Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,121

the one he liked the best. “He had culled my family,” she said. “He knew it was a big family of boys.”

From there, Mimi seized on Father Freudenstein as a new global explanation for everything—the big reason that things went so wrong in her family. Didn’t it make sense, she’d say, that the priest sexually abused Donald, who in turn physically abused his brothers, at least one of whom, Jim, went on to sexually abuse their sisters? What if Jim, too, had been molested by Father Freudenstein? Wouldn’t that explain why he became a pedophile? Maybe all the schizophrenia in the family—which Mimi had, up until now, believed in her heart had to be genetic—was set into motion by the stress of this chain of abuse? Look at how Donald and Peter both became so hyper-religious in the thick of their illnesses; could that really have been a coincidence, or was the Catholic imagery in the air, ready to be repurposed in the wake of trauma?

Mimi was leaping to several conclusions, of course. Sexual abuse does not cause schizophrenia; that much is certain. Even a torrent of sexual abuse like what Mimi had envisioned still could not answer the bigger question of why there had been so much mental illness in their family. Lindsay understood how Mimi was conflating the two things, the sexual abuse and the mental illness, and she thought she knew why. Blaming Father Freudenstein had, at least for Mimi, the virtue of taking some of the blame away from her—as long as you didn’t linger too long on the question of how often a mother and father would have to be looking away for an ill-intentioned priest to have so much unfettered access to their boys.

Mimi renounced her faith. She told her children she did not want a Catholic burial, and that she wanted to be cremated. She was turning her back on all that now. Time was running out. She wanted the world to know who was responsible.

* * *

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SOMETIME AFTER DONALD told her about Father Freudenstein, Mimi decided, in between her usual refrain that they’d been the perfect family before mental illness struck, to become more open about the past, sharing information with her daughters that she’d never before dreamed of discussing. What neither daughter expected was that these disclosures would be about their father.

Mimi began by going into detail about episodes throughout her marriage that, she believed, offered a different perspective on Don. The first happened in 1955, she said, shortly after the family’s transfer from Colorado Springs to Canada, when Don ended up at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., with what Mimi now was saying was a deep, powerful depression. He also had a milder episode later, she said, while they were living in northern California—something like a panic attack. Don had spent so many recent years at home, becoming more and more despondent after a cascade of health problems—they’d all seen that. Now Mimi was saying she believed that Don had a history of clinical depression, through his entire life.

Neither Lindsay nor Margaret believed her, at least at first. This seemed like another one of Mimi’s deflections, a smoke screen of denial to keep criticism away from her—and perhaps to even backhandedly blame the boys’ mental illness on Don’s genes. But without wanting to, the sisters began to think of their father differently. What if post-traumatic stress disorder from the war had seeped into everything their father did during their childhoods? Did he somehow pass along his own traumas to the boys? And the most troubling question of all: Could Don have been the source of the violent streak in the family that culminated in what Donald did to Jean, and Brian to Noni—and Jim to them? Both Margaret and Lindsay had spent so many years focusing on their mother and all that she did and didn’t do. Here were a new set of questions they had never thought to ask.

The sisters were even less prepared for their mother’s next announcement. Mimi said that in the years before his stroke, there had been many other women in Don’s life—at least six, by her count. The first had been in Norfolk, Virginia, just after the war, when Don was traveling up and down the Atlantic on the USS Juneau.