Bitter Harvest Read online

  Odd. Debora had aspired to be an engineer herself, but she had been forced to drop out of the program at the University of Illinois because there weren’t enough jobs waiting. Now that she was a physician, she denigrated the engineering profession.

  Duane and Debora separated in the late seventies; even before her divorce was final, Debora began what she described as a “hedonistic lifestyle.” She was in her mid-twenties and had been in school since she was five. She had never traveled, never taken long vacations. Now, she did. “My friends and I would fly down to Guaymas or Belize or wherever and just do what we liked. . . . But part of me had a need to be grounded—to have a more secure life.”

  Though Debora had had long, monogamous relationships with men who cared deeply for her, in the months after she left Duane, she had numerous boyfriends. She had craved freedom. And she was probably as attractive as she had ever been—or would ever be—in her life. She was slender and her hair was perfectly cut so that it moved in bouncy waves when she tossed her head. Her wit was sharper than ever. She had friends who laughed with her, and she was totally competent as a senior resident in the emergency room of Truman Medical Center. She seemed to have boundless energy; she worked extra shifts to add to her considerable income. She bought a silver Jaguar XKE for $27,000 and zipped around Independence and Kansas City. Any man looking at her would have to notice how vibrant she was, how full of life. If there were less attractive aspects to her personality, they were not immediately apparent.

  At least, not when Michael Farrar met her. Mike was a medical student, starting his senior year with an emergency room rotation at Truman Medical Center. Born in Lawrence, Kansas, and raised “north of the river” in Kansas City, Missouri, he was four years younger than Debora and considerably lower in the medical-education pecking order. He found her exciting. “She was an attractive woman—a thin, attractive woman,” Mike later recalled. “She was obviously exceedingly bright. She was tremendously witty; everyone who knew her knew how witty she was. But she had kind of a sarcastic, biting wit. She was very funny.”

  Mike was drawn to Debora. And she noticed him. He was in his early twenties and around five foot ten; his facial features were as fine as hers were coarse. He was quite handsome, with dark hair worn in the long and curly style of the decade. He looked, if anything, younger than twenty. And, like Debora, Mike was extremely intelligent. “I got straight A’s too,” he said. “But I had to work very hard for them—Debora didn’t. Everything academic came easily to her.” Mike’s parents expected him to get A’s, and he had not disappointed them. But Debora was probably the smartest woman he had ever known.

  In Mike Farrar, Debora perceived a stability she needed. Her “hedonistic” life left her as ungrounded as a balloon that has lost its tether, and she sensed that she needed a good, stable man to feel safe. Mike was brilliant; she knew he was going to be a very successful doctor. Speaking of him later, she did not say that she loved him. Rather, she said that he seemed to be a “good person,” someone she could count on. Apparently, the lifestyle she had been enjoying had left her frightened and in need of an anchor. Or perhaps she sensed some deficiency, some weakness in herself and needed a strong man to bolster her.

  Debora and Duane were separated, and he no longer lived in the house in Independence, so when she and Mike started to date, Debora didn’t tell him that she was, technically at least, a married woman. At some point, Mike realized the truth, but she assured him that she was going to start divorce proceedings—and she did.

  By December 1978, the marriage was legally over. It was, allegedly, an amicable divorce. Their attorney, Ronald Barker, said they had come to his office together and asked that he represent them both. However, although Duane was awarded the silver Jaguar in their divorce settlement, he would say many years later that he felt that he had been a convenience—that he’d helped pay Debora’s way through college and med school, only to be dumped when she had no further need of him.

  Mike Farrar met Duane Green only once; Duane stopped by the house in Independence in October 1978, when Mike was visiting. “He seemed like a nice guy,” Mike remembered. “There were no problems with my meeting him. I didn’t realize until later that he had actually lived in that house.”

  Looking back many years later, Mike tried to remember the early days of his relationship with Debora. Admittedly, he was seeing those days through the far end of a very dark tunnel; events in the interim had colored his recall. But he could not remember that theirs was ever a passionate coming together, or a matter of one seducing the other. Debora won him with her soaring intelligence and her wonderful sense of humor—and, Mike admitted, by the air of success that seemed a part of her. And just as she did not speak of loving him, he failed to mention that emotion as a component of their relationship.

  “I was a twenty-three-year-old medical student living on ten bucks a week,” Mike said. “I ate a lot of tuna fish. I have to admit that knowing Deb was going to start practicing and make seventy thousand dollars a year impressed me. I was going into my internship and I would be making $14,190 a year. Debora drove that Jag XKE and then she paid cash for a cherry-red Fiat Spyder. I hate to admit it, but I think it was all of those things about her that attracted me—her vitality, her wit, her success. Even so, I somehow knew she was very insecure.

  “She felt threatened by my family’s closeness. I have two sisters and my family is close. Her family was very cold. Her mother’s personality was similar to Debora’s. Her father, interestingly enough, was a very nice man—kind of a salesman type, garrulous. I always liked to play golf with him, took him to some football games. I thought he was a great guy.”

  One aspect of Debora’s personality struck a dissonant note with Mike. “She was very volatile; she would fly off the handle and do things that were really embarrassing. I remember one time she got into an argument in a Kroger parking lot with two people who took the space we were headed for. Debora got out of the car and just gave them hell. I was shocked. I asked her, ‘What are you doing?’ But she walked with them all the way to the door—until, finally, the wife unloaded on Debora.”

  Mike was mortified. It would be the first of many times when Debora’s rage at seemingly small slights would embarrass him.

  Why Debora had such a propensity for sudden anger was puzzling. Her parents had not spoiled her, but her genetic gifts of talent and intelligence had always made her life so easy, and there were precious few things she wanted that she did not get. Perhaps that was why she behaved outrageously when anyone crossed her. She believed that she deserved to get what she wanted—whether it was a parking space or instant respect. She could not abide anyone who questioned her intelligence, or any glitch in plans that inconvenienced her.

  Before their marriage, Mike and Debora lived together in a small apartment. Mike would also recall that their sex life was very low-key and that Debora seemed apathetic about a physical relationship. They were, of course, both working very hard and very long hours. It did not seem a serious problem to him—not then. Despite early warning signs, they were a committed couple, and although Mike entertained some doubts, they went ahead with plans to marry.

  The wedding, on May 26, 1979, was far more lavish than Debora’s first. This time, she wore a simple long-sleeved white sheath; her veil was a lace mantilla. Mike wore a gray shantung tuxedo with wide lapels, and a ruffled dress shirt. Debora had carried a single red rose at her first wedding; now, she held a cascading bouquet of pink roses and white carnations. Mike’s sisters, Vicki and Karen, were her bridesmaids. They wore lovely pink dresses; the mothers and grandmothers of the bride and groom wore shades of pink.

  But all was not as serene as it seemed in their wedding pictures, and Mike’s wide grin hid his sense that he might have made a wrong choice. “Even as I walked down the aisle,” he remembered, “I realized I was making a mistake.”

  Any number of brides and grooms experience wedding jitters, but Mike felt more than that. As they made wedding p
lans, he had seen more of Debora’s moodiness and anger than ever before. She seemed to make no effort to fit into his family, and he knew his mother and sisters were worried by that. What he had first seen as Debora’s insecurity and shyness, Mike had come to recognize as self-absorption. Her needs came first—always.

  To his disappointment and frustration, Debora at first declined to make love with her new husband on their wedding night. “She wanted to read a book,” Mike said. “Then I knew for sure I’d made a mistake.” Although Debora finally gave in to Mike’s wish to consummate their marriage, she did so reluctantly and with little enthusiasm. And then she went back to her book.

  Mike tried to hope this was not a bad omen. “My parents had instilled in me that marriage was a commitment and you worked on it to make it right. . . . I really thought that over a period of time she would change.”

  Debora and Mike honeymooned in Tahiti for two weeks. It was Debora who paid the $5,000 that the trip cost; Mike had precious little income at that point. They had planned to stop in San Francisco on their way home, but they were stranded in Tahiti after a tragic air disaster. On May 25, 275 people had perished in the crash of a DC-10 taking off from O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. “They shut all the DC-10s down the morning we were to come home,” Mike remembered. “And Air New Zealand didn’t have any other planes. So we had an extra five days there.”

  The extension of their honeymoon didn’t thrill either newlywed. Theirs had not been a perfect honeymoon, or even a particularly happy one. If he had hoped that the atmosphere in Tahiti and the respite from their stressful careers would make his bride more responsive sexually, Mike was disappointed. Sex did not seem to matter to Debora one way or another. He wondered why she had married him. He was an impecunious intern; she was already in practice in emergency medicine. She didn’t seem to love him, and she didn’t like his family. She preferred reading novels to being intimate with him, and the vivacity that had first attracted him seemed to have disappeared completely.

  Debora didn’t even take Mike’s name; she decided to keep her first husband’s, for professional reasons. This seemed emblematic of the distance between her and Mike. Still, he kept hoping that somehow things would get better—if only with the passage of time.

  4

  It was clear, early in their marriage, that Mike had a kind of self-control that Debora did not. This was probably because of his background. His father, William Farrar, was an inspector with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and a colonel in the Air Force Reserves. Bill Farrar traveled two weeks out of every month. He figured that, over the years, he had been in every town in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, checking food-processing plants, feedlots, and drug companies. Although Bill didn’t enjoy his job much, the FDA willingly granted him time to fly for the Air Force Reserves, and he flew to the South Pacific, Guam, Midway, Panama, and Peru, among other exotic spots. It was Bill Farrar who imbued his son with a love of travel.

  Mike’s mother, Velma, a grade school teacher, was an attractive, patrician-looking woman who prided herself on her perfect figure. When it came to raising children, discipline was important to both Farrars. Duty and honor meant more than mere words, so Mike was not about to tell his parents that his marriage had turned out to be a huge disappointment. He could not imagine what they would say if he were to give up and seek a divorce so soon. He had hoped for a warm, loving wife. He got, instead, a woman whose mercurial moods kept him continually off guard.

  Debora’s predominant emotion seemed to be anger—anger at him. At first, Mike met Debora’s outbursts of temper by fighting back. If she yelled at him, he initially tried to reason with her, then yelled back. Neither approach did any good. Their arguments followed a predictable course, its timing set by Debora. And when she was not angry, she was withdrawn, losing herself in a book.

  Looking back, Mike snuggled to bring forth some good memories. “In Debora’s defense,” he said slowly, “I don’t want to say that my marriage was always unhappy. We had a number of things in common, besides medicine. We both liked to travel and we went on a number of very nice trips. I would never pretend that every moment of our marriage was horrible. The thing that was clearly lacking—always—was that affection, that caring, that intimacy, that was so clearly what I longed for.” And he was the last to know why.

  Debora’s family was not in the picture much. Her sister, Pam, had been married several times, had borne a son, Isaac, in the mid-seventies. She later became a drug and alcohol counselor. Debora was scornful of Pam’s profession.

  Bob and Joan Jones were still relocating frequently as he rose in the hierarchy of the Roman Meal bread company. Their somewhat nomadic life suited them. They bought a fifth-wheel camper and were constantly on the road, seeing America. They rarely visited Debora and Mike, and had fallen into a pattern of getting together only about every two years.

  Mike was much closer to his parents and to his sisters, Vicki and Karen. But Debora seemed stilted and tense around her new husband’s family. She had virtually nothing in common with her mother-in-law. Velma Farrar had a highly developed sense of fashion, and clothes seemed to matter to Debora not at all. Mike’s sisters were slimmer and prettier than she was, and Debora’s biting sense of humor, which charmed so many, missed the mark with the Farrars.

  At first, it seemed to Mike that his mother tried to form a friendship with Debora and Debora held back. Later, he thought, Debora tried but his mother pulled away. Christmases would always be difficult, as they are in so many families, although Debora decorated trees, wrapped packages, and made an effort to be festive—particularly after their children were born.

  Mike did his three-year residency in internal medicine at the University of Cincinnati. He stayed on for a fourth year, as chief medical resident, and was then awarded a three-year fellowship in cardiology. Altogether, he would spend seven years in advanced study before he entered practice as a heart specialist.

  Debora, of course, moved to Ohio with Mike; she went into private practice in emergency medicine at Jewish Hospital. But she soon soured on emergency medicine, and she had a number of run-ins with other doctors—even supervising doctors—in the ER. “One time she called me,” Mike said. “The patient had come in with a heart problem, and Debora told me she knew exactly what he needed. She called the attending physician, but the doctor didn’t agree with her. She was absolutely outraged. . . . But the fact is that Debora was right.”

  Although Debora was often on target in diagnosing and recommending treatment, she was unpopular. Co-workers found her abrasive, autocratic, and difficult to work with. She lacked the tact to differ with them in a diplomatic way. Instead, she exploded with anger if anyone questioned her judgment. Moreover, the vast majority of cases presenting in the ER were mundane; consequently, they irritated her. Debora could not understand why patients waited so long before they sought medical help, letting minor earaches become raging infections, small scratches turn into cellulitis, and colds into pneumonia. Her bedside manner was more confrontational than comforting. She had always been disgusted with stupidity, and she saw so much of it in emergency medicine.

  As part of her training for emergency medicine, Debora had done a rotation in internal medicine. While she and Mike lived in Cincinnati, she decided to switch to that field. Doing so would mean another residency, of course. Her husband was already in an internal medicine program, and through attrition, there were always vacancies at the end of the year.

  “So she came and joined my residency. . . .” Mike recalled. “She and I were both second-year residents. We were both on call on the same nights, one of us at the V.A. hospital and one at the University of Cincinnati hospital. I can remember the very first night she was on call as a supervising resident. She had someone helping her, because she had been out of internal medicine for a while. But she called me up and was absolutely beside herself. She didn’t know what to do; she didn’t know where anything was. . . . I told her, ‘Just ask someone. You’re
learning the ropes.’ But Debora couldn’t do that. She couldn’t seem to admit that she needed help with all these things.”

  That puzzled Mike. When he first met Debora, she had appeared very self-confident, able to deal with anything that came her way. Now, she was unsure of herself and hypersen sitive to criticism. And she continued to avoid Mike’s attempts at greater intimacy. She seemed either to be frightened by it or have no need for it; rather, she enjoyed solitary pursuits, burying herself in books or playing solitaire. Later, she played computer games designed for one person. Still, when they went out with other people, she was the same witty and vivacious person Mike had fallen in love with. He figured that she was just apprehensive about trusting in marriage; she had been mistaken once and maybe she was afraid she would fail again.

  She had a tender side. She talked about wanting to help people; she loved animals and adopted two cats—one a huge white cat and the other a tiny black kitten. A photograph that Mike took during their first year in Cincinnati reveals both his interests and Debora’s; she is sitting at her piano, holding her black kitten and white cat, while Mike’s first very modest wine collection of seven bottles is displayed in an inexpensive wine rack on top of the piano.

  Debora is slender and pretty in the photograph, but she gives the camera lens only a half-smile. She and Mike had been married for more than a year. She had a handsome and brilliant young husband who wanted very much to love her—but in the photo she seems sad, as if her world does not suit her at all. Mike, an avid photographer, took hundreds of pictures of Debora over the years of their marriage, and many of them caught an expression of deep unhappiness—as if Debora’s mind and heart were far away.