Masquerade

by Cauffiel, Lowell;

  “Oh, I’ve taken care of that,” he said. “It was an oversight on their part.”

  When a couple of more state envelopes arrived in the mail, Al snatched them up before she could open them. When she tried to question him about the household budget, he became embarrassed and quiet.

  Maybe his practice had suffered more than he let on during his breakdown, she thought. Damn, I wish he would quit trying to shelter me. What had been a luxury for so many years was now a source of irritation. Well, she figured, that’s his problem. I have my own career to attend to, my own office budget to worry about.

  It had taken nine months, but Jan’s steady effort to build her own practice was paying off by early March. She started with only a handful of referrals and two workdays per week. Now her practice was blossoming by word of mouth.

  When Burroughs Corporation secured the ninth floor of the Fisher Building, requiring her and Al to move, Jan looked at the change as an opportunity for a fresh start. They’d picked out a suite on the tenth floor that would be ready by early April.

  Jan reasoned that the move would be good for both of them. Al seemed to be stirring from the preoccupation that had plagued him through 1984. He was enthusiastic about his own therapy with Dr. Awes, and he even was finding time for lunch dates with Ray Danford. Al spoke so highly of him that she’d always encouraged their friendship. Now if Jan could only get him to break away from the Wayne County Jail and the prosecutor’s office, maybe they could start having lunch together again.

  “Soon, Jan-Jan,” Al said. “I’m wrapping that up.”

  But she sensed something else was brewing in her husband’s psyche. He seemed to be hurt, even resentful, that she was stepping out in her own career. Her first hint came more than a year ago, when she was invited to be the keynote speaker at the spring conference of the Michigan Association of Marriage Counselors and Therapists. It was after her bout with mono.

  Al had told her friend Celia Muir: “I don’t think Jan should go. She’s been so sick.”

  Then a few breaths later, he told Celia, “You know, they’ve never invited me to speak.”

  Jan thought it an odd statement. Al never went to professional conferences. She thought he’d at least be eager to share his knowledge on autism, a specialty with which she had little contact among child psychologists. She found conferences educational, but Al balked at all invitations.

  There were other signs. Their friendly discussions about approaches to psychotherapy had turned into vindictive debates. He became defensive when she suggested that a father and daughter he was treating be brought in for joint counseling. He was offended when she made improvements on reports he asked her to type.

  “I can handle it,” he snapped.

  Jan was beginning to wonder if what she had interpreted as Al’s supportive nature in past years had in fact been paternalism. He seemed more gracious when she was carrying an armful of college texts.

  On their recent Arizona vacation Jan’s mother had noticed him brooding about his role. As the family watched TV in one room, Al sat alone in another next to the fireplace. He spent a couple of hours gazing at the flames, getting up only to poke the logs. Jan’s mother went in the room to chat. He turned to her and said:

  “I can’t thank you enough for taking care of Jan when I couldn’t. I don’t like it when I can’t take care of Jan-Jan.”

  Her mother later said, “Jan, it was as though he was in mourning. I really felt sorry for him.”

  Jan knew Al fancied himself to be protective of younger women. She remembered how proud he was when he became the hero of the agency that supplied the young actresses for Project Indianwood. A businessman returning from a martini-soaked lunch made a crude pass at one of them in a Fisher elevator. Al procured his card by engaging him in a business conversation. Then he called his boss.

  “I want you to know what your employee did in the Fisher Building, and I won’t have it,” he told him.

  Later he told Jan, “You know, she’s tired of men leering at her. This guy pulled this crap in the elevator and I handled him. It’s too bad she can’t be recognized for her talent or her brains because she is so pretty.”

  Back then Jan was impressed. Now she wondered if Al really was the liberal thinker he perceived himself to be. When she told him she was going to practice under her maiden name, he stewed for days. She only wanted to eliminate confusion now that they both carried the title of “doctor.” Everything else had always been segregated—their files, their billings, their telephones, their answering services. She never even answered his phone, and he wanted it that way.

  So, Jan wondered, why is he being so cold about the name change? Jan had also insisted she pay for her share of the rental of the suite. He didn’t like that idea either.

  They seemed to have grown so distant from one another in the past couple of years. And their sex life still showed no signs of revival. Maybe it was no coincidence that they’d stopped making love shortly after she received her Ph.D. Maybe I’ve become a threat to him, she thought.

  Several times she tried to talk to him about that and other problems. He always had the same response.

  “Jan-Jan, I’m working on that in therapy.”

  She hoped he worked everything out soon.

  64

  Anne Fordyce concluded that lying was the only graceful way to end her therapy with Alan Canty. The attractive twenty-five-yearold graphic designer wanted out.

  In the first place, Anne had wanted a hypnotherapist. She found Dr. Canty under that heading in the Yellow Pages when her chronic insomnia forced her to seek professional help.

  Her ever skeptical mother was suspicious from the start. She called Dr. Canty to question his credentials. He cited degrees from the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, and several other colleges.

  “Haven’t I seen your name somewhere?” she asked.

  “Well, of course you would know my name. I’ve written for the Detroit News, the Detroit Free Press. I’ve written books and done articles for all the syndicated papers.”

  By the time Dr. Canty was through ten minutes later, Anne’s mother said she felt like a dummy. Months later they would find out he was puffing, as he did with Anne.

  “I have a 90 percent success rate with sleep disorders,” he told her right off. “I specialize in them. It shouldn’t take more than ten sessions.”

  That was twenty-four sessions and six months ago, and she’d yet to be hypnotized. Dr. Canty told her the source of her sleeplessness was her mother. They were too close, he said, and Anne was acting out her mother’s own complaints of insomnia.

  In some ways, the therapist appeared to care about her. She was his last patient every Tuesday. When they were done, he always walked her to the elevator and shook her hand. He told her he missed her when he returned from vacation. Several times he’d complimented her on her shape. It first came up during a conversation they had about women’s insecurity about breast size.

  “Well, you have nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “You’re very well proportioned.”

  But it was Dr. Canty’s unsettling demeanor, rather than his awareness of her figure, that bothered Anne. He fidgeted quite a bit. His hands always were busy during their sessions. He never had much eye contact with her. When they did he seemed to get more nervous. On the table next to his chair he had a sculpture of a polished brass sphere imprisoned in a wooden cube. It reminded her of his uptight personality. His fingers toyed with the thing, as though he was trying to pull the brass ball out of one of the holes in the cube.

  A couple of times Dr. Canty introduced his wife. She was attractive and dressed in the smart professional fashions that Anne liked to wear. Dr. Canty seemed a rumpled remnant of the early sixties. He struck her as a lonely intellectual who had only books waiting for him at home each night.

  What a contrasting pair, she thought. But her therapist often spoke highly of their marriage, and matrimony in general. A few months earlier Anne had
married, a move Dr. Canty praised.

  “Your husband is the most important person in your life and you’ve got to commit yourself to him totally,” he said.

  Another time he said, “Jan and I have a good understanding with each other. Any time I’m late, I’ll call and tell her. Marriage requires that kind of commitment and consideration.”

  But Anne Fordyce wasn’t there for marriage counseling or mental disorders. Even Canty told her “you have no mental disorders whatsoever.” She just wanted to sleep.

  So Anne had been telling her therapist she was sleeping six to eight hours a night, though she was hardly getting half that. She didn’t want to be manipulated into more therapy. She didn’t trust him anymore and often found him intolerant.

  “No, that’s not what I’m asking you,” he’d snap if he was unsatisfied with her answers.

  By late winter, he was buying her lies about sleeping. He even agreed to hypnotize her during her last session. She had been bugging him to do that for six months.

  Finally, the day came. She followed him to a couch in another room in his suite. She was uncomfortable from the start. Anne had worn a short skirt. She felt it hike up well above her knees as she lay down.

  What a time to be in a stupid miniskirt, she thought. Dr. Canty sat behind her head. She didn’t know if it was because she was self-conscious or her general mistrust, but she could feel his eyes on her legs. He asked her to count from one hundred backward and relax her muscles limb by limb.

  By the time she reached zero she was more tense than when she began. Dr. Canty told her to use the relaxation technique each night before she slept.

  “That’s all there is to it?”

  “Most people have misconceptions about hypnosis.”

  Dr. Canty shook her hand and wished her well. He told her to come back for follow-up if she had any more sleepless nights.

  “You’ll do well, though,” he said. “You’re well on your way out of this.” I certainly am, she thought.

  65

  Another character disorder is nomadism. These people are always on the move.

  —W. ALAN CANTY,

  Henry Ford Community College lectures

  The aluminum-clad bungalow on Casper bore no resemblance to the custom home in West Bloomfield that John Fry and Dawn Spens once fantasized about owning. But it was luxurious compared to the living standards they had known since hooking up in the summer of 1983.

  Between their stays at the Homewood Manor, the Congress Inn, and the trick pad on Clayton, they had crashed at a half-dozen cheap motels, dope houses, and cramped homes of friends and distant relatives. The bungalow at 2518 Casper had a hearty lawn and a porch with a wrought-iron railing. The two-bedroom was a good hundred feet off the street, hidden behind a two-story duplex, abutting the backyard lot line at the alley.

  Through all the moves, drugs and the trick Al were the two constants in their lives. His daily visits—except Sundays—never let up. Neither did his support wane when they found the house on Casper. He covered the $450 security deposit and the $225 monthly rent. The Doc was pleased they had found the house, the referral coming from one of Fry’s old friends from Jackson Prison. The old southside Detroit neighborhood was a lovely suburb compared to the gritty Cass Corridor.

  The bungalow was one long city block off the Vernor-Springwells business district. The area was lined with family-owned businesses and small restaurants catering to a neighborhood mixed with Poles, Italians, Hungarians, and Southerners, who settled it to be close to the Ford Motor Rouge complex and other smokestack industries nearby. Jackets monogrammed with “United Auto Workers—Local 22” were a common sight. Suits and ties were not. The Doc, with his sparkling Buick Regal, his trademark thermos, and his dress slacks and sport coats, would soon stand out as a neighborhood oddity.

  Longtime residents of Vernor-Springwells had been seeing a number of unfamiliar sights in recent years. Crime was on the increase, and undesirables were taking over the once well-kept duplexes and aging single-family homes. John Fry and Dawn Spens, however, appeared to be taking steps to keep from contributing to the crime rate.

  They signed the lease for 2518 Casper and the same day enrolled in a westside methadone program called Private Health Systems. Nearly two years of intravenous drug use had inflicted much damage on Dawn. Her skin was sallow. Circular scars dotted her legs above heavily swollen ankles. Her abscess had healed, but it had marred her groin as though she’d been hit with a hatchet there.

  Al would take Dawn and John to the clinic daily and cover the $100-a-week cost so the pair could get decreasing daily dosages of methadone. But Dawn Spens would not mention Al in a questionnaire she took home with her from the drug program.

  The psychological history asked Dawn to list family members and other people she deemed important in her life. She described her relationship with her father as “poor,” but “those with her mother and sister as “good.” She listed “John C. Fry” as her fiancé and described him as the “most significant person” she knew. Then she gave her reasons:

  “Because I love him, he loves me, we have a very good and open relationship, we make each other happy when we are not around drugs, and he helps me [with] my drug problems and other problems I have.”

  Dawn answered more questions concerning her boyfriend, the only person she indicated was aware of her drug habit. How did he perceive the problem?

  “A serious problem that I can overcome if I really want to and I try hard enough.”

  What were John’s expectations of her?

  “Only that I try my best, but [he expects] me to try.”

  The questionnaire continued:

  “Are any of the people listed willing to become involved in your treatment?”

  “Fiancé—John Fry.”

  “How do you perceive problems that are presently faced by family members … ?”

  “My fiancé’s employment problems are due to past drug use, which is now coming under control.”

  Dawn answered questions concerning sex:

  “What were your impressions of sex during your early life?”

  “I wanted to wait until I was married to have sex.”

  “From whom did you learn about sex?”

  “Parents.”

  “Have your impressions about sex changed?”

  “Yes.”

  “In what way?”

  The space was left blank. Then the questionnaire asked her about money management.

  “How do you generally handle money when you have it?”

  “Good, because I budget for necessities—except where drugs are concerned.”

  The questionnaire wanted to know Dawn Spens’s “recreational activities.”

  “How do you currently spend your leisure time?”

  “Shopping, reading, crossword puzzles, decorating my house, watching TV, talking to my fiancé”

  Finally, it probed possible causes for her habit.

  “Were you an abused child?”

  Dawn indicated no.

  “Have you been abused since you have been an adult?”

  Dawn indicated no.

  “Do you think you have the potential for abusing others?”

  Dawn indicated no.

  “Do you have any serious problems?”

  She indicated yes, adding, “My desire for abusing drugs.”

  “If yes or maybe, do you believe that you need help for these problems?”

  “Maybe,” she answered.

  A twenty-four-yearold unemployed barmaid named Juanita Deckoff wondered what her new neighbors would be like as she watched them move into the bungalow in her backyard on March 15. The brawny man with the beard and the young brunette were unloading boxes from a black Buick. She also watched an older man in a sports coat carry a potted rubber tree into the house.

  Later she introduced herself to Dawn and John. They seemed nice enough. John said he ran a landscaping business and had all kinds of plans for the lawn and shrubbery. Joh
n was gregarious, outgoing, and sometimes spoke in a black street dialect.

  “Yeah,” he later said. “People often accuse me of sounding like a nigger.” The Ides of March was also moving day for Jan and Al Canty. Their new suite on the tenth floor of the Fisher Building was ready. Jan thought the day an opportune time to get rid of some of the junk they’d accumulated in the old office. One item that she’d noticed was already gone was a gaudy artificial rubber tree. Al had hung on to it for ages.

  “I’ve got a patient who has always admired it,” Al said. “I gave it to her.”

  Jan laughed.

  “You’ve got to be kidding, Al. That thing is dinosaur quality. I can’t believe anybody would want it.”

  But Jan didn’t find it too humorous when Al left her alone with the Fisher Building moving crew shortly before lunch.

  “Got to go to the court,” he said, grabbing his thermos.

  She protested.

  “Jan, you know how lawyers and judges are. I’ve got to go down there.”

  She knew he scheduled a couple of hours every day at the jail, the courts, or the prosecutor’s office. But she was irritated he hadn’t budgeted his time for their Friday move. She listened in disbelief as he made another comment on his way out the door.

  “Could you have my office together, I’ve got to start seeing patients on Saturday.”

  He wouldn’t return for four hours.

  How, she thought, can he do this to me with so much yet to do? The Fisher Building provided the movers, but someone had to direct them, pack and unpack the files, and arrange all the furniture. She would have to shuttle back and forth from floor to floor. That left no one to watch for the telephone installers. Without an office exchange, Al’s patients would start phoning their home. For weeks, she already had been getting disturbed at all hours of the night. Usually it was the same person, someone who kept dialing wrong. Jan couldn’t understand how the caller could keep making the same mistake.

  When she answered the phone, he sounded like a black man, always asking in a slurred voice for some woman.