Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice (15 page)

In truth, Debora lived through her children, far more than most women do; she had always been proud of their accomplishments, their activities, their physical beauty, and their soaring IQ’s. They were the friends she didn’t have; they were her excuse for giving up her medical practice. They provided the love and acceptance that she seemed unable to receive in sufficient quantity from anyone else. She did not see her parents often, her sister lived far away and had different interests, and her husband was in love with another woman. That was why she spent so much time with her children. She vowed that Lissa and Kelly would grow up to be BOTARs despite the divorce. Debora was ecstatic about Lissa’s starring role in the upcoming Christmas ballet. And Tim, the child who looked so much like her and who had inherited her brains, would be her protector.

Meanwhile, Mike was struggling to regain his strength and put his life back in order. He had come so close to dying, and he was still very thin. In the second and third weeks of October, he tentatively went back to his practice, working short hours with limited activity and not taking calls. Although he was feeling better and putting on a little weight, his recovery from whatever his illness had been—tropical sprue or typhoid fever or ricin poisoning—was very slow. He hadn’t really worked since August 18; now he hoped to ease back into his practice. Perhaps he would be able to handle full-time work by the first of November.

Ellen Ryan was trying hard to help Debora grow stronger and more independent. She knew now about Debora’s short stay at Menninger’s, but she didn’t know any details. “I had no communication with Deb’s psychiatrist and knew none of her previous history, because that was confidential information. I was working only with the information I was able to pick up. Deb still looked a little bit rumpled but she was getting ‘put together.’ She was on meds, she had regular psychiatric care. She seemed to be doing well—except that they were fighting about the money.”

One unusual feature of Ellen’s practice was the CPA on staff—“to help me track the money, to help me figure out settlements and taxes. I have a lot of women like Deb who can’t even sit down and think about putting together their discovery [the part of litigation when each side must reveal pertinent facts]. I can do that for them. At the same time, we work to get them able to stand on their own two feet.”

Debora had absolutely no idea how much she was spending in a week, and Ellen’s CPA planned to go to the Canterbury Court house to try to establish what Debora would need in the way of support. Debora didn’t know what she owned, what Mike owned, or what their expenses were. Someone had always paid the bills, and since Mike had gone into practice, she had always had enough money to buy everything she wanted for the children, the house, and herself. Now her divorce attorney and her CPA were trying to help her start to focus on budgeting, to envision what her life was going to be like down the line.

“Deb was doing great with that. No problem. And we were trying to figure out what was in the marital estate—Deb had no idea about that either.

“It wasn’t because she was a woman,” Ellen hastened to add. “I’ve represented men with wonderful jobs and incredibly high IQ’s who don’t know how much their mortgage is or how much groceries cost I can do that in my office without shaming them or embarrassing them.”

On October 19, 1995, Ellen’s CPA sat at the dining room table with Debora, working on the concept of budgeting. “Deb made little stacks of bills.
‘This
is a mortgage.
This
is insurance….’ That’s how we kind of start,” Ellen said, recalling the many wealthy women she had taught to manage their own finances.

Ellen’s CPA reported that Debora seemed in very good spirits and appeared to understand that from now on, she would have to figure out her own bills and plan ahead to pay them. She had even talked enthusiastically about her planned residency in adolescent psychiatry.

In fact, everything seemed to be going well. But there were aspects of Debora’s life that Ellen knew nothing about. She had never smelled alcohol on her client’s breath. She was unaware that drinking had ever been a problem. And she still had no clue about the vitriolic fury Debora was capable of. To Ellen, her client was a frightened, incompetent, childlike woman who was doing her best to start a new life. Although she knew Debora had to be very intelligent to get through med school, she had no idea how truly brilliant she was. Ellen would have been shocked to see a picture of a young, slender, vibrant, smiling Debora.

The woman Ellen saw so frequently those first weeks of October was overweight, poorly dressed, and had an unflattering haircut. She spent all her time with her children or wrapped up in a book. Ellen felt sorry for Debora and vowed to help her find a happier way to live. What was going on behind Debora’s façade of an unattractive, abandoned, anxious child was a secret, a secret so completely masked that Ellen did not even realize it existed.

15

O
ctober is an enchanting time in the Midwest. The humid, baking summer dwindles and nights are cooler. The leaves turn and the air smells sweetly acrid as they are burned. Planting season is over and the petunias and geraniums grow straggly and wilted, while the sunflowers bend their heads and go to seed for next year.

Debora had told Ellen and the CPA that she was willing to take over her own life, and they believed her. Ellen felt confident enough that Debora was going to make it through her divorce in good shape that she went to Vermont for a week’s vacation in mid-October. She was unaware of ominous signs in the house on Canterbury Court.

Mike, however, saw that Debora was beginning to deteriorate. Although he had never seen her as intoxicated as on the night Officer Shipps took her to the emergency room, she was drinking again.

And her old anger was bubbling to the surface. It didn’t matter that she had a lawyer fighting for her rights and that she could expect a most comfortable income while she pursued another specialty. It didn’t matter that Mike was helping her by often taking the children on weekends. Debora simply could not deal with the fact that her husband was involved with Celeste Walker. She had mentioned their affair to Ellen in an oddly old-fashioned way: “There’s another woman who’s set her cap for my husband.” But she had said this almost casually, even with humor, and Ellen did not read the fury beneath the words.

Any normal woman would be angry and jealous. But Debora refused to recognize that her marriage was moribund before the trip to Peru, and that the entrance of Celeste had been the kiss of death to any hope of reconciliation. Because Debora was so adept at wit and sarcasm and turning a smiling face to the world when she wanted to, no one saw the first trickles of danger that were beginning to escape from her carefully dammed-up rage.

But she did express her anger to her son. “Celeste leads your father around by his penis,” she fumed to Tim.

However inappropriate that was as a remark from mother to teenage son, it may have been accurate; Mike and Celeste were enjoying an intense physical affair. It had been a long time since either had been so consumed and they were both running away from sorrow and depression and acrimony. Their affair was still only three months old, and Mike had been desperately ill for much of that time. But in the autumn of 1995 they were together as often as they could be. Debora was aware of that and rubbed her children’s noses in it, urging them to hate their father.

She tried out different scenarios on Mike. She told him that he was the fool, not she. She confessed to having had two affairs herself when they were back in Cincinnati and laughed as she said that he had never suspected a thing. Another day, she told him that she had decided to become a missionary in some distant country and would not be able to take the children with her. He would have complete responsibility for them. Mike would have been glad if that were true, but he suspected it was only a ploy to keep him off balance. Indeed, the next day, Debora was back to her plans to go to Menninger’s and become a psychiatrist.

Nevertheless, Mike asked Carolyn Stafford, his friend and Celeste’s from the Peru trip, if she would consider moving into a wing of the house on Canterbury Court. She was a teacher at Pembroke Hill and he trusted her. If Debora
did
decide to leave them all, Mike knew he would need someone to be with his children while he worked. Carolyn said she would consider such an arrangement.

On Saturday, October 21, Mike attended one of Tim’s soccer matches. Tim was equally good at soccer and hockey, and Mike was proud of him. But an odd thing happened while he was watching from the sidelines. Debora walked over to him, carrying a cup of something. She smiled and said, “Here, Tim made this cappuccino for you. Be a good father and drink it.”

Mike stared at the thermos cup she held out as if it were a snake. When Debora put it in his hand, he pushed it away. “No, you have it,” he said.

She shook her head. “I’ve already had one.”

Mike’s stomach churned at the very thought of eating or drinking anything Debora offered him and he watched her walk back to her Land Cruiser with the cup. Later, he cursed himself for not keeping the damn stuff and having it tested.

All three children were to spend that night with Mike, but the older two ended up calling their mother to come get them. Mike felt discouraged sometimes, but he believed that, in time, he would be able to prove to his children that he was a good father rather than the monster Debora made him out to be. At least now their mother wasn’t screaming epithets at him in front of them. But her campaign to undermine him continued. After he went to a “Renaissance Fair” with some of the people from the Peru trip, including Celeste, Debora told the children, “You know, your father’s sleeping with three of those women.”

It was hideous to hear her talk to his children in that vulgar way. He
was
sexually intimate with Celeste, but certainly not with anyone else, and the relationship was not a subject for the children’s ears. Debora didn’t care. She never censored herself in front of the children—especially if she was insulting him.

Six-year-old Kelly was the only one of the children who didn’t have a grudge against Mike. On Saturday, October 21, she stayed at her father’s apartment after Tim and Lissa left. She knew he was upset because her brother and sister had gone home. “She understood everything,” Mike said, remembering the wisdom of a little girl who was only in the first grade. “She put her hand on my arm and said, ‘Don’t worry, Daddy. It’s going to be okay. Everything will be okay.
I
know that you didn’t sleep with all those women.’”

On Sunday, Mike drove Kelly home and found the house empty. He would not have left her there alone in any case, and he had to drive back to Merriam because Kelly had forgotten some of her things. As Mike was backing his Lexus out of his driveway, Dr. Mary Forman, his next-door neighbor to the north, came running up to the car. She needed to talk to him, she said. She seemed disturbed about something, but she definitely didn’t want to discuss it in the driveway, and in front of Kelly.

“I took her phone number,” Mike recalled, “and told her I would call her that night or the next day. Kelly and I drove back to my apartment to get her things, and then I took her back home.” When he pulled up the second time, Debora was home. He left Kelly and drove away.

Drs. Mary and John Forman had lived next door to 7517 Canterbury Court since 1989. John Forman was a thoracic surgeon, and Mary was not currently practicing medicine because they had four children, the first aged eleven, the second nine, and eight-year-old twins. The children all went to Pembroke Hill School, as did the Jurden children, who lived on the other side of Mike and Debora’s new house. Initially, the Formans had looked forward to having another mom-and-pop doctor family right next door, but after Mike and Debora had moved in a year before, they had not socialized much with them—even though their children were almost the same ages. Somehow, their differences outweighed their commonalities.

Mary Forman had been worried about Debora’s children for some time, but she was really disturbed by a discovery her son had made that weekend. John Forman and his son had been raking leaves on the south side of their house, and the eleven-year-old asked his father if he had read “the letter.” Forman didn’t know what he was talking about. “He took me outside,” Forman said, “and showed me one page of a letter. He was having a little trouble with words like ‘adultery.’”

Forman soon found the rest of the letter. Its two pages had been left on a pile of leaves; they were neither damp nor soiled. It was as if someone had meant the Formans to read them. Forman found the letter as strange as anything he’d ever seen. It accused Mike Farrar and Celeste Walker of “moral indiscretion” and, in Forman’s words, “praised Debora Green as a paragon of virtue. And it dealt with some adult issues that we didn’t think he [their son] ought to be reading.”

The Formans had no way of knowing, of course, that Mike had found a similar letter near his own front door a few weeks earlier. His suspicion that Debora had written it was confirmed when he found a handwritten draft of the letter in her purse. But Mike was used to his wife’s manipulations, and had dismissed the letter as one more game.

That Sunday afternoon, October 22, Mary Forman told Mike about the letter someone had left on top of the leaf pile in their yard. That letter was addressed to Dr. Richard Hibschman, the headmaster of Pembroke Hill School; like the other, it listed the virtues of Debora Green and mentioned how much she had done for the school. It said it would be a shame if she and her husband should be divorced because they were a perfect couple. Mary promised to mail Mike the letter.

In truth, several parents of Pembroke Hill students were troubled by the situation in Debora’s home. She could not hide her fumbling speech or the odor of alcohol on her breath, even though she felt fully competent, she would say later, to care for her children and drive them and their friends to school events. One neighbor had seen Kelly locked out of the house, crying, after ten at night. And Tim and Lissa had been fighting outside, long after they should have been in bed.

Mike had seen the deterioration, too, and he begged Debora to arrange counseling for the children to help them deal with their anger. She said she would make an appointment. As for the house, he gave up on it. Their beautiful home was, he said, a “shambles.” There were food wrappers and clothes scattered all over the carpet. The dogs and the kids had free rein of the whole house, and with no one asking them to pick up, they didn’t. Only Tim’s room was meticulously neat, as always.

And Debora was definitely drinking again. Mike could tell by the way she slurred her words ever so slightly. She was good at hiding it, but after living with her for sixteen years, he knew her speech patterns as well as his own.

Mike had done quite well working short hours for the past two weeks, but he was more tired than he had expected to be, so he decided to take a week’s vacation. It began on Monday, October 23.

That afternoon, he went to Celeste’s house; they talked for a while, then went jogging. Mike wanted to get back in shape, and this was the first time since his illness that he’d tried to exercise. “It was a terrible day to go jogging for the first time,” he recalled. “It was blustery and windy and cold.” But he made an attempt, telling himself that he would grow stronger with every day he got out and ran. Celeste could easily have run circles around him that day, but she forced herself to match his pace.

At five, Mike went back to his apartment, showered, and changed clothes. He was due to pick Tim and Kelly up at 6:40. Tim had a hockey game, Debora had an appointment with her psychiatrist, and Lissa had ballet practice, so Mike had offered to take his oldest child and his youngest for the evening.

He drove Tim to his hockey game; Kelly enjoyed coming along to watch. She was a happy little girl, always in a good mood despite the tension that had sizzled around her for most of her six years.

The hockey game was over shortly before 8:30. As Mike drove Tim and Kelly home, they were all laughing and happy. Tim had played a great game. It must have been about a quarter to nine, Mike figured, when they arrived at 7517 Canterbury Court. He hesitated, wondering if he should knock or just follow his kids in. He decided to walk in behind them. Lissa and Debora were in the kitchen. Lissa was doing her homework and Debora was taking some Kentucky Fried Chicken out of the oven where she had been reheating it.

Mike didn’t stay long, probably not more than five or ten minutes. It was awkward being there. No one asked him to sit down and Debora pretty much ignored him. He asked Lissa how ballet was going and about school, and she answered him in short, clipped phrases. “Oh, she was cool,” he remembered. “You know, she was still angry with me about things. She was cool—but not particularly rude.”

Tim bounded up the staircase to the children’s wing to take a shower, but Kelly sat down at the table to eat dinner. Except that Mike no longer lived there, everything seemed normal. Debora often served fast food, and the children certainly didn’t mind. Kelly chewed on a drumstick and grinned at her dad.

Mike picked up a stack of mail and shuffled through it, removing the letters and bills addressed to him.

“And then I left….”

In a sense, life is a series of curtains closing, shutting off the last act so smoothly and silently that we seldom realize we have moved out of one scene into another. Mike said good night and walked out the front door of his house, past the white birches near the entrance. They were bending and dancing in the wind, but he didn’t notice them. Celeste had asked him to come for dinner after he took Tim and Kelly home, so he headed toward Overland Park. It wasn’t far, only one village west of Prairie Village.

Shortly after nine, Mike was sitting down to dinner with Celeste and her two sons. He had left his old world and entered what he thought would be his new one, although he fully expected to be a frequent visitor in both for decades.