16

Amid all the passion and hyperbole, in all the dramatics and overblown elaborate phraseology of that long autobiography written for Karin, in those letters, and lyrics written for Denise, in other letters to others, something was wrong.

All his life Dennis Coleman had been searching desperately, not for something he had once had and lost but for something that had never been his, an essential ingredient in the creation of a personality. Perhaps it was because of the friction and incompatibility in his home in his earliest years, perhaps it was because of something in his psyche, but psychiatrists later said that he had never bonded, not with his mother or his father. He had been a difficult baby, had been difficult all the time he was growing up, refusing what comfort his mother offered, refusing even to let her take care of him, turning aside all her attempts at solace, all her shows of affection and caring. After a time both his mother, with whom he lived, who tried as best she could to tend him and his brother, and his father, with whom he spent weekends, turned into pals rather than parents, trying to spend time and do things with him as equals. Though he refused affection and bonding from them, he craved them from someone, as all children, as all people, do. As his letters clearly demonstrate, when he grew into adolescence, the usual crushes became not puppy love soon shed but intense and clinging attachments that sent him into despair and depression when they ended.

He was what the renowned Viennese psychoanalyst and theorist Helen Deutsch described in a classic groundbreaking study in 1934: an “as if” personality.* Deutsch wrote:

The individual’s whole relationship to life has something about it which is lacking in genuineness and yet outwardly runs along “as if” it were complete.…

The first impression these people make is of complete normality. They are intellectually intact, gifted, and bring great understanding to intellectual and emotional problems; but … without the slightest trace of originality. On closer observation, the same thing is seen in their affective relationships to the environment. These relationships are usually intense and bear all the earmarks of friendship, love, sympathy, and understanding.… but [i]t is soon clear that all these relationships are devoid of any trace of warmth, that all expressions of emotion are formal, that all inner experience is completely excluded. If is like the performance of an actor who is technically well trained but who lacks the necessary spark to make his impersonations true to life.…

Consequences of such a relation to life are completely passive attitude to the environment with a highly plastic readiness to pick up signals from the outer world and to mold oneself and one’s behavior accordingly.…

The same emptiness and the same lack of individuality which are so evident in the emotional life appear also in the moral structure. Completely without character, wholly unprincipled in the literal meaning of the term, the morals of the “as if” individuals, their ideals, their convictions are simply reflections of another person, good or bad.… A second characteristic … is their suggestibility.… Thus it can come about that the individual can be seduced into asocial or criminal acts.

They matched. They fitted, Dennis Coleman and Karin Aparo. Each had what the other craved, what the other needed. It was not just the hidden yearnings and demands. There were all the surface things, too.

They both were smart, with IQs that put them into the special realm of the intellectually very superior, yet in school both were underachievers, doing adequately sometimes, poorly at others, nowhere near as well as they should have. Dennis, says one of his closest friends, “never did homework, never studied. He was the average student as far as grades went, but he never tried. He made out just because of his intelligence. Like, we had a Newsweek course, where the text was the magazine. Dennis never subscribed to the magazine, and I don’t think he ever read it, but he aced the tests because he knew what was going on in the world. It was like, if he was interested in something, he was about the best, and if he didn’t give a damn, he just kind of squeaked by.”

Dennis himself says, “When we moved back to Glastonbury, I was an outsider. My old friends remembered me, and they’d talk to me, but I wasn’t part of that crowd anymore, and they were the guys who were at the top. I was just rebellious. I didn’t like school or anything, so I never read anything. It was funny, the people I was trying to be accepted by, I resented them quite a bit at the same time. And then the college thing. I hadn’t ruled out going to college. I always really wanted to go on to school. But by junior year this guy was going to Harvard and this guy to MIT or Yale, here and there, and I didn’t think I could compete with them. I got turned off and disgusted with the whole societal thing.”

Karin, too, did well only in those things she cared about, even though she was aware that her mother demanded perfection and that if she didn’t perform to those standards, it meant trouble. But sometimes performing to expectations was just too hard; sometimes it was a way of rebelling, one of the few ways she had. “So I just finished failing a geometry exam. No problem!” she wrote in a friend’s yearbook at the end of a school term.

Karin and Dennis shared a love of animals. She had two cats, Godfrey and Winston; there had been cats in her house as long as she could remember; affection for them was a thing she and her mother shared. Dennis’s pet was more exotic, a ferret he named Meegan, and she had become essential in his life, something to which he could talk and confide secrets as he could to nobody else.

They shared—perhaps as important as anything, for it dominated their lives—a passion for music. His, though, was not for the classics. He had little use or appreciation for them, as she had little for anything but, although he tried to win her to what he liked. He was a trombonist in the school orchestra; he also played bass and was part of a rock group with some friends that played a few gigs here and there. “I never had a lesson,” he says. “I taught myself. I could pick up the trombone, most instruments, and be able to play.” He had a dream. He would be a rock star, a composer and performer. As their attachment deepened and became more intimate, as they began to look to the future, he wrote Karin:

I have a dream of being famous like a rock star. I really want that for me, but I’m not sure you do. To begin with, it would mean extensive travel for me and a pretty hectic life. Most of the hard part will be while you’re still in college. Hard meaning travel, low budget, cruddy living, etc. You know, struggling band stuff. But if all works out o.k., then the band will be at midlife and at peak forte by the time we get married in 7–9 years. I will be about 26 or 27 then and about 9 months out of every two years would be spent “on the road.” That’s 9 months straight through—then 18 for rest and recording. I dream of living that way, but there’s no way I could ask you to live out my dream. You must live out dreams of your own. You have an incredible future for yourself. Don’t follow my half-assed, fluke-of-a-life future when you’ve got so much more. By the time I’m 30, or 35, my career should be waning, or at an end, and I’ll be rich enough to make us happy forever. Millions, Karin. What scares the hell out of me is, what if this doesn’t work out?

Still, he wrote poems to her, lyrics, perhaps, for the rock songs he would compose:

You are my fantasy

You are my friend

Together we will be.

Beyond the end

You are my love

You are my life

You are my density

You will be my wife (ha ha)

We’ll always be special

We’ll always be right

But oh how I wish

You were with me tonight

I love you gorgeous.…

Classical music was her world, and in her dream she would be the star of the concert halls as Dennis would be of the rock arenas. But these were impossible dreams, fantasies, and both their lives were dominated by fantasies.

“Karin,” her first teacher said a long time later, “was not as good as I first thought she would be. There was something blocking her talent and development as she got older. She did not live up to expectations. She became an average student, and she should have been a very good one.”

As for Dennis, “His intelligence took over,” a friend who played in a group with him says. “He could literally hear a song once he’d never heard before and follow along the rest of the song. I don’t think I could do that, and I’ve been a musician all my life, both my parents are musicians. Playing with Dennis was really easy. He could just pick up out of nowhere. I’d play off the top of my head and he’d pick up. I play bass on and off, but I could never do what he did. But his intelligence took over, so it was no secret that he wasn’t the greatest bass player ever.”

That was, indeed, what he feared, for he realized it was true. “Where do I get a job and with what qualifications?” he wrote to Karin. “There’s always the very strong possibility that I may take the safer, though probably not quite so lucrative, path that I’m on now. Give up my dreams for assured happiness with you. I still love you, my Karin. Still and always will.” Giving up that dream, sooner or later, was something he knew he would have to do. “It was frustrating,” he says. “I knew what I wanted to do, how I wanted to play, but there was a wall surrounding me and there was no way I could get through that wall. Almost everything I ever wanted to do, I wanted to reach out for, there was that wall surrounding me. So I knew I’d never make it in music.”

They were sure, in these early summer days of 1986, that what they felt for each other was different from anything they had experienced in the past. This, they became convinced, was love, real love, true love. “I’ve always been more of an analytical person, covering my emotions,” Dennis says. “Karin opened me. I never felt that before. She made me a complete person for the first time in my life.”

Dennis had a job by then, a full-time one. He had worked at a supermarket since the time he was old enough, earning enough money to support his car, that MG, and have some to spend on what he wanted. But that wasn’t the kind of job he wanted once he graduated from high school. College might lie somewhere in the future, but not now. He would pass it up for the moment and get a job that would make use of his skills with the computer and would earn him some money. He might have gone to work for his father’s computer consulting firm, for which he had done work over the summers in the past. He decided to pass up that chance. At some time in the future he could always go to work there, just as he was sure he could also decide to go on to college if he ever wanted. Now he got a job with an insurance company, Aetna Life and Casualty, and he was earning $375 a week. It was enough money to buy anything Karin might want or anything he might want to give her.

Late one Saturday afternoon in mid-June they drove into Hartford and had what Dennis called a picnic. It turned into a momentous day in their relationship. “Not in a very long time have I enjoyed another person’s company as much,” Dennis wrote. “We do get along wonderfully. Our picnic turned out to be a sign stealing fest and secretly I was amazed and amused by her brazen talent, and iron nerves for this. What a good day.”

Remembering the same escapade, Karin wrote that they wandered all over Hartford, having a wonderful time, particularly stealing signs off the fences and walls of the Civic Center, the parking lot by the State Capitol and elsewhere.

With the stolen signs in the trunk of Dennis’s MG, they were unwilling just to drive back home, say good-bye, and go their own ways for the rest of the evening. They went to a movie.

According to Karin, all they did was hold hands.

Dennis had fuller memories, as he confided to his diary:

By interpreting what she said after the movie, we weren’t gonna go home right away and she wasn’t hungry. At my best guess, we ended up down at the Meadows. It made me happy to find her so overwhelmed by the area which I managed, for so long, to take for granted. Again I was amazed and amused and even grateful of her appreciation. It was a beautiful night. Now, in all honesty, what progressed in the car went far beyond my most aggressive feelings. Without getting intently graphic, I might say that what happened did so very fast. Never were my intentions that. Not on a “first date.”

In Karin’s diary she wrote that once they left the movie theater they drove down to a field at the edge of the Connecticut River. There Dennis kissed her for the first time. “Very interesting,” she wrote. It was after two in the morning by the time they reached the condos on Butternut Drive. Joyce was waiting up. She was furious. She lashed out at Karin with all her vitriol. But to Karin’s surprise and delight, Joyce did not declare Dennis off limits; indeed, she said that Karin could even see him again the next day.

After midnight the next day Dennis wrote about his reactions:

Last night, when we got home, I was told a small battalion of police were combing the town. I didn’t get much sleep for the first four hours I lay in bed. Sunday, today, I was to call and see if we were going out for dinner that night. I’ll not describe how scared I was making that call. I even talked, at first, with an odd voice in case her mother answered in wrath. I was prepared to say it was only Sean. But Karin answered and by some miracle, it seemed to me, her mother was forgiving and understanding about the whole thing. Dinner was off for that night, but I sensed some tension in Karin’s voice. To me something else sounded wrong. The way she said, “Well, I guess I’ll talk to you sometime … call me tomorrow,” has unsettled me to no end. The fact that my brother later told me that Mrs. Aparo had wanted me arrested did not help. Oh god.

For the first time in over a year, or more, I feel emotion stirred deep, deep within me. For some reason I feel I just can’t, no matter what, lose this girl. I’ve fallen for her completely, and it is the most unthinkable fear which causes my worst thoughts. All I want is to talk openly and honestly. To Karin I would be nothing other than open, honest, and sincere. We need a chance, because what’s inside me now is a feeling much like love. Please understand. What am I going to say to her later this morning? Please.

One of the things he did say when he saw her was that they must make definite plans for dinner together. It would be, both decided, their first real date. They had been talking about it for a couple of weeks, since just before the end of school. He had even given her a list of possible restaurants and asked her to choose one. They settled on one of Glastonbury’s best, Blacksmith’s Tavern. “We planned,” Karin said, “an evening that reeked of class.” There would be that dinner, and then, Dennis promised, he would drive her to a hill from which they would have a spectacular night view of Hartford.

It didn’t happen on the night they originally planned. But it did finally on June 25, 1986. They had dinner and then drove around the town, Dennis stopping and kissing her every few minutes. They parked on a hill with a breathtaking view, and Dennis told her he was falling in love with her. They talked about that and about trusting and respecting each other, and then they drove to an area where new houses were being built, where they parked in one of the driveways. They sat in his car and talked about the future, talked about going away together for what they called a honeymoon. She agreed, but on one condition. Before she could spell that out, he asked her to marry him. She said yes. And then they planned their wedding and reception, and a honeymoon trip to Vienna, and even the house in which they would live on their return.

They were home by ten. Karin went to bed. A few minutes later she heard a tapping at her window screen. It was Dennis. She turned out the lights and went over to the window. He had, he said, come to say good-night.

When he was gone, she took a piece of paper and wrote him a letter, then put it in their private mailbox in her window for him to pick up in the morning. She wrote that she wanted to tell him that she had just come home from a truly wonderful night with a wonderful person in a wonderful car, and that they had talked about wonderful things, and that even without the place and the car and the night, it would still have been wonderful, but the person she had been with had made it perfect. He was, she wrote, very special, and her only fear was that she might lose him. “I want to keep you around … yes, forever. Forever and a day.”

But a separation lay just ahead, and even though only temporary, it loomed to them as forever. Karin had been baby-sitting for some neighbors, Kennedy Hudner and his wife, for the past year. In mid-July the Hudners were going to Cape Cod for vacation. They had asked Karin to go along with them, and she had agreed. It would get her out of the house and away from her mother for a couple of weeks, and that was, to her, a prospect much to be desired. Her relationship with her mother was at best volatile; Joyce’s demands often seemed to her extreme, and nothing Karin did was ever enough, ever satisfactory. She needed room and rarely had it. The Hudners were offering her some of that necessary space.

But when the Hudners returned to Glastonbury, Karin would not be returning with them. Her mother had arranged for the two of them to go to Nantucket for a short vacation of their own, and that would mean they would be in close proximity all the time they were on the island. There would not even be the kind of limited freedom she enjoyed when Joyce was off at her job. There would be only Joyce. And Dennis would be far away, back in Glastonbury.

Then Joyce offered an option that made the trip inviting. Dennis had driven Joyce to her job at Athena in Waterbury on several occasions, they had talked during those rides and she had grown increasingly fond of him. Now she suggested to him, and he eagerly accepted, a chance for him and Karin to be together. Why, she asked, didn’t he go with them to Nantucket? When he said yes, she booked a room for him at the same hotel at which they were staying.

Karin was delighted at the prospect, and not merely because it meant that she and Dennis would be together. He would also be a buffer between her and Joyce, for relations between mother and daughter had been deteriorating over recent weeks, another of those cycles through which she had lived as long as she could remember, things steadily getting worse between them until something happened to cause an improvement. Perhaps Dennis could be that something.

On July 6 she wrote in her diary that she was in trouble again with Joyce, though she didn’t spell out the cause of the trouble, and had been grounded, forbidden to see anyone. She was, as a result, very lonely, missing Dennis and hoping that he hadn’t forgotten her. “Could cry but no tears. Could scream but no voice. Could die but no heart. Must go on in silence, closed silence.”

In another entry the next day she wrote that she was still, and again, in trouble with Joyce, that Joyce was threatening to take away her violin, was even threatening to hit her with the violin, as she had before. Karin didn’t know why; she didn’t know what she had done. “Being a teenager is not my fault!” Maybe if Joyce did actually use the violin as a club, it would clear the fog that seemed to envelop Karin.

That daze may well have been the result of the mounting intensity in her romance with Dennis as much as anything else. They were seeing each other constantly. Dennis had no time for anything but work and Karin. His friends saw him hardly at all, and when they did, he was not the old Dennis; he was distracted, interested only in Karin. Karin, too, had little time for much but the chores her mother set for her, her violin lessons and practice, the tasks, Joyce set for her as a nursing home volunteer, the work for Archbishop Whealon—and Dennis. If they missed a day, it was as though they had been apart forever. When together, they seemed increasingly unable to control their emotions, and perhaps nothing is so uncontrollable as the sex drives of teenagers.

One day Dennis wrote:

To Karin: A Note

Have you come up with a “sure fire” method of taking care of, well, my “problem?”

I HOPE SO DEAR. I also love you.

The notes went back and forth, Karin responding in kind. Then, on July 7, while sitting at his computer at work, he took a piece of Aetna stationery and wrote:

Hi Karin. This program is bugging me out. Totally. I can’t concentrate. Well, about 45 minutes after I left your house, I finally did regain my concentration. However, I am now suffering from something worse than that. There is a lewd term used among males, but it is generally not discussed among mixed company. Point is—it is painful and comes from being “stimulated” beyond or to the limits of concentration, but not quite totally. Pain doesn’t quite do it justice. Agony—maybe. We’ll have to find a solution soon. So, are you going to total my concentration now, or what? GO FOR IT!!! Oh my.

Two days later, on July 9, they took a ride early in the day to celebrate a new car Dennis had just bought. The MG was gone. In its place was a Triumph Spitfire, another sports car. And, he told her, he was about to get a special license plate for it. That plate would read DEN-KAR. They rode, and then they returned to the Aparo condo. That afternoon, Karin wrote in her diary, she and Dennis became engaged. The ring he gave her to seal the promise was a twist tie made of yellow and blue string. And then they made love—for the first time.

Dennis celebrated by writing to her, putting the note in their secret mailbox:

Yesterday morning was absolutely wonderful. You don’t know how much mental anguish I’ve put myself through over the last few weeks concerning the subject. That is all over now, because you are wonderful. In my own way, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Actually, I think that’s the reason I feel lousy. I’ve been working myself up to a peak, or forte lately in preparation for our “special time.” I peaked out, did well, and now I’m on a slide down. It’s only because I have to concentrate on everything I do so much. You’re right—we deserve an “A” and you could’ve fooled me about not knowing any better. Oh my.

Over the next week they made love together several more times, both because it seemed natural and because they wanted to hold on to each other in anticipation of the absence to come when Karin went to the Cape. They took precautions, but suddenly it looked as though they hadn’t worked. Karin’s period was late. She was sure she was pregnant. They bought a pregnancy test kit to find out. She wasn’t. Dennis wrote:

I love you, I love you. If I seem in “high spirits,” don’t think it’s because I don’t care. I care as much as you. Another thing, it’s not your fault. All right? Now about this blood thing. Well, seeing as how there’s six inches of you and eight of me, one is to expect blood. Believe me, I’ve heard this before. It comes with the territory, so to speak. It may last one or two days and that is why it stings. If it were anything else it wouldn’t sting at all. I know these things. I love you, I love you. It’s good you cried, but don’t you worry. I know, I know—how can you not worry? Believe in us. It’ll be o.k. I’ve really got a good feeling about this. There is no doubt. I WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU! Especially not now.

Now that Dennis was hers, she began to talk about things that she had only hinted at before. Again and again, in the days before she was to leave for the Cape, Dennis says, “she told me how she felt oppressed and possessed by her mother. She went into a lot of details about her life, about the things her mother had done to her, kind of telling me her life story like you do with someone. She told me about the time when she tried to commit suicide and a lot of other things. At first it wasn’t like she was saying, ‘Please kill my mother.’ It was more, ‘I wish my mother were dead, or I wish somehow I could change that relationship.’”

How? he asked, pushing aside then any idea of death as a way to change the situation. Did she have any ideas?

If only she could move out, she said.

If she wanted to do that, if it were possible, then he would give her a place to stay. He would ask his mother or father, and he was sure either would take her in. Both of them had grown fond of her; she had baked bread for them, something she did well, something she had learned from her mother. She had done other small favors to win them.

She said, if only he could be her guardian, then he could be responsible for her and that would solve so many problems.

When they had time, they agreed, they would investigate to see if that were possible.

On July 19 Karin left for the Cape with the Hudners. Dennis promised to drive up for a day. He did just that, appearing at the Hudners’ on a Tuesday. When he arrived, she wrote in her diary, she gave him a gold chain she had bought for ninety-seven dollars, a bargain because it was half price. He stayed over and that night crept into her room. They made love, taking precautions this time so that there would be no fear of pregnancy (the precautions, she wrote, did what they were supposed to, and she got her period two days later), and then he went to sleep in her closet. It was, she noted, the day that Prince Andrew married Sarah Ferguson. “Yes,” she concluded, “Denny’s mine.”

Indeed, he was. He had thought during the early stages of their romance that he was the leader, the dominant force, the white knight come riding on his charger to woo and win and rescue his lady fair, trapped, he believed from all she was telling him, in some dark tower. He had her wrapped around his finger, he told friends and later told a psychiatrist. All that changed now. Karin became dominant, Dennis, people later said, her slave. His letters to her were more and more filled with pleadings: “Don’t ever leave me … I don’t know what I would do without you … I need you.… You are my life.” Anything she wanted he would get for her, he told her; anything she wanted him to do he would do without question. “I promise to make you happy and I’ll try my absolute, most hardest to give you whatever you want. And don’t think I wouldn’t give my life for you right now if I had to. Even if you asked. But don’t ’cause I need to be with you.”

What he didn’t realize then was that she was about to put those promises to the test.

* Remarks delivered to the American Psychoanalytic Society in 1938 and published in 1942 in English as “Some Forms of Emotional Disturbance and Their Relationship to Schizophrenia” in Psychoanalytic Quarterly.