Mimi didn’t bother disguising her joy. “She is the most beautiful one yet to come into our family,” she wrote in one letter. “She makes each day a mother’s dream.” She also found room to boast about the rest of her children. Donald, she wrote, “plays a lovely classical guitar and is an outstanding high school athlete. His grades are wanting but as his principal states, ‘I wish all the boys were as fine as Don.’ ” Jim, Mimi said, was “a good all around boy and a great help to me.” John (number three), with “curly brown hair and sparkling blue eyes,” played clarinet and piano with dedication, plus ran a paper route with sixty-five stops. Brian (number four) was “our shining prodigy at the moment,” making Chopin’s tragic overture “most tragic” and Jacques Offenbach’s “Can-Can” from Gaîté Parisienne “most gay.” Michael (number five), who played the French horn and liked to read, was “the delicate member of the family.” Richard (number six) was a “mathematician” who also wanted private piano lessons, “but with two taking private lessons he will have to wait a while.” Joe (number seven) was in kindergarten, learning his letters and numbers and phonetics. And Mark, Matthew, and Peter (numbers eight, nine, and ten) “are my constant companions at home. Like teddy bears, they are always getting into one thing or another. One day I found they had vacuumed the dish waste out of the sink with a new Electrolux!”
Money was going to be tighter than ever, no matter how many extra political science classes Don could teach at the local colleges. Parochial school clothing—two pairs of shoes, two shirts, and pants—cost about a hundred dollars per child. Between feedings for the baby and snacks and meals for the others, Mimi put her Bernina sewing machine into overdrive, making all the clothing herself. But Mimi would say the horizon turned pink on the day Margaret was born. As if by magic, the world had finally cooperated with her and given her what she’d wanted the most. She also said she wanted another—a twelfth—which delighted Don, but alarmed her obstetrician.
When their twelfth and final child, Mary, was born on October 5, 1965, Mimi was forty years old. Her doctor told her flat-out that if she got pregnant again, he would refuse to treat her. He urged her to have a hysterectomy, and Mimi reluctantly agreed. She and Don figured there would be grandchildren to look after, sooner or later.
By the end of November, Mimi was back on her feet, announcing in the Colorado Springs Gazette that roles had been assigned for the Colorado Springs Opera Association’s upcoming production of Verdi’s The Masked Ball. That same year, the local chapter of Notre Dame’s Knute Rockne Club of America named Don Galvin its Father of the Year. Mimi had to laugh. “I had all the babies,” she would say, in that mixture of sweetness and sharpness she’d long since perfected. “He got all the degrees and all the applause.”
* * *
—
WHEN HE WAS about seventeen, Donald smashed ten dishes to pieces one night—all at once, while standing in front of the kitchen sink.
Don wrote it off. So did Mimi. Donald was a teenager, moody. It was the 1960s. Other kids were doing worse.
But Donald knew there was something wrong. He’d known for a while.
He knew that despite the similar hairline and strong jaw and athletic talent, he was not like his father, and that he was never going to be. His grades were mediocre, not the grades of the son of a man whose children considered him the smartest man in the world. His fights with his younger brothers were little more than his own ham-fisted attempts to control them the way a father ought to. He failed at that, too.
He knew that being a star on the football field and having a friendship with another person were two very different things. Sometimes, he would say later, he thought of people as kind of like IBM cards he sorted through his own computer for information he could use. He knew that made him unusual.
Donald recognized how trapped he often felt—frustrated that he was not the person he wanted to be. But at other moments, increasingly often, he seemed completely oblivious—a stranger to his own motivations and actions.
Something was happening, and he couldn’t figure out what. More than anything else, he was afraid.
DON
MIMI
DONALD
JIM
JOHN
BRIAN
MICHAEL
RICHARD
JOE
MARK
MATT
PETER
MARGARET
MARY
CHAPTER 6
In the autumn of 1963, the Galvins moved from their quarters on the Academy grounds and into a newly constructed split-level house in Woodmen Valley, a densely pined collection of dairy farms a few miles out from the center of Colorado Springs. Don had paid a few thousand dollars for three acres of land at the western end of Hidden Valley Road, a four-mile dirt trail that terminated in a gravelly cul-de-sac. Theirs was one of the first in a new line of suburban homes meant to cater to Academy families who wanted a little more room. Before construction, Mimi tied ropes around every tree and bush on the property to make sure the contractors wouldn’t cut them down.
To many of their Academy friends, Woodmen Valley was backcountry, the middle of nowhere. But Mimi, whose feelings about the outdoors had reversed completely since first coming to Colorado twelve years earlier, loved how unspoiled it felt. So much of Colorado Springs had been built up and paved over for the military; not just the Air Force Academy, but Peterson Air Field, Fort Carson, and most recently NORAD, the nuclear defense coordination headquarters embedded in the Cheyenne Mountain defense bunker between Colorado Springs and Pueblo. Woodmen Valley was just a fifteen-minute drive from the center of downtown Colorado Springs, and yet living there, to Mimi, felt as far away from the nuclear age as could be—more timeless, more natural, more authentic.
A short walk from their new house stood a convent that had once been a tuberculosis hospital—the Modern Woodmen of America Sanatorium, for which the surrounding Woodmen Valley had been named. The valley’s geology was a little less red and more white than in the rest of Colorado Springs—leftover feldspar and quartz gravel from the eroding mountains that had settled there, millions of years earlier. Beyond the pines, there were enough large rock formations to have once sustained a tourist attraction called Monument Park. The boys could fill their days exploring the rocks famous enough to be named: Dog Rock, Grandma Grundy, Anvil Rock, the Dutch Wedding Rocks. But the magic of Hidden Valley Road was that it had enough trees and rolling hills to seem like a forest, tucked away from the avalanche of rock. Deer wandered by the patio door at breakfast, and blue jays squawked from the branches of the pine trees overhead.