Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice (3 page)

She had chosen medicine, but Debora’s heart was not really in it. When she was asked later, “Which profession did you
love?”
she answered immediately, “Oh—engineering! My mind is very mathematical, very organized.” But she had decided to become a doctor. In the first of a number of coincidences that would lace her complicated life, one of her team of four medical students in anatomy class was a handsome, gentle young man named John Walker.
^*
There was no romance between them, but they became good friends as they worked over the cadaver assigned to their foursome.

Debora recalled that she had no problem at all detaching herself from the humanity of the cadaver she and John dissected. “An autopsy is different,” she explained. “That person has been alive recently. I didn’t feel that way about the cadavers—but I always smelled of formaldehyde and I always felt greasy.”

Her fellow medical students found Debora likable. Reginald Hall, a classmate, remembered her as studious and caring. “She was a very easy person to get along with,” he said. “She always seemed very concerned about her patients and their well-being.”

Debora finished medical school in three years, graduating with her M.D. on May 16, 1975. During her internship rotations, she found that she enjoyed emergency medicine most. She did her first residency in the ER at Truman Medical Center in Kansas City: “I really liked it—something was always happening.” But after spending more time in emergency medicine, she was disappointed. “I found out that the biggest part of emergency medicine were patients who had earaches—or something that they should have had treated in an office call, but they waited too long and then showed up in the ER. It was boring.”

Later, Debora would switch to oncology, cancer treatment. “I picked oncology,” she said with a smile, “because I’m a ‘people person’—I really like people. But oncology was so depressing because I cared so much about my patients, and yet I knew they were going to die.”

3

D
ebora had met and dated a fellow engineering student at the University of Illinois: Duane M. J. Green. Their relationship deepened, and they were married during her studies at the KU Medical School in Kansas City. It was a charming, if informal wedding. Debora was thin, almost willowy, and she looked very young and very lovely in her old-fashioned “pioneer” gown with a high collar and puffed sleeves. She wore a pinafore of white eyelet over the long pink cotton gown. Her beautiful hair, parted in the middle, fell straight and shining to her hips. Her matron of honor and only attendant was her sister, Pam, who wore a similar eyelet dress. They posed together after the ceremony, two sweet-faced young women beaming with happiness.

Duane was tall and thin, towering over Debora’s five feet four inches. His sideburns and waxed handlebar mustache, de rigueur for the seventies, made him look almost as old-fashioned as she did. Bob and Joan Jones attended the wedding and it would seem that all Joan’s dreams had come true. Her daughters were both married. Pam was interested in studying psychology and counseling; Debora was about to become a doctor and she was married to a handsome engineer who would soon have his Ph.D. The future couldn’t have looked brighter.

Debora and Duane Green lived in an apartment at first, but after she graduated from med school in 1975, they moved to a house at 3110 Sterling Avenue in Independence, Missouri, so that Debora would be within reasonable com muting distance to her residency in the ER of the Truman Medical Center and Duane could be close to his job in Kansas City. But their marriage had been in trouble almost from the beginning. When asked what went wrong, Debora shrugged and said, “I’m not even sure why I married him, but I knew as soon as I did that we had absolutely no common interests. He was an engineer. That pretty much says it all. Engineers are boring and they don’t communicate well.”

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 plans, 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.