Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family (15 page)

My mother understood Ari’s predicament and tried to compensate by giving him extra attention when he did homework. She also pressed him by making sure he understood that he was expected to give it his best whenever he did anything. On his own, Ari would look for different ways to show his intelligence and talent. He became highly skilled at social relationships and adept at both charming and manipulating adults. Not surprisingly, his methods were least effective at home,
where my parents understood Ari’s techniques and generally refused to be charmed. When it came to measuring both our effort and our achievement, they maintained very high standards. It was a tough kind of love, and Ari often resented it.

Decades later, it would not take much prodding to get Ari to recall the burning sense of shame he felt as he tried to overcome his problem in full view of his classmates and brothers. “Do you have any idea what kind of torture it was like to sit there every day?” he would ask Rahm and me. “It was hard enough for me to sit still, and even if I could do that it was almost impossible for me to do what the teachers expected.”

In fact, Rahm and I did know something of what Ari felt. As brothers we may have teased and tortured him on other matters but we did not try to embarrass him when it came to reading and writing. Ari’s struggles were so painful to him that we would have been especially cruel to torment him about it. Also, he was a tough little guy, which meant that he could respond to our teasing with the kind of physical attack that more than paid you back for whatever psychic pain you might inflict on him. Fundamentally, though, it was easy for us to understand how it felt to be on the hot seat, sensing the pressure of our mother’s expectations and fearing that you might not measure up.

This was the downside of life as a child of purposeful parents. Sometimes all the focus and devotion my mother gave us veered into the realm of excessive pressure. This was certainly true where Ari and reading were concerned. Rahm and I pitied him for the amount of attention he received as my mothered tried, sometimes with nothing more than demands and the force of will, to help him overcome his disability. But as we all would discover, lots of kids would have given anything to be part of a family where they received so much attention, even if it was sometimes hard to take.

In 1965, Jeffrey Wacker was a soft, pudgy, pale boy of about six who knew the batting averages for every player on the Chicago Cubs but was so uncoordinated he had trouble tossing a ball across the alley in a way that gave you any chance of catching it. On any given day, he would miss at least one loop as he put on his belt, and his zipper was as likely to be open as it was to be closed, but you might not notice because his shirt was untucked and hanging down to his knees.

We met Jeffrey when his parents brought him to a service we attended at the famous Unity Temple in Oak Park. A center of support for the civil rights movement, this Unitarian church was a place where people of every type of belief or nonbelief came together for services and support. A Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece, the building is a modern version of a Greek temple, with thick concrete columns and a series of flat roofs. Filled with light, the interior is both inspiring and peaceful.

Not that any of us boys, including Jeffrey Wacker, found it easy to be at peace, anywhere. Rahm, Ari, and I struggled to be quiet and Jeffrey was just as fidgety and distracted. His parents, who were brilliant but generally unable to cope with everyday life, had not taught Jeffrey
much about how to fit into social situations or to moderate his behavior out of consideration for others. Individually they both struggled with psychiatric diagnoses that were much more serious than garden-variety neurosis. Mrs. Wacker had had multiple admissions to psychiatry wards. Mr. Wacker, who was a whiz in math but socially inept, worked only sporadically and vacillated between joy and despair. Together, they made a marriage that always seemed to teeter on the edge of disaster.

Raised in an insecure and unstable home, Jeffrey suffered and his parents knew it. Finally, on a day when Mrs. Wacker was once again admitted to the hospital, her husband showed up at our apartment with his son and asked if the boy could stay. My father the pediatrician and my mother—the woman who always tried to do the right thing—said yes. An extra place was set at the table and a bed was purchased and placed at the foot of mine. Jeffrey was enrolled at Brennemann Elementary, our neighborhood public school. My mother found a psychotherapist who would treat him, and we all tried to help him get accustomed to the routine of life with the Emanuels.

Life was not easy for Jeffrey. In a hyperverbal household where quick retorts and arguments were the main currency of conversation, he rarely found a way to fit in. Although he was incredibly intelligent, he was socially tone-deaf and struggled to follow a fast-paced conversation. Most of the time he was two beats behind the flow, responding to points that had already been made and settled, with statements that were non sequiturs. These statements would either stop the conversation cold for a few uncomfortable moments, or be greeted with a response from Rahm along the lines of “You don’t know what the hell you are talking about, Jeffrey.”

What made it worse was that Jeffrey had no sense of his own deficiencies. He assumed he knew things he did not know, or had talents and skills he never possessed, and just dove into every situation.

The best example of Jeffrey’s unnerving, almost fantastic way of thinking arose when we all went to a swimming pool. Having been taught to swim when we were toddlers, Ari, Rahm, and I dove in and glided to the surface like a trio of dolphins. Jeffrey followed, hurling
himself into the deep end and sinking like a stone. Having learned to expect anything from this boy, I watched him carefully and noticed he was in trouble. I raced to him and managed to push him to the surface and over to the side of the pool. Once he got hold of the wall of the pool and caught his breath he gasped, “Wow, that was fun. Let’s do it again!”

We did not “do it again.” In fact, Jeffrey was consigned to the shallow end of the pool for the rest of the day. In the weeks and months that followed, we all paid close attention to him, for safety’s sake, even though he was often irritating. “A tough kid to love,” was how my mother put it.

Our initial adventure with Jeffrey lasted for about a year. In that time we tried to treat him like the fourth brother. He joined us when we attacked my dad on the dining room floor and he was welcomed onto my parent’s bed for story time. He was even covered under our all-for-one/one-for-all rule for back alley fighting, which meant that when he was attacked, we all came to his aid. Soon enough Jeffrey came to abuse this power by goading kids into a scrap and then depending on Ari, who was becoming a rather dominant fighter, to step in, which he always did.

Because loyalty and sticking up for the underdog were hallmark Emanuel values, we never let Jeffrey down no matter how annoyed we got about the crowding in the bedroom, the fights he instigated, and his strange way of talking. Then one day his parents returned, collected his belongings, and took him away. It was not the last we would see of Jeffrey and his parents. For the next ten years, they stayed in touch and every so often his mother or father would show up at the door asking if we could take him in again.

My mother knew that things sometimes got rough and even dangerous at the Wacker home so she always said yes, and Jeffrey would rejoin our household for a few days, weeks, or months. Once she even tried to delay Mrs. Wacker when she came to retrieve her son because she could see that Mrs. Wacker was not psychologically stable and ready to resume her duties as a mother. We helped see Jeffrey through his parents’ separation and divorce. My dad became Jeffrey’s only true
father figure when Mr. Wacker went to live in an old mining town somewhere out west.

Eventually Jeffrey would graduate from high school, leave Chicago, marry, and settle in California. We could hope that in his time with us he learned something about family and the positive possibilities of socialization. We learned we were fortunate to have been born to parents who could give us so much, and that the suffering of others (something my parents often discussed) wasn’t something abstract and distant. Unable to care for himself, Jeffrey had truly paid a price for something completely beyond his control and he had only been helped when someone cared enough to act. The fact that the “someone” was my mother reinforced for us the idea that you should not stand with your hands in your pockets waiting for others to make the sacrifice that matters. If you can do the right thing to make a person’s life better, you do it.

Jeffrey wasn’t the last extra Emanuel brother and, technically speaking, he wasn’t the first, either. Years before Jeffrey moved in with the three of us, my father brought home a baby boy named Boaz and announced to my mother that she was going to take care of him, along with me and Rahm, who was only a few months old. The baby belonged to another resident doctor at Mount Sinai Hospital and his wife, who was a nurse. All my father would say about them is that they were good people, and fellow Israelis, who were having problems and needed help.

Boaz got the same care, feeding, and cuddling as Rahm and me and he was part of everything we did, from visits to the park to shopping trips. On some weekends his mother came and took him away for a few days. On others, his father appeared for extended visits. After a few months passed, Boaz went back with his parents.

Along with Jeffrey Wacker, Boaz set a pattern that would be repeated, many times. My parents would offer their help to a friend or relative and suddenly our nuclear family would include a new member. The arrangements were made out of our view. All we knew was
that suddenly a new boy or young man would appear at the dinner table. Some, like our cousin Gary, came for a few months, returned to their parents, and then came back for a second or even third stay with us. Another cousin, Teddy, was well into his teen years when he came to stay with us. An alienated and lonely adolescent, Teddy had exhausted his parents’ patience. At our house, he found a refuge where there was always something to do, and my mother was always willing to talk and, more important, listen.

My mother seemed a sort of expert nurturer, a woman who could make any child feel safe, secure, and valued. She was a highly intelligent, energetic, and motivated woman who was denied other careers, and motherhood was her profession. At the time it was a logical and productive way to channel her energies. I suspect that millions of other mothers in these pre-women’s-liberation days did the same.

Besides receiving my mother’s attention, the older boys like Teddy and, later, Ralph Feldstein and Jack Skayan, got to be big brothers to the three of us. This role got them out of focusing on their own problems and into the pleasure of helping someone else. Ralph taught us how to swing a hammer and wield an electric saw when my parents allowed him to build a fairly elaborate wall unit in our family room. The end product was not exactly professional quality, but it was a cheap and sturdy piece of furniture that, more than forty years later, still supports a television and piles of books in my parents’ basement.

Still, of all the visitors to our home, it was our grandfather Herman who had the most influence on our lives. He stopped by often and lived with us for almost two years in the early 1970s. During this time, he would commandeer the kitchen on Saturday mornings and set to work making toast, slicing bagels, scrambling eggs, and frying steaks. He did all this while dressed in his white boxer shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt and pausing, every now and then, to slurp orange juice from a big open carton and burp loudly.

Although the smells coming from the kitchen alerted us to the banquet that awaited, he wouldn’t call us until everything was just about ready. We took our seats as he put plates on the table. In the process he might playfully smack the back of Rahm’s head or call Ari “a good-for-nothin’
momser
,” which is Yiddish for “bastard.” But as rough as he was, we knew he was trying to connect with us. As Rahm would later say, “I don’t think he knew anything else to say” to a bunch of verbally endowed but scrawny young kids.

When breakfast was over we went off to rest our swollen bellies or followed the Big Bangah out to his station wagon for a ride. For as long as I knew him the Big Bangah sold imported Scandinavian foods—cheeses, bacon, ham, butter cookies, candies, and other products—which he often delivered to stores and restaurants himself. On many Saturdays he made the rounds of his customers to deliver items that were piled in the back of the station wagon. On these days we would crisscross Chicago, or dash up to small towns in Wisconsin, at breakneck speed, weaving in and out of traffic and treating stop signs and red lights as if they were recommendations.

Although my mother was vigilant about seat belts, her father was not and we bounced around in the back of his huge Ford station wagon like boy-sized salamis. Wherever we stopped we followed him inside, lugging boxes and tins loaded with delicacies. Once we set the goods down, we got to watch him schmooze with his customers like they were close friends.