Never Enough (18 page)

In Nancy’s absence, Ryan and Connie acted as surrogate parents. Connie, of course, had served in that role for several years, especially with Ethan. It was new to Ryan, but he took to it instinctively. He didn’t think it was yet time for long, searching talks with the children about their feelings. His goal was to get them out of Hong Kong without subjecting them to further trauma. He was one future physician who’d managed not to leave his compassion behind in medical school.

When they were not in school, he kept them as physically active as possible and let them watch television with their meals. Television had been used to numb them all their lives. Ryan didn’t approve of that, but he found himself grateful for the effects of it now. For the moment, the less time they spent thinking and wondering, the better.

The police changed visitation procedures at Queen Elizabeth Hospital. No longer could visitors sit in Nancy’s cell, or just outside it, and talk to her. All visits—supervised by the matron—were to take place in a conference room.

Ryan went to see Nancy almost every day, but he often found Parkview neighbors with her when he arrived. A small clique of expat wives, drawn by her sudden notoriety, had suddenly become Nancy’s best friends. During his first few visits, Nancy asked about the children. She said how much she missed them. Any reference to them made her cry. But after a few days, she stopped asking. Ryan didn’t know why. It almost seemed to him that she’d decided she had more important things—such as her own fate—to worry about.

Ira and Bill were still squabbling about custody, but they were running out of time. The children would have to be out of Hong Kong by November 21 because that was the day Connie’s work visa expired. Domestic helpers were not permitted to remain in the territory for more than two weeks after their employment had been terminated. The clock had started ticking for both Connie and Min at the moment of Nancy’s arrest. Min would no longer be needed, but neither Ira nor Andrew and Hayley could contemplate raising the children without Connie.

On the afternoon of Thursday, November 13, as part of the packing process, Min was cleaning out Ethan’s bedroom closet. Suddenly, she screamed. Ryan ran in from the living room. Min was frantically pointing at the closet. Min’s English was imperfect even when she hadn’t had a shock, but Ryan soon understood that she’d found a black plastic garbage bag in the back of Ethan’s closet that didn’t belong there.

Ryan called Simon Clarke. The solicitor called the police. They came to collect yet another bag of potential evidence that they had overlooked. When the bag was opened at Western Division headquarters it was found to contain wads of bloodstained tissues and a bloody glove, as well as the blood-soaked bottom piece that had been sheared from the bedspread before the police had first arrived at the scene.

The implication was clear: whatever detritus Nancy had not disposed of in the packing cartons, she’d tried to hide inside her children’s closets.

On Friday, November 14, Alexander King appeared again in Eastern Magistrates’ Court to say that Nancy remained “medically unfit” and could not be present. The magistrate continued the case until the following Friday, November 21.

Nancy’s level of fitness, both physical and psychological, seemed remarkably dependent on circumstance. In the first days following November 2, she’d not only been able to buy a carpet and tote it home from the store, but to roll up a 165-pound body inside it and then drag it from one room of her apartment to another. Yet since her arrest she’d seemed scarcely able to walk. Doctors found no physical reason for this disability.

She had seemed unable to speak one moment, yet had been able to scream an hour later, such as when she’d seen the ward she was being taken to at Ruttonjee Hospital. She had to blink to communicate with her solicitor, yet she could tell her half-brother that someone in Vermont must be worried about her. She could converse freely with Parkview friends, and with her lawyer, but she couldn’t appear in court to offer a plea.

There was no indication that she’d ever read up on the psychological condition that Freud termed “secondary gain”—an advantage derived from an illness or injury, such as release from responsibility or avoidance of a difficult situation—but she seemed to know instinctively how to achieve it. Secondary gain was often associated with hysteria. From the moment the police found the key to the storeroom, Nancy had seemed hysterical, perhaps gripped by conversion hysteria.

Conversion hysteria, is described by the U.S. National Institutes of Health as “a psychiatric condition in which emotional distress or unconscious conflict are expressed through physical symptoms.” For example: the sudden onset of an inability to walk or talk, or violent, uncontrollable shaking.

The secondary gain associated with Nancy’s symptoms was to postpone the moment when she would have to confront the consequences of her actions in a court of law. The custodial ward of Queen Elizabeth Hospital must have seemed far less threatening to her than a public appearance in Eastern District Magistrates’ Court, or anything else that was waiting down the line.

The question of where the children would go was not resolved until November 15, the day before Ira flew out of Hong Kong. Bill continued to insist—to demand—that the children go to Greenwich to live with Andrew and Hayley. But he’d never sought Hayley’s opinion.

Eventually, she gave it anyway. She said she thought the children would be better off with Ira. “I like him. The kids obviously love him and he loves them. They have a great relationship. I like his wife. They have a lot of extended family in Chicago. Ira’s got the energy to handle this. They’ve got a big house in Winnetka where the schools are great.” Besides, Hayley had two children of her own to occupy her time and energy, and her relationship with Andrew was—to put it mildly—strained. In Greenwich, there would be no guarantee of either tranquillity or stability.

For the moment, Bill was too grief-stricken to fight. He met Ira in the lobby of the Marriott on the evening of November 15 and signed a document that granted Ira temporary custody. Ira flew out of Hong Kong the next day. The children flew to Chicago with Ryan and Connie on November 19. Their father’s body had already been shipped to New York for burial in the Kissel family plot in New Jersey.

Only Nancy stayed behind.

AS FOR THE CHILDREN: HAVING HAD THE ONLY LIFE THEY’D
ever known yanked violently out from under them, in late November they were tossed head over heels halfway around the world to land on Grandpa Ira’s doorstep in Winnetka, Illinois. Two weeks later, they were shuffled off to a Holiday Inn in Cincinnati.

From the day they arrived in Winnetka, Ira knew he and his wife wouldn’t be able to raise them, not even with Connie’s help. His love for the children was abundant, but he was sixty-one years old and traumatized. He’d been under such stress in Hong Kong that he simply hadn’t thought the matter through. He’d also failed to anticipate his wife’s reaction. Sickened by what Nancy had done, Ira’s wife wanted no part of her children, and she’d made that emphatically clear to Ira while he was still in Hong Kong. He’d hoped her reaction would prove temporary. It did not.

Even so, Ira was not about to hand the children over to the Kissels. He knew the Kissels would poison the children’s minds against their mother. Ryan, who was now twenty-four, volunteered to raise them in Cincinnati. He said he’d take a leave of absence from medical school. With the help of both Connie and his mother—Ira’s second wife, Joyce—he was confident that he could provide them with a safe and stable environment.

Fearing that Bill Kissel would seek a court order to keep the children in Illinois until a full-scale custody battle could be launched, Ira took them to Cincinnati, where, as he made arrangements for their future, he stayed with them and Connie in the Holiday Inn. On the spot, he also bought a house that he felt would make a suitable home. It was a middle-class house in a middle-class neighborhood. While it was being refurbished—a matter of weeks—the children and Connie moved into the basement of Ryan’s apartment. On December 7, Ira wrote the Kissels a letter:

Bill Kissel didn’t see any evidence of “the works of the angels” in Ira’s plan.

He rallied Andrew and Hayley and led a Christmas assault on Cincinnati. Bill didn’t like having to rely on Andrew, but he recognized that Andrew and Hayley and their wealth and opulent Greenwich lifestyle represented the alternative most likely to be persuasive to a court should the dispute reach the point of litigation. He was also determined that the children should suffer no drop in their standard of living. In that respect, Greenwich trumped Cincinnati.

Andrew’s agenda was different, but his goal was the same. Hayley had stopped working at Merrill Lynch when they’d hightailed it out of 200 East Seventy-fourth Street in the spring. She and Connie should be able to raise five children in Greenwich effortlessly. And Andrew hankered after the $20 million trust fund.

Greenwich was a dangerous place for a man like Andrew to live. Essentially, it was only Parkview with more acreage and a waterfront. The general principles were the same: having tens of millions meant nothing if you didn’t flaunt them shamelessly, and there was no such thing as enough. Just as Nancy had with Parkview, Andrew wore Greenwich like a glove. He also shared Nancy’s defining characteristic: the compulsion to acquire and display.

Andrew had started collecting luxury cars. Even as a child, his favorite toys had been cars. It was no different now, except the toys were bigger and more expensive. He was especially fond of Ferraris. But different models appealed in different ways. Andrew couldn’t decide. So he bought four. Then he learned that in Greenwich luxury cars meant nothing. In Greenwich, a man was measured by the size of his yacht. For $2.85 million, Andrew bought a seventy-five-foot Hatteras. He considered it his starter yacht.

Bill, Andrew and Hayley, and Jane and Richard installed themselves in a Marriott near the airport and summoned Ira and Ryan to a meeting on the afternoon of Christmas Day. Before the meeting, Bill and Andrew visited Ryan’s apartment. Bill termed it “nothing but a basement firetrap.” Andrew brought a legal pad and walked around looking at plumbing and wiring, shaking his head and muttering, as if making note of code violations. Ryan thought he was heavily under the influence of cocaine.

The meeting took place in the living room of Bill’s suite at the Marriott, as the children, under Connie’s supervision, played with their many new presents next door. Bill began by announcing that Andrew and Hayley would be bringing the children and Connie to Connecticut with them when they left. “Don’t fight me on this,” he warned Ira. “You can’t out-money me. I’ll bankrupt you. I’ll never, ever,
ever
let this go.”

“I don’t think it’s right,” Ira said, “but if—”

Ryan interrupted. “No, we’re not giving in.” He pointed at Andrew, who was sniffling and rubbing his nose. “Do you really think
he
can raise these children?”

“You’d better watch yourself,” Andrew said, suddenly attentive. “I’ve got plenty of money to hire lawyers of my own.”

“Look, Andrew, we all know your family has the most money. But it’s not like the kids are for sale. This shouldn’t be an auction, where the high bid wins. Sure, you can sue us and eventually win because we won’t have enough money to keep fighting. But can’t you see that this isn’t about winning? This is about what’s best for the kids.”

“Stop being such a Boy Scout,” Bill said. “The grown-ups are having a meeting.”

Ryan turned toward him. “I’m going to say something here that I know you won’t want to hear. Even my dad is afraid to bring this up. But I think it’s important. The children should stay in an environment where their mother is spoken about fondly, so that in the event of…of…
reunification,
they’ll want to be with her again.”

Bill’s face turned Christmas-ribbon red.

“I know that’s an awkward subject,” Ryan said, “but the presumption of innocence is still part of the law, even if it doesn’t exist in this room. We can’t know yet what’s going to happen in the Hong Kong courts. As long as there’s any chance that my sister will have her children back someday, I don’t think they should be taught to hate her.”

“Let’s go for a walk, sonny boy,” Bill said. “You and I need to have a little talk in private.”

Bill and Ryan took the elevator down to the lobby. Except for a massive, brightly lit tree, the lobby was empty on Christmas afternoon. Even so, Bill walked to the farthest corner before finding a spot he deemed suitable. He sat on a couch and gestured for Ryan to sit next to him.

He leaned in so close that Ryan could smell his breath. “The children will not be staying here,” he said. “Your father knows that. You can see he’s going to cave in. And you’re a son. You’ve got to listen to your father.” He leaned even closer. “That’s what sons do.”

“No. Even if you bully him, you’re not going to bully me.”

“Why, aren’t you the brave little idealist. I’ve already told you I’ll bankrupt your father. I’ll ruin your mother, too. And—now listen carefully—I will make sure that you never practice medicine in this country.”

“What kind of threat is that supposed to be?”

Bill began to shake his finger at Ryan. “And if you think your girlfriend is going to stick around after I destroy you, you’re wrong.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Kissel.”

Bill smiled. “Look at it this way,” he said. “Why would a twenty-year-old kid—”

“I’m twenty-four.”

“Don’t interrupt me. Why would a twenty-year-old kid—twenty-four, I don’t care—want to raise three young children by himself, the girls ten and seven, the boy four? And then the next year the oldest girl eleven? And the year after that, the oldest girl twelve?”

Again, he leaned in so close that Ryan could both smell and feel his breath.

“I can think of only one reason: to molest them.”

Ryan was too stunned to reply.

“And I’ll make sure people know what you’re doing. Your medical school first. Then your girlfriend. Then the newspapers. I’ll put it all over the country. There won’t be anywhere you can go. Think about it:
child molester
. There won’t be anything you can do.”

Bill pointed his finger directly at Ryan’s face. His voice was barely a whisper. “Don’t think for a minute I don’t mean it.” Then he stood and walked back to the elevator, leaving Ryan alone with the Christmas tree in the lobby.

Even Andrew apologized that night. “My father,” he said to Ira and Ryan, “I can’t explain—he’s been like this his whole life.”