Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family (21 page)

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In 1982, Irwin Feinberg of the University of California at Davis codified this idea as
the “pruning hypothesis.” Schizophrenia, he proposed, often first appears during or just after late adolescence because of “a defect in the [brain] maturational process” in which “too many, too few, or the wrong synapses are eliminated.”

The Galvin sisters were both beautiful, with long brown hair and bright eyes and dimples and high cheekbones. When they entered their twenties, they would even model a little, for print ads and outdoorsy magazines; Lindsay posed on skis, up on a mountain ridge, her hair flowing over a purple parka. They had boyfriends, plenty of them. And drugs—pot mostly—but neither of them seemed to take much pleasure in them. Drugs were more helpful for covering up the past and trying to replace it with something else.

As little girls, the sisters had never quite connected. Margaret, before leaving home, was too busy searching for somewhere else to be to entertain a sister three years younger than she was. Lindsay, shattered by Margaret’s departure, became jealous of her older sister, angry that Margaret got to leave and she did not. But all that changed as soon as both sisters found themselves on a similar course, away from Hidden Valley Road.
I love that little girl so much,
Margaret wrote in her diary at college,
and she
must
know it—we have a great sisterly relationship—it’s so unbelievable that we’re so tight.

Lindsay, in turn, wrote Margaret a poem about the connection they shared now.

She is not there to pass each day

She has become a part of me

She has built, open, found me

Looked within me, found me

Become a part of me

She climbs mountains

I succeed

She inhales the air, I exhale

Nature fills her heart up

And overflows into mine

She is a part of mountains, air and trees and plants

She is part of me

Oh us

She cries as I laugh and laughs as I cry

Her joy, my sorrow

My sorrow her joy

I feel her pain her pleasure feels for me

To be two as one in two different places together

Oh us

Many of her family members were slow in coming around to calling her by her new name. Some, like her mother, never would. But that was fine with Lindsay. The new name wasn’t for them. It was for her new life. But even behind her new guise—adopting a persona, or trying to—Lindsay stood out at Hotchkiss from the start. She had shown up in ninth grade at a school where most students started in tenth grade, and that was enough to get kids talking. Anyone arriving out of sequence had to be going through something strange. Had she been expelled from another school? Were her parents divorcing? Or was there some other drama they could only guess at?

Lindsay stood out in other ways, too. She dressed like a prep school girl, in plaid skirts and collared shirts. She hadn’t known that the girls at Hotchkiss were doing the Deadhead hippie thing. And she had grown up with her father’s liberal politics, and now she was hearing some of her classmates talking about how anyone on welfare was just riding on someone else’s coattails. She found a few sympathetic adults, an English teacher and a philosophy teacher, who didn’t mind her barreling into their offices and bursting into tears, crying,
How could they think this?
And she crafted a survival strategy. Obviously, she wasn’t going to be going on shopping trips in Manhattan with anyone. She wasn’t going to Paris on spring break. Instead, she became an athlete—soccer, mainly, and lacrosse—and that became enough for her to make it through her time there.

Lindsay had been practicing masking her emotions for so long that doing so came naturally to her. Performing in this way—a permanent smile, and an air of personal secrecy—took a small toll. She wasn’t getting the straight As she’d expected. But like all Hotchkiss students, she read
Walden,
and Thoreau’s transcendentalism was a tonic to her, reaffirming her need to be out in nature—like, of all people, her mother. That she was finally so far away from Mimi only to realize how much she shared with her was, to say the least, a surprise.

Some part of Lindsay didn’t think she deserved to enjoy Hotchkiss—that she could pretend to be carefree, but really that state of mind would always be out of reach, reserved for others. Now and then, she would be reminded of exactly how different she was. When she and a friend went to a screening on campus of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
Lindsay didn’t last ten minutes. She ran out of the auditorium in tears. Her friend was concerned. When Lindsay muttered something about how there was mental illness in her family, the friend did not ask any more questions.

LINDSAY WAS AT
Hotchkiss in 1982 when Joe—the oldest of the four hockey boys, the mild, thoughtful seventh son, nine years older than she was—had his psychotic break.

The doctors who had met him when he’d visited Peter a decade earlier had an inkling that something was wrong. But Joe had seemed all right to the rest of the family, or at least well enough to live on his own and work. After high school, Joe had found work at the airport in Denver, and from time to time he would take her skiing, get her out of the house, help her feel normal for a while. Then he got a job with United in Chicago, working as a baggage handler, and he moved there and fell in love with a doctor’s daughter. A wedding seemed imminent until Joe was refused a promotion at work. For Joe, this seemed to be the culmination of many insults he’d endured while working there, including a knee injury he’d been nursing that he’d never filed a claim for. He started to send threatening letters to his bosses. When United fired him, Joe sent more threatening letters, this time to the White House.

In short order, Joe lost everything—his car, his apartment, his fiancée. Then he started seeing things. First Donald and Jim, then Brian and Peter, now Matt and Joe—six of the twelve of them, lost.

Lindsay was brought low all over again. She flew to Chicago to join her parents, who were coming to see Joe at a hospital. What she saw horrified her. Joe was drugged, hardly responsive. It dawned on her that she had never visited any of her brothers at Pueblo—never before seen what happened to Peter and Donald and Matt when they weren’t at home. For the first time, she started to think not just about their behavior, but the kind of medical treatment available to them.

Joe returned to Colorado Springs, joining Peter and Donald and their parents in the house on Hidden Valley Road. He was hearing voices all the time now. One night, he went running down the middle of a street downtown, screaming at the top of his lungs, “The wolves are chasing me!” It took two six-foot troopers to subdue him. He spent much of May 1982 at the state hospital in Pueblo.

Michael, the hippie alumnus of the Farm, was living nearby now, and was as shocked as everyone else by how quickly Joe had changed. He still suspected that if his brothers had a less repressive upbringing, they never would have snapped. He decided that Joe might not be so far gone yet—and that maybe he could help bring him back. He went home to see Joe and spent a night out driving with him, trying to get him to let out whatever anxieties he had, trying to reach some part of him he was keeping hidden.
We need to talk. What are you doing? Why are you doing that?
He took Joe to a field on the grounds of the Air Force Academy.
Hey, let it out!
Michael remembered saying, over and over again.

Nothing worked. His brother was unresponsive, confused, and often just mentally elsewhere. Michael thought that this must be what it was like to talk to an alcoholic—someone too tied to his current state to imagine any other way of being. He couldn’t stop thinking that mental illness was a choice, and that Joe was making the wrong choice.

If Michael was frustrated, Lindsay, back at boarding school, was surprised to find her resentment easing, her rage subsiding. Like Margaret, she had felt marginalized at her exclusive private school—but Lindsay stopped thinking that the solution ought to be to deny her family’s existence. Instead, she discovered a certain kinship with her sick brothers. They were ostracized by society. Sometimes she felt that way, too.

Margaret had traveled east in the fall of 1980 to start her freshman year at Skidmore College in upstate New York, a two-hour drive from Lindsay at Hotchkiss. At Skidmore, Margaret experienced some of the same culture shock she’d gone through at Kent and that her sister was experiencing now. Her classmates were reading the
Times
and the
Journal
every day. They could program computers and discuss seventeenth-century poetry. Margaret’s heart was in the outdoors—camping, hiking, climbing, cycling, rafting. Through a friend, Margaret got her first glimpse at the fine arts department. She knew that it had everything she wanted, yet the life of an artist was an extravagance she could not afford.

Margaret was a work-study student, serving and cleaning up after her classmates in the cafeteria. She no longer benefited from the financial cushion of being an adjacent member of the Gary family, and she was starting to realize that the last several years she had lived off the Garys’ generosity were, in some ways, an illusion. At the end of her freshman year, Margaret decided to transfer to the University of Colorado in Boulder. CU was cheap enough for her to afford on Pell Grants. She had friends there. And it was still a safe enough distance from home—too far to be a commuter, far enough that she could beg off if she didn’t feel like coming home for visits.

Every decision Margaret made was, in some way, oriented around the ability to avoid going home. Home was where Peter was urinating on the floor because a devil was under the house. Home was where Donald was still ranting and raving about his ex-wife, a decade after the divorce. Home was where Matt was cooling off, after his psychotic break at the Garys’ house. And home was where Jim was still welcome to drop by anytime he wanted.

In Boulder, Margaret was in classes with many of her old Kent friends, the rich ones who traveled to France or Portugal every summer. She did her best to have enough money to at least have fun domestically. She scooped at Steve’s Ice Cream and had a second, semiregular job dealing mushrooms for a much older supplier—a guy who leered at her a lot but never made a move on her. With an old Kent School boyfriend, she saw as many as fifty Grateful Dead shows, all around the country, most of them while drenched in coke and acid. Margaret wanted to feel strong and capable and independent. But some part of her was waiting to be rescued—to keep her from ever having to engage directly with anything deeper.

Why do I even go home? My mind feels like it’s going to wind up so much that it won’t ever stop spinning. I cannot understand or cope with my brothers, especially Matt, Peter, Joe and Donald. I’m in tears right now because I can’t handle any of it….Life is merely the permanent roots your family knots around you. My family depresses me, they hinder my progress in many ways. I’m stuck with insanities that no one should have to go through life trying to ignore….

Margaret’s diary, April 3, 1983

That summer, Margaret was out east following the Dead when she found herself swept off her feet in a way she only had dreamed. Chris had been an upperclassman at Skidmore when Margaret was there and had noticed her then. In college he’d been known as Hot Knives—the name for a technique in which you take a piece of hash and smash it between two red-hot knives, and then inhale the smoke. When Chris saw her again now, at a party in Connecticut, he made his move.

Chris was a few years older than she was, with an aggressive, nimble intellect. His father was an oil executive, and Chris was a fixture at his family’s yacht club, racing Laser-class sailboats in championships around the world. He paid to fly Margaret out to Maine in August to see him again. They went boating to the islands off Georgetown and Boothbay, drank Bloody Marys and blueberry daiquiris, ate lobster, and brought nineteen more of them back to Connecticut, where he introduced her to his parents. The next day, they sped into Manhattan in his BMW for shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale’s. To Margaret, Chris wasn’t just another guy. He was an entirely new narrative.