them. It was for her new life. But even behind her new guise—adopting a persona, or trying to—Lindsay stood out at Hotchkiss from the start. She had shown up in ninth grade at a school where most students started in tenth grade, and that was enough to get kids talking. Anyone arriving out of sequence had to be going through something strange. Had she been expelled from another school? Were her parents divorcing? Or was there some other drama they could only guess at?
Lindsay, left, and Margaret
Lindsay stood out in other ways, too. She dressed like a prep school girl, in plaid skirts and collared shirts. She hadn’t known that the girls at Hotchkiss were doing the Deadhead hippie thing. And she had grown up with her father’s liberal politics, and now she was hearing some of her classmates talking about how anyone on welfare was just riding on someone else’s coattails. She found a few sympathetic adults, an English teacher and a philosophy teacher, who didn’t mind her barreling into their offices and bursting into tears, crying, How could they think this? And she crafted a survival strategy. Obviously, she wasn’t going to be going on shopping trips in Manhattan with anyone. She wasn’t going to Paris on spring break. Instead, she became an athlete—soccer, mainly, and lacrosse—and that became enough for her to make it through her time there.
Lindsay had been practicing masking her emotions for so long that doing so came naturally to her. Performing in this way—a permanent smile, and an air of personal secrecy—took a small toll. She wasn’t getting the straight As she’d expected. But like all Hotchkiss students, she read Walden, and Thoreau’s transcendentalism was a tonic to her, reaffirming her need to be out in nature—like, of all people, her mother. That she was finally so far away from Mimi only to realize how much she shared with her was, to say the least, a surprise.
Some part of Lindsay didn’t think she deserved to enjoy Hotchkiss—that she could pretend to be carefree, but really that state of mind would always be out of reach, reserved for others. Now and then, she would be reminded of exactly how different she was. When she and a friend went to a screening on campus of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Lindsay didn’t last ten minutes. She ran out of the auditorium in tears. Her friend was concerned. When Lindsay muttered something about how there was mental illness in her family, the friend did not ask any more questions.
* * *
—
LINDSAY WAS AT Hotchkiss in 1982 when Joe—the oldest of the four hockey boys, the mild, thoughtful seventh son, nine years older than she was—had his psychotic break.
The doctors who had met him when he’d visited Peter a decade earlier had an inkling that something was wrong. But Joe had seemed all right to the rest of the family, or at least well enough to live on his own and work. After high school, Joe had found work at the airport in Denver, and from time to time he would take her skiing, get her out of the house, help her feel normal for a while. Then he got a job with United in Chicago, working as a baggage handler, and he moved there and fell in love with a doctor’s daughter. A wedding seemed imminent until Joe was refused a promotion at work. For Joe, this seemed to be the culmination of many insults he’d endured while working there, including a knee injury he’d been nursing that he’d never filed a claim for. He started to send threatening letters to his bosses. When United fired him, Joe sent more threatening letters, this time to the White House.
In short order, Joe lost everything—his car, his apartment, his fiancée. Then he started seeing things. First Donald and Jim, then Brian and Peter, now Matt and Joe—six of the twelve of them, lost.
Lindsay was brought low all over again. She flew to Chicago to join her parents, who were coming to see Joe at a hospital. What she saw horrified her. Joe was drugged, hardly responsive. It dawned on her that she had never visited any of her brothers at Pueblo—never before seen what happened