sure the price was a bargain and happily agreed to pay it. After the deal was made Ari jumped into the passenger seat and we drove it home to Wilmette. I even let Ari, who was thirteen at the time, do some of the shifting. We pulled into the driveway and honked the horn for the family.

“What are you, a schmuck?” was my father’s immediate reaction when he walked out the kitchen door. “What do you want with that old thing?”

“Dad, it’s almost an antique,” I answered, as if the Volvo were a mint-condition Model T.

“What do you know about cars?” he inquired. “How do you know this one is any good?”

We had long understood my father’s mechanical incompetence and our friend Ralph had taught us enough about cars to make us falsely confident. This explains how I wound up with a Volvo that performed nicely moving forward but whose transmission refused to go backward under its own power. No matter what we did, the car could not be put in reverse. We could get it out of the driveway by a gentle push to get it going down to the street, but this was not a long-term solution to the problem. Neither was a repair, which would cost more than the car was worth. My mother came up with the answer. She had Ralph Feldstein sell it to someone for two hundred dollars. Thus ended my fascination with cars. I wouldn’t buy another one for almost ten years, and haven’t owned one in more than five years.

Fortunately, the kids I hung with didn’t care much about flashy cars. Instead we bonded as members of the debate team. As people say, scholastic debate is football for geeks. It’s where kids who are smart, aggressive, and competitive but not necessarily strong or athletic can experience something like the aggression and camaraderie of a contact sport. The difference is that instead of bruising an opponent’s body you bruise his ego, which is within the rules as long as it’s done with proper style and technique. Unlike the dinner table at home, where even profanity-laced tirades were tolerated, being loud and profane actually hurt your chances in competitive debate. What works is the right combination of research and reasoning delivered confidently and persuasively, but not cruelly.