Masquerade

by Cauffiel, Lowell;

  66

  Children who have angry fantasies will have this kind of fantasy: They’ll wish they could be on a big elephant and that the elephant could go through a community and tromp the heads of all the bad guys.

  —W. ALAN CANTY,

  Concordia College lecture

  By their third lunch, Ray Danford was finding his old friend’s situation with the hooker and her boyfriend rather ironic. There Al Canty was, using the title of “doctor” on the south side. For years Al vowed he’d never make an issue out of the designation before his own name.

  Ray knew why. Alan Canty Sr. had pushed Al relentlessly for his Ph.D., while Al respected his dad for accomplishing so much without one. He admired his father’s hard-bitten approach to the profession, which included the old man’s penchant for knocking out research articles deep into the night over a fifth of bourbon.

  As they looked over the German menu at The Little Cafe, Al stirred up a batch of old memories about his early conflicts with his parents.

  “Hey, I’m seeing Dr. Awes again for help with this problem I’m having.”

  “Awes! She’s still practicing?”

  Ray was surprised the psychiatrist hadn’t retired by now. They recalled the scores of trips they’d made together to the psychiatrist’s office in the 1950s. They put a lot of miles on his black Beetle driving out to Clarkston. Al gave Ray the five dollars his father provided for the trip, but they never used more than a dollar in gas. It took an hour to get there, an hour for therapy, and an hour to get back. They made the trip two or three times a week.

  Ray’s wife Jeannie used to complain about how they were gone most of the night. A girl Al was dating accused him of being gay because they spent so much time together. Then Al worried that he was a latent homosexual. Ray remembered Al’s relief when Dr. Awes told him no, she didn’t think he was gay.

  Their public explanation for Al’s sessions was that he was studying to be a therapist, but Ray knew otherwise. Sometimes they used to talk about his psychoanalysis on the drive back. A lot of it had to do with his relationship with his parents.

  “Ray, I keep having this funny recurring dream,” Al told him once. “I’m on the back of a big elephant, and the elephant is crushing Ma and Pa with its feet.”

  They really talked quite a bit that night in light of everything they’d learned from Freud. Ray knew Al suffered from what they dubbed “momism” when they were young. Anyone could see that mother and son were very attached to one another. Most of the day, Al’s mother was gone on school and club business. But when she was home she hovered over Al, often pampering him with food.

  “Now, Buster, you just sit right down and let me fix you something very good to eat,” Mrs. Canty said when Ray and Al dropped by Al’s house after classes.

  It was all pretty foreign to Ray. Al’s old place on Chalmers was the first house he’d ever seen with a pantry. Ray’s family was poor, and he’d never seen a sandwich with lettuce on it until he left home. Al inspected every leaf. Often Al picked at dishes when they stopped at restaurants on the way home from his sessions with Dr. Awes.

  “This just isn’t right,” he’d say.

  “Not as good as Ma’s, huh?” Ray would tease.

  “Yeah, Ma pampers me so.”

  But Al also resented his reputation as a mama’s boy. Once Ray and a couple of guys in the old gang teased him about being homesick when he came back from Hillsdale College for vacation. It was the only time he ever saw Al rise up and want to fight.

  Now Ray could see Al was trying to stand up and face the situation with the hooker, but typically he was making a procedure out of it.

  “So how’s that going, with the girl?” Ray asked.

  “I’m trying to get out of this thing,” Al said. “I’m going to taper them, you know, wean them from my support.”

  Al also had a new physical regimen to accompany his plan to eliminate the girl named Dawn from his life. He insisted on a Perrier and lime after Ray ordered a beer with his lunch. Ray never knew Al, unlike Al Sr., to be much of a drinker, though he sometimes used to treat alcohol as though he was experimenting with LSD. Al got plastered with the sole intent of releasing his internal conflicts, a good drunk turning into a session of weepy name-calling and other soul-purgings.

  But this lunch in mid-March Al was looking for ways to regain control of himself, not lose it.

  “You know I was in the hospital earlier this year because of my metabolism,” Al said. “I’m trying to watch what I eat and drink. I’ve got to stay sharp, especially for a court evaluation I have this afternoon.”

  67

  On April Fool’s Day, Dawn Spens put on a white uniform, walked into the Central Outfitting furniture store on Vernor Highway with John Fry, and bought a $269 kitchen dinette set on credit. She told the store manager she had been employed as a nurse for two years for a Dr. Al Miller.

  A man answering a call to the number she provided for the doctor’s office verified Dawn’s employment at $275 a week. Dawn paid a $129 down payment on delivery of the furniture to the bungalow on Casper, but the store never received one payment on the balance.

  “April Fool’s has always been my favorite day,” John Fry later said. “It’s the day I escaped from prison.”

  Thirteen days later Dawn and John went shopping again, this time at Albert’s Furniture, and with one important difference in Dawn’s list of credit references.

  Robert Saleh, Albert’s thirty-four-yearold manager, was anxious for a sale in the new store his family had just opened on Fort Street. The business was in one of the south side’s tougher neighborhoods, but the former Michigan State University linebacker had yet to be intimidated by any of his customers. That included the imposing man in the beard, white coat, and white broad brim hat who was browsing through the store with the girl in the tight jeans and freshly curled permanent.

  She picked out a $429 nineteen-inch color TV and a $50 stand and then asked if she could secure some credit. As he filled out Dawn Spens’s credit application, Saleh found himself eyeing her full lips and hoping for a glimpse of her breasts between the buttons of her shirt. He decided her hairstyle added a wild flair to the way she had sashayed around the store.

  “Where do you work?” he asked.

  “I’m a receptionist at the Fisher Building for Dr. W. Alan Canty.”

  “Can I have the phone number and the address?”

  Dawn didn’t know the street address or zip code, but she had the phone number.

  “Spell the doctor’s name.”

  Dawn stuttered with the letters. Saleh filled it out phonetically—“Cantee.” A receptionist who doesn’t know her boss’s address, he thought, or the spelling of his name? But Dawn provided other references, including her mother, father, sister, grandfather, and her friend in the white coat and hat, John Fry.

  Saleh took $50 in down payment and told her he would deliver the TV himself if her application checked out. She insisted on an ambitious payment plan for herself, pledging to pay him $25 a week. After she left he called only one reference, the doctor. He got an answering service. It was a Saturday. On Monday, the doctor called him back.

  “This is Dr. Canty. I believe Dawn Spens came in there and is applying for credit on a TV.”

  “Right, does she work for you?”

  “Lookit, give her anything she wants. If she can’t handle paying for anything, don’t worry. I’ll cover her in any way.”

  Saleh figured if this doctor was going to go that far, perhaps he should come in the store and co-sign.

  “Can you come in and sign something?”

  “Lookit, I don’t have that kind of time, do you understand? Just give it to her. She’s covered.”

  Later in the day Dawn showed up at the store with another $50.

  “Your doctor seems like a nice guy,” Saleh told her. “Especially for him to give you a reference like that.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “He’s worked with me quite a bit.”


  Obviously, Saleh thought, she wasn’t a receptionist. Maybe she was his patient, or his concubine. The distinction seemed irrelevant. Saleh had the doctor’s word, his phone number, and his address. Later that day he delivered the merchandise to her bungalow on Casper.

  From the start Dawn was delinquent with her weekly payments. Saleh himself drove to the bungalow to collect. He didn’t mind at first, as the visits gave him another peek at the intriguing girl with the wild hair.

  Dawn had an array of hard-luck excuses for her late installments. Other times John answered the door. He was polite, easygoing, and said he liked to be called Lucky. Saleh didn’t trust him. Nobody can look like such a hard-ass, he thought, and be that gracious.

  One day the doctor himself came into the store while Saleh was busy taking a credit application.

  “Who’s Bob?” said the guy in the glasses and loud checkered sports coat.

  “I am. Who are you?”

  “I’m here to make a payment for Dawn Spens. And what difference does it make who I am? I’m giving you her payment, aren’t I?”

  He appeared in a hurry. He handed Saleh $25, then flashed an arrogant grin.

  “I’m the doctor,” he said.

  If Saleh hadn’t been occupied, he would have asked him to co-sign right there. But he’d already decided Dawn’s line of credit was closed. Soon he would be making two or three trips a week to get his $25 installment. One balmy spring day, Dawn came to the door in a tank top, and Lucky in a T-shirt. When he saw the scars up and down both their arms, Robert Saleh knew the account was in serious trouble.

  Jan Canty couldn’t remember a time when she’d seen her husband as agitated as on that afternoon in late April when he returned to the Fisher an hour late from his daily visit to the jail.

  “Al, what’s wrong? You look so upset.”

  “The Fisher Building is squeezing me,” he snapped. “The Fisher is putting the squeeze on me for back rent.”

  They must have made some kind of mistake, she thought. We’ve only been in the new suite a month. How could the rent be behind?

  “Well, they’ve always been reasonable people,” she said. “Let’s go down there together and work it out.”

  Al took a deep breath and collected himself.

  “No, it’s OK. Don’t worry about it. I overreacted.”

  He became preoccupied as he walked back to his office. Gee, she thought, solved just like that.

  Jan shook her head. Putting the squeeze on me. That was the first time she’d ever heard Al use the phrase. He must have picked that one up at the jail, she thought.

  68

  The psychiatrist watched her patient try to steady his limbs by locking his fingers and placing his hands in his shifting lap. He’d sped out to her home from his office after discovering the truth.

  “Wow, that was a close one,” he said. “They know. They do know who I am.”

  Dr. Lorraine Awes listened as he told her what he found scrawled on a sheet of notebook paper lying in a pile of odds and ends in the southside bungalow. There it was: “Canty, W. Alan, Ph.D.,” his office address, his office number, his home phone number.

  “They must have gone outside, damn it,” he stammered. “Gone through my glove compartment where I kept my wallet.”

  Missing was the self-assurance the psychiatrist had been hearing for eleven months. Al had been so adamant that his identity was his secret.

  “It’s not a concern,” he said more than once. “They only know me as Al, or The Doc.”

  Dr. Awes suspected all along her patient was only trying to keep her at bay with such rationalizations. Finally he was faced with the realization that what he was doing was not without potential consequences.

  “I guess I’ve only been kidding myself, haven’t I?” he said.

  He trembled for most of the one-hour session, but the psychiatrist welcomed his fear like the warmer days of late April. Now maybe they really could get some work done.

  Lorraine Awes had always been very fond of the patient with the introspective talents of a psychologist and the smile of a young boy. She remembered when he first showed up for therapy at her office more than thirty years ago. He was twenty, but as emotionally frail as his willowy frame and as misdirected as his wavy hair. Two years of college and he had yet to compile a course credit. His father would not have that sort of thing. Something had to be done with the boy, he demanded.

  Dr. Awes expected to find the son of the flamboyant Recorder’s Court clinic director apathetic and unmotivated. She misjudged him. Alan turned out to be bright and eager, but shackled by an exceedingly complex personality. It took them more than fifteen years of intermittent analysis to sort it all out. He emerged from therapy with the elusive doctorate his father was so determined he should have, while gaining a healthy admiration for his dad. Without help, Dr. Awes believed, Al might have never held up as his father battled his own demons through his son.

  The psychiatrist only wished they hadn’t left this bit of unfinished business the first time around. Obviously they had overlooked something. She knew unresolved conflicts could hide like that, remaining dormant as long as certain needs were met.

  Other things hadn’t changed with time. Dr. Awes still fielded comments about her strong resemblance to Bette Davis and the pronunciation of her last name. Some of her patients reported dreams about the Wizard of Oz, but most never made the connection. She, too, wished psychiatry could be as cut and dry as reaching into a wizard’s bag for new hearts and minds. Long-term analysis dominated her field when she began her residency at Pontiac State Hospital and Lafayette Clinic. Now drugs effectively treated some forms of mental illness. She welcomed the breakthroughs. Not every patient was inspired or introspective enough for psychotherapy.

  She knew Alan Canty was. Al’s own realization of the depth of his compulsion had driven him into a temporary paranoid state and a psychiatric ward, but she didn’t consider him psychotic. Upon his release he was confused, but searching for deliverance from his neurosis. When they began therapy again it seemed as though they had only missed a couple of sessions, though a decade had passed since their last appointment.

  Al had been seduced by his own psyche before. They recalled the drama student he fell for in college days. He would have dived into a handstand for that girl. They both agreed she was neurotic, possibly schizophrenic. But that made her all the more the temptress. When Al perceived her as helpless, he was powerless to resist her frequent demands.

  Maggie, his first wife, Al misjudged completely. He envisioned her as a single mother in trouble, but in a few years reality took over. She was a free spirit with a will and career of her own. When he realized she could get along very well without his psychological nurturing, the marriage was destined to fail.

  Dr. Awes saw many parallels as Al told her about his fiftieth birthday and the young prostitute he saw that day on the corner.

  “She looked so young, so helpless,” he said.

  Dr. Awes knew Al was alone that week in more ways than one. In his mind, his isolation began the day Jan received her Ph.D. He believed she no longer needed him in the role of a mentor that had satisfied him for so many years.

  Dr. Awes preferred to analyze the human psyche in terms of its simple needs rather than psychological jargon. Alan Canty, she believed, had a ravenous need to be needed. This time that want had disguised itself in the form of the girl he called Dawn.

  Maybe the whole affair might never have begun if he could have told Jan he was hurt that she was going to Arizona the week of his birthday. But such risky displays of emotion were foreign to Al’s makeup.

  From the beginning, Dr. Awes never doubted Al’s parents were determined to raise a good son. Maybe they were too determined. She remembered when his mother dropped off a diary of his upbringing, one that revealed she began toilet training the boy in his first few months. Dr. Awes decided that revealed what kind of self-control was expected in the Canty household.

  Through t
he years, psychiatrist and patient had talked about many things: a father he could never satisfy, a mother who treated him like a child, his lavishing of gifts on others to buy love and respect, the playing of many roles in a solitary search for self-esteem. That and more had inspired his destructive masquerade.

  When he showed up for therapy in May, Al had even disguised his real intentions from himself. Right off, her patient was anxious about his hospitalization. He worried that Dawn would think he had abandoned her, rejected her like people in her past. He entertained the fantasy that if he could instill confidence in the prostitute, she would get off heroin and make something of herself.

  Al’s outward concern was a comfortable disguise, all for the benefit of his conscience. Dr. Awes urged him to look at the reality of his actions. They peeled off the masks one by one. Underneath generosity was control. Underneath affection, conquest. Underneath sacrifice, domination. Yes, the more dependent Dawn was on him, he finally admitted, the better.

  Still Al kept going back, even when he later complained that Dawn was taking advantage of him. He detailed Dawn’s frequent attempts to humiliate him and rumors that she called her best customer degrading names behind his back.

  “When I arrive she often has her hand out,” he said once. “She says, ‘Well, how much did you bring me today?’ ”

  Yet he only desired her company more. Dr. Awes pointed out that Dawn was unwittingly soothing him. Her punishment helped ease the guilt for his control over her life, temporarily freeing him to control some more. Some charitable treatment by the prostitute might even help terminate the affair, the psychiatrist decided.

  Al also went into depth about John but dismissed him as a manageable character. He explained how John had tried to remain in the background at first but eventually he came forward as her pimp. Al said his pathology was obvious; John was a textbook psychopath. Al was convinced there was no love between Dawn and John, only a business relationship.

  “Oh, he’s only done time for petty crimes,” Al said.

  Dr. Awes thought he was being naive.