The problem for him, at least before the kidnapping, might have been that, while he recognized that you were unhappy and unwell, I think he couldn’t help but feel that there was some part of you, some part bound inextricably to your illness, that everybody could do with a little more of. Not the melancholy, of course, or even the capacity for quips and one-liners (“Give me lithium or give me death,” remember?). Perhaps it was just what he more than once described as a mixture in you of acuity and romanticism that made most other people’s versions of sanity appear hollow compromises, or evasions. Perhaps it was just your capacity to love in spite of the evidence. He identified this unambiguously as part of your illness, and yet I suspect he felt that a lot of people could do with suffering this symptom occasionally.
At one point in there, apparently apropos of nothing but near in time to a session with you, he quotes another psychiatrist. I don’t know whether he ever put it to you. “Illnesses of mood distort and magnify what is human; they do not destroy it.” It’s the last entry on an otherwise normal day that included a session with you. He doesn’t mention you near it but it has a forgiving quality to it and you were probably the one most in need of his forgiveness. I stress that this entry dates from before the kidnapping when there was less to forgive. He wasn’t supposed to be in the business of bestowing or withholding forgiveness but, with you, he was far too willing to cross the line, right from the start. It was not enough for treatment to have been the primary purpose of your relationship. It should have been the sole purpose. When you kidnapped Sam, everyone’s illness was magnified. But what would I know? I know just enough to know that a few undergraduate courses in psychology qualify me only for more undergraduate courses in psychology.
4. My father had another patient who earned himself extracurricular entries, a gambler. He didn’t like him. You and my father on your walks could sound like two old army buddies agreeing with each other till the early hours beneath the on-again, off-again neon beer advertisement in the window of some seedy bar, but this man was an antagonist. In one of the earliest entries concerning him, my father noted that the man had told him that, much to his dislike, people were always abbreviating his surname, Mitchell, and calling him Mitch. Thereafter in the journal my father only ever referred to him as Mitch. And, if that’s a bit obscure, he once wrote, “Mitch again today. Unpleasant, angry. Warrants sympathy. Not forthcoming.”
I take the last part to mean that the sympathy this man warranted wasn’t forthcoming. Mitch himself was actually quite forthcoming. To read his story, albeit through my father’s eyes, is to see that he was clearly an intelligent man who had suffered terribly. I’m surprised by the dislike my father seemed to take to him and equally how well he was able to maintain his professional demeanor with him despite it. Could the man tell that my father didn’t like him?
There’s no evidence to suggest my father ever told you anything about him or, indeed, about any of his other patients, nor should he have. If you’re wondering why he took such a dislike to this gambler, I can assure you it had nothing to do with his gambling. My father wasn’t any kind of puritan and one of the few things he and Mitch seemed to agree about was that gambling was the least of this man’s problems. If anything, I think my father rather enjoyed Mitch’s gambling stories. They would get this man talking, and once he started he wouldn’t stop.
Mitch was or had been some sort of senior analyst with a stockbrokerage firm in the city. Is this ringing a bell? There’s no point being coy or hiding anything now and, anyway, there’s always the chance that you already know some of it. Remember, I don’t know exactly what you know. Mitch worked for a time for the same firm as Anna’s husband, Joe. They often worked closely together. But before you get too excited, first, it was no coincidence that Mitch and you both became his patients, and second, my father’s dislike of the man shouldn’t be misinterpreted as further evidence of his loyalty to you, not that you need any. Mitch seemed to dislike Anna’s husband more than you ever could have. I’m not sure you ever disliked him. Mitch certainly did. They worked together on some big deal which, when it fell through, left both men “exposed,” by which I mean it left them unemployed. Mitch seemed to hold Joe in some way responsible for this. To make matters worse, Mitch had, at about the same time, badly injured himself at some work retreat and he seemed to hold Anna’s husband responsible for that too. A certain time after this he started seeing my father.
By then managed care, which my father had opposed publicly, had already been introduced. I find it completely endearing that he could ever have thought that a few well-written articles or letters could even momentarily slow the juggernaut of civil society’s dismantling, which they were calling “reform” at the time. Well, that’s the way I describe it. I am my father’s daughter, after all. Anyway, your stepson calls me a “sellout” or a “capitulationist.” What he means is that he’s more radical, read “virtuous and wise,” than me, and that what I see as pragmatism is really a moral or political cop-out. Well, what do you want? We’re students. We’re still naïve enough to think we can change things, still young enough to think we’ve got time.
The deal that cost Mitch and Anna’s husband, Joe Geraghty, their jobs when it fell through wasn’t just another deal. It was going to be the first deal to provide a windfall gain consequent upon the introduction of managed care. Mitch was therefore, at least for a time, depending on the failure of my father’s quixotic project, the one that wasn’t you.
It probably won’t surprise you that it wasn’t their difference over the health system that gave rise to my father’s dislike of Mitch. Not as far as I can gauge. That might have been enough for me or for a young hothead like Sam, but it wasn’t for my father. Each of them knew, fairly early on, where they stood on the issue—that is, on opposite sides. My father made sure Mitch knew, but he already did when he started seeing him. Mitch wasn’t ideologically committed to any particular system of health-care provision. He wasn’t ideologically committed to anything much at all. He had chosen my father through a recommendation, not one from Joe Geraghty but, in a way, through him.
It seems that after his accident and the breakdown of his marriage, Mitch had sought the physical comfort of a woman who, unlike his wife, was going to stick with him through thick and thin, at least till the one-hour appointment was up. He and Joe Geraghty had once, in happier times, visited the brothel she worked in together. It was there that he called when the times, his times, became decidedly unhappier. The woman he got to visit him regularly told him, without mentioning names, that she was in love with a man who needed help with legal fees. That was you. Mitch, in turn, told her the sad story of his life and she recommended a psychiatrist, your psychiatrist, my father.
The effort my father made to keep his dislike of Mitch to himself was not reciprocated. Mitch did not share your fondness for my father, and he didn’t try to hide it. But for some reason, he kept coming back. He couldn’t bring himself either to terminate therapy or to see another therapist. Why?
It’s tempting for a daughter to speculate that, for all his irritability and his contempt for my father and psychiatry, this man, Mitch, was getting some relief or comfort from his sessions with him. It’s so tempting for a daughter to think this that I am not prepared to discount it entirely. My father, on the other hand, was never so tempted. For him Mitch’s loyalty could be summed up in a word much less technical than transference or whatever it was that you and Dad had for each other: Angelique.
Putting it simply—and this is the way my father put it, so don’t get angry with me—what Anna was to you, Angelique was to Mitch; by which he didn’t mean that Anna was your callgirl. He was talking about obsession. I’m sure he would forgive you if you wanted to say something about you having the last laugh, but he’s not here anymore. You’ve only got his daughter, one of them, here and I won’t forgive you if you say anything about having the last laugh, no matter how much I might need your help now.
The only link Mitch had to Angeli
que was my father. After her accident, he had no way of contacting her without getting her phone number or real name from him. Faced with my father’s refusal to divulge these, Mitch kept coming back to him, week after week, for more antidepressants, more cognitive therapy, and for another spin of the wheel, another roll of the dice. There was always a chance, however small, that my father would either relent or else let something drop, some hint or clue which would lead him to her. But when the weeks and then months passed and there was no pay-off, Mitch decided to play his trump card.
He explained to my father that he had some money, thousands of dollars, that belonged to Angelique and that if my father didn’t help him contact Angelique he, Mitch, wouldn’t be able to get the money to her. They had won the money together just before her accident. As compelling as it must have sounded to my father, he told him “no dice,” or words to that effect. But Mitch was no idiot and he was a major-league obsessive, almost up there with you. My father was of the opinion that, in addition to Mitch’s obsession with Angelique, his need to see her, there were other things going on. The desire to see her wasn’t merely or even barely some sort of sexual need, not in the conventional sense, anyway. Since Mitch’s accident at his firm’s corporate retreat he was an extremely bitter man. He was angry about so many things, not just the accident. His wife had been consistently unfaithful to him even before the accident. In particular, he was angry about what he perceived as his almost complete powerlessness. Not only did he no longer have any economic power or power to attract the opposite sex, but—and this must be the ultimate disempowerment—he had even lost the ability to help people, particularly Angelique. He was nothing, just a drain on society, an angry drain at that. A competitive man, or at least a man who had for years toiled at the coalface of competition, in the “helping” game, at least in the “helping Angelique” game, he was being beaten, or at least frustrated, by my father. Not only that, but for as long as my father refused to help him contact her, Mitch wouldn’t even get to be a player.
But he had a sum of money with which he intended to apply leverage. My father described it as a test of strength for this man, a tug-of-war, a test of wills. Each session he would bring the money, some thirty thousand dollars in cash. He would try to give it to my father or leave it in his office at the end of the session, but my father would refuse either to accept it or to give Mitch Angelique’s telephone number. The truth was that since her accident he had been unable to contact her himself. You, obviously, couldn’t have known where she was and her roommate had either moved out or neglected to pay the phone bill or both. Angelique had vanished. But this man, this angry, physically broken, insistent man, and his bag of money would not go away.
It is well documented in his journal how my father came to think that it made sense to do what he then did. There is a logic to it, and yet I read it and shake my head wondering how he could have done what he did. Perhaps you’ll understand it better than I do. What happened was this. Realizing eventually that my father was never going to intentionally divulge Angelique’s whereabouts, Mitch came by my father’s consulting office while he was absent—perhaps he was visiting you—and left the money for him with the receptionist he shared with a number of other doctors.
This money and much that surrounds it is all part of a trail that leads to you. You wonder how it can lead to you when you’ve never even met this man, Mitch? Well, for a start, as I told you, the money represented Angelique’s winnings. When the two of them swapped stories and Angelique told him of her boyfriend’s problem paying for his legal defense, Mitch taught her or helped her to gamble her way into thirty thousand dollars at the casino. The money was Angelique’s, Mitch insisted. It was for the lawyer defending her boyfriend, defending you, that is. You see, there was a period of some weeks, at least, when my father and, therefore, I guess, you thought that your lawyer, my father’s new friend Gina, would cease to represent you after Legal Aid threatened to withdraw its funding for your case. Although this fear ultimately proved to be unfounded, it persisted for a number of weeks, and during that time my father was seriously worried about what would happen.
By the time his concern about Legal Aid was resolved by Gina, Mitch and Angelique had already made their assault on the coffers of the casino and, as you might know, it was from there—no doubt giddy with her good fortune, delivered more or less as Mitch had promised—that she pulled out into an oncoming car. Mitch took the money when the ambulance took her.
It was my father’s intention to simply give the money back to Mitch at their next session, but there wasn’t one. Mitch left a message after hours canceling his next scheduled appointment. He didn’t request an alternative time. He wasn’t planning to come back. My father left him a number of messages asking him to reschedule and telling him that he had to take the money back. Mitch didn’t take any of the calls despite it being likely from his own earlier description of his life that he was home. Nor did he return any of them. My father, it seemed, had lost him as a patient but gained thirty thousand dollars.
You might be wondering why Mitch, having failed in his attempt to use the money to lever a reconnection with Angelique, would stop trying and instead leave the money with my father. My father clearly wondered about this. He thought that Mitch simply wanted the money to reach her even if he, Mitch, wasn’t able to. This struck my father as indicative of a selflessness and a nobility he would not have credited Mitch with, and that, in turn, did nothing for my father’s feelings of guilt for having disliked him.
Of course, implicit in this interpretation is the implication that Mitch regarded my father as a man of sufficient integrity to be relied upon to get the money to Angelique and not to keep it for himself. It was an implication my father never commented on, not in the journal anyway. It also assumes, as Mitch had assumed all along, that my father was actually capable of contacting her. Mitch had always assumed either that Angelique was one of Dad’s patients or else that he was one of her clients. Mitch’s assumptions about their relationship were, as you know, of course quite wrong and so was his conclusion. Dad was never able to find her after her accident, try though he did.
But nor did he like holding on to the money. It made him uncomfortable for all sorts of reasons. For a start, he didn’t have the facilities to store thirty thousand dollars securely in his office. Carrying it around wasn’t an acceptable alternative and neither was stashing it somewhere in his none-too-salubrious recently rented two-bedroom place in East St. Kilda.
I remember that place well. People think that children don’t notice relativities in income, living conditions, and circumstances, but the act of noticing is itself relative. My sister and I remembered a time when our father did not live in circumstances where you could smell the fried cooking smells of some of the forty other apartments, where you could follow the rhythms of other people’s domestic arguments, hear their radios and televisions, their use of the bathroom and know the precise bodily function being fulfilled, or hear the strained night-time groans that were less mysterious than we wanted them to be. Children often sit on the floor. They know the feel of carpet better than adults do. No one needs to tell them that the floor beneath them is not as clean anymore, that it is harder, more coarse, closer to the slab that supports everything tenuously. Money would have been conspicuous there. It was no place to house thirty thousand dollars in bills.
But for a while he alternated between keeping the money at home and keeping it in his office without telling anyone. Then, when your trial was over, he gave it to someone, someone he thought would understand why, someone who probably would have understood had he perhaps explained it differently.
I don’t know whether you’re still in touch with her. Probably not. It was all a long time ago. Perhaps you didn’t have that kind of relationship with her, but my father spoke, or rather, wrote, so well of her that it’s not out of the question that you did. It sounds like she did a great job for you.
5. I contacted her first, that is, b
efore I contacted you. It was logistically harder but emotionally easier. My thinking was that if she would agree to see me, she had to be at least civil. How does a member of the public contact a judge? I knew she’d been made a judge, not merely because my father had predicted it but because I’d called the Victorian Bar to ask for her and they’d told me. I called the County Court and eventually got through to her associate who offered to transmit a message. What was the message? How about, “My father is still dead, but I’m an adult woman now. May I talk to you about him?” That’s not so far from the message I left. I said my name was Rachael Klima, daughter of Alex Klima. May I come and talk to you?
A considerable time elapsed without any reply. I vacillated between calling again and giving up. Maybe the associate hadn’t given her the message? There was no way to get to her other than through her associate. I wouldn’t have minded if she was busy. I expected that, but surely I deserved some kind of response, for my father’s sake, if not just out of politeness.
When her associate finally called me back he apologized on her behalf. “Her Honor has had a backlog of judgments to write.”
“Oh,” I said. What is anyone meant to say to that?
She didn’t look like a judge, or not like the stereotype of a judge. She was too attractive, still too young and female to fit the stereotype. Just as she’d done well for you, you’d done well for her, although it wasn’t as though she was immediately appointed to the bench a week or two after your acquittal. There were many other cases, other triumphs, professional triumphs anyway.
She invited me to sit down and offered me coffee, which I refused because I was too nervous to hold a cup with confidence. I wanted to establish a good-enough rapport with her to enable me to ask her certain questions, most of which were really only half formulated. More perfectly imagined was the sense of calm I hoped to get from her answers.