Lindsay, left, and Margaret
Lindsay stood out in other ways, too. She dressed like a prep school girl, in plaid skirts and collared shirts. She hadn’t known that the girls at Hotchkiss were doing the Deadhead hippie thing. And she had grown up with her father’s liberal politics, and now she was hearing some of her classmates talking about how anyone on welfare was just riding on someone else’s coattails. She found a few sympathetic adults, an English teacher and a philosophy teacher, who didn’t mind her barreling into their offices and bursting into tears, crying, How could they think this? And she crafted a survival strategy. Obviously, she wasn’t going to be going on shopping trips in Manhattan with anyone. She wasn’t going to Paris on spring break. Instead, she became an athlete—soccer, mainly, and lacrosse—and that became enough for her to make it through her time there.
Lindsay had been practicing masking her emotions for so long that doing so came naturally to her. Performing in this way—a permanent smile, and an air of personal secrecy—took a small toll. She wasn’t getting the straight As she’d expected. But like all Hotchkiss students, she read Walden, and Thoreau’s transcendentalism was a tonic to her, reaffirming her need to be out in nature—like, of all people, her mother. That she was finally so far away from Mimi only to realize how much she shared with her was, to say the least, a surprise.
Some part of Lindsay didn’t think she deserved to enjoy Hotchkiss—that she could pretend to be carefree, but really that state of mind would always be out of reach, reserved for others. Now and then, she would be reminded of exactly how different she was. When she and a friend went to a screening on campus of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Lindsay didn’t last ten minutes. She ran out of the auditorium in tears. Her friend was concerned. When Lindsay muttered something about how there was mental illness in her family, the friend did not ask any more questions.
* * *
—
LINDSAY WAS AT Hotchkiss in 1982 when Joe—the oldest of the four hockey boys, the mild, thoughtful seventh son, nine years older than she was—had his psychotic break.
The doctors who had met him when he’d visited Peter a decade earlier had an inkling that something was wrong. But Joe had seemed all right to the rest of the family, or at least well enough to live on his own and work. After high school, Joe had found work at the airport in Denver, and from time to time he would take her skiing, get her out of the house, help her feel normal for a while. Then he got a job with United in Chicago, working as a baggage handler, and he moved there and fell in love with a doctor’s daughter. A wedding seemed imminent until Joe was refused a promotion at work. For Joe, this seemed to be the culmination of many insults he’d endured while working there, including a knee injury he’d been nursing that he’d never filed a claim for. He started to send threatening letters to his bosses. When United fired him, Joe sent more threatening letters, this time to the White House.
In short order, Joe lost everything—his car, his apartment, his fiancée. Then he started seeing things. First Donald and Jim, then Brian and Peter, now Matt and Joe—six of the twelve of them, lost.
Lindsay was brought low all over again. She flew to Chicago to join her parents, who were coming to see Joe at a hospital. What she saw horrified her. Joe was drugged, hardly responsive. It dawned on her that she had never visited any of her brothers at Pueblo—never before seen what happened to Peter and Donald and Matt when they weren’t at home. For the first time, she started to think not just about their behavior, but the kind of medical treatment available to them.
Joe returned to Colorado Springs, joining Peter and Donald and their parents in the house on Hidden Valley Road. He was hearing voices all the time now. One night, he went running down the middle of a street downtown, screaming at the top of his lungs, “The wolves are chasing me!” It took two six-foot troopers to subdue him. He spent much of May 1982 at the state hospital in Pueblo.
Michael, the hippie alumnus of the Farm, was living nearby now, and was as shocked as everyone else by how quickly Joe had changed. He still suspected that if his brothers had a less repressive upbringing, they never would have snapped. He decided that Joe might not be so far gone yet—and that maybe he could help bring him back. He went home to see Joe and spent a night out driving with him, trying to get him to let out whatever anxieties he had, trying to reach some part of him he was keeping hidden. We need to talk. What are you doing? Why are you doing that? He took Joe to a field on the grounds of the Air Force Academy. Hey, let it out! Michael remembered saying, over and over again.
Nothing worked. His brother was unresponsive, confused, and often just mentally elsewhere. Michael thought that this must be what it was like to talk to an alcoholic—someone too tied to his current state to imagine any other way of being. He couldn’t stop thinking that mental illness was a choice, and that Joe was making the wrong choice.
If Michael was frustrated, Lindsay, back at boarding school, was surprised to find her resentment easing, her rage subsiding. Like Margaret, she had felt marginalized at her exclusive private school—but Lindsay stopped thinking that the solution ought to be to deny her family’s existence. Instead, she discovered a certain kinship with her sick brothers. They were ostracized by society. Sometimes she felt that way, too.
* * *
Margaret had traveled east in the fall of 1980 to start her freshman year at Skidmore College in upstate New York, a two-hour drive from Lindsay at Hotchkiss. At Skidmore, Margaret experienced some of the same culture shock she’d gone through at Kent and that her sister was experiencing now. Her classmates were reading the Times and the Journal every day. They could program computers and discuss seventeenth-century poetry. Margaret’s heart was in the outdoors—camping, hiking, climbing, cycling, rafting. Through a friend, Margaret got her first glimpse at the fine arts department. She knew that it had everything she wanted, yet the life of an artist was an extravagance she could not afford.
Margaret was a work-study student, serving and cleaning up after her classmates in the cafeteria. She no longer benefited from the financial cushion of being an adjacent member of the Gary family, and she was starting to realize that the last several years she had lived off the Garys’ generosity were, in some ways, an illusion. At the end of her freshman year, Margaret decided to transfer to the University of Colorado in Boulder. CU was cheap enough for her to afford on Pell Grants. She had friends there. And it was still a safe enough distance from home—too far to be a commuter, far enough that she could beg off if she didn’t feel like coming home for visits.
Every decision Margaret made was, in some way, oriented around the ability to avoid going home. Home was where Peter was urinating on the floor because a devil was under the house. Home was where Donald was still ranting and raving about his ex-wife, a decade after the divorce. Home was where Matt was cooling off, after his psychotic break at the Garys’ house. And home was where Jim was still welcome to drop by anytime he wanted.