She resolved never to let the university doctors near her sons again. From then on, it would be Pueblo or nowhere at all.
* * *
—
ONCE, MIMI HAD thrived on structure and order, but now life offered her nothing close to that. With each new sick boy, she became more of a prisoner—confined by secrets, paralyzed by the power that the stigma of mental illness held over her.
Now the pretense of normalcy was a luxury. All the anguish she’d tried to keep secret for so many years, she could not wish away anymore.
Exactly what, again, had brought Mimi Galvin to this moment? One son dead, a murderer; her husband laid low by a stroke and incapacitated; two profoundly ill sons at home, with no one to care for them but her. Only one more boy, Matt, sixteen, remained with the girls, thirteen-year-old Margaret and ten-year-old Mary. Caring for them all, and whoever might get sick next, was too much for Mimi, or for anyone.
It was at this moment that, one evening over the Christmas holiday in 1975, the phone rang in the Galvin kitchen. Mimi answered. It was Nancy Gary, Don and Mimi’s Federation friend. The oil baron’s wife.
Nancy in no way could have been the person Mimi most wanted to talk to at a time like this. Even hearing Nancy’s no-nonsense, brass-tacks voice on the phone, Mimi felt almost like she was hearing an echo of her old life, calling out to her, taunting her. Jetting to Salt Lake or Santa Fe on Nancy and Sam’s private plane seemed like a life she would never lead again—a future destined now for anyone else but her.
But Nancy turned out to be the right person at the right time. She asked Mimi how she was doing, and for the first time, Mimi let her guard down. She did something she never imagined herself doing: She broke out into sobs on the telephone to a woman she only barely considered a friend.
Nancy was not an emotionally demonstrative person. But if there was one thing she was good at, it was using her husband’s fortune to make problems disappear.
“You’ve got to get those girls out of there,” Nancy said. And then, as quickly and easily as if she were ordering room service, she added: “Send me Margaret.”
* * *
—
MARY GALVIN KNEW she was not supposed to show her feelings. After everything that had happened, her mother would verge on hysteria anytime either of her little girls lost control.
But as her sister, Margaret—the only person close to an ally she had in this house—packed up to leave, Mary cried harder and louder than she’d ever remembered. She was so visibly distraught that her parents feared she would make a scene when they dropped Margaret at the Garys’. They wouldn’t even let her ride in the car.
Instead, on a January day in 1976 that is forever seared into her memory, Mary, just ten years old, stood at the front door on Hidden Valley Road, shrieking uncontrollably as they drove her thirteen-year-old sister away, leaving her behind with Donald and Peter—and a third brother, Jim, waiting in the wings, offering what she was told was a refuge, but even then knew in her heart was not—and feeling as abandoned and adrift and helpless as she’d ever felt in her young life.
Part Two
CHAPTER 18
1975
National Institute of Mental Health, Washington, D.C.
There were many days when Lynn DeLisi felt she was in the wrong place at the wrong time—that she didn’t belong in science, and that she’d been foolish to think she ever did. But the worst might have been the day she was told she might be driving her own children crazy.
This prognosis came her way from, of all people, a child psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health, supposedly the vanguard of American psychiatric research. He said it in passing, in the middle of a lecture. DeLisi was one of a few women in the room, a first-year psychiatry resident at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. And she was the only mother—of two toddlers who, at that precise moment, were at home being cared for by a sitter. Like Yale’s Theodore Lidz, the family dynamics specialist, this psychiatrist seemed to believe in a connection between mental illness—specifically, schizophrenia—and the rise of the working woman. Mothers, the psychiatrist told the residents, ought to devote the first two years of their children’s lives to being with and caring for them at all times.
DeLisi couldn’t help but feel singled out. Of all the mothers in DeLisi’s neighborhood in suburban Annandale, Virginia, she was the only one who left her children with a nanny while she went to work, in Washington. Her husband worked, too, of course, but it fell on her to tailor the demands of her residency around parenthood: To avoid night calls, she had made a special arrangement to make up the hours by extending her residency longer than the normal allotted time.
While the other first-years remained silent, DeLisi started arguing, demanding some sort of proof. “Where is the evidence?” she said. “I want to see the data.”
But this psychiatrist had no data. He was citing not studies but Freud.
For weeks afterward, DeLisi could not stop thinking about how what he’d said with such certainty was informed not by experimentation and verification, but by anecdote and bias. What happened that day would color everything about DeLisi’s career in the years to come. In an era when schizophrenia treatment was torn between two approaches—psychotherapy or psychoactive medications—DeLisi was drawn to a third way: the search for a verifiable neurological cause of the disease.
* * *
—
SHE HAD WANTED to be a doctor ever since she was a little girl in the suburbs of New Jersey. Her father, an electrical engineer, supported her dream and encouraged her; he would be the last man to do that for a while. She first thought of studying the brain and its relationship with mental illness at the University of Wisconsin, reading whatever she could about the neurological effects of hallucinogenic drugs. But her timing was not ideal. She graduated in 1966, when the Vietnam War was motivating many of her male classmates to apply to medical school to get deferments. Women who applied alongside those men were going in with an automatic disadvantage: Why would a medical school give a slot to a woman, when every man they turned down might be sent off to war?
Lynn struggled to find a work-around. She took a year off after college and found full-time work as a research assistant at Columbia University, and took graduate classes in biology at night at New York University. In the science library, she met the man she would marry, a graduate student named Charles DeLisi. Before their wedding, she enrolled in medical school at the only place that would take her: the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. After her first year, she applied to transfer to schools in New York, where Charles was still in graduate school. One interviewer asked if her family was more important to her than her career; another asked if she planned on using birth control. No one would take her.