Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice (8 page)

Their mortgage insurance paid off the burned house. Almost everything Debora and Mike owned had been extensively damaged, too, if not by the flames then by smoke. Furniture, clothing, books, objets d’art. “We had
fifty-seven
pages of inventory,” Mike recalled. “You don’t realize what you own until you have a fire. We had to go through every room, every drawer. It took five months for us to go to stores, establish prices, replacement costs. They paid us about $48,000 on our possessions alone.”

The insurance companies paid off without question, and Mike and Debora repaired the house and replaced their lost property. And they sold the Sixty-first Terrace house for $20,000 more than they had paid for it, so their plunge into the much more expensive estate-like home on Canterbury Court was not as financially ill-advised as Mike had feared.

Mike, Debora, and their family moved the few blocks to Canterbury Court. It took only five minutes to go from one house to the other, although the first was in Missouri and the second in Kansas. The whole family took a trip to Disney World; then, on the first day of summer, June 21, 1994, settled into 7517 Canterbury Court.

Where life had been bleak for Debora only a few months before, now things were looking up. Her husband had rejoined the family and they had a brand-new house—grander than anything she had ever dreamed of owning—new furniture, their own pool, a four-car garage. They had a red pickup truck and a Lexus—paid off with proceeds from the insurance—and Mike wanted to get a minivan to use on family vacations. “Debora didn’t want that,” he recalled. “She wanted a Toyota Land Cruiser, a $40,000 vehicle.” Again, Mike capitulated. If it would make her happy, they would all benefit.

Mike felt optimistic about the future. Once he had committed himself to the new house and to a renewed and better marriage, he relaxed and enjoyed their second chance. He saw how beautiful their new home was, and he and Debora furnished the rooms to make them fit their needs exactly.

“Things had calmed down,” he said of this period. “And they seemed better. In Debora’s defense, I think she really tried to change. And I thought—initially—that I was happy. The house was certainly nice. It was a wonderful neighborhood. We had a swimming pool. The kids were happy with that.”

Debora had never been an enthusiastic cook, usually plunking down a pot of something or other—simple mid-western stews or spaghetti—on the table, or sending out for fast food. But she tried to become more involved in the actual running of her wonderful new home. And she was there for her children and their activities, driving endless car pools, buying birthday cakes, cheering Tim on in soccer or hockey, encouraging Lissa’s genuine promise as a ballerina. As far as all that went, Debora was a good mother. But too often she still failed to see the demarcation between mother and child in emotional disputes. It was almost as if she herself
was
a child.

But Debora was trying. She even made an effort to clean house, although she would later admit that she had a hard time getting her children in gear to pick up their rooms. “Tim is the smartest of my children,” she said. “Kelly was next. Lissa will do whatever she needs to do to succeed—Tim and Kelly would do it if they felt like it. Tim’s room was absolutely immaculate, like a drill sergeant was going to inspect it. Kelly’s was a mess. One time, I told Tim I’d give him a new CD he wanted if he’d clean Kelly’s room. He cleaned it—but Kelly lost all her possessions. He just picked everything up and threw it away!”

Mike tried to work shorter hours and spend more time with his family. He vowed that somehow his relationship with Debora would turn into a loving marriage and they would magically become a happy family. He was so eager for that to happen, in fact, that he made a promise to his children that he was not sure he could keep: he told them that he would never go away again, that they would be a family forever.

He would regret that promise for the rest of his life.

The “honeymoon phase” in the Canterbury Court house lasted only six months. After Christmas, all the old problems resurfaced. Mike summed it up accurately: “I made the mistake that so many people make—either they have a baby, or they buy a house, and they think that everything is going to change, that all the bad times will be left behind. But they never are.”

Once again, Mike had to evaluate his marriage—his life. “It became clear to me that our relationship had not substantially improved. I still did not have any love for Debora, and I decided that I wanted a divorce.”

As far as Mike could see, the new house was soon as messy as the old house had been; Debora had little interest in keeping it in order, and order and neatness mattered tremendously to Mike. Even more, he longed for the passion he had never found in his marriage. Reconciliation or not, she was no more interested in their sex life than she had ever been. And she had become a heavy, unattractive woman who paid no attention to how she dressed. She had cut her beautiful hair even shorter and looked sloppy and rumpled most of the time. Mike could barely remember the slender resident in her expensive sports car, with her long hair flying in the wind. And although she was keeping a lid on her tendency toward violent histrionics, he still felt Debora was a powder keg waiting for a match.

Finally, Mike had come to believe that his role in their marriage was simply to give Debora status in their community and bring home a paycheck. When he had the time to visualize the life he longed for, it seemed he didn’t want more than most men: a caring wife who appreciated his sexual interest in her; children who loved him; a clean house. But he had none of these things; he had only a steeper mortgage than he had before.

He wanted out—badly.

He did not, however, tell Debora of his decision; he dreaded a repeat of the scene in their old house. Besides, he, Debora, and Tim planned to go on a trip with a group from Pembroke Hill School that summer—a wonderful trip to the Amazon River and the Inca ruins in Peru. Mike knew perfectly well that if he told Debora beforehand that he wanted a divorce, all hell would break loose. “I thought it would make the trip miserable for us, and potentially miserable for the other people on the trip.”

If the vacation in Peru went well, at least Tim would have memories of a last happy time with his mother and father together. So Mike kept his mouth shut. Knowing that eventually he would have to leave his marriage if he was to enjoy any happiness in life, he thought he could stay for another six months.

7

T
he Kansas City area of the mid-1990s was, like so many other parts of America, caught somewhere in a time warp. Anyone with imagination could close his eyes and see the covered wagons rumbling west over the prairie, which is not flat at all, but faintly undulating. A century and a half ago, the population of Kansas City, Missouri, was measured in the dozens, but merchants there thrived when it became the jumping-off place for pioneers and the California gold rush. Then as now, the roads west were surrounded by trees where creatures with watching eyes scanned the plains below. In the summer, the hawks are hidden. In the winter, they perch, their feathers ruffled against the frigid wind, about a hundred yards apart, dark gray birds a foot tall or more. It is said they can spot a mouse running for cover a half-mile away. Farmers welcome them and they are beautiful to watch in flight, raptors that kill so they may survive.

Oaks, elms, and the Kansas state tree, the cottonwood, abound, but it is the paper-white trunks of the Osage orange tree that stand out, particularly when the rest of the vegetation is dormant. The wind is fiercely cold in the winter and hot and dry in the summer. Indeed, Kansas is named for the wind; the name comes from a Siouan Indian word meaning both “people of the south wind” and “smoky wind.”

The towns along I-70 to Topeka and I-35 to Olathe spike off onto gridlike main thoroughfares dotted with every franchise in America. The parts of Olathe, the Johnson County seat, that were built when the century was new abound in wonderful wooden houses with sagging porches and lilacs in the dooryard. On the “other” side of I-35, the houses are closer together, and have no history before last year. Business seems to follow the new houses and the franchises, but the sunflowers and zinnias crowding whitewashed fences have more appeal to the soul and the senses.

The sun shines bright as fire in Kansas; even though every twig, bush, and tree is a sere brownish gray in the middle of March, the earth seems to come fully alive overnight in May, as if answering a silent signal of nature.

The two Kansas Citys, population aside, are really small towns where community involvement is concerned. People know each other and there are many interconnections. The Women’s Exchange Club, which meets in an historic old firehouse in Kansas City, Missouri, is representative of the kind of mutual support that transcends age, occupation, ethnicity, and personal wealth.

The medical communities on both sides of the Missouri River are even more akin to small towns where gossip, rumor, and scandal move with the speed of a snake in a wheat field and, more often than not, are equally impossible to trace. Many physicians are on staff at hospitals in both states.

Celeste Walker
^*
was a woman who would become the target of many rumors, innuendoes, and outright lies. She was in her early forties in 1995, but she scarcely looked it. She had thick blond hair—streaked perhaps by the Kansas sun, perhaps by her beautician—green eyes, a deep tan, and the taut figure of a woman who works out whether she feels like it or not. Although she had not practiced for a decade, she was a registered nurse. Her expertise was in recovery room nursing and she had occasionally done psychiatric nursing.

Celeste had been married to Dr. John Walker for sixteen years; they had two sons, Brett,
^*
fourteen, and Dan,
^*
ten. The family lived in a sprawling split-level on a huge lot in Overland Park, Kansas, one of the affluent suburbs south of KCMO. John, an anesthesiologist at Shawnee Mission Medical Center, was a handsome man with brown hair and eyes and a solemn, gentle manner. Of medium height and weight, he had worn a mustache for the last few years.

The Walkers’ home was a monument to Celeste’s creative and innovative style and it had a pool, a party room, and a dressing room in the backyard. Celeste’s flower beds covered every other available square foot, and she knew the Latin name for every bloom. During the short but fierce Kansas summers, she virtually lived outdoors, gardening, swimming, or cooking for groups of friends. Celeste wore a bathing suit as often as she wore a dress. The more tanned she got, the deeper the blue-green of her eyes seemed, and she was, without question, a sensational-looking woman.

Celeste had an unquenchable and ebullient air, but the bubbly attitude she showed the world was a carefully constructed mask. Optimism had been—a long time ago, and down deep—her essential nature, but the many years of being married to John had knocked most of the joy out of her. Inside, she felt the desolate pain that every woman married to a clinically depressed man lives with. In almost two decades of marriage, Celeste had gone from hope to despair to acceptance. John was a good man, a kind man, but no matter how hard she tried, she could not make him happy. She could not even get him to admit that the
possibility
of happiness might exist.

Eventually, in order to survive, Celeste spent her days with her sons and with her many female friends, mostly in activities connected with Pembroke Hill School. She may have longed to be with a man who loved life as much as she did, a man who believed in the future—but she had never even come close to having an affair.

Celeste’s sister and mother were both very much like herself—strong, fun, bright, and creative. Celeste’s mother, in her seventies, was “going steady.” Her sister lived in the deep woods of the Northwest, in a house she and her husband had built themselves. Both of them tried to bolster Celeste, to keep her spirits up and urge her to live her own life, to try to be happy even though John could find neither solace nor joy in his life.

Celeste and John had met in a surgical recovery room when he was checking on a patient. It was a romantic way to meet and she was impressed with him right away. “He was so smart. That man knew
everything,”
she would remember. “You could ask him any medical question on any specialty. He had an unbelievable memory.” She did not see the sadness that was an integral part of John. Maybe it wasn’t there in the early days.

They were married on October 6, 1979, four and a half months after Debora Green and Michael Farrar. John was twenty-nine and Celeste was twenty-seven. Coincidentally, John was the same John Walker who had been on Debora’s cadaver-dissection team in anatomy class at the University of Kansas Med School. They had been friends then, but had rarely, if ever, met since graduation.

The Walker marriage, much like the Farrar-Green marriage, proved early on to suffer from flawed communication, with the marital partners working at cross-purposes. “I thought when we got married, we loved each other,” Celeste would write one day, trying to understand what had gone wrong. “But in the first few months, we found we had entirely different expectations. We both tried to make the marriage work, we had children, we built a life together.” But as time went on, Celeste realized that her husband was becoming more and more depressed. It seemed that she fought harder to bring new life to their marriage than he did. “He just didn’t have much energy—and just wanted to escape.”

They managed to bumble along, somehow, until 1990. By then, they were both desperately unhappy; John said that he wanted to be out of the marriage. Still, when Celeste suggested that they separate, he balked. They went to a marriage counselor and things seemed to be better for a while—a very short while.

“That was the point,” Celeste would remember, “where John realized the marriage was a failure, and he felt that he had in some way failed also. He became more depressed as time went on and we had fewer mutual interests. There was little affection or closeness and we grew apart and much more distant from each other until we reached a point where we were more like roommates. John still was a good friend and a wonderful person. He was always sympathetic when I was sick or down. I respected him and valued his opinion—but we just couldn’t connect on an intimate level.”

Sometime in 1994, Celeste had accepted that she and John could not go on together. He had no interest in anything having to do with their home. When the roof leaked and the basement flooded, he simply walked away. “I confronted him,” she remembered. “I said, ‘Anybody else would be down there helping to clean up the basement and putting it back together, and getting the roof fixed and stop the leaking.’

“He said, ‘Well, I figure all we have to do is have some damage repair. I really don’t care. I figure I’ll be gone in ten years anyway. You can’t raise those boys by yourself so I’ll stick around until Brett is in college and Dan is in high school, and then I’ll be gone.’”

Celeste assumed that this meant he planned to divorce her in ten years. But, by then she would be over fifty; it would be difficult to find a job. Knowing that there was a stopwatch running on her marriage, she arranged to update her nursing skills. “I began to plan an independent life for myself,” she said. “I had been out of the workforce for ten years, so I took a reentry course for nursing. I became stronger and more confident. John became more dependent and pessimistic about us, his ability to afford a divorce, the direction of health care in general.”

Celeste agonized over her husband’s ambivalence. He wanted to leave her; he didn’t want to leave her. He would leave in a prescribed number of years. He didn’t feel he could afford a divorce. From one week to the next, she didn’t know where she stood. She didn’t have a marriage; she had a pendulum, and it sank lower with each swing.

And all the while Celeste grew more concerned about John’s profound depression. “In December of 1994, he brought me a gun and told me to hide it—which I did.” Frightened, Celeste made an appointment with a psychiatrist for her husband. John seemed to be descending from increasingly darker moods to a point where he himself feared he might commit suicide. He did go to about four sessions of therapy before dropping out.

Celeste’s hope that John wasn’t actually considering suicide was somewhat bolstered by the fact that he worked hard to keep himself in good physical shape. He exercised and talked about getting a bike that he could ride in the morning before he left for work. She tried to tell herself these weren’t the activities of a man who wanted to die. But her experience in psychiatric nursing told her that John was in deep trouble emotionally.

She didn’t know then that John was buying more and more life insurance—another policy with each devastating episode of depression. He seemed a good risk; he was healthy, and he had a wonderful career. The insurance he was accumulating didn’t strike the underwriters as excessive.

When he was home, John was emotionally removed from Celeste, but he tried to be present for his sons. He watched television and took naps. He seemed to care even less about the house and didn’t have the energy to fix things that needed repair. The kitchen floor needed replacing, but he wasn’t interested. He was too tired, with the kind of absolute fatigue that is not alleviated by sleep, though he went to bed right after supper and slept through the night until it was time to go to work. Celeste felt that John was sleeping through their marriage, their lives.

The Walkers had moved in the same tight circle of close friends for twenty years, but now John told Celeste that he knew they weren’t really
his
friends—they were hers, and they included him in their activities only because of her. He felt that none of them really cared about him. “That was so far from the truth,” she said, “but it showed how unconnected John felt to everyone in his life.”

Celeste saw the Pembroke Hill School’s summer 1995 Peru trip as a chance to step back from her world and evaluate where she and John were going. And she was excited about the project: she thought it would be a wonderful time for herself and her older son. Though John wasn’t at all interested, he didn’t mind if Celeste and Brett went.

Planning for the two-week trip got under way in the latter part of 1994, and a number of parents signed up. They had several meetings about what they should take, what clothing they would need, what they hoped to see while they were there, and even what health hazards they might face.

Even though they were all part of the medical community, Celeste had never met Michael or Debora. Mike practiced north of the river, in Missouri, while John’s practice was on the Kansas side. Celeste had been active in getting Pembroke Hill families signed up for the Peru trip, but she had never seen Mike before May 1995, at one of the Peru trip meetings. “I was drawn to him,” she said. “He had energy and enthusiasm; he just had a spark about him.”

Mike and another doctor would be in charge of providing antibiotics and health information on the trip. As he did with everything, Mike had carefully researched what bugs and viruses might attack tourists in Peru. At the meeting, he and the other physician argued briefly about what the best medical protocol would be.

“After he left the meeting,” Celeste remembered, “Mike called me on the car phone and said he was going to call the CDC [the federal Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta] to be sure we were all really protected—that we got the correct shots, and that we took the right medicines and first-aid equipment with us. I got off the phone and I thought, ‘Gosh, this man is so different from John.’ John never followed through on anything, and here’s Mike Farrar calling back right away to assure me that we would have what we needed in Peru.”