Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice (10 page)

Tim went off to camp, which left ten-year-old Lissa to handle things during the day at home. But she soon reached a point where she could not deal with her mother’s behavior: One Friday afternoon in early August, Lissa couldn’t get her mother to wake up. She was afraid that Debora was dead.

Sobbing, she called her father at the hospital about 4:30. “I asked to speak to her mother,” Mike would recall, “but Debora apparently was unable to speak to me.”

Mike headed for home at once, impatient in the Friday afternoon traffic. When he turned off Seventy-fifth onto Canterbury Court, he saw Lissa waiting anxiously at the edge of the cul-de-sac, watching for his car. She was very upset, and begged him to hurry to help Debora.

He followed her into the house. In the master bedroom, he was shocked to find a scene of complete disarray. “Debora was completely nude except for a T-shirt or a kind of a chiffon top … lying face down,” he remembered. “She was clearly drunk. There was a one-and-a-half-liter bottle of gin that was largely empty lying next to her.”

Kelly was also home, of course; she, too, was sobbing. Neither of the little girls had been able to get their mother to respond. They weren’t sure what was the matter with her; they had never seen her have the “flu” as badly as this.

On the way home, Mike had called his sister, Karen, who lived on the Missouri side of the state line, to tell her something was wrong and ask her to take the girls for the night. She had agreed instantly. With Debora alive and apparently well except for the fact that she was completely intoxicated, Mike scooped up his daughters and took them to their aunt’s. It was now about six P.M.

Knowing that, at least, they were safe, he then hurried back to his house to see what he could do about Debora. He had told her—although he didn’t know whether it registered—where he was going and asked her not to leave until he got back. “I really didn’t expect her to go because I thought she’d be too drunk,” he recalled.

But Debora wasn’t in the master bedroom, and she didn’t answer when he shouted her name. Worried, he looked in the garage and was grateful to see the Land Cruiser still there. At least, she wasn’t out on the road someplace, a danger to herself and everyone else.

Filled with foreboding, Mike searched their huge house. On the lower level were a playroom, the bedroom Debora was using, an exercise room, a recreation room, and the room where he kept his wine collection. The kitchen, dining room, living room, music room, master bedroom, and den were on the main floor. A single staircase to the third floor went up from the foyer just inside the front door. The children’s bedrooms and a computer room were up there, along with the children’s bathroom.

It was an eerie search. Mike looked in closets, in crannies, behind shower curtains, his heart pounding. When he hadn’t found his wife on the two lower levels, Mike went quietly up the carpeted stairs to the third floor. “I looked through every room in the house,” he remembered. “I honestly expected to find her dead.” He was afraid that Debora had hanged herself or cut her wrists. She could not have left the house on foot—the neighbors would have seen her—and she had been half-naked an hour and a half before. But she was nowhere to be found.

Mike didn’t know whether he should call the police. If Debora had somehow gotten out of the house and was wandering around, the police would probably find her. If she was sleeping off her drunkenness someplace close, he didn’t want to make things any worse than they already were. He didn’t want to embarrass her. It had grown dark now, and he didn’t know where to look for her next.

Mike paced through the huge house and searched the yard. Tired to the bone, he knew he couldn’t sleep. As bad as things had become between them, he didn’t want Debora to hurt herself or be hurt by someone else. He didn’t want her humiliated. She was the mother of his children, and they had suffered enough already.

The phone rang and Mike leaped to answer it. It was Celeste. “I’m so glad you called,” he said gratefully. He told her what had happened, and she was as mystified as he. The profound change, in a matter of weeks, from the witty woman who had kept everyone on the Peru trip laughing uproariously to this drunken harridan was more than Celeste could visualize. She realized what Mike had been living through, but she felt a little guilty: knowing Mike had asked for a divorce, she wondered if she was the cause of Debora’s drunken disappearance.

After he hung up the phone, Mike tried to think where Debora might have gone. She had no friends. She had never seemed to need them. There were women she used to play tennis with, some mothers she knew casually from Pembroke Hill School, people she had met on their recent trip. But she had no one remotely like a confidante, no one she could call to pick her up to get her away from the house, no neighbor she might conceivably go to to spend the night with. Mike had no idea where she was. He circled the yard again, checked the shed where they kept the lawnmower and yard tools, looked inside the cars in the garage, and still found no sign of her.

With no place else to look, Mike lay down, although he knew he couldn’t sleep. He jumped when the phone rang at eleven P.M. “Hello?”

“It’s me….” It was Debora. She didn’t sound drunk.

“Where are you?”

“As if you cared.”

“Debora,” Mike said evenly, “tell me where you are and I’ll come and get you.”

“I’m at a friend’s house.”

“Whose house?”

“It doesn’t matter. Someplace where I can think.”

Before Mike could respond, the line went dead. It rang again immediately. It was Debora. “We have to talk,” she said. “We never talk, Mike. How can we get a divorce if we never talk about it?”

“Where
are
you?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

She hung up on him again, only to call back the moment Mike set down the phone. He was relieved, but annoyed. She was someplace safe, apparently. She had a phone at her disposal. And she sounded completely sober, if argumentative.

“Debora,” he said wearily, “why don’t you come home, get some sleep, and we’ll talk tomorrow?”

“What’s the point? I don’t trust you.”

“Debora—”

The phone went dead again. Debora couldn’t seem to make up her mind whether she was angry at him or wanted him to call off the divorce. She was talking in circles. And she seemed to be enjoying his concern, enjoying her power to cut him off.

The phone shrilled again, for the sixth or seventh time. Mike picked it up without saying anything.

“Mike, you think you have secrets, but you don’t have any secrets. You’re so stupid and transparent. I know everything about you—”

This time, Mike hung up the phone. And then he unplugged it. He was exhausted and he needed to get at least a few hours’ sleep. Wherever Debora was, she was all right. In the blessed silence, he fell asleep almost immediately.

He woke at 5:30 and searched once more for Debora, thinking she might have come home. But she wasn’t there. Earlier in the week, Mike had arranged to go birdwatching with a group of friends—including Celeste—and then have breakfast. He knew the children were all being cared for, and he knew that Debora had found someplace to stay the night. He needed to be with happy people, even if just for a little while.

He was home by nine. “Debora was there. She was sitting back in the dark den on the main floor—on the couch.” Coming into the dim room from the bright sunshine, he saw only her outline.

“Where have you been?”

“I have been out wandering in the streets of Prairie Village,” she said quietly, “hoping that someone would run over me with a car and kill me. That would solve everybody’s problem, wouldn’t it?”

“You know that’s not true,” Mike said. “I care about you; the kids care about you. Where did you really spend last night?”

She wouldn’t tell him.

Mike realized he was seeing only a heightened version of her usual histrionics; she was like a child threatening a parent that she will do something she has no intention of doing. It would be weeks before she would finally admit to him that she had never left the house at all that Friday night. “She told me that all that time she had been hiding under the bed—or behind the bed—in the basement bedroom,” Mike said. “There are two phones in the bar area. One is the children’s line and one is our regular line. So she could easily have called from the children’s line to our main phone number.”

Mike had not thought to look
under
the beds when he searched for Debora; he had been so convinced that he would find her hanging, or bleeding, that he had been racing around the house to find her in time to cut her down or stop the flow of blood. He was chagrined when he finally learned that she had been playing a spooky game of hide-and-seek with him. He had to wonder if Debora had been as intoxicated as she seemed when he had rushed home from the hospital after Lissa’s frantic call. She appeared to have the ability to seem passed-out drunk and then quite coherent within a very short time.

What Mike didn’t realize until much later was that Debora had been listening in on Celeste’s call that night. She had never trusted Celeste, and now her suspicions about Mike and Celeste had been confirmed.

Later, Debora would recall that she had done a good job taking care of Tim, Lissa, and Kelly that summer in spite of her drinking. “I always drove them where they needed to go,” she explained. “I was home with them.” Asked if she didn’t feel that she had taken chances, driving them and their friends when she was intoxicated, she shrugged. “Nothing bad happened. If it had, it would have been better than what happened later.”

9

A
few weeks after the late-July pool party at the Walkers’, Debora and Mike hosted a similar party. Celeste would remember being shocked at the chances Mike now took in his own home, after they had always been so discreet. She was terrified that Debora might see him touch her. “He kissed me in the basement of their home. She could have seen us,” Celeste said. “And, at our pool a week later, he put his arm around me when Lissa and Kelly were playing on the other side. It was as if he didn’t care if Debora knew.”

And perhaps he didn’t care, anymore. Debora’s overnight disappearance had terrified their little girls and left Mike frightened and enraged. Maybe he was angry enough to want to punish her. Or perhaps he felt that Debora would agree to a divorce if she understood he was in love with another woman. If that was his motive in being openly affectionate toward Celeste, it didn’t work.

Debora was angry, too. She knew Mike was having an affair and she had begun to feel completely displaced, totally adrift. “He wanted the house,” Debora said later. “He wanted to live in that beautiful house, and he wanted the children and me to live in a smaller, cheaper house. He just wanted to be rid of us. I couldn’t have that.”

“That wasn’t even remotely true,” Mike said when the accusation was relayed to him.

On Friday, August 11, Mike arrived home between six and 6:30. The rest of his family had already eaten, but Debora said she had saved a chicken salad sandwich in the refrigerator for him. He stood in the kitchen and talked to her while he ate it. Still worried about the children, he had not yet moved out. They continued to live in a stand-off.

The sandwich tasted slightly odd, and Mike commented to Debora that it was “a little bitter.”

“We all had them—and nobody else’s tasted funny,” she said.

Maybe it was because the sandwich was cold, or perhaps it had taken on a taste from something else in the refrigerator. It was not so bitter that Mike stopped eating; the slightly off taste was very subtle. He was hungry and he ate the whole thing.

After dinner, he changed his clothes and he and Debora went to the Ward Parkway Shopping Center, where they both bought running shoes; then they picked up the children from their activities. Debora, who had said she was going to start getting back in shape, chose not to jog that night. Mike went for his usual run, but he didn’t seem to have any stamina. “When I got home that night, I felt sick,” he would remember. “I was nauseated. Initially, I thought it was probably from overexerting myself when I wasn’t in terrific shape. But shortly after that, I started vomiting. I developed abdominal pain, diarrhea.”

What he was suffering from felt like a twenty-four-hour virus; the nausea and vomiting were “bothersome but not terribly severe.” He was on call that weekend at North Kansas City Hospital, and he got up the next morning and went to work. In fact, he worked all weekend, although the nausea continued. “I remember I had to leave patients’ rooms several times—and I left the heart catheterization laboratory because I was suddenly sick again—but I still managed to work.”

His illness lasted three or four days but he continued to work. “I improved, but I still didn’t feel great.” Besides the nausea and diarrhea, Mike had abdominal pain—not cramping, but a “burning sensation.”

Mike was concerned enough that he talked to a gastroenterologist. He had been back from Peru for about five weeks and he wondered if he had contracted some tropical disease. They decided to wait to see if his symptoms would ease of their own accord, and Mike did feel better by the end of the week.

“I saw him on Thursday,” Celeste would recall. “We met up near my house for ten minutes and I could see that he was better—his vigor was back.”

But later on Thursday night, Mike’s symptoms returned, with a vengeance. He became extremely ill, extremely fast. The vomiting was “torrential,” twenty or thirty episodes over a few hours. And the diarrhea was worse than anything he had experienced in Peru. “It was truly a miserable illness—it went on all night. I got up in the morning to try to get ready for work. And I was on my hands and knees vomiting in the shower.”

Realizing that he would not be able to work that day—Friday, August 18—Mike called one of his partners to explain. Then he phoned his personal physician, Nick Szilagye, and talked to him. As a doctor himself, Mike knew he was severely dehydrated; after he described his symptoms, Szilagye recommended that he be admitted to the hospital that morning. Mike drove himself to the hospital, passing Celeste’s house on the way. She got in the car and talked to him for a very short time: “He was throwing up when he tried to talk.”

Mike spent a week in the hospital, his condition verging on critical. He spiked fevers frequently—101 to 102 degrees. To his fellow doctors’ concern, he developed sepsis, an overwhelming infection caused by bacteria that invade the bloodstream, carrying an original infection to other areas of the body. Sometimes it is not initially apparent which organs the sepsis is affecting.

One day while he was hospitalized, Mike tried to take a shower; he was suddenly gripped with “shaking rigors,” violent shivering. “I could not control it,” he said, “and my back and legs hurt; it was almost like tetany [violent muscle spasms and convulsions].”

Mike’s fever was 104.4 degrees. His blood pressure dropped alarmingly. His systolic pressure, the top number in blood pressure readings, was 65 to 70; the normal range is from 110 to 150. The diastolic reading when his heart was at rest was not detectable. He knew that he could die. “I was moved to the intermediate care unit and a central line was inserted into my subclavian vein, underneath the collarbone. It is used to give large amounts of fluids to critically ill patients.”

Mike’s blood was cultured for bacteria.
Streptococcus viridans
bacteria grew out of the cultures. A strep infection can cause fever and many of the other symptoms Mike suffered, but his doctors kept checking to be sure they had isolated every possibility. He endured numerous diagnostic tests: a flexible sigmoidoscopy, a colonoscopy, an upper GI endoscopy. His whole digestive system and his entire colon were checked. With the assaults on his lower colon from the diarrhea, a break in the lining could very well have let strep bacteria leak through. But, his physicians wondered, what might have started the gastrointestinal symptoms in the first place?

Celeste was afraid for Mike, so worried that she took a chance and visited him in the hospital. “But I didn’t go alone; I got Carolyn to go with me, and other people we knew. I never saw Debora there—but I guess she found out I had gone to see him.”

Gradually, Mike got better. He was released on August 25, and went home, actually hungry for the first time in a week. He even felt well enough to eat a spaghetti dinner that Debora brought him. But within three or four hours, he became “horrendously sick” again, with the same torrential vomiting and diarrhea. He was back in North Kansas City Hospital by eleven that night. Whether there was any reason behind the pattern or not, he noted that he had become desperately ill approximately every seven days—on a Friday, a Thursday, and then another Friday.

Whatever Mike had, diagnosing it was not easy. He was far too ill to be suffering from simple influenza. And cultures showed that the
Strep viridans
was no longer present. “That was curious to us all,” he said later. Any number of doctors at the hospital where he himself practiced had been called in for consultations. Here was a young man, just forty, who had been in the best of health and now could barely exist outside a hospital. He was losing a tremendous amount of weight, and he was wretchedly sick.

One of the specialists called in was Dr. Beth Henry, an expert in infectious diseases. Good diagnosticians weigh lab tests and the patient’s symptoms against what has been going on in his life, and Dr. Henry wondered what Mike had done in the month or so before his sudden illness that was different from his usual habits.

The obvious answer was the trip to Peru, where he might well have been exposed to disease, impure water, and insects. Mike had swum in the Amazon River and eaten exotic food that might have been prepared under less than sanitary conditions. Oddly, not one of the forty other people on the trip had been ill since their return.
Their
travelers’ diarrhea had been unpleasant but had not lasted more than forty-eight hours. Mike had suffered the same symptoms as they—while they were all in Peru. Furthermore, he had been home in Kansas City for more than a month, feeling perfectly well. What was it, then, that made him so sick now?

Dr. Henry ultimately settled on two possible diagnoses for Mike’s fever, intractable vomiting, and diarrhea: typhoid fever or a disease called tropical sprue (also known as gluten-sensitive enteropathy). But she was still puzzled because his symptoms didn’t fit neatly within the parameters of either.

Neither typhoid nor sprue is necessarily fatal, although each
could
be if the patient remained dehydrated, with his electrolytes out of balance. The indwelling line in Mike’s subclavian vein was working to rehydrate him with larger amounts of fluid than he could manage to keep down because of his persistent nausea. He received a twenty-one-day course of antibiotics that would take care of typhoid fever—if, indeed, that was what he had. And he was put on a gluten-free diet.

Meanwhile, Debora was also having a difficult time during the latter part of August. Not only was her husband ill with some mysterious malady, but her mother had phoned from El Paso, the Joneses’ home base between trips around the country, to tell her daughter that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Her doctors had recommended a mastectomy. As a specialist in oncology, Debora was able to evaluate her mother’s condition, and she assured Joan that her chances were good for long-term survival.

“I talked to Deb on the phone many times,” Joan recalled. “And she talked to my doctor several times. Everything seemed normal in Kansas.” Debora had told her parents that Mike was sick, but they evidently didn’t know
how
sick; they hadn’t seen him, and they weren’t very concerned anyway. “We knew Farrar was sick,” Joan said, “but were not surprised because he will eat anything no matter how gross, if he thinks it is ‘native.’ He is also a terrible ‘boob’ when he is ill, although he has absolutely no empathy for a patient’s pain.”

It was clear that Debora’s parents—at least her mother—had no love for Mike. Joan had attributed to Mike the very uncaring response to patients that he had seen in Debora. But Debora knew that Mike was terribly ill; she had seen him go downhill rapidly. Perhaps, wanting to spare her mother worry, she avoided burdening her with the gravity of his condition. After all, Joan Jones was about to undergo surgery herself.

Debora’s mother later said she was completely unaware that Mike was really sick that summer. She felt that he was putting on a show for sympathy, being a “boob” as usual.

By the end of August, Mike was skin and bones. Celeste was so frightened for him that she went to the hospital alone to visit, and seeing him frightened her more. She was a nurse and she had seen other patients near death. There was no longer any secret that they were having an affair. She loved him and she wanted him well. Whatever it took, she would do.

Debora told him he needed to be in his own home; he was too weak to take care of himself outside the hospital. Mike stayed at North Kansas City Hospital for five days this time. He was released on August 30. And, too debilitated to talk about separation or divorce, he went home.

Back in the Canterbury Court house, Debora was solicitous and kind to him. She carried his meals to him so that he wouldn’t have to come to the table.

On September 4, Labor Day, Mike had been home for five or six days from his second hospitalization in two weeks. He felt better—but weak—and he was sitting in their downstairs recreation room watching the Kansas City Chiefs game on the big-screen television set. Debora brought him a plate of ham and beans and cornbread, and he ate while he watched the game, appreciative of her thoughtfulness.

But later that evening, Mike felt the unmistakable, all too familiar symptoms—vomiting, diarrhea, and a terrible burning stomach pain. He had to be rushed back to the hospital. And this time he began to wonder if he was going to die from whatever it was he had. He couldn’t work; he couldn’t, apparently, survive outside the hospital.

Still in the hospital on September 9, Mike got a phone call from Lissa. She was very upset and crying, and from what she said, he knew that Debora was drinking again—so much that Tim and Lissa were frightened. Gathering all his strength, he asked Lissa to put Tim on the phone. “I told him to hide all the alcohol in the house, and to make sure that his mother was okay,” Mike said. “I asked him to see that the girls got up to bed.”

Tim promised to do as his father asked. And Mike lay back on his pillow, worrying about how he could make sure his children were safe. His sister Karen knew that Debora was drinking too much, but he had not told his parents. His mother had enough to worry about: both of
her
parents were terminally ill. He knew he would have to act, but he was just too sick to start making calls. He would have to count on Tim to take care of things at home. Tim loved his mother and his little sisters. He would have to be the man of the house on this night. In the morning, if things were no better, Mike would call Karen and his parents and ask them to take care of his children until he could get home.