Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice (7 page)

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.

During the early nineties, despite his troubles with Debora, Mike remained true to his belief that a married man, a father, does not break his wedding vows. There are those who say that another woman—or man—cannot break up a good marriage. But then Mike and Debora did not have a good marriage, or even a vaguely workable one. He had married her when he was very young, and though he’d had an inkling that she had a harridan’s temper, he had no idea how deep-seated her psychological problems were.

“I wanted my marriage to last,” he later said with conviction. “Rather than contemplating an affair, I would have preferred to have my marriage somehow hold together, would have preferred to be at home with my children. I just wanted a marriage that would work.”

At the same time, Mike wondered how he could go on in this joyless marriage with nothing to look forward to but complaints, fights, and recriminations. Debora demanded so much and gave so little in return. At times, she seemed to resent him—even hate him—for failing to give her what she wanted. In fact, Mike would have an affair with another woman. But he did not leave Debora. He stayed in their marriage.

6

There was another sore eating away at Mike and Debora’s marriage. Rather than recognizing that a boy needs to admire and respect his father, she enlisted their son, Tim, as her ally in her fights with her husband. When she was angry at Mike, she complained to Tim about it, speaking to him as if he were a little adult. Add to that the fact that Mike had himself been the only son and had always been expected to obey his parents without question, and he had a difficult time parenting Tim. Not surprisingly, the two had a less than perfect father-son relationship.

As Tim grew older, the gap between father and son grew wider. There were some good times, but they were fewer and fewer. Debora did not encourage Tim to obey Mike; rather, she seemed to delight in having the boy take her side in arguments. She treated Tim more like a brother than a son, unaware—or perhaps heedless—that she was fostering a devastating psychological situation in her family. Her priorities were all wrong, her perception skewed. Debora told all their children what a bad father Mike was, so that Lissa, particularly, began to side with her mother and brother. Kelly was such a sunny little girl—and still so young—that she loved her daddy without question.

Debora’s manner of marital combat never changed. She yelled, screamed, stomped her feet, threw tantrums. At first Mike had shouted back at her, but he soon learned that only drove her to higher peaks of rage. So over the years he modified his response—he offered passive resistance and simply ignored her since it did no good at all to reason with her. Finally, he left the house when she was angry with him. Initially, he left for an hour or two. Later, it took a whole day for him to feel that he could go home and not be met with her accusations. Inevitably, Mike’s short-term absences from his marriage lengthened until, by 1994, he was ready to walk away forever.

He felt he could no longer remain in the marriage and believed that all of them would be happier if he were to remove himself from the home. Maybe he
was
the odd man out, and the one who triggered anger and dissension in his family. He was depressed and hopeless in the twelfth year of his marriage, convinced now that things would never get better. “I hated to fail—I had never failed at anything,” he said, “and I especially hated to fail in my marriage. But there was nothing else to try. I knew it would be terrible when I told Debora—and it was.”

Once before, after five years of marriage, he had concluded that he and Debora would never be happy together, and he had almost asked for a divorce. But he had reconsidered—they had Tim and Lissa by then—and decided to work harder at making the marriage succeed. And it
was
work. Mike and Debora had managed to limp along for seven more years, using vacations and work to avoid the reality that they were two people going in opposite directions.

“The house was disheveled all the time,” Mike would remember. “There was no attempt to keep it in order. There was no attempt to get the kids to try to follow rules, to keep their rooms cleaned up. There were no boundaries set for them … it was a pretty bad living situation. Obviously, any of us that have children know that a house is not going to be kept in perfect order—but it did concern me…. It was a bad example for the kids. You know, I think that there has to be some semblance of order in a house you live in.”

Although Debora would say later that she was totally surprised when Mike asked for a divorce in January 1994, he believed she knew full well what was coming. She could not have missed seeing how unhappy he was, and she had told the women she played tennis with that her husband was cheating on her and she feared he might leave her.

In retrospect, Mike believed that Debora tried to forestall exactly the conversation he knew he had to initiate. Suddenly, she did a complete turnaround, which she was capable of if she wanted something badly enough. For two weeks, Debora was solicitous of Mike’s needs, becoming—for those fourteen days—the ideal wife. However, the change came far too late. And Mike no longer trusted her motives.

Finally, he told her he was moving out and wanted a divorce. And as soon as Debora realized what he was saying, she turned and stomped down to the basement, shouting at the top of her lungs. Tim was in the family room watching television and Mike didn’t want him drawn into their discussion. It was too late.

Debora grabbed whatever objects were closest and began to throw them around the room. Books and toys thudded against walls; lamps and knickknacks shattered. She was screaming incoherently and yelling at Tim, recruiting him to her side. “God damn,” she shouted at her son. “Now
look
at what he’s going to do. I’ve done so much for him—you know that—and now he’s going to cheat us out of what is ours!”

Tim, twelve years old, looked at her, stricken, his face pale and fearful. Debora kept screaming at him as Mike tried to draw her aside. “We’re going to lose all this!” she cried, sweeping her arms wide.

“Debora—
don’t
…” Mike pleaded, but it was as if she didn’t even hear him.

“Your father is cheating on me!” Debora shrieked. “He’s going to leave us and we’ll lose everything we have. I’ll have to go back to work, and I don’t know where we’ll live. I don’t know who will take care of you.”

“Mom …” Tim said plaintively. “Mom—it’ll be okay.”

“No it won’t!” she screamed, pounding her fists against her thighs. “Your father is going to take everything we have away from us because he doesn’t love us.”

The family room was a shambles, and Debora had worked herself into a frenzy. There was no point in Mike’s trying to talk to her, nor would Tim let his father comfort him.

“It was awful,” Mike said.

It
was
awful. But it only solidified his decision that he and Debora could no longer go on together. Continuing their farce of a marriage would only destroy their children.

He moved out of the house into an apartment in the Country Club Plaza. The name did not denote plush quarters; the area was an older neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri, halfway between Mike’s office and the street where Debora and the kids still lived in the brick house they had bought with such high expectations six years before.

Surprisingly, things did improve after Mike moved out. He talked to Debora almost every day. “Nothing had changed—I still supported them, of course,” he said, “but I just wasn’t there.”

He took Tim, Lissa, and Kelly two or three times a week, and they had “pretty good times.” Tim and Lissa were very angry with him at first, but he wasn’t surprised at that. He was sure that Debora was talking to them as confidants and not as children bewildered by the breakup of their parents’ marriage. Lissa, in particular, was furious with her father. It took her a long time to admit that her world had not really changed that much. She still had her ballet lessons, the same friends, the same school, and the same house; the kids had their beloved Lab, Boomer.

In fact, things seemed to be getting better all around, so much so that Mike even began to wonder if he and Debora might reconcile. He really did want to hold his marriage together, if they could avoid Debora’s histrionics and temper tantrums. However, the one thing he could not see himself doing at that point was going to marriage counseling. “Debora wanted to go, but I knew I wouldn’t open up—I couldn’t see myself sitting there and opening up to a counselor and it wouldn’t have done any good.”

Even so, he and Debora began to talk about getting back together. She was calmer and it began to seem that they
could
somehow be together and raise their children without the anger and bitterness that had sullied every facet of their marriage. Mike became hopeful enough to tell Debora, “One of the things I’m unhappy about is that house. If we got back together, we would have to move out of that house. It’s too small for us—it needs too much work.”

Debora agreed at once. If they had more room, she felt, and if Mike could come home to a clean house without dozens of chores that needed to be done, their marriage would be so much better. She immediately began searching for more suitable houses and found the beautiful mansion on Canterbury Court in Prairie Village. Mike caught her enthusiasm and looked at the huge house with its six bedrooms, den, exercise room, pool—everything a family could ask for. He agreed that it seemed perfect, if somewhat expensive. It had gone on the market at something over $600,000. In California, it would have listed at $3 million. Even so, in Prairie Village, Kansas, $600,000 was a lot to pay for a home.

But the house had been empty for a while and the owner—who had built many of the luxurious houses in the Canterbury development—accepted Debora and Mike’s bid of $400,000. They were getting a tremendous bargain.

Then Mike began to get cold feet. He had been swept up in Debora’s fervor and in her promises that everything would be different. Now he realized that he had been rushed into a commitment that he didn’t truly believe in. Nothing had really changed, except that they had been apart for four months. They had made no attempts or promises to reconcile, and once he signed the papers the real estate agent was rushing to prepare, he would be agreeing to pay almost half a million dollars for a second house, while he wasn’t sure he could sell the house he already owned. Debora wasn’t working—except for occasional case reviews—the children’s school was expensive, and they had other debts, including payments and leases on several new vehicles. Mike made excellent money, but he felt as if they were running pell-mell into a hasty, ill-thought-out decision.

“I backed down,” he admitted, “and, of course, everyone from the real estate agent to Debora and the kids were devastated. The realtor kept calling and asking me
why?
and I told her there were personal issues I didn’t care to discuss.”

Two or three days later, on a Sunday in May, 1994, Mike was working at the North Kansas City Hospital when he got a call from his answering service. “I got a stat call, which seemed odd since I was on second call,” he remembered. “The doctor who was first up should have gotten the call. And then I knew something was wrong. I called the service and they said, ‘Call your neighbor. Your house is on fire!’”

His neighbor on West Sixty-first Terrace was out of breath and panicky. She said Mike’s house was on fire. “I’m pretty sure that Debora and the kids aren’t there—but I’m worried about Boomer,” she said.

Mike had no way of knowing who was or wasn’t inside his house. He ran to his car and raced home at “literally ninety miles an hour. There were seven fire trucks out in front, and an ambulance—which really shook me up—was parked on Ward Parkway. I ran out there through a huge crowd of people. There was smoke pouring out of the house, and water—but I couldn’t see any flames.”

Frantic, Mike called Debora on her cell phone and asked her where the kids were. Tim was playing in a soccer game, she said cheerfully, and she had the girls and Boomer in the car with her. When Mike told her the news, Debora hurried home and they watched firefighters mopping up the last of the blaze. She told Mike over and over how glad she was that she had given in to Tim’s pleas to take Boomer with them. He would surely have died in the fire.

Although the family was safe, there was massive damage to the house. The fire had apparently started in the basement and raced up a laundry chute. Most of the basement was ashes, as was the kitchen. Flames had even reached Tim’s room on the top floor before firefighters managed to put the fire out. The damage estimate was $80,000, almost half of the $205,000 they had originally paid for the house. But for Mike, the worst part was the time, which seemed endless, when he didn’t know where his family was. He never wanted to live through such an experience again; the sight of the parked ambulance, waiting, perhaps, for one of his children, haunted him for weeks.

The Farrars’ insurance company sent an arson investigator, who determined that the cause was a rather unusual electrical problem. The cord of a practically new dehumidifier had been wrapped around a copper water pipe so tightly that it had shorted through, apparently in three small areas. The pipe had gotten so hot that it had heated adjacent wood paneling to the burning point.

Mike discussed the fire with friends, one of whom said flatly, “She set it.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, puzzled.

“Debora set it.”

“No
…” he said, disbelieving. “Of course she didn’t set it.”

“Believe what you like—but I’m telling you that Debora set that fire to make you come back.”

Mike didn’t buy that theory for a moment. Even if Debora
had
deliberately set fire to their house, she had no expertise in arson. He knew that arson investigators could spot an amateurish effort. He accepted the insurance company’s opinion and figured his friend had an overactive imagination.

“I never really believed that Debora set that fire,” he said later. “We had to board the house up, of course, and Debora and the kids had nowhere to live. They moved into my apartment. We were reconciled by the fire as much as anything. A day or two later, we put the bid back on the house on Canterbury Court. The owner asked for more earnest money this time—
quite
a bit more earnest money—but I didn’t blame him.”