And, of course, their world was not as perfect as Mimi had wanted. She would not have admitted this to herself at the time, much less told another soul about it. But if she needed reminding, she only had to wait for visits home from her oldest two boys. Donald and Jim continued to fight, with each other and with their younger brothers. Every visit to Hidden Valley Road—Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas again—ended in bruises. Richard remembered once watching as Donald ran down the road after Jim, caught up to him, and knocked him to the ground with an uppercut. He had never seen anybody punch someone so hard in his life.
Mimi had surprised herself by being relieved that her two oldest boys were out of the house, on the pretense that Donald and Jim were, in theory, nearly adults and capable of making their own decisions. Each time they came home put the lie to all that. But she also was aware that the slightest acknowledgment that all was not well in her family risked coloring everything else about her life—Don’s new professional prospects, the standing of the other children, the reputation of them all.
And so Mimi tended to agree, most of the time, when her husband said what he’d always said when there was something wrong with the children: that the boys should not be coddled; that they should leave the nest, make their own mistakes and learn from them, take responsibility for their actions, grow up.
And she thought about how perfect their life was otherwise. And how fragile her husband’s happiness had always seemed to her. And how sometimes it seemed as if the slightest move in any direction could bring the whole place toppling down.
DON
MIMI
DONALD
JIM
JOHN
BRIAN
MICHAEL
RICHARD
JOE
MARK
MATT
PETER
MARGARET
MARY
CHAPTER 7
On September 11, 1964, Donald Galvin, at the start of his sophomore year at Colorado State in Fort Collins, paid his first visit to the campus health center. He had come in to be treated for a minor injury to his left thumb, a bite mark from a cat. He offered no explanation for what had happened—no reason why the cat would have felt so provoked that he’d bite and not just scratch.
The next spring, Donald returned to the health center. This time, his problem was more personal, yet every bit as peculiar. He said that he’d learned that his roommate had caught syphilis, and that he was afraid that he might catch it from him by accident. Donald, who had told his parents that he wanted to study medicine one day, had to be disabused of the notion that he could get the disease in a way other than sexual intercourse.
A few weeks later, in April 1965, Donald visited the health center for a third time. He said he was at home, his family’s place on Hidden Valley Road, when one of his brothers, he did not say which one, got the jump on him, attacking him from behind. Diagnosed with back strain, he spent the night in the infirmary.
Then came the fire.
One night in the fall of 1965, Donald staggered through the health center doors with burns on his body. His sweater had caught fire, he said, during a pep rally. After a little back-and-forth, it came out that Donald had jumped straight into a bonfire. Maybe he did it to get attention, or to impress a friend, or as a cry for help. He could not say.
* * *
—
THE STAFF PULLED Donald out of his classes and sent him for a psychiatric evaluation. Major Reed Larsen, a clinical psychologist for the Air Force Academy Hospital, saw Donald four times over the next two months. This was the first time that a mental health professional examined Donald, and the first time that Donald’s parents were forced to face the possibility that all was not right with their oldest son. But whatever fears Don and Mimi had about Donald subsided when Major Larsen came back with his report. “Our findings showed no evidence of a serious thinking disorder, nor of symptoms secondary to a psychotic process,” he wrote on January 5, 1966.
Don and Mimi were reassured, even if the endorsement was hardly full-throated. To begin with, the major noted that one of Donald’s sessions took place with the assistance of sodium amytal, one variety of truth serum. Amytal interviews in psychotherapeutic settings weren’t entirely unheard of, but they were usually saved for patients who are having difficulty communicating—and, perhaps, exhibiting the signs of the catatonic variety of schizophrenia. Even so, the major recommended that Donald be allowed back to school, provided he continued to receive psychiatric help. “We did discover a number of emotional conflicts which, I feel, are disturbing enough to Mr. Galvin to account for his erratic behavior while at school,” he wrote. Such treatment could be paid for, he said, by the military’s new Medicare program for dependents.
What was bothering Donald so much that he ran into a raging fire? Before anyone could find an answer, he propelled himself back into campus life at the start of 1966, determined to make up for lost time. Donald desperately wanted to connect with people now, especially females, even as he seemed rather naive about how to find a girlfriend. The distance from others that he’d been feeling seemed even more pronounced. But he was still athletic and handsome, and he hoped there was still every chance that he could become the man his parents thought he could be.
He started seeing someone, a classmate named Marilee. Within a few months, they were even talking about marriage. This seemed fast—but not if, like Donald, you were eager to lead a normal life, to have sex without it being considered a sin, to have a family like his own family, to be all right. But the family never got a chance to get to know Marilee. When the couple broke up, Donald was shattered, and he kept the news to himself as he scrambled to make things right. On the phone with Marilee afterward, he racked up $150 in long-distance charges. He couldn’t pay his rent, but he also couldn’t bear to admit that to his parents. Donald’s solution was to search for a place where he could live for free—a place to hide while he figured out what to do next.
In the fall of 1966, Donald found an old, abandoned fruit cellar near the campus—a room with electricity and an old heater, but no water. He slept on a mattress there alone, not sure of how he might climb out of the hole he’d dug for himself. Days turned into weeks, then months—until, on November 17, Donald returned to the health center, reporting, once again, that he’d been bitten by a cat.
When the doctors learned that this was his second cat bite in two years, they sent him that same day for a full work-up with a psychiatrist. It was there, finally, that the extent of Donald’s troubles became clear. He seemed to open up to these doctors in a way he hadn’t before, perhaps to anyone else. The intake notes mention more “bizarre self-destructive things” Donald said that he had done: “Has run through bonfire, put cord around his neck, turned on gas, and even gone to a funeral home to price caskets—all of which he cannot give adequate motivation for.”