Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,7

things. As carefully as she could, Mimi went to work on the edge of each eyelid, one after the other. When she was done, she took the long tails of the threads from both eyes, tied them together, and stashed them in the feather on top of the bird’s head, to keep the bird from scratching at them.

Stabler complimented Mimi on her work. “Now,” he said, “you have to keep it on the fist for forty-eight hours.”

Mimi balked. How could Don walk the halls of Ent Air Force Base, where he worked as a briefing officer, with a blinded hawk on his wrist? How could Mimi do the dishes, or look after three small boys?

They divided up the work. Mimi took days, and Don took nights, during his late shifts at the base, tethering the bird to a chair in the room where he spent most of his time. Only once did a senior officer walk in and cause the hawk to “bate”—a falconry term meaning to fly away in a panic. Classified documents went flying everywhere, too. Don had a reputation at the base after that.

But at the end of those forty-eight hours, Mimi and Don had successfully domesticated a hawk. They felt an enormous sense of accomplishment. This was about embracing the wild, natural world, but also about bringing it under one’s control. Taming these birds could be brutal and punishing. But with consistency and devotion and discipline, it was unbelievably rewarding.

Not unlike, they often thought, the parenting of a child.

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WHEN SHE WAS a little girl, Mimi Blayney would sit under her family’s grand piano and listen to her grandmother playing Chopin and Mozart. On nights when her grandmother picked up the violin, Mimi would stare, transfixed, as her aunt danced like a Gypsy along to the music, the logs in the fireplace crackling loudly behind her. And when no one else was around, the pale, dark-haired girl, no older than five, would venture where she was not allowed to go. The Victrola was broken more often than it wasn’t, and the records the family owned—thick, grooved platters, more like hubcaps than LPs—were filled with music that Mimi was dying to hear. When the coast was clear, Mimi would put a platter on the machine, place down the needle, and spin it with her finger. She would get about two measures of opera that way, over and over again.

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The excavation of levees had worked out well for Mimi’s grandfather, Howard Pullman Kenyon, a civil engineer who, long before Mimi was born, founded a company that dredged the rivers of five states, building levees along the Mississippi. Mimi’s mother, Wilhelmina—or Billy to everyone—went to a private school in Dallas, and when the teacher would ask, “And what does your daddy do?” she’d coyly reply, “He’s a ditch digger.” At its wealthiest, during the Roaring Twenties, the Kenyon family owned its own island at the mouth of the Guadalupe River near Corpus Christi, Texas, where Mimi’s grandfather dug his own lake and stocked it with bass. Most of the year, the family lived in a grand old mansion on Caroline Boulevard in Houston. In the driveway were two Pierce-Arrows, a fleet that increased by one additional Pierce-Arrow each time one of Grandfather Kenyon’s five children came of age.

Mimi grew up with plenty of stories about the Kenyons. In her later years, she would recite those stories to her friends and neighbors and everyone she met, like secrets too delicious to keep to herself. The family’s first home in Texas was sold to Howard Hughes’s parents….Howard Hughes himself was a classmate of Mimi’s mother at the Richardson School, the academic institution of choice for Houston’s upper crust….Obsessed with mining, Grandfather Kenyon once traveled to the mountains of Mexico in search of gold and was briefly held captive by Pancho Villa, until his command of the local geography impressed the Mexican revolutionary so much that the two men struck up a friendship. Out of insecurity or, maybe, just a restless intellect, Mimi would come back to these stories as a way of affirming her status, her pedigree. It felt good to remind herself that there was something special about where she came from.

It made sense, by Kenyon standards, that when Mimi’s