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  "Difficult?

  How?"

  He paused.

  "Selfishness." The solitary word was spoken as an almost-question.

  "Not one of my most proud traits. I am vain, and I can be selfish. I was loving my work at the resort. I knew that it would not look good for me in my employer's eyes for my family to leave Steamboat and return to Japan. The company would be… unsympathetic to our problems. They would be critical of my inability to control my daughter. And as to that solution?" He shook his head.

  "My career would be in jeopardy"

  "Ultimately, your wife agreed?"

  "My wife… submitted… to my wisdom. A few weeks later, we saw Dr. Raymond Welle for the first time."

  "As a family?"

  "First he met with Mariko. Alone. Then he met with Eri and myself, alone.

  Finally, he met with the three of us together. Three different days during one week. He called us all together the following week and offered us a plan. He called it a treatment plan.

  "He wanted to meet with Mariko two times each week to help her with her adjustment to… being a young woman. To being in America. To being in Steamboat Springs. He wanted to meet with my wife and me once every other week to discuss ways to assist us in managing our daughter during this difficult time in her life. He described Mariko as straddling two cultures and sometimes losing her balance. He also said that she was not ready to relinquish either culture and if we tried to force her to choose one, or if we took one away from her, she would rebel against us further. Our problems would only exacerbate. He was telling us that we could not make our problems go away by returning to Japan."

  Given the facts, Welle's treatment approach sounded thoughtful and cogent. I don't know what I'd expected, but given the pontificating nature of his national radio show, I wouldn't have been surprised to hear a plan that consisted of something much more embarrassing to the profession, and much less potentially salutary for the Hamamoto family.

  As described by Taro Hamamoto, Dr. Welle's treatment of Mariko sounded like an appropriate method for dealing with an adolescent and her family after a single serious incident of acting out. The intervention with Mr. and Mrs. Hamamoto lasted for six sessions over a period of almost two months. Mariko was seen individually in psychotherapy for slightly longer; her father estimated that she attended psychotherapy sessions twice a week for one month, once a week for two months after that. Maybe sixteen sessions total. He offered to check old financial records if the specific number of visits was important. I told him I'd let him know.

  These days her managed-care company would never have approved such a luxurious investment of psychotherapeutic intervention. But her treatment was back in 1988, when health insurance policy provisions were less strict. Psychologists with psychologically unsophisticated clients often took advantage of the system in such circumstances and continued treatment long after it was necessary. It didn't appear to me that Dr. Welle had abused the system, however.

  The treatment he provided to Mariko was not too long, not too short. Just right. When I was able to pull it off in my own practice, I liked to think of it as the Goldilocks solution.

  Taro noticed me eyeing my watch.

  "I am aware that our time is almost up. I will try to be brief as I conclude.

  As I said before, Dr. Welle helped us. He helped my wife and me understand better the pressures that were weighing on our daughters. He taught us ways to help the girls adjust. He was sensitive to the cultural concerns we had. Eri and I did not want to relinquish,… the Japanese culture. And whatever Dr. Welle said to Mariko, whatever he advised her to do, we never again had problems with her about drugs and boys."

  I sensed that he expected me to challenge him about the last point he'd made. I didn't.

  He tapped his wristwatch with his fingertip.

  "You have a flight to catch. I will be pleased, now, to sign your paper before you go." He slid the permission form from the center of the table and aligned it in front of him.

  "I am grateful for your interest in my… family. Please give my greetings to Dr. Raymond Welle when you see him." He fished a pen from the pocket of his chinos and scrawled his signature along the bottom line.

  I slid the paper into my satchel.

  "Thank you," he said.

  "What you are doing-it gives me a small measure of hope.

  For my family, for me, this has been a wave that never breaks."

  I thanked him.

  "Should we have the opportunity to talk again, we can talk about my other daughter. Satoshi. She is at Stanford, in California. She is studying zoology.

  She hardly remembers living in Japan, I think. You should consider talking with her as well, you know? She knew her sister in ways that I never would."

  "She would be agreeable?"

  "Of course. Let me write down her phone number for you. I will tell her you will call."

  Ten minutes later I was on board the 747 that would take me back to Denver.

  Only after I'd walked the length of the jetway did I glance at my boarding pass and notice that my seat had been upgraded to first-class. On board, the flight attendant couldn't tell me why I'd been moved in front of the curtain, and suggested with a crooked smile that I not "question fate that comes in the form of sunshine."

  It seemed like good advice. My suspicion, though, was that Taro Hamamoto had pulled a string or two.

  After a moment's contemplation I decided I was more grateful than suspicious, and eagerly accepted the champagne I was offered by the flight attendant with the wisdom and the crooked smile.

  PART THREE. A Fool's Errand

  A few years back, during a late spring when I was between wives, I attended a large, formal wedding reception at the Phipps Tennis House in Denver. I remember arriving at the affair mostly cynical and leaving mostly drunk. The buddy who drove me home afterward accused me of hitting on the maid of honor without success-and without honor, for that matter.

  The facility where the event was held remained a bit of a blur in my memory. My recollection was of a huge Quonset-hut-like structure with a glass roof. The building itself was constructed of red brick and covered with green ivy-a monument that a family with too much money had erected shortly after the turn of the last century to indulge its interest in court sports and to express its disdain for the vagaries of Colorado weather.

  At the wedding reception I'd done most of my drinking in the gardens adjoining the huge tennis house. I remembered the gardens fondly for the abundant shade.

  I also recalled that a pair of nickers had been using nearby down spouts and gutters to drum a staccato advertisement for mates. Or perhaps they were after sexual partners-gladly, I don't know enough about nickers to make the distinction. I did recall that their insistent percussion had mitigated my enjoyment of the Mumm I was downing at a pace I would later regret.

  Although I don't remember many details from the afternoon of the wedding reception, I am pretty certain about two things. One, I never set eyes on the mansion that day. And two, the couple who were married that afternoon years ago are now, sadly, divorced.

  * * * It was the Phipps Mansion and not the tennis house that was my destination on the Friday in June after I returned from Vancouver. The mansion and its adjacent play structure had been bequeathed by the Phipps family to the University of Denver. The university routinely made the facilities available for community uses that ranged from weddings and bar mitzvahs all the way to the elegant proceedings of the Summit of the Eight industrialized countries.

  The spectacular buildings were also used for occasional political gatherings in support of presidents, governors, and sundry state and local politicians.

  My instructions from someone named Trish in Representative Welle's office in Washington, D.C." were to arrive at the front door of the mansion at 10:45 and to be sure I was carrying identification. Approaching the mansion in my car, I drove past two black-vested valets who were hijacking vehicles at the entrance to the tenn
is-house parking lot. I didn't slow, instead continuing up the hill in the general direction that I expected to find the manor.

  It wasn't hard to spot. The mansion is a grand Georgian structure that commands a pleasant knoll not too far south of the tennis house. The redbrick home looks down both front and rear-and both literally and figuratively-on an expansive neighborhood that has grown up around it on what the Phipps family probably once called "the grounds." I was deterred from entering a long circular drive up to the mansion by two large men in gray suits who I surmised had not been hired for their facility at traffic control. I smiled at their stern warning to move on and continued around the block, driving a long, looping route that rolled up and to the west before circling back behind the tennis house.

  I was in a nice neighborhood. On a street shaded by stately elms I parked across from a brick-and-stucco house that looked like a country hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and in front of a vaulting A-frame that would have done Aspen proud. I decided to forgo the services of the valet because I'm cheap and also because I didn't want my car to be boxed in by the cars of the attendees of the day's fundraising event. I knew I would be exiting early. Trish had informed me that my meeting with Representative Welle was pre luncheon only.

  She had asked me if that was clear.

  I told her I thought it probably meant that I wasn't staying for lunch.

  Yes. Trish and I had been on the same page.

  In that morning's editions the Denver newspapers had reported that political supporters of Dr. Welle were going to pay one thousand dollars each to attend a pre lunch reception at the tennis house. I could only guess how much the two dozen or so who had been invited to luncheon in the dining room at the mansion afterward would be paying-or, more likely, had already paid-for the privilege of tearing puglia with the congressman.

  Some memory fragment from the long-ago nuptials I'd attended suggested that I could cut through the gardens of the tennis house from near the spot where I'd parked my car and thus considerably abbreviate my walk to the mansion. I followed some catering employees past a redolent Dumpster, through a ratty wooden gate, and into the familiar tennis-house gardens. I listened for the percussive evidence of flickers. None around. From the tennis-house gardens I wandered up some brick stairs and through a charming wrought-iron-and-brick portico into the formal gardens on the north side of the mansion.

  Although the flowering plants weren't at their peak, they hinted at what was to come in July and August. The grape arbors offered shade, and the abundant rose gardens were in perfect early-summer form. The cherry and apple trees showed the beginnings of a summer of good fruit. Upright junipers spaced like soldiers at parade rest protected the perimeters of the huge garden.

  I wished Lauren were with me. She could tell me what some of the perennials were.

  One of the two gray-suited men from the end of the driveway spotted me wandering the paths of the gardens. He apparently didn't think my stroll was a good idea and jogged up the driveway and across the lawn to tell me so.

  "I have an appointment with Representative Welle," I said in response to his query about whether he could help me find my way.

  "Your name, sir?" He stood between the distant entrance to the mansion and me.

  "I'd like to see some ID." I told him my name and handed him my driver's license. When he returned it I asked, "And your name is?" I also held out my hand to shake his. He didn't notice; he was busy repeating my identity into a microphone that was hidden somewhere in his gray suit.

  A moment later he said, "They are expecting you, Dr. Gregory. At the front door." He pointed up the hill.

  I checked my watch.

  "I'm a little early."

  "That's not a problem. We would prefer that you not be on the grounds unaccompanied, sir. Would you like me to accompany you the rest of the way to the mansion?"

  "I don't think that will be necessary."

  "I'm glad to hear that."

  The man who met me at the door of the big house was built like a double pork chop that had a grape stuck on the meaty end. Thin legs, tiny head, huge trunk.

  Maybe five-nine. The only way to get by him in an airplane aisle would be to get down on your knees and crawl past those spindly legs.

  "Phil Barrett" he said in a slightly too loud voice that I could only imagine coming in useful at a high school reunion as he was greeting someone he was afraid didn't remember who he was.

  "Alan Gregory," I replied.

  He shook my hand.

  "Of course. Of course. Welcome. Come in." I imagined that he'd been at Phipps no more than half an hour and he was already acting like he'd just inherited it from some dead aunt.

  I looked around.

  "Nice place." "Yes," he said.

  "Rays an alumni."

  I was tempted to correct his Latin. Didn't.

  "Of?"

  "D.U. He was a Chi Phi. President, I think. His undergraduate degree is in economics. Not too many people know that part of Rays background. Before he became a healer he was quite a student of economic policy and all. Bet you're surprised. Am I right? I know I'm right. We have to do a better job of getting that part of Ray's background out to his public. Ray's been good to his school and the trustees are kind enough to let us use this place once in a while."

  "That's nice."

  "It's especially appropriate this year, of course. The original Mr. Phipps was a United States senator from Colorado, too. Did you know that? I'm afraid the history of this great state of ours eludes too many of its citizens."

  I had indeed been aware that Lawrence Phipps was Senator Phipps but I said that I hadn't. It seemed important to Phil Barrett that I be ignorant.

  We'd stepped far enough into the entrance hall so I could see the bustle of activity in the dining room, where the caterers were setting up tables for at least two dozen people. Lunch, apparently, was going to require a lot of silverware.

  "Major supporters," Phil Barrett explained. Maybe he'd been thinking the same thing about the silverware.

  "Hey," I said, shrugging my shoulders. I wondered if Raoul Estevez, my partner Diane's husband, would be in attendance. Diane had told me that R-aoul threw major money at politicians sometimes. Raoul's politics were usually difficult to discern but I felt confident that he threw money at both Democrats and Republicans without revealing his bias about their beliefs. He was practical enough, and honest enough, to admit that he was seeking influence, not ideology.

  Barrett led me in the opposite direction from the dining room and we promptly got lost in the huge house. We backtracked once unsuccessfully and a second time with more success and he showed me into a library that was almost as large as the top floor of my house. The paneling and shelves were of knotty pine that had aged to a color halfway between honey and bourbon.

  I let my eyes wander the room. Walls of books. Comfortable furniture. Nice lights. I decided I could read there.

  "Ray will be just a minute or two. You'll be fine?"

  I smiled.

  Less than a minute later I was checking titles on the shelves when a young man dressed as though he was from the caterers staff entered the room and asked me if I would like something to drink.

  "Please. A soft drink. Something brown and diet would be great."

  I climbed a rolling library ladder and was perusing titles on the upper shelves, my back to the door, when I heard, "Your libation, sir."

  I chuckled at the pretension and turned around to see not the young man from catering, but rather the familiar face of Dr. Raymond Welle. He was bowing lightly at the waist, a tray balanced perfectly on his right hand, a linen napkin folded expertly over his wrist. From my vantage, I could see that the crown of his head was becoming mostly bald.

  I said, "Dr. Welle, Representative Welle, hello."

  "Don't bother with all that rigmarole. Ray will do just fine. May I call you Alan? Or is it Al?"

  "Alan." I reached the bottom of the ladder and took the glass from his tray wi
th my left hand and shook his hand with my right.

  "Thank you very much. I'm pretty sure that this is the first drink I've ever had delivered to me by a member of the United States Congress."

  "I like to think we're good for something other than raising money, spending money, and arguing about everything and nothing. I think that if I could deliver a cold drink to every one of my constituents we might all be better off. We'd certainly trust each other more."

  Over Welle's shoulder I saw Phil Barrett entering the room. He had donned a dirt brown suit jacket over his shirt and tie. I thought of a breaded pork chop. A stuffed breaded pork chop.

  "You two have met, right? You don't mind that Phil's going to sit in, do you?

  Didn't think so. Sit, sit, everyone, please," cajoled Welle. He guided us toward the windows, where we each took a Queen Anne chair.

  I didn't want Phil Barrett anywhere near this part of my inquiry. But I already knew what objection I was going to make about his presence and knew it would play better later on than it would at the start.

  "Trish tells me you want to take a trip down memory lane, Alan. Back to my roots, so to speak. Clinical psychology. Seems like at least two lifetimes ago that I was doing psychotherapy every day. Some old case of mine, right? That's what you want to talk about? I don't know how much I'll remember after all these years. But I promise to do my best"

  "Thank you. That's all we can hope for." I was having trouble finding comfort while addressing Welle by his first name, but I didn't have the luxury of time to figure out why I was stumbling. I assumed it had to do with his congressional status, hoped it didn't have anything to do with his celebrity. I did know I didn't want to enter into this conversation intimidated by this man. I said, "As I'm sure your office was apprised when the request was made for this appointment, it was an unfortunate case that I wish to discuss. That of Mariko Hamamoto."

  He raised one eyebrow and glanced at Phil Barrett. Something passed between them that I wasn't privy to.

  Welle said, "Although I'm not fond of starting conversations this way, I'm afraid I'll have to be disagreeable right off the bat. Case wasn't unfortunate at all. Textbook intervention. I'm proud of it. I did good work. Fine work.