Are You a Mason?

In the hush of a marital interstice, Frank Perry—equal parts bon vivant and hapless flâneur—slips from his own threshold into a mirrored home, a trespass that almost lands him behind iron bars. To cloak the gaffe, he spins a glittering fib: the nocturnal misadventure was clandestine Masonic ritual, the sort of fraternal hocus-pocus his wife Helen has long coveted. Helen, effervescent with social ambition, trumpets the bogus initiation to her father, himself a counterfeit brotherhood member whose apron and handshake are as hollow as Frank’s. Thus three strata of deception interleave: a husband’s improvised lie, a wife’s yearning for bourgeois respectability, and a patriarch’s lifelong masquerade. The narrative corkscrews through drawing-room farce and bedroom brinkmanship, each new revelation tightening the vise of mutually assured embarrassment until the whole charade threatens to detonate in front of the lodge’s granite-faced aristocrats.