Island Practice (35 page)

“Dad, look, this is just untenable,” Lepore told his father. It was no use. Direct communication between Lepore and his father had never been extensively emotional. Pam Michelsen, who had gotten to know Lepore’s father when she and Cathy would take their children to visit him “in America,” says that if John Lepore “doted on his daughter, it was because she always had things go wrong, and Tim was the one who didn’t. Tim’s dad told me one time: ‘Tim’s a great doctor, and he loves his children, and he doesn’t drink, and I am so proud of him.’ But I don’t think that Tim heard that, and if he did, he didn’t really hear it.”

The Martina episode, though, sundered the relationship beyond repair. Lepore did not realize the extent to which his father had abandoned him until John Lepore died in 1995, three years after his son and daughter’s feud began.

John Lepore, it turned out, had changed his last will and testament. “My father left everything to my sister. He died and left everything to her.”

Buckley had a yard sale of items, including some things that had belonged to Lepore. “I had to buy some of my stuff back,” he says incredulously. He sent his friend, Bob DiBuono, to buy several bows. A cousin went to the house with a truck to collect the gun case John Lepore had made for Tim, one of his World War II uniforms in a foot
locker, and maps he had used to mark where he had served in North Africa and the Italian campaign.

There were other things of his father’s that Lepore would have liked to have: tools, a wine press, a drill press, a jigsaw, a vice. “It didn’t have tremendous value. But just having his tools, all the stuff he had”—it would have meant something. As would his father’s huge collection of electric motors, his car, his boat. “I don’t know what happened to those. The day of the funeral was the last time I was in the house.”

Besides the belongings, Lepore knew there was “a bank account in my father’s and my name” with $16,000 in it. To get access, he was forced “to get a lawyer to go after my sister.”

Buckley says she never tried to keep Lepore from collecting their father’s items. “There was always an open door with me: ‘What do you want? Take what you want.’ No answer. He was more than told many, many times to get what he wanted.”

For years there was virtually no contact between Buckley and the Lepores, although the Lepores stayed in touch with Buckley’s sons. Then in 2007, Martina, who was married and living in Connecticut, called out of the blue: “Hi, Uncle Tim, it’s Martina. I need help.”

Martina’s eldest child, McKael, then five, was “really, really sick,” she recalls. “He couldn’t move; he couldn’t run. He was crippled, for all intents and purposes. He walked around like he was a ninety-year-old man.”

Martina suspected Lyme disease, but her pediatrician disagreed because three Lyme tests had been negative. After nine months of evaluations, Martina’s mother suggested she call Lepore. On the phone, he mentioned nothing about the family rift, listened to the symptoms, and urged her to find a doctor who would treat the boy for Lyme. They did, and “within a week and a half, he’s a different kid,” Martina says. “I remember standing in the kitchen with my husband, and I saw McKael smile. He was always so melancholy and just down; it was so long since I had seen him smile.”

Somewhere along the line, the Lepores had made their peace with Martina. “She’s a very nice adult,” Cathy says. “Realistically, she was a kid, and that’s how she coped. People who have alcoholics in their family, that’s what they do. They tend to be very manipulative. She felt bad about what had happened.”

Detente with Buckley took somewhat longer. In 2009, Buckley’s son Tim told her Lepore would be in Guilford, Connecticut, where she had a house, running a race. She called: “I want to see you if only for a minute.” Lepore grudgingly agreed and brought Cathy along. Martina, who works as a police officer in Guilford, showed up in uniform, although, she says, “I wasn’t there for the Kumbaya moment.” Neither was Lepore, who took off running the race, leaving Cathy and Buckley to talk.

“It was like putting two warring factions in a room,” Cathy recalls. But Buckley “was very nice, actually.” Both women cried.

“We just said, ‘What the hell are we doing?’” Buckley remembers. “She experienced losses; I experienced losses. We wasted so much time. We screwed up many, many years.”

Not long after that, Buckley went to Nantucket for the Christmas Stroll and again for the Daffodil Festival. “It was a big step,” she says. “My brother was rather distant. Did I hang around with my brother? No. But did I enjoy Cathy? Yes.”

During the Daffodil Festival visit, Buckley brought five friends, and Lepore “brought them to his office and tried to shock them” with his guns-and-dead-animal decor. “My friends will never forget that.”

Cathy is pleased with the rapprochement: “It’s not fun to have that monkey on your back. It makes me happier having this relationship work right now. You can carry it all around with you, this anger, and it doesn’t really hurt anybody else except you.”

Things with Lepore are more of a work in progress. Buckley respects his dedication to the life he’s built on Nantucket. “He’s very proud of his island,” she says. “He’s turned into a very beloved, eccentric character
on the island, and I think he’s a big fish in a relatively little pond, like my father was. It suits his character, and it suits the island type of character.”

But they are different people. “I would find it very difficult being there with my brother,” Buckley says. “He likes to do what he likes to do, and he’s very, very intense with what he does. When he does something, his whole heart, body, and soul is into it.”

As for Lepore, his reaction is typically succinct. “It’s over,” he remarks of the long feud. “Good.”

By the time the Lepores took in Julie in November 2007, they figured they’d had enough experience to handle anything. Their own children were grown, and, remarked Lepore, “I view it as we’re blessed with having an opportunity. ‘Blessed’ is a crazy word, but it’s an opportunity to help a kid.”

At first, they were careful to treat Julie, then thirteen, with kid gloves. After all, this was a child whose mother was believed to have tried to poison her. “I don’t want her to feel like if she screws up, we’ll get rid of her,” was Cathy’s philosophy. “She says, ‘Other kids get to do this.’ I say, ‘Julie, these are the rules.’ I’ll never say to her, ‘You need to leave.’”

When she tried to evade the restrictions, going to Lepore to overrule a curfew Cathy had set, for example, they tried to be patient: “She’s a good kid, but she can be a meathead sometimes—there’s sort of an element of sadness about her,” Lepore concluded.

Cathy realized that, “yes, she tries to manipulate me, but sometimes I think she’s being that way, and she’s not. I’ve been wrong enough times. She will eventually see this as something that saved her life, because it’s given her the opportunity to live with a family who is stable.”

As Julie got older—fourteen, fifteen, sixteen—things became more difficult. She bridled at the Lepores’ expectations that she help out around the house, get a part-time job, and participate in an athletic activity. They considered that the way to instill a child with responsibility and self-worth. It frustrated them when Julie resisted.

“Julie is bright, very bright—she is also very, very lazy,” was Lepore’s assessment at one point. “We had her play softball, basketball. We see that as mandatory. And she has to do her schoolwork. If you don’t understand the math, go ask the teacher. If she sat down and applied herself... if she did her homework . . . She goes in a month before school’s over with three Fs, two Ds, and a C. That’s what she was heading towards. She passed, but nothing higher than a C.”

Lepore was always trying to get Julie to read. “I have this thing about books—you read, you can create the world,” he says. “In a video game it makes the world for you. You’re a watcher, not a participant. Unplugging the computer is the only way we can get her to get off the Internet.”

And they were concerned about what he described as a tendency to “go to school dressed like a hooker.” They told her, “Put a shirt on and keep the shirt on.”

Julie also tried to ditch one of her few outside jobs, dog walking. “It’s a two-hours-a-week job, and she’ll put on such histrionics, you’d think she was in the third stage of labor,” Lepore observed.

One summer afternoon when she was fifteen was typical.

“I’m supposed to walk my boss’s dog, but I don’t feel like it today,” Julie reported, lounging on the Lepores’ couch. “I like dogs that walk with you. This dog, you take it outside, and it just sits there, and you have to pull it really hard. It’s a real pain. I just can’t deal with it. The dog will be all right for one day.”

Julie knew the Lepores would never stand for that. “When Cathy comes home, she’s going to ask if I walked the dog. I’m going to say, ‘Yes, I walked him.’ I hate lying, but if she finds out, she’ll be mad, and she’ll take away my phone again. I don’t really lie, except about little things.”

The defiance and clashes worsened. Once, Cathy “got mad because I didn’t get out of bed in time,” Julie recalls, lamenting that her phone had been confiscated as punishment. “She said I’m not getting it back for two days.” Later that day, “Tim wanted me to read my book. I’m like, ‘I’m not reading my book right now.’ I was so pissed because Cathy took my phone away, and, like, I needed to call my friends and, like, text them and stuff like that.”

Julie made amends the next day, promising to be better behaved. “I just went and gave her a hug and said, ‘I’m sorry, Cathy,’ and she was, like, okay, and then I helped her shuck some corn. I’m, like, a very forgiving person.”

That the Lepores were respected and involved members of the community only seemed to amplify the tension. “Everybody knows who they are, so I couldn’t really do what I wanted,” Julie observed. “If I had wanted to hang out with friends, Cathy was like, ‘Oh, that person does drugs, and you can’t be friends with them,’ ’cause she knows everything.” And anything Julie was doing “gets right back to them.”

Cathy’s role as a school counselor meant that “the teachers know” about “everything I’m doing.” And Cathy realized that with Julie around, she was essentially getting no break from her day job of working with troubled teenagers. “I deal with it all day at school, and I don’t want to deal with it at home, so that’s hard.”

Things became even more difficult when, as Julie admits, “I started smoking weed and doing that sort of stuff.”

While the Lepores felt deep sympathy for what Julie had been through, they also felt she milked the tragedy and showed little empathy for others. “Julie will say, ‘I don’t know why people tell me their problems—it’s not like my mother didn’t try to kill me,’” Cathy reported.

Lepore recognized there would always be an “element of friction. Cathy’s not her mother. I think Julie sometimes resents that. Your
mother may try and kill you, but she’s still your mother.” Plus, he observed, the instability in Julie’s earlier life may have been chaotic, “but it was excitement, whereas Cathy says, ‘Do your homework,’ and that isn’t quite as much fun.”

Although Julie had not had direct contact with her mother, she was in touch through Facebook with her brother, who was living with their mother. “I want to see her. I’m not angry. I’m just kind of like disappointed. But, you know, stuff happens. I miss her.”

Cathy consulted Julie’s counselor, who told her that Julie targeted Cathy with her anger because she felt safe doing so. “Even though it feels bad, it’s a compliment,” she told her. But Cathy was not persuaded. “She was not nice to me, and she was only nice to Tim insofar as what she could get. She was just shooting herself in the foot. What has this time been? Has it been meaningless for her?”

Julie was also wondering if she could handle it much longer. “I like it here, but their rules are kind of like so stupid. Sometimes I just get so depressed living here. I don’t know if I want to be here till I’m eighteen. I may want to go somewhere more chill.”