Beyond Obsession (14 page)

Mrs. Aparo does admit that her child is left alone every day from 3:30 to 5:00
P.M.
because she works. The child is left with several phone numbers in case of emergency. One of the numbers is that of a neighbor about I mile down the road. She also mentioned that her daughter is not a “normal” seven year old in that she had an IQ of 145 and is very mature for her age. It was explained that despite her high IQ, this was really an unsuitable arrangement for her child's care. Mrs. Aparo said she had tried various alternatives. She did have a live-in person for a period of time but it “did not work out.” She had a 12 yr. old babysitter but Mrs. Aparo felt that the capacity of this person was hardly much more than her own intelligent daughter. She also was going to try day care but this would involve leaving work to transport her child which she was unable to do. Other attempts to hire a babysitter have failed also due to transportation problems and people not willing to sit for 1½ hrs.

Mrs. Aparo mentioned that the lack of supervision of Karin will no longer be a problem in about I week. She is enrolled as a full-time student for the Montessori School in Rocky Hill for the entire summer. It was explained to Mrs. Aparo that this does solve the immediate problem for the time being but more suitable arrangements will have to be made upon resumption of the school year. She said she would continue trying to find an appropriate alternative.…

Conclusion: Abuse has not been confirmed but neglect has been substantiated. This neglect is in the form of lack of supervision of a 7 year old child for 1½ hrs. every day. This immediate problem appears to be temporarily solved.… It was suggested that she contact this agency for suggestions should she have difficulty [in making arrangements once the new school year started]. It was also explained that should we receive another referral of a similar nature at that time, we will become involved (whether we are requested or not) in making more suitable arrangements with potential of the case transferred to treatment.

Over the next several weeks attempts by the agency to interview Joyce Aparo face-to-face rather than by phone were unavailing, Joyce explaining over the phone that her heavy work schedule made such a meeting impossible. The agency did not press.

On September 5 the whole matter was dropped. The DCYS notified Joyce: “I have not received any further inquiry from you regarding the protective services referral of June 5, 1978. Since you have not contacted me, I will assume that you have no further questions. Therefore, I will be closing your case. I apologize for any inconvenience caused by the involvement of this agency.”

A long time later an executive with the agency said, “Look, nobody could have predicted what was going to happen in nine or ten years.” The agency is flooded with calls and complaints, has a limited budget and a small staff. It has to set priorities. At the top of the list are cases involving the major problems that cannot be ignored, such as sexual abuse, patently battered kids and delinquency. Obviously, with Joyce and Karin Aparo, those problems did not seem to exist to the agency. And there was something else. Joyce Aparo was intelligent and motivated, and most important, she knew the special language of the social worker; she had all the right answers, so had a ready explanation for everything. “I don't want to offer this as an excuse,” the agency executive says, “but if things were as bad as people say, why didn't the father intervene? Why didn't some other member of the family? Why didn't Archbishop Whealon, who was supposed to be so close to Karin, to Joyce, to the family, why didn't he step in and do something? They all should have been a lot more knowledgeable about the situation than we were.”

Nobody, of course, did anything, then or later. Joyce's explanations were accepted. And the accusations that she practiced witchcraft were just as easily dismissed when she contemptuously denied them. Yet, neighbors say, she openly told them when she first moved into the house on Wesleyan Street that she was a witch, though she gave no details. Perhaps it was just a way of keeping at a distance neighbors she wanted nothing to do with because she considered them as much beneath her as she thought their children were beneath her daughter.

But the boast was there, and some gave it credence; if they were not adults, then at least other children believed it. Lori DeLucca, a friend of Karin's until the fourth grade and an acquaintance thereafter, remembers that when they were friends, Karin told her and Shannon Dubois about her closet, about sitting there and meditating for hours, told them that if they sat outside in the dark and stared at the moon, they would be able to leave their bodies. Lori went home and told her mother, who said, “Stay away from that girl. There's something not right about her.” Lori obeyed, and the friendship died.

8

In any person's life there are seminal events, essential in the formation of later attitudes and actions. On the surface they may seem trivial, of little lasting significance at least to the outsider. But in the psyche they are unforgettable and take on a crucial aspect. For Karin Aparo her seventh birthday, on February 12, 1978, was such an event.

Years later she wrote about it to Dennis Coleman, during a critical phase in their relationship. It was in early August 1986, and she had watched from her window as he walked out of his house and got into his car. She had turned away to put on some clothes, meaning to go out and speak to him. But by the time she got dressed, he had driven away without looking in her direction or speaking to her.

As she watched him leave, she suddenly remembered her father's doing precisely the same thing on that seventh birthday. It was to have been a special day. She had never before had a birthday party for friends, and now Joyce was about to give her one. A rum cake had been ordered, made specially for her, and Joyce had purchased candy and other treats, party favors, napkins and plates and all the rest to make this a gala occasion.

Karin was just returning with her father from a weekend together. Those weekends were special, for they were the only times she saw him, and during those days he treated her like a princess. As they drove up to the house, he suddenly proposed that she go upstairs, change, and then he would take her to visit her grandmother—his mother—and other relatives, who all had presents for her, and they would spend her birthday together.

She was ecstatic. She raced into the house. Joyce was busy cleaning and getting everything ready. As she tore up the stairs, Karin announced her plans. Joyce was furious. She picked up the phone and began calling the kids who had been invited; there would be no party. Michael Aparo appeared. He and Joyce had a bitter argument. Karin, upstairs, frantically trying to change her clothes, heard them. Then she heard the front door close. “My dad left. He got into his little yellow Volkswagen bug & sped away in the opposite direction. He didn't even say goodbye.”

A few minutes later Karin descended the stairs. She asked where her father was. Joyce told her he had run out on them as usual. Karin began to cry. Joyce told her to stop because she had brought the situation on herself. Through her tears Karin asked if they could call her friends and tell them that the party was really on and that the first call had been a mistake. Joyce refused. She ordered Karin to throw out all the party favors, the plates, napkins and the rest, to put the candy away and leave the rum cake in the refrigerator. Then she ordered Karin to go back upstairs, unpack her weekend suitcase, return and finish all the housework.

Karin got no presents that birthday. The party that never was, as she later called it, was supposed to be the present from Joyce. From her father, she thinks she got a card, though she can't remember it. The cake remained untouched in the refrigerator, bringing tears until Joyce eventually threw it out.

“Well,” she wrote to Dennis, “instead of ‘little yellow Volkswagen bug' put in ‘little yellow Triumph Spitfire' then maybe you'll get the idea of how hurt I was.” The one difference was that this time she didn't cry. But, she wrote, she had begun to wonder if perhaps she should never get dressed again. When she did, something bad inevitably happened. Her father had once been, and now Dennis was, her only escape from her mother. They both gave Karin time away from Joyce. They both endeared themselves to her, gave her nice things, made her forget her troubles and problems. But they both deserted her in a time of desperate need, and they both “didn't even say goodbye.”

Michael Aparo barely remembers that event. But it convinced Karin that she could never depend on him in time of need. He became a figure of increasingly less importance or influence in her life. Though she continued to see him now and then, the meetings became fewer and fewer as time passed, and the distance between them grew ever wider.

Her father had disappointed her, but she could escape him. Her mother, who did worse than disappoint her, she could never escape. And the agony of living at home with her grew worse as the years passed. There would be the times, many of them, repeated often, she says, when Joyce “made me stand in the middle of the floor while she was in bed, and then she would go over me critically from head to toe, making remarks. ‘Look at your hair. It's always in your eyes. You look like a dog. Hold your face up or you'll get a double chin. You're getting fat. I don't know why you don't listen to me. You're an intelligent girl.'”

And there was the day “I was standing with my mother and she was ironing and she was yelling about something I had done and she held up the iron and said, ‘Come here. I want to burn your face.'” Fortunately Karin didn't move, and the cord wasn't long enough to reach her, though Joyce kept stretching it and screaming at Karin to come to her and get burned. Suddenly the washing machine in the other room started making noises, spinning out of balance. Joyce glared in that direction, then at Karin and ordered her to go and fix it.

But there were things to fill the emptiness, to blunt the terror. There was the violin. Karin and Joyce, in reality and fantasy, shared it, and in the sharing they forged whatever bond existed between them. Among the earliest memories of neighbors and friends is the picture of a small, sad-faced child with big dark eyes, soon concealed behind large glasses like those her mother wore, and dark hair, always with a violin case in her hand. Among other memories are those of a grown woman talking constantly, pridefully of her daughter and her daughter's future with that violin.

Karin picked up the violin for the first time just before her sixth birthday, in January 1977, and it remained in her hands, central and crucial to her existence and to her relationship with her mother, for the next ten and a half years. Karin later told a psychiatrist that the violin was the only thing in her life that belonged to her alone. Her mother might tell her how much she loved music, might share that love with Karin but the violin was “my thing,” the one thing that took her away from her mother, the thing that became the focus of her identity.

Joyce brought her to Constance Sattler, a teacher at the Julius Hartt School of Music, a practitioner of the Suzuki violin method, based on the idea of constant cooperation and interplay among teacher, student and parent, in which the parent attends the lessons, an individual one and a group one with other children every week, observes, gets some instruction herself and then, at home, is able to help the child during practice sessions.

Sattler remembers clearly that first meeting. Mother and daughter arrived. She looked at Joyce, and her immediate thought was that she must have gone through some terrible tragedy; her hair was snow white. “Then I saw her a couple of weeks later, and her hair was a different color, and over the next several years, it changed color again and again.”

Karin took lessons with Sattler at Hartt for the next four years. At first Joyce was always there, sitting off in a corner, observing and embroidering something in satin with ornate gold and silver thread. When Sattler casually asked what she was doing, Joyce told her she was making a headdress for an archbishop.

“Her moods,” Sattler recalls, “were very changeable and unpredictable. She could overflow with love and approval one minute or one time and the next be icy with disapproval, all for no apparent reason.” No matter what Joyce's moods were, Karin never seemed to react.

There were other things about Joyce that Sattler noticed. As Karin got older, Joyce, at the teacher's urging, showed up less often. Michael Aparo sometimes, or a variety of other men, for Joyce invariably had men around her, dropped Karin off for her lessons and then picked her up when the lessons were over. Once, when Sattler expressed concern for Karin to Aparo over the way she was being treated by her mother, Aparo had no comment, acted, the teacher thought, as though he were helpless to do anything.

Through the years Sattler heard a variety of stories from Joyce about her plans. “She talked about marriage all the time. She would come in and say, ‘I'm getting married next week.' It never happened.” And once Joyce told her that she was about to leave on a long business trip to Australia, perhaps the one she had told several friends she was making to hunt for semiprecious stones and buy into an opal mine, and that Karin would be flying out a few days later to join her. But Karin missed only a couple of lessons, and when she was back at the music school, she explained that her mother had returned sooner than expected, so she hadn't made the trip. As it happened, Joyce hadn't made the trip either.

Joyce's expectations for Karin as a violinist were outsize and far beyond the child's ability or talent, as were her expectations about everything. “Karin,” Sattler says, “was not as good as I first thought she would be. There was something blocking her talent and development. She was an average student, and she should have been a very good one. She started off with a bang and then dropped off.”

But Joyce had convinced herself that Karin was the best, and she demanded perfection. Once when seven-year-old Karin was playing in a music school recital as part of a group of twelve children, her bowing suddenly went out of sync with the others. In front of an audience of about seventy-five people, Joyce leaped from her seat, rushed onto the stage, dragged Karin off into the wings and began to scream at her.