...And Never Let HerGo

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 fundthat 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 lawfirm. 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