Mary told her mother she was sleeping over at her friend’s house. She left out the part about the party. When she got there, the big brother was there, along with two other guys, drinking Seven and Sevens. She joined in.
The guys invited both girls out to a well-known make-out spot in town to drink some more. Her friend said no; she had to stay home to take care of her little sisters. But Mary said yes and got into a car with them. By the time they came back, Mary’s friend and her sisters were all asleep. Mary was so drunk she could barely stagger back inside.
The boys, seeking privacy, found a walk-in closet, opened the door, and directed Mary inside it. One at a time, they followed.
Mary woke up a few hours later with no idea of where she was. She opened the closet door and found her way to the living room. Daylight streamed through the windows. Mary shuddered. Her mother was supposed to pick her up. She stumbled outside and waited on the curb, holding her stomach, trying to sort out what had happened.
The plan had been for her mother to take her to a dentist appointment. “I can’t go,” Mary said, as soon as she got in the car. “I’m sick.” Mimi might have gathered that her daughter had been drinking—this was her twelfth teenager, after all—but she said nothing.
It was then, on the way back home, it all came flooding back—two boys taking turns, a third halfheartedly trying to stop them. Mary almost threw up all over herself. A fitting punishment, she thought at the time, for a girl who had been so bad. She had lied to her mother, and she had gotten drunk, and she had failed to run away.
Too clouded by shame to place the blame on anyone but herself, Mary told no one what happened. She figured everyone she knew would know sooner or later. She made herself a promise that day: Once she left for Hotchkiss, she would never live in Colorado Springs again.
No more teenage boys in closets.
No more Jim in the cottage, at the top of the Manitou Incline.
No more Donald or Matt or Peter or anyone but her and her alone.
* * *
It was still orientation. Too soon to be pigeonholed, she hoped. All she wanted was to be the last person anyone at Hotchkiss would ever think was unusual. Then a teacher she’d just met read her name tag and scowled.
“There is already a Mary Galvin at this school,” she said. “What’s your middle name?”
Mary did not answer right away. She knew that her name said more about her than she wanted anyone to know. Forget, for the moment, how being called Mary Christine had helped to make her, in her brother Donald’s eyes, the sacred virgin mother of Christ. Sitting there with all of those sons and daughters of privilege, feeling the East Coast WASP-iness of the place, Mary sensed that her Catholic name screamed not one of us.
In a flash, she thought of another name. Thomas Lindsey Blayney was her great-grandfather on her mother’s side. Lindsey was a scholar and an eminence for the family—the kindly and wise Don Galvin of his generation. Lindsey had remained in close touch, writing Don and Mimi and doting on his great-grandchildren.
Lindsey seemed like a prep school name to Mary—a better name, a Hotchkiss name. She flubbed the spelling, a mistake that had the virtue of making the name all hers. She had to do something, to make some sort of gesture that would wipe away everything that had happened to her in the first thirteen years of her life.
“Lindsay,” Mary said.
And from that moment on, Lindsay was her name.
CHAPTER 24
1979
University of Colorado Medical Center, Denver, Colorado
Robert Freedman and Lynn DeLisi never worked in the same lab or even the same research institution or hospital. They were just two of hundreds of researchers around the world who were investigating schizophrenia. Their specialties were different, too—two disparate approaches to the same problem. While DeLisi wanted to track down the genetic components of schizophrenia, Freedman was on the hunt for a physiological understanding of the illness. She wanted to learn where it came from; he wanted to learn how it worked.
Neither of them knew that their paths one day would merge in the study of one extraordinary family—and that what they would learn from that family would help them both unearth new knowledge about the disease.
While DeLisi’s path to a career in medicine was riddled with detours, Freedman’s had been more or less seamless. He graduated from Harvard in 1968, two years after DeLisi graduated from the University of Wisconsin, and entered Harvard Medical School right away. As an undergraduate, Freedman had been drawn to the idea that the human mind could synthesize its own, entirely separate reality. “It just seemed to me if there was ever a disease that was uniquely human and philosophical, it was having schizophrenia,” he said. At the same time, Freedman was fascinated by the physical body, particularly the workings of the central nervous system. After medical school, he directed his career toward the study of the brain, starting off with the belief that there must be a better way to learn why neuroleptic drugs like Thorazine did what they did.
Freedman understood from a new flurry of research that people with schizophrenia might have difficulty processing all the information sensed by the central nervous system in an efficient way. This “vulnerability hypothesis”—an update, or elaboration, of Irving Gottesman’s 1967 diathesis-stress hypothesis, introduced by a team of researchers from Harvard and Columbia in 1977—sought a middle ground between nature and nurture by suggesting that certain genetic traits directly compromised the brain’s sensory and information-processing functions, making the brain especially vulnerable to any number of environmental triggers. To these researchers, those triggers—anything from everyday heartbreak, to chronic poverty, to traumatic child abuse—didn’t cause schizophrenia as much as provide “an opportunity for vulnerability to germinate into disorder.” And that vulnerability, many thought, was really an issue with “sensory gating,” or the brain’s ability (or inability) to correctly process incoming information. A sensory gating disorder was the most common explanation for the schizophrenia experienced by John Nash—the Nobel Laureate mathematician depicted in A Beautiful Mind—who was able to detect patterns no one else could, and yet also was prone to delusions and visions of beings who were out to get him. Both of those aspects of Nash’s personality were said to be products of the same hypersensitivity.
Neurons talk to one another through brain synapses, the junctions between nerve cells that are essential for sending messages through the central nervous system. Many researchers came to suspect that the John Nashes of the world weren’t able to prune their synapses in the same way as most people.* Some people with schizophrenia, they thought, might become sensitive to distracting sounds and feel flooded by too much information—the way it sometimes seemed Peter Galvin felt, or Daniel Paul Schreber had back in 1894. Others might become hyper-reactive, guarded, even paranoid—like Donald Galvin, mysteriously inspired to move all the furniture out of the house on Hidden Valley Road. Still others might be unable to pick and choose what to focus on with any reliability and might become delusional—seeing hallucinations and hearing voices, like Jim Galvin.