Masquerade

by Cauffiel, Lowell;

  But Jan suffered from her own affliction the week her husband would mark a half century of life. Mononucleosis. Mono—she hated even the sound of the word. It was the second infection that year, and the third bout in a lifetime. This siege had lasted three months.

  Jan had tried to rest at home but never really felt sick enough to justify lying in bed all day, every day. Between her work load, Al’s schedule, and four thousand square feet of house, it just wasn’t practical. Finally, sore throats and fatigue rendered her useless.

  “You’ve got a choice,” her physician said. “You’re going to have to be hospitalized or just go somewhere and get the bed rest.”

  She opted for a standing invitation from her parents at their retirement house on the edge of the Arizona desert. Al encouraged her.

  “You should go and get well,” he said. “Rest up.”

  He was right. Jan’s parents hadn’t let her do a thing but sleep since she got off the plane.

  Jan suspected Al would be all for the respite the minute she brought it up. They celebrated their ninth anniversary in September, and she easily could say her years with Al Canty had been a pretty smooth ride.

  Al seemed to delight in freeing her from pressures during her long pursuit of a career. She’d been a student for most of the marriage. Her quest for a doctorate in psychology had been Al’s top priority as well as hers. For years, that Ph.D. had seemed her whole life, and their big, Tudor-style home in Grosse Pointe Park just a place to sleep and do homework between trips to the University of Michigan.

  She couldn’t have asked for a more understanding partner. He never complained about uncertain meals on nights before finals or about the years the living room went without furniture. Only recently did they buy a TV. There just wasn’t time before. Al closed his evenings gently critiquing her papers or giving pep talks when she felt she couldn’t take one more day of classes.

  It was as good a relationship as she’d seen anywhere, and better than most. Now that she was winding up her postdoctoral program in family counseling, Jan only wished that she and her husband would spend more time together.

  The mono aside, at thirty-two Jan Canty was in full bloom. Her toothy smile and turned-up nose blessed her with the good looks of an all-American girl in her twenties. Now they were the makings of a handsome professional woman. A hint of makeup around her green eyes went a long way. In a week, she could find a half-dozen ways to wear her light brown hair. She was just an inch over five feet, but a complement to Al’s five-foot-ten frame.

  Jan often turned heads, but keeping her husband at her side for extended periods was a more difficult proposition. She’d never met anyone with so much energy for his work. Only in the last year had Jan convinced him to take another day off. For half their marriage he’d worked seven days a week. Finally she’d talked him into Fridays as well as Sundays off. Still he managed to see nearly fifty patients a week and book sixty clinical hours of therapy. He saw patients at the office. He saw patients at home. He dabbled in forensic work in the courts. He supervised other psychologists in Port Huron, nearly forty-five minutes away.

  The demanding pace generated a cash flow of more than $150,000 a year. But, Jan wondered, was the money worth days that began at dawn and ended well after sundown?

  Some of her frustration, she guessed, had to do with their seventeen-year difference in age. Al didn’t socialize much with her younger friends, though with his boyish smile and trim build he could have passed for forty.

  The last time they really cut loose together in a big gathering was at a Halloween masquerade. She dressed as a bumblebee, Al as a race car mechanic, a fictitious character he named Al Miller. She guessed he came up with the name from an old Miller race car he was restoring in the garage. She found him a doctor’s hospital coat and had the name monogrammed across the back. Al disappeared into the garage and returned with a wrench in his pocket and grease smudged across the smock. She never saw him so outgoing. They partied until 4 A.M. at her friend’s.

  But that night two years ago was an aberration. With her schedule lighter now, she was disappointed they didn’t get out more and do that sort of thing. She liked concerts and Detroit Tigers baseball games. He preferred spending the time with a book.

  Well, she reasoned, I can’t expect someone his age to like Stevie Wonder. As for baseball, Al just wasn’t the type who went for sports, though he never complained when she went to the ballpark with her friends.

  In that way, the positives of life with Al Canty offset the negatives. The equation had worked well in June when she had a chance to go abroad as a chaperon for her friend’s French class.

  “Then Jan, why don’t you go?” he said, smiling. “It’s a great discount on the airfare. Do it. I’ll be fine.”

  Al had been so comfortable with that trip to France, so why was she worried about this get-well trip to Arizona? He’s already told me how he feels, she told herself. He’s always been honest about his feelings.

  “Are you certain you won’t mind?” she’d asked.

  “Jan, you go right ahead. I’ll be fine. You needn’t worry about me.”

  She remembered his eyes reassuring her through his tortoiseshell glasses. Soon the blankets pressed her into another deep sleep.

  3

  The personality is a product of growth, learning and experience.

  —W. ALAN CANTY,

  Principles of Counseling and Psychotherapy

  “Oh, Ma, you didn’t have to do that,” he said when she phoned him after his lunch hour.

  “Well, Buster,” she said, “you’re a big boy now.”

  Gladys Canty was glad she’d marked her son’s birthday with a card and five hundred dollars. Al Jr.’s birthdays always warranted one hundred dollars. But a man’s fiftieth is a milestone, she told herself when she wrote out the check.

  Buster. The nickname was one of those spontaneous things. It came the day her only child was born, Thanksgiving Day 1933, when Al Sr. called her sister to break the news.

  “Well, Buster is here,” Al Sr. said.

  The name had stuck all these years, though no one else called him that. Al Sr., when he was alive, preferred to call him Alan. But it could get pretty confusing with two Alans in the Canty house. Sometimes she called him Alan Jr. But she preferred Buster and, in recent years, had shortened that to Bus.

  He was all the family Gladys had left in Detroit. Al Sr. had died in 1976. She had no siblings in the area, and her only surviving sister lived in Cleveland. Buster called her once every day from the Fisher Building. Despite his heavy schedule, he always found time to chat.

  That isn’t to say that Gladys Foster Canty, at the age of seventy-six, doddered away her days waiting for the phone to ring. In fact, friends often found her difficult to reach at her retirement home on Detroit’s far east side. She divided her weekdays between outings with historic groups and visits to a wide circle of friends who clamored for her company. On Saturdays she volunteered in the Detroit Children’s Museum—working in its gift shop, selling smart souvenirs to the children. That was her favorite.

  “I find it so delightful when the museum fills up with those little faces of innocence,” she once explained to a friend.

  In the museum or anywhere else, Gladys carried herself upright and took steps that were quick and without hesitation. Gray had yet to dominate her wispy red hair, which she kept up in a loose bun. Age hampered her no more than a lack of academic credentials had held her and her husband back in their prime.

  The family hadn’t been in Detroit even two full generations, but the Canty name was one of the most respected in the city. Gladys Canty was very proud of that. She and Al Sr. arrived in Detroit from Cleveland in 1929, six months before the crash. Al Sr. had secured a staff position with the first clinic of its kind in the country, a forensic unit originally named the Psychopathic Clinic of Detroit’s Recorder’s Court.

  Bus arrived five years into their marriage and after nine months of daily nausea for Gl
adys. It was so bad her doctor thought she might lose the baby. She would have liked more children. But Al Sr. made it quite clear he wasn’t going to have her go through that again.

  She strove to give Bus the best rearing she could in their home near the Detroit River. She kept him smartly dressed, prepared his meals as though he was child royalty, and read him storybooks at night. But Gladys had more to give.

  The daughter of an Episcopal minister, Gladys grew up with her father’s church across one lot line and her public school across the other. Those dual influences were rekindled by a PTA meeting she attended after she enrolled Buster in first grade. She devoted eighteen years to the organization, rising to citywide president and statewide mental health chairman.

  Her son often accompanied her as she met with group after group around the city. The two of them were on the go together a lot as Al Sr. put in his long hours at the clinic. Buster learned a lot about the city’s streets and neighborhoods that way.

  After Buster graduated from high school, her organizational skills caught the attention of Detroit voters. She was elected to the Detroit school board, serving twice as president in her fourteen-year board career. If anyone happened to count the headlines, Gladys Canty’s unblemished public profile in charitable and community pursuits often exceeded her husband’s considerable notoriety.

  Their schedules made family life a little less traditional than she would have liked. But Gladys made it a strict rule to be home to greet her son every day when he returned from school. They were a tightly knit trio, she thought. One reason Al Sr. worked so hard was to provide his son with the best education available.

  Buster had done far better financially as a psychologist than Al Sr. had with the court. But sometimes she wondered if his practice was taking more than it gave. She could see it under his eyes.

  “Oh, Bus, you look so tired,” she’d say.

  “Oh, Ma, you don’t understand. People have so many problems.”

  “But you’re working to help them.”

  “But Ma, I carry them around on my shoulders, too.”

  That was one of the differences between father and son. Al Sr. rarely brooded over people he evaluated at the clinic. After a day with cops and criminals, he mixed a highball and discovered more energy as the evening wore on. He spent his nights studying journals or writing for them, often into the early morning hours, invariably causing him to oversleep his morning alarm.

  Al Jr. was continuously driven by nervous energy. Bus reminded Mrs. Canty of her brother George. They even looked alike. George Foster’s frantic pace contributed to a massive stroke at the age of fifty. He never regained his speech, and he died three years later. The memory worried her.

  But Gladys always strove to nurture the bright side. As a child she’d read the book Pollyanna and counted it as a major influence in her life. And her son had his hobbies—his collection of antique cars and his bricks. When she thought of cars and Buster, she thought of his old black pedal car and their tightly knit trio at the midget races. Even in his later teens, her son enjoyed watching the racers scamper and bump their way around the oval dirt track.

  Now her son had about a half-dozen autos he was restoring in his garage. They looked like piles of parts to her, but Bus pronounced them “choice.” The only treasures he valued equally were his antique paving bricks. She wasn’t quite sure how that hobby got started, but collecting them by the trunkload from demolition sites had been nearly a sevenyear quest. A pile grew behind his garage, had yet to become a driveway, and bordered on an obsession.

  Once, when they were visiting Al Sr.’s grave at Elmwood Cemetery, Bus became engrossed by the sight of a wrecking crew working nearby. Laborers were tearing up a brick street. On their way out, he stooped to pick up a couple of the bricks. She scolded him.

  “Oh, Ma, it’s all right,” he said.

  “But Bus, it wouldn’t look good.”

  He dropped the bricks but looked hurt. She would have thought she’d told him to put away his play blocks.

  Yes, she thought, Buster was a sensitive chap, even at the mature age of fifty. It’s what made him a good therapist, she reasoned, and a good husband. He and his wife seemed to be such a happy pair. Jan was such a cute girl she couldn’t resist dubbing her Jannie.

  “So what are you doing for your birthday, going to dinner with Jannie?” Mrs. Canty inquired near the end of Bus’s birthday call.

  “No, Ma,” he said. “Jan is at a conference in Ann Arbor.”

  “Oh, and she’s not going to be home for your birthday?”

  Gladys Canty thought that odd.

  “Well, she’s at a conference and I have to work late and I have a big day tomorrow,” he explained quickly. “Besides, she’ll be home later anyway.”

  Gee, she thought, those two must really understand each other. Besides, who was she to question? Bus was the marriage expert. He’d recently been quoted at length in a Sunday magazine article in the Detroit Free Press. It was called “Married Forever—A Good Marriage Is Something You Earn.”

  She was proud her son had been sought out as a source on the subject. Unlike his father, Al Jr. never sought publicity. Gladys had cut out the article, saving it with a large collection of clippings she had on her late husband.

  Bus had served the family name well. She was happy she’d sent him the five hundred dollars. She knew it wouldn’t last long. How her son liked to spend money! He could graciously protest all he wanted about the amount, but Gladys Canty could sense his delight.

  4

  I suppose that at a deeper level, our children, with their extremely bad self-images, were finally touched by the awareness that someone so poised and beautiful was performing enthusiastically for them.

  —W. ALAN CANTY, 1976,

  Therapeutic Peers, The Story of Project Indianwood

  Dawn Spens recognized the resonant voice on the telephone later that Wednesday afternoon.

  “Are you busy, Dawn?” he asked.

  She would have preferred to be finished for the day. She liked to get her dates over with early, shooting moves on the downtown businessmen who cruised the Corridor on their lunch hours. That left evenings for partying with John.

  But she began to pin the caller down to a price.

  “Oh, don’t worry about the money,” the trick said. “Just let me take care of that.”

  Repeatedly John had preached, “First, you take care of business,” but she sensed the date would pay, and probably pay well. Her customers tipped her more often than not.

  The trick agreed to meet her near the White Grove, an all-night diner only a few doors from where they had met. It was only a block from the apartment.

  Dawn Spens strolled to the rendezvous just after dark. She could have flagged several quick dates on the way to the White Grove. But this way there would be no hassles with the cops. The last thing she needed was to be busted again.

  The black Buick was waiting for her. Its engine hummed in a parking lot next to the diner, under an old sign for a defunct Chinese restaurant called Forbidden City.

  She could smell the car’s interior. It seemed immaculately groomed by a professional garage. They made small talk as the two of them drove to a nearby hotel.

  “So what kind of work do you do?”

  “I’m a doctor. Actually this is my lunch hour. I work afternoons over here in the Medical Center.”

  The big medical complex was five minutes away and included the Wayne State medical school and Harper-Grace and Detroit Receiving hospitals.

  Dawn anticipated the question a lot of tricks ask: “So how did you end up doing this?” Many men seemed to be as interested in why a woman sold herself as in the sexual pleasures she was selling. Her answer was fabricated and unlikely.

  “Actually, I’m from the suburbs, but my parents can’t send me to school. I’m just doing this for a while to get the money for college.”

  But it seemed to satisfy most tricks. At least they stopped asking questions.r />
  The query never came from the man in the Buick. She directed him to the Temple Hotel. The three-story brick residence recently had been painted and was in considerably better shape than most everything else in the Corridor. Two lock buzzers and an iron gate stood between them and the front desk.

  In the lobby, stubble-faced men sat on furniture covered with old bedspreads. The room smelled of ethyl alcohol—vapors from the men’s lungs as their bodies processed another day’s worth of liquor.

  They approached the hotel clerk, who booked his business behind a cashier’s cage of metal mesh and shatterproof glass. The trick paid five dollars for an hour in the small room with one bed, one table, one light, and one common bathroom down the hall.

  The date wanted what every whore knows as a “half and half,” fellatio followed by intercourse. After he undressed she held him between her thumb and fingers. What her mouth might not accomplish, her hand would. It sometimes went faster that way.

  When they began the second half of their arrangement, he was neither hurried nor forceful like many dates. He was rather ordinary, if there was such a thing in her business.

  He was quite pleased afterward.

  “Can I call you?” he said. “Can I see you again?”

  He handed her a hundred dollars—one hundred top dollars. Some Corridor hookers would work for as low as twenty dollars, and seventy-five dollars was a first-rate date. A hundred bucks transformed a Corridor whore into a call girl.

  The trick named Al was grinning again. At first she suspected he was high, but he smelled stone sober. That goofy grin, and he had a funny walk to go with it.

  He toddled like Charlie Chaplin as they walked out of the hotel.

  “It was as though he thought he was getting something over on somebody,” she said later.

  But what difference did it make? That was his problem.

  She looked at him with passive eyes. Of course she would see him again.