Beyond Obsession (11 page)

Hardly had the vows been taken before Robert and Joyce Cantone White were gone. They moved to New Haven, where he had found a job as a beginning executive with Good Humor, the ice-cream company. Joyce continued her education. In New Haven she spent her days taking graduate courses in sociology at Yale, eventually, her resume noted, earning master's degrees in social work and education.

The marriage lasted less than five years. White will not discuss the marriage at all. He will say only that it was a relief to him when it finally ended. Some who saw them occasionally say that the marriage was doomed from the start. Whatever expectations White had, Joyce did not share. He wanted children. Children were the last thing she wanted. She had decided on a career, and children could only interfere with that. That was only one problem with the marriage. Another was that White expected to be the head of his home. Joyce unfortunately took orders from nobody. Eventually they divorced.

Joyce left New Haven, took an apartment on her own in East Hartford and quickly found a job with the state of Connecticut, as a social worker with the Department of Child and Youth Services. She did not discuss the failed marriage or Bob White at all—not with family, friends or even members of the wedding. If asked, she said only that it hadn't worked out.

With strangers and new acquaintances she had a different story, one that she was to repeat to everyone over the years. White had not understood her at all. The marriage had been a disaster from the beginning. After a few years it was falling apart, and there was little hope of putting the pieces back together. In fact, she had no desire to keep the marriage alive, so she told White that she was going to leave him and get a divorce. White became more and more despondent. Then one day, when she arrived home, she found the house strangely quiet. She walked into the kitchen; White was slumped over the table. He had taken a .45 caliber revolver and shot himself in the head. The wallpaper in the kitchen was splattered with his blood and brains. That, she said, was why she never had wallpaper in her house; it reminded her too much of that awful moment.

She told the story of White's suicide to nearly everyone she met through the years, and everyone believed it. There seemed no reason to doubt it. Who would make up such a wild story if it weren't true? It was only in the summer of 1990 that the truth finally came out; Robert White, by then white-haired and paunchy, looking older than his years, appeared in a courtroom in Hartford and pronounced himself alive. “I couldn't believe it,” said a friend of Joyce's who had heard the story often for more than two decades. “It blew my mind when he showed up.”

She invented that story of suicide, perhaps, because on her return to Hartford she met another man. She always had men around her, at least that was what she said, but this man was special. His name was Michael Aparo. He was a deeply religious Catholic, a close friend of the head of the Hartford archdiocese, Archbishop John Whealon. He had studied for the priesthood, leaving the seminary to become a social worker for the city's Catholic Charities about the time he met Joyce Cantone White in 1966. He fell in love with her. There are those who speculate that she came up with the tale of White's suicide because there was just no way that the devout Aparo would have married a divorced woman. A widow was something else. In any event he proposed and she accepted. They were married on July 30, 1966, and moved into an apartment in East Hartford. She was twenty-six; he was a year older.

Through her new husband, she came to know Archbishop Whealon, and a close friendship soon developed, the Aparos meeting socially often with the archbishop. By 1967 Joyce was not only seeing Archbishop Whealon but writing him long letters, filled with the events of her life, problems she faced, personal matters, and Whealon was responding. She kept all that correspondence in a filing cabinet in her basement.

As time passed, though, Joyce began to invent, embellish and whisper other stories about her meeting with Aparo, their courtship and marriage. But, then, she always seemed to have other stories about everything.

In one version she and Aparo met while he was home from Rome, where he was studying for the priesthood and was about to take his vows. He fell in love with her, so deeply that his dedication to serving the church as a priest vanished as completely as a puff of smoke caught by the wind. They went to his friend and mentor Archbishop Whealon and discussed the situation. Whealon gave them his blessing and then sent them both back to Rome, where Aparo was given dispensation and permission to leave the seminary. Then they married.

As far as anyone knows, Michael Aparo and Joyce never made a voyage across the Atlantic, never went to Rome.

As time passed, she began to tell yet another story, this one more disturbing to those who heard it because of its import. She had met, she would say, Archbishop Whealon right after her return from New Haven. Just how she never said, for she was not a churchgoing or even a believing Catholic, her devotion to the church having vanished years before. There had been an instantaneous and uncontrollable attraction between them, a passion that transcended his priestly vows of celibacy, to say nothing of his position as head of the church in Hartford. They had begun an affair, one they were to maintain through the rest of her life. To cover that affair Whealon tapped his protégé Michael Aparo, persuaded him to leave his studies for the priesthood, become Whealon's cuckold and marry the woman who was Whealon's mistress. To make the arrangement at least partly palatable, Whealon made Aparo a deacon in the church, a position open to married men for whom the priesthood was no longer possible.

The marriage of Michael and Joyce Aparo lasted ten years. Aparo worked for Catholic Charities, Joyce for Connecticut's Department of Youth and Child Services. Those who knew her and worked with her then say that she displayed a very real and intense desire to help the abused, neglected, needy and even delinquent children whose cases landed on her desk, was totally dedicated, worked long hours, often took unusual and imaginative actions and did an extraordinary job. She once told a friend that in order to find out what some of her kids were really going through, she spent a week, day and night, in one of the children's detention centers, experiencing what those kids experienced, listening to what they had to say. It was invaluable; it made a lot of difference in her work, in the way she approached those kids, she said.

The devout Aparo, apparently never completely reconciled to having given up the priesthood, spent most of his spare time on religious devotions in church, even erecting in a room in their home a small private chapel to which he often retreated for prayer.

Joyce had her own life apart from her husband, and some of that life was in sharp contrast with his. A woman always with an inquiring mind, anxious to learn all she could about anything that might interest her or that she might use, she explored a variety of esoteric diversions. For a time, in company with a friend, she spent Sundays on Park Street in Hartford, in a house where a spiritualist congregation held its meetings and séances. There were services; there was a medium who would go into a trance and then, in the voice of someone from the beyond, communicate messages from the beyond, from the departed, to one or another of the waiting congregation, revealing secrets about the past, hopes for the future.

“Joyce,” says the friend, “really liked it. She was fascinated. I don't know how she found out about it, but she did. I think she just wanted to learn what it was all about. And then after a while it just sort of petered out.” But not completely, never totally. Throughout her life she kept packs of tarot cards in her desk drawer and now and then used them to read fortunes. In the spring of 1987 she once read Dennis Coleman's future. What she saw was a long life and great success and happiness.

There was something, though, that fascinated her even more than spiritualism. She devoted what spare hours she had to an increasingly important and lucrative sideline. Jewelry and precious and semiprecious stones had dazzled her for years. She began collecting stones of all kinds, working with them, making her own jewelry, and was soon selling it to a growing number of customers. Carol Parkola remembers visiting the apartment in East Hartford in those days. “She had this thing on the kitchen table, and there were rocks in it, and she told me you had to keep turning them to smooth and polish them down before you could begin to work with them. Later, when she was in the condo in Glastonbury, she had all these machines down in the cellar for transforming plain little rocks you'd pick up and go ‘ugh' and throw away, for cleaning and polishing and cutting them and turning those stones into good jewelry. When she finished, those stones were just gorgeous. She used to go-up to the quarries in Vermont and other places and look for semiprecious stones, and she could pick them out from stuff anyone else would think was just junk. I remember later she said she was taking a second mortgage out on her house so she could have the money to go to Australia and look for stones and buy an opal mine. She was crazy about opals. She was going into partnership in that mine, she said, with some military man, an older man, who was going on the trip with her.”

Going to Australia and buying into an opal mine, with or without a military man as a partner, though, were just other embellishments, another of Joyce's stories.

Nancy Polydys, Carol Parkola's sister and a friend of Joyce's, remembers a time on Cape Cod “when we went into Provincetown, and we walked by Thunder Rock, which is not the jewelry store it used to be. I remember Joyce walking down the stairs and seeing this fiery opal and she fell in love with this fiery opal, and it was two hundred sixty-eight dollars. She just had to buy this fiery opal, and she did. When she saw something and she liked it, she bought it.”

Indeed, she did. All through her life. But only the best. She was very fond of good things and disparaging of the second-rate. Says Carol Parkola: “She would save her money to buy one good thing. She'd never shop at K Mart or Bradley's or a place like that. She'd die before she'd walk into one of those stores. She would save her money so she could buy one nice blouse instead of going into a store and buying a couple that didn't look as nice. She would say to me, ‘Carol, save your money. Even if it takes all year, do it and then buy one good piece of jewelry.' Joyce had crystal and silver and china, all good things. She never bought anything that she didn't think was the best; she wouldn't have anything that wasn't the best in her house.”

She had cats, too, two Siamese in the mid to late 1960s. Those cats went everywhere with her. Carol Parkola's mother and father had a summer house on Cape Cod. Joyce was a frequent visitor, sometimes with Michael Aparo, more often without, but never without her Siamese cats. Carol Parkola recalls, “One time she was up there and one of those cats—I hate Siamese cats—climbed up on the breakfast table and put its foot in my orange juice. I yelled, ‘That's it! Get that cat out of here!' She got so upset about that because those cats were her babies. Really. She treated them just like they were her children, maybe better.”

Indeed. For while she may have empathized with the children who came under her protection at work, she seemed to have little patience with children outside, had her own ideas about how they should be raised, standards that nobody else could meet. Again Carol Parkola: “When my daughter was just a couple of years old—this was sometime in the late 1960s—Joyce was over one night for dinner. Now, my daughter wasn't one of those children who ate with their fingers and threw food all over the place. My sister and I weren't brought up that way, and my children weren't brought up that way. Anyway, Bonnie dropped something out of the high chair and somebody picked it up off the floor, and Joyce said, ‘You're going to let her get away with that? If I ever have children, they're going to behave the way they're supposed to behave.'”

But children were definitely not part of Joyce Aparo's plans for the future. Michael Aparo might want them, might talk to her about having a child, might try to persuade her, but she was having none of it. She had her own life and her own career, and that was what was important. Children would only sidetrack her.

Though he was a deeply convinced Catholic, who believed firmly in the church's teachings and dictates, his wife practiced birth control. Much as he might resent it, there was nothing he could do about it. He was, everyone who knew him was certain, a weak man totally dominated by a strong wife. “You'd have to say that Michael was really a wimp,” says a friend of long standing. “If Joyce ever raised her voice to him, he'd just back away and kind of cower. I really think he was afraid of her.” She ruled their house, and she made the rules. As she told a friend, “There's no way the church is going to tell me what to do about birth control. It's none of their business whether I have children or don't have them.” Besides, she told that friend, she probably couldn't have children anyway. She had had several operations, she said, her insides filled with stitches, and the doctors told her she should not even consider having a child.

Further, the marriage was turning out to be something less than idyllic. Aparo's devotion to his religion, his obsession with it, his constant praying and churchgoing infuriated her. She derided him and sneered at him. “Throughout our married life,” he says, “I was a victim of her abuse. It was practically always verbal, psychological. Joyce had the capacity of talking circles around anyone. Unfortunately, I think, her great intelligence ended up serving the purpose of her cruelty.”

Then, in the middle of 1970, Joyce Aparo learned that she was pregnant.

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She was furious. The child was not planned, and she did not want it. She blamed Michael Aparo; somehow he had tricked her. She was not going to have the baby. She was going to get an abortion.

“I was in pain,” Aparo says. “I was feeling that I was being totally rejected because of this pregnancy. And this was my child. I was devastated.” He sought help from a psychiatrist. Joyce went with him for one session. It didn't seem to help. Then “I don't know why,” Aparo says, “but she changed her mind.”