Island Practice (34 page)

Julie’s arrival was hardly the first time the Lepores had opened their doors. They have repeatedly taken in people who are down on their luck or need a place to stay. “Lepore’s slop house,” the doctor sometimes calls it.

“They feel they are very lucky and want to be able to help,” says Chris Fraker, their neighbor. “People just sort of drive over here and show up.”

While Nantucket is an island with jaw-dropping wealth, the Lepores are hardly affluent. Their home on Prospect Street is modest and not overflowing with space.

But “they were always taking in strays,” their daughter, Meredith, says. “It’s just part of who they both are.”

Their son Nick says he “never realized that that was odd. It was always my family plus whoever was there. I think it then kind of became, like, ‘Oh hey, this person needs a place to stay—maybe I can get in touch with the Lepores.’”

One foundling was a high school student named Lynn, who was “having troubles with her mother,” Lepore says. After living with the Lepores, she joined the Peace Corps and then became a nurse. A student from Denmark named J.C. was so beloved by the family that “the first time I saw my dad cry was when J.C. left,” Nick says.

And a Bosnian Muslim girl, Aida, arrived on a temporary student visa after having hid in a cellar in her home country and cut her hair short to help conceal her identity so she would not be raped. Aida was placed with an older family on Nantucket, “but it wasn’t really a good fit, so the sponsor asked us to take her,” Lepore says. Later, when Aida returned to Bosnia for what she thought was a Christmas visit, she was
told that because she had held a job at a restaurant while being a student on Nantucket, she would not be allowed to leave Bosnia and return to the United States for seven years. The Lepores wrote letters on her behalf and contacted their congressman, but to no avail.

The Lepores have also taken in several nieces and nephews, some of whom were having trouble in school or experiencing stressful home lives. And they have played host to teachers who had come over to do stints in the schools, like Bob Barsanti, a high school English teacher who needed a place to stay for the summer and was supplementing his income by being a bouncer at a club called The Muse.

“If we have room, I’m happy to help people,” Lepore says. “It’s never been an intrusion.” Not every member of his family, however, has always been so sure. Cathy considered Lepore’s running buddy, Dickie Brainard, a less than ideal tenant. Brainard lit candles in the basement, setting off the fire alarm in the middle of the night. He ate food that Cathy was saving for the family.

“He was responsible for the infamous Dickie Rule,” Meredith says. “Once you cross the Dickie line with my mom, there’s no going back.”

The Lepores have also given money to people who are struggling, although they are not wealthy themselves. While they earn about $200,000 a year between them, Nantucket is expensive, and Lepore’s income is not always consistent. One year, when he bought an ill-fated computer billing program for the office, Lepore made only $25,000 and had to take out a personal line of credit to pay his staff.

Meredith says her father told her, “You’re not getting an inheritance,” because the family had no resources saved up for that. “But you’ve got your education.”

Pam Michelsen, Cathy’s friend, says that growing up in a large working-class Irish Catholic family gave Cathy “a natural empathy for people,” making her “just as happy when a kid does something well, even if it’s not their kid. I don’t know of any two people who are more humane in this often inhuman world.”

Their generosity has come at no small cost. At one point it was stressful enough that Meredith told her parents point blank: “I don’t want anyone living in the house except us.”

One trying situation involved the adopted daughter of one of Cathy’s brothers. The Lepores took her in when she was thirteen to help Cathy’s brother, whose wife had passed away a couple of years earlier. Cathy says the girl had been diagnosed with attachment disorder and had gotten into trouble stealing things from classmates.

The Lepores thought they could handle it and made sure she had counseling on Nantucket. But “she was a nightmare,” Cathy recalls. “The kid was really disturbed. She would lie, and she would smoke weed. I would find pot in her handbag, or she wasn’t doing what she was supposed to do for school. She would sneak out at night. She could be very sweet and very nice—you’d say, ‘Oh my God, this is such a nice kid’—and then she would turn around and do crazy stuff.”

Cathy believes the girl had missed some crucial love and security before being adopted. “Brains develop in layers,” she says. “If you do not develop that trust and attachment to a primary caregiver, if that doesn’t happen when it’s supposed to, the next layer comes in without everything it needs. She had no conscience. She would be upset if she got caught, but not because she did something wrong. She just had no remorse if she did anything. She would just turn around and do it again if she could get away with it.”

After about seven months, Cathy came to the troubling realization that it wasn’t working, most significantly because “I can’t keep her safe.” Lepore agreed, and told their niece: “You either come down and talk to us about it, or you pack your bag.” The girl packed her bag.

But it was the experience with another niece, Martina, that led to difficult long-term fallout for the family. In 1991, when Martina was fifteen, her mother, Lepore’s sister, Cheryl Buckley (called Sherry), asked the Lepores to take her for a while. Buckley, who lived in Connecticut, says her marriage was undergoing strain.

“My husband was an alcoholic,” says Buckley, whose husband has since sobered up. Her job as a lending broker involved being on the road a lot. “I was working. There was no other money coming in. I made that decision to protect her. Her being alone with him and him being irresponsible and drinking—I couldn’t have her home with him drinking and driving.”

Lepore offered to pay for his sister to resettle on the island, but she rejected that idea and sent Martina to Nantucket for tenth grade. The Lepores, of course, weren’t about to turn Martina away. They had previously let Buckley’s sons, Tim and Jonathan, stay during the summer, and Tim Buckley was so inspired that he decided to become a doctor like his uncle Tim. So the precedent was encouraging. And early on, everything was fine.

“I got off the boat, we immediately went to the beach, and I was playing football with T.J. and Nick and my uncle,” recalls Martina. “I was like, oh my God. This is what a family was like. I immediately felt loved and immersed in a new family.”

Coming from her unstable home life, “I loved Nantucket,” she says. “For me there was no chaos. If I ever had problems with things, I’d just go over to the beach, sit, and watch the ocean, and it would rejuvenate my thoughts. Part of it was the whole fact of the island—you were sheltered; you were protected; nobody could get to you.”

And that was before her uncle Tim saved her life. Shortly after Martina arrived on Nantucket, “my uncle noticed I was pretty heavyset, and I didn’t eat anything. His food bill wasn’t really going up, and it didn’t make sense.”

Lepore was concerned because, as he so delicately put it, “she looked kind of porky.” Martina remembers having been like that for a while, but that at home, “my mom was working a lot, and my dad wasn’t really aware of what I was doing. Nobody really noticed me.”

Martina had undergone a physical in Connecticut before going to Nantucket, and the doctor even “did ultrasound and couldn’t see anything,”
her mother says. “They thought she was fine, but thought she was kind of fat and needed to lose weight.” Martina remembers her pediatrician saying, “your stomach’s really hard—you must do a lot of sit-ups.”

Lepore thought there had to be more to it. Martina told him that “pretty much every time I ate, I had really bad indigestion.” He started her on an antacid, but when nothing improved, he took her to the hospital for an ultrasound, thinking she might have gallstones. Oddly, the ultrasound screen was completely black, and the technician assumed the machine was broken. Lepore sent in a radiologist, whose scans showed, alarmingly, that “all of my organs were up in my upper back,” Martina recalls. Something was taking up the space in her abdomen.

Amazingly, an ovarian cyst had been growing inside Martina for years, having gotten so large it now weighed thirteen pounds. It had pushed up and compressed her organs. “My kidneys were underneath my shoulder blades.”

Martina was dumbstruck: “What are we going to do?” Lepore glanced at her nonchalantly: “Well, tomorrow, at 10:30 AM, we’re going to cut you open. We’re going to get it out of you.”

Lepore called his father, John, still a surgeon in Marlborough, who decided to come to Nantucket to remove the cyst. (Lepore and his father shared a willingness to operate on family members; years earlier, Buckley says, John Lepore operated on his sister, and when she started bleeding and needed a transfusion, “they took blood right from my father and gave it to her.”)

But when John Lepore, who had previously had a lung removed to treat his lung cancer, was scrubbing in to perform the surgery on Martina, he began feeling short of breath. He couldn’t operate.

“I had to do it,” Lepore recalls. Buckley was grateful. “I can’t think of anybody else I’d want. Would you like somebody that loves your daughter to do it, or somebody you don’t know?”

To put Martina at ease, he cracked Lepore-like jokes. They were crass, she remembers, but they helped. During surgery, he had to remove not
only the cyst but an ovary too. And when she woke up, he told her he had also removed her appendix, “’cause I just didn’t need it and he was in there.”

Martina feared the scar would be “this huge gash on my abdomen, but it ended up being this thin little line.” And the next day, Lepore pushed her to get up. “We gotta get you moving,” he told her, to jog the organs into shifting back to their rightful abdominal place. Martina learned later that if Lepore hadn’t diagnosed her and operated quickly, “my kidney could have burst when nobody was there, and that would have been the end of me.”

That wasn’t the only benefit, Martina soon discovered. “I went from being 185 pounds on a Monday to 112 pounds on a Tuesday. I remember thinking, ‘Holy Cow, I shrank!’ I’d never really felt good about myself, and it’s like all of a sudden, I’m not obese. All of a sudden, I had a waist and a figure. I felt like Malibu Barbie.”

But the Lepores had not counted on raising a life-sized liberated Barbie. “The other children had always been strait-laced—this was the procedure when they were growing up. I didn’t have a procedure,” Martina admits. Martina was almost a year older than their oldest child, Meredith, and “I didn’t have boundaries at home; I didn’t have structure; I didn’t have too many rules. All of a sudden they got this child who knew how to raise herself and didn’t need anybody’s input. I think I overwhelmed them because I was the fifteen-year-old girl with the figure and the boys coming. Blam!—they had the instant teenager.”

Martina says she didn’t drink or do drugs—“I think they thought I did a lot more things than I did.” But she spent a lot of time rollerblading around the island and hanging out with a football player she was dating. As an “act of defiance,” she didn’t do her homework, and “I wasn’t a very good student,” doing especially poorly in English, which was unfortunate because her English teacher was Bob Barsanti, the friend and former house guest of the Lepores who would visit them all the time.

By the end of the school year, the Lepores had reached their limit. “She’s not staying here,” Cathy told her sister-in-law. “She needs to be with you now, ’cause I’ve had it.”

Buckley acknowledges now that things weren’t handled well. Martina “gave them a tough run for their money. I think it’s not what they bargained for.”

But back then, Buckley was resentful and took it out on Cathy: “Who are you? Queen of the island?”

To which Cathy replied, “I don’t want to talk to you again.”

“I was so hurt by the whole thing,” Cathy reflects. “Because we always got along, and family is so important to me.”

Buckley sent Martina to Nantucket the next year anyway, arranging for someone else, a teacher, to take her in. Martina was dating that teacher’s friend’s son.

“That was really hard for me,” Cathy says. “This teacher was someone that I knew and respected. Nobody called and said, ‘Are you okay with this?’” And Cathy couldn’t help but come in contact with Martina. “I was the school nurse. She was in the school with me every day. It was awful. There was no love lost, if you will.”

At school functions, Martina worried, “Do I go up and say hi, or do I not?” On the island, “everybody knew the Lepores; everybody liked them. I never heard anybody talking negatively ever, which is unusual for an island, because you usually get some nastiness.” She considered her uncle, in particular, “a very strong person” who’s “done many difficult things in his life that most people could never think about.”

Martina wrote to the Lepores and “apologized for whatever I had done,” but the tension remained during the year she lived with the teacher and over four subsequent summers when she returned to work as a nanny and lifeguard. “I didn’t have any ill will toward the Lepores. I was hurt. I don’t know why they didn’t like me. I was sad that I screwed up somehow.”

Beyond that, Martina says, “I felt that I came between my mom and her brother. I guess I always felt guilty that I had caused all of it.”

Buckley says the overt flare-up was “between Cathy and I—my brother does not like to get involved in any controversy.” Lepore simply stopped talking to his sister. “I don’t like to drag up a lot of what happened,” Buckley says. “There were reasons that were legitimate there, and some things that I’m not proud of.”

The most painful part for the Lepores was that John Lepore “took my sister’s side of this whole thing,” Lepore recalls. “My father sent a nasty letter to Cathy.”