But there came a morning when mom’s tennis game didn’t happen. As I left our apartment building one spring day in 1977, I was jarred to see my mother coming back home, carrying a pair of slacks, a shirt, and other items in her hands. These belonged to my older brother, Ken. Eight months prior, at the age of 20, he’d suffered his first schizophrenic break. Though eventually he recovered, what next might happen? On this most recent occasion, Ken had likely taken LSD and was with some friends, freaking out in a Westwood hotel room. At 5:00 a.m., they’d called Erna, asking her to come there and help. She arrived to see him with no clothes on, shaking under the covers. As mom attempted to talk down her oldest child, he suddenly bolted out of the bed, opened the door, and ran nude, into the streets of Los Angeles.
When I saw mom that morning, she had no idea where Ken was. Fortunately, a few hours later, an off-duty policeman would see Ken running through Santa Monica, roughly five miles from the hotel. Ken soon went to what was then called a sanitorium. Within three years of this episode, Ken would occupy mental health facilities for the remaining 42 years of his life.
As with the breast cancer, here too, mom embodied Fitzgerald’s premise. She and my father, Alan, took every step possible to ensure Ken’s health and safety. But they wouldn’t be defeated by it. Mom continued to enjoy her tennis, mostly as a player, frequently as a viewer, occasionally as a spectator. Beginning in the ‘80s and into the ’90s, she and dad made an annual ritual of driving 120 miles east one Friday a year to watch the men’s quarterfinal matches at the ATP-WTA event in Indian Wells.
