Mary Sue Welcome did not come to talk, as the psychiatrists did, about borderline personality disorders, suicidal ideation or therapeutic alliances.
Instead, she spoke in personal terms of "My Jackie," the best friend whose public facade of stylish self-assurance obscured a private life marked by loneliness and fear of failure.
As comptroller of Baltimore, Jacqueline F. McLean could be so impatient and sharp-tongued that many gave her wide berth. But Ms. Welcome's Jackie was a social misfit who pined for a better marriage and kept a bottle of vodka in her refrigerator to numb her despair.
"I realized the public Jackie was not the real Jackie," said Ms. Welcome, a lawyer who is the daughter of the late Verda Welcome, Maryland's first black woman state senator. McLean was working as a secretary for Senator Welcome in the 1960s when the two became close.
"Jackie and I became friends because she was one of the warmest, sweetest people you ever met," she told the judge who later decided that Mrs. McLean should not be imprisoned. "She had a laughter that was contagious. She made you feel good about being around her."
Taking the witness stand yesterday -- a day after psychiatrists described Mrs. McLean in their dry medical jargon -- Ms. Welcome offered the most emotional and intimate glimpse into the former comptroller's mental breakdown.
The courtroom fell silent and Mrs. McLean cried as Ms. Welcome talked of a financial watchdog who felt self-conscious about her lack of a college degree, of a wife who despaired as her marriage crumbled and of how the bottle became her one "comfort zone."
Ms. Welcome saw the vodka in the refrigerator on a rare visit to the McLean home. She'd always assumed Mrs. McLean was too busy with other friends. But later, she discovered that Mrs. McLean had no real social life, and no real friends.
"I was her best friend, but I had no idea I was her only friend," she said.
It also became clear to Ms. Welcome that her friend couldn't cope with the pressures as comptroller, a job that put her in charge of all city audits and the board responsible for all major city expenditures.
"In order to bolster herself, she was tearing down anybody who came in her path," she said. "She wanted out, and she didn't know how to break out."
Finally, Ms. Welcome cried when she recalled the suicidal Jackie, lying in a hospital with a stomach full of prescription pills.
In court yesterday, she said, "I look at her and she looks absolutely awful. She has lost so much weight. She's aged."
Pointing to Mrs. McLean's stays at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Towson, Ms. Welcome said her friend has in some ways already done time.
"She has had people telling her what time to get up. For the longest time, she couldn't leave the grounds. She could go to the door but couldn't go past it," Ms. Welcome said. "They told her when to eat. They ring bells and people line up and take their medicine. It was prison."