“I’m cleansing,” he’d say.
On another visit he pointed to a room of an elderly fellow patient and said:
“My dad, Jan. My dad’s in there.”
“I guess Al’s a lot sicker than I thought,” Jan later admitted to Celia.
University psychiatrists told Jan Canty her husband needed an extensive evaluation. They suspected mind-altering drugs, because of the acute onset of his strange behavior.
That makes sense, Jan thought. It was a typical clinical course for someone his age with no prior history of hospitalization. The psychiatrists had questioned her repeatedly about that.
“Are you sure he’s never had another episode like this?” one kept asking. “It’s highly unusual for this to be the first at his age.”
Yes, I know that, she thought, but she was sure he hadn’t. Al certainly would have told her if something like this had happened before. She’d even called Gladys Canty about it. His mother was adamant. No, nothing like this had ever happened to her Buster before.
But Jan wasn’t surprised when Al’s drug screen came up negative. More than ever, she was convinced exhaustion was the culprit. And she could see why.
Back at the Fisher Building she was swamped. She was discovering how much she really didn’t know about his practice and what it took to maintain their lifestyle. Both needed immediate attention. Al could lose everything in a couple of weeks. Contacting his patients took days. His appointment book was difficult to read. Finding patient phone numbers was complicated by a file system that should have been cleaned out and updated years ago. If his patients asked, she told them he was in the hospital for exhaustion.
The paper chase got worse. Al’s idea of clinic organization was a cluttered conference table in one of the suite’s rooms. The table was stacked with professional publications, unopened mail, grocery lists, and just plain junk. She wondered, how can anyone make any sense of this?
At first she was reluctant to open mail. She respected Al’s privacy. He had always respected hers. But then when she found he’d be hospitalized longer than a week, she had to act. Someone has to pay the bills, she thought.
There was a pile of them. As she arranged the envelopes, one in particular jumped out at her. It was for their health insurance policy. She tore it open. It was $576—and overdue. My God, she thought, Al’s in the hospital and they’re going to cancel his policy.
She ripped through several more envelopes: office rent, an electric bill, the answering service—all overdue. These must be paid now, she thought. But how? There was a zero balance in Al’s checking account. There were only a few dollars in hers. She couldn’t find a savings account. She wasn’t even sure if he had one.
Jan knew of only one place to go, though the proposition of approaching Al’s mother struck her as humiliating. As it turned out, she’d have to make three such trips in April. For all practical purposes, Jan realized, Al was broke without his caseload.
Gladys Canty wrote more than $6,000 in checks to get them through the month. Even then, Jan wasn’t sure the office and household budgets were sound. Many of the bills had past-due amounts. She wasn’t sure which ones might have been brought up to date by Al after the billing date.
This all has to change, she told herself. She didn’t know whom to be more angry at—Al for failing to take her into his confidence, or herself for being so trusting. Nothing in her life, she thought, could top the embarrassment of asking for that money from Gladys Canty.
“As soon as Al gets better, all this is going to have to change,” she told her mother-in-law. “This marriage can’t last on those kind of terms.”
Gladys Canty agreed.
“That’s no way to live,” Mrs. Canty said. “Alan Sr. and I had everything jointly owned and shared the knowledge of everything else.”
But Jan Canty would have to wait. By the end of April, the University of Michigan psychiatrists had made their diagnosis: a major depressive reaction. True, Al had worked too hard for too long, they said. Stress was a factor. But also Al appeared to be holding in too many feelings.
She wondered what they were. But none of the hospital therapists had been able to penetrate his shell. The diagnosis made sense. What she’d seen as preoccupation had probably been withdrawal, a major symptom of depression.
The hospital staff suggested outpatient therapy once he was released. Al had already made his wishes known in that department. The day Jan found him incoherent in the office, Al had scribbled a name on his notepad: “Dr. Awes”—Dr. Lorraine Awes.
Jan had heard Al use the name, pronouncing it as in the Wizard of. She knew he’d gone to Dr. Awes for therapy as a young man. He had spoken highly of her. He told Jan she’d helped him deal with the pressures of becoming a psychologist.
Jan also had found something else scrawled on the notepad next to his desk that day: “Mother is the ultimate passive-aggressor.” She knew the psychological term described someone who vents anger with nonassertive but annoying behavior, like someone habitually late for appointments.
Something was amiss between mother and son, Jan thought. She’d sensed conflict in recent years but had never been able to discern it because both of them were so guarded about one another. Whatever it was, whoever treats my husband should know about that and a few other things as well, she decided.
Jan was thinking like his psychologist again. She decided the only way to shut it off was to type out everything she’d observed about Al before and during the breakdown:
Preoccupation. It had escalated. She’d found him alone in the den on several nights, looking as though he was outlining a new thesis without the benefit of paper and pen. It was difficult to get and keep his attention.
Insomnia. Psychomotor retardation. Apathy. Loss of appetite. Loss of interest in cars.
She let her mind drift further back. Al has never gotten over his father’s death, she thought. He’s never really let out his feelings. He’s never really grieved over his loss.
The next day she delivered the list to Dr. Awes at her office in West Bloomfield. The psychiatrist was soft-spoken and, she guessed, was in her late sixties.
“I thought this might help you,” Jan told her.
Dr. Awes accepted the paper politely. Jan wasn’t expecting much more than that. She knew all about confidentiality. When Al got out, he would be in the psychiatrist’s hands. Jan reasoned she had done everything she could. Maybe she could just be his wife now.
Gladys Canty did not speak with Dr. Awes, but with one of the psychiatrists treating her son at University Hospital. She wanted information on Buster but found herself answering questions rather than asking them.
The psychiatrist wanted to know how long Alan had been depressed, how often he had such spells. It was a routine she’d heard before. She hated the way psychiatrists were so evasive. No, she said, he’d never had anything like this happen before.
Gladys Canty didn’t consider it important enough to reveal what she wrote off long ago as “a bad case of the nerves.” But, in fact, her son had been hospitalized before for emotional troubles. The first episode was when her Bus was starting college. He got a notice from the draft board to appear for a physical. He completely fell apart.
“I can’t go in the Army,” he sobbed. “I just can’t …”
She couldn’t understand. He wasn’t upset about military service when he was at ROTC camp just after high school. He was just a little homesick. She still had the letter he wrote to her. He was eighteen years old, and it began:
Dear Mommy,
Before I went to bed, I thought I better get a letter off to my best girl … I don’t mind this Army life too much, but it’s not like being home …
But the draft-board letter made Bus so anxious he could hardly function. Al Sr. called his good friend, psychologist James Clark Maloney. Dr. Maloney recommended Al Sr. take his son to the Haven, a private sanitarium in Oakland County. Meanwhile, Dr. Maloney would find a top psychiatrist.
Al S
r., however, couldn’t drive him to the Haven. He had an out-of-town speaking engagement. So on a Sunday afternoon, Mrs. Canty drove him out there herself. On Monday, she also appeared at the draft board and explained her son had been hospitalized. He was classified 4-F.
A week later Dr. Maloney had him released under the care of a Dr. Awes. He went for sessions several times a week.
Back then, she thought Bus’s therapy would never end. She recalled it as lasting several years. The drain on Al Sr.’s salary was substantial. Dr. Awes’s office was located nearly an hour away in rural Clarkston. Sometimes she drove him herself and waited in the car.
One particular trip always stood in her memory. Bus came skipping from the office, grinning widely.
“Why, Buster, what are you grinning for?” she said.
“Well, Ma, I had a good session,” he said.
“What was so good about it?”
“Oh, I told her what a witch you were.”
“Alan, you did?” She hoped he wasn’t serious.
“No, Ma, you know I wouldn’t say that.”
“Well, you’re feeling awful good about something. Did you really talk about me?”
“Oh, sure. I talked about both you and Pa.”
Gladys Canty disliked all the mystery.
Later, Alan met Maggie. After they were married, Gladys Canty assumed the sessions had stopped. He didn’t come to them anymore for the money, at least.
She thought her son’s emotional troubles were behind him. Bus and Maggie began their marriage in a townhouse downtown. His first wife, then a teacher at Wayne State, apparently covered most of the bills. Bus was engrossed in his internship at Merrill-Palmer Institute. Later they bought the house on Fisher Road in Grosse Pointe. For years everything seemed fine.
Then one day he came over terribly upset. Maggie was leaving him, he said. She wasn’t happy with their financial arrangements, he said. Gladys Canty knew her son’s first wife as an independent woman not afraid to speak her mind.
The day she left, Buster again went into a real tailspin. He sobbed and blamed himself. Then over a period of days he became listless and morose. He couldn’t work. Al Sr. took over his practice for several weeks. Bus said he was seeing Dr. Awes.
But the divorce continued to generate trauma, for Gladys Canty’s husband as well as her son. Bus and Maggie had been married nine years, and her son had to have a witness testify that the marriage was not salvageable. She’d assumed Al Sr. would take that role. In fact, she sensed her husband was excited at the prospect of returning to a Detroit court where he was so well known.
A few days before the hearing, however, Bus came to her with a request: Could she tell Pa that she was going to be his witness?
“Ma, I just know if Pa goes down there he’s going to see Maggie and say something—work her over and do something embarrassing,” he said. “Ma, we don’t want anything like that.”
That, she insisted, would be a request he would have to make for himself. And her son did, very reluctantly.
Al Sr. never let his son know it, but Mrs. Canty could tell her husband was upset. The day she and Bus went to court, Al Sr. stayed in bed well into the afternoon. He brooded about it for days.
After the divorce in 1972, Bus seemed to find new purpose, especially after he met Jan. She remembered her son bringing Jan over the first time.
“Ma, isn’t she beautiful?” he kept saying. “Isn’t she just beautiful?”
Now, Gladys Canty couldn’t imagine what might prompt a breakdown. She couldn’t help but think of Dr. Awes as the University Hospital psychiatrist skirted her inquiries with expressions she knew all too well.
“We’re doing a complete evaluation,” the psychiatrist said.
Why, she thought, do they always have to be so secretive?
40
By May 9, the dogwood blossoms in Ann Arbor were so thick they would fall any day. Jan Canty noticed them through the window as she waited for final paperwork on her husband’s discharge.
Only then did it occur to her. It was spring. She wondered to herself, how long have the trees been in bloom? How could I not have noticed? That’s right, she thought, I haven’t needed an overcoat in quite a while.
What a four weeks it had been, the last few spent trying to convince Al to remain in the hospital. By late April, he not only was on the rebound, he was anxious to get back to work. But he needed rest, she told him. After all, work put him under in the first place, a notion Al himself readily agreed was true.
But Jan also could tell her husband wasn’t comfortable discussing his breakdown. He seemed embarrassed by it. If she brought it up, he began to get that little-boy look she knew so well. He couldn’t look her in the eye when he got that way. She suspected that Al felt as though he had let her down by falling apart.
She wished he wasn’t so concerned about her. He needs to look after himself, she thought. He works too hard at trying to please me.
Well, she thought, that’s got to change, along with a few other things. She had questions that needed answers. She was worried about their finances and her ignorance of their budget.
But she also decided now was not the time to confront her husband. He seemed so fragile. He was compliant and hesitant. As they waited for the discharge, she noticed his back was slightly slumped. Even his posture looked submissive.
Jan was anxious about the discharge. The psychiatrist emphasized that Al not return to work immediately. He should avoid stress. She heartily agreed. But she knew her husband. On several visits Al had brought up money.
“I’m sure I’ve run up a lot of bills, and I’ve got to get them paid,” he’d said. “We need the money.”
“Al, I don’t think you’re ready,” she’d said.
Jan held his arm as they walked out the hospital’s door. Al took a deep breath of the spring air. Then they noticed some sort of celebration under way on the hospital grounds.
“Let’s go see what they’re doing over there,” he said.
A big tent had been set up. Dozens of people were milling about. Hospital staffers were pouring coffee and dishing out ice cream and cake. Jan and Al looked at a big banner strung across the front of the tent. It said “Patient Appreciation Week.”
The atmosphere was festive, but Jan Canty felt awkward as she and Al made small talk. The world seemed superficial. They seemed superficial. There Al was, trying to minimize what had happened to him. Here she was, watching her every word, worried that she might upset him. How everything had changed in just one winter!
On the way back to Detroit Al insisted they stop at the Fisher Building before going home to the big Tudor. She hoped he would be pleased by what he found. She’d organized the big, cluttered conference table. She’d thrown out the notices of conferences he’d never go to or books he’d never buy. That way there would be less of a backlog for him to plow through.
“What happened to all my stuff?” he asked.
She smiled, explaining the new order.
“This pile is for this, that pile is for that …”
But he became unsettled by the arrangement. A few minutes later she found him sitting in the big leather chair in his counseling room. He was thumbing through his appointment book.
“Don’t think you’re going back to work right away, Al Canty,” she said. “It’s not a good idea.”
They had a discussion about it right then and there. They agreed he would wait several weeks before seeing patients, and then it would only be a few at home. There would be fewer hours and more vacations. Saturdays would be half days, instead of eight to eight. And the coffee. He was going to have to switch to decaffeinated coffee.
“OK, Jan,” Al said. “I won’t go right back to work.”
He was saying exactly what she wanted to hear. For some reason, she had the nagging suspicion he really didn’t mean it.
41
Downtown attorney Ted White had mixed feelings when Al Canty called him to say he should come in for his r
egular 3:30 P.M. appointment at the Fisher Building. He hadn’t seen his therapist in nearly five weeks.
Now he wasn’t sure he really wanted to make the May 15 appointment. Not that he didn’t need the help. He just couldn’t decide whether therapy was doing him any good.
White wanted a cure to his mental turmoil—and he wanted it quick. That’s why he had gone to W. Alan Canty in the first place, following a thirty-two-day stay in a psychiatric ward of a private hospital in Grosse Pointe for severe depression.
White saw his indecision about resuming therapy with Canty as typical of his own neurotic personality. At forty-five, Ted White was a vice-president in one of the largest banks in the state. But the title was more impressive on his business card than on his tax return. By white-collar standards, his income was as modest as his Harper Woods address.
Financial insecurity had lured him into trouble in the first place. The previous summer, following an internal Armageddon, he made The Big Decision. He took a second mortgage and sank twenty-five thousand dollars into a speedy film development franchise. He bought the seventy-seventh store in the national chain and planned to buy two or three more.
But the seventy-seventh store was the franchise’s last. The parent company folded. In less than five months Ted White was broke. When he couldn’t shave in the morning without sobbing, he checked himself into the psychiatric unit. There he also found out he was an alcoholic, and he began attending AA meetings.
One day after his release, a friend handed White an excerpt from a book by psychiatrist David D. Burns. It was called Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. Dr. Burns wrote about a new “cognitive therapy” that was effective, practical, and, most importantly, short-term.
White wrote Dr. Burns at the University of Pennsylvania, asking for a list of cognitive therapy specialists in Detroit. He received the name of W. Alan Canty.
“They say this kind of therapy is fast,” he told Canty on his first visit in early January.
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