Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,38

of one of his routine visits to the campus psychiatrist, talking about falcons. Staring at an abstract design on a card, he said that he saw a cliff with a hole in it. Through that hole, he said, there was a nest—a place where he could find newborn birds to take home and make his own.

A mysterious, dark, birth-canal-like passageway, through which Donald could find a new family: The Rorschach test had only just begun, and Donald was already giving the psychiatrist plenty to work with.

He looked at the second image and thought about temptation. He saw a woman ready to have sex with a man, and the man, according to the doctor’s notes from the session, “suffering mental anguish as to whether he should or shouldn’t.” The man finally decided “to keep own values high” and not have sex.

The third picture reminded Donald of a friend of his, a beatnik. “He’s on dope, I guess—he’s unconscious.”

The fourth and fifth made Donald think about a father and a son. He saw a son in bed, and his father coming to say good night. The father, he said, was going to walk out the door. Then he saw a son crying on his father’s shoulder, asking his father for help. The son had done something wrong, Donald said, and the father was going to offer his son some guidance.

When he saw the sixth, all at once a violent drama unfolded in his mind—a man contemplating revenge, and a woman talking him out of it. “He’s half listening and half not,” Donald said.

The seventh, to him, was another revenge scene. This time, a son was avenging his father’s death. The son, he said, “feels right in what he did, because the other person committed injustice to him and his family.”

In the final picture, Donald saw himself.

“I’m climbing up a cliff,” he said. “I’m at the top, and falcons are diving at me.”

DON

MIMI

DONALD

JIM

JOHN

BRIAN

MICHAEL

RICHARD

JOE

MARK

MATT

PETER

MARGARET

MARY

CHAPTER 8

While Donald was struggling at Colorado State, Jim, the maverick second son, spent a year after high school attending classes at a local junior college, rebuilding his academic record. To everyone’s surprise, he did well enough to transfer the next year, 1965, to the University of Colorado at Boulder. It was lost on no one, least of all Jim, that his new college was better than Donald’s. When it came to him and Donald, Jim never stopped keeping score.

Jim was about two years into Boulder—and a fixture at several bars in town—when he met Kathy. He was twenty, and she was nineteen. He spotted her at a dinner-and-dancing club called Giuseppe’s. She was with an old high school friend, and Jim asked to cut in. Then he called her at her parents’ place, where she was living, and they started dating. Early on, Kathy had picked up on the contempt that Jim felt for both of his parents. “They kept having babies and didn’t deal with the younger ones,” he once said. And he would rant about how much he detested his older brother—how Donald had been the big hero in high school, and Jim never really measured up. Now all that seemed to be behind him, she thought, or at least it ought to be.

When Kathy got pregnant, Jim didn’t think twice before asking to marry her. For Don and Mimi, this outcome might not have seemed ideal—even if, truth be told, they had done very much the same thing when they were about Jim’s age. It was pointless, in any case, to say anything. This was Jim—he was going to do what he was going to do. And after having just blessed the union of Donald and Jean, they didn’t have a leg to stand on.

The wedding took place a year after Donald and Jean’s, in August 1968. They moved

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