Masquerade

by Cauffiel, Lowell;

  Dawn helped her own cause by not letting her dates know she was an addict. Most Cass Corridor johns weren’t naive, and they knew a junkie worked at bargain prices. First she aimed for blood vessels in her hands, but in time they swelled. Then one of John’s friends offered to mark the vein in her groin with an injection. It became her favorite port of entry.

  That Sunday there was as much drug use as there was talk of cutting back. They replaced their planned tour of Walled Lake with a celebration of their dream home and business partnership. The party lasted well into the night.

  The evening ended at the Ford-Wyoming Drive In Theatre near an industrial corner of southwest Detroit. They parked the Escort among the pockmarked cars of teens and poor families beating the high price of moviegoing. They pushed down the front buckets and finished off the Asti in the backseat. They ran the last of the Dillies.

  Before they passed out, Fry caught the name of the movie. It was Fort Apache: The Bronx.

  8

  The last twenty-five years have seen the growth of tremendous popular interest in the field of psychology.

  —W. ALAN CANTY,

  Principles of Counseling and Psychotherapy

  Jan Canty stepped off the December 4 plane from Phoenix with a light step and an agranulocyte count at near normal. Al was waiting for her, grinning widely as she came up the ramp.

  “Look at the color back in your face,” he said excitedly. “You look ten years younger.”

  Jan Canty had much catching up to do. She’d let so much slide because of the mono. Her paperwork was piled up at home. And come Monday, she was anxious to get back on track in her postdoctoral program at the University Health Center in Detroit’s Medical Center.

  Her fellowship was the last phase of her education. She was grateful to be in a program that accepted only three new fellows a year from applicants nationwide. Her training was divided between counseling patients and working with family physicians affiliated with the Wayne State School of Medicine. She was refining her skills in psychotherapy and marital and family counseling.

  The program was run by Aaron L. Rutledge, a respected psychologist who used to write a weekly help column for the Detroit News. Jan Canty liked Dr. Rutledge’s sensible approach to the field. She was always impressed with his definition of professionalism.

  “You’re not a psychotherapist to your family and friends,” he’d say. “Leave it at the office. It’s not fair to you and it’s not fair to them. Turn it off at the end of the day and just be a spouse, a sister, a daughter.”

  It was good advice. It took a lot of mental energy to apply her skills. She had no desire to do a free workup on Al, or anybody else. That included herself. She was reasonably sure she hadn’t entered the field to exorcise her own demons. She often avoided telling strangers what she did for a living. People at parties sometimes got defensive.

  “I don’t want to be psychoanalyzed,” they’d say.

  “Don’t worry,” she’d say. “I don’t work for free.”

  And it was work. It was not a hobby. It was not a parlor game. Other than her theoretical discussions with her husband, she worked at leaving the mental tools of her trade at the office.

  Dr. Rutledge also had supervised Al in the early 1960s. It was just one of several parallels Jan had with her husband. She never really planned to follow W. Alan Canty’s career path. Over the years it just seemed to work out that way.

  In fact, before she met Al, she would have never thought a bachelor’s degree, let alone a doctorate or a big home in Grosse Pointe Park, was in her future. The part of town where she grew up just wasn’t known for producing scholars or socialites. Her native northwest Detroit neighborhood bore no resemblance to the affluent suburb known for its mansions along Windmill Pointe Drive. Still, Jan couldn’t imagine a better childhood than the one she had on Annchester Street.

  Jan Lucille had a twin sister and an older brother. Her parents staked out their share of modest postwar prosperity in a neighborhood where saplings lined the streets and the rows of redbrick bungalows went on forever. Her father’s demeanor was as steady as the salary he brought home each week as a products estimator for Ford Motor. Her mother practiced homemaking as an art form.

  There were kids everywhere on Annchester, and everyone knew each other. Jan lived right near her school. Her house was a popular stopover for friends. She smelled burning leaves every autumn and wheeled and dealed through several summers in an ongoing Monopoly tournament on a girlfriend’s porch. She didn’t date a lot as a teen but discovered love with a high school sweetheart.

  After graduation she felt lost. She was an A student but hadn’t applied to a university during her senior year. That was for the daughters of teachers, or the girls who lived in affluent Rosedale Park. Most of her girlfriends planned to marry or find jobs as secretaries. She took a job as one for a branch office of Western Michigan University. For two years she mulled over the idea of doing something more.

  Then in the summer of 1972 Jan heard from a friend about a Fisher Building psychologist who was looking for helpers in a therapy program he had developed for autistic children. He was hiring young women her age who could act in short, highly charged plays aimed at bringing the children out of their emotional shells. The job sounded appealing, but Jan took three months to call. She was surprised when the psychologist told her he was still looking for helpers.

  Alan Canty had a name for his therapy program—Project Indianwood. He offered Jan a job as an “Indian guide.” That’s what he called the half-dozen girls who were to put on the skits for the children. They rehearsed frequently in a room on another floor in the Fisher. But as it turned out, Jan wasn’t much of an actress. Both she and Al knew it, though he never once told her she wasn’t working out. Instead, Al gently steered her into office work, asking her to be the typist for Therapeutic Peers, the book he was writing on the project.

  Jan liked the bespectacled psychologist from the start. He was bright and quick. But he also had a rich streak of creativity—the kind of colorful imagination not often found in the scientific disciplines. She could also tell he was a romantic from some of the moving passages about the children in his book.

  His memory amazed her. Al dictated his book off the top of his head, and she typed the drafts. He never needed notes. Sometimes she made mistakes and lost pages around the office. At first she expected to be lectured about her errors. Instead he gave her gentle advice on the importance of not expecting perfection in everyone and everything. Soon, she found she could make suggestions for the manuscript. And her boss welcomed her ideas to improve his office files.

  “You’re really college material; you know that, don’t you?”

  Al told her that several times. Al made her feel good about herself.

  After nine months on the job, Jan was flattered when he asked her out. She was twenty-two and he was nearly forty. But he didn’t look a day over thirty. He was handsome in a distinguished way. His wavy blond hair fell just over his collar. He looked like a young British actor when he took off his black horn-rim glasses, and sat with his thumb at his chin, cradling a cigarette between his fingers.

  On their first date, however, she felt as though she had sneaked into a world she knew nothing about. He took her to a restaurant overlooking Lake St. Clair. She found it difficult to enjoy the view. All she could think about was her dress. She’d made it herself. She felt paralyzed by the prices on the menu. She’d never been in a restaurant where you didn’t pay at the front cash register.

  Al encouraged her to order an after-dinner drink. He suggested Galliano. It looked like olive oil and tasted as bad to her. She gulped it down to be done with it. On the way out, Al told her she looked as though she was going to get sick. Al was also perceptive. She ran into the bathroom and threw up. She felt guilty that all that money was going down the toilet.

  When Al Canty asked her out again, Jan knew he was an extraordinary man. His ability to overlook her shortcomings became one of hi
s most appealing qualities. Once, on a day at Metropolitan Beach with a girlfriend, she locked her keys in her car. She called Al, who was forty-five minutes away at the Fisher Building. He insisted on rescuing them.

  “We all make mistakes,” he said when he showed up with her extra set of keys. “I’ll see you tonight.”

  Al Canty seemed to have real direction in his life, she thought, both professionally and personally. He was established and working. Back then he had a house on Fisher Road in Grosse Pointe Farms. But he also had an endearing boyish quality. He nicknamed her Jan-Jan. She thought it cute, like the adolescent smile he got when he was embarrassed or when he was trying to hide a surprise.

  In time, Al explained to her how his first marriage had failed. He had no harsh words for Maggie, his ex-wife, who was ten years his senior. He still admired her intelligence and her administrative career at Wayne State. Their parting after nine years was mutual, he said. They just found they weren’t compatible. Jan thought it was refreshing to hear that from someone divorced only two years.

  In retrospect, Jan thought it clever how the psychologist prompted her to believe in her abilities. When she questioned whether she could handle university work, he suggested she try one class at a community college. One class turned into a full load. That turned into an apartment on the campus and a full academic scholarship to Wayne State.

  Jan decided she wasn’t going to let the most sensitive and supportive man she’d ever met get away. After nearly a year of dating, Al was hinting about commitment, talking about what kind of house they might like to live in.

  She deliberated about only one thing—their seventeen years’ difference in age. She tried to anticipate the scenario years later. One day she’d likely be a relatively young widow.

  “I never lost sight that in all probability I would one day be alone,” she later told a friend. “But I summed it up in my own mind by saying ten or twenty years with him is worth it, even if I’m alone the rest of my life.”

  One summer morning, when they were out for breakfast, she decided to propose. Somebody had to do it.

  “What do you think about us being married?”

  Al was speechless, but he had a look that said, “Well, when?”

  Jan took out her pocket calendar, picked up her fork, and stabbed it blindly onto the page.

  “How about September 28?” The year was 1974.

  “Sounds good to me,” he said.

  They went house shopping and discovered their big Tudor-style in Grosse Pointe Park. Technically, its architecture was that of an English country house. But most everyone called them Tudors in the Pointes. Al was delirious with the find, though she thought it too large. It did have all the qualities they wanted: Something to fix up. Something with a fireplace. Something with a home office for Al and his patients. Something with a garage for Al’s cars.

  Her admiration of Al and his field increased with the miles on her Volkswagen as she commuted to Wayne State. At first she wanted to write children’s books. Then, after reading The Magic Years, she became interested in child psychology. Finally, hearing Al talk about his practice piqued her interest in adult psychology and marriage counseling.

  She plunged into her studies. They nicknamed one of the bedrooms upstairs “the dissertation room,” converting it into her study area. She spent years up there with her papers, her typewriter, and her bookshelves. Al was usually seeing patients well after dark anyway.

  Her husband was her role model back then. “I just hope one day I can be as good as him,” she told her mother once. “If I could be half the psychologist he is, I think I’d be satisfied.”

  Al’s interest in Project Indianwood waned soon after they married. He said he was burned out after nearly twenty years in the field. He hired young professional actresses and recorded the plays on videotape. He sent the tapes to ten autistic programs around the country to be field-tested. He said he’d find his satisfaction in the fact that the work was continuing elsewhere with the videotapes and the techniques he taught through the book.

  Therapeutic Peers was published in 1976, and Al gave several lectures to child psychology students at universities, explaining his techniques. There were only a handful of such talks. But she was impressed with his command of the language and his confidence in the subject matter. She carried in the books, selling them to eager students. She knew nothing about book publishing but knew the book was important to him, and to her. Its royalties were paying for her postgraduate tuition, he said.

  Al was a superb listener as well as lecturer. He was eager to hear about her classes. Often their discussions were held on their walks to nearby Lake St. Clair along Windmill Pointe Drive. The half-hour strolls just before bed were often the only time they had to really talk on most workdays. Even in winter they’d bundle up and go.

  Sometimes he spun detailed monologues about his field. He was well read in the history of psychology and its emergence as a profession in the 1930s. He told her how it grew dramatically following World War II, when the Veterans Administration began providing help to returning servicemen. Most of the men did not have the medical problems that required a psychiatrist, he said. They just needed help to adjust emotionally and socially following the war. Al credited that era with lifting the stigma and mystery that so long had surrounded psychotherapy. Counselors and therapists became the alternative to the parish priest or well-intentioned but often misguided friends that troubled people had sought out in the past.

  As Jan’s sophistication in the field began to approach her husband’s, she filled him in on new treatment methods. He became less a role model and more a colleague. She developed her own conceptions of her work.

  Sometimes she and Al debated theory, but usually in a noncompetitive way. Al could not say enough good things about Albert Ellis. The psychologist had helped charge the sexual revolution with such books as Sex Without Guilt and The Case for Sexual Liberty. But Al admired him as the leading proponent of rational-emotive therapy, or RET, one of the cognitive approaches in their field. In RET, the therapist helps a patient look at his belief structure in the present. For example, if a person feels the world is supposed to be a fair place, they will suffer when anything unfair happens. RET prompts a patient to change his thinking: The world is not always fair; therefore I can expect it to be unfair at times to me.

  Like Ellis, Al preferred short-term therapy. He didn’t believe most patients required years of analysis on the couch, as required by more classical techniques. Al had attended a number of Ellis workshops and knew the psychologist personally. At a conference they attended several years back in New York, Al took a lot of pride in introducing her to the influential author.

  Jan Canty, however, was drawn to the psychodynamic, long-term approach to therapy. She thought a patient’s history and unconscious played important roles in behavior and perception. Dream interpretation, slips of the tongue, and other dynamics below a person’s awareness level had to be examined along with conscious beliefs. The discovery of hidden drives of the psyche, she argued, yielded the kind of long-term changes most patients wanted.

  On one point they always agreed: If the patient got better, what difference did it make? Their theoretical debates often ended that way. And their professional differences never stopped them from discussing their field with brainstorming passion.

  Other nights they just got silly walking to the lake. Al liked to playact sometimes. He would assume the role of a snob, criticizing the sprawling estates of their neighbors along Lake St. Clair.

  “You know, that one would look reasonable if only they would put a flagstone sidewalk in,” Al would quip, pointing to a forty-room mansion.

  “Then why don’t you tell them?” she’d say. “You know, just go up and knock on the door and tell them.”

  The psychological horseplay sometimes sparked romantic moods. They’d return from one of the walks and make love. Al was always gentle, always patient with her on such nights.

  On seve
ral strolls they found themselves talking about their differences in age, how they might be considered an unlikely pair. The subject had come up again recently.

  “You know, one day, Jan-Jan, you’ll be alone,” he told her on one night. “If that day happens, given the age difference, I definitely want you to remarry.”

  Jan said such talk was a bit premature. Al’s hair did look more grayish red than blond these days, and his hips were spreading with middle age. She wished he’d take time to exercise and not eat so much on the run. But the only thing she could see ailing in Al Canty were the patches of psoriasis that troubled him around his elbows and scalp.

  “Nevertheless. I don’t want you ever to have second thoughts because we were so happy. I don’t ever want you to be alone on my account.”

  “Al, don’t be silly,” she said, hugging his arm as they walked.

  Their other routine was dinner every Tuesday at an Italian restaurant called the Blue Pointe. It was in its sixth year as a standing date, first nurtured by her graduate school schedule and her work at the nearby Center Point Crisis Center. Al was like that. Once something was established in his schedule, he didn’t budge from it. He could be awfully predictable.

  Two days after she returned from Arizona they met for dinner. Al was late—delayed, he said, by business at the Fisher. He always kept her waiting at the Blue Pointe. Sometimes she wondered if he even planned tardiness into his routine. Al ordered a Bloody Mary. He didn’t drink often. Usually it just made him sleepy. But this evening he was pretty animated. He was still enthused about her recovery and return from Phoenix.

  “You are looking so healthy, so good. You know you have been pushing yourself too hard, and I don’t want to see you get sick again.”

  Jan agreed but wished Dr. Canty would take his own advice.

  Well, she thought, in another six months they could both ease up. She would be done with her fellowship. Then they could realize their long-term plans. They wanted to practice together in the Fisher Building. Then the “Detroit Guidance Center” sign on Al’s office door would take on some significance. Since his father’s death, Al was the only psychologist in the suite.