Are You a Mason?

Summary

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.

Synopsis

Frank Perry's wife Helen is away visiting her mother, and he uses this "free time" for a night of drinking at a nightclub. Unfortunately, when he tries to return home, he enters the wrong house and is nearly arrested When Helen comes back he tells her that the "incident" was actually an initiation rite of the Masons, knowing that his wife has always wanted him to join the group. She excitedly tells her father about Frank's becoming a Mason, since her father is also a Mason. What neither she nor Frank know is that her father has actually been doing the same thing Frank is--pretending to be a Mason when he actually isn't. Complications ensue.