Beyond Obsession by Richard; Hammer Page A

with the baton. But her mother would have none of his dreams. In front of the children she constantly derided him, sneered at him, berated him for spending his time and money on useless things while she was forced to struggle just to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. Her wrath, though, was not limited to words and gestures; on a number of occasions she turned on him with her fists, with frying pans, with whatever was available. He never struck back. Finally, Joyce said, thoroughly beaten, all his hope and dreams gone, he committed suicide.
    There is nothing in the local newspapers to support Joyce’s tale, but, then, a poor man’s suicide was rarely noted or reported, and suicides in Catholic families were often hidden, the death attributed to other more natural causes.
    Her brothers and sisters, she later told a friend, were older so that she had little to do with them. She rarely saw any of them after they left, saw them not at all during the last decade of her life.
    To another friend she confided that her brothers and sisters had made her life miserable. Just like her mother. They picked on her constantly, ridiculed her because she was too smart, because she was stubborn and had a mind of her own, because she was a rebel in a home where conformity and traditional values were not merely the norm and expected but demanded and because she was attractive, never without beaux flocking to her. She prided herself on her intelligence, her talents and her ambitions. But she was not quite so confident about her beauty. Her large dark eyes were all right, one of her best features, and her dark hair was thick and soft. But she hated her nose, thought it too large, too Italian. A long time later, in the early 1980s, she finally did something about it. She had it bobbed. A friend remembers meeting her in the Gallery restaurant in Glastonbury shortly afterward. “Joyce came in, and she was grinning. She always had this big grin whenever I saw her. And she was just preening. She said, ‘How do you like my new nose? I finally had something done to it.’ You know, I didn’t even notice it at first. I guess they did a good job because it fitted her face.”
    Very early she announced that she had no intention of following the accepted path laid out for the youngest daughter in a poor Italian family. She would not find a husband as soon as possible, marry without finishing school and then spend the rest of her life cooking, cleaning and raising a large family, modeling herself after her mother and sisters. She was going to finish school, go on to college and then carve out her own career in the professional world. She would make her mark. If a husband came along at some time, all well and good, but she was not going to go out looking for one and holding her breath until she found him. Her pronouncement, she said, served only to exacerbate an already oppressive situation.
    That’s not the way her sister Ina saw it. Joyce, she said, was the pampered youngest child, catered to by everyone in the family, including her sisters and brothers, given things that were denied them. While they were made to toe the mark, follow all the rules and do what was expected of them, and woe if they didn’t, Joyce was allowed to do pretty much what she wanted and, even when she broke the rules, was rarely punished severely. “Joyce,” she said, “was showered with a lot of attention as she was growing up since she had the advantage of older sisters and older brothers and a myriad of cousins. She was also fortunate in that economic times were better and my parents were able to give her dancing lessons, art lessons and a college education. Joyce was a very intelligent girl but also a very manipulative person.”
    She was also a lonely child. Even her mother, Rose Cantone, who now lives with daughter Ina, says that Joyce “grew up more or less alone.” Because, people who knew her say, she