Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family (16 page)

Back in Pueblo, Donald asked to see a Catholic priest. “He denies hallucinations or delusional paranoid feelings,” the hospital staff conference notes read. “The only problems he admits to are emotional problems that he encounters with his family, which apparently includes some physical fighting.” His prognosis, once again, was designated “guarded.”

Within a few days, Donald’s troubles would be the last thing anyone in the family was thinking about.

In a home that now rarely knew a moment’s peace, an appearance by Brian, riding in from California for a family visit, was a welcome balm, a break from the pathos and a shot of electricity—the rock ’n’ roll star, or at least the Galvin family’s version of one, returning home. When he turned up with a girlfriend, that got everyone’s attention. The couple communed with everyone in the Galvin living room, playing reel-to-reel tapes Brian had brought of his band, Bagshot Row. He brought his guitar and played along with his brothers, and the air pressure of the place changed completely. Mimi even let the couple sleep in a room together downstairs—a special dispensation that spoke to Brian’s elevated status in the family.

Lorelei Smith, or Noni to her friends, was a native Californian—bright, cheerful, and no-nonsense, with sun-kissed blond hair and a friendly smile. She was three years younger than Brian, and her childhood had been far more luxurious than his. The walls of Noni’s childhood bedroom in Lodi, a small town outside of Sacramento, were covered with ribbons from horse shows. But there was more than enough heartache and strife in Noni’s life to interest Brian, who had always seemed drawn to the darker aspects of the human condition. Noni was barely a teenager when her mother died from a combination of pills and alcohol. Her father, a well-known pediatrician in town, married a woman from the horse show set who was less than ten years older than Noni was. Noni never lived with her father again. She spent three years at boarding school, and her senior year at her sister’s house in Lodi, so that she could finish at the local high school. By the time she and Brian were together, Noni had found work at a veterinarian’s office in Lodi while taking classes at a business college.

Nearly a half century on, few people are left who remember Noni. Her father, mother, stepmother, and sister have all passed away. Her sister’s former husband remembers her as a happy girl, likable and charming. She had floated through Lodi High School for just a year, not long enough to make a lasting impression. The only member of the next generation who was alive at the same time as Noni is a nephew, the son of her sister—now an adult, nearly twice the age Noni was in 1973. All that nephew has is the awareness that once there was a girl named Noni whose boyfriend shot and killed her—and that after that, no one in his family ever was the same.

BEFORE HE’D LEFT
for California, Brian had been given to hippieish philosophical musings. He had talked about death, but not in a grim or fatalistic way—more as if it were a state of mind, a crossing over to another dimension. “To him, it wasn’t ending,” said John, the third son, who roomed with Brian for a year in the music program at CU Boulder. “It was just going somewhere else. He’d always talk to me about going over to the other side.”

To John, there didn’t seem anything too urgent or dangerous about the way he was talking. “It was the times,” John said. “The psychedelic times that we lived in.” Some of this could have been fanned by drugs; no Galvin brother dropped more acid than Brian. But there was a darkness to Brian that never seemed to concern his brothers, either because they couldn’t see it, or because they didn’t want to see it, or because they found it romantic.

On the afternoon of Friday, September 7, 1973, the Lodi police department received
a phone call from Noni’s boss’s wife at the Cherokee Veterinary Hospital, concerned that Noni had gone home for lunch at noon and had never come back. An employee missing for an hour or two would hardly seem to rise to the level of a police matter—unless there was something happening with Noni that everyone at the office knew about, something that made her vulnerable.

Noni and Brian had broken up a month or so earlier. They had been arguing ever since. And now, Noni was living alone.

The first officer to arrive at 404 ½ Walnut Street found the apartment door open. He walked inside and found the young couple on the floor, a .22 caliber rifle beside them. Noni’s face was covered in blood. She had been shot in the face. Brian had a gunshot wound to his head—a wound that the police on the scene determined to be self-inflicted.

THE YOUNGEST CHILDREN—
Peter, Margaret, Mary—awoke to the sound of their mother sobbing.

Downstairs, Mimi was lighting candles on the kitchen table, and Mark was trying to calm her down. Don was on the phone, making arrangements, pulling their brother Donald out of Pueblo on a temporary pass so that he could attend his brother’s funeral.

The official explanation, at least for the little ones, was a bicycle accident. Margaret was eleven and Mary almost eight, too young to be told that Brian had shot and killed his girlfriend, and then turned the rifle on himself. Many of the others didn’t get the full story, either. Some believed the couple had been the victims of a robbery gone wrong. They most likely would not have thought that, had they been told what the police had learned—that Brian had bought the murder weapon from a local gun shop just a day earlier. What happened in Lodi seemed premeditated.

Years later, others in the family entertained other theories—that Brian and Noni had a suicide pact, or had taken LSD together. But what only Mimi and Don knew, and told no one for many years, was that sometime before his death, Brian had been prescribed Navane, an antipsychotic. There is no known record of the diagnosis that called for that prescription—mania, or depressive psychosis, or trauma-induced psychosis, or a psychotic break triggered by the habitual use of psychedelic drugs. The other children never learned when their parents first knew about this. But both Don and Mimi must have understood that one of the conditions Navane treats is schizophrenia. The thought of another insane son—their amazing Brian, of all people—was so devastating to them, they kept his prescription secret for decades.

MICHAEL WAS NUMB.
He had been on his way to California, but had stopped in L.A., thinking he’d get around to seeing Brian up north some time later. Now all he could think was that Brian needed someone to throw a wrench in whatever it was that had been set into motion—and that he hadn’t been there to help. Now he was asked to help again: His father recruited Michael to come with him to California to get Brian’s body and find something to do with all of Brian’s belongings. They met with the police, but as an officer explained to him and his father what they thought had happened, Michael couldn’t handle it. He tuned out, refusing to hear anything more, about a second after he heard the words “murder-suicide.”

Even without knowing about Brian’s prescription, the younger boys connected what had happened to what was happening to their older brothers: first Donald, then Jim, and now Brian. John’s wife, Nancy, was the first to say out loud what everyone else had to be thinking—that what was happening to the Galvin boys had to be contagious. She and John left Colorado for Idaho, where they both found jobs as music teachers. The other sons started to drift away. Joe, the seventh son and the oldest of the four hockey boys, moved to Denver to work for an airline as soon as he graduated high school. Mark, the next in line, graduated a year later and headed off to CU Boulder.

After a brief furlough for his brother’s funeral, Donald returned to Pueblo—“quite intense about his religion,” the staff reported that year, “extremely controlled” in affect, again with an “underlying hostility close to the surface.” He stayed for more than five months, returning home in February 1974 with some new medications: Prolixin, an antipsychotic alternative to Thorazine; and Kemadrin, a Parkinson’s drug often prescribed to temper the side effects of neuroleptic drugs. Not counting Donald, Don and Mimi had just their four youngest children left at home: Matt, Peter, Margaret, and Mary.

Don had spent years building distance between himself and his children. Even once they started getting sick, he kept working, out of necessity but also in such a way that it removed him from the day-to-day dramas, just as he’d always been. Two months after Brian’s death, he acquired an additional professional title, beyond his role at the Federation: president of the newly formed Rocky Mountain Arts and Humanities Foundation.

But what had happened to Brian proved impossible for any of them to move past, and while Mimi searched for ways to keep busy with the children who remained at home, Don internalized it all. Early one morning in June 1975, Don was getting ready to leave the house to take Peter to an early morning hockey practice when he collapsed to the floor.

The stroke hospitalized Don for six months. He was paralyzed on the right side of his body and seemed completely without short-term memory. As he regained control over his body, he still couldn’t remember anyone’s names, or much of what had happened in his life after World War II.

Don reluctantly announced his retirement. The farewell letter from the Federation was courteous, if a little cool. “In light of your recent stroke,” wrote the governor in charge, for whom Don had done all the grunt work, “I think your decision to seek a job which gives you greater control over time, travel, and responsibility, is a wise and sound decision.”

After years of leaving his wife to take care of the children, Don now needed Mimi to take care of him. Don had always thought that the sick boys ought to leave and get treatment outside the home. “God helps those who help themselves,” he would say; if the boys were unwilling, there was nothing else anyone could do. But now Mimi had her way with no protest from Don—in part because Don, in his weakened condition, had lost the authority to make decisions; and in part because they had let Brian go, and look what had happened to him.

All of Don’s old arguments—that Mimi had been babying the boys; that he believed in the school of hard knocks; that those self-help books he gave the boys were all about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps—would never work again. Now that the worst had happened, Mimi would never give up on another one of her sick children.

As the youngest of ten brothers, fourteen-year-old Peter seemed to have so much authority weighing over him that he chose to disregard it all, starting arguments and defying orders every chance he could. He was so rebellious—oppositional defiant disorder might have been his diagnosis, a generation or two later—that Mimi got into the habit of calling him a “punk,” picking apart anything he did that was out of step with what was expected. If this seemed a little harsh, Mimi felt justified: Just when it seemed as if things couldn’t get any harder for the family, Peter seemed to be going out of his way to make things even worse. But what bothered her most, of course, was the feeling that if Peter veered too far off course, he would go the same way as Donald and Jim and Brian.

Peter might always have been contrary, but his father’s stroke—which he’d been present for, had witnessed, helplessly, from just a few feet away—seemed to shake loose whatever self-regulating mechanism he once had. He was caught stealing things and even setting a small fire. Then came the morning in his ninth grade algebra class, not long after Don’s stroke, when he started talking gibberish to the students around him. When Peter’s teacher tried to get him to stop, he wandered over to her, sat on the edge of her desk, and kept talking. After she got Peter back into his seat, the principal and dean of students came to the classroom. They brought along a third man, a gym teacher, in case Peter got violent.

Peter was admitted to Penrose Hospital in Colorado Springs, but only briefly—just long enough for the doctors to stabilize him. Once he was home, Mimi, her hands full with her husband’s hospitalization, decided to send him off to hockey camp as scheduled. It was there that Peter fell apart completely, wetting his bed, spitting on the floor, hitting the other campers. He left the camp for Brady Hospital, a private psychiatric clinic in Colorado Springs, where the doctors prevented anyone from visiting Peter for weeks.

In early September, Mimi finally visited and saw Peter wearing only underpants, strapped to a bed with no sheets on it. The whole room reeked of urine. Mimi pulled him out right away. Before leaving, Peter was prescribed a small dose of Compazine, a drug usually used for nausea and vomiting.

Mimi was running out of options. The state mental hospital in Pueblo that treated Donald seemed like too much, too extreme, for a boy of his age. So Peter’s next stop, late on a Saturday night in September 1975, was the University of Colorado Hospital in Denver. Peter was in the waiting room for so long that he started urinating. Once admitted, his speech was too slurred to be understood.

“It was sad to note that when the patient did become more provocative,” the doctor wrote, “his family thought this was his normal level of functioning.”

IT WASN’T LOST
on the doctor that both Mimi and Don, when he was well enough to visit, referred to Peter as the latest of their sons to have lost his mind. Before long, the staff of the hospital learned about the others.

They learned about Donald, and a troubling dynamic he seemed locked in with Peter—how the more strangely Donald behaved, the more heat Peter seemed to catch for it at school, and the more Peter came to resent Donald at home. “It is easy to be number one,” Peter used to say, “but not everyone can be number ten.”

They learned about Jim, who happened to have been admitted as a patient in the adult psychiatry ward of the same hospital, after experiencing what the staff identified as “an acute schizophrenic state highlighted by severe paranoid ideation.”

They learned about Brian and the murder-suicide. And they saw for themselves that something was off about Joe, the introspective seventh son. When Joe visited Peter on the ward, one doctor wrote, he “was able to tell the patient’s therapist that at times in the past he has had symptomatology similar to Peter’s.”

Here was what appeared to be case number five, coming down the pike. There was nothing in the medical file that suggested there was anything to be done about Joe other than to watch carefully for signs of the same psychosis that took command of the others. All this confirmed everything Don and Mimi feared. Something was happening to all the boys, one by one—first Donald and Jim, then Brian, and now Peter and soon maybe Joe—and they had no idea how to stop it, or even if it could be stopped.

Casting about for clues, Mimi and Don wondered if each brother had been set off by some sort of heartbreak: Donald’s and Jim’s marital woes, Brian’s breakup with Noni, Peter seeing his father collapse with a stroke. Mimi also searched for something in their family histories—a precursor in some distant relative that could have warned them about this. Don’s mother 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 she would never lead again—a future destined now for anyone else but her.

But Nancy turned out to be the right person at the right time. She asked Mimi how she was doing, and for the first time, Mimi let her guard down. She did something she never imagined herself doing: She broke out into sobs on the telephone to a woman she only barely considered a friend.

Nancy was not an emotionally demonstrative person. But if there was one thing she was good at, it was using her husband’s fortune to make problems disappear.

“You’ve got to get those girls out of there,” Nancy said. And then, as quickly and easily as if she were ordering room service, she added: “Send me Margaret.”

MARY GALVIN KNEW
she was not supposed to show her feelings. After everything that had happened, her mother would verge on hysteria anytime either of her little girls lost control.

But as her sister, Margaret—the only person close to an ally she had in this house—packed up to leave, Mary cried harder and louder than she’d ever remembered. She was so visibly distraught that her parents feared she would make a scene when they dropped Margaret at the Garys’. They wouldn’t even let her ride in the car.

Instead, on a January day in 1976 that is forever seared into her memory, Mary, just ten years old, stood at the front door on Hidden Valley Road, shrieking uncontrollably as they drove her thirteen-year-old sister away, leaving her behind with Donald and Peter—and a third brother, Jim, waiting in the wings, offering what she was told was a refuge, but even then knew in her heart was not—and feeling as abandoned and adrift and helpless as she’d ever felt in her young life.