Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury a Mother's Sacrifice Read online

  Oaks, elms, and the Kansas state tree, the cottonwood, abound, but it is the paper-white trunks of the Osage orange tree that stand out, particularly when the rest of the vegetation is dormant. The wind is fiercely cold in the winter and hot and dry in the summer. Indeed, Kansas is named for the wind; the name comes from a Siouan Indian word meaning both “people of the south wind” and “smoky wind.”

  The towns along I-70 to Topeka and I-35 to Olathe spike off onto gridlike main thoroughfares dotted with every franchise in America. The parts of Olathe, the Johnson County seat, that were built when the century was new abound in wonderful wooden houses with sagging porches and lilacs in the dooryard. On the “other” side of I-35, the houses are closer together, and have no history before last year. Business seems to follow the new houses and the franchises, but the sunflowers and zinnias crowding whitewashed fences have more appeal to the soul and the senses.

  The sun shines bright as fire in Kansas; even though every twig, bush, and tree is a sere brownish gray in the middle of March, the earth seems to come fully alive overnight in May, as if answering a silent signal of nature.

  The two Kansas Citys, population aside, are really small towns where community involvement is concerned. People know each other and there are many interconnections. The Women’s Exchange Club, which meets in an historic old firehouse in Kansas City, Missouri, is representative of the kind of mutual support that transcends age, occupation, ethnicity, and personal wealth.

  The medical communities on both sides of the Missouri River are even more akin to small towns where gossip, rumor, and scandal move with the speed of a snake in a wheat field and, more often than not, are equally impossible to trace. Many physicians are on staff at hospitals in both states.

  Celeste Walker* was a woman who would become the target of many rumors, innuendoes, and outright lies. She was in her early forties in 1995, but she scarcely looked it. She had thick blond hair—streaked perhaps by the Kansas sun, perhaps by her beautician—green eyes, a deep tan, and the taut figure of a woman who works out whether she feels like it or not. Although she had not practiced for a decade, she was a registered nurse. Her expertise was in recovery room nursing and she had occasionally done psychiatric nursing.

  Celeste had been married to Dr. John Walker for sixteen years; they had two sons, Brett,* fourteen, and Dan,* ten. The family lived in a sprawling split-level on a huge lot in Overland Park, Kansas, one of the affluent suburbs south of KCMO. John, an anesthesiologist at Shawnee Mission Medical Center, was a handsome man with brown hair and eyes and a solemn, gentle manner. Of medium height and weight, he had worn a mustache for the last few years.

  The Walkers’ home was a monument to Celeste’s creative and innovative style and it had a pool, a party room, and a dressing room in the backyard. Celeste’s flower beds covered every other available square foot, and she knew the Latin name for every bloom. During the short but fierce Kansas summers, she virtually lived outdoors, gardening, swimming, or cooking for groups of friends. Celeste wore a bathing suit as often as she wore a dress. The more tanned she got, the deeper the blue-green of her eyes seemed, and she was, without question, a sensational-looking woman.

  Celeste had an unquenchable and ebullient air, but the bubbly attitude she showed the world was a carefully constructed mask. Optimism had been—a long time ago, and down deep—her essential nature, but the many years of being married to John had knocked most of the joy out of her. Inside, she felt the desolate pain that every woman married to a clinically depressed man lives with. In almost two decades of marriage, Celeste had gone from hope to despair to acceptance. John was a good man, a kind man, but no matter how hard she tried, she could not make him happy. She could not even get him to admit that the possibility of happiness might exist.

  Eventually, in order to survive, Celeste spent her days with her sons and with her many female friends, mostly in activities connected with Pembroke Hill School. She may have longed to be with a man who loved life as much as she did, a man who believed in the future—but she had never even come close to having an affair.

  Celeste’s sister and mother were both very much like herself—strong, fun, bright, and creative. Celeste’s mother, in her seventies, was “going steady.” Her sister lived in the deep woods of the Northwest, in a house she and her husband had built themselves. Both of them tried to bolster Celeste, to keep her spirits up and urge her to live her own life, to try to be happy even though John could find neither solace nor joy in his life.

  Celeste and John had met in a surgical recovery room when he was checking on a patient. It was a romantic way to meet and she was impressed with him right away. “He was so smart. That man knew everything,” she would remember. “You could ask him any medical question on any specialty. He had an unbelievable memory.” She did not see the sadness that was an integral part of John. Maybe it wasn’t there in the early days.

  They were married on October 6, 1979, four and a half months after Debora Green and Michael Farrar. John was twenty-nine and Celeste was twenty-seven. Coincidentally, John was the same John Walker who had been on Debora’s cadaver-dissection team in anatomy class at the University of Kansas Med School. They had been friends then, but had rarely, if ever, met since graduation.

  The Walker marriage, much like the Farrar-Green marriage, proved early on to suffer from flawed communication, with the marital partners working at cross-purposes. “I thought when we got married, we loved each other,” Celeste would write one day, trying to understand what had gone wrong. “But in the first few months, we found we had entirely different expectations. We both tried to make the marriage work, we had children, we built a life together.” But as time went on, Celeste realized that her husband was becoming more and more depressed. It seemed that she fought harder to bring new life to their marriage than he did. “He just didn’t have much energy—and just wanted to escape.”

  They managed to bumble along, somehow, until 1990. By then, they were both desperately unhappy; John said that he wanted to be out of the marriage. Still, when Celeste suggested that they separate, he balked. They went to a marriage counselor and things seemed to be better for a while—a very short while.

  “That was the point,” Celeste would remember, “where John realized the marriage was a failure, and he felt that he had in some way failed also. He became more depressed as time went on and we had fewer mutual interests. There was little affection or closeness and we grew apart and much more distant from each other until we reached a point where we were more like roommates. John still was a good friend and a wonderful person. He was always sympathetic when I was sick or down. I respected him and valued his opinion—but we just couldn’t connect on an intimate level.”

  Sometime in 1994, Celeste had accepted that she and John could not go on together. He had no interest in anything having to do with their home. When the roof leaked and the basement flooded, he simply walked away. “I confronted him,” she remembered. “I said, ‘Anybody else would be down there helping to clean up the basement and putting it back together, and getting the roof fixed and stop the leaking.’

  “He said, ‘Well, I figure all we have to do is have some damage repair. I really don’t care. I figure I’ll be gone in ten years anyway. You can’t raise those boys by yourself so I’ll stick around until Brett is in college and Dan is in high school, and then I’ll be gone.’”

  Celeste assumed that this meant he planned to divorce her in ten years. But, by then she would be over fifty; it would be difficult to find a job. Knowing that there was a stopwatch running on her marriage, she arranged to update her nursing skills. “I began to plan an independent life for myself,” she said. “I had been out of the workforce for ten years, so I took a reentry course for nursing. I became stronger and more confident. John became more dependent and pessimistic about us, his ability to afford a divorce, the direction of health care in general.”

  Celeste agonized over her husband’s ambivalence. He wanted to leave her
; he didn’t want to leave her. He would leave in a prescribed number of years. He didn’t feel he could afford a divorce. From one week to the next, she didn’t know where she stood. She didn’t have a marriage; she had a pendulum, and it sank lower with each swing.

  And all the while Celeste grew more concerned about John’s profound depression. “In December of 1994, he brought me a gun and told me to hide it—which I did.” Frightened, Celeste made an appointment with a psychiatrist for her husband. John seemed to be descending from increasingly darker moods to a point where he himself feared he might commit suicide. He did go to about four sessions of therapy before dropping out.

  Celeste’s hope that John wasn’t actually considering suicide was somewhat bolstered by the fact that he worked hard to keep himself in good physical shape. He exercised and talked about getting a bike that he could ride in the morning before he left for work. She tried to tell herself these weren’t the activities of a man who wanted to die. But her experience in psychiatric nursing told her that John was in deep trouble emotionally.

  She didn’t know then that John was buying more and more life insurance—another policy with each devastating episode of depression. He seemed a good risk; he was healthy, and he had a wonderful career. The insurance he was accumulating didn’t strike the underwriters as excessive.

  When he was home, John was emotionally removed from Celeste, but he tried to be present for his sons. He watched television and took naps. He seemed to care even less about the house and didn’t have the energy to fix things that needed repair. The kitchen floor needed replacing, but he wasn’t interested. He was too tired, with the kind of absolute fatigue that is not alleviated by sleep, though he went to bed right after supper and slept through the night until it was time to go to work. Celeste felt that John was sleeping through their marriage, their lives.

  The Walkers had moved in the same tight circle of close friends for twenty years, but now John told Celeste that he knew they weren’t really his friends—they were hers, and they included him in their activities only because of her. He felt that none of them really cared about him. “That was so far from the truth,” she said, “but it showed how unconnected John felt to everyone in his life.”

  Celeste saw the Pembroke Hill School’s summer 1995 Peru trip as a chance to step back from her world and evaluate where she and John were going. And she was excited about the project: she thought it would be a wonderful time for herself and her older son. Though John wasn’t at all interested, he didn’t mind if Celeste and Brett went.

  Planning for the two-week trip got under way in the latter part of 1994, and a number of parents signed up. They had several meetings about what they should take, what clothing they would need, what they hoped to see while they were there, and even what health hazards they might face.

  Even though they were all part of the medical community, Celeste had never met Michael or Debora. Mike practiced north of the river, in Missouri, while John’s practice was on the Kansas side. Celeste had been active in getting Pembroke Hill families signed up for the Peru trip, but she had never seen Mike before May 1995, at one of the Peru trip meetings. “I was drawn to him,” she said. “He had energy and enthusiasm; he just had a spark about him.”

  Mike and another doctor would be in charge of providing antibiotics and health information on the trip. As he did with everything, Mike had carefully researched what bugs and viruses might attack tourists in Peru. At the meeting, he and the other physician argued briefly about what the best medical protocol would be.

  “After he left the meeting,” Celeste remembered, “Mike called me on the car phone and said he was going to call the CDC [the federal Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta] to be sure we were all really protected—that we got the correct shots, and that we took the right medicines and first-aid equipment with us. I got off the phone and I thought, ‘Gosh, this man is so different from John.’ John never followed through on anything, and here’s Mike Farrar calling back right away to assure me that we would have what we needed in Peru.”

  Although they had a few business dealings about the trip by phone and mail, Celeste didn’t see Mike again until they were on the Peru trip, six weeks later. She talked on the phone more with Debora, and it was Debora who had delivered the package of medicine to the Walker home.

  The Pembroke Hill group left Kansas City on June 24, 1995. “Before I left for Peru,” Celeste said, “we [she and John] decided we would both spend that two weeks being really honest with ourselves about where we wanted to go from here.”

  Things were also close to a watershed point between Mike and Debora. Tim had lost almost all respect for his father. One evening, mouthing off to Mike, he so angered his father that Mike picked up the thirteen-year-old and slammed him against a wall. Fortunately, Tim hit at a point between the studs, and the plasterboard buckled. He wasn’t hurt, but Mike was horrified to think that he had literally put his own son through a wall. It didn’t matter that Tim was a well-muscled young athlete and Mike was not particularly strong; it mattered that he was the father and he had lost control.

  On two other occasions, father and son were angry enough at each other to wrestle. Debora did not step in to stop these confrontations; she only watched. The worst scene of all came on a late Mother’s Day celebration, in May 1995. Debora’s parents, Joan and Robert Jones, were visiting and the atmosphere was tense. Joan later described what happened that day:

  “The plans were to take me out to dinner, a sort of combination Mother’s Day/birthday. It wasn’t really Mother’s Day, as that day had to be reserved for Farrar’s mother. Farrar went to work early as usual. Tim sat and had tea with us and told us all his plans and hopes. He seemed so grown up. He didn’t know if he wanted to be a teaching tennis pro or a chef. He was really into cooking and wanted to go to cooking school and wanted a pasta maker for Christmas. He and grandpa played a lot of pool, and Tim told his grandpa the reason he was working so hard at lifting weights was to protect himself from the ‘wimp’ (one of the nicer names he called Farrar.)”

  Joan was disappointed to find that the man she called Farrar was going to dinner with them. She felt that he didn’t want to take her out and that he meant to spoil her evening by deliberately “starting in on Tim,” harassing his son until he was in a rage.

  “Farrar made Tim go [with the party] but every time Tim started to settle down, Farrar would say something to start him off again…. When we got to the restaurant Farrar wouldn’t let Tim go in…. Tim came in and apologized and asked if he could have something to eat and Farrar actually got up and chased Tim from the restaurant.”

  The argument between Tim and Mike continued at home. Mike wouldn’t deny that. But he did reject his mother-in-law’s version of the rest of the evening’s events.

  “Tim was on the floor, and he called me a motherfucker,” Mike said. “That was too much. I was pulling him into his room. It was dark, and he was flailing around, and he hit me. It was a lucky punch—but he broke my nose.”

  Hearing his mother-in-law’s version of that evening, Mike was amazed. He had felt that Debora’s parents agreed with him that Tim had gotten much too cocky, especially when they saw Mike’s bloody nose. “I went downstairs after Tim was in bed and they said, ‘Well, you put up with his behavior longer than we would have!’”

  It was humiliating for Mike to have to go to a fellow physician the next morning to have his nose set, and to explain that his own son had done it in anger.

  There was no question that Tim was a very unhappy teenager: he was being manipulated by his mother, who was lining up her children to be soldiers on her side of the family war; his father was angry and miserable; and he was just entering that stage of puberty when every kid is alternately shy and aggressive, unsure and a know-it-all.

  * * *

  Despite the tensions in the family, Debora, Mike, and Tim were still signed up for the Peru trip. (Lissa and Kelly would stay with relatives in the Kansas City area and in St. L
ouis.) Twenty parents and twenty children were slated to be on the trip for the first week; half of those planned to stay for the second. Most of the children were sixth-graders, a few fifth-graders. The adults were fortyish and professionals in their fields.

  Mike and Debora planned to stay for both weeks of the tour, returning on July 6. The group flew from Kansas City to Atlanta on Delta Airlines, then continued south to Peru, where they would spend half their time in the jungle and half in the Andes Mountains. The jungle lodge where they spent their first few nights, though remote, was not primitive. There were “open air” double rooms and a dining hall. Afterward the tourists took a boat down the Amazon River to an even more remote camp.

  Celeste Walker, her son Brett, and Carolyn Stafford, a teacher at Pembroke Hill, spent a lot of time together on the trip. Celeste could not help but feel a little wistful when she saw how Debora and Mike seemed to be together all the time; it would have been such a great trip if she had a husband who shared her love of travel and adventure. Debora and Mike struck Celeste as a perfect couple. She noticed that they always sat together on the buses, hiked together, and ate together. They seemed so devoted to each other.

  Celeste had been surprised the first time she saw Debora: she had expected a thinner, prettier woman. On the trip, she wondered whether maybe Debora and Mike were such a tight couple because of their differences. They didn’t look as if they belonged together. “Debora was pretty intimidating looking,” Celeste said. “She was big—heavy. She was bigger than he was, and she had a really short haircut, boyish looking.”

  It was true; Debora’s latest metamorphosis made her look quite masculine. Ever since she had started to work out of her home, she seemed oblivious to her appearance. In hot weather at home, she often wore a robe or muumuu all day; on the Peru trip, she wore faded old T-shirts and shorts. She didn’t wear any makeup, but neither did any of the other tourists. Hiking up Machu Picchu wasn’t the sort of activity that called for makeup.