Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,100

to her.

* * *

—

IN THE OFFICIAL version of Mimi’s enchanted New York City childhood—the story she’d raised her daughters on, and related to friends and neighbors proudly—Mimi’s stepfather, the painter Ben Skolnick, was her tutor in music and art. While her mother worked in the garment business in Manhattan, her stepfather helped her appreciate culture in a way no one ever had before. All of that was true. He played Tchaikovsky for her on the record player. When she was laid up with a sprained ankle, he suggested Carmen.

But it was also true that Ben drank, and it was also true that he took liberties with Mimi. When Lord & Taylor started selling Mimi’s mother’s A-line skirts, she couldn’t manufacture them fast enough, and she started spending most weeknights in the city—leaving Mimi at home with her stepfather. That was when Ben Skolnick advanced on her.

Mimi was deliberately light on details, and Lindsay did not press her for any. But it was clear that he’d molested her, touching her inappropriately.

As she told Lindsay this, Lindsay sensed some of the stray threads of her mother’s childhood story coming together. She understood now why the marriage between Mimi’s mother and Ben did not last—why they lived apart after the war. And Mimi said one thing that, in an instant, made Lindsay think of her mother entirely differently. Mimi said that she finally told her mother about it when Ben started to prey on her little sister, Betty.

Lindsay knew something about the nerve it would have taken a girl in that position to speak out—to put her own credibility on the line to save her sister. If her mother had really done that, then Lindsay must not know her as well as she thought she did.

That exchange with Mimi might have been the most emotionally complicated moment in Lindsay’s life. Part of her was knocked flat by her mother’s candor, and after hearing her mother’s story she felt closer to her than ever. But at the same time, Lindsay felt she had been denied something—her own misfortune was once again preempted by someone else’s. Mimi was talking about her own experience, skipping right past the details of what Lindsay was saying about Jim. Lindsay needed Mimi to take her side, to tell her that what Jim had done to her was wrong.

But Mimi did not do that. She had never picked the side of a healthy child against a sick one, and she wasn’t going to start now. Instead, Mimi started talking about how Jim was mentally ill.

Lindsay flushed. To her, schizophrenia wasn’t an excuse for what Jim had done to her. Certainly no mainstream researcher or psychiatrist would say that it was Jim’s psychotic delusions that made him a pedophile.

But Mimi was not willing to separate the two issues. Lindsay, though she expected as much, was still deeply hurt. What made it so hard for her mother to sympathize with anyone other than her boys? It was as if she had used up all of her compassion on the sick children, even Jim, leaving nothing for anyone else.

But that day, Lindsay was ready. She told her mother she would never agree to be in the same room as her brother again.

* * *

Jim wasn’t supposed to be there. Her parents had assured her he would not be.

Lindsay was back on Hidden Valley Road, visiting for a Sunday dinner after a long absence—her first time back since that night outside the Griffiths’ house. Both of her parents were there. So was Joe, medicated and somber and, unlike his other sick brothers, acutely aware of his own sickness. A peaceful evening for the Galvins, until Jim walked in.

Her father asked him to leave at once. “Jim, you don’t belong here, please go home.”

“Why don’t I belong here?” Jim said.

Mimi said nothing.

Lindsay bit her lip. It didn’t help. She lost it. She stood up and started screaming.

“You fucking asshole! You sexually abused me!”

Jim was not in good shape. His wife and son had left him, he was heavily medicated—and, per one of the side effects of the medication, well on