They were from Chicago. They attended Northwestern University. The sheriff arrested them all. This was in March. We were… devastated. My wife, she…" Hamamoto bowed his head.
The hair on his crown was thinning.
"There was much shame. It was my fault. Mariko should not have been granted the. the… oh, oh…" He snapped his fingers twice. "… the license… the the… freedom. That was my fault. Mariko should not have been free to be there then with those… men who we did not know. That was my doing. My responsibility. My error in judgment. As her father, I failed."
He looked up and examined my face, wary. I assumed he was trying to assess whether my infelicitous frankness was likely to continue.
"But my daughter was smoking the marijuana. She admitted that to me honestly.
And that was Mariko's responsibility. That was her error." He closed his right hand into a fist and struck his chest lightly with the side where his index finger and thumb united.
I was wondering what was so grave about what I had heard. A sixteen-year-old girl experimenting with dope, hanging out with college boys? Not exactly earth-shattering behavior.
"They were at one of the hot springs. You know about the hot springs in Steamboat? At Strawberry Park?"
"Yes. It's where Tami told her parents that she and Mariko were going the night they disappeared. It's become overrun by tourists. They charge admission now."
"Really? I suppose that I am not surprised that the tourists have discovered it.
Your other statement is true as well. Mariko did not tell her mother that she and Tamara were going to the hot springs. Mariko knew she was prohibited from returning there."
"You are concerned that Mariko lied to her mother?"
Taro Hamamoto's face flushed.
"When the sheriff" arrested my daughter, she was. " He averted his eyes.
"She was… naked." He corrected his posture and touched his collar with the fingers of both hands.
"Mariko was in the hot springs without clothing. She was with two young men she had just met that afternoon on the gondola. She was smoking marijuana. And you think that she would not lie to her mother about a plan to return there? The shame."
I considered the facts I was hearing. When I was sixteen I hadn't done what Mariko had been caught doing. But I'd done it when I was a little older.
Different hot springs, in the Sangre de Cristo Range above Buena Vista. Older girls, graduate students at Arizona State.
The memory warmed me now as the experience had then.
But the difference was, I hadn't been caught.
"I was at a meeting that night at the resort. I came right home. My wife, Eri, she was in shock, and was not sure how to proceed. I went to the police station and retrieved Mariko. She was released to me without…" He snapped his long fingers.
"Bond? Is that the right word?"
"Yes."
"Good. At the police station I saw Mrs. Franklin, Cathy Franklin. Tami's mother.
I was upset, more upset than she. I told her I was afraid that Mariko would now need to go home to Japan. The influences, I explained. We, her parents, were failing. We couldn't control her.
"Cathy tried to calm me down. She explained that the kids were just being kids.
Experimenting, she said. Spreading their wings, she said.
We argued a little about that. We discussed grounding. She said maybe we should keep the girls apart for a while but she thought sending Mariko to Japan was… rash? Is that the right word? She gave me a name of someone who could help settle Mariko down." I said, "Dr. Raymond Welle."
"Yes. That is when I heard for the first time of Dr. Welle."
I remembered Lauren telling me that Cathy Franklin wasn't fond of Mariko.
Tami's mother thought the friendship wouldn't last. That she referred to Mariko as one of Tami's projects.
Taro Hamamoto stood and excused himself to the rest room.
The pieces didn't fit together with any grace.
Our time together was running out. I felt it burning away like the wax in a candle. I decided I needed to be more assertive with the remaining minutes available to me. I doubted that I would ever be face-to-face with Taro Hamamoto again.
"You went to see Dr. Welle together? As a family?"
"Not right away, no. Eri, my wife-the shame was too much of a burden for her right after the arrest. She felt that everyone in the town was judging her because of what Mariko had done. She begged me-she wanted to take the girls and leave Colorado. Return to Japan. It was, for me, a difficult time."
Taro was silent long enough that I felt it necessary to prod him.
"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."