So she abandons her plan. She strands Donald on the hill. He stays up there, surrounded by flies and pasqueflowers, standing in place and praying for a very long time. Long enough that Mary gets some time to herself, but not so long that he doesn’t come back down again.
* * *
—
SHE MANAGES A smile now when she thinks about it. “Margaret and I laugh,” she says. “I’m not sure others would find it quite so funny.”
On a crisp winter afternoon in 2017—forty-five years, a lifetime, after that day on the hill—the woman once known as Mary Galvin pulls her SUV into a parking space at Point of the Pines, an assisted living facility in Colorado Springs, and walks inside to see the brother she once fantasized about burning alive. She is in her fifties now, with the same bright eyes, though in her adulthood she has chosen to go by a different first name: Lindsay, a name she picked as soon as she left home—a determined young girl’s attempt to make a break with the past and become someone new.
Lindsay lives a six-hour drive away, just outside Telluride, Colorado. She owns her own business, staging corporate events—working as hard as her father ever did, crisscrossing the state between home and Denver, where most of her events take place, and Colorado Springs, where she can tend to Donald and others in her family. Her husband, Rick, runs the Telluride ski resort’s instruction program, and they have two teenagers, one in high school and one in college. Anyone who meets Lindsay now usually doesn’t see past her calm confidence, her easy smile. After years of practice, she has an artful way of pretending as if everything is completely normal, even when the case is quite the opposite. Only a tart, razor-sharp comment now and then suggests something else—something melancholic and immutable, simmering beneath the surface.
Donald is waiting for her in the first-floor lounge. Dressed casually in a wrinkled, untucked Oxford shirt and long cargo shorts, her oldest brother, in his seventies now, looks incongruously distinguished, with wisps of white hair at his temples, a cleft chin, and heavy black eyebrows. He could be cast in a gangster movie, if his voice weren’t so gentle and his gait so stiff. “He has a little bit of that Thorazine shuffle still left, the way he walks,” says Kriss Prado, a manager at the facility. Donald takes clozapine now, a sort of last-resort psychotropic drug with both a high rate of effectiveness and a high risk of extreme side effects—heart inflammation, low white blood cell count, even seizures. One of the consequences of surviving schizophrenia for fifty years is that sooner or later, the cure becomes as damaging as the disease.
When Donald spots his sister, he stands up, ready to leave. Usually, when Lindsay visits, it’s to take him out to see other family. Smiling warmly, Lindsay says they’re not going anywhere today—that she is there to see how he is doing and to talk with his doctors. Donald smiles, too, slightly, and sits back down. No one in his family comes to see him there but her.
Lindsay has had decades to make sense of her childhood, and in many ways that project continues. So far, she has learned that the key to understanding schizophrenia is that, despite a century of research, such a key remains elusive. There is a menu of symptoms, various ways the illness presents: hallucinations, delusions, voices, comalike stupors. There are specific tells, too, like the inability to grasp the most basic figures of speech. Psychiatrists speak of “loosening of associations” and “disorganized thinking.” But it is hard for anyone to explain to Lindsay why, on a day like today, Donald is cheerful, even content, while on another day he is frustrated, demanding she drive him to the state mental hospital in Pueblo, where he has been admitted more than a dozen times over fifty years, and where he often says that he would like to live. She can only guess why, when Donald is brought to the supermarket, he always buys two bottles of All clothing detergent, announcing brightly, “This is the best body wash ever!” Or why, almost fifty years later, he still recites that religious litany: Benedictine, Jesuit, Order of the Sacred Heart….Or why, for almost as long, Donald has consistently and unwaveringly maintained that he is, in fact, the offspring of an octopus.
The most dreadful thing, perhaps, about schizophrenia—and what most sets it apart from other brain conditions like autism or Alzheimer’s, which tend to dilute and dissipate a person’s most identifiable personality traits—is how baldly emotional it can be. The symptoms muffle nothing and amplify everything. They’re deafening, overpowering for the subject and frightening for those who love them—impossible for anyone close to them to process intellectually. For a family, schizophrenia is, primarily, a felt experience, as if the foundation of the family is permanently tilted in the direction of the sick family member. Even if just one child has schizophrenia, everything about the internal logic of that family changes.
But the Galvins never were an ordinary family. In the years when Donald was the first, most conspicuous case, five other Galvin brothers were quietly breaking down.
There was Peter, the youngest boy and the family rebel, who was manic and violent, and who for years refused all help.
And Matthew, a talented ceramic artist, who, when he wasn’t convinced that he was Paul McCartney, believed that his moods controlled the weather.
And Joseph, the most mild-mannered and poignantly self-aware of the sick boys, who heard voices, as real to him as life itself, from a different time and place.
And Jim, the maverick second son, who feuded viciously with Donald and went on to victimize the most defenseless members of his family—most notably the girls, Mary and Margaret.
And, finally, Brian, perfect Brian, the family’s rock star, who kept his deepest fears a secret from them all—and who, in one inscrutable flourish of violence, would change all of their lives forever.
* * *
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THE DOZEN CHILDREN in the Galvin family perfectly spanned the baby boom. Donald was born in 1945, Mary in 1965. Their century was the American century. Their parents, Mimi and Don, were born just after the Great War, met during the Great Depression, married during World War II, and raised their children during the Cold War. In the best of times, Mimi and Don seemed to embody everything that was great and good about their generation: a sense of adventure, industriousness, responsibility, and optimism (anyone who has twelve children, the last several against the advice of doctors, is nothing if not an optimist). As their family grew, they witnessed entire cultural movements come and go. And then all the Galvins made their own contribution to the culture, as a monumental case study in humanity’s most perplexing disease.
Six of the Galvin boys took ill at a time when so little was understood about schizophrenia—and so many different theories were colliding with one another—that the search for an explanation overshadowed everything about their lives. They lived through the eras of institutionalization and shock therapy, the debates between psychotherapy versus medication, the needle-in-a-haystack search for genetic markers for the disease, and the profound disagreements about the cause and origin of the illness itself. There was nothing generic about how they each experienced the illness: Donald, Jim, Brian, Joseph, Matthew, and Peter each suffered differently, requiring differing treatments and a panoply of shifting diagnoses, and prompting conflicting theories about the nature of schizophrenia. Some of those theories could be especially cruel to the parents, who often took the blame, as if they’d caused the disease by something they did or did not do. The entire family’s struggle doubles as a thinly veiled history of the science of schizophrenia—a history that for decades took the form of a long argument over not just what caused the illness, but what it actually is.