“Yes, you were his little girl.”
“I was just one of two.”
“He talked about you.”
“Please, I don’t mean to sound rude but . . . don’t change the subject.”
“I thought you’d want to know what he said about—”
“Of course I do. You know I do, but I have to understand this. Anna said enough of what Simon needed her to say?”
“Yes.”
“You think my father talked her into doing that?”
“He . . . I don’t know that Simon would have been acquitted without him.”
“So it worked.”
“Alex took a huge risk, a stupid risk.”
“It paid off.”
“For Simon.”
“That’s why you broke up.”
“Well—”
“You were angry at him, so you broke up.”
“I was angry. But that wasn’t the reason.”
“Then why did you break up with him? You loved him. He loved you.”
“Is that what he said? Is that what it says in the—”
“Why did you break up with him?” I asked her. She took a sip from her glass, put two fingers to her lips, and exhaled through the gap between them, like someone who had once smoked habitually. Then she spoke.
“You’re going to have to put yourself in my position and, because we’re talking about your father, I don’t know if you’re going to be able to. You’re a young woman, Rachael, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you and—”
“Uh-oh.”
“What?”
“Well, you know you’re in trouble when someone prefaces something they’re about to say with, ‘You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.’ ”
“Why?”
“Because it means the speaker is about to patronize you, to make all sorts of assumptions about you based on your youth, and one of them is almost always that your pain is somehow worth less ounce for ounce than that of someone who was born earlier.”
“Rachael, I’m not discounting your pain. You’re very quick to make assumptions.”
“Really? I thought I was being restrained. Blame it on my youth.”
“Rachael, it won’t do you any good being angry with me, especially if you want my perspective on your father.”
“With respect, Your Honor, how many times can he die? I know the end of the story. I’m the sequel. And, anyway, I don’t mean to make this sound like a trade negotiation but this is a two-way exchange of information. As you can imagine, he wrote about you in the journal.”
“Rachael, why are you angry with me?”
“I don’t know . . . Because he’s dead.”
“And because I’m not?”
“No, because you knew him better than I did; because he didn’t love my mother anymore and because of something you were about to tell me before I snapped at you, something bad, something hard for you to say, to me, something that I’d find easier to understand if I had more of my life behind me.” On the last few words I was choking back tears I had promised myself not to show her. She took my hand and I was gone for all money, a sobbing mess of a half orphan, no longer the young sophisticate I was pretending to be. Then the waiter came with our meals, and she took her hand away.
7. What she would tell me does, I suppose, on reflection, make sense. At the time of your arrest and consequent need for her legal services, she was a divorced woman in her early forties with two children under ten. Although she already knew my father, this was the time when they reentered each other’s life with unambiguous significance. The picture she painted of him made sense and yet, or maybe because it made sense, it sat uncomfortably with me. A handsome, unconventional man, a gentle medically educated iconoclast, cultured, with a certain old-world charm but no meshuggener; that’s what she fell for and probably what my mother fell for originally as well. That’s what we all fell for. You too fell for this only in your case he seemed to be acting on a promise that was, for all the rest of us, only implied. He was going to make everything all right for you. Yes, he would love the rest of us and, yes, he would fight to save the public-health system from the grasp of faceless men who wanted to turn everybody’s ill health into gold. But for you, he would go into battle every day, and the greater your problems, the deeper into them he would dive, risking his own well-being for yours. I think, at least for a time, you were the measure, yours was the case by which he would judge himself. If he failed you, he had failed. And why choose you for this august role? He chose you because he saw in you so much of himself, too much of himself.
So it flattered her that he would choose her to represent you. It was about the highest compliment he could pay her advocacy skills. And initially his dedication to your problems was admirable. And yes, everybody knew, by which I mean that my dad and she and, of course, you knew that you had taken Anna’s Sam without anyone’s permission and that he couldn’t tell her you had and that she couldn’t ask or even admit her suspicion that you had. And maybe, as long as she didn’t quite know, maybe it was forgivable to just once make contact with Anna and try to convince her that, for all your obsession-fueled spur-of-the-moment recklessness, the greatest crime in all this would be to let you be convicted and die in prison.
Once, maybe he could do it once. Once was wrong, once was crazy, once was still a onetime breach of just about anything you can think of. But he didn’t do it once. Anna was not interested in saving you, not at first, not at all, and that you wanted him to keep trying to get her to change her mind shouldn’t have mattered. You were in prison, you were in extremis. This was not the time to take instruction from you, legal instruction maybe, but not an instruction to commit professional suicide.
When Gina learned that my father had been, not once, but repeatedly in contact with Anna, she was furious. Had Anna wanted to, she could have brought charges against your psychiatrist. They might have stuck, too, in which case it would have meant not only the end of his practicing career but possibly prison for him as well. It would have been disastrous for your case too. This isn’t my opinion. This was what Gina said. What fun the prosecution would have had with the knowledge that the defendant’s psychiatrist had attempted to bribe or intimidate or coerce the defendant’s ex-girlfriend, mother of the kidnapped child, into changing her evidence, that he had attempted to pervert the course of justice. Gina said that she had pointed this out to him more than once and always very forcefully. But still, he kept calling her, calling Anna.
She told me that she was furious with him not merely because of the risks he was taking with your case and with his own career and indeed with his liberty. She said she came to realize she was furious at him because of what his repeated calls to Anna were doing to her, Gina. Anna could save you, she could save my father by not telling the police about his calls, but she could not save Gina, she could not save Gina from seeing something she had been closing her eyes to. Dad wasn’t well.
And this was where she asked me to try for a moment to forget that he was my father and to put myself in her position. She had come out of what could best be described as a stale marriage but, she said, could at worst be much more colorfully described than that. The man she had married had given her two children before revealing himself to be competitive, insecure, and selfish and not the man she thought she was getting. It was years before Gina had finally summoned up enough courage to leave him. While she didn’t say she was positively reconciled to remaining on her own indefinitely, she said she was well aware before she left him that it was a distinct possibility. She left him anyway, taking her two children with her. She was renting a place and trying to keep her practice going when my father walked back into her life, this time in a starring role. Without ever saying anything to this effect, he was going to save her life too.
He brought her a high-profile, career-making case which he would, in his way, be working on with her. He was a dinner companion, a warm and worldly, intelligent, available professional man. But in per
sisting with his attempts to persuade Anna to perjure herself on your behalf, he was revealing something about himself she didn’t want to see. For what does it say about a man that he will act so imprudently, even for a good cause, so detrimentally to himself and to those people he has a much greater obligation to help? It says, “Do not invest too heavily here. This man is unwell.”
So she pulled away, just a little. But my father could tell she was becoming slightly distant. She wasn’t a good enough actress to hide it. He broached it with her and, at first, she denied it. He implored her not to let any problems between them compromise her work for you. Then they argued. She said there weren’t any problems between them other than his suggestion that her work on your case could be affected by her relationship with him. This, she now concedes, was untrue but at the time, she was unwilling to name their other problems. She had no qualms insisting he cease all attempts to contact Anna. That came within her professional purview. But how do you tell someone you love, a psychiatrist, someone who had been going to take care of you, that you have concerns for his mental health? They were both under enough stress already. You saw to that, as did the rest of their work, their exes, and maybe even their children.
She said she was putting off sorting things out with him till your case was finished. But then came the bag of money he gave her, and that ruined everything. You know where this money came from. It was the money Mitch had dumped on my father. It was the money he had helped Angelique win. Unable to contact Mitch or Angelique, my father decided after a while to apply it to your defense, as Angelique had intended, which meant giving it to Gina.
It’s not clear from his journal whether this was a carefully considered use of the money or a spur-of-the-moment decision. However he arrived at it, it was a grave miscalculation and I heard the way Gina received it. I had not wanted to hear the way she received it and it took two further meetings before she was able to get me to shut up and listen, before she was able to get me to stop defending him.
He arrived at her home one evening when they were supposed to be going out for dinner. Her children and the constraints that went with them were at her mother’s and when he gave her the money in a bag, her response was consequently unconstrained. Where did he suddenly get this money? Wasn’t he short of money and why was he suddenly giving it to her? None of his answers, as true as they were, made things any better. The money was, in a roundabout way, from Simon, he told her. Don’t laugh. There’s a way in which it was. Angelique had Mitch help her get the money to cover your legal expenses, and Mitch had entrusted my father with it when he couldn’t find Angelique. My father, having tried unsuccessfully to call Mitch, was then giving it to Gina. But it seemed there was no way to make any of this sound reasonable, and it only further contributed to her picture of my father as unstable. She told him she was already getting paid to defend you, that Legal Aid was paying for it. He said he knew that but the Legal Aid scale of fees was way below what a privately funded client would pay and that, anyway, she was working around the clock on the case and wasn’t charging for even half the time she was putting in. The money he had brought would help redress the imbalance. But it was a bag with $30,000 in bills and the truth, as it came out of my father, with his description of his angry, mysterious, uncontactable patient, sounded fantastic to the point of bizarre.
She was suddenly being forced to confront all her doubts about him. Her response was explosive. It is still emotional, even in the retelling, but it’s no longer red-hot and out of control. At the time, in addition to her disillusionment, her disappointment in him, there was the insult to her and the squalidness of the whole thing. She had fallen in love with him and there he was turning up with a bag full of money, ostensibly on your behalf. She had never threatened to withdraw from your case. On the contrary, when there had been a bureaucratic glitch, when Legal Aid had tried to pressure you to enter a plea of guilty by threatening they’d withdraw funding if you didn’t, she had gone into battle to ensure that your trial was funded irrespective of the plea.
It was one thing, she said, to be a little obsessive in his “pastoral” care for you, one thing to try to persuade Anna to lie for you, but this money in a bag, this was something else altogether. She even wondered about the ethics and legality of accepting the money. An honest lawyer, despite the popular stereotype, will run a mile to get away from a pile of money in a brown paper bag. And if he was prepared to jeopardize her career and reputation this way, what did it say about the sincerity of his feelings for her? She was bewildered and hurt. How had she allowed herself to fall in love with him? Her judgment with respect to men was obviously still suspect. The hunger that lives in a failed marriage had snuck up on her and impaired her discrimination. She said that this was what she was thinking at the time, and at that time, it might even have been that night, she broke up with my father.
The way she told it, it made sense for her to have the doubts she had and to end it. The way he wrote about it, it made sense for him to give her the money. He was devastated when she ended it. He hadn’t seen it coming at all. Whether or not they would have made a successful couple, I’m in no position to say. When one first meets her, or should I say when I first met her, she seemed too cold for him, not warm enough. Not warm enough for the father I remember from my childhood. But she warms up and, after a while, she talks about him with a tenderness I cannot always bear. It makes the way their relationship ended all the more tragic.
Why didn’t they talk more? I’m guessing he was too hurt, too embarrassed to plead his own case with anything like the vigor with which he’d pleaded yours. People who are in the business of saving the world don’t get ditched by their girlfriends. It’s inconsistent with their self-image, I suppose. And for Gina, the money was the last straw. The man was clearly unwell. Given enough breathing space, one or both of them might have been able to put it all in context. But it seems there was no breathing space.
8. My father had received a letter from Mitch. “You’ve failed me. I’m not coming back,” it announced. My father, concerned about his emotional state, phoned him a number of times but Mitch was either always out or just not taking the calls. He was anxious to identify the specific nature of Mitch’s dissatisfaction and either address it or, at least, recommend another psychiatrist. The only response his calls could elicit was another letter from Mitch reiterating that he wasn’t coming back to see him and that he should stop phoning him. “You’ve failed me, and I’m finished with you,” it concluded. Again my father left messages and again they went unanswered.
It was then my father took the unusual step—in fact, it was unprecedented other than in your case—of making a house call. Without warning and despite Mitch’s hostility to him, my father drove to the address in Mitch’s file. He rang the doorbell and waited. He waited for quite some time. He had in mind, I suppose, that Mitch was partially incapacitated. It’s not clear from the journal what my father was going to say. Maybe, as he waited for the door to open, he didn’t know either. But the door didn’t open.
Dad was going to leave when, through the curtain, he saw a light on somewhere deep inside the house. Something possessed him to lean against the front door and when he did, it moved slightly. He called out through the gap several times, but there was no answer. After waiting a little while longer he pushed the door again, tentatively. Its progress was being impeded by something. My father called out to Mitch a few more times before forcing the door wide open. When his further calls were met with silence, he stepped inside the house. There he saw what had been somehow jammed up against the door. It was, my father wrote, Mitch’s cane or walking stick. My father recognized it from their sessions. It was all very strange. Apprehensively, and calling out “Hello” as he went, he made his way to the only room with a light on. It was an upstairs bedroom and the bedside lamp burned hot, illuminating in the bed the man referred to in the journal as Mitch, nearly too cold to be alive and no longer with thoughts too sad for dreaming. Unconscious, he l
ay there still and still there in new flannel pajamas, the cellophane and cardboard packaging strewn on the floor. That’s how my father found him.
The paramedic in the ambulance my father called could not tell him which hospital they were taking Mitch to. The closest, he said, might still be on ambulance bypass. Sufficient hospital beds were not a government priority. The paramedic didn’t say that. My father did.
Gina hadn’t known anything about this at that time. How could she have? How could she have known? She could have called him. Why didn’t she call him? When the jury finally came back with their verdict and found you “not guilty,” whether it was through Gina’s skill or Anna’s momentary entrechat between her honesty and your liberty, Gina could have called my father. But she didn’t call him on that late afternoon. I can barely imagine the afternoon your nightmare ended. He wasn’t in court. He couldn’t be there, which was, in itself, a minor tragedy. Did you have a chance, near the climax of it all, to wonder why?
He couldn’t be there because, not knowing what time the jury would be ready to return its verdict, he was frantically busy trying to find out which hospital an overdose victim, a former patient of his, a onetime analyst in a stockbrokerage firm, Dennis Mitchell, had been taken to. And when he’d located the hospital, it took him a while to determine Mitch’s condition. The inquirer, he had to explain, was the patient’s former psychiatrist. He was also the one who had found him and called the ambulance and, yes, the one who’d prescribed the sleeping pills he’d overdosed on. The duty ER physician informed my father that they’d gotten him in time and that he’d be all right.
That my father found Mitch, that no one else was visiting him, might go a long way toward explaining why it was that, evidently, given the new pajamas, Mitch, or Mr. Mitchell, had opted to determine “checkout” time for himself. But it did not explain, not to my father, why he, my father, had not anticipated such an eventuality by taking more care with Mitch when he was still keeping his appointments. However hard he might have taken the suicide or attempted suicide of any of his patients, this one seemed to have delivered an extra blow, what you might call a guilt-edged guilt.