Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Kolker Robert

Author:Kolker, Robert [Kolker, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychology, Science, Biography, History
ISBN: 9780385543767
Amazon: 038554376X
Goodreads: 50088631
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2020-04-07T07:00:00+00:00

* * *

It was still orientation. Too soon to be pigeonholed, she hoped. All she wanted was to be the last person anyone at Hotchkiss would ever think was unusual. Then a teacher she’d just met read her name tag and scowled.

“There is already a Mary Galvin at this school,” she said. “What’s your middle name?”

Mary did not answer right away. She knew that her name said more about her than she wanted anyone to know. Forget, for the moment, how being called Mary Christine had helped to make her, in her brother Donald’s eyes, the sacred virgin mother of Christ. Sitting there with all of those sons and daughters of privilege, feeling the East Coast WASP-iness of the place, Mary sensed that her Catholic name screamed not one of us.

In a flash, she thought of another name. Thomas Lindsey Blayney was her great-grandfather on her mother’s side. Lindsey was a scholar and an eminence for the family—the kindly and wise Don Galvin of his generation. Lindsey had remained in close touch, writing Don and Mimi and doting on his great-grandchildren.

Lindsey seemed like a prep school name to Mary—a better name, a Hotchkiss name. She flubbed the spelling, a mistake that had the virtue of making the name all hers. She had to do something, to make some sort of gesture that would wipe away everything that had happened to her in the first thirteen years of her life.

“Lindsay,” Mary said.

And from that moment on, Lindsay was her name.

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