Not long before Christmas, just a few weeks before shipping out, Don called Mimi long-distance from Coronado. Would she visit? Mimi asked her mother for permission, and Billy said yes. As soon as Mimi arrived, she and Don drove to Tijuana and got married. After the briefest of honeymoons on the road, they returned to Coronado for a tearful farewell. It was during Mimi’s long trip home, on a stop in Texas to see her Kenyon relatives, that she experienced morning sickness for the first time.
Their rapid-fire wedding suddenly made sense: During Don’s last swing through New York, several weeks before she’d traveled west to be with him, Mimi and Don had conceived a child.
Don’s parents, devout Catholics, were not satisfied with a Tijuana wedding. Before shipping out, their son secured a few days’ leave and traveled across the country one more time. On December 30, 1944, Don and Mimi took their vows again, this time in the rectory of the Church of St. Gregory the Great in Bellerose, Queens. The next day, Don filled out a Navy form to change his next-of-kin from his parents to Mrs. Donald Galvin.
* * *
—
THE BRIDE SPENT months vomiting. Long, unresolvable bouts of morning sickness would be a hallmark of nearly all of Mimi’s twelve pregnancies. Her young husband’s ship approached Japan in May 1945, just in time for the climax of the American offensive in the Pacific. Don’s role was to transport soldiers on small crafts from ship to shore. Listening to the radio for reports on the Granville, Mimi nearly fell apart when Tokyo Rose announced that Don’s ship had been destroyed. That turned out to be wrong, but just barely.
Anchored near Okinawa, Don witnessed boats on either side of him being blown up by kamikazes. He spent hours dragging his dead comrades out of the water. Don would never discuss anything about what he saw or did, not with Mimi. But he survived. And on July 21, 1945, two weeks before the United States dropped the bombs that would bring an end to the war, Don received a telegram aboard the Granville from Western Union: IT’S A BOY.
CHAPTER 2
1903
Dresden, Germany
It makes a certain amount of sense that the most analyzed, interpreted, pored-over, and picked-apart personal account of the experience of being psychotically paranoid and wildly delusional would be almost impossible to read.
Daniel Paul Schreber grew up in Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century, the son of a renowned child-rearing expert of the period who made a practice of turning his children into test subjects. As a boy, he and his brother are believed to have been some of the first people to experience Moritz Schreber’s cold-water treatments, diets, exercise regimens, and a device called the Schreber Geradehalter, made of wood and straps, that was designed to persuade a child to sit up straight. Schreber survived that childhood and grew up to be very accomplished, first a lawyer and then a judge. He married and had a family, and with the exception of a brief depression in his forties, everything seemed just fine. Then, at the age of fifty-one, came his collapse. Diagnosed in 1894 with a “paranoid form” of “hallucinatory insanity,” Schreber spent the next nine years near Dresden in Sonnenstein Asylum, Germany’s first publicly funded hospital for the insane.
Those years in the asylum formed the setting—at least physically—of Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, the first major work about the mysterious condition then known as dementia praecox, and a few years later renamed schizophrenia. Published in 1903, this book became a reference point for practically every discussion about the illness for the next century. By the time the six boys of the Galvin family became ill, everything about how they would be viewed and treated by modern psychiatry was colored by the arguments about this case. In truth, Schreber himself hadn’t expected his life story to attract much attention. He wrote the memoir mainly as a plea for his release, which explains why, at many points, he seems to be writing for an audience of one: Dr. Paul Emil Flechsig, the doctor who’d had him committed. The book starts with an open letter to Flechsig, in which Schreber apologizes for writing anything that the doctor might find too upsetting. There is just one small matter Schreber hopes to clear up: Is Flechsig the one who has been transmitting secret messages into his brain for the last nine years?
A cosmic mind-meld with his doctor—“even when separated in space, you exerted an influence on my nervous system,” Schreber wrote—was the first of dozens of strange and miraculous experiences related by Schreber over more than two hundred pages. It also might have been the most coherent. In a manner decipherable, perhaps, to Schreber alone, he wrote passionately about the two suns that he saw in the sky and the time he noticed that one sun was following him around wherever he went. He devoted many pages to an impenetrable explanation of the subtle “nerve-language” that most humans didn’t notice. The souls of hundreds of people, he wrote, used this nerve language to pass along crucial information to Schreber: reports of Venus being “flooded,” the solar system becoming “disconnected,” the constellation Cassiopeia about to be “drawn together into a single sun.”
In this respect, Schreber had a lot in common with the oldest of the Galvin children, Donald, who, years later, would recite his Holy Order of Priests in front of seven-year-old Mary in their family’s house on Hidden Valley Road. Like Donald, Schreber believed that what was happening to him wasn’t just physical but spiritual. Neither he nor Donald nor any of the Galvins were observing their delusions at a remove, with a detached sense of curiosity. They were right there in it, thrilled and amazed and terrified and despairing, sometimes all at once.
Unable to free himself from his circumstances, Schreber did his best to bring everyone in there with him—to share the experience. Being in his universe could feel ecstatic one moment, then shockingly vulnerable the next. In his memoir, Schreber accused his doctor, Flechsig, of using the nerve language to commit something he called “soul murder” against him. (Souls, Schreber explained, were fragile things, “a fairly bulky ball or bundle” comparable to “wadding or cobweb.”) Then came the rape. “Owing to my illness,” Schreber wrote, “I entered into peculiar relations with God”—relations that, at first, seemed an awful lot like immaculate conception. “I had a female genital organ, although a poorly developed one, and in my body felt quickening like the first signs of life of a human embryo…in other words fertilization had occurred.” Schreber’s gender had transformed, he said, and he had become pregnant. While he might have felt touched by grace, Schreber instead felt violated. God was Dr. Flechsig’s willing accomplice, “if not the instigator,” of a plot to use his body “like that of a whore.” Schreber’s universe was, much of the time, an intense and frightening place, filled with horrors.
He had one grand ambition. “My aim,” Schreber reflected, “is solely to further knowledge of truth in a vital field, that of religion.” It didn’t turn out that way. Instead, what Schreber wrote contributed far more to the emerging, provocative, and increasingly contentious discipline of psychiatry.