Beyond Obsession (19 page)

“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.

The only one who was always there and upon whom she could rely, then, was her mother. And they were linked not only because they were mother and daughter and shared the same house but because of the violin. It might be Karin's only escape, but it was ever more intensely the focus of Joyce's dreams. Karin would be a star, and the credit would belong as much to Joyce as to Karin.

So, on Friday nights after work, Joyce drove Karin down to Rowayton for an evening with the Markovs, during which Karin had a lesson. Sometimes they stayed over, and when they didn't, they drove back to Glastonbury, and then, early Saturday morning, Joyce drove Karin the hundred miles to New York for another lesson with Albert Markov at the Manhattan School. She took Karin to concerts, made sure she played in the school orchestra and in Hartford's children's symphony, tried to get her solos wherever and whenever she could and made her practice hours every day, demanding perfection all the while.

It was, of course, a fantasy. “She was okay,” a teacher at the Manhattan School says of Karin. “She knew how to bow, and she had pretty good technique. It would have been pretty strange if she hadn't. She'd been studying how long? She was, what, fourteen, fifteen then? So maybe she'd been playing ten years. You can tell by then; hell, you can tell sooner. She sounded just like any other fairly talented kid that age. What I mean is, you couldn't pick her out from the rest. You know, you hear somebody really good, the one in ten thousand, and you know it right away, as soon as you hear the first notes, maybe even the minute the kid tucks the fiddle under his chin and picks up the bow, the way he does it. There's just something there. It shines out. But not Karin, not most kids. There was nothing particularly distinctive about her playing, nothing spontaneous or idiosyncratic, and not much emotion. She was accomplished, and she played well in a technical sense, but that's about it. A career? Not really. If she got lucky, maybe in some small city, maybe a fill-in when somebody needed a violinist. But not first chair. Soloist? No way.” What he remembered best was Joyce, the omnipresent and overbearing mother.

Nobody ever told Joyce this evaluation of Karin's talent or even suggested it. It would have done no good anyway. She would not have believed it. Holding on to the illusion was essential. It had been her dream for a decade, and she could not give it up. Had she been forced to abandon it, her world might have collapsed. If Karin realized that, understood her limitations, she could never have breathed it to her mother. As long as she played the violin, as long as she took lessons, as long as she practiced those hours, there was a chance for harmony at home, and it was possible to win her mother's approval and acceptance. Besides, realizing it was her road to freedom, she held to that same dream. One day she might accept the harsh judgment and find some way to deal with the inevitable cataclysmic repercussions. But not then, not when she was thirteen or fourteen. That day would surely come, but it would have to wait until she considered and was ready to act on the alternatives. At that moment, for both mother and daughter, the dream was vital to survival.

Another dream, or fantasy, began to surface now. Karin, a teenager, growing into a young woman, in Joyce's mind always older and more mature than her chronological age, constantly thrown into the world of adults and expected to behave like one, would meet a man, older, established, successful, and marry well. Though Joyce was forever telling people she herself was about to get married, for some unexplained reasons those marriage plans never came to fruition. And nobody ever seemed to meet the men she was going to marry. In the past, as Karin was growing, Joyce occasionally took her to the openings of new nursing homes, to other parties and celebrations. But now she became Joyce's constant companion, Joyce certain she was ready to be part of adult gatherings, to participate as an adult. Karin might be out of her depth there, but she went without complaint, went and stood to the side listening without comment as her mother paraded before the others Karin's accomplishments, Karin's promise, Karin's glittering future, as Joyce boasted and invented stories to back those boasts.

There Karin came to know the men in Joyce's orbit, particularly Michael Zaccaro. Joyce saw him as a man on the move. Running the state's program to regulate nursing homes, an industry in which Zaccaro was emerging as a major force, she was in a position to help him achieve his ambitions. Since Zaccaro's reputation was above reproach, she didn't have to bend any rules to help him—he fitted precisely the standards she set. Further, he was such a font of knowledge about the business that she could, and did, turn to him for expert advice. She could even bounce her own ideas off him.

Their business association quickly turned into personal friendship. Joyce made it a point to be at any nursing home affair when she was certain that Zaccaro would be there as well. Often they wended their way from those occasions to dinner together, and she began to invite him to her home for a meal, for an evening when they played Trivial Pursuit, Monopoly, and other games, listened to music, listened to Karin play the violin. Sometimes she went with him to wrestling matches, a spectator sport he particularly enjoyed. Inevitably Karin went along.

It was a relationship in which there were potential dividends for everyone. The state Health Coordinating Council, the planning agency on which Joyce sat as a major bureaucrat, was part of Connecticut's Health Department. But it was funded by block grants from the federal government, and the Reagan administration, with a disdain for social programs, was cutting back on those grants with the aim of eliminating them altogether. The states, with their limited resources, would not be able to fill the gap, so agencies like the Health Coordinating Council were doomed. When that day came, Joyce Aparo would need a job. With her knowledge, expertise, and contacts, she would not want for one, she would be deluged with offers; the company that won her would gain an invaluable asset. Zaccaro was determined to be the winner. So he set out to woo and win her.

What Zaccaro had only a faint sense of was that Joyce saw him as a fitting consort for her daughter, though he was twice her age, nearing thirty while Karin was fourteen. “When I got engaged in 1987,” he says, “I didn't really talk to Joyce about it because I had gotten the feeling that she was hoping I'd wait around for her daughter to grow up.”

That was, indeed, precisely what Joyce was hoping. Karin was caught in the middle, thrown constantly in Zaccaro's way, her every talent and every attribute praised to him. While Zaccaro was fond of her, he was more the kindly uncle than the lover.

Still, Joyce was constantly telling her that Zaccaro had expressed deep feeling for her, that he had told Joyce that he wanted to marry her when she grew up, and when she did, he would court her in a proper fashion, with presents, dinners and much more. Zaccaro did give Karin small gifts, a bottle of perfume, a gold watch and some other things, all of which she proudly displayed to her best friend, Shannon Dubois. “Karin,” Shannon later said, “told me she liked Michael Zaccaro very much romantically.”

That, of course, was not the way Michael Zaccaro liked her. Karin gradually came to realize it, and the dream of Zaccaro faded. Perhaps Joyce saw it, too, though she never totally relinquished the vision of her daughter and her friend united. Had she been younger, or he older, she might have set out to capture him for herself. But romance never blossomed, though the friendship grew ever closer.

As the romantic vision of Zaccaro receded, it was replaced by another one that Joyce saw as even more fitting. The man in this fantasy was Alasdair Neal. He was in his mid-twenties. He was handsome and courtly. He was exotic, born in Scotland, still speaking with a burr. Best of all, he was talented in a way Joyce admired. He was a conductor, so he embodied the true picture that she had of her daughter's future. Neal would conduct the orchestra while Karin played. It was a dream they could share, one that united them more fully than ever before.