She looked at Tom and laughed and said, “You’re crazy,” even as she wanted to believe what he was saying. “I was so guilt ridden the next morning,” she said, “even though nothing happened. It was my own response that made me feel guilty.”
Tom called Debby later in the week and apologized, but he was also opening the door a little wider. And he continued to call her. He knew what to say and he knew how to flatter her. “He hooked me,” she would remember. “I think he looked for a person like me. I think he was such a good reader of vulnerable women.”
DEBBY did not begin a physical affair with Tom right away, but she might as well have. She thought about him all the time, and if she forgot for an hour or so, he was on the phone, complimenting, persuading, cajoling in his soft, deep, and ultimately compelling voice. She knew her marriage was in serious danger. Up until the stolen kiss on New Year’s Eve and Tom’s declaration of his love for her, she had coasted in her marriage and looked for appropriate ways to fill her time. She had never allowed herself to think of divorce. Certainly, she had never considered having an affair.
Now with Tom importuning her constantly, she could think of little else. Debby had married with the full intention of being married forever, seeing Dave Williams not only as the love of her life but as a haven and a protector. Nine years later, she knew the marriage wasn’t working, although it would be a long time after that before she understood her own unrealistic expectations and see why it never could have succeeded.
And nine years later, she was as desperate to be loved as she had ever been. That made her a sitting duck for Tom Capano’s blandishments and protestations of utter devotion. It never occurred to Debby that she was probably not the first woman Tom had focused on. “He made me feel that I was so exclusive—that I was the woman he had never had and always yearned for.”
Debby’s feelings for Tom were all mixed up with the fact that she and Kay Capano had become friends; they exercised together, talked about babies, and formed play groups for their toddlers with the other young mothers in the group. She had no idea how Kay and Tom got along, however. Debby was chatty and Kay was not; she never spoke of her marriage in any intimate way. In the end, her fondness for Kay made Debby feel a great deal of guilt, but she didn’t seem able, nonetheless, to stop what was happening. “I felt terrible about what I was doing. I had a conscience enough to know that it would be wrong, but I was just so compelled by his persistence.”
It took almost five months, but Tom was finally able to convince Debby that it was all right for them to be together, and they made love for the first time in late May 1981. He suggested that it would be kindest to everyone for them to keep their relationship secret, and that was, of course, the only thing they could do. The place Tom selected for a regular sexual rendezvous was as trite and predictable as a B movie: the Motel 6 on Route 9 near the Delaware Memorial Bridge. “I told my husband that I was taking a course once a week at the University of Delaware, but I was really meeting Tom in a motel,” Debby recalled. “Looking back on it, it was very demeaning, but I did it. I don’t even like to talk about it now.”
Once the affair began, Debby felt even greater guilt and regret for what she was doing to people who trusted her. It never occurred to her how much she might be harming herself and her already poor self-image. When she was with Tom, he said all the words and phrases that soothed her conscience and made her feel like a valuable and beloved woman. But as soon as he was gone, the terrible doubts and yawning emptiness came back—worse than ever.
Debby finally realized she couldn’t go on with the affair and she told Tom that she had to try to salvage her marriage. Kay was pregnant for the second time, and there certainly was no real future for Debby with Tom Capano. At first she wasn’t upset to learn that Kay and Tom were still sexually intimate; she had never really expected him to stay with her long. For as far back as she could remember, people had moved in and out of Debby’s life. She vowed to try harder in her marriage, and it seemed to her that giving Dave another child might bring them closer.
She became pregnant almost at once, and her pregnancy was a welcome release. She didn’t have to worry about Tom’s persuasive arguments that they were meant to be together when she was heavily pregnant with her husband’s child. She and Kay continued their easy friendship—much easier now for Debby. They walked together, talked about babies, and she tried to forget that she had betrayed both Kay and her own husband. It was over.
IN February of 1982, Kay Capano gave birth to a second daughter—Katie. Tom was ecstatic with his olive-skinned baby girl. A few months later, Debby and Dave Williams had a chunky blond son they named Steven.* Although Dave was thrilled to have a son, a new baby wasn’t the answer to a failing marriage. Nothing between Debby and Dave had changed. And it wasn’t long before Tom was back in her life.
And then, as if in punishment for her unfaithfulness, Debby’s family plunged into eighteen months of one crisis after another. Her mother-in-law had a stroke, there were deaths in her extended family, and worst of all, her four-year-old daughter, Victoria, was diagnosed with a severe kidney disorder. In April of 1983, to save her life, it was necessary to remove one of her kidneys.
“It sounds awful,” Debby would recall, “but I was almost thankful that there were so many things that I had to deal with—because then I didn’t have to face the issue of my marriage, which was looming over me.”
In June of that same year, she confronted her feelings and knew that she didn’t love her husband. They no longer spoke, and they lived separate lives. A man she could never have was telling her constantly how much he loved her and needed her, while the man she lived with apparently found nothing valuable about being with her. When Debby tried to discuss her feelings with her husband, he told her that she was obviously disturbed and needed help. He suggested that she go to a psychiatrist.
“I thought about it for a while,” she said. “And then I did.” She went to a therapist she had seen in high school after her mother left the family, and for the first time, she told her father that she was miserable in her marriage—and that she was having an affair. “I didn’t tell him that it was Tom Capano. I never told anyone.”
The therapist suggested that her marriage might have deteriorated to a point where a trial separation was needed. Sometimes a separation can show people they really do care for each other. And sometimes it shows them that they do not. “I looked at it all as a temporary situation,” Debby said. “I really didn’t think that this relationship I was having with Tom Capano was impacting my marriage. That was so foolish of me.” And when she suggested the trial separation to her husband, he agreed at once. “Only, he said that it was over. No trial separation. It would be a divorce. Just like that.”
And it was.
Debby’s marriage was irrevocably broken in October of 1983. She and the children remained in the little white Cape Cod home on Dickinson Lane where they had lived since May of 1979. Victoria was almost five, and Steven was eighteen months old.
Tom had been very supportive of Debby’s decision to confront her husband. He had listened to her worries and fears and reassured her that things would be fine. “It was a shock to me when it ended so quickly,” Debby recalled. “But it did. I wasn’t scared, because I could support myself and the children financially. Emotionally, I had support from my family. I had Tom Capano and I thought I actually had someone in him who cared for me quite a bit and whom I could talk to. . . . But I knew he would never marry me. I never even considered that he would. I knew I would be fine.”
But how she needed her talks with Tom. She felt like a complete failure, full of regret and sure that the impending divorce was all her fault. “I was so full of Catholic guilt, and I still felt that there was something wrong with me because I couldn’t seem to make people happy.”
Shortly after their divorce, Debby’s ex-husband married his secretary, whose name was also Debbie. To avoid confusion, Debby took back her maiden name and started to lo
ok for a place for her and her two children to live. She would have to find something to do with the rest of her life. She would never blame Tom for the failure of her marriage; she was simply grateful that she had someone as kind as he, as passionate in her defense—someone who made her feel special and cherished.
Chapter Six
AFTER ANNE MARIE FAHEY graduated from Brandywine High School in 1984, she and her friend Beth Barnes spent the summer at Bethany Beach on the Delaware coast. They found jobs and were young enough to survive on little sleep. “We would stay up all night partying,” Beth recalled, “and go to work the next morning. I think that was the happiest time of Annie’s life.”
It may well have been. Anne Marie was legally an adult and she had made it through a tumultuous childhood. She was enthusiastic about going to college, and for the first time in a very long time, she had a place to live that was just like other girls’ her age. She was free to have fun. Their partying was innocent and hilarious. They all loved the beach, being tanned, and having little responsibility.
In the autumn, Anne Marie moved down to Dover to go to Wesley College, where she planned to major in international relations. It was more difficult now for her siblings to stay in close touch—but she was mature enough so they didn’t have to keep tabs on her. The littlest of the “little ones” had flown the nest and her wings seemed strong. They phoned as often as they could. Dover was only fifty miles from Wilmington, but it was far enough that they couldn’t just jump in the car on a whim to visit.
And that was all right; Dover was not nearly as large as Wilmington, and the college itself was small and welcoming. “It was like being in high school,” one graduate remembered. “Very safe. During that era, Wesley College wasn’t like going off to a big university.”
Anne Marie had an athletic scholarship for the hockey team and some student loans, but she would still have to work. She had always been able to find a job, and sometimes she worked at a couple of jobs at once on a part-time basis, selling the trendy clothes at the Limited in the Dover mall, or waiting tables at W. T. Smithers, a wildly popular bar. She also worked for a dentist for a while.
Anne Marie lived in one of the two dorms at Wesley College. “I remember her well,” another former student recalled. “I remember being so shy, and Anne Marie seemed to be so popular. I can picture her running in the hall on the second floor of our dorm, shouting and laughing. She was very athletic, and she was always on the go. She had lots of friends—she was very social and vivacious. I remember that she was always smiling.”
And Anne Marie was happy at Wesley; but during the times when she felt discouraged or anxious, no one but her very close friends ever knew it. She had long since mastered the art of keeping an ebullient facade, no matter what was churning beneath the surface. With her scholarships and loans, and by working whenever she could, she managed to complete the two-year program at Wesley.
Robert Fahey Sr. had continued to live with Brian at the apartment in Newark for a while, but then he’d moved to live with Kevin and Robert at their house. His health wasn’t good; years of drinking had aged him before his time, and his heart was in bad shape. He had also been diagnosed with leukemia. Once she no longer had to live with her father or depend upon him for the necessities of life, Anne Marie had made a tentative peace with him, although neither she nor her sister, Kathleen, could forget the bad years.
Robert Fahey Jr. came home on the evening of March 24, 1986, and found his father dead on the floor; he had succumbed to a heart attack. He was sixty-four. It was eleven years to the month since Kathleen Fahey had died. Now, with both her parents gone, Anne Marie was bedeviled by ugly memories that brought back the pain and the emotional chaos of living in a family dominated by alcoholism. She had repressed the recollections for so long that she had almost forgotten them, but they were there in her psyche, curled up and waiting to spring out. It was the beginning of a very difficult time for her.
At the end of October 1986, Anne Marie transferred to the University of Delaware in Newark so that she could get a four-year degree. She was twenty now, and while she had been happy at Wesley, the university, with an enrollment ten times that of Wesley, overwhelmed her. It may have been that the bigger college intimidated her, or it may have been that all the difficult experiences of her young life had worn away at her for so long that her carefully constructed defenses finally crumbled.
That semester at the university was a bad time; Anne Marie felt alone and isolated and fell into a depression. It grew harder and harder to paste on her perpetually happy mask. She stopped going to class, and the darkness of winter and the holiday season, fraught with remembrances of better—and worse—times, found her almost immobilized.
She didn’t return to the University of Delaware for a second semester; she dropped out and moved in with her brother Brian in the house he’d bought on Van Buren Street. Her depression lasted about six months, and she sought professional therapy to help her out of the black hole that trapped her.
Still, there was always a core of strength in Anne Marie that began to surface when hopelessness gripped her. She thanked her grandmother Katherine McGettigan for that. Nan was still there for Annie, showing her as she always had that people didn’t quit just because things got a little tough.
Gradually, Anne Marie worked her way up out of her despondency. She realized that she really missed Wesley College and Dover, and she decided to move in with friends there. Her decision worried her brothers and sister because she didn’t have any firm plans about finishing school or getting a job. “It was hard right after she left,” Brian recalled. “But after we got over that, we stayed in touch the same way we had before. I went down to visit a few times. She came up on weekends once in a while.”
It took Anne Marie a little time to pull things together, but she did it, and they were all relieved when she found a job as a waitress.
Wesley had become a four-year college, and that worked out perfectly. Anne Marie re-enrolled and it proved to be a good decision for her, even though she would have to work to pay her way and it would take her longer than the average student to get enough credits to graduate.
Anne Marie had a gift for friendship; she had friends that she had known since she was a girl, and she made more in college. Her best friends from grade school, Beth Barnes and Jennifer Bartels, were still close to her. Another really good friend was Jackie Binnersley, whom Anne Marie had met in the seventh grade when Jackie moved in four or five houses up the street from the Faheys; and from that point on Jackie considered Anne Marie her best friend. During one period when things were rough at home, Anne Marie had lived with the Binnersleys for several months.
AFTER she graduated from college in Rhode Island, Jackie persuaded Anne Marie to come up to Hyannis Port, on Cape Cod. It was another wonderful summer. They called each other silly nicknames and talked about their hopes and their problems. Anne Marie’s name was Annie Bananie, and sometimes Anal Annie because of her compulsive neatness.
When Anne Marie returned to Delaware, that long, good summer of 1991 was not yet over. She visited a girlfriend who was sharing a house on the Jersey shore at Sea Isle City. She also made another friend who would be very important to her: Kim Horstman. Kim, along with Jackie, Beth, and a young woman named Ginny Columbus—whose brother, Paul, Annie was dating, the first serious boyfriend she had ever had—would remain part of the inner circle of Annie’s friends.
Still, even though Anne Marie had numerous close friends, there were perhaps only three or four in whom she confided, and those who felt they knew her intimately would have been surprised to discover how impenetrable the invisible wall she hid behind really was.
ONE of Anne Marie’s professors had been particularly helpful in getting her back into Wesley. She was most adept at languages and was fluent in Spanish. The professor was married, but his wife was European and lived abroad. When Anne Marie expressed an interest in an internship in Spain, her mentor helped her facilitate that and fou
nd a Spanish family she could live with.
Brian was her closest sibling in age, and perhaps in terms of bonding. She called him Seymour. It was an inside joke and he didn’t mind. He was a man of great sensitivity who could connect without words with people he loved, and now he was concerned that Annie’s teacher might have more than a professorlike interest in her. As it turned out, he was right. Brian warned his sister about the dangers of married men, and she just grinned. Didn’t he think she had good sense? After all the waitress jobs she had had, she was perfectly capable of spotting a come-on, and also of turning it away. She told Brian that the professor had approached the subject, but he had graciously accepted her answer when she told him she would not even consider such a relationship.
“He turned out to be a nice guy,” Brian recalled.
Her time in Spain was a good experience for Anne Marie, and she longed to go back one day. It had been like a vacation from her life. Afterward, she delighted in finding people who could converse with her in Spanish, and she sprinkled Spanish phrases through her conversation when she spoke English.
Back in Dover, refreshed and feeling much more serene, Anne Marie got her degree in political science from Wesley College on May 9, 1992. She had broken up with Paul Columbus in the summer of 1991 after a three-year relationship, but they were still good friends. Although she had dated lots of men, Paul was her first serious boyfriend. He was an aeronautical engineer and a pilot now, and he had found a job in Denver. Their breakup was so benign that Anne Marie moved in with his family for a while after she graduated. She and Ginny Columbus had become dear friends, and Ginny and Paul’s mother thought of Annie as another daughter.
ANNE MARIE got another waitress job—at T.G.I. Friday’s on the Concord Pike in Wilmington—to see her through while she looked for employment that would enable her to use her degree. A friend from Wesley encouraged her to apply for an internship with the OAS—Organization of American States—in Washington, D.C., and she was accepted. She would use her fluent Spanish to translate documents.