Beyond Obsession

by Hammer, Richard;

  To her daughter, she was the mother who taught her to sew and crochet and knit, to cook and bake, to make strawberry jam. She was the mother who shared her dreams and fantasies. She was the mother who put in her hands the violin, the instrument that became the center of her life, and who sacrificed so that she could learn to play. But she was also the mother who rarely, if ever, showed affection, let alone love, the mother who abused her physically and emotionally from the time she was a baby, the mother who manipulated her without end to her bidding. At home as much as at the office, Joyce was a mother who was intolerant of any mistakes, real or imagined, a mother who filled her daughter with tales that left her uncertain about herself, left her in terror. Joyce isolated Karin from much of the world, trapped her in a home and a life that was unendurable and from which there seemed no escape.

  And there was something else, something many did not fully realize until after her death. She was an inveterate liar. Her second husband, Michael Aparo, later called her pathological, a woman who invented so many stories it was often impossible to ferret out the truth, and perhaps it came to a point where she herself did not know where the truth lay.

  She was born Joyce Cantone in 1939, the youngest child of a lower-middle-class Italian family, several years between her and her brothers and sisters, some adults by the time she was born. She grew up in a cramped second-floor tenement apartment in the Italian south end of Hartford. It was not a happy home. Her father, she told a college friend, was a day laborer and a heavy drinker, a man who more often than not arrived home drunk and, when drunk, vented his fury and frustration on everyone, beating her mother and then turning on her brothers, sisters and herself. The situation was intolerable and did not change for the better as the years passed. She kept trying to persuade her mother to leave her father, she said, but they were practicing and deeply devout Catholics, and that was something that just wasn’t done.

  Then her mother met a man. They fell in love, and he promised to marry her if somehow she could free herself from her husband. “Joyce said her mother went to see a priest,” her friend Carol Parkola remembers, “and then the priest came over to the apartment with an altar boy and spread incense all around and explained that he was going to cleanse the apartment, and all this would get rid of the evil spirits and all the evil that was involved with leaving her husband. Well, Joyce said she got so mad she opened the door and she took the priest’s hat and she threw it down the stairs and told him to go chase it. She just didn’t take to the church telling her what to do or how to do things.” Her father, she said, later died as a result of his alcoholism.

  That was one story. There were others. Her father, Joyce later was to tell other acquaintances, as well as repeat often to her daughter, had been a brilliant and sensitive man, a man with outstanding musical talent, a superb pianist who should have been destined for the concert stage. His dream had been to become a conductor, and as a young man he had shown considerable promise with the baton. But her mother would have none of his dreams. In front of the children she constantly derided him, sneered at him, berated him for spending his time and money on useless things while she was forced to struggle just to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. Her wrath, though, was not limited to words and gestures; on a number of occasions she turned on him with her fists, with frying pans, with whatever was available. He never struck back. Finally, Joyce said, thoroughly beaten, all his hope and dreams gone, he committed suicide.

  There is nothing in the local newspapers to support Joyce’s tale, but, then, a poor man’s suicide was rarely noted or reported, and suicides in Catholic families were often hidden, the death attributed to other more natural causes.

  Her brothers and sisters, she later told a friend, were older so that she had little to do with them. She rarely saw any of them after they left, saw them not at all during the last decade of her life.

  To another friend she confided that her brothers and sisters had made her life miserable. Just like her mother. They picked on her constantly, ridiculed her because she was too smart, because she was stubborn and had a mind of her own, because she was a rebel in a home where conformity and traditional values were not merely the norm and expected but demanded and because she was attractive, never without beaux flocking to her. She prided herself on her intelligence, her talents and her ambitions. But she was not quite so confident about her beauty. Her large dark eyes were all right, one of her best features, and her dark hair was thick and soft. But she hated her nose, thought it too large, too Italian. A long time later, in the early 1980s, she finally did something about it. She had it bobbed. A friend remembers meeting her in the Gallery restaurant in Glastonbury shortly afterward. “Joyce came in, and she was grinning. She always had this big grin whenever I saw her. And she was just preening. She said, ‘How do you like my new nose? I finally had something done to it.’ You know, I didn’t even notice it at first. I guess they did a good job because it fitted her face.”

  Very early she announced that she had no intention of following the accepted path laid out for the youngest daughter in a poor Italian family. She would not find a husband as soon as possible, marry without finishing school and then spend the rest of her life cooking, cleaning and raising a large family, modeling herself after her mother and sisters. She was going to finish school, go on to college and then carve out her own career in the professional world. She would make her mark. If a husband came along at some time, all well and good, but she was not going to go out looking for one and holding her breath until she found him. Her pronouncement, she said, served only to exacerbate an already oppressive situation.

  That’s not the way her sister Ina saw it. Joyce, she said, was the pampered youngest child, catered to by everyone in the family, including her sisters and brothers, given things that were denied them. While they were made to toe the mark, follow all the rules and do what was expected of them, and woe if they didn’t, Joyce was allowed to do pretty much what she wanted and, even when she broke the rules, was rarely punished severely. “Joyce,” she said, “was showered with a lot of attention as she was growing up since she had the advantage of older sisters and older brothers and a myriad of cousins. She was also fortunate in that economic times were better and my parents were able to give her dancing lessons, art lessons and a college education. Joyce was a very intelligent girl but also a very manipulative person.”

  She was also a lonely child. Even her mother, Rose Cantone, who now lives with daughter Ina, says that Joyce “grew up more or less alone.” Because, people who knew her say, she acted as though she were better than and superior to everyone else, she had few friends and no real confidantes. Alone and friendless, then, thrown on her own resources, she retreated often into a world of fantasy, of make-believe, and expressed those fantasies as though they were real. Someone who knew her when she was a teenager remembers a day when they ran into each other on the sidewalk and Joyce held out her hand. “See my new ring,” she said. “The queen gave it to me when we were in England.” The Cantones made no trips abroad. Others remember that she always had a story, about trips, about meeting and becoming close to famous people, and that she always told them with such absolute conviction that many believed what she said.

  That she was very intelligent is indisputable. She invariably scored high marks all the way through school and graduated near the top of her high school class. She had, a friend says, a photographic memory. “I was a little intimidated by her. She knew Latin, Italian, French—three or four languages. I had to work like crazy, study all the time just to get by, and she could pick up a book and just glance at a page, her eyes just darting over it, and that was it. She knew it all.”

  Her education did not end with high school. When she was graduated, she enrolled as a business major at Hillyer College in Hartford, now the University of Hartford. According to what Joyce told friends, her decision to go on to college, rather than being supported by her family, was bitterly opposed. She fought constantly wit
h her mother. They agreed about nothing. Finally, she said in one version, her mother threw her out when she was sixteen, and from that day on she made her own way. Like so many other things she said, then and throughout her life, that just didn’t happen to be true. All through college she lived at home with her mother and commuted to school, though a bed and a roof were about all the support she got. She paid for her college education with scholarships and by holding a job as an assistant to an insurance agent named Gino Dinatto at the Aetna Life and Casualty Insurance Company from her freshman year right through graduation in 1961.

  With a degree in her hands, she had a kind of real independence she had never possessed before; she had credentials; she had education. One thing she knew for certain was that now she could cut all but the most casual ties with the home where she had felt trapped, where she was sure nobody had understood or sympathized with her and her ambitions. The opportunity to do just that was there for the taking: Robert I. White. Over the years of college their friendship turned into a kind of romance. When he proposed, she accepted, and within days of graduation they were married. It was a small ceremony, attended by only a few friends and some family, so small and casual, in fact, that one person who was there cannot remember who else attended, cannot even remember if it was a religious ceremony. When it was over, Joyce had cut the ties; rarely after that did she see her mother, brothers or sisters.

  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 inquiri
ng 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.”