Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,76

morning, on her own and free.

* * *

—

MARY’S FATHER WOULD take Mary with him to the community swimming pool at the Academy, where he was trying to manage a few laps to help him rehabilitate from his stroke. Don recognized people now, but his short-term memory was still compromised, and he seemed fated never to completely recover it. Where he used to speed-read his way through two or even three books a day, now he watched sports on the television, a device he had once not even wanted in the house. His falconry days were behind him. And returning to work was an impossibility. Sam Gary had thrown him a few consulting gigs in the oil industry, but Don wasn’t up to the task.

With the exception of Don’s military pension, there was no money coming in. The strain of caring for both Donald and Peter was impossible to deny. But whenever Don tried suggesting that Donald and Peter ought to live elsewhere, Mimi’s response would always be the same: “Where would they go?” This was a pointless pantomime by now: Mimi was in charge, they both knew that. But even if what her father said went nowhere, it meant something to Mary that he said it. At least he spoke up, making the case for the well children over the sick ones.

Mary would sit with her father as he watched golf on TV and look at him—his memory often working at half speed, his energy sapped—the only person willing to see her situation clearly, to sympathize, to take her side. Alone with her father, Mary would ask him why he was still a devoted Catholic—why, after everything that had happened, he still believed in God. This was not an abstract question to her; she still had to go to mass every Sunday, and she wanted to know what point there could possibly be to that now.

Don told her there had been many times in his life that he, too, had doubts. It was through his own reading and his own intellect, he said, that he found a way back to God.

He did not encourage Mary to do the same. He knew she was not one to be pushed.

* * *

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SOMETIMES IT SEEMED to Mary that her family had been cleft in two: not the crazy ones and the sane ones, but those still at home and those who got out. Among those still at home, her brother Matt was Mary’s soccer coach, and something of a guardian, her defender. Mary once wrote a school essay about him, anointing him the person she most looked up to. But in the spring of 1976, Matt graduated high school and left home, too. Then it was official: Just Mary and two of the sick ones, Peter and Donald. But Hidden Valley Road remained the primary way station for all the sick boys, their one reliable option when they were not welcome anywhere else—even Jim, when he was on the outs with Kathy.

It was all on Mary’s mother to choose the right treatments, to search for a solution, to protect them all. Mimi still deeply believed in a miracle. And, for a time, she thought she’d found one, courtesy of a pharmacologist out of Princeton, New Jersey, named Carl Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer’s journey through medicine was unorthodox and, at times, deeply strange. In the 1950s, he was one of a handful of pharmacologists tapped by the CIA to conduct experiments with LSD on consenting prisoners. He went on to chair the pharmacology department at Emory University, but then left traditional academia in 1960 and started to publish a stream of papers, all devoid of standard double-blind testing and all based on the fervent belief that brain chemistry depended on a very particular balance of vitamins to keep a person mentally balanced—combinations of supplements that he was prepared to provide to anyone, for a price.

In 1973, Pfeiffer founded the Brain Bio Center, a private clinic that became his headquarters for several decades. Mimi, who had been reading everything she could get her hands on that suggested ways to improve one’s brain chemistry, learned about Pfeiffer just a few years after he’d set up shop. When she contacted him, the pharmacologist was more than eager to travel to Colorado