Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice (4 page)

4

I
t 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 And when she was not angry, she was withdrawn, losing herself in a book.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.

Although Velma Farrar had her doubts about her new daughter-in-law and was not particularly welcoming at first, Mike’s parents tried to draw Debora into the family. Their efforts met with little success. One Christmas, the elder Farrars drove from Kansas City to Cincinnati—six hundred miles. Mike was still at the hospital when they arrived. “Debora had been reading a book in the back room,” he recalled. “She came out, let them in, and then went back to the bedroom and continued to read.”

At other times, too, Debora virtually ignored Mike’s parents. On one such occasion, “I was on call,” he said. “Debora got home from work and they were there at our apartment. She walked past them to the bedroom and they didn’t see her again all night.”

Clearly, Mike and Debora had a very different concept of family. Obviously, their principal common interest was medicine, and few professions demand as much in terms of time and commitment. It was relatively easy to overlook hollow spaces in their marriage, simply because they had so little time to contemplate them.

In retrospect, Debora and Mike seemed so mismatched that they might have been pieces from two different puzzles. Debora was a loner and as unpredictable as a caged tigress. She didn’t like housework or care about neatness for its own sake. She was highly intelligent about
things
but had virtually no aptitude for dealing with human beings, a flaw that was subtly undermining her medical career. Mike—gregarious, punctilious, neat—was progressing rapidly at the University of Cincinnati’s medical school, and higher-ups had their eyes on him. He was a passionate man, and his wife was disinterested in sex.

At the beginning of their relationship, it was Debora who had held the reins of power. She had been the resident about to go into practice, the laughing, witty woman in a cherry-red sports car, while Mike had been the poverty-stricken medical student. In Cincinnati, the balance of power at first became almost equal; then Mike’s star rose while Debora’s descended. But to an outsider looking in on them in 1980, they would have appeared to be a solid couple. With two M.D.’s in the family they could count on being wealthy. Mike was immersed in his medical training and loved what he was doing. Although his goals were entirely clear in his mind and Debora would change the focus of her career often, they seemed to have a workable marriage.

But then Debora began to have health problems, and Mike suspected she was taking drugs, either regularly or sporadically. “When I was an intern,” he said later, “occasionally I would find these bottles of sedatives or narcotics … Dalmane and Valium, that kind of thing. Sometimes Tylenol Number 3 or Tylox or Percodan. I’d find them at home, but they would have some patient’s name from the clinic at the hospital on them. It wasn’t very often, but I would find them from time to time. I asked Deb about those, and she would say, ‘Oh yeah—I picked that up when the patient brought his drugs in and I forgot to give it back to him.’”

At first, Mike wasn’t much concerned. In that inner-city hospital, many patients were on “a jillion different medicines,” which they commonly brought in in paper bags so that the residents could take inventory and keep track on the chart. It was within the realm of possibility that Debora could have found vials that had fallen on the floor or been left behind, and slipped them into the pocket of her lab coat.

“Anyway,” Mike recalled, “I remember coming home one day and there was a gouge in the wall—with a big black mark…. Clearly one of our wrought-iron chairs had been knocked into the wall, and it was lying on the floor. I went into the bedroom and Debora was lying there. She was sick and complaining of a terrible headache and was just kind of out of it. I thought,
‘What’s
this?’ She continued to complain about these headaches, and said she felt awful, and had all these problems.”

Not only did Debora have excruciating headaches in the back of her head—an unusual site for a headache—but Mike was alarmed to see that she sometimes walked with a staggering gait, as if she was dizzy. Afraid that she might have a brain tumor, he took her in for a consultation with a neurologist at his own hospital.

Asked what health problems she had had recently, Debora mentioned that she had injured her wrist in a fall and had developed an infection so intractable that she’d had to have surgery to drain it. Mike agreed that her recovery from the wrist incident had been complicated.

After a series of tests, the neurologist diagnosed Debora as suffering from an unusual condition, cerebellar migraine. The cerebellum is located in the back of the brain and migraines in that area would account for Debora’s headaches. She was given a prescription for beta blockers, drags usually prescribed for high blood pressure.

“Ultimately,” Mike recalled, “she did get better, so that’s what I assumed it was. Later, with more incidents, I realized that she probably had some continuing pain in her wrist and was using these narcotics to ease it.”

Debora Green had another affliction: she suffered chronically from insomnia. “She tried every way I know of to get [a good night’s] sleep—and she never could,” Mike said. “I think the sleeping pills were to let her get some rest. But, at the time, I believed her explanation that she had absentmindedly pocketed both the painkillers and the sleeping pills.”

Although Mike and Debora used no birth control, Debora did not conceive for almost two years after their wedding—perhaps because their intercourse was so infrequent. But when Debora found she was pregnant, in the spring of 1981, she was very pleased—and so was Mike. Aside from their shared nearsightedness, they were perfect genetic specimens for producing exceptional children. Debora’s IQ was 165, and Mike had tested at genius level. They were both healthy and attractive. A child born of their union would be smart, strong, and fair to look upon.