Masquerade

by Cauffiel, Lowell;

  Jan wanted her friends along during the intake, and John seemed to have a calming influence on Al. A psychiatrist came in and began asking Jan questions about Al’s episode. She responded like a diagnostician.

  “Dilated pupils, rapid breathing … labile emotions. Mute … Yes, it was acute onset … No, no suspicion of drugs.”

  When she saw the psychiatrist was scribbling down her answers she became tongue-tied. God, she thought, I’m acting like I’m conducting an intake interview again. This is my husband, not a patient. And her husband was crying again. Damn it, she thought, what are you, Janis Lucille Canty—his psychologist or his wife?

  She turned to Al and comforted him. The psychiatrist’s voice became distant. She found it hard to concentrate on his questions. One word kept coming to her mind.

  “Preoccupied. I’ve never seen a man so preoccupied.”

  When the intake interview was over, the four of them were left alone. By then it was well after dark and storming heavily. The wind pelted the window glass with rain so loudly she had to look to see if it was hail.

  Outside she noticed flashing lights, oscillating colors descending from the black above. One was flashing bright red, like some kind of ambulance in the sky. Then came a pulsating sound, as though massive amounts of air were being hurled against the hospital by a great bird’s wing.

  That noise. It was a helicopter, she realized. The hospital heliport was right outside the window.

  “I never knew this was here,” Jan said, turning to her friends.

  Al had been crying quietly. Now he began to weep loudly. She’d never seen Al weep like that. He took off his glasses. He began rubbing his face with his palms, as though he was trying to clean his skin of some kind of acid-laced dirt.

  He began speaking between sobs, but she could hear only a few words. Later Celia and John would report what he was saying. The choppers were getting louder.

  “They’re coming,” Al sobbed. “They’re coming to take us all. They are coming to take the wicked and the evil. But they won’t take the pure, the pure as snow.”

  He fell to his knees on the floor in front of the chair where Jan sat.

  “I could have never done this to you,” he told his wife. “You’re so pure and they’re so bad. I’ve been such a bad, bad boy. And you’re so pure.”

  What in God’s name, Jan thought, is he talking about? She looked quizzically at her friends. The choppers kept drowning Al out. There wasn’t one, but two or three. They were arriving in succession. It must be some kind of big emergency.

  “They’re coming for the wicked and the evil. They’re coming.”

  His sobs escalated with the noise. The rain was hitting the window in sheets. She moved from the chair to the examining table. She had to move. She couldn’t be still or be near him.

  Al followed her, walking on his knees. He was frantic, pleading, trying to explain to her. Trying to tell her.

  “I’ve been a bad, bad boy,” he cried. “The things I’ve done. My birthday. A fraud. You’re so pure. As pure as snow. A fraud. Everything I’ve done is a fraud. They’ll find out Indianwood is a fraud. But you’re so pure, as pure as snow.”

  He looked like a condemned man. She tried to calm him.

  “No, honey. You’re not bad. You’re confused. You know Indianwood wasn’t a fraud. I know it wasn’t a fraud. I was there. I typed it, remember?”

  Then he began stroking her body with his palms as though she was some kind of pagan idol.

  “I’ve been so very bad … And you’re so pure … As pure as snow. As pure as snow … As pure as snow …”

  It was a chant, like a call and response. His stroking began to frighten her. It was almost sexual.

  “As pure as snow … As pure as snow … As pure as snow … As pure as snow … As pure as snow.”

  Damn that noise, she cursed. She wanted to soothe him. How? She couldn’t hear herself think. The helicopters were hacking the air to pieces. The window glass shook. She could feel herself beginning to unravel. My God, she thought, what is happening to my husband? What is happening to me?

  “MOMMY,” Al shouted. “MOMMY … You will take care of me. You’ll never leave me. No matter what. Mommy. No matter what I’ve done. You’ll never leave me. Don’t leave me, Mommy. Don’t leave me, Mommy. Don’t leave me, Mommy.”

  Jan Canty felt Celia Muir’s hand on her arm. Her friend pulled her out of the interview room.

  “Let John be alone with Al,” Celia said. “Jan, let John be with Al.”

  “Ces, he’s so sick,” she began to sob. “I don’t know what he’s doing. I looked at him and I didn’t even know him.”

  Once the paperwork was processed, Jan and her friends walked Al to his room in the psychiatric unit. He lay down on his bed. He didn’t want to take off his shoes.

  “Honey, want me to take them off?”

  Al shook his head no. He didn’t want to be covered with a blanket either.

  “I don’t want to stay here,” Al said. “I just want to go home.”

  “You’ve been working way too hard,” she said. “Now you can get some rest. Everything’s going to be OK.”

  She paused to take a last look at him. He was completely spent.

  “I love you,” she said. “I’ll be close. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  “God,” Jan told Celia and John on the drive home. “Maybe I should check in and book a bed right alongside Al. I’m exhausted.”

  It was the only light moment of the night. That evening Jan planned to sleep on her friend’s couch. She didn’t have the energy to drive herself home. It was well after midnight.

  It had been some Friday the thirteenth.

  38

  Celia and John Muir lay exhausted, but awake, trying to find some order in the disorderly events of the night.

  “Do you think there’s some truth to what he was saying?” John asked his wife.

  They went over Al’s ramblings again. They suspected Jan Canty comprehended only fragments. She was so worried she couldn’t seem to connect with what he was saying. And what they’d heard was disjointed as well.

  But on the drive out to the hospital, John heard Al talk about meeting some prostitute in the Cass Corridor on his birthday. Al said he had to help her.

  “She really needs me,” he’d whispered. “But I haven’t told Jan. I haven’t told Jan. I haven’t told Jan.”

  The Muirs decided the scenario was feasible. They had heard Al Canty talk recently about Detroit’s street life during an outing to a Mexican restaurant on the south side. He pointed out a couple of prostitutes on the street as the four of them rode to the restaurant in his new Buick Regal.

  “See, that’s how they do it, pick up their johns,” he said. “Most of these girls are severely addicted to drugs.”

  But such offbeat subjects were not unexplored territory for Al. He often fascinated them with stories about patients and his father’s criminal work in the courts. He had a vivid memory for detail. It was one of his entertaining qualities.

  Celia and John felt as though they were in the classic Ann Landers dilemma. How, Celia said, do you tell your best friend that her husband may have screwed a whore on his fiftieth?

  The question was too trying to even ponder at this hour. And Jan needed stability, not mystery. John walked into the kitchen at 3 A.M. and found her wide awake, making up a list at the table. That was Jan, John later said, organized and orderly. It was her way of coping. As for the prostitute, maybe Celia could talk with Jan about it some time.

  But it would be many weeks before Celia Muir would be able to exorcise the mental picture of Al in that interview room.

  “My God, John, did you see what he looked like?” Celia asked.

  “He acted like somebody with brain-stem damage, repeating that stuff over and over,” John said. “You know, after you two left, I told him I loved him. He was obviously very desperate and frightened. I wanted to give him something to hang on to.

  “I sai
d, ‘Al, you know I really love you.’ It seemed to soothe him.”

  Several days later Celia Muir picked up her ringing telephone and lost her breath.

  “I’m looking for Jan,” Al said. “I’m coming home. They’re letting me out of here tomorrow. I’m looking for Jan.”

  She told Al that Jan had already left, then ended the call gracefully. She thought, what if he comes here looking for her? What am I going to do? I can’t handle seeing him that way again.

  Celia Muir was scared. She saw Al as unpredictable. That was it. That was what was so disturbing about the waiting room, the phone call. Al Canty, out of control. It was so foreign to his nature.

  Celia and John talked about that point quite a bit one night. They decided they had come to know him pretty well over the years, as well as anyone could know Al Canty. Al had always been so analytical about everything, so aloof. John remarked that he talked with Al many times at length but never really knew how he felt.

  “Everything he said was so censored, guarded. I’ve never actually felt like I knew him to the core.”

  Al always seemed uncomfortable when he and Jan dropped by their house. He couldn’t sit in the living room more than a few minutes before saying, “Well, where are we going?”

  Sometimes Celia and John thought that was because their lifestyles were so different. Celia and Jan were steadfast friends but had pursued entirely separate life paths. Jan had chosen a career, while Celia embraced the work of homemaking. She and John had a modest colonial, two daughters, and plans to adopt a third. Celia and Jan had a standing line about their differences.

  “I come to your house for the noise,” Jan would say. “I love it. You come to mine for the quiet. We ought to switch for a while.”

  But not for more than a couple of hours, Celia thought. She’d stick with the cookie batter and the paw marks of children. Celia and John saw themselves as independent, but at the same time dependent on each other. “When one of us is down, the other pulls up,” Celia said. Sometimes they found serenity; other times they clashed. But their failings always balanced out.

  Jan and Al never showed that kind of blood-and-guts unity, John and Celia agreed. They never had arguments. They had disagreements on issues. Their lives seemed so clearly split. She had her car. He had his. She had her schedule. He had his. She planned to have her practice. He had his. Time wasn’t shared—it was delegated.

  “How do you make it with these kids?” Jan said once. “With our lifestyle, we just couldn’t fit it in.”

  Al acted as though he liked kids. Actually, he only tolerated them. Al Canty always wanted to be the center of attention. Celia thought that made him incompatible with children. Little ones have a way of upstaging most adults. She thought they’d made a wise decision to remain childless.

  John Muir, however, wondered if the decision was really Jan’s to make. He saw her metamorphosis on the subject as a classic example of the way Al Canty delicately shaped his wife. When they first married, Jan was excited about one day being a mother. Al said he was all for fatherhood, but John suspected his heart was elsewhere.

  Then Jan began questioning having children. John was convinced Al was cleverly spoon-feeding her: Her career was more important. Children didn’t fit their lifestyle. She would have to make sacrifices.

  Al never had to say he didn’t want children. Finally, it was Jan that didn’t want them. It was Jan that made Al get a vasectomy.

  “Gee, you really changed your feelings about that, Jan,” John commented one night.

  “No,” Jan said. “I never really did want children.”

  Al Canty, Celia and John agreed, liked control. They’d seen a prime example of that over the winter, when Jan and Al had a disagreement over where to park her new car. Al had that five-car garage, but she was forced to park her new Thunderbird in the driveway. Al said he needed the space. Al told her, “Well, if you really need a garage, you could keep your car over at my mother’s.”

  That was four miles away.

  “Ces, I told him, ‘What am I supposed to do, Al? Walk over there in the snow?’ ”

  John was flabbergasted she had to fight for a stall. But he knew Al catered to himself and was thrilled when others catered to him. Al talked of the best house, the best car, the best coffee, the best office address—the best. Not that he was materialistic. For Al, saying he had the best seemed more important than possessing it.

  “Choice,” another of his favorite words. “That dinner was very choice.”

  Al manipulated all of them when they went out as couples. They ended up at his choice of films. They dined at the restaurant of his choice. But rather than go through the hassle of outwitting him, everyone went along with the program. Al liked eateries where they knew him, where he got special attention. When they dined at a new place, he always made a rather evident effort to charm the waitress.

  “Now what is your name?” he would say. “My, now that is a lovely uniform you have. I’m sure you’re a very fine waitress.”

  If she bought the bullshit, Al was quite delighted with the restaurant. If she didn’t, which often was the case, Al complained all night how the place fell below his standards.

  Al, in fact, expected to be served most everywhere. He’d been coming to the Muir household for years, but he still insisted his coffee be brought to him as he sat in the chair.

  “Oh, Celia, more coffee please, would you?”

  Then he showered Celia with compliments.

  “Celia, you’re such a good mother,” he’d say.

  She knew he just wanted another cup of coffee.

  Al rarely did anything menial. Home maintenance was foreign to him. Better to pay somebody else to do it, he’d say. He never labored over his cars. Better to hire somebody to do it.

  Yet Al was always buying things for his garage.

  “John, I better get a set of tools,” he’d say.

  Al and John then rushed to Sears for tools, but Al never opened the box when they returned. Al had three boxes of the same set sitting in the garage. And he never finished his cars. Just as one automobile was a small job away from full restoration, he abandoned it and started on the next. The appearance of undertaking a project seemed more important than the project itself.

  Project Indianwood had those overtones. Jan once expressed puzzlement in their dating years that on some days Al’s Indianwood guides didn’t seem to do much. Al paid them by the hour often to just sit around in his suite all day and wait for his next move.

  One day, after Al was admitted to the hospital, Celia and Jan talked about his babbling about the Indianwood program.

  “Celia, Indianwood couldn’t be a fraud because I typed the thing,” Jan said. “He stayed awake well after midnight many times working on it.”

  “Maybe he copied it from somebody else,” Celia offered.

  “Couldn’t have. It came out of his head. His memory isn’t that good. He just must have been confused.”

  Celia knew Jan had a lot of trust in her husband. How could she not trust him? On the surface, at least, he always appeared to be putting her first. Jan had always been Al’s star pupil, Celia thought, and she suspected he wanted to keep her in that role. Celia was shocked when she found out one day that Jan still did his typing at night. It was the same job he hired her for ten years ago. Why should a Ph.D., she thought, do his secretarial work?

  But Celia knew Jan was dedicated and warmhearted. She was dedicated to Al, perhaps to a fault.

  Celia and John reasoned Jan probably saw beyond Al’s veneer. And despite Al’s self-centered ways, the Muirs too had grown fond of the eccentric psychologist. John suspected that in a lot of ways, Al just was socially inept on a personal level. He often said the same superficial things over and over.

  “How are you, Al?” John would ask, greeting him.

  “I’m doing well. Real well. How about you?”

  “Good, Al.”

  “You look like you’re doing good. You look well. You loo
k like you’re doing real well.”

  It was as though Al didn’t know what else to say, without risking an emotional revelation. But the Muirs felt there was a good man inside. He’d given John many rousing pep talks as John switched careers from car painter to stockbroker. One year he showed up at their doorstep bearing a Christmas tree.

  There was a lot of child in him, too. Al once took an entire afternoon playing tea party with the Muirs’ daughter. Halloween was more of a holiday than Christmas. He set out a half-dozen pumpkins for trick-or-treaters at his door. He delighted in telling ghost and murder stories on rainy nights and windy walks to Lake St. Clair.

  “If only he didn’t have to pump himself up so much,” Celia said. “He really isn’t fooling anybody.”

  “In fact,” John said, “it makes him easier to be had.”

  The Muirs felt concerned for him. During several visits they made to University Hospital in the following weeks, they could see he was being forced to do things he’d never done. He had to fold his laundry. He had to make his own bed. He had to take part in soccer games for recreation.

  Al appeared angry at his predicament.

  “A psychologist being treated by psychiatrists,” John said later. “And no doubt Al doesn’t think they’re anywhere near as talented as him.”

  Celia and John Muir found Al Canty’s crisis embarrassing. They felt embarrassed for Al.

  39

  Jan Canty drove directly from the Muirs’ house back to the psych ward, taking a toothbrush and some clothes of John’s that might fit Al.

  “Now these are some things from John,” Jan said.

  Al was sitting on the edge of the bed. At first she thought he looked better.

  “This is his shirt?” Al asked. “This is John’s shirt?”

  He caressed the flannel as though he’d waited a lifetime for it. Then he put it on, right over his bathrobe.

  “This is John’s shirt? This is John’s shirt?”

  He wore John’s shirt for nearly two weeks—sometimes in the shower with the rest of his clothes. Jan would visit and find him under a baptism of spray. He couldn’t get clean enough.