Beyond Obsession

by Hammer, Richard;

  It was enough that the hospital decided to follow up, to refer the matter to Child and Youth Services and let it look into it and talk further with Karin, with Joyce, with both Ed Murphy and Michael Aparo. Although Karin attempted to make light of the episode, telling an agency interviewer that her relationship with her mother was generally good and that what she had done was stupid, there was a feeling that she might well be covering up for her mother. The agency dug deeper.

  A DCYS report, written a few months later and based on that digging and interviews and other investigations, reads in part:

  8/11/83: … Mother called the floor early this morning, sounded bitter, refuses to see Karin until she straightens up her act. Karin’s relationship [sic] with father and stepfather are good. Karin says mother and stepfather are on verge of a divorce.

  … She is a petite, pert 12 yr. old, who appears quite sophisticated. She did not seem at all depressed. She wants to go home, said things are OK between her and mother, she has called twice today. Karin explained what led to her attempted suicide. Her mother was angry with her on Tuesday 8/9 because she had not bought Kitty [L]itter and taken books back to the library. On Wednesday mother was upset because Karin misunderstood instructions and changed her dental appointment. She called her annoying and irresponsible, said she never listens. Karin was afraid mother would yell at her when she got home. Mother does not hit her, only did so once this summer at the beach. Karin views her relationship with mother as good, better than average. She did not express any negative feelings about her. She did say mother does not yell at her when stepfather is around. Karin expressed understanding that mother is under stress and very tired when she gets home, as she works in Hartford. Sometimes mother stays in Glastonbury where they own a condo. When mother is home, she makes dinner, they eat and then mother falls asleep, so Karin said she really does not see her a lot. Karin is not sure why she took the pills, said she has never done anything like that before and will never do so again. Karin said she is not eating in the hospital and “that’s good, I’ll lose weight.” She is not at all overweight.

  I told Karin that DCYS would remain involved with her and mother for a while because we are concerned. I mentioned counseling, but she is not sure what that would accomplish.

  8/12/83: … Mother tried to call Kay [hospital social worker] yesterday about 4:30 P.M. and was very agitated when she was unable to reach her. Kay offered to call her at home about 9:00 P.M., but mother said no, she’d be exhausted and asleep. However, she complained to the Social Services Department this morning that Kay did not call her at home. Mother also complained that the hospital staff told everyone in her office about Karin’s suicide attempt.…

  P.C. [phone call] from mother. She talked in circles, I had difficulty following the conversation. Much of what she said concerned herself, not Karin, about whom she expressed little concern. Mother identified herself as “Joyce Aparo.” She is making arrangement for her and Karin to move to Glastonbury within a few days, which will bring stability to their lives, something they have not had for 1½ years (the length of the marriage). Her attorney is making arrangements with Mr. Murphy re: the move. She is filing for divorce, which was “on hold” because he keeps changing his mind. Mother described herself as a “raving tired lady,” said both she and Karin were drained, used up emotionally, with no resources to build on. She said Karin deserves more than a mother who is tired all the time and that the move to Glastonbury will cut her commuting time down considerably.…

  Hospital is preparing to discharge Karin. Dr. Cuello saw her, said she is well put-together, not suicidal. She is, however, afraid of her mother’s anger. Psychotherapy is being recommended for mother and Karin, to which both agreed. They also know DCYS will follow-up. Dr. Cuello described mother as “at the ragged edge.” She recommends using softest touch possible with her. Kay met with mother, step-father this afternoon. The couple has decided to have a gradual divorce, to be finalized in 3–6 months, rather than a sudden move. The mother does not want the marriage to end, is using Karin as a pawn as step-father is very fond of her. He describes Karin as “pure gold, a solid rock.” Throughout Kay’s interview, Karin looked at step-father, not mother, and was somewhat seductive with him. He told Kay mother’s verbal abuse of Karin is as sharp as a knife and he is a buffer between them. Karin was guarded during the interview.

  Mother admitted to Kay she is close to falling apart. She has a demanding job at the State Health Department in charge of distribution of health funds for the elderly and disabled. For four years she was director of the State-Department of Mental Health. Mother’s first husband killed himself when she was 22, then her elderly father committed suicide.

  Step-father wants a divorce and at the end of the interview asked mother when she would be moving out.

  Kay talked to Karin alone. She is aware that the next few years will be anxious ones, but after that she believes she will manage very nicely. Both Kay and I are unsettled by the level of her maturity. She is obviously a very bright child. She is delighted that they are not moving to Glastonbury right away.…

  8/16/83: … Step-father called Kay yesterday, wished to share some information. He said mother is a pathological liar.… She is “diabolical,” fakes injuries and fainting. She once wrote a letter to a mortgage holder that Mr. Murphy had died and he did not know of this letter for months. He is “scared to death” for Karin because of mother’s mood swings. She is either euphoric or depressed, there is no middle ground. She is using Karin to prolong the marriage. By taking the pills, Karin brought everything to a head and he is hopeful that things will change.… Mother claimed that father used to abuse her and Karin. However, Mr. Murphy does not believe that and suspects she may have assaulted the child herself.

  Step-father said Karin is a terrific kid with lots of potential. He thinks sending her to a boarding school would be a good idea.

  Step-father has told mother to be out of the house by 11/16/83, exactly three months from now.

  Kay called mother today. She was very sweet and appreciative. She indicated they had a wonderful weekend with Karin home and noted what a compatible family they are. Mr. Murphy’s children were there and helped move some of her things out of the house already.

  The agency recommended, indeed insisted, that both Joyce and Karin see a psychiatrist for therapy. For a few months they saw one on a few occasions and then simply stopped.

  Those sessions did nothing to reconcile Joyce and Ed Murphy. The divisions, the disagreements, the incompatibility were simply too great for anything to help. So the marriage came to an end. In November 1983 Joyce and Karin left the Murphy house in Darien for the last time and returned to Glastonbury. “I did the best I could,” Murphy says. “I hung in there longer than I should have. Finally I told her, ‘You’re out of here.’ I put her stuff in a truck and drove it up to Glastonbury and dropped it off and told her, ‘You’re not coming back.’ I felt sorry for Karin, but I had no choice.”

  Much later Murphy was asked how long he had been married to Joyce Aparo. “I can’t remember,” he said, “and I don’t want to remember.”

  They were married for a year and a half.

  Joyce, of course, had another story about the reasons for the split. Murphy hadn’t thrown her out, as he claimed. She couldn’t stand what she saw as his weaknesses and his attempts to tell her how to bring up her daughter. And she couldn’t stand his kids a minute longer. So she told him it was over, and she and Karin left.

  As least they were back in the town where Karin had spent most of her life, where she had friends. There was that. But she could not forget what her mother had said to her when she left the hospital and what she repeated time and again thereafter: “The next time you’d better take the whole bottle or I’ll shove it down your throat myself.”

  12

  Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

  They were back in Glastonbury, in the two-bedroom condo on Butternut Drive that Joyce had bought and
furnished with its blue carpeting and off-white walls, crystal chandeliers and sheer full-length white draperies.

  Karin started school, now in seventh grade at the Gideon Welles Junior High, and renewed old acquaintances. There was, especially, Shannon Dubois, who was again her best friend. In many ways Shannon was a role model. “My daughter,” Susan Dubois says, “was not a gifted child; my daughter was not affluent enough for Joyce; she was not in an influential enough family; we probably weren’t up to Joyce’s standards.” Perhaps she was right, but Shannon was something of an idealist who saw good in everyone. Shannon was a sympathetic listener. Above all, Shannon had the kind of family Karin dreamed of having, and Shannon was the kind of person Karin deeply wanted to be, and could not.

  There was a new friend, too, with whom she forged a bond. Her name was Kira Lintner, and she was the antithesis of Shannon Dubois. “She was a good kid until she got into the sixth grade,” says an old-time resident of Glastonbury, an editor for the local paper for whom Kira worked for a time. That was the year that Kira’s father arrived home one afternoon, gathered her and her two younger siblings around him, looked at them and announced, “Good-bye, you little bastards, this is the last time you’ll ever see me.” He turned and walked out of the house, and that was, indeed, the last time they ever saw him. “It was downhill all the way from that day on.” Kira grew into a tall girl, taller than Karin by several inches, a little chubby, her brown hair cropped close. There was a hardness about her, the blue eyes icy and devoid of emotion, something of a sneer perpetually painted on the snub-nosed face that might have been pretty had there been a softer look. By the time she was in her teens, she was given to wearing leather jackets, clinging T-shirts, and tight jeans and later took to riding a big motorcycle. “She’s wacko” seemed to be the general consensus among the kids who knew her in school. “A lot of people were afraid of her in high school,” says a fellow student at the time. “One second she’d be this calm, very polite kid, and the next she’d be talking about beating the shit out of somebody. She was a strange, strange girl.” And she became close to Karin.

  Joyce now made an easy fifteen- or twenty-minute commute to her office in Hartford, the hour-and-a-half drive each way to Darien a thing of the past, though she still spent days touring the state, watching over the new and the old nursing homes.

  There were changes, of course, but the more things changed, the more they remained the same. The slaps across the face might be gone, ended with the abortive suicide in the summer, but the emotional torment remained, grew even worse. For Karin was about to turn thirteen, about to become a teenager, so about to have new interests, about to be filled with the natural desire of all teenagers, to break free and begin to live and make a kind of life of her own. Joyce, like generations of mothers before her, was determined to retain control, to keep Karin subservient, to mold Karin into the image she wanted.

  Joyce had many weapons; Karin had few. But she began to use the few she had. One was illness. Within weeks of her arrival at junior high school she reported to Maria Bonaiuto, the school nurse, complaining of a headache. She had headaches all the time, she told the nurse, sometimes so bad it was hard for her to function. Bonaiuto called Joyce. The only explanation Joyce had was that Karin was subject to a lot of stress, what with the divorce from Murphy, the move back to Glastonbury and all the rest.

  A few weeks later Karin was back in the nurse’s office. She’d had an accident, had bumped her head. Bonaiuto examined her. The bump seemed minor, and Karin appeared no worse for it. Still, a head injury is not something to make light of. The nurse, who tried unsuccessfully to reach Joyce, finally put Karin on the school bus for home at the end of the day. That evening, just to make sure everything was all right, she called the Aparo house. Joyce answered and immediately began to scream at her. “What did you people do to my child? She looks unconscious. She’s lying there, just a heap on the couch.”

  “It was just a bump,” Bonaiuto said. “I didn’t think it was that serious. But look, why don’t you take her to the doctor and have him check if you’re worried?”

  A couple of days later Karin was back in school. When the nurse asked if she was all right, Karin shrugged it off. It had been nothing at all, really, she said, just a stress reaction, the kind of thing she had often.

  But a pattern developed. Three or four times a month for the next four years Karin dropped by Bonaiuto’s office. There was always a medical reason. She had a headache, a backache, was suffering from nausea, something else relatively minor. The real reason was that she wanted to talk, and she had found in Bonaiuto someone who would listen and sympathize, even empathize. She told the nurse of her problems at home.

  “Mom went out the other night, and she didn’t tell me where she was going, and I worried the whole night, practically didn’t get any sleep.” Bonaiuto heard about that several times.

  “I wanted to be with my friends, and my mother made me stay home and do the housework.” Bonaiuto heard that many times.

  “My mom’s always telling me that I’m fat and ugly. She says I look like a two-ton heifer. She’s always making me diet and exercise, and then, after I eat, she makes me go to the bathroom and throw up. And then you know what she does? She goes out and she buys éclairs and keeps them in the front of the refrigerator, and then she tells me I have to eat them.” This tale, Bonaiuto says, was repeated every couple of months.

  “My mom and I fight all the time about the violin and my lessons. She never thinks I’m good enough no matter how hard I practice.”

  When the nurse heard from a friend of Karin’s that Joyce had beaten her with the violin after one of those fights, she called Karin in to ask, “Is that true what I heard about your mother hitting you with the violin?”

  Karin shrugged. “Well,” she said, “nothing hurt, so everything’s okay. Only please don’t call my mother.”

  “Please don’t call my mother. She’ll be mad at me, and it’ll be a lot worse if you call her.” That was a litany Karin recited after every tale. She was perfecting the technique that her mother had practiced for so long, that of manipulating people, and she was doing it better than Joyce ever had. There was always something effortful about Joyce; she tried too hard, and though she succeeded, there were many she used who realized, if not at the time, then later, that they were being used. Not Karin. She told her stories with absolute guilelessness. If at times they were exaggerated, there was always some truth in them, so those she told them to believed them implicitly, had no sense that she might be using them for her purposes. That she, if few others, had an understanding of what she was doing emerged later, when she told Bonaiuto that she was very worried that she was becoming too much like her mother. It was a nice touch, guaranteed to gain more sympathy and assurances that she was different.

  They were, of course, different, and one of the ways in which they were different was in their attitude toward their religion. They were Catholics, but while Karin was deeply believing, Joyce had fallen away and had no use for the religion of her birth and rearing or for any of its practitioners, save, perhaps, her idealized Archbishop Whealon. The difference in attitude inevitably led to a clash.

  It came when Karin was about to prepare for the rite of confirmation. Karin’s friends, especially Shannon Dubois, were studying in anticipation of the event that would mark their turning fifteen. But when Karin told her mother she wanted to prepare, Joyce was adamant. There was no way she was going to let Karin go through that; she was not even going to let Karin go to church. All of Karin’s pleading could not alter that decision.

  Karin turned for help to the only source she thought might have power to sway Joyce. She wrote to Archbishop Whealon.

  He wrote back in his own hand, not on a typewriter. He told her he was pleased that she had written to him about her problems with her mother over religion, particularly over Joyce’s refusal to allow her to practice Catholicism. He offered her advice. Rather than feel isolated and alone, misunderstood
and not loved, she should write to him when she had questions, and he would try to answer them. She ought to realize that many kids, children of broken homes and not close to their parents, were in similar situations. But they should not resent or blame their parents and begin to withdraw and become depressed. “Self-pity,” he wrote, “is the worst of attitudes.” It was important to remain outgoing, active, interested in everything and to keep a sense of humor. She shouldn’t forget that other people had worse problems than she.

  No matter what, he said, she should obey her mother, remain loving and respectful to her and help her. If Joyce told her not to go to church, then she shouldn’t go. It wouldn’t be her doing or her fault.

  She had to remember that as far as God was concerned, it was the intention that counted, and hers was to practice her faith if she could. Someday she would be able to do that, and she ought to wait until that day came.

  She also must remember, he wrote, that it was not necessary to be confirmed in order to marry or enter the convent. Baptism was essential, or course, but she had been baptized. And later, when she was old enough and so able to resume practicing her religion, that would be time enough to be confirmed.

  He told her that even though Joyce was preventing her from going to mass on Sundays or holy days, there were other things Karin could do. She could read the Scripture lessons for that particular day in the Vatican II Sunday missal, or she could watch him perform the mass on television, as he did once a month.

  She should set aside a few minutes every day for prayer or devotions and should try to get to confession a couple of times a year while she was on vacation and away from her mother.

  It was hardly the kind of help she had wanted. Whealon had let her down, as Michael Aparo and others had done before, and as others would do, she was sure, in the future. She could not, when she needed him most, depend on Whealon, any more than she could depend on her father or any man. But, then, her mother always told her that men will always disappoint you in the end.