It was at about this time that Peter sat for an assessment that seemed to shake loose something new about him, something he hadn’t discussed before. He started out irreverent, as usual. Asked about his marital status, he said, “I divorced the United States.” Asked if he had any special vocational training, he said, “I’m in the Federation,” a nod to his father’s old organization. Asked if he had any allergies, he cited both lithium and Prolixin.
Then came some boilerplate mental health questions.
Have you been hearing voices?
“Voices from God. He tells me to obey the commandments and love one another.”
Have you been experiencing suicidal ideation?
“Yeah, ’cause if I get hold of a knife or a spoon, I’ll swallow it. I took a whole bottle of lithium once.”
Have you ever hurt anyone?
“Yeah, all kinds of people.”
Have you ever been involved in physical or sexual abuse?
“Yes,” Peter said. “I was abused as a child by my brother. I won’t say which one.”
* * *
The brothers who had not become sick had been doing their best to move forward with their lives, with varying degrees of success.
John, the devoted classical music student, thought Boise was completely unimpressive, the middle of nowhere, when he first moved there in the 1970s. Then he went fly-fishing for the first time, and he noticed no one was in his way. That was when he knew he’d found a new home. John was, in his way, the embodiment of the dual nature of the Galvin family: outdoorsy but scholarly; athletic and capable, but drawn to a life of the mind. He was the only Galvin brother to put those childhood piano lessons to use and earn a steady paycheck, teaching music to elementary schoolers. His trips home to Colorado with his wife, Nancy, also a music teacher, were so infrequent, John would say, because the expense of visiting was too much for a family of teachers.
But it also was more convenient not to visit. What was happening to his brothers completely terrified both John and Nancy. Every trip back to Colorado had a way of justifying those fears. Once, they left their two small children at the house for a few hours of baby-sitting and came back to see flashing lights in the driveway. There had been another blowup with the sick boys, and Mimi had taken John and Nancy’s kids into a closet until the police came. The kids were fine, but John and Nancy’s visits grew less frequent, and they never stayed overnight at Hidden Valley Road again.
To some of his brothers and sisters, it seemed like John had all but abandoned the family. But the truth as John saw it was that he felt distanced from them—robbed of having a family at all by the unpleasantness of the disease. When the time came for them to tell their own children that they had half a dozen mentally ill uncles—and that the family might have a genetic legacy that could affect them one day—John and Nancy said nothing. His sick brothers were never a topic of conversation at home. His son and daughter would not learn much about the family illness until they were in their twenties.
Michael, late of the Farm, had made a life for himself in Manitou Springs, the hippie-friendly town next door to Colorado Springs. He married and had two daughters, and then divorced. He made a living on this and that—helping take care of older people, home repair jobs, the occasional classical guitar gig. He remained skeptical of the medical establishment’s treatment of his brothers—still raw from his own misdiagnosis years earlier, still suspicious of any conformist impulse, still thinking hopefully that his sick brothers had the power to snap out of it.
Richard, the rehabilitated teenage schemer, had more of Mimi’s grandfather Kenyon in him: cocky, restless, impulsive. All that was largely a front, of course: Brian’s death had made him wonder if it was only a matter of time before he, too, went crazy. “It scared the shit out of me,” he said. “For twenty years, I anesthetized myself, hoping that it wouldn’t happen. I blocked my family out.” His teenage wedding, prompted by a pregnancy, had resulted in a very short-lived marriage. Richard gave up primary custody of his son to his ex-wife, and he spent most of his twenties partying, playing jazz piano at local clubs at night, and sharing his cocaine with his younger brothers and sisters when they asked for it. He avoided home more and more, getting filled in on the latest crises when he visited for Thanksgiving or Christmas. “I was hearing these horrendous stories—‘Oh my God, you won’t believe what Donald just did,’ or what Jimmy just did or what Matthew or Peter or Joseph just did.”
In his early twenties, Richard was hired by a mining company that was connected, indirectly at least, to the Koch and Hunt oil families. He spent many years working those connections to score different gigs and round up investors for mining projects around the world. Richard had never wanted his family’s issues to taint his career prospects, so he kept his distance. Only every now and then did what was happening to his brothers break through and register with him. In 1981, when Ronald Reagan was shot, Richard happened to be acquainted with a close relative of John Hinckley Jr. He heard about the FBI descending on Hinckley’s family, gathering facts, asking questions. The thought entered Richard’s mind before he had the chance to stop it: How soon before he got a knock on the door like that?
In the mid-1980s, Richard said, he bought a mine that became a Superfund site right after he got control of it. The litigation with the previous owner took two decades and cost Richard $3 million to resolve; then came a bankruptcy. All the while, he continued to make other deals and boast about his success to his siblings. When the genetics researchers came to examine the family, Richard did the minimum, giving some blood and sitting for an interview, but he kept his distance from the medical efforts after that. He would see his mother alone, presenting himself as a welcome distraction for Mimi—an entertaining visitor who could get her mind off of her troubles. To his surprise as much as anyone’s, he found himself enjoying a warm relationship with Mimi—years after viewing her as a harsh disciplinarian the way his other brothers had.
Mark, the eighth son, had once seemed like the brightest of the boys, able to beat his older brothers at chess at the age of ten. As a child, he had been the peacemaker in the family, the one who tried to break up the fights. “I think I was kind of like Mom’s little angel,” he once said. “Maybe she was less hard on me than on all my brothers. I could do no wrong.” But the loss of so many brothers weighed hard on Mark. He dropped out of CU Boulder, married, had three kids, and never returned to college. He divorced and remarried, and eventually found stable work as a manager of the University of Colorado bookstore. “I think what he did was he decided that he needed to take all the pressure off of himself and to lead a very simple life,” Lindsay said. “That was his solution.”
Mark remained in close touch with his sisters and his parents, and was given to moments of heavy sentiment, often prone to crying when thinking about the old days. He may not have caught the family illness, but it had essentially marooned him. Joe and Matt and Peter were his teammates, the ones he spent every waking moment with as a boy. They were the hockey brothers, and everyone else in the family had been little more than background players. Once they had their psychotic breaks, one after the other, it was as if the three most important people in the world to Mark had fallen off the face of the earth.