Read Online The Quiet Room by Lori Schiller, Amanda Bennett - Free Book Online
Authors: Lori Schiller, Amanda Bennett
Tags: REL012000
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tutorials. Good was never good enough. I wanted them to stretch the limits of their abilities in whatever they did.
Everything in my own life taught me this lesson, that education and striving and initiative were the ways to success. Both my parents were born in Europe. My father was born in 1901 in territory that was sometimes Poland and sometimes Russia. He fled a brutal military service, and found passage to America on a cattle ship.
My mother was born in Austria, but because she was only six months old when she arrived here she grew up speaking English without an accent. From childhood, she worked in a sweatshop making ladies’ millinery. As the oldest girl in a family of nine, she became a second mother to her siblings.
When I was born, my father didn't have the money to pay the hospital bill and take me home, so he pawned a silver candlestick his mother had sent him from the old country.
I learned early that my brains and my determination were my tickets out. I graduated from high school when I was fifteen and started college at sixteen. I wanted to go to Cornell, but my parents didn't have the money, so I went to Queens College, a New York City school instead, where my first semester cost only $87, including books.
After my military service interrupted my studies, I returned to school, graduated with honors, and went on to graduate school. I zoomed through. I started my studies—in clinical psychology—at Michigan State University in 1956. Three years later, I had my master's degree and my Ph.D., and was beginning to work.
When I started to work at A.T. Kearney as a management consultant to business, I knew I had made it. In very short order, I began climbing the ranks of the firm. When we moved to Los Angeles, I headed that office. When we moved back to New York, I was coming back as head of that major office. On the day we shook hands to buy our big beautiful house in Scarsdale, Nancy and I drove back to the Bronx tenement where I had grown up. I didn't want us to forget where I had come from. Although it had taken a long time for me to really feel secure financially, by the late 1970s, money was no longer a problem in our family.
But by the spring of 1982, when Lori was having her problems, I was playing a high-stakes game of bet-your-job. The country was in a recession, and our consulting business was being restructured. After twenty-two years, several of my old colleagues and I felt as if we were being pushed aside.
It was a tremendously traumatic time. Those of us being shunted aside decided to stage a coup, to gain control of our company. My days were filled with tension, clandestine meetings, caucusing, polling the partners, trying to get enough votes to reconfigure the current management so that we could take control. If we won, I would be in the new senior leadership. If we lost, I would be out of work. I told no one at the office about Lori's troubles, and instructed Nancy to do the same at her job. Our work and our personal lives were separate, and no good could come from letting our minor problems leak out into the public eye. They were nobody's business but our own.
When she left the hospital, Lori was still contrite, still apologetic, still giving every sign that she realized what she had done had been wrong.
“I just flipped out, Daddy,” she said. “I won't do it again.”
Nancy and I tried to reassure her. We didn't want to put any more pressure on her than we had to. So we brought her back home to Scarsdale for a few days. I called her boss at the insurance company and explained that she had been taken ill, and would like a leave of absence for a while, but that she would definitely be back at work soon. He was very nice about it. Lori was a productive salesperson, he said. They would be happy to have her back whenever she was ready.
But Lori's problems didn't go away.
Although she returned to her apartment, she didn't seem willing or able to go back to work. And she began to seem
Everything in my own life taught me this lesson, that education and striving and initiative were the ways to success. Both my parents were born in Europe. My father was born in 1901 in territory that was sometimes Poland and sometimes Russia. He fled a brutal military service, and found passage to America on a cattle ship.
My mother was born in Austria, but because she was only six months old when she arrived here she grew up speaking English without an accent. From childhood, she worked in a sweatshop making ladies’ millinery. As the oldest girl in a family of nine, she became a second mother to her siblings.
When I was born, my father didn't have the money to pay the hospital bill and take me home, so he pawned a silver candlestick his mother had sent him from the old country.
I learned early that my brains and my determination were my tickets out. I graduated from high school when I was fifteen and started college at sixteen. I wanted to go to Cornell, but my parents didn't have the money, so I went to Queens College, a New York City school instead, where my first semester cost only $87, including books.
After my military service interrupted my studies, I returned to school, graduated with honors, and went on to graduate school. I zoomed through. I started my studies—in clinical psychology—at Michigan State University in 1956. Three years later, I had my master's degree and my Ph.D., and was beginning to work.
When I started to work at A.T. Kearney as a management consultant to business, I knew I had made it. In very short order, I began climbing the ranks of the firm. When we moved to Los Angeles, I headed that office. When we moved back to New York, I was coming back as head of that major office. On the day we shook hands to buy our big beautiful house in Scarsdale, Nancy and I drove back to the Bronx tenement where I had grown up. I didn't want us to forget where I had come from. Although it had taken a long time for me to really feel secure financially, by the late 1970s, money was no longer a problem in our family.
But by the spring of 1982, when Lori was having her problems, I was playing a high-stakes game of bet-your-job. The country was in a recession, and our consulting business was being restructured. After twenty-two years, several of my old colleagues and I felt as if we were being pushed aside.
It was a tremendously traumatic time. Those of us being shunted aside decided to stage a coup, to gain control of our company. My days were filled with tension, clandestine meetings, caucusing, polling the partners, trying to get enough votes to reconfigure the current management so that we could take control. If we won, I would be in the new senior leadership. If we lost, I would be out of work. I told no one at the office about Lori's troubles, and instructed Nancy to do the same at her job. Our work and our personal lives were separate, and no good could come from letting our minor problems leak out into the public eye. They were nobody's business but our own.
When she left the hospital, Lori was still contrite, still apologetic, still giving every sign that she realized what she had done had been wrong.
“I just flipped out, Daddy,” she said. “I won't do it again.”
Nancy and I tried to reassure her. We didn't want to put any more pressure on her than we had to. So we brought her back home to Scarsdale for a few days. I called her boss at the insurance company and explained that she had been taken ill, and would like a leave of absence for a while, but that she would definitely be back at work soon. He was very nice about it. Lori was a productive salesperson, he said. They would be happy to have her back whenever she was ready.
But Lori's problems didn't go away.
Although she returned to her apartment, she didn't seem willing or able to go back to work. And she began to seem
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