Beyond Obsession

by Hammer, Richard;

  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.

  Karin was just starting ninth grade, was not yet fifteen when she met Neal. He was in residence at Yale and was conducting the symphony group in Hartford in which Karin played. “When I showed up for rehearsals the first day, he was
the conductor,” she says. Joyce was with her, and after the rehearsals Joyce went to Neal, talked to him, beckoned Karin to join her.

  From that moment on Joyce talked about Neal constantly, and Karin, seeing him three times a week at rehearsals, felt herself increasingly drawn to him. She introduced Shannon to him and later told Shannon she thought he was “handsome and cute and a terrific person. I had a crush on him, and my mother said she had a crush on him, too,” Karin said.

  Indeed, so highly did Joyce approve of Neal that she did everything she could to bring Karin and him together, and so highly did she approve that her attitude toward Karin altered radically. No longer did she complain constantly; no longer did she find fault relentlessly. At last they got along. They drove to New Haven several times to hear concerts Neal was conducting, saw him as often as possible. Joyce appeared ecstatic whenever he was around, whenever his name was mentioned.

  New fantasies emerged. Joyce began to tell Zaccaro and others how close Karin and Neal were, how deep was their feeling for each other. Then, early in 1986, she announced that she was leaving for Scotland with Karin and Neal; he was going to conduct an orchestra there, and Karin was going to play solo. Further, while they were in Scotland, they all were going to stay with Neal’s parents, Lord and Lady Neal.

  For a week or more Karin was out of school. Nobody saw her. The phone at the Aparo home went unanswered. They had, everyone believed, gone to Scotland on that concert tour. Indeed, Joyce was in Scotland—but not accompanying her daughter and Alasdair Neal on a concert tour. She was on one of her rock-hunting expeditions. Karin remained home, under strict orders not to answer the phone, not to leave the condo, not to be seen. Everyone was to think they were in Scotland.

  It all had gone beautifully, Joyce proclaimed when she returned. The concerts had been well received, they had stayed with Lord and Lady Neal and the noble couple just loved Karin.

  Karin listened in silence as Joyce rhapsodized to Michael Zaccaro and others. She did not tell them that she had not been to Scotland, that she had not played the violin with an orchestra conducted by Alasdair Neal, that she had never met Neal’s parents, who were not, anyway, a lord and lady. “I just sat there and didn’t correct her because I was fifteen and I knew I couldn’t correct my mother.”

  Then Alasdair Neal was gone. By the spring of 1986 he had other commitments, so it was time to leave Yale, time to leave Connecticut. He had looked with perhaps amusement or tolerance on the adolescent infatuation lavished upon him by one of his violinists and on the adulation of her mother. For him, it had not been a serious thing; it could not be; the girl, after all, was only a child. He never realized, nor could he, how important, how crucial he had been to Karin, to Joyce and to both of them together at that moment, nor could he have had any sense of how devastating his departure would be to them. Over the next months Karin’s diary entries were filled with plaintive “Oh Alasdair, please come back and make things better!” … “Miss Alasdair” … “Miss Alasdair terribly.”

  For when Alasdair Neal left, the era of good feelings between Karin and Joyce vanished.

  With what she saw somehow as Neal’s abandonment, Karin looked elsewhere, anywhere for solace. She experimented with sex for the first time, with a boy her age named Jeff. It was not especially satisfying, did nothing to ease the sense of loss. Worse, somehow, perhaps through reading the diaries Karin kept in her bedside drawer, Joyce learned of it or sensed it, and the condo was filled with recriminations and threats. Karin would do what Joyce wanted, or Joyce would spread far and wide the tale of Karin’s delinquency, would destroy Karin’s reputation.

  So Karin, in the late spring of 1986, retreated into herself more and more, her mind churning to discover some way out of what had become once more an intolerable situation.

  13

  All her life Karin Aparo had been a victim, brutalized physically until she was twelve, and worse, tortured emotionally without end. She was on the verge of being murdered, not physically but emotionally. What had been, what was being done to her was what psychiatrists have come to call soul murder. In his study Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation,* the analyst and clinical professor of psychiatry at New York University Dr. Leonard Shengold defines soul murder as “my dramatic designation for a certain category of traumatic experiences: instances of repetitive and chronic overstimulation, alternating with emotional deprivation, that are deliberately brought about by another individual.” He writes:

  The capacity to destroy a soul, hinges entirely on having another human being in one’s power, and this confrontation of the powerful and the helplessly dependent is inherent in childhood.… What happens to the child subjected to soul murder is so terrible, so overwhelming, and usually so recurrent that the child must not feel it and cannot register it, and resorts to massive isolation of feeling, which is manifested by brainwashing (a mixture of confusion, denial, and identifying with the aggressor).… In individuals, psychic murder is founded on the relations between hostile, cruel, indifferent, psychotic, or psychopathic parents and the child prisoner in their charge.

  Karin Aparo was that prisoner, and Joyce Aparo was the parent in charge, hostile, cruel, indifferent, psychotic, psychopathic. The home in which Karin was kept was nothing so much as a concentration camp. She was a prisoner, at the utter mercy of a mother whose capricious and often wanton cruelty, ladled out with a shovel and interspersed by occasional drops of kindness, made her a combination commandant and guard. Karin was trapped, unable to find any escape, knowing that even if she managed to flee, her mother would find her no matter what it took, return her to captivity and there subject her to even worse. She was only fifteen, and there were three years lying between her and possible escape to freedom, years that seemed like forever.

  Joyce Aparo was a very sick woman. This moment, in 1986, should have been for her a time of celebration, a time of fulfillment. She had achieved in her career much that she had sought. As Michael Zaccaro foresaw, those block grants to the states to aid social programs had come to an end, and the health council on which Joyce sat had been phased out. Zaccaro had left NewMediCo and, with a group of colleagues, started Athena Health Care Associates, to develop and operate nursing homes and convalescent facilities. Joyce Aparo was just what he needed. He made his pitch. She accepted and now was heading Athena’s social services division, earning about fifty thousand dollars a year. The drive to Waterbury, where Athena made its headquarters, was longer than the one to Hartford, but there were plenty of compensations. The work was what she knew and what she enjoyed. She was being paid well for that work, was associating with people she respected. She was doing good for many.

  But it satisfied none of what was eating away inside her mind. Nothing could. She was a classic compendium of neuroses and psychoses. The symptoms were there, had been spotted long before by many who came into her orbit. They were growing worse, consuming her and those closest to her.

  Her obsession with Archbishop John Whealon, the stories she invented and repeated about her relationship with him, say psychiatrists who have examined her history, have all the earmarks of what is called erotomania. DSM-III-R, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Third Edition Revised), compiled by the American Psychiatric Association, defines it as “an erotic delusion … that one is loved by another [and] the person about whom this conviction is held is usually of a higher status, such as a famous person.” The sickness, though, was not isolated in Joyce alone. While Whealon might dominate her inner life, she attempted, as well, to infect her daughter with the virus, trying to convince Karin that she was loved and desired by Mike Zaccaro, Alasdair Neal, and other men of success and promise.

  Erotomania was only one, and perhaps one of the least, of the psychiatric ills that afflicted Joyce Aparo. It would be nearly impossible to look at the relationship of Joyce the mother with her daughter, of Joyce the wife with her husbands, and not see a pervasive pattern of cruel, demeaning, and aggressive beh
avior—symptoms of what many psychiatrists call a sadistic personality disorder.

  From the time she was a child demanding undivided attention from her parents and siblings, through her teen years, when she was flashing a ring and claiming it was a gift from the queen of England, on to her tales of foreign travels and adventures, to having her nose fixed to enhance her beauty, to her constant berating of Karin, with whom she so closely identified, as too fat or otherwise physically unattractive, Joyce Aparo was forever demanding, in the words of the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, “reassurance, approval, or praise; [was] inappropriately seductive in appearance or behavior; [was] overly concerned with physical attractiveness; [was] uncomfortable in situations in which she [was] not the center of attention; [displayed] rapidly shifting and shallow expressions of emotions; [was] self-centered; [had] no tolerance for frustration or delayed gratification; [attempted] to control the opposite sex or enter into a dependent relationship. Flights into romantic fantasy [were] common.… Interpersonal relationships [were] usually stormy and ungratifying.” It all added up to an aberration called histrionic personality disorder.

  That was not all. Joyce Aparo neatly fitted the descriptions of at least two other major psychiatric disorders. Her unreasonable demands for perfection in everything, both from herself and from Karin, demands that could not possibly be met and that therefore too often meant that things could never be completed satisfactorily, and her preoccupation with compiling detailed rules, lists, schedules, and more, combined with her insistence that they be followed precisely with no deviation, are clear demonstrations of what the manual calls obsessive compulsive personality disorder.