Then came Theodore Lidz with his family dynamics explanation: A child can fail to mature adequately, he declared, if “he perceives very faulty nurturance in his first few years, or he is seriously traumatized.” The Yale psychiatrist cited no data to support this position, just his personal work with families affected by schizophrenia.
A week went by like this until, on July 1, the conference’s last day, it fell on Rosenthal, the organizer, to sum up the state of the field. He treaded lightly, opening with a joke. The heredity-environment controversy in schizophrenia, he said, reminded him of a “white-shirted French duel,” in which the duelers “managed to avoid each other so thoroughly that they never exposed themselves even to the danger of catching cold.” Remaining diplomatic, Rosenthal said that he saw it as a positive sign that everyone was able to come together at all. “This week we have been able to sit here day after day and listen to people expounding ideas both compatible and contrary to our own,” he said, “and far from catching any dread affliction, the only thing we have caught, I hope, is the spirit of earnest concern about the other man’s data and opinions.”
There would be no real reconciliation anytime soon. Three years later, the chief of the family studies section at NIMH, David Reiss, also a participant at Dorado Beach, would still be referring to the geneticists and the environmentalists as “warring camps.” Families like the Galvins, meanwhile, continued to live at the mercy of a mental health profession still caught up in a debate that came nowhere close to helping them. But there was a good reason for this impasse, one that Rosenthal acknowledged in his closing remarks—a mystery that would take another generation to even start to be solved.
The good news, Rosenthal said, was that “all the reasonable doubts that had been raised in past years have now been answered, and the case for heredity has held up convincingly.” This conference, he predicted, “could be remembered as the time when it was definitely and openly agreed by our foremost students of family interaction that heredity is implicated in the development of schizophrenia.”
But that concession only raised a more puzzling question. “In the strictest sense, it is not schizophrenia that is inherited,” he said. “It is clear that not everybody who harbors the genes develops schizophrenia.” Schizophrenia was definitely genetic, but not always passed down. And so they all were still left wondering: How could this be?
“The genes that are implicated,” Rosenthal said, “produce an effect whose nature we have not yet been able to fathom.”
DON
MIMI
DONALD
JIM
JOHN
BRIAN
MICHAEL
RICHARD
JOE
MARK
MATT
PETER
MARGARET
MARY
CHAPTER 15
Nothing may have been more important to Mimi than a flawless Thanksgiving. She spent all day on the meal, and beforehand she usually made a gingerbread house in time for it to be on display. In recent years, as Mimi had been forced to look past the food fights and dish-towel whippings between the brothers, each November still filled her with hope, offering one more chance for a beautiful experience.
This year, 1972, Joseph and the other three hockey boys were all still at home with the two girls. Donald, too, was home from Pueblo. As the day wore on, Jim and Kathy and baby Jimmy joined them, along with Brian and Michael and Richard. Only John was away, with his wife Nancy’s family. With this many Galvins in one place, the chances for an explosion were high. The sparring started early and continued up until mealtime—the boys sniping at one another over who took how much to eat, who did their share of cleaning up, who was a pansy, who was an asshole.
You took too much!
What are you going to do about it?
You didn’t leave me any
Too bad for you
Move over
You stink
You suck
Fuck you
You asshole
It’s not my turn to do the dishes
You never help around here
Pansy
You are such a girl
Take it outside
Grow up
Margaret braced herself. On Thanksgiving, it fell on her, now ten years old, to iron the linens and place the silver and the napkins on the table. These chores kept her close to her mother and away from the boys. Keeping with the family tradition, there were assigned seats. Don, the patriarch, was at the east end of the table, with Donald to his immediate right, where he could be closely monitored. Mimi’s place was on the table’s north side, with a view out the window, with chess-playing Mark and introspective Joe nearby, and rebellious Peter closest of all, so that she could keep an eye on him. Margaret always sat at an end because she was left-handed, and little Mary, still just seven, not far away. Matt sat across from them, near Jim and Kathy. But they weren’t seated yet this year when the worst happened.
Jim and Donald were more at odds than ever. They fought every time they were in the same room now. Jim looked at Donald and saw a weakened foe, someone he could finally defeat; he also might have seen an unwelcome image of himself, suffering from delusions just as he was. Either way, Donald had to be expunged, and Jim had to be the one to do it. Donald, meanwhile, looked at Jim and saw a pest who never seemed to go away. He’d been humiliated enough—by a wife who would not agree to stay married to him, by brothers who did not obey him the way he’d once hoped. For Jim to walk through the door and assume that he was in charge was, for Donald, the final insult.
So they fought—wrestling, like in the old days, in the living room, the usual spot. Donald used to have the advantage, but not anymore; Donald had been in the hospital, and was weakened by neuroleptic drugs. They seemed evenly matched now. As someone got little Mary safely out of bounds, the fight escalated.
It wasn’t long before they could not be confined to one room.
The living room at Hidden Valley Road opened out to the dining room. If you wanted to take a fight out into the backyard, you would have to cross through the dining room to get there. On this Thanksgiving, the brothers started to move in that direction. The only thing in their way was the table.
Donald ran to the far side of the dining room. He lifted up the table, with Jim on the other side, coming closer. In Margaret’s memory, he tipped the table over onto its side, and everything on it came crashing down onto the floor. In Mark’s, Donald actually picked up the whole table and threw it at Jim. In either case, Mimi’s perfect Thanksgiving was destroyed.