Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family (18 page)

Things changed as Mary entered adolescence. Jim had never stopped hitting Kathy, but now Mary would see it in a way she hadn’t when she was younger. There was no way for her to rationalize that as anything other than what it was—ugly and frightening and wrong. But she could not abandon Kathy, and so even then, she kept coming back. She continued to endure Jim for the same reason.

Some part of her understood it had to end. She knew that her body was changing, just like her sister’s had. She sensed Jim escalating with her, working his way toward something. She thought about what it might mean if Jim tried to go all the way with her—if that meant she could have a baby.

She tried her best not to think about that. But that information sat there. She could ignore it, but not forever.

There was a gardener who clipped the hedges, and a lady who did all the laundry, and a German chef to prepare steak and potatoes for dinner. There were seven people on staff, all told, not counting pilots for the plane and instructors for the private ski lessons.

The Gary family lived in Cherry Hills, a secluded neighborhood in the southern reaches of Denver, a world away from the bustling downtown. Outside their home was a full-scale ranch with horses. Their driveway had a Porsche and a Mercedes, and their backyard had a tremendous trampoline. Inside, to the right of the entryway, chlorine and humidity radiated from a turquoise swimming pool with a tornado slide and a bubble roof. The walls of all the hallways were lined with paintings: a Modigliani, a de Kooning, a Chagall, a Picasso. In the playroom was a giant swing and a life-sized dollhouse with bunk beds for sleepovers. Margaret’s room had a waterbed. That astounded her until she tried to sleep in it. It took a few nights before she gathered enough courage to ask for a regular bed. They got her one.

Margaret got to know Trudy the housekeeper, a second mother to all the Gary children and their friends, and Katie the laundress, who returned her clothes, clean and folded, to her room every single weekday. And she got to know the Garys’ eight children, making friends with Suzy, who was a few years younger than she was and a bit of a troublemaker, and Tina, who was a few years older and a bit of a goody-goody. Margaret accompanied the family on trips to the Florida Keys and Vail, where they had a condo on the main drag and she could walk into any store and buy whatever she needed: ski clothes, new Olin Mark IV skis, lift tickets, even snacks from the candy shop when skiing was over. Nancy Gary never went shopping; the shops came to her. Soon, Margaret was wearing the same Lacoste shirts and rugby jerseys as the other children.

Most weekends, the entire family would fly to their house in Montana, a modernist showpiece with one wall made entirely of glass, offering a brilliant view across Flathead Lake to the federally protected Bob Marshall Wilderness Area. On the family’s hundred acres, there was a cove with a motorboat for waterskiing and tubing and a Hobie Cat for sailing, a tennis court with a guesthouse where the tennis pro stayed, a cherry orchard open for picking, and a stable for riding. The horses were transported from Denver. The servants came along, too, making all the beds and serving all the meals. In Montana, Nancy Gary functioned as a sort of CEO of children’s activities, deputizing Trudy the housekeeper as chief camp counselor, scheduling each kid’s tennis lessons and horseback-riding lessons and waterskiing lessons. Sam Gary, still running his oil empire, shuttled back and forth between Montana and Denver on his plane to teach all the kids how to water-ski. He’d sit on the edge of the dock with his feet hanging over, hooking the kids under their armpits with his feet, until the motorboat pulled away, yanking the kids forward.

Margaret’s parents would say that they had given her the choice to stay home—not to move in with the Garys. But for Margaret, there had never really been a choice. She was being offered the chance to turn in her resignation as her mother’s helper: No more dusting the hutch, vacuuming the stairs, feeding the birds, hauling in groceries, or toasting two loaves of bread for breakfast. She had already said goodbye to her summers dancing in Aspen and Santa Fe; those had ended with her father’s stroke and resignation from the Federation. Here was a chance to say goodbye to compulsory attendance at hockey and baseball and soccer games; goodbye to four years at Air Academy High School or, worse yet, St. Mary’s; goodbye to gymnastics, where she’d never meshed with the coach; goodbye to track, where there was always someone faster than she was; goodbye to the cheerleading squad, which she would miss least of all.

She was being offered the chance to escape the brothers, Donald and Peter, who might erupt any moment. And the other brother down the road, whom she stayed with regularly, and who came to see her late at night.

It was that last reason—Jim—that clinched her decision. When she was being honest with herself, everything else was just an excuse.

And because that was the reason, going to the Garys never felt like just a good thing to her. No matter how much fun she was having, she could never stop framing what she was going through as some sort of expulsion, or exile. How could it be, she’d wonder, that Jim was still an important, even respected, member of the family, while she was the one who had been sent away?

MARGARET’S FOURTEENTH BIRTHDAY
in February 1976 came shortly after Nancy plucked her out of Hidden Valley Road. At home, Margaret typically got something modest—a pair of ice skates, a radio from Spencer Gifts. Here, there was a table covered with watches and Frye boots and a full wardrobe to complement her full tuition at the Kent Denver School, the same exclusive private school their own children attended.

Margaret struggled to catch on at Kent. All the kids had their own cars, their own bank accounts, their own allowances and clothing budgets, their own memories of trips abroad with their families to draw from when learning about world history. While Margaret had been going to mass and helping her mother feed a family of fourteen, everyone at the Kent School seemed to have been learning how to throw pottery and silk-screen T-shirts. They seemed so much more artistic and inventive than she was, so free with their impulses. She got cut from play tryouts, got a C on her creative writing project. Their sculptures looked like Giacomettis. She spent most of her first year torn between gratitude and terror, obsessing about what people thought of her. She told herself that the girls who were ostracizing her were just snobs, even as she compared herself to them.

One of the first books Margaret was assigned at her new school was
Great Expectations
. That turned out to be too on the nose for Margaret, who, like Pip, found herself the recipient of charity from a mysterious benefactor. In Margaret’s case, the mystery only deepened because of how friendly the Garys were, how ready they seemed to share what they had. Her dynamic with her host family confused and unmoored her. Once, on just another typical day in Cherry Hills, Nancy was cutting up a chocolate cake and started clowning around by cutting off another slice for Margaret or others or eating one herself, and then another slice, and then another, and another, all under the pretense that she was trying to even the cake out. Margaret laughed. It was funny. But at the same time, part of her understood that this was not her cake, just a gift, and it never would be anything other than that.

SAM GARY WAS
about the same age as Don Galvin. Like Don, he grew up in New York, only instead of the outer reaches of Queens, Sam grew up on Park Avenue. He served in the Coast Guard after the war, and during a night off he met Nancy at a dance in Greenwich, Connecticut. In 1954, just a few years after the Galvins moved to Colorado Springs, the Garys moved to Denver, in the midst of an oil boom.

Like Don, Sam was friendly, likable, and quiet and modest in person. But while Don was professorial, Sam was entrepreneurial, a born salesman. Nancy’s primary image of her husband in the 1950s was of him sitting on someone’s front porch in a rocking chair, shooting the breeze with the owner of a piece of land where he wanted to drill. “At the end, Sam would say, ‘And how about leasing your north forty?’ or wherever, and they’d say, ‘Sure.’ So he was very good. He’s good with people.”

He was also a natural risk-taker. For years, he had been known around Denver as Dry Hole Sam, an impetuous wildcatter with a knack for drilling in all the wrong places. In the mid-1960s, when everyone in the oil exploration business was drilling in Wyoming, Sam started drilling just north of the state line in the southeastern corner of Montana. Sam drilled thirty-five dry holes. He swore off the whole project more than once, but kept turning around and digging again. In 1967, Sam put together another deal to drill on forty thousand acres of land that everyone else in the business was certain had nothing beneath it. He ended up owning most of that project, he said later, “in large part because I couldn’t sell any more.” He had a helping hand in gaining the right to drill on this land from his good friend at the Federation, Don Galvin.

Don’s main role at the Federation had been to smooth the path between the regulators in Washington, D.C., and the entrepreneurs who wanted to invest in business in the American West. When Don needed support for an arts or culture program, Sam was one of the people he’d turn to. And when Sam needed investors for his latest wildcatting project, Don would help Sam make some of those connections. Most crucially for Sam, Don passed along whatever information he heard in Washington about federal land leases and when they were due to expire. On June 29, 1967, one of the new wells—Sam’s thirty-sixth try—struck oil in Bell Creek Field in Montana. Sam set up four hundred new wells, hanging on to 30 percent ownership. Which was how, first slowly and then quickly, Sam became one of the richest men in the Rockies. Neither Don nor Sam ever said explicitly that Don had steered to Sam the fateful land lease that had made him rich. But where they once had been casual friends, they became closer after Sam struck oil.

In time, Margaret learned that there were guarded precincts in the Garys’ lives that no one could ever penetrate. They, like the Galvins, were dealing with their own family illness, myotonic dystrophy, an incurable genetic disease that eats away at the body’s muscles. Four of Nancy and Sam’s eight children started to show some symptoms when they were still young and would eventually die from the disease as young adults. The difference was that despite their troubles, Sam and Nancy seemed determined to live their lives with a guileless sense of adventure, gathering their family and friends for backpacking excursions and ski trips. The money helped: Their new wealth allowed them to wear at least some of their burdens lightly, and they also shared what they had. Margaret was not the only child the Garys had taken in. There was a boy the Garys had met on a trip to Mexico, and another girl from Denver. Sam was open about his philosophy of life—how while he may have worked hard, he also felt lucky, and so he felt the need to help those who needed it when he could.

A fifth child of theirs was treated for a time at the private Menninger Clinic, which specialized in schizophrenia. That was an option that Nancy and Sam must have known Don and Mimi could never afford. But there were limitations to their help, of course. They weren’t going to help all the Galvins, and so they took one girl—the one old enough to attend the Kent Denver School.

Even during some of Margaret’s most comfortable moments there, her thoughts—her greatest enemy now—turned to the nature of that charity. Her mind started playing what-if games that made her feel more and more like she was walking on eggshells. What if Sam had never asked her dad to help him find those government wildcatting contracts? What if Sam had given up on drilling for oil on the thirty-fifth try, and never made his fortune? What if she had never been taken from her home? And the fact that all this had happened—was it because Sam and Nancy really wanted to, because they really liked her? Or because they felt guilty?

INEVITABLY, SHE ACTED
out. She started stealing small things to make up for the fact that she felt like she had nothing compared to everyone else. When she raided Suzy’s piggy bank, Trudy caught her, but she was not punished. This became just one more thing for Margaret to feel guilty about, to be indebted to the Garys for, and for the Garys to overlook out of a sense of generosity.

But slowly, she assimilated. After years of field trips and river trips and expeditions into the San Juan Mountains, she became a Telemark skier and an accomplished hiker and backpacker. The Kent School boys ignored her until they saw that she was a good athlete. Becoming one of the guys didn’t ingratiate her with the girls, but it was something. Her first boyfriend at Kent was someone popular enough to open doors for her socially. With him, she moved on from pot to opium, the drug of choice at Kent at the time. She tried cocaine at an Eric Clapton concert at Red Rocks. She collapsed after too many hash brownies at a Kenny Loggins show at the University of Denver.

She had sex with that boyfriend, too. After what she’d been through with Jim, this felt like an attempt to feel normal, to feel loved. She spent more energy than she admitted fending off the shame of her family’s illnesses, and trying to forget everything that Jim had done to her.

She told none of her Kent friends that one of her brothers had died, or that three others were revolving-door regulars at a mental hospital. For those secrets to remain secrets, Margaret could never explain why she came to live with the Garys. She had a stock line about the educational opportunity that Kent offered her, and how lucky she was to have that chance. Covering up the truth might have made her seem fake to some of her classmates. But it was what she needed to do to get through the day, to build some sort of life she wouldn’t feel bad about, to survive.

Hidden Valley Road was both home and not home now. Margaret’s family seemed apart from her—which relieved Margaret, even as it provoked spasms of guilt. When her parents came for visiting day, rolling past the Mercedeses in their prehistoric Oldsmobile, Margaret flushed with embarrassment. She saw her mother’s clothes differently now. She returned to Hidden Valley Road only on holidays, which tended to be the worst times to visit, with every sick Galvin boy stuck in a house together. One year, Matt had to go to the hospital with a concussion after Joe back-flipped him on the patio. When Matt’s head hit the concrete and blood started rushing, that only seemed to wind the brothers up more. With barely a pause, another fight broke out downstairs, this one forcing Don to end it. Don, of all people, who was still recovering from his stroke but too furious not to try to do something to contain the chaos.