Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family (20 page)

At camp, I lingered long enough to determine that I would constantly be thrust into new social situations and that there was a regimented program, moving groups of kids from one organized activity to the next. I quickly concluded this wasn’t for me. I preferred my freelance, self-designed summer of beaches, books, and parks instead of weeks of structured play. When I explained this to my mom she was not immediately sympathetic. As a girl she would have given anything to get out of the city and attend a summer camp. But after I insisted and explained how I felt—and she saw my anxiety—she let me come home with her.

By the fall of 1966, I was a fourth grader, Rahm was in second, and Ari was starting kindergarten. In my social studies class, we were required to pick a topic and follow it in the newspaper. While other students focused on the space program or the Chicago Cubs, I studied the war in Vietnam. Every week I brought clippings into class for discussion and when it was my turn to make an oral report I gave a lengthy talk
on the numbers of American military deaths, which rose almost fourfold between 1965 and 1966. By the end of the school year the annual death rate had almost doubled again, to more than eleven thousand.

My concern about the war was driven in part by the conversations at our dinner table and the articles I read in the magazines that were piled in the rack in our bathroom. Pictures from the war made a deep impression on me. One of these photos was the February 11, 1965,
Life
magazine cover shot that showed two wounded GIs, their heads wrapped in bandages, waiting for help in a foxhole. More disturbing was a widely published image of a Buddhist monk who had set himself on fire in Saigon in 1963 to protest the war and the corruption of the American-backed leaders of South Vietnam.

The emotions stirred by what I read and saw made me deeply skeptical about the justifications voiced by those who got our country involved and kept raising the stakes. No one in my family accepted Lyndon Johnson’s assurance about the war being necessary simply because he was the president. Born and raised to question authority, I prodded my classmates with questions about just what America hoped to accomplish as it waged war at an ever-higher price in a small country with little or no previous relationship to ours.

These discussions seemed natural and normal to me, but many of the kids in my class struggled with the idea that America might be losing a “bad” war. Many adults were also reluctant to see the tragic folly of Vietnam. On Winona Street, our upstairs neighbor John Downs had terrible difficulty reconciling his own experience in the army and his brothers’ service during World War II with the critiques of the military he heard from my mother. In time he would come to agree with her view that America’s leaders had led the country astray in Vietnam. But at the start of the war, and even as it escalated, John was firm in his support for the direction our leaders had taken. He felt uncomfortable as he listened to my mother talk about the corruption of the regime we were backing, the unfairness of a draft system, and the shaky rationale underpinning the whole enterprise.

Fortunately, liberal Anshe Emet was not the kind of school where they forced you to stop talking when other people became uncomfortable,
so I was not discouraged from addressing a controversial subject, even in the fourth grade. However, I was guided by my teacher to tone down my arguments, which no doubt sounded shrill in my squeaky voice, and give the kids who did not have the benefit of getting dinner table lessons in debate a chance to make themselves heard.

In the sixties it often seemed like the political issues that dominated the front pages were played out in our daily lives. I think this was true for many families as the draft brought almost two million sons, neighbors, and friends into the service for the war in Vietnam, and the raging debate over civil rights made it impossible for people of different races to interact without being aware of the ways that minorities had been mistreated over the generations. For us, the arrival of Vern Henry brought both of these crises—the war and the struggle over racial equality—directly into our lives.

All of five feet tall, and perhaps a hundred and thirty pounds, Vern Henry was a black woman whom my parents paid to come to our home to help out with cleaning, cooking, and other chores. Though she worked for our family, we were taught from the day we met her to call her “Mrs. Henry” and to treat her with the utmost respect. Indeed, we cared so much about her that we actually cleaned our room ourselves because it was so messy we thought it would be unfair to have her even cross the threshold.

Mrs. Henry wore a maid’s uniform on her first visit to our apartment, but my mother immediately put an end to that, insisting that she dress for comfort, not status. She became so comfortable around us that when she had an earache she showed up with cotton stuffed in her ear canal and a toothpick, for easy extraction, hanging out of it.

We boys looked forward to Mrs. Henry’s visits. She told us stories and fed us southern foods like fried chicken and greens, which she prepared with consummate finesse. She also taught us skills that would last a lifetime. When she set up the ironing board in the corner of the dining room but within sight of the television, we actually fought over who would be allowed to help her first. She was an expert at steaming,
pressing, and starching and under her guidance we became quite expert ourselves. There was something exciting about having charge of a tool that blazed hot enough to burn the skin and belched great clouds of steam. We all became quite proficient, but what we liked best was being close to Mrs. Henry.

This relationship between Vern and our family was first and foremost a friendship. Vern got kisses and hugs from us when she arrived and departed and we frequently visited at her home. She lived in an apartment in an old triple-decker house on the West Side, which was the heart of the city’s black community.

We went to the Henrys’ once every month or two. We often ate Sunday dinner, which might include a few dishes like chitlins and okra, which we considered exotic. The crowd around the table included Vern’s two younger sons and, if he wasn’t working, her husband, a bus driver. Before dinner Rahm, Ari, and I played with the neighborhood kids in the back alley and the street. As the only whites in a crowd of black kids, we may have felt a little like racial outsiders but we were readily accepted. At Christmas we brought presents to them and got a glimpse, through their eyes, of what the holiday meant.

When Mrs. Henry’s son Rodney was drafted into the army my father tried to get him a medical deferment. He felt justified doing this on moral grounds. After all, young men from middle- and upper-class families received routine deferrals on the basis of minor medical problems or because they enrolled in college and, afterward, in graduate schools. Dick Cheney, future vice president of the United States and super-hawk, received four educational deferrals and avoided service altogether. Rush Limbaugh, the similarly hawkish radio commentator, got a medical deferment for a “pilonidal cyst,” which is a fancy medical term for a small, painful abscess on the area of the tailbone right between the butt cheeks. Hardly a serious medical condition.

While millions of sons of privilege (most of them white) were being excused from service on the basis of college studies and medical problems, blacks entered the military at a much higher rate, eventually making up 23 percent of the combat troops in Vietnam. This was more than twice their representation in the population as a whole. My
father was keenly aware of this disparity and tried to identify a serious medical justification for a deferment. When he could not come up with something, Rodney was drafted. A lovely, caring young man, he went through basic training, shipped out to Vietnam for combat duty, and returned a heroin addict.

Mrs. Henry would be a fixture of our lives for about five years. My parents talked to her often about Rodney, and when Martin Luther King was assassinated we validated her grief with our own deep feelings of sadness. My mother gave us black armbands to wear to Anshe Emet for the next few days. Although we attracted stares and questions at school, we understood the statement we were making.

Of course, the fight for equality wasn’t just about symbols and marching. It was also our responsibility to act whenever possible. With constant urging from my mother, who also paid the tuition, Mrs. Henry added school to her work schedule and eventually got her certification to be a licensed practical nurse. She soon found a job that paid well, had fringe benefits, and allowed her to work plenty of hours. When she stopped coming to our house to work we missed her warmth, wisdom, and attention. She remained a family friend and we would continue to see her for the occasional chicken dinner, but we all felt her absence in our home.

Vern Henry’s departure wasn’t the only big change that required some adjustment. While my brothers and I were focused on school and neighborhood adventures and my mother was busy caring for us and running the household, my father quietly put down a deposit on a split-level house in the North Shore suburb of Wilmette. Remarkably for a guy who was so thrifty he would haggle over the price of a pair of shoes, he paid the asking price and did not even attempt to negotiate on the biggest purchase of his life. After he put down a deposit he came home one night to announce, “I’ve bought a house.” My mother, her voice dripping with sarcasm, replied, “Why didn’t you buy two?”

The argument that ensued was more serious than any I heard before and since. My mother was a Chicago woman, through and through.
She thrived on the variety of people, ideas, and cultures she bumped up against in her daily life and was proud of her ability to move surely from neighborhood to neighborhood. A move to the suburbs would deny her everything that gave her an identity as a Chicagoan. She was adamant in her objection to moving, and furious with my father for making such a big decision, and a great financial commitment, all on his own.

This was not the kind of intense but brief conflict that we were accustomed to seeing from our parents. Instead the argument was joined, suspended, and resumed countless times over many months. For weeks my mother would not even go look at the actual house. When we finally drove out there we discovered a modest, four-bedroom split-level on Locust Road, a north-south path that ran through a grid of residential properties that were each about a quarter of an acre in size. Nearly all the houses were ranch/split-level hybrids of modest size. Each one was set back from the road about thirty feet and flanked by a strip of concrete that served as a driveway. Some had garages.

On Locust Road my father saw the ultimate emblem of American middle-class respectability, bringing with it an end to rent payments and a chance to accumulate some wealth in the form of appreciating real estate. There he could also escape private school tuition payments because the local public schools were excellent. What he did not say, but was understood, was that as my family bought into the real estate aspect of the American dream, the possibility that we might ever move to Israel became much less likely. My father had stayed in contact with colleagues in Israel and even visited several times to explore the potential opportunities for work. However, every time the jobs being offered to him were just a grade or two below what he had already achieved in the United States. And none offered the kind of potential that would make it worth giving up the medical practice and collegial relationships he had developed in America.