But all this was new to Shirley’s classmates, and soon they were begging her to explain Miss Conkling’s lessons—and even to do their homework. They told Shirley not to try too hard: any painting or drawing she did in someone else’s name must be just good enough so Miss Conkling wouldn’t “holler at it.” But “not so good,” as one student added, “that she will know I didn’t do it myself, Mason!” Shirley’s newfound social success was dizzying. “I had never in my life had any sense of being looked up to or accepted,” she remembered later. “It soon became a perfectly wonderful life to be in college.”4 She entered a modest whirl of extracurricular activities: working as art editor of the yearbook, writing columns for the campus newspaper about topics such as how Samuel Clemens got the nom de plume Mark Twain.5
Only about 16,000 people lived in the city of Mankato, but as the region’s biggest industrial and market town, it was a sparkling metropolis compared to shabby Dodge Center. Shirley marveled at the porticoed, multistoried buildings; the limestone public library; the tree-lined main boulevard; and Sibley Park, with lush flower beds, a lake, and a zoo.
The teachers college was a new world, too, especially when it came to sex roles. Virtually all the women back in Dodge Center were married by their twenties. But at Mankato State, most of the female staff members were single—and apparently happy and fulfilled without husbands or children. Miss Harriet Beale, as the school yearbook called her, taught French during the academic year and spent her summers far away, on Cape Cod. Effie Conkling motored around the countryside in her car, which was so much a part of her life that she’d given it a nickname: Hermes. Another art professor, Julia Schwartz, never cooked on Friday evenings. Instead she read Time, Newsweek, and eight other magazines until her eyes started to water.6
For Seventh-Day Adventists, these independent, secular women were straight out of Sodom and Gomorrah. But no one blinked at them in Mankato. People could do what they wanted there, including not attending any of the town’s many churches if they didn’t want to. Even Jews in Mankato were modern: The town’s big, Jewish-owned department store, Salet’s, was always open on Saturdays, with the Salet family matter-offactly toiling behind the counters.7 So much for the Israelite day of rest. Or Shirley’s day of rest, for that matter. In Mankato Adventism was just a curiosity.
During social science classes and in bull sessions at Cooper Hall, the women’s dorm, students argued about religion and other controversies. Miss Conkling introduced her art students to the work of Wanda Gág, from the tiny town of New Ulm, thirty miles from Mankato. Born in 1893, Gág had started life as a country girl, then moved to New York City during the flapper era and become a prominent printmaker and illustrator. Her art work was curvy-edged and frenetic, with houses, telephone polls, and curtains looking as though they’d been squeezed from a toothpaste tube then shaken to the beat of a rhumba. Gág sent her work to socialist magazines and was a self-styled feminist. She cut her hair short, avoided marriage in her youth, and touted free love. She was practically the only female artist that students in Mankato’s art department had ever heard of. The women there worshipped her.8
Jean Lane was one such student. When interviewed for this book, in 2008 and 2009, she was in her late eighties and one of the last people alive who had been a good friend of Shirley’s during her youth. In her old age Jean is a tall, hefty woman, and in her college photos she was just as imposing. She reminisced about being born in a farmhouse, to a mother who was raised Seventh-Day Adventist and later renounced the faith. She vividly recalled the first time she met Shirley Mason, when Shirley was a freshman at Mankato and Jean was a sophomore. Jean was also majoring in art, and she made the rounds of the dorm to check out the department’s new students.
She was not impressed. Shirley was “very tiny,” with a “sort of long” hairstyle that Jean found dull and old fashioned. In the coming weeks, as the two young women socialized along with the rest of the students, Shirley’s devotion to religion also put Jean to sleep. “She did a lot of Bible study,” and while everyone else partied on campus on weekends, Shirley left to attend church with her parents. Jean sought livelier friends and at first dismissed Shirley. But eventually they became close.
One topic that fascinated both young women was psychoanalysis. It was a fashionable topic among bright students just off the farm, Jean remembered, and she and Shirley soaked Freud up, talking constantly about his theories and trying to psychoanalyze their own childhoods. The U.S. edition of The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud had just come out in the early 1940s in a cheap, mass-market edition. Readers could learn about “The employment of the mouth as a sexual organ,” “The Activity of the Anal Zone,” “Castration and Penis Envy.”
Another recently available book was Studies in Hysteria, co-authored by Freud and his colleague Joseph Breuer. Studies introduced readers to Miss Anna O., a daydreamy twenty-one-year-old from a “puritanical family.”
Anna O. suffered grievously from hysteria. For no organic reason, one of her arms would not move, and a leg was paralyzed, too. Anna was crosseyed. Sometimes she went deaf and sometimes partially blind. Once, in the kitchen, she meant to walk to the door but instead headed for the oven. She frequently went into trances and acted like someone else. This happened, according to Studies in Hysteria, because she had “two entirely separate states of consciousness.”
In other words, Anna O. had two personalities. One was “sad and anxious but relatively normal.” The other was “naughty.” It scolded people, threw pillows, ripped buttons from bedclothes and underwear, and even smashed windows. Anna didn’t remember wreaking this mischief. It happened, she said, during “absences” of time—time lost to the consciousness of her normal self.9
For Shirley, Freud’s case histories must have had the drama and dirt of those novels, plays, and soap operas which Adventist girls were supposed to avoid because they were not true. But Freud was true! Further, he and his colleagues helped troubled people, including young women who got sick and acted in frightening ways.
Shirley complained to Jean about her mother’s overprotection and erratic moods. But, Shirley added, she could make Mattie do anything she wanted. In grade school she had often wondered what her teachers thought of her. Instead of asking, though, she sent Mattie to inquire. This sort of impromptu parent-teacher conference might be normal today. But according to Jean, it was completely over the top in the small-town Midwest of the 1920s. She tactfully pointed out to Shirley her tendency to be manipulative. Both girls decided that “most of our problems were related to our parents.”
Jean was so inspired by Freud that she decided to study psychiatric social work in Chicago after finishing her undergraduate degree. Shirley wanted to do graduate work in psychology, then teach art in a mental hospital. The intellectual ferment pulsing through Mankato was pushing each girl to novel ambitions, though both had come from rural, fundamentalist girlhoods.
While Jean adjusted easily, Shirley felt overwhelmed at Mankato with “too much emotion,” as she later put it. By the second semester of freshman year, in early 1942, she was tossing and turning at night, wracked with insomnia, her mind swirling with vague and fearful thoughts. She developed more physical problems. “She didn’t look well,” according to Jean. “She was always sick—she got colds, she got this, she got that.” Her joints throbbed. Her throat felt scratchy. Her sinuses ached. Her groin hurt badly every month when she got her period. Once again, she got a tentative diagnosis of anemia from the campus doctor, and some liver shots. The anemia disappeared.10
Even so, she relapsed into her old “spells.” When she set off walking in one direction, she would suddenly change to another. She would head for the door and end up running into the window.11 She started acting dramatically out of character.
On most Friday afternoons she went home to Dodge Center or she met her mother, who often came to Mankato to celebrate the Adventist Sabbath with her daughter and bring her money, which Walter was always forgetting to send. During
her visits Mattie would sometimes wander into other girls’ rooms, asking who Shirley’s friends were and what she did in her spare time. Shirley hated these intrusions, but she tried not to complain to her mother.12 Usually quiet, demure, and eager to follow the rules, she took to visiting the dorm’s living room late at night, where she would sit at the piano and bang out classical music at ear-splitting volume.13
And she occasionally talked strangely. Jean remembered Shirley saying a few times that “she’d spent the day downtown in bars, drinking with men.” Jean thought this was very odd behavior for a devout Adventist girl, and she didn’t know whether her friend was “telling the truth, lying, or fantasizing.” Stranger still was the time Jean was in Shirley’s room and Shirley began talking in a high, childish voice. Demonstrating the smalltown, Midwestern reticence shared by everyone at Mankato, Jean politely said nothing, and she left the room. She never heard the high voice again.
But these problems seemed trivial compared to Shirley’s blackouts.
“She could be doing anything,” remembered Jean. “And suddenly she would become comatose. It usually happened in class. She would be just sitting there, then pass out, slump over. Like a faint.”
The blackouts turned into a weird drill. Shirley would go limp in her chair. The professor would stop lecturing, students would leap to carry their classmate to the infirmary, and the college nurse would arrive, sometimes followed by the doctor. Within a few minutes Shirley’s eyes would flutter open and she would regain consciousness, remembering nothing. At that point she was often injected with luminal, a barbiturate used in the early twentieth century as a sedative for anxious, agitated patients. Once she overdosed and was hospitalized, frightening the school administration. The campus physician thought she was a hysteric, but he felt his diagnosis should be checked by a specialist. He referred Shirley to the Mayo Clinic.14 Walter drove her.
There Shirley had a brief consultation with Dr. Henry Woltman, a prominent neurologist who specialized in studying the relationship between psychiatric conditions and certain organic illnesses. His research had revealed that when patients suffered from symptoms such as fatigue, depression, inability to tell fantasy from reality, and confusion about their identity, sometimes these problems were due to metabolic and blood disorders. Woltman asked Shirley what was wrong and she replied that she was “discouraged, nervous, and everything bothers me.” When she felt “bothered,” she added, she lost her breath and her muscles twitched. Woltman told her to come back the next day for a physical exam and tests. But Shirley refused, and sent Walter in her place.
Woltman found himself in the awkward position of trying to make a diagnosis by interviewing the patient’s father instead of the patient herself, and without doing any tests. With little to go on, he recommended that Shirley spend more time outdoors in the fresh air, and he wrote to the school doctor in Mankato, agreeing with his assessment that Shirley was a hysteric.15
Back at Mankato, Shirley took to her bed and asked other students to run errands and bring her food and medicine. Some Cooper Hall girls complied, trying to keep their friend under the radar of the school doctor and the dean of women.16 But in 1943 Shirley got kicked out of school after overdosing while being treated with phenobarbital for her “spells.” After spending several months at home, she returned to college but again had to leave. The Masons by then had moved to Nebraska, four hundred miles from Mankato, to follow an Adventist minister who was starting a church there. Arriving in Nebraska in 1944, Shirley was put on bed rest—on a regimen so strict that she was not allowed to draw or to write any more than her signature on Christmas cards.17
Her behavior grew bizarre. Once, when her father took her for a ride and went into a store to buy something, he came back to the car to discover Shirley gone. He found her at a nearby playground; she said she couldn’t remember how she got there. At home, she got so manic that she started walking on the furniture. Her parents locked her in the house.18 In a few months she felt better. But she continued to muddle between Mankato and Nebraska, returning to school for a term, then relapsing and dropping out.
The minister tried to help her by getting her an English and art instructor position at an Adventist school in Nebraska. She didn’t yet have her bachelors degree, but World War II had created a teacher shortage. Women like her, with partial academic credits, could get provisional teaching certificates.19 As she got busy with her coreligionists, Shirley’s worst hysteria symptoms faded, but she was still skinny, achy, moody, and chronically angry with Mattie and quick to torment her. Her college friend Jean once paid a visit to the Masons and remembered that “Shirley was keeping cages of pet rats in her bedroom. Why? To irritate her mother, I think.”
In 1945 Mattie developed stomach problems and began seeing a general practitioner in Omaha. In late July Shirley accompanied her mother to a medical appointment, and the doctor noticed that Shirley herself looked ill. He suggested she see psychiatrist Cornelia Wilbur, who reputedly was working miracles with young women hysterics. An introductory appointment was made for August 1.20
There was instant mutual attraction. Dr. Wilbur came to therapy sessions in her Katharine Hepburn suits, a cigarette poised in her manicured hand. From late summer to December, Shirley had only five sessions with her new doctor: just one fifty-minute hour per month. Those smidgens of time helped her immensely, though. And they gave both women the chance to become fascinated with each other.
Connie took one look at shaky, anorexic Shirley—she was five-foot-three and weighed perhaps eighty-five pounds—and felt there was “something about her,” she would recall years later. She was a vision of Connie’s fantasied teenaged self, with the dark hair, the pallid skin and weed-like slenderness. And the ambition of this young, small-town Midwesterner! Most of Connie’s patients were unschooled girls who thought of little but marriage and having babies. But Shirley was passably schooled despite all her problems, and she was desperate for more education. Unhappily dependent on backward parents. Ever ready to deprecate herself even as she boasted constantly about her artistic talent.21
There but for fortune, Connie thought. What if she herself had followed her mother’s Christian Science dicta that doctors were useless and evil? What if she’d bowed her head after her miracle soap fell through and accepted her father’s pronouncement that she was too stupid for medical school? She might easily have ended up like this poor, struggling girl. Connie felt a pull toward Shirley. She wanted to help her fulfill her dreams.
And Shirley was taken with Connie. Lying on the office couch for an hour each month, she poured her heart out about abstract art, fiction, and Freud, without the slightest fear of shocking or annoying Dr. Wilbur. She could curse life and pity herself without being told she was a sinner. She could talk about her daydreams and fantasies, telling stories that weren’t true—about how she’d won an art contest at the Dodge County fair, for instance, even though in reality the fair didn’t have an art contest during the years she said she’d entered. She could be congratulated, consoled, even coddled by an older woman who wasn’t her mother. Shirley felt like a happy child. She worshipped Dr. Wilbur as a little girl worships a parent. She decided she wanted to be a psychiatrist, just like Dr. Wilbur. She ruminated constantly about her new career plan.
As a diagnosed hysteric, Shirley was a prime candidate for Pentothal, Connie’s favorite treatment. But her Adventism prohibited such drugs. Connie gave Shirley mild sleeping pills for home use, but there would be no “truth serum” injections. Instead, she got pep talks similar to the “mind cure” techniques of the Christian Scientists.
Question the authority of your parents and your religion, Connie told Shirley over and over. Be your own person. Follow your dreams but learn to control your emotions. Shirley complained that she had trouble typing because she had a habit of constantly looking at her hands on the keyboard—possibly a remnant of her earlier obsession with germs. Connie told her to fix her gaze on the page rather than the typewriter. Shirley
complied, and soon she no longer felt like checking her hands. She was tremendously grateful for Connie’s help.22
When Connie announced she would soon be leaving Omaha to become a psychoanalyst—perhaps in Detroit, not far from where she’d attended medical school—Shirley was distraught.
Connie had no option but to reconfigure her life, because the soldiers were coming home. For her part, she was not only losing her job—she was also fighting with her husband, whose career looked as promising at the war’s end as Connie’s was becoming shaky.
The summer Connie met Shirley, Henry Wilbur had just been offered the dentistry professorship at University of Louisville’s medical school, in Kentucky. Connie’s pink slip in Omaha must have seemed like a blessing to him.
Connie felt torn. Not only were her husband and boss telling her to stop working, but American psychoanalysts whom Connie highly respected had begun stressing—in popular magazines and professional liter-ature—that childless women with careers were emasculating, unfeminine, and neurotic. Even so, as she recalled years later, she began to explore the possibility of getting a divorce.
Meanwhile, Shirley thought about Connie all the time. It seems likely that she had developed a relationship with her doctor that Freudians call “transference”—an unconscious projection onto the therapist of deep-seated feelings which the patient harbors for important people from her past. During therapy with Connie and at home later, Shirley began yearning for the unlimited attention from Dr. Wilbur that she got from Mattie, her classmates, and the school nurse. She daydreamed about Dr. Wilbur. She wondered whether Dr. Wilbur really cared for her. How could she make her see what she felt? How could she get Dr. Wilbur to stay in Omaha?
Sybil Exposed Page 9