Masquerade

by Cauffiel, Lowell;

  “I’ve got to distribute some more,” Canty said. “I’ve been awfully busy working on another book. I’ve been so darn busy my body chemistry has been out of whack lately.”

  Canty appeared so straight, so established, Willing thought. He had imagined Canty living like him, among artists and students in the city’s cultural center north of the Cass Corridor.

  Canty explained what supervision entailed. They would have a forty-five minute session once a month. They would discuss professional approach, specific cases, and personal problems affecting his work.

  Then Canty handed him two copies of Therapeutic Peers. Willing could tell the psychologist was flattered.

  “You know, when you first came in here I was going to try and tell you no—politely. But I’m real interested in your work with children. I can’t do it myself anymore. It’s just too draining.”

  Canty said he had ceased Indianwood therapy sessions in the Fisher several years back. But he had made videotapes of the psychodramas, however. They were being field-tested in children’s programs around the country.

  “I can’t do it myself anymore,” Canty said. “But I’m going to try and keep in contact with the children through you. What do you think you can pay me?”

  Willing already knew a supervisor received a fee. But he was embarrassed. His day camp job paid little, and he was barely getting by as it was.

  “I have very little money. I could, uh, scrape ten dollars together.”

  “Fine. But just so you know, I normally charge twenty dollars for fifteen minutes of consultation. Normally you would pay sixty dollars.”

  They shook on it. When he left, Bob Willing felt as though it was his lucky day.

  33

  Cheryl Krizanovic had entertained a slim hope that she might win back John Fry by moving into the Homewood Manor. Instead she’d only made herself more miserable.

  As the days passed, she became certain her old boyfriend was thoroughly bewitched by his young whore from the suburbs. Cheryl had never seen John Fry treat another human being so well. She was jealous of all the attention he gave Dawn.

  One night when she and Dawn were alone, Dawn complained about their lifestyle. She said she was growing sick of the prostitution, the drugs, and John’s temper.

  “I can get enough money from Al to leave John. Al says John’s a bad influence.”

  “So then, why don’t you leave him? You should leave him.”

  “But I love John,” she said.

  Cheryl wondered why Dawn even bothered to tell her. She figured Dawn was just showing off. Compared to my four years with John Fry, Cheryl thought, this girl is living a fairy tale. She still was virtually unscathed. Cheryl had seen John slap her only twice, when she got right up in his face and downright mouthy. If Cheryl would have tried that, she would have ended up hospitalized.

  In fact, John had put Cheryl in a hospital bed for six weeks nearly two years ago. Someone had told him Cheryl was shooting dope behind his back, holding out on him. He caught up with her on Second Avenue, then marched her behind the White Grove. There were only two punches, one to her side and an uppercut under her ribs. He had more abuse planned for her at a friend’s house, but she started throwing up.

  Doctors discovered two sets of broken ribs and a shattered spleen. A surgeon removed the organ. Cheryl showed Dawn Spens the long scar on her side.

  “All over a couple of packs of dope,” Cheryl said.

  But Cheryl also owed John Fry for saving a limb, her right leg, the time an abscess turned into gangrene. He’d always kept her guessing with those kind of contradictions. John didn’t force the tattoo “Lucky” on her left thigh, but he vowed he’d “cut it out” if she ever left. He used to warm her heart by talking about honesty, but he never let her forget it when she told him she’d been raped by one of his friends. He once saved her from a fatal overdose but then told his brother he was going to put her in a garbage dumpster if she died. He convinced her to leave the only man who she guessed really cared about her, then he left her for Dawn when she did.

  The man’s name was Dale McMasters. He picked her up nearly two years ago while she was hitchhiking to the Cass Corridor from their old place off Michigan Avenue. Cheryl told him she was “a social worker and sex therapist.” He laughed and told her he went by the name of Frank. He was in his early thirties and was hauling rigs out of Dearborn between stays at his home in northern Michigan.

  The meeting started a friendship, one she kept concealed for months from John. Frank was the first man she ever met that didn’t want something from her. When he found out she was a prostitute he said, “I don’t pay for it,” but he offered her money so she could rest from the streets. He said he was a former addict and wanted to help her get off drugs.

  At first she and John played the brother and sister routine. Cheryl let John think Frank was a regular trick. But John didn’t like him.

  “Twiggy, end this,” he kept saying.

  Then Frank McMasters befriended John Fry. He had them as guests in his house in northern Michigan—in Alanson, near Petoskey. He wanted to help them both kick their habits, but it had never worked.

  Cheryl Krizanovic knew Frank McMasters had fallen in love with her, but the big trucker had given up long ago. Twice she’d left John and stayed with Frank up north a few days. He never took advantage of her. She found some peace in the Lake Michigan surf and the still northern nights. She spent hours watching the water off the long pier in Petoskey.

  But inevitably John Fry came begging, promising to get clean. They always ended up high and back in the Motor City. Frank finally became disgusted with the routine. She hadn’t seen him in nearly a year.

  Now Cheryl knew only one way to deal with her resentments. She turned as many tricks as she could snare and shot the profits into her veins as fast as she could score. By February, even John Fry appeared alarmed. One night he called Frank McMasters in Alanson.

  “Frank,” he said. “I know you had feelings for Cheryl, man. It’s over between me and her. She’s killing herself down here. How would you like to come and get her?”

  Frank said he would think about it.

  Dr. Al Miller, meanwhile, had an open wallet for Dawn Spens. He continued urging her not to turn tricks on the streets. When she complained she had to make money somehow, his payments increased. He wanted her out of the Corridor. John Fry bragged to fellow addicts that she could squeeze her sugar daddy for a half a grand at a time.

  “I think he felt guilty that he’d almost cost Dawn her fuckin’ leg,” John later told one. “He was starting to get really possessive and protective of her. Didn’t bother me a bit. He could be possessive and protective all he wanted—for one hour a day.”

  Cheryl Krizanovic wondered how long the doctor could hold out. He must not have been hurting too bad yet. He’d bought himself a new car, a 1984 Buick Regal. The color was black. “A royal ride for a royal trick,” Cheryl quipped. His daily visits were more predictable than the Detroit bus schedules. But he never came on Sundays.

  One day Dawn asked him why. Al said he often had business in Port Huron that day, and if not, he visited his mother. Mother Miller was old, lived alone, and could barely walk, he said.

  “I’m all she has in Detroit,” he said. “And she’s virtually blind.”

  John Fry was shooting himself sightless with mixed jive. He spent days at a time in the Homewood. If he wasn’t in his own apartment, he was with other addicts down the hall. Cheryl noticed he had lost a lot of his swagger since his brother’s death. With her and Dawn in and out between tricks, the doctor showing up, and John squabbling about money, life in apartment 202 was suited for a study of combat stress.

  Often the only order in the day was Al’s visit. Everyone became civilized so he could relax with his newspaper, drink his special blend, and have his little chats with Dawn. About once a week, if he was lucky, Dawn said, he got a blow job.

  But Dr. Miller represented only an hour in a twenty-four-hour day
. The rest of the time was divided between bitching and drug-induced apathy.

  The routine changed for ten days when Cheryl was jailed on outstanding prostitution warrants. But after her release, she tangled with a neighborhood junkie over a pack of dope. She had survived the worst of her heroin withdrawal in custody, only to come out with plans of starting again.

  John Fry called Frank McMasters.

  “Frank,” he pleaded. “She’s virtually clean, mon. I’m telling you, mon, she’s clean. Can you come and get her?”

  Frank said he’d think about it.

  The day after she was released from jail, Cheryl Krizanovic complained to Dr. Al Miller on his visit that she wasn’t feeling well. She had missed her period. Her abdomen was swollen.

  “I don’t have the money to go to a doctor, Al. Can you tell me if I’m pregnant?”

  “Well, I don’t know about that, but let’s see.”

  Cheryl was about to strip when he told her just to lie down on the couch. He poked around on her abdomen with his fingers. Only a lab test could tell for sure, he said. When she left the apartment with John she was convinced he wasn’t a doctor.

  “A doctor would go up inside you, John,” she said. “He’d feel around.”

  A week later she would be hospitalized for a severe case of gonorrhea, but not before Frank McMasters showed up at the Homewood Manor unannounced at four in the morning. It was the day before Valentine’s Day, and he was on his way to Pennsylvania to visit relatives. Then he planned to return home to Alanson.

  “Don’t argue with me, Cheryl, but you’re goin’ with me,” he said. “Pack your things.”

  Cheryl was never so happy to see him. They spent a day in Pennsylvania, then drove back to the north. She asked Frank to take her to Lake Michigan on their way to Alanson.

  “But it’s the middle of February, Cheryl.”

  He drove to the Petoskey pier anyway. It jutted a quarter mile into the bay. Cheryl jumped out of the car and ran the best she could with her swollen tummy. The pier was covered with ice and the temperature was nearly zero.

  When she reached the end, Cheryl let the horizon fill both edges of her peripheral vision. The lake was frozen. But Cheryl Krizanovic wasn’t complaining. She held up her arms, gave a shout to the big lake, and borrowed a deep breath from the clean northern wind.

  34

  The child now begins to react to, and interact with, the mother and to experiment with her reactions to his behavior. His ever-increasing attempts at interaction are based on his past experience, and the positive or negative feelings which have resulted.

  —W. ALAN CANTY,

  Principles of Counseling and Psychotherapy

  Gladys Canty had thought that the days of being her son’s banker had stopped a couple of years ago. She was troubled when she found out otherwise one day in late February.

  Buster dropped by in a rush, saying he needed nine hundred dollars. He needed nine hundred dollars right away. He had a cash flow problem. The shortage had been caused, he said, by the Wayne County Circuit Court. They owed him money for his case evaluations.

  “They haven’t paid me in a couple of years. Ma, they owe me a bunch.”

  “Oh, Bus, how come?”

  “The county is in dire straits. You know that, Ma. You’ve read about it. They’re having payless paydays. You know how it is with a bureaucracy.”

  Yes she did, but she also knew about her son’s ways with the money. She had often warned him that he lived beyond his means. Repeatedly, in the years after he had remarried, she had bailed him out with checks in five figures. Their disagreements on money had reoccurred with the predictability of a dunning notice that kept arriving in the mail.

  Bus always called his requests “loans.” But he never paid her back. Of course, she never pestered him for payment. She had plenty of money. It was the principle of the thing.

  She sometimes wondered where he got that streak of irresponsibility. She’d noticed it in several areas of his life over the years. She and Al Sr. had done their best to give him the most progressive upbringing available. When he was a baby, they even wrote away to Washington, D.C., for books from the government on child rearing. The pamphlets covered everything from health to discipline.

  “I was good about telling him when I was proud of him and when I wasn’t,” she would later recall.

  Early on, Gladys Canty improvised a way to let her son know when he was being good or bad. She and Bus found the expression together in a children’s book she was reading to him one night in his preschool years. The book talked about a boy who could “stand tall.”

  When he was bad she would say, “Oh, Buster, you weren’t standing tall then.”

  He picked right up on the expression. When he knew his behavior was unacceptable, he’d come to her saying, “Well, Mommy, I guess I wasn’t standing tall when I did that.”

  But her son also let her know when he’d been good. He used to throw his little shoulders back, sport a big smile, and practically march into the room.

  “I was standing very tall, wasn’t I, Mommy,” he’d say.

  As he grew, she and Al Sr. sometimes disagreed on methods. She worried about him when he wanted to play out in the neighborhood, or stay out past dark. Al Sr. was more permissive.

  “You don’t understand,” her husband would say. “Boys have to do that. You don’t understand, you’re not a boy.”

  Al Sr. himself was not a punctual man. Often he would sleep in on weekdays, not rising until well after he should have been at work. Sometimes he didn’t get up until noon. She often found herself at the foot of the stairs shouting time bulletins through the morning. Often she would be stewing.

  “It used to bother me greatly,” she later complained. “I took my responsibility very seriously. And I suppose I was irritated because I was an early riser and he was asleep when he should have been up doing his chores.”

  Still, she couldn’t complain about her husband as a provider. He let Gladys amass quite a nest egg for her retirement. When she and her husband were both working, Alan Sr. insisted she bank every dime of her salary for the future. Those savings went untapped for years. In fact, she and Al Sr. often went without. Much of her husband’s salary went to Alan Jr.’s education.

  It was more expensive than they anticipated, again because of her son’s inability to discipline himself. First he enrolled in Hillsdale College, a small school three hours west of Detroit. But he flunked out after a year. He complained he didn’t like being away from home in a small, conservative city. Then he explored the idea of being an osteopath, visiting a school Al Sr. recommended in Kansas City. He returned saying the place was not for him. Finally, he decided he’d enroll at Wayne University, then a budding urban college.

  He began in liberal arts, then became enchanted by the theater. It seemed a natural progression to her. In his teens they had season tickets to a theater and opera series. In high school he’d played the lead in The Royal Family, his high school’s senior play. The part was the extent of his extracurricular activities in high school, and he studied it with a passion. She helped him with the lines. Sometimes he sang around the house. His voice was rich, but always about a half step off-key.

  At Wayne he dove into theater with vigor. He spent hours hanging around the Bonstelle Theatre. He couldn’t say enough about James Dean, his favorite actor. He took up smoking, holding his cigarette like the young star, but he never inhaled. He dressed like James Dean, wore his hair like James Dean, and mimicked James Dean’s lines at the dinner table.

  Al Sr., however, thought his son was making a chancy investment of his time and energy.

  “Alan, if you want to go into acting, fine,” he said. “But you have to have something else. Acting can be so—temporary. Take some education classes, at least. At least you’ll have something to fall back on.”

  Bus took his advice, but “something” was a long time coming. He received his bachelor’s in psychology at twenty-six, his master’s a
t twenty-eight, and his Ph.D. at thirty-five. Al Sr. paid for the entire journey, not to mention a host of miscellaneous living expenses.

  Sometimes Gladys Canty thought she’d become so protective of her own money because of all those costly years with Bus. She’d sewn her holdings into CDs in banks around Detroit and Grosse Pointe. She hadn’t driven a car in years, so now she depended on her son to shuttle the money from bank to bank, reinvesting the certificates as they matured.

  Gladys Canty also had put Al Jr.’s name as a coholder on all of her largest accounts, as well as on the title to her house. She wanted her son to have the right of survivorship in the event of her demise.

  Bus had been helpful along the way. He’d passed on sound advice on several investments from professionals at the Fisher Building. She only wished he could be more diligent about his own budget. He reminded her of an adolescent with an unlimited allowance. It used to irk her when he’d get a wedding or birthday invitation from someone he hadn’t seen in years.

  “I sent them a check for $100,” he’d say proudly.

  “Why, Buster, it doesn’t call for that kind of gift.”

  “Ma, let me do it the way I want to,” he’d snap back.

  Now he needed $900. She thought of the new black Buick Regal he’d bought recently, and the cleaning lady Bus and Jan had coming to the house twice a week. She figured the housekeeper was worth $320 a month alone. They’d argued about that before.

  “Ma, you don’t understand,” her son would say. “That’s our lifestyle.”

  The dispute would continue along these lines:

  “Oh, Bus, you’re living beyond your means.”

  “Do you realize how much money I make, Ma?”

  “Then why can’t you meet your expenses?”

  “Do you have any idea what my expenses are at the Fisher Building?”

  “Bus, I think I do.”

  Then he would angrily say, “Forget it. I’ll get it someplace else.”