Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family (37 page)

I flew to London over Thanksgiving and then again during Amherst’s January term. While Linda worked in a tiny, closet-like lab doing experiments on the effect of tetanus toxin on nerve cells, I wandered
through the museums and libraries of London. We stayed at her flat doing domestic things—cooking, reading to each other, and talking, and more talking. She took me up to Cambridge, where I met her parents and some of her extended family, including her uncle Max Perutz, who won the Nobel Prize in 1962 for his work on hemoglobin and had founded, at Cambridge, the world’s greatest center for molecular biology. Linda’s father, John, was a historian who had not finished his doctorate and wound up working in business and then as a barrister. His style was rather pontifical; he made pronouncements at the dinner table and expected unanimous assent. Being an Emanuel, I failed to grasp the family dynamic and instead of acting agreeable I said whatever came to mind, which irritated John and either amused or frightened everyone else.

The spring break in my last year of college brought Linda to Wilmette to meet my family. She flew from London to Newark and then on to O’Hare Airport, where she appeared looking weary and a little apprehensive about meeting the people responsible for creating the intense, hyperopinionated young man she just happened to love.

When we arrived at my parents’ house, my mother, tall and imposing, opened her arms to give Linda a big hug. Volumes are communicated in moments like these. How strong was my mother’s embrace? Did Linda return the affection? Was there tension in their bodies? Were any words exchanged? I don’t know the answers to these questions but I do know that these were two women from completely different worlds with completely different styles and completely different aspirations.

My mother did everything in a powerful way and even if she tried to hide her true feelings they came through loud and clear. Surely this included a few signals indicating she was uncomfortable about another woman “taking” her firstborn son.

Linda was reserved and so mannered you had to work at getting her to be candid. But she wasn’t at all weak. Beneath the reserve she was highly moral and opinionated, especially when it came to interpersonal exchanges.

Inside the house, Linda did not make it past the kitchen before she was met by my father and brothers. Ari, who was then a senior in high school, said something loud and obnoxious about me that was intended to be funny. Rahm, who was in his second year at Sarah Lawrence, asked how she could possibly care about a schmuck like Zeke. My father said he was astonished by the fact that she had traveled thousands of miles to visit me. In
her
usual way Linda listened carefully, and managed an uncomfortable smile.

In fact, a strained smile was the best Linda could summon during her entire stay as she watched my family jostle and kibitz around the house and listened to dinner table chats that became roaring debates filled with comments like “You are an idiot” and “Don’t be such an asshole.” The put-downs and attacks were sometimes so sharp that it would be hard for an outsider to know we weren’t entirely serious. Sometimes one of us would stake out a position just because we knew it would bother everyone else. Ari, for example, became somewhat conservative about economics once he had studied both Keynesianism and the alternatives being promoted at places like the University of Chicago. At one dinner debate he almost came to blows with Rahm when he said that government spending might be too high and that the economy might be boosted by cuts in taxes and business regulations.

“You’re an idiot,” said Rahm. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t call names,” our mother said before adding, “But Rahmi’s right, Ari. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Besides indulging in this kind of open argument, we also dispensed with most of the social niceties that other people use to welcome guests and establish trust and comfort. Indeed, guests were rarely formally introduced to the family or the house. Whether we had guests or not, we tended to be somewhat grabby with food, and table manners were optional. The only time this ever drew any objections was when my father started eating before my mother sat down.

In retrospect it’s easy to see why my mother got upset whenever my father jumped the gun at the dinner table. She invested considerable
time and effort in preparing the food and we owed her the courtesy of letting her sit down before we chowed down. Our father didn’t see it this way. To him food was fuel and our family dinner was not a slow social engagement but rather a utilitarian exercise embellished with conversation.

As often as not, my father would pick up his knife and fork as soon as his plate was set before him. We would shout, “Dad, cut it out!” and sometimes reach over with our own forks to trap his against the plate. He would complain that he’d worked hard all day and that he shouldn’t be constrained by a rule that made no sense. Sometimes this response would be accompanied by a sarcastic joke that made it clear he thought that anyone bothered by his manners was overly sensitive.

Positioned between our parents, we boys took our mother’s side. For one thing, we knew she’d worked hard all day and deserved some consideration. We also knew that peace depended on her mood. We wanted to enjoy our food and the time at the table, and this required her being happy when she sat down.

Still, though, I think our father’s blasé attitude encouraged us to be somewhat dismissive when it came to the feelings of others, especially women. As our father rolled his eyes at our mother’s complaints, we got the idea that women were less rational than men and weren’t quite worthy of our full respect. Believe me, this perspective is a liability for any man hoping to love a woman as an equal in a relationship, and this was a lesson we’d each have to learn as adults.

On her first visit with my family, Linda was overwhelmed by the fight-club style of conversation and no doubt detected the sense of entitlement in my father’s attitude. I had no real appreciation for social graces and struggled to understand what Linda was experiencing. In response Linda often retreated to my room. She emerged mainly for meals and the occasional outing, which gave me a chance to show her around the North Shore and Chicago. We also went to a movie with my father, which, in retrospect, might not have been such a great idea. He likes to absorb every frame with complete focus while I’m an enthusiastic viewer who laughs easily, and loudly. My idiosyncratic
hee-haw inevitably provokes him to scold me and elbow me in the ribs. I think nothing of it, but to Linda it seemed like she was going to the movies with a couple of loudmouths who were more interested in policing each other than watching what was on the screen.

It was a mistake, no doubt, to have Linda stay at our house for such a long time. Although my family considers an extended stay in someone’s home simply the way things should be done, three or four days’ exposure with nights spent at a hotel would have been a gentler way for everyone to get to know one another. I didn’t know any better and my parents would have been insulted if Linda had insisted on staying at a hotel.

And though she tried to be accepting, my mother was never going to be enthusiastic about any woman who replaced her as the number-one female in my life. Inevitably she let her disapproval show. By the end of the visit she and Linda were locked into a pattern of mutual wariness that would last for years to come.

As the man in the middle, I was brought face-to-face with two challenging realities. The first was that my family was uniquely loud, intense, and passionate. And while it was warm, often effusively warm and familiar, it took a rare kind of person to feel comfortable staying in the house. Friends like Andy Oram had said as much, but I’d failed to fully appreciate their insight. But when Linda expressed her discomfort and anxiety every time we were alone together, I was forced to come to grips with the fact that our aggressive, free-form style of relating might strike an outsider as obnoxious, if not assaultive. Worse still was the way we assumed that everyone who came into our orbit should simply adapt and play along. The underlying message was that if you were not skilled at the thrust and parry of kitchen table debate there was something wrong with you. Emanuels did not have to accommodate to the world; the world had to accommodate to them.

After Linda left, I put a great deal of thought into how I might make things work with her despite the difference in our ages, and the physical distance that might separate us as we pursued our careers after I graduated from college. Linda was planning to take a postdoctoral
position in London come autumn. I had reluctantly applied to several medical schools. I was rejected at most of them, such as Johns Hopkins and Cornell, without even an interview, but was accepted at just two: Northwestern—where my father was on the faculty—and Harvard. My parents wanted me to be close to home and go to Northwestern. That was not my choice. I was still reluctant to commit myself to becoming a physician and needed more space to make some decisions. Consequently, rather than rush into medical school, I decided to postpone matriculation. Fortunately, the admissions office at Harvard agreed to let me defer, as long as I was doing something that could justify the time off. With a fellowship from Amherst, I decided I would give biomedical research one more sustained period of time to see if I liked it. With the help of one of Linda’s relatives I found a research position in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford. I would be able to see Linda on weekends, try my hand again at research, and have some time—and distance—to assess my career options.

Rahm and Ari felt a little abandoned by me when I went to college, but during the two years when they were both still at home they became closer friends. Then, when Rahm left for Sarah Lawrence, Ari enjoyed special status as the last son at home. Although Ari would deny it as an adult, Rahm and I distinctly recall that he got away with murder. Credit his charming manner or my parents running out of whatever energy made them more watchful with me and Rahm, but for whatever reason, they relaxed the rules and just generally stopped worrying so much. If I had to be home on weekends by 11
P.M
. or midnight during my senior year in high school, Ari had no curfew. Sometimes he stayed out until daybreak, and he roamed all over the Midwest working and playing with his friends. On the few occasions when he went a little too far and got into trouble, Ari always managed to do something to change the course of the conversation. In one memorable conflict with my mother, for example, he forced her to stop complaining
as he literally picked her up and deposited her in the garbage can on the side of the house. He drove away before she got herself out, but he returned with a bouquet of flowers that she accepted as an apology.

Late in August, Ari and Rahm drove the old Ford wagon to see me at Cold Spring Harbor. From there, I was supposed to accompany Ari to Maine, Vermont, and Massachusetts on his college tour. It was travel according to my father’s thrifty style, right down to sleeping in the car and stealing apples from an orchard to eat with peanut butter because we didn’t have the money to buy food. We bought the gas on our father’s credit card.

The trip did not result in Ari finding the right fit at Bowdoin, Middlebury, Tufts, or any of the other schools we visited. But in his senior year of high school Ari would come east by himself to visit Rahm and practice an early form of “speed dating” at Sarah Lawrence, where the ratio of females to males was heavily skewed in his favor. In the end he wound up focusing on Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Macalester was quite selective, but with hard work Ari had learned ways to compensate for his dyslexia and improved his grades enough to be accepted. With maturity he also developed better control of his temper and behavior. He was still aggressive and revved higher than most people, even when idling. But he was far less prone to get into physical confrontations and, with the distance, his relationship with my father improved.

All in all, life was progressing smoothly enough. I buried myself in academic work and chased a postgrad position at Oxford. Rahm breezed through college, earning a degree in psychology and soon throwing himself into politics in Illinois. Meanwhile, Ari, after he got his degree at Macalester, took an extended “working” vacation in France, where he made some money but mostly ran up the balance on my father’s credit card.