And what about the boys? In the years before Donald went to Pueblo, he had been out of the picture, married in Fort Collins, at least two hours by car from Hidden Valley Road. Once he got sick, he was sometimes home, sometimes at the hospital, and sometimes attempting to live independently, finding jobs in stores or selling items door-to-door. As long as Donald was well enough to try living somewhere else, these trips to Aspen and Santa Fe could continue.
Jim was married, living with Kathy and Jimmy in downtown Colorado Springs. The next boys in line, John and Brian, were in college—and the next after them, Michael and Richard, were high school age and only came to Aspen and Santa Fe sometimes. The rest of the time, they stayed home and looked after the four youngest boys—Joe, Mark, Matt, and Peter—taking them to team practices, making sure they ate meals. They could take or leave these Federation excursions; they’d rather be on the ice or the ball field.
But for the girls, these trips away from home were everything. Margaret could pretend that she belonged there all the time. The spell would break whenever the brothers would come along with them. You need to be away from here, Margaret would think, watching Joe or Mark or Matt or Peter snapping towels or doing cannonballs in the pool. This is my place. The last place she wanted to be was with any of her brothers—not on Hidden Valley Road or anywhere else.
* * *
—
MARGARET HAD BARELY been a toddler in 1963 when the family first moved to Hidden Valley Road, and in those earlier, happier years, she existed mainly as a prop for her brothers. Each boy before her had gone through a version of this, too. “We were the football,” her brother Richard once said, remembering being tossed around their old living room when he was the littlest. In the girls’ case, first Margaret and then Mary became everyone’s toy.
In close quarters, all ten boys tickled and teased her and hurled her through their spanking machine, for no reason other than it seemed to pass the time. This had thrilled Margaret at first. She had worshipped her brothers; she was two years younger than the youngest boy, Peter, and seventeen years younger than Donald, the oldest. Once she was big enough, Margaret would scramble through the scrub oak in their backyard and climb the pines to spy on the boys as they built a three-story tree fort at the top of the hill, overlooking the entire valley. When the boys finished the fort, Margaret was afraid to climb it, but when her brothers called her a sissy, she did it, anyway.
Margaret was too sensitive not to internalize the conflict between the brothers—all that wrestling and punching and brawling—even when it wasn’t about her. And soon enough, it became about her. As she got older, Margaret became less of a mascot and more of a target, a sitting duck. On her way home from school, her brothers threw pinecones or water balloons at her from the top of the hill. Once she was home, the spanking machine remained fully operational—only now there would be obvious sexual undertones. Mark once was told by his older brothers that he had to run over and “do” Margaret. She would be groped and handled strangely, bullied harshly in a way that some of the boys might have considered innocent and fun.
Was this abuse? Or was it a bunch of wound-up athletic boys with no sense of limits, no internal regulators, getting physical with one another and her? Margaret would spend years wondering about that. In any case, she was too powerless to engage in open combat with them. She wanted to be comforted and protected. On Hidden Valley Road, home of the twenty-four-hour wrestling tournament, that never seemed to be an option.
A generous portion of Margaret’s, and later Mary’s, formative years took place in the spectator section of the Broadmoor World Ice Arena, watching practices and games. The youngest four brothers formed their own little unit within the larger family, playing every sport together, with hockey their finest. Joe was mild-mannered and introspective. Mark was a chess prodigy, sensitive and, by Galvin standards at least, preternaturally well-behaved. Matt was prone to mischief, but also had a flair for making pottery. Peter, the youngest, was the family’s great insurgent—more rebellious than any of the others ever had been, unable to tell Mimi and Don anything but “no.” But barely a week went by without one of the four hockey brothers making it into the Colorado Springs Gazette for their performance in hockey games—culminating in one glorious moment, when three of them were all in high school together, all on the same team, and all on the ice together, and Joe and Mark both assisted on a goal scored by Matt, and the announcer cried, “Galvin to Galvin to Galvin!”
Clockwise from top: Peter, Mark, Joe, and Matt
At home, the boys fired off sports trivia at one another between practices, and watched whatever game was on, and wrestled and fought. Even when Matt shattered his jaw and occipital lobe during one hockey game, and had to be rushed to the emergency room, and spent weeks with a constellation of pins and stitches keeping his head together, that, too, was typical Galvin fare, nothing out of the ordinary. Margaret sought shelter with her mother in the kitchen, helping her out as she listened to Mimi go on about the annoyances of the day. She would go to the market with her mother, controlling the second shopping cart that was necessary for holding enough groceries for a family of their size. And she would submit, obediently, to her mother’s constant corrections of her behavior, her school performance, and her attempts at painting and drawing.
In sixth grade, a teacher complimented Margaret’s artwork, and something registered inside her. Only when she was dancing had she felt anything like this—the sense that she might be able to create something out of nothing, to matter, to be more than just a piece of furniture in her brothers’ playhouse. She had watched her mother with her watercolors, painting mushrooms and birds. Now she wondered if that was something she could do one day, too.
But Margaret was a little too cowed by Mimi to compete with her that way. She always wanted more reassurances and support and approval than her mother was willing to give. So she put those feelings on a shelf, for the time being.
* * *
—
DONALD HAD BEEN off at college when they’d moved to Hidden Valley Road, and had only come home for visits. After his release from Pueblo, his stay at home seemed open-ended—until he got better, maybe, or at least could be trusted to hold a job and live alone. That day seemed far off to everyone, and for Margaret, who was eight when Donald moved home, each day with him there brought the fear of something new. Donald would lead masses for a parish of one—himself—shouting the Beatitudes, the Hail Mary, and biblical passages. He would go to the art store and buy some cheap picture frames and mount them to the wall, framing one-word quotes like sincerity all around the house. Too contained by the house, he would walk hundreds of miles around the neighborhood, county, and state.
At mass every Sunday, Mimi told the children to pray for Donald. But in public, she would titter and smile and say that their family of twelve children was a little daffy or eccentric or adorable—like the family in You Can’t Take It with You. The most she would say about Donald was that he had not been the same since his wife left him. That woman had not been a good choice for Donald. The marriage was all wrong to begin with. Now he couldn’t seem to get over her. “She was not a wife—she wasn’t,” Mimi would say, shaking her head—implying, without exactly saying, that her son’s problems were the result of a broken heart.