Bitter Harvest Read online

  “She clearly didn’t care if I was there or not,” Mike said. “It was kind of upsetting to me, because I thought that this was something that we would always go through together.”

  Kelly turned out to be a special child, an unexpected gift, a curly-haired blond pixie of a baby. And there was something more: she exuded love and seemed to have the somber wisdom of an old soul. She was, her father would judge, the most intelligent of the three children born to him and Debora. Of course, it wasn’t long before everyone forgot she had begun as an unwelcome surprise. Both her mother and her father adored her, and Tim and Lissa welcomed their baby sister.

  Debora had always been an excellent mother to newborns and toddlers. Mike was proud of her for that. She seemed to enjoy them tremendously—and they her. There were always special birthday cakes and parties. Debora taught them to swim and saw that they had tennis lessons and dancing lessons and that Tim started in sports early. She had great ambition for her children.

  If only their marriage could have grown as naturally as their children. But it didn’t. Debora suspected that Mike was looking at other women, a concern that may not have been unfounded. One nurse who worked with Mike later recalled that Debora seemed obsessed with him and would follow him around to see what he was doing when he was away from her.

  Even so, nothing changed at home. Debora either would not or could not control the tantrums brought on by frustration at delays and small annoyances. She had never been a homemaker and she was clearly not about to change. She and Mike had the children in common, but the physical side of their marriage, the intimate man-and-wife side, scarcely existed.

  And while Debora had been able to lose her pregnancy pounds easily after Tim and Lissa’s births, she found it difficult to get back to her normal weight after Kelly was born. She was discouraged by that, and by other small—but cumulative—blows to her self-esteem.

  5

  One activity the family enjoyed together was traveling. Somehow, tensions eased once they got to their destinations. They had a time-share condo on Sanibel Island, off the western coast of Florida, and all five of them looked forward to their vacations there. They went to Alaska, British Columbia, Puerto Vallarta, Knott’s Berry Farm, Hollywood, and Disneyland. They traveled to Cabo San Lucas, to the Alamo, took a real western wagon-train trip in the Flint Hills, and to Breckenridge, Colorado. Perhaps Debora and Mike were seeking an escape from their marriage. If things weren’t good at home, maybe they could travel to some spot so exotic and so different that their marriage wouldn’t matter.

  Mike recalled that he and Debora and their children did have a great time on vacations. The problem was getting there. “There were more scenes in airports than I can count,” he said wearily. “I would absolutely cringe at the thought of traveling with Debora. When we got there, it was okay. But if the flights were delayed, if there was a change in schedule, she would become absolutely unglued. I can remember her chewing out people at the desk because planes were delayed because of storms.”

  On one trip to Sanibel Island, the airline announced that the flight would be delayed by storms in Dallas. Debora could not deal with the few hours’ wait, despite Mike’s argument that they would get to Sanibel even if they were a little late. It was a concept that Debora could not accept.

  While other disappointed passengers murmured to each other, Debora began to shout at the airline representative at the desk. “We will never fly on this damn airline again!” she said loudly. “You are incompetent, ridiculous, and you have no consideration for the people who pay your salary!”

  “Debora—” Mike said, trying to draw her away from the counter.

  “My husband, Dr. Farrar, agrees with me,” Debora said, pounding on the counter. “And I am Dr. Green. You are a very sorry excuse for an airline! Don’t you agree, Michael?”

  Mike could have cheerfully sunk through the floor as he felt scores of eyes watching them. He knew what was coming next: Debora was getting ready to use her extensive vocabulary of four-letter words.

  “Michael, tell them what you think of this kind of lousy, stupid, fucking inefficiency!”

  “Debora, they can’t help it if there’s a storm in Dallas,” Mike said quietly, balancing Kelly in one arm and trying to hang on to Lissa with his other hand. Tim stood there quietly, staring at his mother as her face got redder and redder. “It isn’t safe to fly,” Mike said. “When it’s safe, we’ll fly. We’ll get there.”

  Now Debora was furious with him because he wouldn’t side with her against the airline. She blasted Mike with a few more vulgar epithets and then stomped off down the airport corridor.

  “You’d see that over and over and over,” Mike recalled. If planes were delayed, Debora would demand that he rent a car and drive them where they were going. Debora was a “perpetual pessimist” who always believed the worst. “You couldn’t talk to her, you couldn’t reason with her when something like that happened,” Mike said. “She used absolutely vile, terrible language. It was embarrassing.”

  It was a paradox: Debora loved their vacations—yet made the trip itself hell. But once they reached Sanibel or the dude ranch or Disneyland—wherever they were headed—everything would smooth out; anyone looking at the hundreds of happy-family-on-vacation photographs that Mike took would have no hint that anything roiled beneath the surface.

  Debora had her own version of their vacations: “Mike had everything planned from the time we got up until the time we went to bed. We were on a schedule. We couldn’t relax. One year he couldn’t go to Mexico with us and we had a wonderful time. We got up when we woke up and I asked the kids, ‘Well, what should we do today?’ We just did what we wanted, and we rested when we felt like it. It was so much better without him.”

  Mike didn’t dispute Debora’s complaint. “I did want to see everything there was to see,” he said. He had been attracted to Debora because of her energy and the air of excitement about her; once married, she seemed to him to have little enthusiasm for anything.

  Mike was working punishing hours in his cardiology practice, often leaving the house at six and coming home after eight or nine. When Debora was working, she was usually home by four or five. “Of course, societal mores dictated that she was the one who was home with the kids more,” Mike said. “In her defense, she worked fewer hours because of that.”

  Mike was a perfectionist in many aspects of his life. Because he seemed able to compartmentalize his world and concentrate completely on whatever task was at hand, he expected that Debora could do the same. He liked schedules and well-planned trips, with no spur-of-the-moment flights of fancy. He felt most comfortable when he could control his environment and, in a sense, Debora and their three children were part of what he wanted to organize. But Debora was the most disorganized and chaotic woman he had ever known. Her sense of humor and her slapdash approach to life didn’t mesh with Mike’s need for order.

  Debora’s poor study habits, lack of social graces, sloppy housekeeping, and, finally, failure at the practice of medicine all disappointed Mike. It seemed almost as if she had decided that if she could not please him, she would displease him, would go out of her way to behave outrageously. Or perhaps she thought her rages were a way to control and manipulate him, to demonstrate her importance and superiority. But, in fact, she was allowing herself to become completely dependent upon Mike and their marriage for her support and survival.

  Nevertheless, after Kelly’s birth, Debora tried to reestablish her practice, going on staff at Trinity Hospital. The competition there was rough, particularly because the doctors who had failed to offer her a partnership were well established at Trinity. She failed to attract enough patients to warrant keeping her on staff. And so, in 1989, with her practice failing and her knee bothering her so much, she let her career go.

  Mike encouraged her to do so. “She never really seemed to like being in practice, anyway,” he said. “I would get these phone calls from her—and I was trying to do my work—and she would
want to sit there and complain how bad things were for her. I would try to console her, tell her what to do. I thought she was depressed.”

  That was probably an accurate diagnosis, even though it came from a doctor whose specialty lay in the valves of the heart and not in the more ethereal workings of the psyche. Something was tormenting Debora. Despite all her intelligence, she seemed unable to find anything good about her life—except for her children. And again she began to use drugs to escape.

  By now, Mike easily recognized the signs. “She’d get this kind of funny look on her face, a funny smile, and a specific way she talked—and I could tell. I confronted her again and she denied it, multiple times.”

  It took a more concentrated search, but he finally found her cache of drugs. And this time, Mike surmised that Debora must be calling in prescriptions for her patients, then going to the pharmacy and picking the drugs up. Some of the narcotics were rigidly controlled substances, which she couldn’t order by phone. Without knowing for sure how she was getting them, Mike assumed Debora was pretending to be the patient. In fact, she didn’t really have any patients; all she had was a medical license. And if she were deeply involved in drugs, it would affect not only her career but his as well.

  Mike could not bring himself to turn his own wife in. It would have meant the end of her life as a physician; it might even result in her going to prison. So once more, he talked to her about this seemingly insoluble problem.

  “Debora,” he said flatly, “you aren’t just hiding drugs from me, and you aren’t just harming yourself. You are breaking the law. Do you realize that this is a felony? You can lose your license. You can go to jail just like any junkie out there on the street. If you keep doing these things, somebody is going to catch you. And then what’s going to happen to the kids?”

  “I’m not like—” she protested.

  “Yes, you are,” Mike cut in. “In a way, you’re worse. You’re a doctor. You’ve heard what people say about doctors who get hooked on drugs. You’ve got to stop. Turning you in is the last thing in the world I want to do, but I swear I’ll do it if I find one more of your hidden stashes. And you know I’ll find them.”

  Debora looked horrified at the possibility that she might go to jail and be separated from her children. It was as if the thought had never occurred to her before. But Mike left her no place to run and he accepted no excuse. She was going to bring them all down if she didn’t stop taking drugs.

  The warning seemed to be effective. Mike never again found vials of Tylox and other narcotics hidden under piles of underwear or in the back of a closet. As far as he could determine, she stopped her drug use after that.

  But throughout their marriage, Debora had an inordinate number of accidents—the mysterious knee injury; a finger that became infected after she was bitten by a patient; the break in a tiny navicular bone in her wrist—an unusual injury, with subsequent complications. None of her injuries healed quickly and all of them required painkillers. Asked later if he ever suspected that Debora might have been deliberately injuring herself either to get attention or to obtain more painkillers, Mike seemed genuinely surprised at the idea. That his wife might have suffered from Munchausen’s syndrome (self-injury to achieve attention or importance) had not occurred to him.

  But at least her problems with pills had not carried over to other addictions. Debora never drank alcohol to excess. They went to wine-tasting parties, and Mike had his small wine cellar. They enjoyed a glass of wine or a gin-and-tonic at the end of the day—nothing more.

  Debora tried another job, at the Missouri Patient Care Review Foundation. Again, she initially seemed to do very well working in peer review. The position offered regular hours, and Mike felt that she had a real knack for going through medical charts and spotting red flags. Rather than having someone hovering over her work and criticizing, she was now looking for troubling areas in other physicians’ patient care. It was tedious and meticulous work, but it seemed a good fit for a woman who had once longed to be an engineer. There were rules and guidelines and familiar pathways to follow. If some other doctor whom she had never met veered from the guidelines, she took pleasure in spotting his or her failings.

  “It sounded to me as if Debora was very successful,” Mike said. “But she wasn’t. Her reviews were being reviewed because, again, she was having trouble with people in the office. Ultimately, the Missouri Patient Care Review Foundation had to downsize and consolidate their regional offices to one office, down in Jefferson City. Debora told me that they were going to put her in charge of the whole operation there, but that she had turned the job down because my practice was here in Kansas City.”

  Mike would come to wonder if his wife was even offered the job in Jefferson City, but he could never substantiate his doubts. At any rate, Debora went on to do freelance work, reviewing Medicaid files sent to her by a number of states. This was something she could do at home and that left her free to drive her children to school and to ballet and sports practice. She did not have to deal with other people; her work was solitary.

  Tim and Lissa were attending the very exclusive, very expensive Pembroke Hill school. Tim was playing soccer and hockey, and Lissa was taking ballet lessons. Kelly was only four, and there was plenty to do at home. But Debora took another job, working in an occupational medicine clinic. The man who hired her also contracted to oversee a number of emergency rooms, and Debora had known him for some time. But she had absolutely no training in occupational medicine, and her supervisor was notoriously difficult to work for.

  “Ultimately, it didn’t work,” Mike remembered. “Debora said she was just going to do freelance reviews and stay home with the kids. I thought ‘That’s great. That’s fine.’ We didn’t need the money, and if she’s home with the kids, driving them around—maybe joining a country club and playing tennis—she’ll be happy. As long as she’s happy and not so stressed by work, maybe things will be better.”

  Debora did stay home and she did join a tennis club. She was the most devoted of mothers, always there for car pools and school visits, and to pick up Tim from soccer or hockey practice, Lissa from ballet lessons and Kelly from toddler tennis lessons. Some of the women in her social group described her as a wonderful mother, “very loving with her children. She did everything with her kids.” But others found Debora somewhat abusive: when she sat on the sidelines of soccer matches, “she always bad-mouthed her kids,” one mother said. “She would say, ‘They are driving me crazy!’ It made us really uncomfortable because it was so continuous.”

  Debora had a cleaning lady who came in once a week or so, but between times, the brick house on West Sixty-first inevitably became cluttered and dusty. Debora had never found housework interesting or necessary. It didn’t bother the children if things were untidy, but it drove Mike nuts. He thrived on order.

  Debora was still a licensed physician, but she had no practice and no regular job; and although her profession had never seemed to fulfill her (or even interest her that much), without it she had lost another piece of her identity. She had always been someone special—the best student in school, the wittiest resident in the ER, a doctor with her own practice. Now she had all the time in the world to read the stacks of novels she brought home from the library, time to play with her children, time to take care of the black Lab—Boomer—that the kids had begged for.

  But some essence of Debora seemed to disappear in the early nineties. Few would deny that she had behaved bizarrely in the past, that her tantrums were shocking and uncalled-for, that she could be a pain to work with. But now, in an unkempt house, with the daily chores every mother faces, it was as if her outrageous behavior had brought her to a place that even she—with all her brilliance—could never truly have contemplated.

  She wasn’t remotely special anymore.

  Something else about her had undergone a dramatic change: her appearance. Although there had been times before when she put on weight, she always took it off rapidly enough. Now
she gained forty or fifty pounds, and her thighs and hips bulged beneath tight jeans. She was in her early forties now and looked five years older. In contrast, her husband, four years younger, looked to be in his early thirties. Debora cut her beautiful hair into an unflattering straight bob. She wore the thick glasses prescribed for her severe nearsightedness rather than the contact lenses she had once used. She wore no makeup, and her clothing was sloppy and unisex—T-shirts and jeans or shorts. It almost seemed as if she had given up. And if she had no insight into her own bizarre behavior, she could only blame someone else for her pain.

  Mike had always been focused on his career, and, at the same time, determined to make his marriage work. He couldn’t overlook Debora’s behavior. He had to deal with her rages; she was in his face, yelling, stomping her feet. Sometimes she beat herself on the head with books, or beat on her thighs until she left bruises. Or, worse, she behaved the same way in a public place while their children cringed and strangers stared at her with a mixture of concern and curiosity. That behavior, her drug use, and the repeated problems she had had with her practice were clear evidence that Debora could not adjust to the world and its stresses the way other people did. But Mike didn’t know why—or what he could do about it.

  When he left home in the morning for rounds, it was a relief. He plunged himself into his career so completely that he didn’t have to think about his marriage during the hours he was away. And he would not deny that he noticed other women—soft-voiced, blond, slender, seemingly compliant women—who would not shriek at him or stomp off in a hysterical fit of pique when life did not go smoothly. But Mike overlooked or failed to recognize that some of his wife’s behavior was totally irrational, even dangerous. Or perhaps he simply repressed signals that were too alarming to deal with.