Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice Read Free

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    The young couple were married on Halloween, 1948, and Joan’s dreams of being a math teacher evaporated. She became pregnant almost immediately and gave birth to their first daughter, Pamela, in the hot summer of 1949. Her second baby came less than two years later: Debora (who was first called Deborah, then Debra, Debi, and Deb before she finally settled on a spelling that suited her) was born on February 28, 1951.
    By all accounts, the Joneses’ marriage was happy enough, despite their youth. Had Joan worked, she would probably have earned more than Bob did in the early years. But spouses didn’t switch roles in the fifties, so Joan stayed home and kept house. The marriage lasted; they were still together as their golden anniversary approached.
    Both Pamela and Debora were cute little girls. And both of them were exceptionally bright, but it was Debora who showed true genius. Her uncle Gordon Purdy, who lived in Minnesota, remembered that she taught herself to read at two and a half by poring over the newspaper. He was astounded to get a letter written by his toddler niece.
    Some who knew her said that Joan resented giving up her education to marry Bob, and that she sometimes took her frustrations out on her daughters with verbal abuse. Perhaps. Maybe she only wanted them to succeed beyond anything she had ever accomplished. If she seemed resigned to her role as a mother and housewife, she nevertheless wanted her girls to go to college and have professions. When Joan found fault with either girl, it was usually because she had failed to study hard enough. Where Bob was easygoing, Joan could be almost obsessed with the idea that her daughters had to succeed. She would brook no criticism of them from anyone outside the family.
    “Between my parents,” Debora would say cautiously later on, “I think I would say my mother was the strongest—the one who made the decisions.”
    Joan was the serious parent, and Bob was fun—the parent who made jokes and played games with the girls. Joan demanded excellence and high grades, although the girls were both good students. Debora was, in truth, a lazy student, but it didn’t matter; she was so smart she didn’t have to exert herself, not even to make straight A’s. If she heard it once, she heard it a thousand times: she was a genius.
    Forever after, Debora would define herself in terms of her scholastic accomplishments and her intelligence. She would also judge others, perhaps unconsciously, by how smart they were and how well they did in their careers. Everything came so easily to her that she had little comprehension of her peers’ problems in grasping reading and math. She was also agile and athletic, and a gifted musician.
    Her father drove a Butternut Bread bakery truck and gradually moved up in the company. “We didn’t have a lot of money,” Debora recalled, “but we always had everything we needed.”
    Later, when asked about her childhood, Debora could not remember anything unusual, anything negative. It was almost as if her memory was blank. She described an idyllic existence, with no family dissonance. But, in fact, there was at least one unpleasant incident. Debora was very angry with her father when he came home drunk from a bowling tournament. It was late, but she was still up and she startled Bob as he was counting several hundred dollars he had won in the tournament. Furious, Debora bawled him out. Later, when she found out that he had always meant the money for her college fund, she was ashamed about what she said to him that night. She did not mention that in her recall of her young years, nor did she speak of the fact that she wet her bed until she was twelve.
    Debora and Pam shared a room, and they got along well—as sisters do, with the normal squabbles. If Pam resented Debora’s transcendent intellect, her sister wouldn’t remember it. Debora took piano and violin lessons and excelled at both, continuing the piano lessons well