...And Never Let HerGo

And all the time he still loved her, and he put us [in line] behind her at a very critical time of our lives. And so we were really left to fend for ourselves. We all reacted differently. I continued to placate.”
    But sixteen-year-old Debby was finally angry at her mother. She had bailed out on the family, and Debby refused to talk to her for a year. “Then I came around to realizing she couldn’t help it; she was sick.”
    D EBBY M AC I NTYRE met Dave Williams when she was a junior at Tatnall. She had broken up with her boyfriend the week before the prom, and a friend set her up with Dave. He was quite short but handsome, with wavy dark hair. He was an escape from all that was going on at home.
    “No one guided me about choosing a husband—or anything else,” Debby remembered. “My home life was terrible. Dave came into my life, and he was my savior. And all the time it was a match that never should have happened. But my dad always said I was impressionable. Later, he said, ‘I knew it wouldn’t work—but you were so impressionable that nothing I said would have made a darn bit of difference. You were so stubborn, so determined that you were going to make it work.’ ”
    Debby and Dave dated all through high school, and continued to go together when she went off to Mt. Vernon College for Girls in Washington, D.C. She dated other boys casually, but she always planned to marry Dave.
    Mt. Vernon was a two-year college, and Debby MacIntyre graduated salutatorian in her class, with honors. She earned a Phi Beta Kappa key, but she burned out and decided she didn’t want to go back to college. She took a year of business courses, where the pressure to excel academically wasn’t nearly so strong. After that she still didn’t feel like going back to college, so she got a job as a receptionist in a brokerage firm.
    Debby loved Dave and she was emotionally dependent upon him. She would always feel safer with men than with women. Even though her father had often chosen his wife over his children, she had come to understand that her mother was more helpless than she was, and that her father loved her; it was just that he loved her mother more. Dave would love
her
more, and she visualized marrying him and being the most important person in someone else’s life for the first time.
    “I do think that I loved Dave,” Debby said later. “I told him that I loved him. I’m not sure how capable I was of understanding what that meant. I thought that I was going to have a wonderful, happy life with Prince Charming.”
    Dave graduated from college in 1972 and had been accepted atlaw school. He and Debby were married at St. Anthony’s Church in Wilmington at noon on June 17, 1972. Father Roberto Balducelli performed the Catholic ceremony. Coincidentally, Debby and Dave were married at the very moment that Kay and Tom Capano were having their wedding ceremony in Connecticut.
    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