* * *
—
INEVITABLY, SHE ACTED out. She started stealing small things to make up for the fact that she felt like she had nothing compared to everyone else. When she raided Suzy’s piggy bank, Trudy caught her, but she was not punished. This became just one more thing for Margaret to feel guilty about, to be indebted to the Garys for, and for the Garys to overlook out of a sense of generosity.
But slowly, she assimilated. After years of field trips and river trips and expeditions into the San Juan Mountains, she became a Telemark skier and an accomplished hiker and backpacker. The Kent School boys ignored her until they saw that she was a good athlete. Becoming one of the guys didn’t ingratiate her with the girls, but it was something. Her first boyfriend at Kent was someone popular enough to open doors for her socially. With him, she moved on from pot to opium, the drug of choice at Kent at the time. She tried cocaine at an Eric Clapton concert at Red Rocks. She collapsed after too many hash brownies at a Kenny Loggins show at the University of Denver.
She had sex with that boyfriend, too. After what she’d been through with Jim, this felt like an attempt to feel normal, to feel loved. She spent more energy than she admitted fending off the shame of her family’s illnesses, and trying to forget everything that Jim had done to her.
She told none of her Kent friends that one of her brothers had died, or that three others were revolving-door regulars at a mental hospital. For those secrets to remain secrets, Margaret could never explain why she came to live with the Garys. She had a stock line about the educational opportunity that Kent offered her, and how lucky she was to have that chance. Covering up the truth might have made her seem fake to some of her classmates. But it was what she needed to do to get through the day, to build some sort of life she wouldn’t feel bad about, to survive.
Hidden Valley Road was both home and not home now. Margaret’s family seemed apart from her—which relieved Margaret, even as it provoked spasms of guilt. When her parents came for visiting day, rolling past the Mercedeses in their prehistoric Oldsmobile, Margaret flushed with embarrassment. She saw her mother’s clothes differently now. She returned to Hidden Valley Road only on holidays, which tended to be the worst times to visit, with every sick Galvin boy stuck in a house together. One year, Matt had to go to the hospital with a concussion after Joe back-flipped him on the patio. When Matt’s head hit the concrete and blood started rushing, that only seemed to wind the brothers up more. With barely a pause, another fight broke out downstairs, this one forcing Don to end it. Don, of all people, who was still recovering from his stroke but too furious not to try to do something to contain the chaos.
Margaret remembered the wooden door to the garage broken into pieces, and the ghostly silence once the fighting finally stopped—only after the ambulance came to take Matt away.
* * *
—
IN 1976, MATT enrolled at Loretto Heights, a local private college in Denver, not far from the Garys’, to study fine arts. Don and Mimi’s ninth son—one of the hockey boys, four years older than Margaret—was a potter, and a good one. Even Mimi said so. He also received encouragement from Nancy Gary, who had served on the Loretto Heights board. The Garys told Matt he was welcome to drop by sometime.
One day, Matt brought a vase he had made to the Garys’ house, to show them what he could do. Margaret heard a commotion downstairs, and up came Matt, completely naked. He had taken off all of his clothes, then taken the vase and smashed it. With some of the others, there at least had been some warning signs. But Matt’s breakdown was a stunner. It was as if whatever had been slowly overtaking her brothers was picking up speed now.
This was Margaret’s old world crashing in on her new one—a reminder she did not belong there, and that nowhere was safe. It was only a matter of time, she felt, before her Kent School friends learned the truth about her family—about her.
DON
MIMI
DONALD
JIM
JOHN
MICHAEL
RICHARD
JOE
MARK
MATT
PETER
MARGARET
MARY
CHAPTER 21
“There is a loud telepathic signal here,” the skinny man said, calling out with an easy smile to the swath of tie-dye all around him. “If you just be quiet for a while, you can feel it.”
Stephen Gaskin was a six-foot-four ex-Marine with a blond goatee, a receding hairline, and a long, untamed tangle of hair flowing down his shoulders. With his time in the military years behind him, he had moved up in the world, becoming a certain kind of prophet. Gaskin had first drawn a following in San Francisco in the late 1960s with a lecture series called “Monday Night Class,” in which he regularly filled a two-thousand-capacity ballroom with discourses about acid trips, supernatural activity, and the right way to pursue peaceful social transformation. In 1970, he decided to take Monday Night Class on the road, and he and some four hundred followers traveled the country in a convoy of sixty buses that won them a raft of nationwide media attention. The sign on the convoy said it all: OUT TO SAVE THE WORLD. After wandering across the continent and back again, Gaskin’s new community—a nomadic tribe of mellow revolutionaries—paid nearly $120,000 for 1,700 acres of land in the woods of Summertown, Tennessee, settling there in the spring of 1971. Within a few years, the Farm, as Gaskin named it, became the nation’s largest commune.
Michael Galvin first arrived at the entrance of the Farm in 1974, partly as a hippie in search of a new way of living, and partly because he was out of options. The tragedy of Brian and Noni had brought low everyone in the family, but it was Michael who had gone with Don to see the body, and Michael who stood there as a police officer explained in cold, clinical terms what had happened to his brother—and to that poor girl. He still believed that, in an alternate reality, he might have helped his brother—how, if he had gone straight to Sacramento and not detoured in L.A., he might have made it there in time to do something. What, exactly, he couldn’t say.
Mimi and Don must have sensed how difficult this was for Michael. They decided to send him east to New York to stay with an uncle, Don’s brother George, who worked as a conductor with the Long Island Rail Road. Michael’s parents thought that he might find Michael a job as a brakeman. When Michael failed the engineering test, he went to see his maternal grandmother—Mimi’s mother, Billy, then living in New Jersey—who came up with another idea.
* * *
—
AT THE HEIGHT of its popularity, the Farm attracted a population of about 1,500 people. Michael might have been the only one who pulled up to the front gate in a Buick driven by his grandmother. Before being let inside, Michael was informed of the rules. No overt anger. No lying. No private money. No eating animal products. No smoking tobacco. No alcohol. No man-made psychedelics like LSD. No sex without commitment (Stephen Gaskin was licensed by the state of Tennessee to perform marriages, and did so frequently, preferring to marry two couples to one another in what he called a “four-marriage”). Michael said yes to it all.