Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,70

was depressed once, and so was Don after the war. What about that emotional episode Don had in Canada? Wouldn’t you call that a breakdown? Was Don the carrier of a plague that all the boys were, sooner or later, destined to catch?

Or maybe drugs were to blame. Where the boys once listened to the Metropolitan Opera, now they blasted Cream and Jimi Hendrix. Brian, Michael, and Richard had all been into LSD—mild-mannered Joe, too. Chess-prodigy Mark was into black beauties and other uppers. Even Mary smoked pot at age five, thanks to Peter and Matt, who probably scammed it from one of the older brothers. Don and Mimi had noticed at least some of what was going on at the time, but they found themselves with very little power over so many boys. They never could have predicted how drugs would be everywhere, suddenly—at least not for their own exceptional children.

Now, for them, the counterculture became suspect. Could what was happening to their boys be, in some way, just another aspect of the volatile, rebellious times they were living in?

But the doctors who saw Peter had another theory.

* * *

—

THE NOTES FROM Peter’s hospital stay in 1975 are extraordinarily tough on Mimi. One doctor wrote that she was “unwilling or unable to hear unpleasant news,” and very adept at giving Peter “mixed and double messages”—a reference, it would seem, to the double-bind theory of bad mothering—and “successfully thwarted him from stating conflicting areas.”

In therapy sessions where Mimi was present, a doctor noted, Peter would try to bring up his hallucinations and fears, but Mimi would not allow such talk to continue. “It seemed apparent that this role has been played by mother with the other sons as well,” the doctor wrote.

At the same time, there was no question that both Mimi and Don were worried about their son, and Mimi was inarguably a source of comfort to him. “At times during the family meeting,” the doctor wrote, “the patient would rest his head on his mother’s chest and would show a smile, which made one think of a contented infant.” To the doctor, at least, this dynamic—omnipotent mother and dependent baby—“was most comfortable for mother and her children to fall into.”

At one meeting that Mimi would never forget, she and Don, sitting at a large table, flanked by doctors, found themselves directly on the receiving end of the schizophrenogenic mother theory. Everything they were telling Mimi added up to her being the prime mover in Peter’s—and by extension all the others’—mental breakdowns. They both were stunned. Mimi was first appalled, then horrified, and finally defensive.

She resolved never to let the university doctors near her sons again. From then on, it would be Pueblo or nowhere at all.

* * *

—

ONCE, MIMI HAD thrived on structure and order, but now life offered her nothing close to that. With each new sick boy, she became more of a prisoner—confined by secrets, paralyzed by the power that the stigma of mental illness held over her.

Now the pretense of normalcy was a luxury. All the anguish she’d tried to keep secret for so many years, she could not wish away anymore.

Exactly what, again, had brought Mimi Galvin to this moment? One son dead, a murderer; her husband laid low by a stroke and incapacitated; two profoundly ill sons at home, with no one to care for them but her. Only one more boy, Matt, sixteen, remained with the girls, thirteen-year-old Margaret and ten-year-old Mary. Caring for them all, and whoever might get sick next, was too much for Mimi, or for anyone.

It was at this moment that, one evening over the Christmas holiday in 1975, the phone rang in the Galvin kitchen. Mimi answered. It was Nancy Gary, Don and Mimi’s Federation friend. The oil baron’s wife.

Nancy in no way could have been the person Mimi most wanted to talk to at a time like this. Even hearing Nancy’s no-nonsense, brass-tacks voice on the phone, Mimi felt almost like she was hearing an echo of her old life, calling out to her, taunting her. Jetting to Salt Lake or Santa Fe on Nancy and Sam’s private plane seemed like a life