Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,118

first hospitalization had been a matter of weeks after that. But there was something else. Since they were closer now, Lindsay asked Peter if, like she and Margaret, he’d ever been sexually abused by Jim. Peter said yes, though he did not elaborate.

Lindsay was not exactly surprised. It seemed as if Jim had taken liberties with every young child around him. But wasn’t this trauma her trauma, too? Just like that, after years of effort, Lindsay was back to wondering what it was about her—her brain chemistry, her genes, her deep dive into therapy—that kept her from ending up just like Peter.

DON

MIMI

DONALD

JIM

JOHN

MICHAEL

RICHARD

JOE

MARK

MATT

PETER

MARGARET

LINDSAY

CHAPTER 31

It never stopped amazing both Lindsay and Margaret how to so many people outside of Hidden Valley Road, their mother, in her advancing years, seemed almost saintly in her devotion to her family. “Despite some physical illness on her part, she does not seem to let this get her down,” one Pueblo doctor wrote in 1987. “Her attitude is that she must keep going and somehow things take care of themselves.”

On visits with doctors at Pueblo or at the outpatient Pikes Peak Mental Health Center, or Penrose Hospital, or the CARES facility where her sons sometimes stayed, Mimi never failed to impress, entertaining the doctors with stories about the opera and Georgia O’Keeffe and her grandfather and Pancho Villa. “She was always very pleasant,” remembered Honie B. Crandall, a psychiatrist who, as the medical director at Pikes Peak, treated nearly all the Galvin brothers at one time or another. “Never saw her out of control, or unpleasant. But she was always saying, ‘You’ve got to drop everything and come do this now. Come take care of this.’?” Mimi was a happy warrior again. Only the war had changed.

Alone with her sick sons, Mimi’s fuse was a little shorter than outsiders might have thought. She’d snap at Matt’s poor hygiene, and fume about Peter’s insolence, and pick on Joe for putting on so much weight. She had slightly more patience for Donald, still the son with whom she had the closest contact. After many years of trying to live in a group home, Donald had given up and come back to Hidden Valley Road, seemingly for good. “He just couldn’t tolerate being with other ill people,” Mimi would explain—not her exceptional son. Donald’s hands had a tremor now; the doctors diagnosed him with tardive dyskinesia, a common side effect of antipsychotic drugs, causing involuntary stiff, jerky movements. Donald’s explanation for the tremor was that he got it because his father “made us stand at attention because he wanted us to be doctors.”

So much of what Donald said on any given day still was not linked in any understandable way to reality. But with the benefit of the same medications that were slowing him down, Donald had periods of lucidity. On a good day, he and Mimi would go bird-watching, and Donald would get slightly more animated when he saw something—“Oh, there’s a red-tail!” or “There’s an eagle!”—and he would reminisce about flying falcons with his father. Mimi would take him on every visit to see other relatives—her escort for the day, usually sitting quietly by her side until it was time to go. And yet as the years went on, Mimi started to grow weary of Donald’s more obstreperous side. She had to hide the family photo albums to keep Donald from pulling out pages and destroying them. He smashed a large statue of Saint Joseph that had been at her fireplace for years. On one outing with Mimi to the bank, he told a teller he wanted to open an account and change his name. But on most days, Donald would not leave his room. Even at Christmas, he would greet everybody with a hug and then retreat to a hiding place. One of Mimi’s granddaughters found him once, when she was about five: “Mimi”—many of the grandchildren, adorably, called her by her first name, following the lead of