Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,122

Mimi told both Margaret and Lindsay about how she was supposed to have gone on one of those voyages, too, with Donald and Jim, who were still little. This, she said, was the trip where Don met the wife of a senior officer, and started an affair. If Mimi had been able to take that trip, she told Margaret, that affair might never have happened. Mimi found out about it later, she said, and they transferred away from Norfolk. But Don would not be held down forever.

This surprised both sisters. But in some strange way, this new view of their father also filled a gap in their understanding of their parents’ relationship. Lots of what they’d seen at home made more sense to them now. Like how their father, at the height of his powers, always seemed to be somewhere else. And those dinner parties at the Crocketts’, where the neighbors’ wives called their father Romeo. The more they thought about it, the more the affairs explained so much of their childhood—even, perhaps, Mimi’s quest for a perfect household.

Mimi had come forward with all this now to show her daughters that Don was human, not perfect, deserving of the same scrutiny as herself or anyone else. Now it was Mimi they wanted to understand better. Why did she stay with Don all that time? Did she stay because she wanted to—or because, after she’d had the children he’d wanted, she had no choice? Why did she agree to be at her husband’s mercy, while he was at liberty to do as he pleased?

Margaret thought of a painting of her mother’s, now in Lindsay’s possession, of Pinocchio, hanging on a string being held in the hooked beak of a falcon. For Margaret, that painting was a fair metaphor for her mother’s true feelings—made to care for twelve children, while her husband was off somewhere else. She wondered if all of those traits she’d ascribed to her mother—the inability to be truly present or vulnerable—were really more her father’s. Say what you wanted about Mimi, but she never left. She never stopped trying.

CHAPTER 32

1998

University of Colorado Medical Center, Denver, Colorado

Throughout the 1990s, most of the Colorado-based members of the Galvin family—Mimi and Don, Lindsay, Margaret, Richard, Michael, Mark, and the sick brothers Donald, Joe, Matt, and Peter—went to Denver and submitted to long days of testing in Robert Freedman’s lab. Whenever Freedman had the chance to discuss his research, his description of sensory gating and vulnerability, of schizophrenia brains having difficulty pruning information, made sense, at least to Lindsay. She thought of how sometimes one of her brothers would be especially sensitive to something she thought was background noise, like the hum of a fan.

Freedman had never thought of his brain-electrophysiology experiments—the double-click test that measured a patient’s sensory gating abilities—as a foolproof test for schizophrenia. He saw them as one of many potential strategies for having a look inside the brains of his test subjects. With the Galvins, Freedman found that many family members could not inhibit the second click, including some nonmentally ill family members like Lindsay, but some of them could. The next step was to see if the ones who failed shared a certain genetic trait that others did not.

This put Freedman in unfamiliar territory. He was a central nervous system guy, not a geneticist like Lynn DeLisi. “I was late to genetics,” he said. “Lynn was way ahead of me.”

What he did know about was brain function. He understood how the hippocampus—that seahorse-shaped swath of brain matter located in both the left and right lobes of the brain—is the part of the brain that helps with situational awareness, figuring out at any given moment where you are, why you’re there, and how you got there. He’d seen, and his double-click tests had affirmed, how that process requires not just neurons, or brain cells, to bring in sensory information, but the inhibitory interneurons that erase the brain’s whiteboard of situational information instantaneously. Without the inhibitory interneurons, we would end up processing the same information all over again—wasting time and effort, grinding our gears, becoming disoriented and, perhaps, anxious and paranoid and even delusional.

Now, Freedman wondered if there was something at the cellular level that these inhibitory interneurons turned on and