04.Die.My.Love.2007 (5 page)

When Piper didn’t immediately find a job after law school, she painted watercolors of dreamy bucolic scenes and flowers. Fred found her an agent, the wife of one of his DIE, MY LOVE / 31

graduate students, and she began selling her paintings for $200 apiece.

The October after her graduation, Fred and Piper threw his annual Halloween party. There’d been fewer of them in all the disarray since Piper entered his life, but that fall their lives seemed to be settling into place. By then Piper had a job at the Hays County District Attorney’s Offi ce, thirty minutes from their home in Austin. She appeared to enjoy the job, where her main responsibilities were prosecuting traffic cases, mental commitments, and protective orders. At that year’s Halloween party, Fred dressed as the playful wood nymph Pan, from Greek mythology, the horned overseer of goat herders and shepherds. In something of a reversal, the diminutive Piper dressed as a commando, with camouflaged hair and headband and her face streaked in black.

At the party, Piper talked of her exciting job, showing friends her jacket with “Hays County D.A.” on the back and entertaining guests with stories of drug raids. Yet less than a year later she was unemployed. Later she’d say she quit because she didn’t feel safe working as a prosecutor, claiming a man came to negotiate a plea bargain and began by taking out a gun and putting it on the table between them. Fred would describe her departure from the D.A.’s offi ce differently, saying she’d been fi red.

Whatever the reason, this time it didn’t take as long to find work, and Piper secured a position as a staff lawyer at the Texas Association of School Boards, where she read cases and interpreted decisions for school boards throughout Texas. Since she didn’t have to litigate, she didn’t have the stress of the courtroom, and years later Fred would describe this as her best job.

In 1988, four years into their marriage, Piper and Fred began planning a family. Although most faculty wives kept their private lives out of the office, Piper had no such qualms.

32 / Kathryn Casey

In fact, on more than one occasion she called and breath-lessly told Surratt or Matthews, “Tell Fred he has to come home now. I’m ovulating!”

In typical Piper fashion, when the big news presented itself, she announced the pregnancy with fl air. That year, Fred went off to the annual International Communications Association conference in San Francisco. As he walked from a meeting surrounded by Daly and his colleagues, a man dressed as a stork in a diaper approached them, handed Fred a cigar, and announced Piper was pregnant. Everyone laughed, and Fred appeared delighted.

From that moment on he was enraptured with the prospect of fatherhood. He talked often of his excitement, detailing the pregnancy for all who would listen. And he planned, single-mindedly committed to building a secure future for his growing family. At times he was so methodical about it, colleagues found it funny. One day he approached Matthews with a pad of graph paper and a pen, saying he’d heard tales of childhood illnesses. “How much a year do I bud get for ear infections?” he asked. He was serious, but Matthews chuckled and said she didn’t know, that such expenses weren’t predictable.

In hindsight, Fred had reason to be concerned; not only were he and Piper expecting a baby, but they were also building a new home, high up in the rugged pine and oak covered landscape west of Austin, in Westlake Hills. The Texas economy was down, and Fred, ever practical, had picked up a wooded one-acre lot in this affluent section of Austin for less than half of what it would have sold for a few years earlier. The building process, however, was a diffi cult one for Fred, who thought contractors should adhere to as rigid a schedule as he did and didn’t understand why Piper had to continually change her mind about what she wanted.

But the house turned out well, with dark tile floors and an art room where Piper could paint. Fred kept the house on DIE, MY LOVE / 33

Harper’s Ferry to rent out, calling it the children’s college fund, and just weeks before the baby was due, they moved into the Westlake Hills house.

In July 1989, Jocelyn Rountree-Jablin entered the world, a beautiful child with a round, full face. Both Piper and Fred were delighted, so much so that Fred brought the video he took of the birth to the UT faculty offices to play for Daly and his other colleagues. Many were uncomfortable at viewing something so intimate, but Fred didn’t appear to notice.

He was happy with Piper, the new baby, and about being a father.

On Friday afternoons when the office quieted down, Matthews and Surratt listened to him talk about Piper and the baby, always in glowing terms. He was very much in love, and had never looked happier. Yet, they knew something he never mentioned: that his young wife had a formidable temper.

Like good British servants who observe but never speak of all they know, Surratt and Matthews had taken phone messages from Piper. While the other faculty spouses were scrupulously civil with them, Piper rarely minced words.

Before and after Jocelyn’s birth, she called the offi ce often, sometimes ten times a day, more often than not furious.

“You tell Fred I just fired the maid and he needs to come home right now,” she’d scream, then hang up.

Nearly every time she called, Piper was demanding one thing or another, and more often than not the message began with an angry, “You tell Fred . . .”

Please call home
, Matthews and Surratt wrote on pink telephone message slips they slipped in Fred’s mailbox. At times, Matthews wrote
now
and underlined it, hoping to clue him in to what awaited him when he picked up the telephone.

Among themselves, Matthews and Surratt talked. “Piper’s on a rampage again,” one would tell the other. Surratt began to wonder if Fred Jablin’s young wife had psychological issues. It seemed odd to her that a man who was so supremely 34 / Kathryn Casey

rational would have married a woman who could sound so incredibly irrational.

While Piper worked, Jocelyn was in day care provided by her mother’s office. Fred dropped her off each morning and picked her up each afternoon, when he finished classes. He was as devoted to the new baby as he was to her mother.

Then Piper’s work arrangement changed again. Little more than a year after assuming her position with the school board association, she quit, taking a more lucrative slot at Henslee, Groce, a law firm that specialized in representing school districts.

If the Jablins’ marriage was at times rocky, Piper’s life as a lawyer didn’t go any more smoothly. She crowed to friends about how exciting it was working for a law firm with a big support staff, including runners and researchers, legal secretaries, even someone to get her lunch, but a year later, while she was pregnant for the second time, Piper was let go. She was furious. “She said that they fired her because she was pregnant, and she threatened to sue,” says a friend. Fred would later say that Piper filed a complaint with the Texas Employment Commission regarding the firing, which was dropped when the law firm countered by pegging the grounds not as Piper’s pregnancy but a lack of performance.

Piper didn’t take the rejection well. Friends would later remember how furious she was, threatening to get back at a lawyer she claimed had plotted against her. “She said she’d get even. She was spitting-nails angry,” remembers Chris Daly.

Years later Fred would say he never thought that Piper had to have the big job with the six-figure-plus annual paycheck, but had believed she would work and help make ends meet. The house in Westlake came with a high mortgage, and he had to hire house hold help, since Piper didn’t consider cleaning among her responsibilities.

At the baby shower the faculty and staff threw, Surratt DIE, MY LOVE / 35

and Matthews were surprised at how friendly Piper seemed, after they’d fielded so many angry telephone calls. John Daly’s by then ex-wife, Chris, would remember Piper’s second pregnancy as a difficult one, in which Piper exhibited wild mood swings. Once, Chris visited and found her sobbing. Sitting together on a couch, Chris comforted Piper while she cried, angry about her life. “Why am I with Fred, he’s so boring,” she said. “There are lots of men out there, and I deserve someone better.”

Chris Daly didn’t know what was wrong. “It just seemed serious and dark,” she says. Other things would later come back to Chris, including how Piper talked incessantly of her family. She was proud of them, of all they did, especially Tina, who’d gone on to become a nurse practitioner and had opened her own clinic in Houston. “One minute she’d be talking about Tina as if she were a bit crazy, saying, ‘You won’t believe what my sister Tina did,’” says Chris. “The next minute, Piper was boasting about her and the whole family. She thought the world of them, as if they were all very special.”

Daly knew that Fred didn’t care for the Rountrees. Tina visited often, sometimes babysitting for Jocelyn. While she was there, Fred appeared on edge and talked of Piper’s

“whacky sister.” In truth, he seemed less than fond of many in the Rountree family. He rarely attended their summer reunions on the beach in Padre Island, because he said they were all “a bit eccentric.”

That March, 1992, Piper gave birth to a son, Paxton Rountree-Jablin. Like his sister, who was then three years old, he was a beautiful child. Afterward, Piper spent weeks in bed, without the stamina to do more than what was absolutely necessary to take care of the baby. It was a case of postpartum depression. “I didn’t want to get out of bed,”

says Piper. “It got worse with each pregnancy.”

Those feelings were at odds with the Piper who dubbed 36 / Kathryn Casey

herself “Momea” and enjoyed nothing more than being a mother. “Being a mother is my personality, my thing,” she’d say years later. “It’s my purpose in life. It’s simply what I am at my core.”

Paxton would become his mother’s favorite child, and she’d call him her protector and her strength. A few months after his birth, Chris Daly saw Piper at a party and approached her, anxious to ask how she was. “I’m fi ne,” Piper said resolutely. “We’re all fi ne.”

Yet, in truth, all wasn’t particularly well. It was around that time that Fred would later say that he and Piper went for marriage counseling. Perhaps it was spurred by something that happened shortly after Paxton’s birth.

Piper withdrew all her funds out of her Hays County retirement account, $1,605.05, and did something she’d been talking about since college. She added another $1,400 and paid $3,000 for breast implant surgery. Fred found out two days before the surgery, and he didn’t want her to do it. He argued against it, worried about reports of leaking implants and problems breast feeding.

The year after Paxton’s birth, Piper invited Lora Maldonado, the coordinator of the graduate program Fred supervised, and her children for dinner. Maldonado would never forget the evening at the Jablins’ Westlake house. Piper drank wine and talked, laughing and high- spirited, while Fred quietly cared for the children and cooked dinner. As friendly as Piper was, Maldonado had a hard time separating her from the angry voice she often heard on the telephone calling for Fred. In Maldonado’s view, Fred Jablin appeared to consider his wife too good for him, but in truth she thought he was too good for Piper. “In Fred’s mind, everything was about Piper.

He waited on her hand and foot,” says Maldonado. “Maybe that’s what he had to do to keep the family together, because Piper was the kind of woman who was going to do what she wanted to do, and nobody was going to stand in her way.”

DIE, MY LOVE / 37

At work, Maldonado and Fred had, at times, been at odds.

He demanded that everything be precise, and she simply wasn’t wired that way. Yet he never raised his voice with her.

“He’d get this look on his face, like,
sigh,
” she’d later recall.

“And then he’d explain how he wanted things done. Rather than get angry, he’d try to prove he was right, win you over to his point of view.”

In 1992, not long after Paxton’s birth, Piper took a part-time position that turned into full-time work with the Texas Classroom Teacher’s Association, in offices in a graceful Victorian mansion on Guadalupe Street, just outside downtown Austin. Her job was to work with teachers, providing legal counseling and employment repre sentation. Jeri Stone, the organization’s executive director, found the new staff attorney perplexing. At times, Stone walked into Piper’s office, adjacent to the reception area, and found the Jablins’

large dog curled up at Piper’s feet. Although they had a laid-back office, no one had brought a pet to work before. At other times, Piper showed up with one of the children, most often Paxton. One day Stone walked in on Piper in the lunchroom while she was feeding the toddler. “Piper was shoveling food in his mouth so fast he barely had time to swallow,” says Stone. “She seemed just frazzled, not unusual for a working mom, but more so, to the extreme.”

A year after Piper began, Stone called her into her offi ce.

“Piper’s leaving was a mutual decision,” says Stone. “For our part, it was that she didn’t have a passion for her work.

She didn’t care deeply enough about the teachers and their needs.”

Piper then tried to open her own, small law office, but that didn’t go well, either. She had few clients, and Fred later complained that he spent more money on her expenses than she made. And then Piper was pregnant again.

Friends would remember this as the Jablins’ darkest hour, not because they didn’t want the baby, but because there 38 / Kathryn Casey

were problems with the pregnancy. Well into the pregnancy something happened, and the baby was lost. At the time, Piper and Fred said that she had miscarried. Later, Piper would describe it as a therapeutic abortion, after tests determined that the fetus had a gene tic abnormality. “They were both absolutely crushed, devastated,” says Matthews. “It was a really hard time for Fred and Piper. Fred was incredibly sad.”

Afterward, Piper sank into yet another deep depression, but Fred said nothing to his colleagues or friends, except that she was having difficulty dealing with losing the baby so late in a pregnancy.