federally protected Bob Marshall Wilderness Area. On the family’s hundred acres, there was a cove with a motorboat for waterskiing and tubing and a Hobie Cat for sailing, a tennis court with a guesthouse where the tennis pro stayed, a cherry orchard open for picking, and a stable for riding. The horses were transported from Denver. The servants came along, too, making all the beds and serving all the meals. In Montana, Nancy Gary functioned as a sort of CEO of children’s activities, deputizing Trudy the housekeeper as chief camp counselor, scheduling each kid’s tennis lessons and horseback-riding lessons and waterskiing lessons. Sam Gary, still running his oil empire, shuttled back and forth between Montana and Denver on his plane to teach all the kids how to water-ski. He’d sit on the edge of the dock with his feet hanging over, hooking the kids under their armpits with his feet, until the motorboat pulled away, yanking the kids forward.
Margaret’s parents would say that they had given her the choice to stay home—not to move in with the Garys. But for Margaret, there had never really been a choice. She was being offered the chance to turn in her resignation as her mother’s helper: No more dusting the hutch, vacuuming the stairs, feeding the birds, hauling in groceries, or toasting two loaves of bread for breakfast. She had already said goodbye to her summers dancing in Aspen and Santa Fe; those had ended with her father’s stroke and resignation from the Federation. Here was a chance to say goodbye to compulsory attendance at hockey and baseball and soccer games; goodbye to four years at Air Academy High School or, worse yet, St. Mary’s; goodbye to gymnastics, where she’d never meshed with the coach; goodbye to track, where there was always someone faster than she was; goodbye to the cheerleading squad, which she would miss least of all.
She was being offered the chance to escape the brothers, Donald and Peter, who might erupt any moment. And the other brother down the road, whom she stayed with regularly, and who came to see her late at night.
It was that last reason—Jim—that clinched her decision. When she was being honest with herself, everything else was just an excuse.
And because that was the reason, going to the Garys never felt like just a good thing to her. No matter how much fun she was having, she could never stop framing what she was going through as some sort of expulsion, or exile. How could it be, she’d wonder, that Jim was still an important, even respected, member of the family, while she was the one who had been sent away?
* * *
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MARGARET’S FOURTEENTH BIRTHDAY in February 1976 came shortly after Nancy plucked her out of Hidden Valley Road. At home, Margaret typically got something modest—a pair of ice skates, a radio from Spencer Gifts. Here, there was a table covered with watches and Frye boots and a full wardrobe to complement her full tuition at the Kent Denver School, the same exclusive private school their own children attended.
Margaret struggled to catch on at Kent. All the kids had their own cars, their own bank accounts, their own allowances and clothing budgets, their own memories of trips abroad with their families to draw from when learning about world history. While Margaret had been going to mass and helping her mother feed a family of fourteen, everyone at the Kent School seemed to have been learning how to throw pottery and silk-screen T-shirts. They seemed so much more artistic and inventive than she was, so free with their impulses. She got cut from play tryouts, got a C on her creative writing project. Their sculptures looked like Giacomettis. She spent most of her first year torn between gratitude and terror, obsessing about what people thought of her. She told herself that the girls who were ostracizing her were just snobs, even as she compared herself to them.
One of the first books Margaret was assigned at her new school was Great Expectations. That turned out to be too on the nose for Margaret, who, like Pip, found herself the recipient of charity from a mysterious benefactor. In Margaret’s case, the mystery only deepened because of how friendly the Garys were, how ready they seemed to share what they had. Her