they learned to step out of the way whenever she tilted her tail a certain way to poop.
The oldest two boys, Donald and Jim, started school. While the third boy, John, was still a toddler, the fourth and fifth, Brian and Michael, were born in 1951 and 1953. As infants, all the boys were breast-fed, a less-than-popular choice among most of the mothers Mimi knew. From the start, she felt good showing everyone that she could do everything on her own—no nannies, no baby-sitters. Who needed anyone else, Mimi thought, when she obviously was the best person to teach the boys, as they grew older, about opera and art and the observation of exotic birds, the examination of strange insects, and the identification of wild mushrooms? How many other children in Colorado Springs knew that the red polka-dotted ones were Amanita muscaria?
One after another, each boy got the mumps, the measles, and the chicken pox. With each new baby, the competition for Mimi’s attention increased, as did the demands on her time. Even with five boys, neither Don nor Mimi made any mention of stopping. The refrain from both sides of the family was ceaseless: Why so many children? After all, Mimi’s attraction to the finer things in life—culture, art, social status—hardly seemed compatible with having so many mouths to feed. But if Mimi couldn’t have the former, she was more than happy to try her hand at the latter. There was a different sort of distinction in having so many children, and being known as a mother who could easily accomplish such a thing.
At the same time, no amount of social ambition could explain everything about Mimi’s desire for a large family. There was quite likely another, deeper explanation as well—that the children filled a need in Mimi that perhaps even she had not anticipated. From an early age, Mimi had a way of glossing over the more painful disappointments in her life: the loss of her father; the forced exile from Houston; the husband who remained so distant from her. Even if she didn’t admit it, these losses hurt, and took their toll. Having so many children, however, offered Mimi a brand-new narrative—or at least distracted her, changed the subject, shored up the losses, helped her dwell less on what was missing. For a woman who so often felt abandoned, here was a way to create all the company she would ever need.
Don’s mother, Mary Galvin, holding forth from her home in Queens, would say, somewhat cruelly, that the pregnancies were all Mimi’s doing—that Mimi ran Don’s life now, and that Mimi wanted the upper hand in all things, and that she was determined to out-Catholic the real Catholics in the family, and Mimi’s perpetual state of pregnancy was the clearest and most powerful way to win that competition.
For Mimi, the response to that was simple, stopping all conversation. The children, she said, made Don happy.
* * *
—
HE WAS ALWAYS more of a scholar than a soldier. Mimi found that part of Don both lovable and frustrating. At the same time that he insisted on having a house filled with children, he also treasured a life of the mind, of solitude and order. And yet no matter how tranquil and orderly she made their home, he always found a reason to stay away.
As an intelligence officer at Ent Air Force Base, Don embraced the circumspect nature of Cold War military work. “Don’t give anyone any more information than you have to,” he used to say, and his coy way of saying it made the air of secrecy seem almost conspiratorial, something they all shared. They didn’t share it, though: The most Don would confide in Mimi was that the generals he was briefing didn’t seem terribly bright. Despite how well he seemed to be doing there, his ambition as an Air Force man had limits. Even when President Dwight Eisenhower set up his summer White House in Denver in 1953, and Don found himself drafting the intelligence briefings that Eisenhower himself was reading, military work interested Don only insofar as it made him even more determined to get a PhD in political science one day.
Where falconry once was something Don and Mimi did together, that started to change. He spent more time away