Beyond Obsession (12 page)

Though she had changed her mind about giving birth, she had yet to change her mind about being a full-time mother to a baby. In January 1971 she saw her brother Tom, the White Plains construction executive, for the first time after a long separation. She told him how she felt about having a baby. “I told her,” he says, “have the child and I will adopt it.” Without discussing the offer with Aparo, who learned about it only years later, she said she would consider it.

The baby, a girl weighing five pounds four and a half ounces, was born just before four o'clock in the afternoon of February 12, 1971, at Hartford Hospital. She was christened Karin Elizabeth Aparo. Her godfather, she would be told by her mother, as would everyone else, was Archbishop John Whealon.

The pregnancy had been a trying time. Joyce later told Karin that she had been ill through much of it, had spent a lot of it in bed. Hard as the pregnancy had been, the delivery was even worse. She told Karin that she had suffered terrible agony, had been in constant pain and had nearly died during labor and had been seriously ill for weeks afterward.

Good husband and father that he was, Michael Aparo notified his wife's family. Sister Ina went to the hospital to visit Joyce and her new niece. Joyce, she says, was anything but the proud mother. Rather, she was bitter. She had not wanted the baby in the first place, she said, and now that it was here, she still didn't want it and was thinking about putting it up for adoption.

Brother Thomas arrived for a visit after the baby had been taken home. What he saw distressed him greatly. Joyce ignored the child, ordered Aparo to change the baby's diapers, feed her, put her to bed, take care of her. Joyce seemed to have no interest at all in her infant daughter. It was, Tom Cantone thought, time to renew his offer. “I wanted to adopt my niece to get her out of the environment she was living in,” he says. “I told my sister I would take my niece, raise her as my daughter—with the stipulation that my sister would not have any claim or any contact with the child.”

The offer couched in those terms, with those conditions, was something Joyce was not willing to accept. She might be willing to turn the infant Karin over to her brother, but only on condition that she have unlimited rights to visit her, that Karin be told that Joyce was her mother and that Joyce have the ultimate say in her upbringing. Tom Cantone would not agree. He dropped his proposal.

A year later, during another upsetting visit, he repeated it once more when he learned that Joyce had not yet accepted her role as mother and seemed determined to rid herself of this burden. The offer was made with the same conditions. Joyce spurned it. She might not want to raise the child herself, but she was determined to lay down the rules under which she would be raised no matter who did the raising.

So after all, she would raise her daughter or at least have her daughter in the same house. She hired a woman, Jill Smith, to take care of Karin during the day, and she let Michael Aparo do the tending at night. Michael Aparo might think, with all the baby care he was doing, that he was being both mother and father to his child while Joyce was ignoring her, and him, and going back to work, this time in a more important job at the state's Department of Mental Health. But Michael Aparo was dominated by his wife, she was the strength in their house and that was obvious to anyone who came through their doors.

By the time Karin was two, Joyce finally began to take an interest. Karin was talking by then; Karin was showing signs of absorbing information; Karin was revealing an intelligence beyond the usual; Karin was beginning to function as something other than what Joyce considered a totally dependent creature whose only responses were instinctual and who was only an onerous burden for a smart, ambitious woman. Now Joyce began to see her as a kind of empty slate ready to receive whatever Joyce cared to write on it, an unformed stone waiting to be carved into whatever shape Joyce wanted to carve. She would issue the orders, and the child would follow them to the letter with no deviations. She would lay down the rules, and her child would obey them completely.

Ina Camblor remembers a visit when Karin was about three. By then, she says, Karin was a very quiet child who never laughed, never played and displayed little emotion. She picked the child up, talked to her and tickled her, trying to get her to laugh. Joyce, she says, ordered her to put Karin down. “That,” Joyce said, “is not the way I'm raising my child.”

Ina Camblor said, “Babies need love. I'm a mother, and I know how to raise children. They need love. Until they're ten, they're still babies.”

“Don't tell me how to raise my daughter,” Joyce said.

On another visit she watched as Joyce slapped Karin hard across the face. “Don't do that in my house,” Ina ordered.

Joyce ignored her, turned to Karin and said, “Don't you dare cry.” Karin didn't.

“If you want to slap her on the bottom,” Ina said, “that's okay. Any parent does that. But to slap her across the face—that's not right.”

“Mind your own business,” Joyce said. Then she gathered Karin and stormed out of the house. Ina never saw her sister again, did not see her niece again until the day of Joyce's funeral.

Those slaps across the face in Ina's house were not isolated incidents. Her earliest memory, Karin says, is of her mother slapping her. She was about four then, and “there were people over to the house. They were in the living room with my mother and father, and my father was offering them drinks. My mother asked me, ‘What are those people doing with Daddy?' I said, ‘They're drinking,' She slapped me across the face and pushed me out of the room.”

It was something Karin grew used to. She says Joyce slapped her across the face almost every day of her life until she was about twelve. They were not simple cuffs; according to Karin and to some who witnessed them, the slaps were hard, were invariably first a backhand across one side of the face and then the palm across the other, and they sent Karin reeling across the room.

Joyce might, then, show little affection, might explode and strike out for little or no reason, might make demands beyond any hope that they could be met, might inflict punishment far beyond any cause, yet she was proud of her daughter, had grandiose dreams for her, perhaps saw a way of reliving her own life and realizing all her unfulfilled dreams through her. Karin was bright and quick and eager to learn. And so, when Karin was just past three, Joyce enrolled her in a Montessori school, where open classrooms replete with a variety of materials available make it possible for a child to progress at his or her own rate.

For the first few months all went well. “Karin,” says her teacher then, Janet Stachelek, “was very bright, and she did very well, and she was a typical happy-go-lucky three-year-old.” There was, though, one disturbing element even then. Karin always came to school immaculately dressed, inappropriately so, the teacher thought, for the kinds of trips the kids took and for the outdoor play and other physical activities that fill so much of the kids' time in such a preschool environment. She sent notes home to Joyce, even called, asking that Karin be dressed more appropriately. Joyce ignored them.

Then Joyce began to appear, demanding to know why Karin wasn't reading yet, why she wasn't doing math, why she wasn't doing other advanced work. Stachelek attempted to explain that at a Montessori school the children set their own pace, do things when they are ready for them. That wasn't answer enough for Joyce Aparo. If she couldn't force the school to push Karin, she would do it herself.

“Karin,” Stachelek remembers, “would come in and say, ‘My mother says I have to do this today,' instead of ‘I'd like to do this today.'” Stachelek got in touch with Joyce and asked her to ease up on the pressure, just to let Karin play and enjoy herself.

Joyce responded, Stachelek says, by declaring that she had an IQ of more than 140 and Karin took after her, and so her teacher ought to be doing something to use those brains and abilities and push her ahead. Stachelek dismissed those demands because Karin was doing very well on her own.

But the demands kept coming, and the pressure on Karin kept mounting. “One day in Montessori,” Stachelek says, “Karin and I were playing a rhyming game. We were just making simple words that rhyme. And she wrote two sentences that rhymed. I wrote them down on paper for her. To me, it was just a fun thing. But to Joyce it was that Karin had composed poetry, so Karin was forced to bring in a new poem every day. I could just picture the kind of thing she had to go through at night at home.”

There wasn't much Stachelek could do to make Joyce back off and ease up on the pressures. But there were some things she couldn't dismiss or ignore, some things that convinced her she had to take some action. The children spend a long day in a Montessori school, often from seven-thirty in the morning until about five in the afternoon, when their mothers arrive to pick them up. One afternoon when Karin was four, Joyce appeared to retrieve her. “She obviously had not had a good day at work,” Stachelek remembers. “But Karin also had had a very long day, she was whiny, hungry, tired, and she wanted to go home. She wasn't getting her jacket on quickly enough, and before I could even realize what was happening, Mrs. Aparo had backhanded her across the face so hard she flew into the water fountain and cracked her head. I immediately stepped between them and told Mrs. Aparo that her behavior was totally unnecessary. I bent down and put Karin's jacket on for her. What surprised me was Karin's response. She didn't cry at all. She just stood there. A little four-year-old girl with her eyes sparkling with tears but refusing to cry. I asked her, ‘Does your head hurt, honey?' She shook her head no. Then Mrs. Aparo was immediately contrite. ‘Oh, I don't know what came over me. I've had such a bad day.'

“But the next day when Karin came into school, she had a large bump on the back of her head, and I asked her, ‘Honey, does your head hurt?' She said, ‘No, my head doesn't hurt. That didn't hurt as much as a real spanking.'”

That was enough for Stachelek. She decided to take some action. She put in a call to the Department of Child and Youth Services. Stachelek made that call anonymously. “I knew she would pull Karin out of my classroom or out of the school completely if she knew I had done anything, and I didn't want that to happen.” Stachelek told the DCYS what had happened, said that she suspected that Karin was being terribly abused, both physically and emotionally, probably more psychologically than physically, and someone ought to go into the Aparo home and investigate.

Somebody did. And Joyce Aparo, well versed in the vocabulary of child abuse, of the department where she had once worked, managed to explain it all away. But she was furious. She suspected somebody at the Montessori school of having made the report. She confronted Stachelek. “She was livid that somebody would have the nerve to suspect her of child abuse. I can clearly remember her telling me that it was just ridiculous. Karin, she said, was on a first-name basis with Archbishop Whealon, and she herself was beyond reproach, and she couldn't believe that anybody would suspect her of this.”

By then her marriage to Michael Aparo was falling apart. They had moved from their apartment and bought a small house on Wesleyan Street in Glastonbury, near the border with East Hartford. Karin was five then, in her last year at Montessori before entering the first grade in the Glastonbury public school system. What she remembers of those days, before the move and after, are constant battles and arguments between Joyce and Michael Aparo.

According to Aparo, many of those fights were over his objections to Joyce's treatment of their daughter, though “most of her cruelty at that time was directed toward me. And then there was a time, I think it was November 1976, Armistice Day, Veterans Day, and we were both home on vacation. Karin was holding a small bowl with strawberries, and she stumbled and spilled some of the juice on her T-shirt. Joyce began to act as if the kid had committed murder and really began viciously hitting her. I intervened and pushed her away. And she stumbled and fell and accused me of battering her. And within a matter of days I was served with divorce papers. I have to say I was happy to leave. I would never have initiated the divorce because of my religious convictions. But once she initiated it, I was happy to leave.”

The precipitating cause of the divorce, according to what Joyce told friends, had nothing to do with Karin; it had everything to do with Michael Aparo and his dedication to, she called it obsession with, his religion. “I went over to her house,” a friend recalls, “and Joyce and I were talking, and she said, ‘This is why I'm not with Michael. I can't take it any longer. And I'll show you why.' She took me upstairs, and she showed me a bedroom, and she said, ‘This is why.' In the bedroom was a prayer stool and an altar and a lot more, what she called his prayer room. ‘He spends so much time up here,' she told me; ‘he can't leave it; he hasn't been able to split from it. There's just too much religion.'”

For Karin, then five years old, Joyce had a mixture of explanations for the departure of Aparo. “She said my father used to hit her, and once he tried to throw her over the balcony.” There were others. Her father had always regretted his decision not to become a priest, she was told, and the church was still holding him, would not let him loose; he was religion-obsessed and had no time for them, only for his religion. There was yet more. Joyce often told her that the real reason for the divorce was Karin herself, that if it hadn't been for a child, Aparo might have been able to realize his dream of becoming a priest.

So, five-year-old Karin believed her mother's lies and had that burden to carry. She carried as well the burden of her mother's grandiose, outsize expectations, even obsessions. Unwittingly Stachelek opened a door, and Karin passed through into a new world that was to dominate her life and her mother's fantasies from that time on.