There aren’t many places to find privacy on a warship, but there are enough. Back on the mainland, however, secrets are not so easy to keep. The officer’s wife might not have known that one of her friends was acquainted with the wife of Don Galvin. When Mimi heard about that voyage of the Juneau, any last bit of allure of being the bride of a distinguished Navy lieutenant quickly faded. No one may have been more in thrall to Don than Mimi. But now, with two little boys to care for, she was all too aware that she needed him more than he needed her.
* * *
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DON APPLIED TO a law program in exchange for committing to stay in the Navy another six years. He was turned down. He requested transfers to Panama, Cuba, or the Atlantic Division—all places where the Navy offered law classes. He was turned down again.
There was another violently ill pregnancy, followed by another son: their third, John, born in Norfolk at the end of 1949. Don was away for this one, in the middle of a deployment in Glenview, Illinois, for four months of officer’s training. Mimi and the boys stayed in Norfolk as Don worked to be transferred somewhere, anywhere, else. Then Don received word that the Juneau was moving its home shipyard to Puget Sound—across the country on the West Coast, one step closer to Korea, where war was brewing.
Mimi couldn’t contain herself any longer. It was time for Don to leave the Navy. On January 23, 1950, Don gave notice in a letter that laid the blame squarely on his home situation. “Deprivation of a wholesome family life is reason enough for my resignation,” Don wrote. “To remain in the Navy would deprive my wife and my three sons of a normal family life and a home.” Don also appeared to be stinging from his rejections—all the moments when the Navy had failed to recognize his potential. He’d had enough of being passed over for law school. “Motivation,” he wrote, “can only come when we want to do something, or someone instills in us a desire to do it. I have experienced no motivation in the Navy.”
Mimi was relieved. Finally, her long exile in strange, faraway towns would come to an end. They planned to move back to New York, where Don would enroll at Fordham Law School in the Bronx, and they would get started on the life she’d wanted all along. They shopped for a house in Levittown, Long Island’s new enclave of affordable mass-produced houses within driving distance of the city, and they set their sights on a place large enough for little Donald and Jim and John, plus whoever else might come along.
What Mimi did not know was that Don also had been talking with his brother Clarke, who had recently become an officer in the United States Air Force. Unlike the Navy, everything about the Air Force was still fresh and unformed. The pilots didn’t even have the blue uniforms yet, just the khaki “pinks and greens” left over from its wartime incarnation as the Army Air Corps. And they seemed to need people badly—so much so that Don learned that if he joined, they’d make him an officer instantly.
On November 27, 1950, ten months after he’d left the Navy, Don joined the Air Force as a first lieutenant. Mimi could not believe how blithely Don seemed to be reneging on every understanding she thought they had about how they wanted to live their lives. America was sending troops to Korea, and he wanted back in? Why was he always one half step out of sync with her—so remote, so absent?
Don was as persuasive with Mimi as ever. Clarke had taken him out one day to see Mitchel Field, the air base on Long Island that was serving as the military branch’s national headquarters. Did it really matter to Mimi, he asked, whether he was commuting to the Bronx to study law or Long Island to train? Either way, they could still live in Levittown. Besides, Don still had dreams. America was leading the world now, building the future. The air fleet that had just defeated fascism would be flying in and out of his and Mimi’s backyard. Did he want to push paper in some skyscraper and catch the 5:07 home every night? Or did he want to be a part of that—an expert in international affairs someday, with the ear of presidents?
Mimi and Don put together enough money for a deposit on a house. They had almost closed on the place when the Air Force announced, quite suddenly, that its new headquarters would be in the middle of the state of Colorado. This time, Don was as shocked as Mimi was. The relocation had been planned behind the scenes in Washington. No one they knew had known anything about it.
After a brief panic, they got their deposit back. Don reported to Ent Air Force Base in Colorado Springs on January 24, 1951. Mimi and the children joined him by Valentine’s Day.
* * *
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THERE WAS ROCK everywhere Mimi turned—miles of it, all different shades of red, tremendous open prairies pressed flat by glaciers and punctuated by violent outcroppings that towered over the flatlands like a stage set. There were the spas of Manitou Springs, spouting mineral water said to possess amazing healing powers. And the mountains where the previous century’s gold rush had first put this part of Colorado on the map. Beauty surrounded Mimi, even if she was in no mood to see it.
The town was not looking its best when they got there. Mimi and the boys had arrived in the middle of a drought. Water was being rationed. Even Mimi’s mother’s house in New York City had green grass and flowers; now everywhere Mimi looked, she saw brown. There was no ballet and no art or culture here—nothing close to the life that Mimi had dreamed of as a girl. The house Don found for them was located on what passed for a bustling boulevard in Colorado Springs, a silent street called Cache La Poudre. This was about as different from Levittown as a person could imagine: an old converted feed barn with a stairway with floorboards that were hopelessly bowed and crooked.
Mimi cried for several nights and seethed for longer than that. The house was a dump, she said, the town a backwater. Where exactly had he dragged her now?
But Don was her husband. And she was a mother of three, with plans for more—Don was a Catholic, after all—and plenty to do no matter where she was. Mimi decided to try to make the most of it. The birds helped—the Oregon juncos and the gray-crowned rosy finches and the mountain chickadees. There was a big cottonwood tree in the yard, and when she stared a little closer at the brown dirt, she saw wildflowers. She decided that she would plant a garden there.
Mimi’s new neighbors on Cache La Poudre came to know her as a conspicuous reader of very thick books, a woman who could recite the names of every king and queen not just from Great Britain but from every country in Europe, from the Dark Ages until the present day. They soon learned all about Grandfather Kenyon and Pancho Villa and Howard Hughes and her years in New York. And on her husband’s modest income, Mimi searched for other ways to seem special. From her mother, Mimi knew everything there was to know about the best fabrics, so she would scope out a bit of cashmere that had found its way into the Goodwill and then crow about her catch. She found a local choir to sing in and volunteered as an organizer with an amateur opera group. They wouldn’t stage anything by her favorite, Mozart, at first—even that was too challenging for them, she’d scoff privately—but Mimi helped with the casting of performers for Il Trovatore and Madama Butterfly, all the old standards.