Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family (25 page)

The brothers who had not become sick had been doing their best to move forward with their lives, with varying degrees of success.

John, the devoted classical music student, thought Boise was completely unimpressive, the middle of nowhere, when he first moved there in the 1970s. Then he went fly-fishing for the first time, and he noticed no one was in his way. That was when he knew he’d found a new home. John was, in his way, the embodiment of the dual nature of the Galvin family: outdoorsy but scholarly; athletic and capable, but drawn to a life of the mind. He was the only Galvin brother to put those childhood piano lessons to use and earn a steady paycheck, teaching music to elementary schoolers. His trips home to Colorado with his wife, Nancy, also a music teacher, were so infrequent, John would say, because the expense of visiting was too much for a family of teachers.

But it also was more convenient not to visit. What was happening to his brothers completely terrified both John and Nancy. Every trip back to Colorado had a way of justifying those fears. Once, they left their two small children at the house for a few hours of baby-sitting and came back to see flashing lights in the driveway. There had been another blowup with the sick boys, and Mimi had taken John and Nancy’s kids into a closet until the police came. The kids were fine, but John and Nancy’s visits grew less frequent, and they never stayed overnight at Hidden Valley Road again.

To some of his brothers and sisters, it seemed like John had all but abandoned the family. But the truth as John saw it was that he felt distanced from them—robbed of having a family at all by the unpleasantness of the disease. When the time came for them to tell their own children that they had half a dozen mentally ill uncles—and that the family might have a genetic legacy that could affect them one day—John and Nancy said nothing. His sick brothers were never a topic of conversation at home. His son and daughter would not learn much about the family illness until they were in their twenties.

Michael, late of the Farm, had made a life for himself in Manitou Springs, the hippie-friendly town next door to Colorado Springs. He married and had two daughters, and then divorced. He made a living on this and that—helping take care of older people, home repair jobs, the occasional classical guitar gig. He remained skeptical of the medical establishment’s treatment of his brothers—still raw from his own misdiagnosis years earlier, still suspicious of any conformist impulse, still thinking hopefully that his sick brothers had the power to snap out of it.

Richard, the rehabilitated teenage schemer, had more of Mimi’s grandfather Kenyon in him: cocky, restless, impulsive. All that was largely a front, of course: Brian’s death had made him wonder if it was only a matter of time before he, too, went crazy. “It scared the shit out of me,” he said. “For twenty years, I anesthetized myself, hoping that it wouldn’t happen. I blocked my family out.” His teenage wedding, prompted by a pregnancy, had resulted in a very short-lived marriage. Richard gave up primary custody of his son to his ex-wife, and he spent most of his twenties partying, playing jazz piano at local clubs at night, and sharing his cocaine with his younger brothers and sisters when they asked for it. He avoided home more and more, getting filled in on the latest crises when he visited for Thanksgiving or Christmas. “I was hearing these horrendous stories—‘Oh my God, you won’t believe what Donald just did,’ or what Jimmy just did or what Matthew or Peter or Joseph just did.”

In his early twenties, Richard was hired by a mining company that was connected, indirectly at least, to the Koch and Hunt oil families. He spent many years working those connections to score different gigs and round up investors for mining projects around the world. Richard had never wanted his family’s issues to taint his career prospects, so he kept his distance. Only every now and then did what was happening to his brothers break through and register with him. In 1981, when Ronald Reagan was shot, Richard happened to be acquainted with a close relative of John Hinckley Jr. He heard about the FBI descending on Hinckley’s family, gathering facts, asking questions. The thought entered Richard’s mind before he had the chance to stop it: How soon before he got a knock on the door like that?

In the mid-1980s, Richard said, he bought a mine that became a Superfund site right after he got control of it. The litigation with the previous owner took two decades and cost Richard $3 million to resolve; then came a bankruptcy. All the while, he continued to make other deals and boast about his success to his siblings. When the genetics researchers came to examine the family, Richard did the minimum, giving some blood and sitting for an interview, but he kept his distance from the medical efforts after that. He would see his mother alone, presenting himself as a welcome distraction for Mimi—an entertaining visitor who could get her mind off of her troubles. To his surprise as much as anyone’s, he found himself enjoying a warm relationship with Mimi—years after viewing her as a harsh disciplinarian the way his other brothers had.

Mark, the eighth son, had once seemed like the brightest of the boys, able to beat his older brothers at chess at the age of ten. As a child, he had been the peacemaker in the family, the one who tried to break up the fights. “I think I was kind of like Mom’s little angel,” he once said. “Maybe she was less hard on me than on all my brothers. I could do no wrong.” But the loss of so many brothers weighed hard on Mark. He dropped out of CU Boulder, married, had three kids, and never returned to college. He divorced and remarried, and eventually found stable work as a manager of the University of Colorado bookstore. “I think what he did was he decided that he needed to take all the pressure off of himself and to lead a very simple life,” Lindsay said. “That was his solution.”

Mark remained in close touch with his sisters and his parents, and was given to moments of heavy sentiment, often prone to crying when thinking about the old days. He may not have caught the family illness, but it had essentially marooned him. Joe and Matt and Peter were his teammates, the ones he spent every waking moment with as a boy. They were the hockey brothers, and everyone else in the family had been little more than background players. Once they had their psychotic breaks, one after the other, it was as if the three most important people in the world to Mark had fallen off the face of the earth.

THE PATRIARCH OF
the Galvin family was in his sixties now, but aged considerably more by his stroke, plus some more recent health concerns. In the 1980s, Don received his first cancer diagnosis: a carcinoma about the size of a nickel on the top of his head. The cancer spread, and he’d have three treatments over the next fifteen years, including a dissection of his breast to pull cancerous tissue out of forty-five lymph nodes, an operation on his prostate, and polyp removals from his colon. By the 1990s, he was on medication for hypertension; from there, congestive heart failure would be just around the corner.

Gone were the days of traveling the world for the military and defending the country with NORAD and flying to meetings and parties with politicians with the Federation of Rocky Mountain States. At home all day now, Don collected maps of Alaska and sat for hours planning expeditions to find goshawks with his old falconry friends. The plans were a fantasy. Don’s ankles were too swollen, his heart too clotted, his mind too compromised for such a trip. But Don talked on the phone with those friends, and wrote them cards and letters, holding on to the idea of falconry as a shorthand for the man he’d been, envisioning himself in the ranks of the kings and ornithologists and naturalists who turned the taming of a wild bird into something sublime. Without that, he might have had nothing at all.

It wasn’t enough that everything Don had built up in his life—his academic scholarship, his rank, his expertise—now seemed to mean nothing. Where he once looked at his children after a day at work and imagined that he was a part of something important, the proud leader of a storied tribe, now he could only look on in wonder at everything that had happened. Don would sift through photo albums with visitors, smiling and pointing to snapshots of one sick son or another, wryly mentioning how much each received from the government in benefits every month. “This one gets $493, but
this
one gets $696….”

Lindsay sometimes wondered if her father was disappointed in all of them—feeling that even the six who had escaped mental illness had, in some way, failed him. At one time or another, John, Michael, Richard, Mark, Margaret, and Lindsay each believed they would never measure up to the man their father once was. They all felt those same expectations, and they all thought they’d fallen short.

The Galvin sisters were together in Boulder, sitting around one night, when Lindsay finally brought it up. It was, in her view, a risk. She still remembered the other time she’d mentioned it to her sister, how she had been shut down.

This time was different. This time, Margaret said, “You, too?”

Margaret had no memory of Lindsay ever asking about Jim before. That was how determined she had been to live as if it was not happening at all. But now they were both ready. They compared the details of what Jim had done—parallel traumas, each happening without the other knowing. At first, they were amazed at how similar their experiences had been, like noticing a twin who in some way had been around the whole time.

Then they both felt a little drained—filled with dread and even regret about ever having said anything at all. Talking about it made it even more real.

In time, that, too, gave way to simple, grateful relief—just knowing that someone else knew what they were talking about and understood the depth of the pain. That they lived in the same family and understood what had happened in the same way was a rare bit of good fortune for them both. After years of first avoiding each other and then tiptoeing around each other, each sister not wanting to burst the other’s bubble, Lindsay and Margaret found that they were able, finally, to offer each other comfort.

For years, the sisters talked about everything.
Do you remember this? Did this really happen? Remember that night?
They cooked together, exercised together, and deconstructed their childhoods together. This was the period when they were closest, bonded by a mission to understand what had happened to them.

They made a promise to each other that if either of them even felt remotely suicidal, she would call the other one.

Lindsay told Margaret about the help she was getting now—how she talked to Tim, who talked to Nancy Gary, who helped her find the right therapist. Margaret listened carefully. Lindsay recommended a book:
The Courage to Heal
. Margaret promised to pick it up.

MARGARET’S MARRIAGE TO
Chris had lasted barely a year. They had honeymooned in Greece and then Cairo, where they had a personal guide arranged by Chris’s father, the oil executive. Not long after they came home, Margaret discovered she was pregnant. She hadn’t planned it, and now that it happened, she didn’t know what to think. When Chris demanded that she get an abortion—and threatened to leave her and the baby if she didn’t—she was well on her way to understanding that they had no business being married.

She went ahead with the procedure, and the marriage ended abruptly when Chris filed for divorce—nine months after Margaret discovered the pregnancy, an odd bit of timing that did not go unnoticed by Margaret. She moved back to Boulder, living close by her sister and trying to finish college and start over. She got her degree in 1986, but not before another lopsided relationship, this time with a mushroom-dealing climber with taut muscles, a broad back, and piercing blue eyes who would wake and bake every morning before heading off to Eldorado Canyon for the day. Sometime after graduation, Margaret shook this boyfriend loose. Good riddance, he’d told her; as far as he was concerned, both Galvin sisters were a buzzkill.

The moon must be in Scorpio….I am trying desperately to feel better and the desperation is killing me. My feelings are deadened and my reactions to situations have not been the greatest. Maybe it’s because I have not reacted enough. I don’t know.

Margaret’s diary, April 23, 1986

Margaret found an outpatient rehab, visiting a counselor there once a week. Instead of smoking pot each morning, she headed out for runs up Flagstaff Mountain. She found a job at a tchotchke shop on the Pearl Street Mall, started yoga, and contemplated new ways of thinking, phrases like “stepping into the softness of myself.” It was, she sometimes thought, like making a new friend.

But unlike her sister, Margaret had no real desire to delve into her family issues or seek deeper therapy. She wanted to be gentle with herself. She went camping and mountain biking in Moab in Utah, captivated by the immense red rocks all around her. She rode more than a hundred miles along the White Rim trail inside Canyonlands National Park—four days and three nights. The
Nutrition Almanac
became her new bible; she did almost all of her shopping at Alfalfa’s, the only health food store in Colorado at the time. Slowly she felt able to look closely at some of the things she’d been running from for years. The pain of dealing with her collapsed marriage. The residue of years of sexual abuse by Jim. The unresolved issues with her entire family.

She and Lindsay became roommates in a new place, a condominium where they split the rent.
We are really lucky to have each other,
Margaret wrote in her diary in 1987,
and we have to remember that always.
Wylie came out to Colorado to visit. He was the stable one, the one she’d known before her marriage and was a better fit for her. He was working on the trading floor at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He wanted to be with her. He always had.

Margaret still was afraid that being with Wylie would mean being honest about everything about herself.
He’s pretty cool,
she wrote in her diary,
but he engulfs me with self-disclosure and it makes me retract.

MARGARET CONFRONTED JIM
a few years after Lindsay did. While Lindsay had done it in person, if somewhat on the fly, Margaret did it over the phone, a safe enough distance away.

Jim denied everything, just as he had with Lindsay. And when Margaret opened up to her mother about Jim, Mimi reacted the same way she had with Lindsay: She shared her own experience with her stepfather, and then gave Jim a little benefit of the doubt because he had been sick.

Margaret was so angry she could barely function for weeks. She was teetering at a great height now; she could fall off one way or the other. If she stayed fearful and embarrassed and ashamed of her family, she thought she might never make it out alive. But she was not sure of any other way.

Wylie was there for Margaret now
.
She needed someone she trusted to stand by her while she recalibrated what sex and intimacy meant to her. They lived in Chicago together for a few years and then they moved back to Boulder together. They married in 1993 and started a family as she continued to search for a way forward.

She found a therapist, referred to her by Lindsay’s therapist, and supplemented that with countless nutritional and exercise regimens and nontraditional forms of therapy—the latter being something of a town specialty in Boulder. She tried art therapy at Naropa University and meditation at the Shambhala Center outside Fort Collins. She trained in the Hoffman Process, a retreat-based amalgam of Eastern mysticism, Gestalt, and group therapies, in which she indulged in creative visualization—turning her turmoil into a dragon, then trying to slay it. For a few years, she found solace in Brainspotting, an avant-garde trauma therapy concentrating on controlling one’s eye movements in the midst of creative visualization. An offshoot of the better-known Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR, therapy, Brainspotting is meant to help a patient relive traumatic events, only this time with a sense of control and safety. (“The child whose memory we’re activating is getting nurtured,” her therapist, Mary Hartnett, would say.) In sessions tracking the direction and focus of her vision, Margaret ran through the whole catalogue of traumatic memories, starting with the smaller items: Jim slashing Lindsay’s car tires the night before her wedding, Donald naked on the floor of the empty house, all the furniture moved into the yard, Matt stripping naked at the Garys’. Gradually, with her therapist’s guidance, she worked her way up to the major traumas: Jim’s sexual abuse, Brian’s murder-suicide. After sessions, Margaret would sometimes cry for an hour and a half, grieving the loss of the life she could have had if they all had been normal. Then she would go straight to bed and sleep through the night.

In rethinking her life, Margaret kept coming back to her mother: Why did Mimi have all those children? Why did she protect the sick ones at the expense of the well ones? Why did she put both of her daughters in harm’s way by sending them on weekends to stay with Jim, whom she knew was insane? Slowly, she did her best to see her mother in a new way. She began to think that Mimi hadn’t been capable of seeing the sexual abuse going on right under her own nose because she, Mimi, had never really acknowledged her own abuse. Could that also have been the reason Mimi kept having baby after baby after baby, with no sense of limitation, no sense of scale or proportion? Her mother had been binging on family—running away from the past and trying to build something ideal. Something flawless.

For the first time in a long time, maybe ever, Margaret felt a kinship with her mother, as a survivor. She was getting closer to healing. But with the exception of her sister, she needed to keep her distance from the family to get it done.