Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family (22 page)

I never thought I’d meet a man with so much to offer, and the outrageous part is he wants to share it with me.

August 31, 1983

She went back again in September. He flew out to see her in Colorado in October, and again on Thanksgiving. And on New Year’s Eve, they were together again in Manhattan, dressed brilliantly, ringing in the new year at the Rainbow Room. They both were half-done-in by champagne and coke and pot when, in the first moments of 1984, Chris leaned in toward her, conspiratorially.

“Can you keep a secret?”

“Yeah.”

“Will you marry me?”

“YOU’RE NOT GETTING
married to this guy. That’s ridiculous.”

This was Wylie, a classmate of Margaret’s in Boulder, another love interest, or at least he hoped to be. While Chris was a competitive sailor, Wylie spent the warmer months painting houses. Wylie was level-headed and soft-spoken, usually. But this news, and the ring on Margaret’s finger, took him by surprise.

But she was serious. No one was taking care of her anymore—not her family, not the Garys. Chris was ready. Trips to Germany and Crete and Egypt were all planned out.

Lindsay got it. She might have been the only other person on the planet who really knew what Margaret was running from. This was her sister’s chance to have a new family.

Mimi and Don approved, too. Aware of Chris’s family’s wealth, they mortgaged their house to host the finest wedding they could manage. Mimi made all the dresses herself from an Oscar de la Renta pattern, pink silk with ruffles around the bottom and top.

They set a date for August. All Margaret needed to do now was navigate a path through her brothers—all nine of them—to the altar without a scene.

IN THE MONTHS
before the wedding, Peter was arrested in Vail for soliciting funds on the street for what he was calling a cancer society benefit. At the hospital, he asked the doctors for a bulletproof vest to protect himself. The Vail police, he said, were jealous of him and out to get him. Eventually Peter made it back to Hidden Valley Road with Mimi and Don, staying in bed, not bathing, subsisting on coffee and cigarettes, alternating between long periods of silence and occasional explosive outbursts. Once, he locked Mimi out of the house and put his medicine in the family’s coffee.

Two of the other hockey brothers, Joe and Matt, were in and out of Pueblo at the same time. Joe was preoccupied by Catholic imagery, like his brother Donald, but never grew menacing like Donald once had; the voices in his head were not so much evil, he would say, as bothersome. Matt’s fantasies were more paranoid, making it hard for him to stay stable for long. Between hospital stays, he was arrested once for loitering in Colorado Springs and placed on probation.

Donald had been living more or less peaceably at home since his last state hospital visit in 1980. Now the one everyone was most wary of was Jim.

Earlier that year, after sixteen years of marriage, Kathy had finally left her abusive husband. For years, she’d worked and raised their son, Jimmy, while steering around Jim’s ups and downs. Her friends all knew about Jim—his mental illness and the abuse—and yet Kathy never made a move until the first time she saw him strike their son. Jimmy was fourteen. Jim hadn’t touched him before then. He saw Jim about to hit Kathy and got between them, facing off against his father for the first time, trying to protect his mother. When Jim punched his own son in the stomach, Kathy called the police. She left with Jimmy soon after.

Now Jim was living alone, still getting outpatient shots of a neuroleptic drug to keep his symptoms in check. But he was working less and drinking more. No one in the family knew what he might be capable of.

A few days before Margaret’s wedding, Jim came by the house on Hidden Valley Road, where Lindsay was staying with a boyfriend for the weekend. When Jim arrived, Lindsay wasn’t there, but her boyfriend’s car was. Others in the house watched Jim as he slashed all four tires, screamed obscenities at the top of his lungs, and drove off.

Lindsay and her boyfriend moved that night to a friend’s cabin, where Jim could not find them. If there had been even a little doubt in Lindsay’s mind that Margaret was right to start a new life with Chris, there wasn’t any now. Part of her wished she had a similar ticket out.

THE REHEARSAL DINNER
was at the Garden of the Gods country club. At least two hundred people would attend the church ceremony, followed by a reception in the backyard of a family friend’s new home in Broadmoor, the fanciest part of Colorado Springs.

Wylie called Margaret the night before the wedding with a last-ditch offer. He was in Massachusetts with his family. “I’ll send you a ticket here if you don’t marry him,” he said.

Margaret cried for hours. Lindsay stuck an ice pack on her face to keep the swelling down. Margaret knew that she wasn’t doing the right thing, that she was about to marry a man she hardly knew. But what was the alternative? Fly to Wylie? Cry on his shoulder? Tell him that one of her brothers had molested her for years—and that another killed himself—and that there were four more at home just like them?

To Margaret, that was no choice at all. Wylie wanted more from her than she could give anyone—a sincere, honest look at her own life. With Chris, she wouldn’t have to think about her family ever again.

She hadn’t counted on missing the mountains so much.

Lindsay graduated Hotchkiss in 1984 in the top quarter of her class. She could have found a college farther away from home than Boulder. But Colorado, she was amazed to realize, had been calling to her—not Hidden Valley Road, exactly, but something about the state that felt like home. Now that she was back, she wanted to climb every fourteener she could see, all the time. And for a short time, she could commune with that place again, until all her usual fears came back.

At the University of Colorado, she got straight As doing hardly any work, and yet at odd moments she was overcome with panic. She had a social life, boyfriends, parties, drugs—nothing was stifling her anxiety. She found herself reading every self-help book she could find at any bookstore, trying to figure out why.

When she tried mushrooms for the first time, she thought that this must be what schizophrenia felt like: absolutely terrifying. She didn’t need mushrooms to be afraid. She had plenty to worry about without them.

She grew tired of pretending that nothing was wrong. She was looking for help, but she was unsure of where to find it.

“TELL ME ABOUT
your family,” the campus therapist said.

Lindsay started talking. And then something happened. As she started explaining that she had ten older brothers and that six of them had schizophrenia, the look on the therapist’s face changed.

At first it seemed like she didn’t believe Lindsay—that she thought she was making the whole thing up. Then Lindsay saw what was really happening. The therapist was wondering how much of this was all in Lindsay’s head. She thought she was the crazy one.

The session went nowhere. Who would listen to her? Who would believe her?

That fall, Lindsay started seeing a boy, someone she’d known for years. Tim Howard was Sam and Nancy Gary’s nephew. Like Lindsay, he had been visiting the Garys’ lake house in Montana his entire life—another of the many children Sam and Nancy would host. Like a lot of boys, Tim had been in awe of the Galvin sisters—both stunning, both effortlessly athletic. Now he and Lindsay were in college together in Colorado.

Lindsay and Tim had been dating a few months when they both ended up as guests of the Garys in Vail during a school vacation, staying at the family’s condominium on the main strip. There came a time when they finally had the place to themselves—everyone else was either skiing or shopping—and they were on the verge of sleeping together.

Lindsay couldn’t.

Tim asked her what was the matter.

Lindsay looked at him.

This wasn’t an angry boyfriend, demanding sex. This was a boy, nearly a year younger than she was, who had been carrying a torch for her for the better part of a decade—a boy who genuinely liked her, who would not judge her. He knew a little bit about her family already, even if he didn’t know some of the more difficult details. And this was Tim, not some stranger. There may have been no safer person to tell.

Lindsay was in tears as she talked. This threw Tim, at first. She had always seemed so tough to him—a
shtarker,
like Sam had often called her; Yiddish for a tough guy, someone who knew how to get things done. But he stayed in the room with her. He listened.

She stopped short of revealing Jim’s identity. She didn’t say who had abused her, and he didn’t ask. When she stopped talking, he struggled with what to say.

“I don’t know what to do,” Tim finally said. “But I know who would.”

They got dressed and left the condo when Tim spotted Nancy Gary in the distance, walking toward them along the main drag. Tim left Lindsay and ran up to his aunt. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

Lindsay stood there, snow on the ground around her, as Tim and Nancy talked. Barely a moment passed before Nancy cut away from Tim and marched down the lane to Lindsay. She and Nancy went inside and talked some more.

Louise Silvern remembered meeting Lindsay for the first time in 1984, listening to the pretty, self-possessed nineteen-year-old talk about her family and what had happened to her. Lindsay’s description of her family, and of the minute-to-minute experience of growing up in that house, was far and away the most traumatic story, certainly, that she had ever heard from a patient. And when Lindsay got to the part about the college health services therapist not believing her, she remembered being outraged. Job one, Silvern had always thought, was to not shut a patient down.

There is a narrative, or a myth, that our society indulges in about trauma and therapy, particularly in the wake of unspeakable childhood abuse. The myth starts with a child unable to speak, and takes flight when the right therapist is sensitive and kind enough to coax the child into a breakthrough. This is the mold established by Dr. Fried, the Frieda Fromm-Reichmann surrogate in
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.
Once the child lets it all out, the trauma disappears like a bad dream. The patient is as good as cured—relieved and unburdened and ready to embrace the world again. In books and movies, the breakthrough happens in one fraught, angry, tearful session, perhaps late at night, after a small crisis triggers something in the patient that they’ve tried to keep bottled up for years.

In Lindsay’s case, the myth was barely half true. In Silvern—Lindsay’s second therapist, based in Boulder and referred by Nancy Gary—Lindsay found a professional listener who, yes, through sensitivity and kindness, created the safe, accepting space that was necessary for Lindsay to take control of her own story.

Where the myth breaks apart is with the idea of a breakthrough. For Lindsay, the breakthrough was more like a seep-through, coming gradually, over twenty-five years, the product of steady, intense work in sessions that sometimes were as frequent as three times a week. While Lindsay was going to classes and getting straight As and having boyfriends and going skiing and climbing, she was dashing away for an hour a week, sometimes two or three, to tell her therapist her family secrets. And while this took a very long time, Silvern made sure the pace remained unrushed. Unlike the movie therapists, she did not want to seem overly invested in the outcome of each session. That kind of pressure can turn a patient into a performing seal, just doing whatever she feels the therapist expects. At its worst, that pressure can be retraumatizing.

As a first step, she did very little but listen to Lindsay carefully for several sessions, paying attention to which subjects were overwhelming, or “fragmenting,” to her, and which closed her down entirely. To become fragmented, she explained, was to be so walled off from difficult elements of yourself that those difficulties would only grow stronger, more insistent, more destructive. The solution, or the goal, was to help Lindsay find her own strengths and then develop them to help herself cope with these challenging subjects—to “integrate,” as Silvern put it, the difficult parts of her psyche into the rest of her life, rather than cordon them off.

Lindsay wanted to move faster, of course. She wanted to get the problem solved—for someone, anyone, to send the worry away. But for her brothers’ and her own sake, she also wanted answers from Silvern about the nature of mental illness—the causes. Could trauma or abuse cause insanity? Is it possible that Peter or Joe or Matt were at Pueblo because of something Jim did to them?

It seemed like a tidy enough explanation. But if that were true—and to be sure, no studies have ever suggested that abuse does cause schizophrenia—that would mean that Lindsay was at risk.

After all this time, she still was terrified of becoming mentally ill. Silvern made it clear to Lindsay how much bravery it would take for her to get past this fear.

LINDSAY PAID FOR
the sessions herself. Silvern would put whatever she couldn’t pay on a tab. Lindsay continued to pay it off for years after graduation, settling it finally after starting her own business in her late twenties.

She never asked her parents to pay. Both Mimi and Don rejected the whole idea of therapy.
Why dig all that up again? Let the past be the past.
Exactly the response that made Lindsay ashamed in the first place, afraid to tell them the truth about what Jim did to her.

Silvern focused on getting Lindsay to tell her own story—to reclaim the past on her own terms. This was about more than just trying to face up to reality. It was about removing all of the filters that had been imposed on her. Children, Silvern explained, rely on the adults around them to interpret what’s happening to them. They use their parents’ constructed systems: This is good and that is bad; this person is untrustworthy, and that person is somebody you can count on. Shame and guilt are ways that children usually process those traumas when the grown-ups around them have failed them.

Exhibit A for Lindsay, of course, was Jim.

Jim was still in all of their lives, a member of the Galvin family in full standing, turning up on holidays, popping by Hidden Valley Road whenever Lindsay visited, even living back home for a time after Kathy left him. Now that she was back in Colorado, Lindsay was working hard to make herself okay with that, showing up at events like Margaret’s wedding as if everything was fine. But Jim was only getting more volatile, now that his wife and son were out of the picture. And Lindsay was getting tired of pretending.

Lindsay asked her therapist:
How can I be around him? How can I go home, knowing he’ll drop in at any moment? And if I refuse to come home, can I deal with the upset that would create?

Silvern would help Lindsay fantasize about what she could do with her anger toward Jim. Lindsay thought about killing him—a lot—and then she felt guilty for those thoughts. But her biggest concern, even bigger than confronting Jim, was that she would have to tell her mother. What if Mimi didn’t believe her?
Then,
she thought,
I would somehow be another crazy one.

She was stuck in the same dilemma she experienced as a little girl: If you were angry, you were unstable. If you cried because you got a B on a test, maybe it was time for you to go to Pueblo.

Lindsay’s father remained idealized for her—in her mind, at least, her only ally left on Hidden Valley Road, despite his frailty. But she and Silvern talked a lot about the particular way Mimi had of silencing Lindsay. She wouldn’t say, “Shut up.” It was more like “You think you’ve got troubles?” She attacked Lindsay’s emotions by undermining them, dismissing them, or invalidating them.

Feelings were scary in the Galvin family, Silvern said. There had been too many out-of-control horrors for it to be otherwise.

SILVERN CALLED RESILIENCE
“that wonderful term for something we don’t understand.” Resilience is the subject of umpteen academic studies, of course, and if someone could figure it out, they would rush to bottle the solution. In Silvern’s experience, it was sometimes a matter of luck that a person has the right temperament to absorb trauma in a way that still allows them to be open to new experiences, to go through life with armor.

But there are all sorts of coping mechanisms, some more self-limiting than others. Lindsay was a tough kid, donning a mask of self-reliance and stubbornness that served her well through childhood, and then eventually that mask fused to her real face. The question was how well that mask was still working for her now: hypervigilant, uncomfortable with failure, terrified to present herself to others as anything less than perfect.

Silvern told Lindsay that when somebody copes by being more armored, it can wind up hindering them later. They have a narrower road to travel going forward—a more fenced-in, claustrophobic life. Her hope for Lindsay was that she end up in a place where she would be willing to trust new people, to let down her armor under the right circumstances.

To get there, Lindsay would have to learn to recognize post-traumatic stress in real time, as it was happening to her—so that she would be able to recognize, for example, that a blistering argument she had with a friend one night was at least in part because of the rape scene in the movie they’d just seen.

THERE CAME A
time in her sessions when Lindsay decided to talk about what had happened to her at the party in eighth grade, the night in the closet. She was vague about it at first—“there was an incident with some boys.”

Silvern knew that Lindsay had to go at her own pace. First, she needed to work through all the self-blame.

She lied to her mother. She went to a party when she shouldn’t have. Didn’t she deserve what happened next?

Come on, Silvern said. No.

Was she asking to be taken advantage of?

No, Silvern said.

Was she sending out some sort of sexual signal, as the victim of her brother’s abuse, equating sex with affection in some misplaced way? Was she asking for it?