A Family Reflects on Its Long, Tortured Lesson in Love

How does it feel to see your family, Ernie?

“It feels great,” this big man says, shyly, his head bowed. “I thought about them a lot.”

What did you think about them?

“I thought they had their problems that they didn’t straighten out.”

Ernie’s mother, her eyes rimmed with tears, grabs the hand of her daughter, Ernie’s sister, for strength. The daughter, now a mother herself, the one who had joked that “guilt is my job,” tries a smile. Ernie’s brother stares, absorbed, unsure.

Nobody’s written any rules for a reunion like this.

Ernie Langenwalter, 28, is visiting with his family for the first time in 25 years. He lives in Upstate New York, they in Phoenix and Garden Grove.

Mentally and physically handicapped, Ernie is the only child of his mother’s second marriage. His birth, after his mother contracted German measles, helped break that marriage up. He was institutionalized at the age of 3.

When the family recalls their life with Ernie, in New York and Arizona, snapshots of memories emerge. It is a retrospective of misery, fear, and tortured love.

“He was a big lunk,” says his sister, Susan Barnes. “I raised mice. You’ve read ‘Mice and Men.’ Well, that was what Ernie was like. He killed all my mice, by petting them and squeezing them too hard. One morning I woke up and they were all dead.”

“Abortion is a tragedy, but I’m sure it would beat this,” Carl Bailey is saying as he leans forward, looking me straight and clear in the eyes, emotionally drained after releasing so much from his private hell.

The “this” is not easily defined, although we have been talking about it for close to three hours now. It is about Ernie, of course, but also about a family that severed its tie to one of its own--or tried to at least.

The cut, sharp and clean, opened other wounds. Ernie’s brother and sister have been in therapy over its effects. Ernie’s mother, Claudia Franklin, tries not to look back. But she does.

“I remember sobbing to him, ‘You didn’t ask to be born. You didn’t ask to be born,’ ” she says.

Claudia speaks of years of “denial,” of not hearing professionals diagnose the worst, of loving her son and knowing that was not enough, of the clash between a rosy popular image of raising a handicapped child and what her family’s life had become.

“It’s like nothing you can imagine,” she says. “I want to emphasize that he was our little brother, a part of our house. I think it is kinder to just give them up at birth. . . .

“I remember once in a grocery store, I saw a boy who had the same condition that Ernie has. I knew. I could tell by the shape of his face. And then I looked at his mother. I knew I had made the right decision. That mother was a zombie.”

Claudia recalls the exact moment, in a toy store on a Saturday afternoon, when she made the decision to place Ernie in an institution for what might well be the rest of his life. She made two calls the following Monday, visited both places and chose the cleaner.

By Tuesday, her son was gone.

“I remember I was in counseling then over my marriage,” Claudia says. “I told the therapist what I had done. He, of course, said, ‘How do you feel?’ I said, ‘I feel like it’s a belated therapeutic abortion. I’m very relieved.’ ”

Ernie is not here now. His family does not want their words to hurt.

“Sometimes I wonder if Ernie is not the blessed one,” Susan says. “Life is so simple for him.”

Claudia Franklin contracted German measles from her daughter, who picked it up at school. The year was 1964, over Christmas vacation, and Claudia was two months’ pregnant. The family--Claudia, her husband, Susan and Carl--lived in Upstate New York. Claudia, then a 26-year-old housewife, describes herself as naive.

She says her doctor told her the disease might severely damage her child--he mentioned blindness, deafness, heart problems and a raft of other conditions--but he injected her with massive doses of gamma globulin and hoped for the best. Claudia says she just knew that “things would work out.”

Ending the pregnancy was not discussed. The law in New York at the time allowed doctors to perform abortions if the life of a woman was at stake. It was the doctor who was to decide just how broadly, or narrowly, to interpret that law.

But Claudia says her doctor never brought the subject up. And she had no idea. She is angry to this day.

“And if I had known the real effects of what the German measles would do, I would have even sought out an illegal abortion,” she says.

Two years earlier in Phoenix, another pregnant mother, Sherri Finkbine, had found herself in a situation clouded by a similar theme. This mother of four--otherwise known as Miss Sherri in her role as the local hostess of TV’s “Romper Room”--had taken Thalidomide, a tranquilizer that had been linked to the births of thousands of European babies without limbs.

Finkbine’s doctor scheduled a therapeutic abortion at the local hospital, but then Finkbine, thinking it might be good to warn other women about Thalidomide, mentioned this to a friend in the press.

Many of you know what happened next. The saga was recently chronicled in a television movie; “A Private Matter” it was called. Finkbine finally got an abortion, in Europe, after losing her job and after learning what real hate is about.

How Ernie came to be sitting in his mother’s living room is a story that to this young man, makes perfect sense.

“I knew that one of these days we were going to be together,” he says.

His family sees many more shadows. They are complicated people, introspective, hungry for answers that are not easy to get. The three of them are very close.

Carl, 30, a former counselor, owns a cleaning business. His mother, 54, is studying for the ministry. The two live together in Garden Grove.

Susan, 34, who lives in Phoenix, was a therapist, too. Now she has a cleaning company herself. She is married with two children. She volunteers that she had an abortion, during a time when she was doing drugs.

“Mainly my decision was based on Ernie,” she says. “I did not want to have a retarded child.”

As the family tells it, Ernie came back into their lives by coincidence. Claudia learned that her ex-husband, Ernie’s father, had died. She asked her sister in Upstate New York if she might check to see if her son was all right. One Saturday morning a few months ago, Claudia’s sister called and said Ernie was standing next to her in the room.

Claudia, stunned, spoke to her son on the phone. He told her, “Mom, I knew you did the best that you could.”

After more phone calls, Ernie invited himself out, along with a handicapped woman he plans to marry some day. Claudia acquiesced.

When Claudia told me of the visit, a few days before Ernie had arrived, she spoke of feeling excitement and love, albeit with tragedy woven through. After spending some time with her son, however, that had changed a bit.

“I feel tender toward him, but I feel estranged,” she says now.

“I feel compassion, but I’m not sure it’s love,” Susan adds. Carl, who says that “a whole lot of therapy” helped him prepare for this time, hopes to come to some sort of “understanding” with his brother.

He wants to love him, but doesn’t know if he can.

Ernie is telling me that he and Mary Jean Whitney, the mentally retarded woman who accompanied him on this trip, will be married when they can save enough money to do it right. One day, they would like kids.

Mary Jean, 30, was able to navigate the couple’s way through a gate change at Chicago’s O’Hare on the way out. They are very proud of that; this is the first time they have traveled alone.

There are other accomplishments, too. Ernie is living on his own and plans to learn data entry soon. He won two silver medals in swimming at the Special Olympics; Mary Jean says she will take a picture of the medals and send them out.

And Mary Jean has worked at McDonald’s for nearly four years. “I love it,” she says. Ernie smiles.

“How is your life different now, Ernie, after seeing your family again?” I ask.

“I feel a lot happier now that I’m reunited with them,” he says.

“Now he’s got a real brother and sister,” Mary Jean interjects.

“What it means to me is that I finally found a family that is my natural family,” Ernie goes on. “And I hope we can continue to function together as a family.”

Now Ernie bows his head again, looking at his shoes. Claudia’s eyes turn moist and the corners of her mouth lift in a shaky smile. She seems to be speaking without words.

“Ernie, what I’ve felt is like something has been missing, but I didn’t know that until it was returned,” Susan says. “Do you know what I mean?”

“You mean sort of like a puzzle piece?” Ernie asks.

“Yeah,” Susan says.

“Yeah, I felt that way, too,” Ernie says.