Beyond Obsession (15 page)

A year later Karin was slated to play a solo at another recital, but Sattler wasn't satisfied that she was quite ready to perform this difficult piece and gave it to another child. After the performance, in the midst of the crowd of parents and friends, Joyce grabbed hold of Karin, and shouted, “Listen, everybody. Karin can play that solo as well as anybody. Listen while she plays the piece.” She forced Karin to play, to Karin's mortification and the embarrassment of everybody else. When Karin finished, Joyce looked around with obvious satisfaction and pride and proclaimed, “There, didn't she do it better than the other one?” It didn't end there. Joyce advanced on the other child, snarled at him, “See, Karin could have played it better than you.” Then she began to curse at him and his parents.

“I never saw anything like it before or after,” Sattler says.

Joyce was a woman with an obsession, a woman driven to achieve all her dreams through her daughter. Karin would be Joyce's star. Karin would be famous and rich and celebrated. Karin would be all that Joyce had ever wanted to be. Joyce preached that idea constantly. She filled Karin with stories about her own father, the musical genius, the conductor of enormous promise who had been derided at home and driven to suicide, and stories about herself as a musical prodigy on the piano who had been blocked by that same family opposition. Karin had obviously inherited their talent and would do what they had been stopped from doing.

Karin had talent, yes, but, as her teacher said, not as great as Joyce assumed, or dreamed or fantasized, and demanded.

But Joyce was convinced that the talent was there and that Karin towered over all her contemporaries. Joyce also used the violin as a weapon to maintain control, to keep Karin subjugated. She bought better and more expensive violins and then threatened to take them away if Karin didn't maintain the standards Joyce set. She made Karin practice in front of her for at least an hour every day, and no matter how well Karin played, Joyce never seemed satisfied. On the way to lessons, she forced Karin to play for her what she was going to play in class, and if she didn't do it to Joyce's satisfaction, Joyce turned the car around and drove back home, refused to let Karin go to her lesson. There were times, too, when dissatisfied with the way Karin was playing, she would grab the violin out of her hands and beat her across the back with it. After recitals she never let Karin share in refreshments that had been laid out. Instead she dragged her away and told her that Karin had embarrassed her mother by playing some wrong notes. “I felt like standing up in the middle of your piece and walking out and letting you find your own way home,” she said more than once. But that was merely talk, that was merely the attempt to force perfection. The dream did not die. Later she enrolled Karin at the Manhattan School of Music and for several years drove her down to New York every week for lessons.

She might say to Karin that she was a disappointment, was not fulfilling her promise, but when Karin wasn't around, Joyce constantly boasted of Karin's great progress, of her growing expertise, and related fantasies as though they were true, as though they had really happened.

To one friend she told a story of how she and Karin had gone on vacation to Bermuda. “Joyce said that Karin took her violin with her because she didn't want to miss any practice time. And somebody heard her playing and asked her to play in the restaurant and she did, and everybody gave her money.” The only thing was, Joyce and Karin never went to Bermuda.

To other friends she told how Karin had been invited to the Soviet Union over a Thanksgiving vacation to play a concert. Only Karin and Joyce did not go to Russia; Karin was never invited to play there.

There were stories that Joyce told about Karin's playing with the New York Philharmonic, about Karin's going to Scotland to play a concert there. They were inventions.

Jeff Sands remembers Joyce's telling him that Karin was going to England to play a concert. “Joyce brought in a tape that she told everybody was Karin's rehearsal with the New York Philharmonic. I asked Joyce if I could listen to it. I put it in the tape deck of my car and listened to it on the way to work one morning. It was a stunning tape. The pieces were beautifully played, and the violin was the featured instrument. Then I gave it back to Joyce, and she was so excited about this and the trip and everything. Later on I mentioned it to Karin, and she said it wasn't her; she said it was a tape of Alex Markov playing with the New York Philharmonic.”

“That woman was insane, she was a dangerous personality,” Constance Sattler says, “and I thought so from the time I first met her.” Years later, when Sattler heard on the radio that Joyce had been murdered, she says her first reaction was “If anyone ever deserved it, she did.”

9

And there was Archbishop John Whealon, for more than two decades head of the Hartford Roman Catholic archdiocese, the twelfth-largest in the United States. He became and remained perhaps
the
most important figure in the fantasies and realities of both mother and daughter.

For Karin, he was a father figure, supplanting Michael Aparo even before Aparo had faded from her life. For Joyce, who had nothing to do with her religion, who was contemptuous of it and its practitioners, who later did not permit Karin to be confirmed or even to attend church, Whealon inhabited a very special place in her mind, her fantasies, her delusions.

From the time Karin was small, barely able to remember, she visited him at St. Mary's Home, where he maintained his apartments, and for years she made his bed, cleaned his room, tended his garden and did other chores for him. She wrote him letters, first in a childish scrawl corrected and recopied by her mother, later in a more accomplished manner. They were filled with the events of her life and of her dreams, the kinds of letters one writes not to a stranger but to someone close, someone in whom it is possible to confide. They were filled not only with her thoughts and feelings but with those of her mother as well, for, she says, when she was young, her mother used to write many of those letters as though they were from Karin, some of them by hand, some on a typewriter, and then have Karin sign them. To most he responded in an affectionate, caring manner, not the kinds of letters one would expect from a priest to just an ordinary member of his congregation.

Kept in a filing cabinet in the basement of the condo on Butternut Drive, the correspondence fills thick file folders, letters from Whealon to Joyce Aparo dating from 1967 until shortly before her death and from Whealon to Karin from 1974 until mid-1990, along with copies of some of the letters they wrote to him.

“We saw your picture in the paper,” begins one dated March 17, 1979, just after Karin's eighth birthday, a letter that Karin later said was actually written by Joyce although Karin signed it. She had cut out that picture and added it to a growing collection she had of him in her room, so many that Joyce kept coming across ones she hadn't seen before.

Karin had a gray and white cat named Franklin Roosevelt Cat that often misbehaved, she wrote Whealon. She had made more progress with the violin, was now playing
Judas Maccabeus
by Handel and would like to play it for him, though he never seemed to have the time to listen. “I know you are busy,” she wrote, “but you should take a little rest and see friend.”

She and her mother often drove by St. Mary's Home and his church, but Joyce always refused to stop. Karin wished the two of them, Joyce and Whealon, could be friends again, since Joyce always said she liked Whealon even though she wanted nothing to do with anybody else in the church. Perhaps, though, it might be possible for Karin and the archbishop somehow to get together during the summer.

She was sure the archbishop would be interested in all she had been doing, so she wrote about a trip to Florida where she had seen an aunt and some cousins and had gone to Disney World, ridden the Space Mountain roller coaster, which she loved but which made Joyce's stitches, from an operation, act up and which made Joyce throw up as well. But Karin wanted another ride on the Space Mountain, and some nice strangers had obliged. And, she wrote Whealon, they had stopped in Washington on the way home, gone to the zoo and seen the pandas. She had a camera and was taking lots of pictures with it. She had taken one of the name on the exhibit, Lesser Panda, but before she could shoot the animal itself, she had run out of film.

More seriously, she and Joyce were in an automobile accident right after they got back to Glastonbury. They had been shopping for groceries when the car crashed. Joyce broke her glasses, and Karin hurt her elbow, the right side of the car was a complete wreck, the groceries were destroyed and the backseat and floor of the car were a mess, littered with broken bottles, smashed cartons and all the rest.

Now that they were home, they were doing spring-cleaning, Joyce scouring and polishing everything and impatient to finish so she'd have time when the weather got warmer to go out, hunt for and then cut her rocks.

Karin asked the archbishop when he had last worn his miter, apparently one that Joyce had made for him. She wrote that she had never seen him in it. Also, she noted, Whealon had promised to give her a chair from the church, and she hadn't received it yet. She hoped that he wasn't doing the same thorough spring-cleaning that Joyce was and in the process had thrown it out.

“Be good,” she wrote, “and try not to get into trouble and I'll do the same.” Maybe they would get to see each other on a Saturday, the day she was with her father, because Joyce was proclaiming that she never wanted to see Whealon again. Of course, Whealon could always drive out to Glastonbury and visit them, and if he did, Joyce would have to act her best. What bothered her was that “nobody will tell me why you guys are mad at each other.”

As on all her other letters to Whealon, she signed this one “Love, Karin.”

In another letter, which Karin says was also composed by Joyce for her, written three years later, on March 24, 1982, Karin wrote that she and Joyce, in celebration of spring, had driven out to the cemetery to visit the grave of Sister Mary Thomas, apparently a special nun close to Karin and Whealon, on which they had laid a wreath of pinecones. While there, they tasted some maple sap, and “best of all, I left a message at the edge of your vegetable garden. The message said, ‘I LOVE YOU, KARIN.'”

It bothered her that the garden seemed overgrown and untended, and, she wrote, she really wanted to work on it with him, cleaning it up and getting it ready for planting. She might have added more to the message she left, but she didn't know whether he had already planted something; besides, if it rained, the message would be washed away.

“I miss you a lot,” she wrote. “It is time for us to take a little walk and have a little talk. I could use that. I am growing up. I told you I would—just wait for me a little more.”

Indeed, she was growing so rapidly, she wrote, her arms lengthening, that Joyce had purchased a two-hundred-year-old French-made violin for her, and she was playing it both in the Glastonbury school orchestra, in which she was first violin, and in the University of Hartford children's intermediate orchestra, in which she was second violin. What she really wanted was to play it for him.

Life at home, she told him, was fine. Joyce was wonderful; she was everything good and bright. Joyce was going to a ball, apparently for Catholic Charities at which Whealon was to be present and the host, and Karin wanted very much to go, but Joyce said that she was too young, that when she was eighteen, it would be time enough. Didn't Whealon think sixteen was old enough? A lot of Joyce's friends, she said, were going to be at that ball, people Joyce knew from her jewelry making and from her work with nursing homes. Especially important was a Mr. Murphy, whom, the letter said, Karin really liked and who kept telling Karin he wanted to marry Joyce.

“Maybe you could save a dance in your heart for me,” she wrote. “Actually, I want them all.… Try to steal away 15 minutes for a little walk and talk with me. I love you, Karin.”

Though Karin does not remember when she first met him and began calling him Uncle John, she does have two early recollections of Archbishop Whealon. “I was three or four, and my parents were still married,” she says. “They dressed me up to take me to mass, and he was going to officiate. At the end of the mass he led the procession down the aisle, and my parents moved me to the end of the row, and he picked me up and carried me against his chest out of the church.”

She remembers, too, that Archbishop Whealon administered her first communion and that she did not have to prepare for it. “My mother had a letter from Archbishop Whealon, and we worked it out,” she says.

But there was a dark secret that in the years to come became not quite so secret. Joyce told it to her from the time she was small and kept repeating it all her life so that Karin came to believe it without question. Later Joyce told it to so many others that after her death it was just about the first piece of information imparted to questioners by those who knew her.

It was the kind of secret that even if true should never have been revealed. It was the kind of secret that could only do irreparable damage to everyone: the person who told it, the person who heard it, the person it was about. It was, without doubt, the deadliest of all the poisons Joyce fed her daughter, the cruelest of afflictions laid upon her.

Archbishop John Whealon, Joyce told her daughter over and over, was her godfather, yes. But he was more than her godfather. He was her natural father.

Joyce said that she had had an affair with a young priest; Karin had been conceived out of that affair. The affair had not ended then, she said, but had continued over the years with few interruptions. Just before her death she maintained that the affair was still going on. That young priest, she said, had risen high in the church, had become an archbishop, and his name was John Whealon.