Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family (36 page)

The next morning, at breakfast, Andy got the full Emanuel treatment. As he would later recall:

Like just about everyone, Andy was charmed by my father’s warm, open, and easygoing personality. My mother, on the other hand, made Andy feel a little bit anxious and on guard. “She always seemed a tiny bit dangerous,” he remembered. “There was a certain edge that made you feel like she would say something hurtful and not let someone’s pain get in the way of her own need to make a point.”

Exhibit A in Andy’s critique came after he had known the family for a long time, and my mother, in a careless moment, said something about how he would always be an outsider. According to him, she said, “We love you, honey, but we don’t need you.” Since Andy was not quite family the statement was true. His point, of course, was that she still didn’t have to say it.

In truth, both my parents pushed until you pushed back. For example, the doctor issue. As a youngster I accepted their plan for me to become a doctor, but by the end of high school I had doubts. While I was really good in science, and throughout my high school and college career had never earned anything other than an A in a science course—except first-semester organic chemistry—I had begun doing medical research in laboratories over the summers. The work was interesting, but once I understood the underlying science, I became somewhat bored. All the effort to discover one little piece of a puzzle did not seem worth it. I never liked the process of doing the experiments, and so the notion of becoming a research physician seemed less and less appealing. As a consequence, I began trying to imagine other possible careers. I tried to express my feelings, but my parents did not take them very seriously. They continued to ignore my view, dismissing it as born of insufficient experience. The way they talked about my being a doctor, it was as if I had no choice.

My doubts about medicine reached one peak at the end of my junior year in college when I went home and the three of us went out for dinner at a popular burger place in nearby Northbrook. I tried to tell them that while I found my science classes compelling, I didn’t enjoy lab work at all and I could not imagine taking care of patients day in and day out the way my father did. My father delighted in the interaction with people and solving individual patients’ problems; I took
after my mom and thought about solving people’s problems by changing social policies. I was much more intrigued by political theory and political change. I also told them that I was becoming more intrigued by studying and writing about politics, philosophy, and economics. I lacked a clearly formulated alternative to being a doctor. My thinking was pretty vague. Maybe, I ventured, I should start a political magazine or become a political philosopher. These half-baked possibilities were quickly quashed. My parents saw only that I got good grades in pre-med classes and stressed that as a physician I would be well respected and enjoy a good and reliable income, which certainly wasn’t likely as a founder of an obscure magazine, they emphasized to me.

Sensing that I might not be satisfied with a life like his, my father said I could combine clinical practice and serious research. “So what if you don’t like doing the lab work?” he said. “In a few years you’ll have students and fellows to do the work. You’ll be the boss.”

For once, I didn’t have the words to argue with my father. However, while I enjoyed learning about science, I knew I didn’t enjoy lab work, even though I was reasonably good at it. I felt a vague sense that while I could not clearly articulate it, I was missing out on something that really appealed to me. I saw the irony that I was easily sailing forward on the pre-med track yet having the persistent gnawing sense that it wasn’t right for me, while many of my classmates who truly wanted to be practicing doctors—and would be really good at it—were getting grades that would force them to contemplate other careers. Back at school I continued doing the pre-med track, while also continuing my studies in philosophy and political science. Always a loyal friend, Andy listened to me describe what happened that night in the restaurant and was not at all equivocal in his assessment. He said my parents “were trying to live through their kids too much” and were ignoring my own drives and aspirations. While he did not have an alternative career to suggest to me—after all, it wasn’t his role, and because he wasn’t sure what he wanted, he was planning to take a year off between his junior and senior years—but he did encourage me to stick to my own feelings. The tendency to push forward until someone
screams out in painful resistance was one of the negative aspects of the Emanuel way, he said.

I could understand Andy’s point, but it would take more than a good friendship to force me to confront some of the negative aspects of being an Emanuel. For that to happen, I would need to fall in love, marry, and have my own children.

Love and marriage and children were not something our parents pushed on us. Instead they showed us through their example that finding the right person, making a commitment, and having kids can make life more fulfilling and make us into better individuals. However, they clearly communicated to us boys that there was no need to hurry the process, and in the meantime there was no reason to deny oneself life’s pleasures, just as long as you were responsible. That’s why, in high school, Ari expressed true shock when Gibby told him a classmate was pregnant. “What’s the matter with them?” she recalled my brother saying. “Haven’t they ever heard of condoms?”

Ari would never be shy about sex, and as the most handsome and charming of us all, he would have an adventuresome single life. Eventually he would meet and fall in love with Sarah Addington, whom he later married, in 1996, when he was thirty-four years old and was becoming a successful agent. Rahm would follow a similar path, holding off on love and marriage until he met Amy Rule in 1990. They married in 1994, when Rahm was also thirty-four and well ensconced in the White House. In marrying late, both of my brothers followed my father’s example. He insisted that it was best to complete your education and establish yourself firmly in a career before considering marriage and children. Love can wait.

Considering the fact that I was the brother who was truly tone-deaf when it came to women, it was a bit of a surprise—even to me—when I turned out to be the one who took a romantic detour from Ben Emanuel’s route to an early marriage. Certainly my college friends would have never expected me to be the first one to actually find a like-minded soul and win her heart. It would happen in the summer between my junior and senior years, at a place that might be called the Shangri-la for molecular biologists.

Located on the North Shore of Long Island, about forty miles outside New York City, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory occupies a small campus on the former company estate of a nineteenth-century whale-oil millionaire named John D. Jones. At its founding in 1890 the lab was involved in many aspects of research, including eugenics. After World War II an influx of immigrant European intellectuals made the lab a leader in the emerging field of molecular biology. By the time I got there in the summer of 1978, Cold Spring Harbor was the home of several Nobel Prize winners and was moving into neuroscience in a big way. The lab was led by James D. Watson, codiscoverer of the structure of DNA.

Ten college students were admitted to the summer Undergraduate Research Program (URP) and were fondly called URPs. The students selected for this work came from around the country, and were notable for being younger than everyone else on campus. We were assigned to work in the faculty labs, and allowed to sit in on classes offered mainly to graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. I ended up working on yeast genetics because my Amherst genetics course included a semester-long yeast lab project. We lived in pretty spartan rooms with not much more than a single bed, an old wood bureau, and a shared nightstand. Cold Spring Harbor was the kind of place where you could sit in on a Nobel laureate’s lecture and bump into future prize winners in the hallways discussing new data. We were constantly reminded that a previous URP, David Baltimore, then of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had already won a Nobel Prize.

Many of the URPs took their lab work very seriously. My roommate, Jeremy Nathan, a future MD-PhD student and Johns Hopkins professor, worked out the genes that make the proteins for color vision in the eye and worked out the genetic basis of color blindness for his dissertation. He routinely worked until eleven at night, and referred to the lab as his “temple.” Because of my doubts about science as a career, I could never get into the lab work that much. A fellow URP, Adam Schulman, was having his own doubts about becoming a molecular
biologist. Adam and I reinforced each other on that score. We read Greek philosophy together, traveled into New York City to attend the Mostly Mozart program at Lincoln Center, and organized special discussions for the URPs with some of the outstanding scientists who visited Cold Spring Harbor that summer. Adam and I also organized an URP field trip to the Tanglewood Music Center in western Massachusetts. On many nights we “borrowed” an official Cold Spring Harbor van for late-night swims in the pool of a mansion located across the harbor and owned by the lab. I liked learning about immunology and neurobiology in the Cold Spring Harbor classrooms, but I never really found my lab work compelling. However, I did become infatuated with a beautiful young woman who walked past my lab several times per day as she made her way to the centrifuges to collect samples that were part of her own research.

A couple of years older than me, Linda Wendon was a PhD candidate at University College London but doing her research in Israel. She already had her name on some important neuroscience papers. Linda had come to Cold Spring Harbor with her mentor, Rami Rahamimoff, a world-renowned Israeli physician and neuroscientist who was based at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Slightly built with silky blond hair and blue eyes, Linda was by far the most attractive young woman I saw at Cold Spring Harbor.

Linda, who had come to New York from Rami’s lab in Jerusalem, had been born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when her father, who was British, was a graduate student at Harvard. He had actually been born into an assimilated German Jewish family. In the 1930s, when he was nine, his parents sent him to a boarding school in England to escape Nazism. He converted to Christianity and became a British citizen. Linda’s mother attended Wellesley College and was descended from the artist branch of
Mayflower
blue bloods, the Brewsters. Like me, Linda had seen quite a bit of the world. Unlike me, she did not seem to give a whit about politics or social issues. I was stunned, but also a little intrigued, to discover she did not know the name of the British prime minister and whether he was Tory or Labour. More impressively, she did not seem to care that she did not know.

We had watched each other, but finally met on August 1 and for the next four weeks spent as much time together as we could. During the workweek we ran together, ate dinners together, and went on late-night swims at the mansion pool or at the pebbly beach near the lab. On weekends we often took the train into New York City to visit museums or just walk around. Not interested in politics or social controversy, Linda seemed to me reserved and somewhat mysterious. She was everything an Emanuel wasn’t.

When the summer program was over and I returned to Amherst, I was on such an emotional high that I barely ate or slept. I signed up for five courses and worked as a teaching assistant in two others—chemistry and genetics. Linda would remain at Cold Spring Harbor continuing her research through the end of October. During this time we saw each other almost every weekend. If she did not come north to see me, I traveled south to see her.

A long-distance romance forces you to set priorities, and in mine with Linda, I came to question my father’s advice about love and marriage. He may have taught us to delay making a commitment until we were fully educated and established in life, but true love is never guaranteed and too many people pass on the real thing while waiting for the “right time” and a host of other variables to align perfectly.

When Linda finally left for England to resume her doctoral research at University College London, we had yet to figure out anything concrete. In the days before the Internet, Skype, and even cheap telephone service, the prospect of being separated by an ocean was daunting. Then there was our age difference. Linda was a quite serious twenty-four-year-old who knew she wanted to have children within a few years. I was just turning twenty-one and not finished with college. She was understandably worried that I wasn’t ready for what she wanted. She told me to think hard about my choices. But love doesn’t tell you to think carefully. Love leads you to Laker Airways and ninety-nine-dollar fares from Newark to London.