Sybil Exposed

by Nathan, Debbie

  The Masons left the farm in spring 1928 to enroll Shirley in kindergarten. The Adventists had their own school, which all their children were supposed to attend, to protect them from what the Adventists called the “polluting, corrupting” influence of secular education. Virtually all parents supported the denominational facility, but not the Masons: For reasons unknown, they chose public school for Shirley. They may have felt they could not afford the church’s modest tuition. More likely, they were venting their own conflicts about Seventh-Day Adventism through their daughter.13

  Shirley’s matriculation took the Masons out of the chicken house and back to town, where Mattie had not only her nice furnishings but also her women’s magazines. She had subscriptions to Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping. The magazines’ lavishly illustrated pages celebrated the latest in home appliances, interior decorating, and the season’s hats from Paris and New York. And there was more. They carried short fiction with seductive teasers on the cover: “Another Glamorous Story of the Theater by Booth Tarkington,”

  “A New Hollywood Series by Frederick Collins.” These stories, with their focus on actresses, vanity, and romance, were poison for Adventists.14 Mattie knew the faith’s warnings about such material but could not help loving it. She read even on Saturday and tried to keep her habit under wraps.

  Shirley knew, and she had her own secrets. On Saturdays she stared at her paper dolls, wondering: Is it OK to dress them on the Sabbath?15 She certainly couldn’t ask, especially not on the sacred day of the week. So she only thought about doll clothes. But angels could read minds. According to Adventist theology, they took information about people’s bad ideas to Heaven, where—as one of Shirley’s children’s storybooks warned—they jotted the information into a holy record book. Shirley squirmed.

  She felt bad about other things, including Mary Mason, her paternal grandmother. Mary was an easygoing, affectionate woman who had helped care for Shirley when she was a baby but suffered a stroke when her granddaughter was four, and by then also had cancer of the cervix. Grandma Mary sometimes lived on the second floor of the Mason house with Grandpa Neill. Her room was filled with fascinating objects: paintings she had done on panes of glass; little pots she’d helped Shirley pinch from clay dug out of the riverbank; big, farm-supply-store calendars with paintings of cows. But as the cancer worsened, Mattie began timing Shirley’s visits to conserve her mother-in-law’s ebbing strength. She seldom allowed Shirley’s to stay upstairs for more than half an hour.16

  After Grandma Mary died in 1931, Shirley stopped eating and lost weight. The third grader appeared distracted in class. When the teacher called on her, she sometimes seemed in a daze. Her teachers noticed but hardly intervened. As children they, too, had seen death, and adults seldom asked them how it felt. Shirley had no brothers or sisters, and experts had been warning teachers for decades that children with no siblings were peculiar: they tended to social awkwardness and they played with imaginary companions. As one psychologist put it, being an only child was a “disease in itself.” And Shirley was mollycoddled by her parents, the teachers thought. Her mother held her hand and walked her to school every day, even though school was just across the street from home. Leave it to the Masons, the teachers huffed, to aggravate Shirley’s “disease” of only childhood.17

  Her parents did dote on her. Walter was a man who rarely talked, but like his daughter, he was gentle and artistic. Shirley loved how he taught her to use hammers and saws, and how in the dead of Minnesota winter, he dressed her in little boys’ overalls for warmth and called her Mike. When Mattie didn’t have the blues she and Shirley often played games. Mattie had not outgrown her own childhood love for dolls, and she often compared her daughter to them. “Oh you’re so cute, Peggy Ann,” she would say to Shirley, laughingly referring to a very popular fourteen-inch girl with a winsome face and molded Dutch-boy hair topped with a bow. Delighted, Shirley would laugh back.

  During her periods of “nervous” energy, Mattie loved to mimic people in town. She could do a perfect rendition of distant cousin Grace Sorenson, who attended the Adventist church. She could parrot the squawks of demanding customers on Main Street and the long-suffering sighs of the salesclerks. Shirley imitated her mother’s imitations. “That’s not very nice!” Walter would protest. But he laughed anyway. Copycatting people’s voices was great fun, and Shirley had picked up her mother’s gift for it.

  Then Mattie would get the blues. In the living room she would obsessively polish her cut glass and Haviland dishware, turning the pieces over and over, murmuring about their beauty. When Shirley interrupted to play the Peggy game, Mattie kept talking about dishes.

  “Look at the cat!” Shirley would implore, and Mattie would snap. “I can’t look at the cat. I’ve got work to do. Who do you think would get things done and meals ready on time if I stood around looking at the cat?” Shirley would feel enraged, with an overwhelming urge to smash her mother’s glassware. But she stayed quiet and docile. For Adventists it was a sin to be angry.18

  Shirley had few friends, but there was one boy she adored—Bobby Moulton. Skinny and snaggletoothed, Bobby was pitied by other children because his mother was ill and he had to push his baby sister’s stroller through the neighborhood. But he and Shirley were kindred spirits in creativity. At age eight Bobby was tap dancing professionally. He loved dolls and doll clothes, and could sew costumes for Shirley’s Peggys and Peggy Anns. He made little playhouses out of wood and cardboard, and recruited Shirley’s dolls to stage Shakespearean dramas in the sunroom.

  And there was a pretty little girl named Anita Weeks, who was almost three years younger than Shirley. She was the only other Adventist in public school besides Shirley, and the two girls saw each other in church.19

  ____________

  The Second Coming seemed nigh to the congregation after the stock market crashed in October 1929. Walter lost his contracting business then and felt lucky to have an $18.50-a-week job as a hardware store clerk on Main Street. Not long after, the Dust Bowl blew out of the Dakotas, blackening the Minnesota sky even by day. Soon the countryside was withered with drought.

  Desperate to make ends meet, Mattie took in a $12-a-week boarder, an elderly man from church who was so sick that he needed her help eating and using the toilet. He died in 1935. So did Walter’s father, Neill, who had spent his final years rejoicing in international financial collapse and its prophetic relationship to the End Time. After his death Mattie accepted more boarders. The Masons, once one of Dodge Center’s “best” families, were financially strapped and practically running a hotel.

  Things had gotten so bad that Walter stopped tithing to his church—a major travesty for Adventists. And Shirley was still kept from Adventist schooling. After local Adventist children completed their grade-school studies in town, they graduated to a boarding academy over a hundred miles away and only came back to Dodge Center on weekends. Shirley’s parents did not want her to join them. The plan was for her to receive twelve years of secular education in Dodge Center.20 That decision was hard on Shirley, and as the years went by she developed severe problems at school and at home.

  She moped about how Adventism was separating her from her classmates. Her faith absented her from the Sunday schools that everyone talked about, and it kept her from birthday parties on Friday nights or Saturdays. Even at festivities held on other days, she couldn’t dance or play checkers or cards. Because Adventism banned pork, she had to skip after-school wienie roasts—important social occasions for the town’s young people. The other kids knew about her strict diet and the fake, vegetarian “meat.” “Cow food,” they taunted, and called Shirley the “White Jew.”

  She was angry with her religion but fearful about her ire and worried that her hostility was Satan’s work. She tried to broach her concerns to her father. But Walter, a man of few words and a workaholic, never wanted to talk about anything, much less religion.

  Her mother made things worse. If Shirley came home f
rom school looking sad, Mattie would quiz her insistently until Shirley confessed about an invitation she’d had to turn down because of Adventist Saturday. Mattie would blow up. “They could have had the party another day!” she would rage. “They knew you couldn’t do this. So why did they even ask you?” Then her tone would grow softer, tender. “We’ll do something nice,” she would tell Shirley. “Just you and Mamma. Mamma loves you. You and Mamma don’t care what the kids do. They don’t count, anyhow.” And she would take Shirley to Main Street to buy a new doll for her ever expanding collection. Shirley craved Mattie’s affection. But accepting it meant separating herself even further from her classmates.

  At some point, Shirley decided it was her own bad character, not her faith, that distanced her from her peers. “I don’t care,” she told herself. “I don’t want to belong, anyway.” She turned to Adventism for solace and strived to be “letter perfect.” She spent additional time studying religious literature, looking for reasons to believe. She entered reveries, memorizing page upon page of Bible verses, trying to please God with sacred labors.21

  But what she really loved was drawing, painting, and stitching clothes for her dolls. She had more than fifty of them by the time she finished grade school, perched on shelves in her bedroom and on the window ledges of the sunroom. As she played with them she made up stories, with herself as heroine. She would imagine that one of her relatives secretly entered her artwork into a contest at the Dodge County fair, and that she had swept the competition, winning first, second, and third place, as well as honorable mention! She dreamed of being asked to come to the fair and accept her ribbons, and declining because pride was sinful. Often she became so absorbed in these gorgeous imaginings that she forgot what was happening around her.22

  Things had long been difficult for Shirley, but they started going very wrong in sixth grade. Perhaps influenced by increasing Adventist anxiety about the Depression and the approaching end of the world, she began feeling odd anxieties about time. Often when she sat down to play with her dolls or to draw, she got nervous, thinking she wouldn’t be finished when Mother ordered her out for a walk. On Main Street she fretted over and over that the Masons’ house, a block away, would burn down or blow away, destroying her playthings. She told Mattie about her fears. Mattie said they were silly because toys were just toys and could be replaced. Besides, when Shirley grew up, she would really have things to worry about.

  Then her body stopped working. She got colds all the time and felt congested, listless, and weak. Worse, she began squinting uncontrollably. She started staying home from school, and her report cards were flecked with marks tallying her absences. Her parents bought her glasses, but the tic got so bad that Walter threatened to take Shirley out of school entirely. Desperate to stop the squinting, she discovered that it got better if she used her hands to trace in the air pictures she was seeing in her head.

  And another, stranger problem developed—intense phobia about certain types of print. Whenever she picked up a newspaper, Shirley would become so frightened that she almost passed out. Worried about seeing her “scared stiff” and “acting funny,” Mattie and Walter canceled their subscription to the Minneapolis Journal. For good measure, they also stopped the Ladies’ Home Journal and Walter’s subscription to Fortune. No matter. Shirley began picking up magazines in other people’s trash and hiding them in the back of her closet. Alone in the house, she took magazines out, counted them and secretly read them, then hid them before Mattie returned.

  She probably read as many magazines in secret as she ever had when they were allowed—including, possibly, the April 1935 issue of Fortune. It devoted twenty-four densely printed pages to an article titled “The Nervous Breakdown.” The piece included an explanation of Sigmund Freud’s theories of hysteria, along with a description of what happened to the typical person with the disorder: “He may seem to lose his sight or his hearing. He may make endless quick repetitive movements with one set of facial muscles… . His arm or leg may be functionally paralyzed or it may lose all sensation.”23

  After reading, Shirley always scrubbed her hands with hot water, then with the Lava soap Dad used to remove paint and grease from his skin. Then twice again with hot water. Then a final, cold rinse. Despite her furious scrubbing, she still worried that she was infected with venereal disease or cancer from handling the magazine pages. She would show the tiniest spot to Mattie and ask if it was serious. “Of course not,” Mattie would answer brusquely, but Shirley started peering at her hands every few minutes. The looking made her more anxious. The anxiety led to more looking. “For Heaven’s sake girl,” her mother would snap, and threaten that if Shirley didn’t stop this disturbing habit, “I’ll do something so you won’t have any hands to look at.”

  Shirley started sneaking looks, with a lightning quick, palms-up gesture she hoped no one would notice. Sometimes, when the urge overwhelmed her, she would leave the room her parents were in so she could “look and look and look.” Mattie and Walter knew what she was doing. She started experiencing the trance-like feelings again, a sense of “going blank.” She would come to with the sound of her parents’ worried scolding.

  She began to get creeping, tingling feelings in an arm and a leg. They radiated to one side of her face, affecting her vision. She would look at someone and not see them unless she swiveled her face around. And she would twitch and lurch crazily, heading for a door but ending up at a window. She was terrified by these “spells,” as she called them. When she got one she would lie in bed and fall into a leaden, hours-long sleep.24

  Mattie took Shirley to see Dodge Center’s family physician, Dr. Otoniel Flores. A stocky man with a cigar constantly hanging from his mouth, he was a Central American immigrant who had a kindly manner and was beloved in the community. Dr. Flores determined that Shirley was anemic, and he gave her injections of extract of hogs’ liver, a newly developed medication for treating the problem. By summer after the sixth grade, the tingling, blindness, lurching, and headaches were gone. But the hand-looking and finger tracing persisted.25

  Shirley was so ashamed that she became reclusive. Mattie would drag her to classmates’ birthday parties and she would enter a daze, failing to answer when talked to. Back home she sat alone on the porch steps, leaning her head on her knees, pretending she was Vicky, her imaginary friend from London with the big, Catholic family. Or she lay in bed inventing complicated, heroic scenarios with herself as a doctor who specialized in hearing problems, and as a teacher of children at a school for the deaf. She was the best teacher the school had ever had, and she performed brilliant feats of instruction, silently miming painting lessons to the children and mounting their art in prize-winning exhibits.

  Shirley spun detail after detail, remaining awake all night, not sure what was true and what was invented. As morning dawned and she emerged from her reverie, she wondered why she felt so terribly blue, so unlike other kids. She prayed to God for relief, promising to be a good girl if He would only cure her.26

  He didn’t, and she became angry, not just at God but at her mother. She began bickering and fighting with Mattie, though she knew Adventist children were supposed to love their parents and never disobey them. As a result of this sinful behavior, it seemed that God exacted revenge. Her mother never found out about Shirley’s fiction secret, but she discovered something far worse. When Shirley was in her senior year in high school, Mattie caught her in bed, under the sheets, with a hairbrush, masturbating. She marched her daughter to Dr. Flores’s office for diagnosis and treatment.

  Though no records of the visit survive, Dr. Flores probably did the same tests on Shirley’s blood that he had in the past, to see if the cause of her strange behavior might be a recurrence of anemia. In all likelihood the studies came out negative. According to Flores’s daughter, Virginia Cravens, who was interviewed almost sixty years later, Flores ultimately decided that Shirley’s problem was loneliness. So he asked Virginia, who was sixteen years old at the time, to help
out. She was already assisting her father on weekends, taking temperatures and giving injections, and now Flores assigned Virginia to make therapeutic house calls to the Mason home once a week. Her task was to play cards with Shirley, make chitchat, and try to be her confidant.

  When Virginia visited the Masons, Mattie puttered around, desperately plying the two girls with fresh-baked cookies to create a semblance of sociability. Shirley would not touch the food; Virginia gobbled it. Shirley was remote and sluggish, perking up only when the conversation turned to her art work. She conversed a little then, but she never asked her visitor about her own life. She would not let Virginia touch her dolls.

  After a few weeks Virginia decided she could not stand this sullen and self-absorbed girl. Still, she had a job to do. She knew perfectly well why she was feigning friendship with Shirley—her father had explained everything in medical terms, and she told herself she was performing valuable work with her house calls. She pasted a smile on her face, and when she visited Shirley she never ever mentioned the solitary, secret vice.27

  CHAPTER 2

  CONNIE

  SHIRLEY MASON FIRST EXHIBITED HER puzzling physical and mental problems in 1935, the same year that a young medical student a few hundred miles away, in Michigan, also came down with mysterious ailments. Twenty-seven-year-old Cornelia Wilbur was diagnosed with a thyroid condition, most likely Graves’ disease. It affects mainly women, and causes them to feel anxious, moody, and sad, with a heart that beats too fast and hands that shake. In the 1930s, Graves’ disease sufferers frequently were diagnosed as mentally ill. Often they were packed off to psychiatrists.1

  Cornelia Wilbur may well have had this experience, but we cannot know for sure; after her death in 1992, virtually all of her papers were disposed of by the executor of her estate. Still, we know at least one important thing about her early days. In an interview she gave in her old age, she was asked about influences during youth that made her—and this was her word—a “maverick” psychiatrist. “I was raised in a family of pure scientists,” she said proudly, then heaped praise on her chemist-inventor father, Arthur Warner Burwell. But Cornelia Wilbur seldom talked about how her father had tried to keep her out of medical school. It was all right for girls to study a little, he thought, but not too much. Besides, he told his daughter, she was too stupid to be a doctor—and her mother did not argue. Cornelia never discussed the desperate measures she took to overcome her parents’ lack of encouragement, even as she tried all her life to be an encourager herself and a famous and rich “pure scientist.”2