And Never Let Her Go (10 page)

Debby was twenty-one when she married Dave. They lived their first summer with his parents. It was a “terrible,
terrible
summer,” according to Debby. “His father was an alcoholic, but of course, I didn't know anything else.” She felt as if she had been plunged back into the situation she had tried so hard to escape.

In the fall, the young Williamses moved to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where Dave went to law school at Dickinson College. Now Debby wanted so much to go back to college, but that opportunity was gone; she had to work to put her husband through school. She worked for a year in Harrisburg as a secretary to a man who had a government grant. When that funding was phased out, she got a job in a bank as a teller. She couldn't look for a career job because they had to move back to Wilmington each summer so Dave could do his law clerk internship.

Debby's marriage was not what she had hoped it would be. It's quite possible that no marriage could have been. Starved so long for attention and love, she still longed for a Prince Charming who would put her first in his life, sweep her off her feet, pay
attention
to her. But Dave had never had that kind of personality, and he wasn't naturally demonstrative. They never fought, never had an argument. Their relationship was very quiet and controlled. It always had been, but Debby thought that would change.

She was stunned when she finally realized that Dave wasn't the man she thought she was marrying. And of course, he wasn't. He immersed himself in his law studies, and she found herself alone in a strange town. “He had no friends—
we
had no friends, other than a few people I'd met at work,” Debby said. “We had a very lonely existence. I was very lonely.” But still anxious to please and to make everyone around her happy, she did all the wifely things as well as working. She kept the house clean and even took up needlepoint to make the time pass.

After Dave finished his first year at Dickinson, they bought a little house in Deerhurst, just east of the Concord Pike, in the area where Lou Capano had built dozens of homes. They bought it for an investment; they would rent it out while they were in Carlisle, and then hoped to move into it when Dave got his law degree. Debby's money paid for the house—she used some of a trust fund
that had been established for her. Although money would never really be a problem for her now, she always preferred working to being alone at home.

In 1975, they
did
move into the Deerhurst house, and Dave studied for the bar exam. He passed and was accepted to the Delaware bar that October. He was, in Debby's words, “a workaholic, very, very focused. He was very thorough and he worked very hard.”

Debby had to face reality. She had believed she was lonely when her husband was in law school because they were so far from home. But now they
were
home, and nothing had changed. “I remember sitting in our den, alone, one night, and I was
miserable.
I still remember that moment. But I was so out of touch with my feelings that I didn't know why. I was twenty-six then. I was trying to get pregnant and I couldn't. I thought if I had a baby, that would make me happy—and I couldn't even do that.”

Debby went back to college and she felt better. She was doing something for herself and had a modicum of control over her own life. She got involved in Junior League and all manner of volunteer activities. “I tried to fill my time,” she said. “And that worked for a little while, and then, finally, my daughter was born. I was so happy, and Dave became the most affectionate father in the world—to
her.
He showered her with so much love. I saw a side to him that I never knew existed.”

Although she was thrilled that Dave was a wonderful father, Debby felt a certain bleakness, too. She had never been the recipient of any of the kind of affection and outpouring of love her husband was apparently capable of. Inside, although she didn't understand it then, she was still the little girl who had done everything she could to please, to make people happy, so they would love her and notice her. And she was still alone. She was a good mother and she loved caring for her daughter, Victoria.* Dave was a great father, a hard worker, but she was “just there.”

Debby and Dave were moving in divergent paths that took them further and further away from each other. She sought out pursuits that made her happy. She studied art, became remarkably adept with a camera, and doted on her baby. When they did anything social together, it was usually with other couples from Dave's law firm: Morris, James, Hitchens & Williams. The “Williams” was Dave's father, but Dave's job was anything but nepotistic; he would become a very skilled labor attorney.

Debby enjoyed the get-togethers with their peers from the law
firm. The wives were all attractive, well educated, and fun. Although she no longer believed that she was particularly attractive, in her late twenties Debby was
very
pretty. She was slim and blond, with her hair styled in the blunt short cut that skater Dorothy Hamill made famous.

But she was definitely not a femme fatale. She almost always had a baby on her hip and a diaper bag on the other arm. But most of all, her attitude was not that of a woman who was sending out signals. She believed she had failed at marriage, failed to please her husband enough so that he would love her.

D
EBBY
was twenty-seven when she met Tom Capano in 1977 at one of the law firm's functions. When Debby was pregnant with Victoria in the fall of 1978, she and Dave went to a lunch that Kay and Tom had at their Seventeenth Street house. “We all became friendly—we all had similar interests and young children,” Debby said. “There was a group of us that became more and more involved socially.”

By that time, the Williamses had moved into a little Cape Cod house near the house Debby had grown up in, near the Bancroft Parkway and Rockford Park. Her mother, despite all her excesses and mental problems, was still alive and living in her own apartment in Pennsylvania, and her father still took care of her—but Sheila wasn't available to Debby any more than she had ever been. Debby and her sister were not close, her brothers were far away, and she had no one but her father to talk to about the things that worried her.

Debby wouldn't recall having felt any special attraction to Tom Capano when she first met him. He seemed to be a nice person, and a very friendly person. He did not, however, impress her any more than the other men who worked with her husband. But later on, when he began to take a special interest in her, that mattered a lot. “I wasn't happy in my marriage,” she said. “I didn't know how unhappy I was for a long time. My relationship with Tom wasn't the reason for my divorce, but he fulfilled something in my life that I wasn't getting in my marriage. He actually paid
attention
to me. He appeared to genuinely care for me—to like me, to be interested in me as a friend. And I was very flattered because my husband didn't seem to be any of those things.”

The group of friends from the law firm grew much closer together in the late seventies and early eighties. “We were all affectionate with each other,” Debby said. “And flirtatious, I guess. We hugged each other and kissed good-bye. Tom wasn't any more or less flirtatious than anyone. None of it meant anything.”

Debby really liked Tom because he was so much fun and so charming, and because he seemed like such a good husband. He was openly affectionate to Kay in a way she had never known in her own marriage. It was New Year's Eve of 1980, at a party for the firm's younger set, when everything changed. Debby was headed down a hallway when Tom grabbed her and pulled her into a bathroom. “He leaned me up against the sink,” she remembered, “and said, ‘I cannot control myself anymore—I am madly in love with you.' ”

“You couldn't be,” she stammered.

“Of course I could. You are the most natural . . . the most loving . . . the most
giving
woman I've ever known.”

Tom had just told Debby exactly the things she had longed to hear for most of her life. “I hadn't heard things like that from any man—
ever.
I was literally starving for affection, my marriage was empty, but I wasn't dealing with it.”

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.”

D
EBBY
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.

I
N
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.