New York slowly grew on Mimi. Sack lunches in hand, she and her sister could take the bus and subway for a nickel from far-off Queens to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, then make their way through Central Park, past Cleopatra’s Needle to the Museum of Natural History, and find their way back home before dark. All the New Deal WPA projects allowed Mimi to see theater in ballparks and high school auditoriums. School took her on her first trips to the aquarium and planetarium. Her first ballet, by Léonid Massine, was staged inside the Met. Mimi would never forget the sight of twelve little girls who came all the way from Russia to dance—all, it seemed at the time, just for her. If the first world Mimi had known was the world of the Victrola and the grand piano and the country club and Junior League of Houston, she took more fiercely to this new world. “I loved growing up in New York,” she would say. “That’s the best education in the world, it really is.”
And in the years to come, whenever things seemed awry in her life, Mimi’s stories about her charmed New York childhood and gilded Houston family would, all together, paper over the gloom. Grandfather Kenyon hit some hard times in the Depression and had to let the family’s loyal servants go, but beneficently permitted them to stay on his property, rent-free….Mimi and her mother once traveled to Texas on the same train as Charlie Chaplin, and she played with the Little Tramp’s children (who were rascals in their own right)….In the 1930s, Mimi’s mother, Billy, accompanied Grandfather Kenyon back to Mexico, where she went drinking with Frida Kahlo and shook the hand of her exiled Russian friend, Leon Trotsky….
As far as Mimi was concerned, these stories were better than the one about how much Ben Skolnick liked to drink. Or how she never saw her real father, John Blayney, again, and how much that hurt. Or how deeply, achingly she had longed for a life that would be as safe and secure as it would be extraordinary.
* * *
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MIMI MET THE man who would offer her that life in 1937, when they were both still practically children. Don Galvin was fourteen and tall and pale, with hair as dark as hers. She was a year younger, studious but also quick to laugh. They were at a swim competition, and she’d blown a start, diving in before the whistle blew, and he was sent in to bring her back. After the meet, Don asked her out. That was the first time such a thing had happened to Mimi. She said yes.
Don was a serious-minded boy, college-bound, a reader. All that appealed to Mimi. But he also was handsome in the most wholesome, all-American way: lantern-jawed with slicked-back hair, a matinee idol in the making. Don wasn’t an extrovert, and yet when he opened his mouth, people seemed to listen. It was not so much what he said as how he sounded: Don had the voice of a crooner, practically singing everything he spoke, smooth and seductive. With that voice, one of his sons, John, later said, “he could hold you in the palm of his hand.”
Mimi’s mother was suspicious. There may have been some snobbery at play there. The Galvins were devout Catholics—a tribe as foreign to the Episcopal Kenyon family as a Jewish family would have been before Billy had met Ben. Don’s father was an efficiency expert for a paper company, and his mother was a schoolteacher. Neither of these facts did much to impress Mimi’s mother.
But there was snobbery on both sides. Don’s mother noted how Mimi did all the talking in the relationship. Did that mean she would ride roughshod over her youngest son? And then came the refrain from both sides that dogged them for years: You’re both so young.
Nothing seemed to convince them that they weren’t meant for each other. It was true that their interests weren’t completely in line: He loved the Dodgers; she loved the ballet. But when they were fifteen and sixteen, Mimi persuaded Don to take her to Petrushka featuring Alexandra Danilova, the ballerina who had left the Soviet Union with George Balanchine. When Don came home raving about the performance, his brothers teased him for days. In the summer, Billy took Mimi on a trip, ostensibly to see Grandfather Kenyon. The not-so-secret agenda was to get Mimi away from Don for a while. It didn’t work: Mimi wrote Don letters all the way there and back. Once she came home, Don took her to see The Wizard of Oz, and the couple sang and skipped together all the way home. That fall, they went to dances together, and school basketball games and rallies and Friday night bonfires. That spring, they drove out together to warm-weather clambakes on Cedar Beach on Long Island’s South Shore.
Slowly, everyone came around. As Don neared graduation, his parents invited Mimi and her family to dinner. The Galvins lived in a nicer house than Mimi’s family’s place, a Dutch Colonial with a vast living room covered by a deep, dark red Oriental rug. Billy took notice of this. From that point forward, Don became a welcome guest at Mimi’s house on Friday nights to play Scrabble. On return visits to Don’s house, Mimi would clown around with Don and his two brothers, George and Clarke, both of whom were as handsome as he was. Even Don’s mother thawed a little when Mimi and Don visited the Cloisters, and Mimi wrote a school paper for Don on the tapestries there. Mimi was helping her son to better himself. That was all right with her.
Not everything about their romance was effortless. Every weekend, Don hosted dances as the grand master of the Sigma Kappa Delta fraternity. Mimi went broke making new dresses each week, determined not to let anyone else go with him. There was a price to pay, perhaps, for going steady with the boy the Jamaica High School paper once called “Senior Head School Romeo.” Nothing but an absolute refusal to discuss his affairs of the heart could be obtained from the very secretive and the shy Mr. Don Galvin.
Something about him—not just his looks, but a relaxed, easygoing self-assurance—made him both irresistible and, in some strange way, unattainable. That air of mystery would work to Don’s advantage for much of his life. From the very start, it was as if Mimi belonged to him, while he belonged to everyone.
* * *
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MIMI LOVED DON for his ambition, even if in her heart of hearts she would have preferred that he stay close to home. After high school, he told Mimi he wanted to join the State Department and travel the world. In the fall of 1941, just a few months before Pearl Harbor, he enrolled at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C. A year later, Mimi enrolled in Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, to be closer to him. But it was only a matter of time before the war would catch up with them both.
In 1942, in the middle of his sophomore year at Georgetown, Don enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve. The following year the Marines sent him to Villanova, Pennsylvania, for eight months of mechanical engineering training. Before completing the course, the trainees were offered a shortcut to the front lines: If they wanted to, they could transfer to the Navy right away, with a guaranteed admission to Officer Candidate School. Don took the deal. On March 15, 1944, he was off to Asbury Park, New Jersey, for Navy midshipman’s basic training, and then to Coronado, California, where he awaited an assignment. In November, Don received his posting: He would serve as a landing craft operator on the USS Granville, a brand-new attack transport ship bound for the South Pacific. Don was going to war.