These conflicts, Don and Mimi sometimes thought, were best settled between the boys. Interceding too much might send the wrong message, and the boys might never learn to get along with one another on their own. And even if they had wanted to determine who was wrong in every instance, they would have had trouble figuring out whose fault it was. Because while Donald might have ruled over the other boys with an iron fist, Jim never stopped gunning for Donald’s position at the top of the heap.
* * *
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IF DONALD WAS the model son, Jim was more of a maverick. This meant embracing the James Dean and Marlon Brando spirit of the time—the leather jacket, the fast car, the defiant snarl. He had tried being more like Donald first and came up short. As an end receiver and defensive back, Jim had been good enough to, one time, block a punt and score a touchdown in the same play, but he never could outperform Donald on the football field—or in falconry, for that matter. Soon, he saw no upside in trying. Jim couldn’t fail to notice his parents’ expectations and attention always swerving past him and toward his older brother, and that angered and shamed him. There was, naturally, one person onto whom he could direct all that rage. Which was how, from his teenage years onward, Jim always seemed to have a score to settle with Donald. “It was like a pact with himself,” Michael said.
Jim and Donald never seemed to stop wrestling—in the basement, in the bedrooms, on the shrubs in the backyard. Jim was smaller, and so when Donald beat him, he’d go off and lift weights, or try to round up some of his younger brothers to gang up on Donald. That never worked. The other brothers were afraid of them both. Once, Jim slammed a storm door in Brian’s face, cutting his mouth. The skirmishes extended beyond the nights Mimi and Don were out, and into the daytime when they weren’t around, and then every waking hour. Once the fights started spilling into the living room, Don and Mimi knew they had to intercede. Michael remembered being in third grade and seeing his father, usually so aloof, running at teenage Donald at full speed and tackling him, to keep the boy from hurting one of his other brothers. This struck Michael as impressive at the time. But Don must have known he was on borrowed time. Donald was a football star. All the boys were only growing in one direction.
Different command styles are appropriate in different situations, and so Don searched for the right approach. At first, to him, this seemed like an issue of setting the right tone. Something about the family atmosphere seemed too highly charged with young male vigor, and it was his job to help them find their way, each of them, toward manhood. Ever the benevolent patriarch, Don would try to sell the boys on books that could improve their personalities, smooth out the rough edges. The Power of Positive Thinking was one. Another was Psycho-Cybernetics, Maxwell Maltz’s popular 1960 self-help book, which introduced much of the public to the idea of creative visualizations. Don thought these books might offer the boys a road map out of their conflicts. He’d get them all around the long dining table and lecture about harmony. When that didn’t work, Don decided that he could at least impose order, something the military had taught him well. So he brought home boxing gloves. And he made a new rule: No fighting without them.
Richard—the sixth son, nine years younger than Donald—remembered the dread he felt when he put on those boxing gloves. “All the brothers were all-state athletes, you know, in top-notch shape,” he said. “So when a fight broke out, it was a real fight.”
* * *
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THE GALVIN HOME became a place where two different realities existed at the same time: the wrestling pit and the church choir; the wildness of the boys and the model family Don and Mimi believed they had. A little mischief could always be waved off, especially on a military base where competition and power and might were almost part of the drinking water.
But for many brothers—John, Michael, Richard, and Matt—there was a growing sense of being lost in the shuffle, even neglected, feeling less than safe, treated like a number and not a person, raised to take the illusion of protection as the real thing.
The private and public faces of the family were sometimes hard for others to reconcile, too. Visiting their cousins in Queens, the boys seized every unsupervised moment to break every rule in the house—climbing up on top of the garage roof, shooting at windows and birds with a BB gun. The East Coast cousins were both thrilled and scandalized. Then, months later, the cousins would get Christmas cards of Don and Mimi and the kids, a saintly family tableau, everyone dressed perfectly in pajamas around a tree. The disconnect seemed strange to them, even then.
For the moment, Don and Mimi chose not to see what was happening as anything other than roughhousing. These were boys, a lot of them, living in close quarters. It would be unrealistic to think that they would never fight. And the oldest, Donald, was still such a source of pride—a clean-cut teenager who was featured in a photo taking up nearly half the front page of The Denver Post, rappelling from a falcon-nesting spot high up on Cathedral Rock. Just like his father.
* * *
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PETER, THE TENTH son, was born on November 15, 1960. This time, Mimi had a long stay in the hospital afterward with a severe prolapse, along with a blood clot in her left leg. Now there were fewer jokes about how Mimi ought to wear garlic to bed to fend off her husband at night. Her doctor gravely told her that her childbearing years were behind her. Fifteen years of more or less continuous pregnancy, labor, and delivery would seem to be enough for anyone. But Mimi did not seem interested in listening, even when others pleaded with her.
“Really, dear, you should give poor ‘Major Galvin’ a turn at the hospital,” Mimi’s paternal grandfather, Lindsey Blayney, wrote to her. “But, seriously, I am concerned about you.”
In truth, asking Mimi and Don to stop at ten children was like asking a marathoner to stop at twenty-five miles. Stopping struck them as ludicrous—not now that Don was rising in status at the Academy, and they both were feeling comfortable back in Colorado. Besides, as if it weren’t obvious to everyone yet, they still did not have a girl.
In 1961, mere months after giving birth to Peter, Mimi became pregnant for the eleventh time. Over Christmas, shortly before she was due, she and Don and the ten boys assembled for a photo on the grand staircase in Arnold Hall, the central gathering place at the Academy. The boys wore identical Eton suits from Lord & Taylor, paid for by Mimi’s mother, Billy. Mimi’s grandfather Lindsey called the photo “startling” when he received his copy in the mail—all of those children, with no sign of stopping. He predicted that Mimi’s next delivery would be twins, which would make for an even dozen.
He was wrong, but Mimi did break new ground on February 25, 1962, by delivering Margaret Elizabeth Galvin. The Greeley Daily Tribune of Colorado broke the news with a short article: AT LONG LAST, IT’S A GIRL! Don had predicted as much, but that didn’t keep him from joking to his cadets, “Dang, that was supposed to be my quarterback.”