Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family (34 page)

The subject of Joe propelled him into more difficult territory. “Donald just made my life a nightmare,” Matt said. “He took his anger out on the whole family. He smacked me across the floor.” The more he talked about his childhood, the more he descended into self-pity. It was never far from Lindsay’s mind that Matt—who had once been the coach of her soccer team; whom she once wrote an essay about, calling him her hero—really was a victim, just as she was.

“Donald, Brian, Jim all abused me,” Matt said—though, given this was Matt talking, there could be no way of knowing how true that was. “So I left the family for like eight or ten years. And I came back, and Jim had a heart attack, over there at Main Street. And Joe had a heart attack. And my dad died. And then my mom died. And I lost my family. And there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“I’m here,” Lindsay said.

Her brother glanced at her. “It’s good to see someone still here.”

That night, Mimi’s house on Hidden Valley Road received a host of Galvins who had come to town for her funeral. Michael drove in from Manitou Springs with his wife, Becky, and one of his daughters; he was still unpacking the experience of taking care of Mimi as she left this world. “I told Mary that taking care of somebody like that, it’s really a privilege,” Michael said. “Because if you
had
to do it, you would. But because there’s enough money, most of us don’t have to.”

“Hey, sunshine!” John said, spotting Michael.

John, the music teacher, now retired, had come down from Idaho with Nancy—their first time back at the house since his mother’s ninetieth birthday, three years earlier.

Michael brightened. “Hi, there he is!” The two brothers hugged. “I think you shrunk a couple inches, buddy.”

“Well, maybe a little bit,” John said.

“No, I’m sure you did,” Michael said. “You were always taller than me, weren’t you?”

“Well, yeah,” said John. He’d fallen off a ladder two years earlier and endured a long, painful recovery. “Three back surgeries, four knee surgeries, three ankle surgeries. I was one step above an invalid for the last two years.”

“Hey, I got some ladder work if you want to do it,” Michael said with a smile.

John and Nancy had come to town in their RV, a retirement splurge. Entering their golden years in Boise, they had some creature comforts now: an antique piano they meticulously restored themselves, a koi pond in the backyard, and a small arbor where they grew grapes for wine they made in small batches and labeled. They used the RV to travel the country, making trips to Colorado somewhat more feasible. But they had built a life apart from the Galvins, in part by design and in part, they said, by necessity. “Margaret and Mary have probably taken the brunt of all of it as far as taking care of those who are mentally ill and seeing to their needs,” John said. “And they have the money to do that.”

Now that he was here, John was already feeling a little put out. He had rehearsed a piano piece for his mother’s service, only to learn he would not be able to play it. Lindsay had planned a gathering outside, in a meadow. He’d wished they’d put together something more formal for his mother—even though rationally he understood that he had no real right to feel that way, given that the timing of the funeral was arranged around his previously scheduled visit to Colorado Springs. Still, it was unsettling, not the closure he wanted. John found himself in a narrative that was unfamiliar to him, one he could not control. This is the way it works, a lot of the time. If you’ve left town, like John, you can hold on to your truth. To come home is to run the risk of being contradicted. Even the people who leave, like John, can feel almost rejected.

John decided a long time ago to live his own life the best he could, but he never saw a role for himself in caring for his brothers. “I try to see Matthew and Peter if they’re available when I go down there, maybe once a year,” he said. “But my oldest brother, Donald, well, you couldn’t have a conversation, basically.”

MATT DECIDED NOT
to come to dinner; he had fared well enough during lunch earlier that day with Lindsay, but seeing everyone at Hidden Valley Road seemed difficult for him. Peter was not invited to dinner; for him to mix and mingle with family the night before the funeral seemed like too much—too exhausting for him and everyone around him. But the next day, both Matt and Peter would be at the funeral, Matt skulking in the background, sweating uncomfortably, and Peter beaming in front of everyone, the closing act of the service, playing “My Favorite Things” on his recorder to a round of applause, and then, for an encore, reciting a rambling, customized version of the Nicene Creed: “I believe the one God the Father Almighty maker of heaven and earth….”

Mark Galvin came in from Denver for the funeral-eve dinner—the eighth son, the onetime hockey star and chess prodigy, and now the youngest Galvin brother who was not mentally ill. Bald with a goatee and a wide frame, Mark resembled no one else in the family, except perhaps in the way he talked. He and John and Michael all spoke high-mindedly about politics and music and chess—cultured in the fashion their mother had always hoped. He had retired from managing the university bookstore—a state job with a pension that he’d started collecting. In his retirement, Mark had turned his car into a private taxi service, doing regular business at two of the fanciest hotels in Boulder, the St. Julien and Boulderado. This new career had caused him to cross paths with some people that Mimi would have loved to hear about, like the artistic director of the Boulder Philharmonic, who hired Mark to take her guest artists to and from the airport. “I’ve got tickets to Vivaldi in January,” Mark said. “I’m driving Simone Dinnerstein”—the world-class pianist—“back to the airport from Boulder, after getting free tickets in exchange.”

Mark had felt alone in his family for decades now, the other hockey brothers dead or sick. Some days his entire childhood seemed like a blank to him—an impulse to move on, perhaps, or to stop hurting. A few of the more vivid memories, however, hadn’t faded. Mark had an excellent recall of the massive blowup between Donald and Jim on Thanksgiving, forty-five years earlier—and Donald picking up the dining room table and throwing it at Jim. “A madhouse,” Mark said, shaking his head.

OF THE WELL
siblings, only Richard and Margaret didn’t come to the dinner on Hidden Valley Road. Richard seemed to be avoiding a confrontation. He had recently launched an email salvo against Lindsay over the subject of Mimi’s will, arguing that Lindsay should not be the executor, only to get pushback from all the other well siblings, who came to Lindsay’s defense.

In Lindsay’s opinion, Richard was just upset not to be included in the will. Lindsay said that Mimi had made the decision to leave him out only because Richard had already accepted money from Don and Mimi several years earlier, to help him through a rough patch. “My father couldn’t stand Richard,” she said. She could not deny, though, that Mimi had thought the world of Richard, laughing and gossiping with him whenever he visited. “She would play us against each other to get what she wanted,” Lindsay said. “That’s a trait I have to work very hard not to have.”

When Michael used to watch Richard cozy up to Mimi this way, he’d almost laugh. “He wants so much to be like his father and feel on top of the world,” he said. “I think he tries too hard.”

To hear Richard tell it—over lunch one day, a few weeks later—he clashed with Lindsay because it seemed to him that all she ever wanted to discuss was the sick brothers. “I got so upset. I said, ‘Mary, I want one dinner to talk about the moon, the stars and the skies without talking about mental illness.’ It just became so depressing for me.”

Richard seemed to take more after his mother than his father, determined to speak about pleasant subjects only, like his trips to Pebble Beach and Cabo, and his business deals in Dubai. Like Mimi, Richard also was convinced of the value of having a pedigree, being raised from good stock. This much was clear when he told stories about his father that were unlike any that anyone else in the family told. In Richard’s version of his father’s life, Don Galvin wasn’t the second-in-command of the USS
Juneau
—he was the captain. Don Galvin wasn’t just a briefing officer at Ent Air Force Base—he had a personal relationship with President Eisenhower. Don Galvin wasn’t just the first executive director of the Federation of Rocky Mountain States—he founded it. Don Galvin didn’t get his Father of the Year award from the Knute Rockne Club—the award came directly from President Nixon. Don Galvin wasn’t just the president of Colorado Springs’ local ornithological group—he “brought Audubon to the West.”

And Don Galvin wasn’t just a communications officer at NORAD. “Dad was in OSS,” Richard said, “which became the CIA.”

Richard would talk at length about covert missions his father took to Iceland, Ecuador, and Panama, all while using his jobs at the Academy and NORAD as covers. All this, Richard said, he’d gleaned from conversations with his mother. “She just said there were things that he could never say,” he said.

The idea that Don Galvin was a spy is unsubstantiated by any available information from any military branch or intelligence agency. And yet this romantic view of his father was helpful to Richard. At the very least, it was preferable, for instance, to the story of a father whose military career stalled out—perhaps because he’d harbored the liberal political views of an academic, not the hawkish view of a military officer—and who gritted his teeth after being demoted to service as a glorified PR man.

Rather than think of Don Galvin that way, Richard adopted a convenient self-delusion. Not the sort of delusion that fits a DSM criterion. But we all have stories we tell ourselves.

MARGARET HAD TOLD
Lindsay that she didn’t want to spend the night at the house—that she’d rather come in for the funeral the next morning with Wylie and her two girls. Once again, Lindsay felt abandoned. She was not sure what to do with that feeling. Most of the evening, she didn’t discuss it—until, in the kitchen, John turned to Lindsay.

“So. Margaret’s not here.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Lindsay said.

“What’s the problem?”

Lindsay took a few seconds, not sure how measured to make her response.

“I think it’s Margaret’s overwhelming guilt,” she said finally, “at not having lifted a fucking finger for, like,
ever
.”

“Yeah, she’s into her own thing,” John said, treading lightly.

“She is
into her own thing,
” Lindsay said, and her smile widened. “Actually, there you go! That is the explanation.”

LINDSAY WALKED OUTSIDE
to the patio and hugged Michael and Mark. There was talk of who had RSVP’d for the funeral and if the clear weather would hold long enough before an expected rainstorm. Then the reminiscing started—the epic road trip the family took across the country for the 1964 World’s Fair in New York; the luggage flying off the roof when Dad misjudged the clearance of an A&W restaurant drive-through; all the luggage coming into the car, jammed in with the kids and the birds.

“Didn’t he drive off the road in Kentucky in another rainstorm?” Mark asked.

“Yeah,” said John. “And in the rainstorm a rock hit the truck, the bus. And then he had to take it to New Paltz, New York, to a repairer-dealer. He dropped the screw into the rotor. The mechanic found the screw in the rotor.”

“I remember the rainstorm,” Michael said, “but I don’t remember the other stuff.”

“You don’t remember the rock hitting the van?” said Mark. They all laughed.

“Who the hell keeps falcons?” Lindsay said. “Every time I tell people, they’re like ‘What?’ ”

“I tell people stories in the cab all the time,” Mark said.

John turned to Lindsay, suddenly serious, thinking about the funeral.

“What’s plan B if it rains?”

“Umbrellas,” Lindsay said. “If it rains, John, you can play at the restaurant.”

“The keyboard’s electronic,” John said. “It’s just not the same.”

Lindsay smiled and motioned over to the piano that Mimi had still kept at the house. “I’ll try to convince them to take the piano up from the basement and out to the field.”

There was more laughter.

DONALD WAS ALONE
in the living room, away from the others, smiling politely at anyone who smiled at him. Today happened to be his seventy-second birthday, and Lindsay had asked Debbie to get him a cake as a surprise. But he kept to himself, mostly silent, until he was asked if he’d had a chance to say goodbye to his mother.

“Yes, when she first left,” Donald said. “She said, ‘Thanks.’ I said, ‘Thanks,’ back to her. I just thanked her for being there.”

Will he miss her?

“No,” Donald said. “She’s bred. She’s out of harm. I mean, she’s at sea right now, as a triplet.”

His mother is a triplet?

“I bred her as a triplet, at sea right now.”

As a human being, or as a fish?

Donald scowled, finding the question ridiculous. “As a human.”