Last Dance, Last Chance

Smith’s death, and it was clear then that her world revolved around her husband. So, apparently, did the world of her mother-in-law, and Tony himself certainly saw himself as the central person in the universe.
    The D.A.’s personnel always referred to Dr. Anthony Pignataro as Mr. Tony Pignataro, ignoring his pretentious “Anthony” and refusing to call him Dr., fully aware that he had long since lost his medical license.
    Sharon’s assignment in the investigation was to help Debbie build some confidence and at the same time try to find information for the state about the crimes against Debbie. “And, personally,” Sharon recalled, “I wanted to help her walk through this.”
    Sharon knew that it was going to be a long ordeal, although even she could not have known how long. Initially, her most challenging goal was to help Debbie Pignataro focus on herself instead of on her husband. She had seen herself as an extension of Anthony for two decades and had always put herself second.
    “‘I just want to hear about Debbie Pignataro,’” I said. “And she couldn’t seem to grasp that.”
    “Tell me about Debbie,” Sharon would say, and Debbie would look at her, confused. Somewhere along the way, the real Debbie had gotten lost. It was almost impossible for her to verbalize who she was, what her hopes and dreams were, what she liked to do. She was “the doctor’s wife,” or “Ralph and Lauren’s mom,” and she knew how to be those people, but she had forgotten how to ask for anything for herself.
    “She couldn’t even see her life without Tony, although she always called him Anthony,” Sharon recalled. “That’s how she defined herself. She’d always start with ‘and then Anthony…Everything was described through his eyes. She started in the middle of her life, and I asked her to go back to the beginning of her life.”
    After Debbie had been told for twenty years that she was too fat, too dumb, too clumsy, and too unimportant to deserve a man like Anthony Pignataro, it wasn’t easy for her to find any self-confidence. It was harder when she was well nigh paralyzed. But Debbie began to look forward to Sharon’s visits.
    “It was a process,” Sharon said. “I’ve been trying to think if I can recall a specific time when Debbie realized that Tony was trying to kill her, but I come up with nothing. I think that’s because the first time I spoke with her in the hospital, I sensed that she knew it was him but didn’t—or wouldn’t—believe it.”
    Sharon kept asking Debbie to recall her life from birth to the present without talking about her husband. And that almost made Debbie tongue-tied. She had a very difficult time visualizing her life except in its connection to Anthony. Slowly, Debbie was able to tell about how she felt and what had happened to her. Sometimes, Sharon would interrupt and comment on how difficult and heartbreaking some events of her life must have been. The deaths of her baby girl and of her father had been tremendous losses. Both women ended up in tears.
    “That’s just too much,” Sharon said later, as she evaluated how tragic Debbie’s life had been. “You’ve gone through all this with your husband—which had to be major denial, even while you’re sitting in the courtroom and watching him being sentenced. And you said, ‘Yeah, the world’s trying to screw Anthony and us’—and it was genuine. It wasn’t the way most people blame the system. And then you went through the girlfriend—and the letter. Bad enough something like this happens…”
    She broke off. She hadn’t been able to say it aloud to Debbie. She was nowhere near ready to face it.
    Sharon voiced her own feelings about how steadfastly loyal Debbie had been to her husband and her family, always the supportive partner in the marriage. Debbie needed to hear that. Even though she was a woman in pain, her limbs frozen by paralysis, she still felt guilty, as if she had failed or somehow hadn’t done enough for her family.
    As they moved through the years to the present—late summer, 1999—Sharon asked Debbie to help her with a timeline on when she began to be sick and how her illness had progressed. Again, she focused on how this affected Debbie —that it was her story. It was easier for Debbie to look at it that way, rather than to talk about what was essentially a criminal act—a criminal act that her own husband had almost certainly committed.
    “I could tell that all this woman