In time, she came to love the beauty around her. The plants and geology, all so foreign to Mimi, now made it seem as if everything she had once gazed at through glass in the Museum of Natural History on Central Park West was coming alive before her eyes. And together with Don, she discovered falconry. The cultivation of such feral birds managed to blend the intense intellectual might on which they’d built their relationship with something wild and undiscovered, like their new home.
Training a falcon, they both learned, was more than just trapping; it was also about the relentless imposing of one’s will—maintaining control until the bird develops a sort of Stockholm syndrome, agreeing to stick around and even preferring captivity to being out in the world. After two weeks carrying the blinded bird on a gloved fist, or gauntlet, they would tie a creance—a one-hundred-foot string the same weight as fishing line—to the bird to maintain control during training. With some meat in a leather pouch to lure him home, they encouraged the bird to fly farther and farther away—until finally, they swung the lure out of reach to teach the bird to make diving passes. Diving, as they were deeply thrilled to witness, at upward of two hundred miles per hour.
As tricky as it was, the method for domesticating a wild hawk or falcon was well articulated—and if followed correctly, she and Don learned, you ended up with a well-behaved, obedient, civilized bird. Mimi also applied this persistent, unyielding approach at home, where sometimes there were more allowances made for the birds than for the children. The garage shelves were filled with leather hoods for the birds, and eventually the garage itself became a mews. (When one neighbor called the board of health on them, Don, who kept a clean mews, fended them off easily.) Mimi had taken a cheap watercolor set and started painting renderings of falcons. And together they introduced their new obsession to their boys. When Donald, their oldest, was grade-school age, he took part in the trapping of his first bird, a female sparrow hawk. They found her in a hole in a tree while bird-watching in Austin Bluffs, a 6,600-foot summit that once was the home of a tuberculosis sanitarium and would one day be the site of a University of Colorado campus. Mimi named the hawk Killy-Killy, after the killeee cry she made. Donald trained her himself. Once she caught a grasshopper and flew up to the top of a door, and started nibbling at the grasshopper like an ice cream cone. Donald stood below the door, patiently calling out, “Come Killy-Killy! Come Killy-Killy!” Back in the house, he’d let Killy-Killy fly loose, and they learned to step out of the way whenever she tilted her tail a certain way to poop.
The oldest two boys, Donald and Jim, started school. While the third boy, John, was still a toddler, the fourth and fifth, Brian and Michael, were born in 1951 and 1953. As infants, all the boys were breast-fed, a less-than-popular choice among most of the mothers Mimi knew. From the start, she felt good showing everyone that she could do everything on her own—no nannies, no baby-sitters. Who needed anyone else, Mimi thought, when she obviously was the best person to teach the boys, as they grew older, about opera and art and the observation of exotic birds, the examination of strange insects, and the identification of wild mushrooms? How many other children in Colorado Springs knew that the red polka-dotted ones were Amanita muscaria?
One after another, each boy got the mumps, the measles, and the chicken pox. With each new baby, the competition for Mimi’s attention increased, as did the demands on her time. Even with five boys, neither Don nor Mimi made any mention of stopping. The refrain from both sides of the family was ceaseless: Why so many children? After all, Mimi’s attraction to the finer things in life—culture, art, social status—hardly seemed compatible with having so many mouths to feed. But if Mimi couldn’t have the former, she was more than happy to try her hand at the latter. There was a different sort of distinction in having so many children, and being known as a mother who could easily accomplish such a thing.
At the same time, no amount of social ambition could explain everything about Mimi’s desire for a large family. There was quite likely another, deeper explanation as well—that the children filled a need in Mimi that perhaps even she had not anticipated. From an early age, Mimi had a way of glossing over the more painful disappointments in her life: the loss of her father; the forced exile from Houston; the husband who remained so distant from her. Even if she didn’t admit it, these losses hurt, and took their toll. Having so many children, however, offered Mimi a brand-new narrative—or at least distracted her, changed the subject, shored up the losses, helped her dwell less on what was missing. For a woman who so often felt abandoned, here was a way to create all the company she would ever need.
Don’s mother, Mary Galvin, holding forth from her home in Queens, would say, somewhat cruelly, that the pregnancies were all Mimi’s doing—that Mimi ran Don’s life now, and that Mimi wanted the upper hand in all things, and that she was determined to out-Catholic the real Catholics in the family, and Mimi’s perpetual state of pregnancy was the clearest and most powerful way to win that competition.
For Mimi, the response to that was simple, stopping all conversation. The children, she said, made Don happy.
* * *
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HE WAS ALWAYS more of a scholar than a soldier. Mimi found that part of Don both lovable and frustrating. At the same time that he insisted on having a house filled with children, he also treasured a life of the mind, of solitude and order. And yet no matter how tranquil and orderly she made their home, he always found a reason to stay away.
As an intelligence officer at Ent Air Force Base, Don embraced the circumspect nature of Cold War military work. “Don’t give anyone any more information than you have to,” he used to say, and his coy way of saying it made the air of secrecy seem almost conspiratorial, something they all shared. They didn’t share it, though: The most Don would confide in Mimi was that the generals he was briefing didn’t seem terribly bright. Despite how well he seemed to be doing there, his ambition as an Air Force man had limits. Even when President Dwight Eisenhower set up his summer White House in Denver in 1953, and Don found himself drafting the intelligence briefings that Eisenhower himself was reading, military work interested Don only insofar as it made him even more determined to get a PhD in political science one day.
Where falconry once was something Don and Mimi did together, that started to change. He spent more time away from home, luring birds with other local falconers, while Mimi’s work caring for the children was never-ending. This new disconnection maybe wasn’t so new—more likely, it revealed something about them that had been the case from the very beginning. From the first day they’d met, Don had always seemed to be living his life a few inches off the ground, while Mimi had waited patiently, her feet planted firmly on earth. Don identified with his birds—soaring where he pleased, returning only when it suited him. And Mimi, quite against her will, found herself cast in the role of falconer—domesticating Don, luring him home, laboring under the impression that she had completely tamed him.
Mimi found her own ways of occupying herself, some designed to bring her closer to a husband who was growing further and further away from her. Fulfilling a promise she had made to Don’s family, she went through several years of instruction to convert to Catholicism. Being the same religion as her husband made their family a real family, and so she did this happily—another mountain to climb, another subject to master. She formed a lasting friendship with her tutor, Father Robert Freudenstein, a local priest who introduced her to concepts like transfiguration and the virgin birth, all over cocktails. This was Mimi’s kind of priest: Freudy, as he was called, came from some money and wasn’t afraid to show it off, driving his convertible so fast that the birds outside their house would scatter when he pulled up. Freudy performed sleight of hand tricks for the boys and told them stories. With Mimi and Don, he talked about books and art and music, helping them feel less alien in their new home. When the Royal Ballet came to Denver, he took Mimi and Don together. Soon Freudy was dropping in at all hours, almost like another member of the family, whenever he needed to get away from his bosses at St. Mary’s parish. “Oh, Monsignor Kipp is mad at me,” he’d say. “Can I have breakfast with you?” Mimi always said yes.