Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,119

Margaret and Lindsay—“Donald is sitting in the closet.”

Even in those moments, Mimi’s heart went out to Donald. “Holidays are extremely hard,” she said. “Everybody’s getting together and discussing where they’re going and what they’re doing and how many children they’re having, and so forth. It’s a very hard time.” Hard for her, too, to be reminded of everything she’d once hoped for him. When she looked at Donald, Mimi often would reference the boy he had been before he was sick. “People would say, ‘Oh, he has such beautiful manners.’ Little did they know.”

In conversation, Mimi started citing a book she’d been given called Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics, about communities in Ireland where the mentally ill are cared for, and even treated as people with special insight into an otherwise unnoticed world. Just knowing such a place existed was a comfort to her—the suggestion that there might be something distinctive about Donald and the others, to make up, in some small way, for what was lost.

When the illness first took hold of the family, Mimi’s life had changed, too. It was as if an entire future she’d once counted on like the sun coming up in the morning just never came to pass. She never complained about any of that directly. But sometimes when her two daughters visited, they noticed a new bitterness to Mimi. The stories she told changed: Her monologues weren’t just about Howard Hughes and Jacques d’Amboise. They were about how she had wanted her husband, their father, to be a lawyer, but he insisted on the military; how she had always wanted to live on the East Coast, but Don took her around the country and out to Colorado; how she never thought that she would have twelve children, but Don wanted twelve, and so they had twelve. She did what a wife does, she said, even converting to Catholicism, because that was her role. She had served everyone else, she said, enumerating the great sacrifices she had made to do so.

At her worst, she blamed Don’s side of the family for the illness. The son of one of Don’s brothers seemed to be unbalanced now, perhaps bipolar. It was a matter of time, she would say, before science proved that what happened to her children was an inherited illness from the Galvin side.

This struck both Lindsay and Margaret as petty, even cruel. Their father was a shadow of the man he’d been, spending most of his time in front of the television. When the subject of any of the sick boys came up, he seemed unable to look closely at the situation anymore. And his chin would quiver when anyone talked about what Jim had done to the girls. He stopped short, at least in Margaret’s estimation, of taking responsibility. But he was no longer quite as distant as he once was. He teared up. Why pile on him now?

Something was bothering Mimi—and it had to do with her daughters. She knew that in their eyes, she was both the villain and hero of the family: a mother in denial, heartlessly neglecting her daughters because she was so attached to her sick sons, and a mother who kept her family together, left to care for so many sick sons by herself. Mimi sensed she was being judged. It frustrated Mimi that as much as she took on, the last people to appreciate her seemed to be some of her own children. She could only abide this for so long.

* * *

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IN THE 1990S, a revelation hit Mimi that she never saw coming—something devastating that, the more she thought about it, made dreadful sense. Seemingly out of nowhere, Donald confided in his mother that, as a teenager, he had been a victim of sexual abuse. And when Mimi asked the name of his abuser, the answer was a man whom she had considered a close friend.

In the late 1950s, when he was just a boy, Donald had been the first of the Galvin sons to serve as an altar boy at St. Mary’s for Father Robert Freudenstein—the same priest who had instructed Mimi in Catholicism and baptized her. In the years that Freudy became close to the family, a confidant to both Mimi and Don, young Donald was close to him,