PETER
MARGARET
LINDSAY
CHAPTER 42
One night a few years before Mimi got sick, Margaret woke up crying from a dream that was too much for her to bear.
In the dream, she and her sister were in Vail after a day of skiing. Lindsay didn’t say where they were going—and the knowledge that her little sister knew and Margaret did not is, perhaps, a telling detail in its own right—but soon Margaret realized they were heading toward the condominium owned by Sam and Nancy Gary. When they arrived, the door was unlocked.
Lindsay walked through, and Margaret followed her. They were alone. The place was not in the best shape. Lindsay said that Sam’s children use it now. That got Margaret thinking of all the Gary family members she once knew and had not seen in years. Sure enough, Nancy and Sam came through the door, along with their children and their friends. Clearly, they were having some sort of party to celebrate something.
Margaret felt awkward. She did not know why she was there. Only when she noticed her sister using a measuring tape to gauge the size of the room did she understand. They had been asked to help plan a party for Sam and Nancy.
It was too late now to set up. More guests were coming through the door, filing along a wooden walkway into the living room. Margaret saw Sam’s secretary, the Garys’ drivers, their cooks, their housekeepers, even the tennis instructor who came to Montana to give Margaret and the others lessons by the lake house. They all were older now, but Margaret recognized them just the same.
She was uneasy, convinced she did not belong there. Then one of the family’s tutors came up to her and smiled. “I don’t know why I’ve been gone so long,” Margaret told him. “You all are such great people.” The tutor replied, “Well, we’ve got to get you into our family history.”
Margaret felt better, but the feeling didn’t last. She overheard other guests mentioning other parties she hadn’t been invited to. Suddenly it all came back to her—the one-upmanship of the Denver social scene, how she never fit in, and how the only reason she ever came into contact with it was because of the breakdown of her own family. Everything came back to that deep well of rejection—of pain. Then came the tears.
* * *
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WHEN YOU DON’T find a sense of love and belonging where you are, you go searching for it somewhere else. In Margaret’s case, and perhaps Lindsay’s too, the first stop in that search had, tragically, been Jim’s house—a place away from home, with a family member who paid attention to her. For Margaret, the Garys’ home and the Kent Denver School represented more chances to belong somewhere—problematic, too, in their way.
Then came Margaret’s Deadhead years, traveling with a tribe of like-minded nomads, and her brief first marriage. Looking back, she felt lucky to have survived. Did I really marry a guy who dealt drugs when I was twenty? she wrote in her diary.
And then finally her decision to settle down with Wylie and have a family of her own. “I like to call him a safe harbor,” she said.
In the years when she and Wylie had their daughters and Margaret became a full-time mom, she grew preoccupied with maintaining some sense of emotional equilibrium. “You’re the feeler of the family,” Mimi often told Margaret, and on this point, at least, Margaret and her mother agreed. In therapy, Margaret had said that Brian’s death had been the pivotal moment of her childhood, as searing, even, as the abuse she experienced; she was eleven at the time, old enough to see the toll it took on everyone. But the trauma she dwelled on most often was abandonment—not just being sent away to the Garys, but being neglected before then, too, in favor of so many other siblings. “The kids who don’t get the attention are the ones who often need it most,” Margaret said. “At least that was my experience.”
Margaret thought often about something her mother always said of her and her sister: “The roses after all the thorns.” She and Lindsay were the roses, and all ten of her boys were the thorns. What most people saw as tender struck Margaret as ugly and passive-aggressive. What must the boys have felt, growing up hearing their mother say that? And how could the girls be secure, hearing praise for them in the same breath as such dismissive scorn?
As one of those two roses, Margaret never felt she had a shot at her mother’s love. If Mimi really loved her, she never would have sent her packing at the age of thirteen. Sometimes Margaret felt that her time with the Garys permanently separated her from her mother—that she had never gotten over that rejection and had spent the rest of her life trying to protect herself from being hurt that badly again. I’ve already been cast aside as a throwaway, a cast-off, Margaret once wrote in her diary. As time went on, she felt more of a right than ever to create distance between herself and everyone else. I want the closeness of a normal family, but frankly my family of origin is not normal.
To Margaret, her sister and her mother seemed like two peas in a pod. Mimi gave Lindsay furniture from her house and even sewed clothes for her, and Lindsay seemed to show no ambivalence in the slightest about taking care of Mimi in return. Margaret resented them both sometimes, though she needed them both, too.
* * *
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ONE OF MARGARET’S most vivid memories from just before she was taken from Hidden Valley Road—those months after Brian died, when she watched her father and her brothers falling apart all around her—was her mother staying up late, long after the children were in bed, to draw and paint—birds and mushrooms, mostly. When Margaret thought about that later, she was beyond confused. How could Mimi still be puttering around the house, watching for the fox and the family of deer that ambled by the backyard, reporting on the dramatic loss of birds at the bird feeder? This was the same woman she’d just seen wailing with grief over Brian. What did her mother have inside that Margaret didn’t? Was it strength, or denial, or something she couldn’t understand? Only later did she arrive at the idea that the natural world Mimi had fallen in love with in Colorado offered her some small measure of solace, a refuge from everything else that was happening.
Once Margaret, in her adult years, finally worked up the bravery to start painting, her subject, more often than not, was the very thing she had spent a lifetime trying to avoid: her family. She painted flowers that her mother loved, with a stirring realism. She made one painting about the Garys, called Gray Ease; another called Sophisticated, about her own journey, learning to be vulnerable; and another called Compartmentalizing the Grief. She veered into abstraction in a striking series of twelve paintings based on the twelve Galvin children. Donald is red and white; Jim is a spectral black and white; John, Brian, Michael, and Richard are variations on greenish yellow; Joseph is yellow with red seeping through; Mark, Matthew, and Peter are all studies in red, with only Peter’s including flashes of blue.