04.Die.My.Love.2007 (4 page)

“The thing about Piper was that she believed everything she did had a purpose,” says another friend. “And that she literally had an angel with her at all times, looking out for her.”

Perhaps the crystals Piper carried in her pockets made her feel more connected to her angel. Or maybe her belief in angels harkened back to the time the house collapsed on her.

It’s not unlikely that someone told her she survived because an angel was on her shoulder, protecting her. However the belief began, it would be a connection Piper felt throughout her life, this tie to another, less physical world.

In 1978, when Piper reached the University of Texas in Austin, she was following a family tradition. Tina and their brother William had both gone to UT before her. By then all the Rountree children had spread out and started their lives. William was an attorney in Harlingen, and Tina was a registered nurse who’d married an attorney and settled in Houston.

For the first three years, Piper roomed with Lavon Guer-rero, a close friend from Harlingen. Lavon would talk fondly of those years, and how nurturing her old friend could be: “In the mornings, Piper would bring me tea in bed, and we’d talk.

She was gentle. She baked bread, and she loved animals.”

At UT, Piper majored in speech. Already fluent in Span-ish from growing up in the cross-cultural environment of the Texas/Mexican border, she studied German.

DIE, MY LOVE / 23

In the fall of 1981, Piper’s se nior year at UT, Lavon had graduated and Piper was sharing the apartment with Maureen Bemko, a fellow student with whom she’d worked on the UT yearbook. Piper paid little attention to the apartment, and when Maureen moved in, she spent a week cleaning after she found the place roach-infested and dirty, with piles of dishes in the kitchen sink. Friends asked Bemko why she lived with Piper, who they saw as odd. “No one could tell me why they felt that way,” Maureen would say later. “They just described her as ‘different.’”

Even her old friends from home wondered about Piper.

One ran into her at UT. She and Piper had been on the Harlingen High School tennis team together, and they’d both continued to play in college. The friend didn’t like to ask Piper about her angel theories or her belief in crystals, “because she’d just go on and on about them.” This partic ular day, the friend was suffering from tennis elbow. Piper, who seemed to have a crystal for every purpose, pulled one from her bag and placed it on her friend’s elbow. “We always laughed at Piper because she was so small, quirky, really cute,” says the friend, “but it was strange. My elbow stopped hurting. I really was cured.”

Maureen saw Piper as worldly, more so than she. That view was reinforced the day two cases of German champagne were delivered to the apartment for Piper. Then there was the conversation that made Maureen stop reading a book one night.

Devoted to tennis and running every morning, Piper had the body of an adolescent girl, and on campus she wore bill caps over her short dark hair, jeans, and T-shirts. She was thin, little more than 100 pounds, and small-breasted. “Maybe I’ll get breast implants,” Piper said nonchalantly that day. For the next week, she wore prostheses in her bra. At the end of the experiment, she shrugged her shoulders and announced,

“I don’t think it’s worth it. They just got in the way.”

24 / Kathryn Casey

Not long after, Piper asked Maureen if she thought it was acceptable to date older men. Maureen said she didn’t know, but soon Piper brought Fred Jablin to the apartment. Afterward she asked Maureen if Fred looked familiar. “He might,”

Piper said. “He’s a professor. One of
my
professors. But don’t tell anyone we’re dating.”

Once Piper began dating Fred Jablin, she spent less and less time at the apartment. Maureen sometimes saw Fred dropping her roommate off and picking her up in his yellow Toyota. Piper leaned over and kissed him before she left.

Daly and others on the faculty knew of the relationship. “We didn’t think anything of it because Fred wasn’t Piper’s teacher anymore,” says Daly. “It wasn’t really improper.”

By December 1981, Piper had moved out of the apartment she’d shared with Bemko and into Fred’s home on Harper’s Ferry. She lived there throughout the spring semester. The Kuentzes saw her often, jogging in the neighborhood or playing with the menagerie of animals she moved into Fred’s house and yard. She had a Siamese cat, and she bought Fred a rabbit. Before long she had pet ferrets and a bird. When he talked about the animals to Daly, Fred shrugged his shoulders and smiled, appearing delighted with the happy clutter Piper Rountree had brought into his life.

It seemed, too, that he knew how to make Piper happy. As he’d once barked through the UT hallways, he now barked in the backyard. “Fred could get every dog in the neighborhood barking with him,” Piper would later say. “He made me laugh.”

That spring, 1982, Piper graduated, with a bachelor’s degree in communication and a second major in German. Afterward she left for Germany on a

one-year scholarship,

studying at the University of Mannheim. Once she was gone, Fred seemed lost. As he had with Marie when they were married, he’d focused on the relationship, making it, along with his work, the centerpiece of his life. When he heard that DIE, MY LOVE / 25

Piper had met a man overseas, Fred flew over to reclaim her.

“It was a tumultuous relationship,” says Mark Knapp. “It was Fred wanting Piper and being willing to work to make her want him.”

When Fred returned to UT, he seemed placated, more sure that at the end of her classes in Germany, Piper would be returning to Texas and to him.

Looking back, John Daly would say that Fred and Piper each found something in the other that they lacked: “Piper rounded Fred out, made him more of a person. With her quirk-iness and her pets, she opened up a different world to him.

In addition to stability, Fred brought financial support and a firm commitment to Piper. A steadfastness that she didn’t have before him. Fred loved her spontaneity, her enthusiasm, that she was beautiful and had an amazing exuberance for life.”

“Fred took pleasure in the relationship,” says Margaret Surratt, a UT executive assistant who worked with Fred and Daly in the communication department. “I think he sometimes looked at Piper and pinched himself. Sometimes he thought that she was too good for him, that she was so beautiful, and he was lucky to have found her.”

When Piper returned to the States, the relationship was in full force. No one who saw them questioned that it was serious. “They seemed very much in love,” says Surratt. “They were great friends, who enjoyed being together.”

In 1983, Piper moved back into Fred’s home, the ranch house that shared a yard with the Kuentzes. Piper, in many ways, became Fred’s world. He loved her, and he worried about her. When Linda Kuentz remarked to Fred that Piper seemed to have it all together, Fred corrected her. “Piper’s really not confident at all,” he told Linda. “It would surprise you how insecure she truly is.”

In the fall of 1983, Piper entered St. Mary’s University Law School in San Antonio. That October, on the thirteenth, 26 / Kathryn Casey

Fred and Piper married in Austin, in the living room of his home. It was a quiet wedding, with just family and a few friends. Afterward, they threw a small reception at Austin’s Hyatt. Two weeks later John and Chris Daly hosted a reception for twenty-four colleagues in their home to celebrate Fred and Piper’s marriage. Fred was thirty-one and Piper was twenty-three. Margaret Surratt would later remember looking at Piper that day and thinking she seemed very young.

After the party, Piper and Fred gave the Dalys an inscribed four-leaf clover to thank them. “That was a Piper thing to do.

It was something that in the past never would have occurred to Fred,” says Chris. “She’d really changed his life.”

4

Marriage doesn’t always bring with it imagined comforts: love, companionship, security, and joy. Sometimes, even before the happiness of family and friends gathered to celebrate and witness vows has time to fade, windows open into a person’s psyche, hints that a new spouse may not be the person imagined. Yet, how does one walk away without trying to salvage the relationship, if love still joins the couple together?

It would later seem that this was the situation of Fred Jablin, when soon after the marriage he discovered that his new bride may not have been all she seemed.

It wasn’t until after the marriage, he’d later say, that he learned Piper had been diagnosed with attention defi cit disorder. Rather than a form of Ritalin, she’d later claim that her physician prescribed Ionamin, a drug most often used for dieting under the generic name phentermine. Many people have ADD and live happy, full lives, but there was more; Piper apparently had more baggage from her childhood than her upbeat demeanor let on. She’d consulted therapists to reconcile issues from her childhood, and, Fred would say, “I found out that Piper was bulimic and had been for years.”

Still, he was dedicated to her and the marriage. “He was absolutely devoted to Piper,” says Surratt. Despite the knowledge that his new love might have come to him with 28 / Kathryn Casey

deep-seated issues, “Whatever he knew about her, Fred never said a bad word about Piper. At first we all thought that she was good for Fred.”

At work, his colleagues noticed that Fred seemed softer, less the unyielding scholar and more human. It was thought that Piper had smoothed his rough edges, making him more understanding. Always, Fred had been a quiet man, but now he seemed genuinely happy, delighted in the marriage and in Piper. On Friday afternoons, when the work week drew to an end, he’d entertain Surratt and Deanna Matthews, who also worked in the faculty offices, with stories of Piper’s menagerie. When the pet rabbit she gave him went missing, Fred looked sincerely worried. “When they found that rabbit, it was big news,” says Matthews with a soft chuckle. “It was like the return of the prodigal son.”

Yet, in hindsight, Surratt and Matthews would grow to believe the marriage was based on one concept: that Fred took care of Piper, sometimes at high cost to himself.

From the beginning, Piper struggled at St. Mary’s. After they married, Fred paid her $10,000 tuition, telling friends he viewed it as a good investment in their future together.

When her grades slipped to the point where she was on academic probation, he put the Harper’s Ferry house up for rent and moved eighty miles away to San Antonio. For more than two years, Fred drove three hours a day to and from work, so Piper would have more time to study.

His friends never heard Fred complain. Instead, in typical Fred fashion, he used the time in the car to work. Before long he’d covered the dashboard, passenger seat, and con-sole of his beloved Corolla with scribbled on yellow Post-it notes, hastily saved ideas, concepts, and plans that occurred to him during his drives. Despite the hours in the car, Fred never lost his focus. That year, with Professor Linda Putnam of Texas A&M University and two other scholars, Fred be-DIE, MY LOVE / 29

gan work on a comprehensive text, the first handbook of organ i za tion al communication.

At UT, Fred thrived. Each semester, he oversaw two students, one working on a Ph.D., the other a master’s degree, and taught an upper-level class or two, while he worked on his research. Vernon Miller, one of his Ph.D. students, would remember him as a mentor and a friend. “He taught us how to express our ideas, to write, and he truly became interested in us as people,” says Miller. “Yet he was incredibly involved in his own work. We students had a signal. If we stopped at Fred’s door and he looked up, he was ready to talk. If he kept writing, we kept walking.”

When they did talk, Fred looked for the brilliance in Miller’s ideas. “He was this really unassuming man,” says Miller. “You’d never expect he was such an expert in the field. When he gleaned a good idea, his whole face lit up, and he had a radiance in his eyes.”

By 1987, Fred’s book with Putnam and the others,
The
Handbook of Or gan i za tion al Communication
, was released, garnering positive reviews and winning awards. UT re-warded him by making him a full professor and granting him tenure. Fred saw his contribution to the school as substantial, boasting that he’d taken the department from number two in the field to number one. Still, he didn’t see himself as particularly brilliant. “Fred saw himself as a plugger, who hung in there and worked hard,” says a friend. “And, he was right. Tenacity and determination were two words made for Fred Jablin.”

Over the years, he’d show that same resolve when it came to his marriage, a determination to stay the course even through the roughest waters.

At St. Mary’s, all didn’t go as well for Piper as it did for Fred at UT. Her stint in law school would, in fact, be disappointing, but she did make it through. She graduated in 30 / Kathryn Casey

spring 1986, but not at the top of her class, where a young lawyer needed to be to attract a lucrative position.

After she graduated, with no need to remain in San Antonio, Fred and Piper moved back into the Harper’s Ferry house. Piper settled in to study for the bar exam, while Fred worked on his research. In addition, he cooked and cleaned, two things it would seem that Piper never quite had time for.

Yet, Fred didn’t seem to care, and Piper could be truly charming. The Kuentzes still lived next door, and their children circulated in and out between the houses, visiting.

When their daughter Tessa fell on a cactus, Piper retrieved a tweezers and spent an hour soothing the child, as she pulled needles from her skin. “Piper loved children, and she looked like she’d be the perfect mother,” says Linda. With her menagerie of pets, one friend would look back and visualize Piper as the prototypical earth mother. “You could picture her with a breeze blowing her hair and wearing a crown of daisies, surrounded by children, birds, and animals.”

Fred, too, loved children. In fact, John Daly would go so far as to say that Fred was fascinated by them. From early on, Fred appeared captivated by the Daly’s oldest, Johnny, a lanky child Fred nicknamed “Stretch.” When he visited, Fred doted on the boy, playing with him and taking the time so few adults do to actually sit down and talk to him. He and the child were so close that when the Dalys left for the hospital in the middle of the night to have their second baby, they asked Fred to stay with Johnny. The next morning, the toddler awoke to find his parents gone and Fred Jablin in the house. Rather than shrieking with fear, Johnny giggled and looked completely unconcerned.