“Politics?” Termine added rhetorically. “Flora wasn’t out for politics or political change. She was out for Flora.”
Accordingly, after Nixon’s 1968 electoral victory, she informed his staff she’d voted for him, then submitted an application for a job in the presidential cabinet (she never heard back from Nixon’s people).27 After she realized she wouldn’t be relocating to Washington, she took on more work: doing public relations for her college and working on a nationally syndicated newspaper column with Stuart Long, a liberal Texas journalist who looked like a cross between Abraham Lincoln and Buddy Holly. Cavern-faced, bespectacled Long traveled the country writing about politics, and Flora added a psychology slant: they called their joint effort “Syndrome USA.”28 Soon the two were sleeping together and Long was writing Flora notes filled with sexy double entendres and paeans to her nipples. As college president Reisman had been, Long was married with children. His family lived in Austin, though, so Long’s wife was fuzzy about what her husband was up to in Manhattan.
Shirley and Connie were also in the dark about Flora’s pecadillos. As long as she reported regularly to them about her attempts to sell Who Is Sylvia?, they felt sufficiently informed.
Finally, in late October 1969, an editor bit. Gladys Carr worked at a small publishing company, Cowles. She was intrigued by multiple personality, and she already had heard of Dr. Wilbur. A friend with emotional problems had received psychotherapy from her, and as far as Carr was concerned, Connie had saved the woman’s life.29
But when Carr asked if she could meet the real “Sylvia,” Shirley got cold feet. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to do the book anymore; she said she was worried her identity as a mental patient would be revealed. Flora and Connie swore they would keep her identity secret, and to reinforce that vow, Connie offered to make a huge sacrifice. Though it meant she would achieve no fame from Sylvia, she, too, would appear in the book under a pseudonym. Shirley finally relented.30
Flora signed a contract with Cowles.31 The advance was $12,000, as much as she was making each year doing full-time teaching and public relations work. She got a third of the money immediately. Another third would come halfway through the writing, and the final third on completion of the manuscript, which was due in only eleven months.
The book’s title morphed slightly, to Sylvia: The Many Multiples of One. Flora started working on it in earnest. Very quickly, however, she discovered problems with the story, problems so profound that she would wonder if she could write a book about Shirley.
PART IV
CASE STUDY
CHAPTER 14
THE EDIT
FLORA’S MAIN DILEMMA, THE FLATNESS of the multiple personalities, had seemingly been taken care of with Shirley’s and Connie’s list of sixteen sets of likes, dislikes, and hairdos. But as she more closely examined that inventory, Flora saw that she still had problems. She was preparing to write an action-packed, “nonfiction novel,” yet the personalities didn’t do much of anything. Even when rebellious little Peggy first appeared in Connie’s office, she didn’t run or yell or bug her eyes out—she simply knocked on the office door and matter-of-factly announced herself as an alter personality. Connie had acted equally ho-hum during this introduction. And when Shirley was first told she had multiple personalities, she’d barely blinked an eye.
For years Connie had made tape recordings of her therapy sessions, and now she gave them to Flora. Listening, Flora heard sobbing, screaming, and confusion: “Let me out! Let me out! The people, the people, the people! It hurts. It hurts. My head hurts. My throat hurts. The people and the music. The people and the music. I want to get out! Please, please!”1 The reel-to-reel mayhem dragged on for hours. The distress it conveyed was incoherent, monotonous, and for all its horror rather boring.
But during conversations Flora had with Connie and Shirley as she prepared to write the book, they told her about the many childhood atrocities Shirley had remembered after Connie helped her dissociate into Peggy, Vicky, and the other alters during drug and hypnosis sessions. Flora was amazed by Mattie Mason’s assaults. Describing them, she realized, would boost Sylvia’s appeal to readers, especially because Americans were growing increasingly concerned about a newly recognized phenomenon: the battered-child syndrome.2
That’s what pediatricians were calling the recent discovery, by radiologists in the 1960s, that, when x-rayed, many children showed evidence in their bones of having been severely beaten by their parents. Experts were trying to figure out why in the world people would deliberately injure their offspring. Some thought poverty was the underlying problem: when fathers and mothers led mean lives marked by too much work, too much stress, and not enough money for a babysitter, they got frustrated and swung their fists, including at babies.3
Other experts focused on individual rather than socioeconomic causes. They thought people who assaulted their children were mentally ill. By the early 1970s, policy makers had become interested in this possibility, including Senator Walter Mondale, who a few years later would serve as vice president under President Jimmy Carter. Mondale was working on a package of child-protection legislation that would fund abuse prevention and treatment programs, and require teachers, doctors, and others to notify authorities if they suspected maltreatment in children they worked with. Mondale soon realized that his colleagues in Congress would be friendlier to those reforms if they believed child abuse was caused not just by minority parents who were poor, but also by white mothers and fathers who were middle class but emotionally disturbed.4
Policy makers who were trying to solve the child maltreatment problem also realized that sexual abuse was even more compelling a public issue than was physical abuse. That fact was even reflected in the literary world, in a book by an outspoken woman lawyer. Lisa Richette was a former Philadelphia assistant district attorney who had gone on to specialize in defending children accused of crimes. Her book The Throwaway Children was first published in 1969 and promoted as a critique of the country’s juvenile justice system. True to marketing strategy, it contained many anecdotes about children unfairly sentenced in the courts and inappropriately locked up in detention centers. But the real draw for readers was the book’s titillating bizarreness, which was based on actual cases Richette had dealt with as a prosecutor. One chapter told of a group of children coaxed by a neighbor man and woman to copulate with the couple’s pet German Shepherds. In another chapter, a paranoid schizophrenic woman made her young son fondle her breasts and genitals. A third case history featured a thirteen-year-old who murdered his parents after seeing them having sex and discovering his mother’s collection of hard-core pornography.5
This salacious material could have competed with the sleazy offerings of Times Square; it certainly had never appeared in mainstream media. Now, with The Throwaway Children available in bookstores and public libraries, even women could read about mind-boggling lewdness perpetrated against boys and girls. Such reading was not only legal, it was noble, a kind of obscene civic duty. Richette’s book sold briskly and was soon reprinted as a mass-market paperback. That happened in 1970—the year Flora began writing her own book.
She decided that Sylvia would be a “whodunnit” about severe child abuse—especially sex abuse. The heroine’s psyche would be fractured by her lunatic mother’s mistreatment, as severely as a child’s bones would be split if they were hit on the street by a truck. But thanks to Dr. Cornelia Wilbur’s dedication and brilliance, Shirley-aka-Sylvia would be healed. Her sixteen alters would knit together, making her whole again. She would accomplish this feat by remembering Mattie Mason’s hideous crimes, as catalogued in Flora’s nonfiction novel.
Flora began planning the book’s abuse scenes. Connie had told her that while Shirley was under Pentothal, she had remembered Walter and Mattie Mason keeping her in a crib in their bedroom until she was nine years old. There they often staged what Connie called “primal scenes”—the Freudian term for having sex in front of one’s young sons and daugh
ters. According to Freud, primal scenes invariably traumatized small children.6
In addition, Connie said, Shirley had recovered memories of Mattie engaged in lesbian sex with young women in Dodge Center. Shirley remembered witnessing these acts when she walked in the woods near Dodge Center with Mattie and Mattie’s “three teenage friends,” spying on them as they sneaked behind bushes. Flora had also heard about Shirley being dragged around the neighborhood at night while her mother defecated on lawns. Worst of all were Peggy’s accounts, preserved on audiotape, of Mattie hanging Shirley with ropes, splaying her legs apart, and raping her with utensils and enemas.7
Flora began having doubts about these stories, however, after she read autobiographical entries in Shirley’s old therapy journals that diverged radically from what she was being told. Homosexual orgies in the woods with three teenagers, for instance: In a 1956 journal, Shirley had described her mother babysitting girls who were not teenagers but only eight or nine years old. Mattie had taken these children into the woods to play, Shirley wrote, but Shirley, herself, never saw anything improper. She’d only began to visualize images of gyrating bodies when injections of Pentothal, coupled with questioning by Connie, got her to thinking about Mattie’s sick mind. She had realized then that it was Peggy who’d seen Mattie having illicit sex in the bushes.8
Flora knew nothing about forensic research into Pentothal and other supposed “truth serums.” Nor was she aware that, far from eliciting truth, barbiturate injections commonly provoked wild fantasies. She did understand that hypnosis was risky. For an article she’d done four years earlier for Science Digest, she’d interviewed psychiatrists talking about innocent men who had falsely confessed to murders they had nothing to do with when hypnotized during interrogations at police stations. And she’d found a doctor who once hypnotized a man to cure him of asthma. While in a trance state the patient said he had killed his sister, and everyone believed him until it was revealed he never had a sister.9
But when Flora expressed skepticism about Mattie’s perfidy, Connie pooh-poohed her doubts: “You are being naïve about this,” she wrote in a letter, “if you can’t imagine what an intelligent, intellectual, talented sadistic schizophrenic might dream up to torture her daughter.”10 Shirley reinforced Connie’s position. She complained to Connie when Flora questioned her about the abuse. Flora backed off.11
Focusing on other motifs in Shirley’s history besides abuse, she was especially eager to write scenes in which the Peggys, Vicky, Vanessa, and the rest of the alters left home and interacted with the public. After all, the book required glances, handshakes, and conversations with other people: in school, in stores, on the street. What had Shirley’s friends done and said when they saw her acting like an eight-year-old, a baby, or a boy? Once, as Peggy in Trenton, New Jersey, she’d tried to break into a car she thought was her father’s. Hadn’t anyone noticed? Had she been arrested? She talked of marching many times into gift shops as Peggy and smashing goblets. Could any saleswoman remember a diminutive, staidly dressed woman acting deranged? Did anybody ever call the police, or an ambulance?12
No, Connie said, and she added that, oddly, no one in public had ever noticed Shirley dissociating into alter personalities. Her friends didn’t notice, either, except for her former roommate Willie, who herself had been in psychoanalysis with Connie and was prepped about Shirley’s multiple personalities before she started seeing them.13
Flora decided to write a fugue scene about a trip to Philadelphia. But as she researched Shirley’s trips there, she discovered that most sounded less like amnesiac fugues than like the pleasant, out-of-town jaunts any artist might make for a quick change of scenery. Often Shirley returned to New York with a notebook full of charcoal and pencil studies, fully aware of everything she’d done all weekend.
Of course, the one trip that really did sound like a fugue was murky in detail because Shirley really didn’t remember what had gone on in Philadelphia. She recalled catching the train from Manhattan and later calling Connie from a pay phone, confused and anxious. She had found children’s pajamas in her hotel room in Philadelphia, she said, and didn’t know how they got there until she found a receipt showing they’d been purchased from a store called The Mayflower Shop. She couldn’t remember being in the store, which was frightening. But she’d always known she was in Philadelphia, and she returned to New York without incident. It was not a very interesting story.
Flora soon learned of a much better one. After she’d explained that she needed a good fugue scene, Shirley described an extraordinary event whose memory she said she’d repressed for the last three decades and just remembered.
It was a Saturday in early April 1942, Shirley said. She was a nineteen-year-old freshman at Mankato State Teachers College in Minnesota, and had dissociated on that day into nine-year-old Peggy. Peggy was wandering by the big post office downtown when a large-breasted woman approached and asked if she wanted to make a quick $100. Peggy said yes in her childish voice, and the woman led her to a black car. They drove north for two hours, to the Minneapolis airport, and got onto a jet. It was bound for someplace in Europe. Peggy didn’t know exactly where.
Hours later they disembarked in Amsterdam. There, Peggy—who no one seemed to notice was a child in a woman’s body—was handed a sheaf of papers identifying her as a British citizen. The buxom woman quietly told her to walk by her side so it would be obvious that the two women were together. That was necessary in order for them to be recognized by a young man, an officer in the British Army, who was trying to spirit his wife out of the country. The airport was occupied by German Nazis who were not allowing Dutch citizens to leave. Peggy, who looked English, was to switch places with the wife, and if the Nazis guessed the trick they would kill her, not the Dutch woman. But if Peggy made it through with her fake papers, she would give the documents to the wife and herself return to America.
It dawned on Peggy that she was part of a cloak-and-dagger operation to rescue people from the Nazis. More excited than frightened, she marched through Immigration and Customs. She passed muster without a hitch and handed her papers to the husband, who melted into the crowd. The buxom woman slipped her a return ticket and the $100 she’d earned, and she flew back to Minnesota. There, Peggy reverted to Shirley, who had no memory of the four-day trip overseas or her contribution to the struggle against fascism. All she knew was that, back in Mankato, she found $100 in her purse and had no idea where it came from. Not only that, but for years she felt funny whenever she heard the word “Amsterdam.” Only recently had she begun having dreams about the place. Connie told her the dreams were memories, and one day, after Flora started planning the book, Shirley suddenly recalled everything.14
Flora could barely contain her excitement about the Amsterdam story, which would make a gripping opening chapter. She would bring it to life not just with Shirley’s memories, but by gathering more details. She wrote a friend in Amsterdam asking him to tell her exactly what the airport there looked like. She also made plans to visit Mankato to see the post office where the full-breasted woman had approached Peggy.15 And she would take the opportunity to investigate Shirley’s childhood by spending a few days in nearby Dodge Center.
But when she told Connie and Shirley about her upcoming trip, they begged her not to go.16 Flora’s papers don’t name their reasons, but the two women probably told her that Shirley was worried about Flora showing up, and the people in her hometown learning that Shirley was mentally ill and a book was being written about her condition.
To minimize the possibility, Flora came up with a scheme. She would represent herself as a journalist doing an article about “Tiny Towns in America,” and claim she’d chosen Dodge Center because she had a friend named Shirley Mason who just happened to be from there. Then, when people started talking about Shirley, Flora would discreetly fish for details about her past. She expected stories about Mattie’s deranged and revolting exploits to be part of the town folklore. Without anyone suspecti
ng her motives, she would retrace Shirley’s youthful footsteps.
She arrived in Minnesota in mid-June, and sure enough, there was the grand, limestone post office in downtown Mankato, just as Shirley had said. She headed to Dodge Center, sixty-eight miles away. The little town had barely changed since the Masons’ time there over a generation earlier. White wood houses sat in the shade of great elm trees, flanked by flower and vegetable gardens tended by sun-bonneted old women with ramrod-straight posture. Main Street abutted two railroad tracks. Hulking, nineteen-sixties-model cars with fins were parked in the shopping district, which had never grown beyond two blocks: it was still possible to walk the length and width of the town in a half hour. Flora checked into a down-at-the-heels hotel and set out to find people who had known the Masons.17
The first person she ran into was Genevieve Crouch, Shirley’s childhood piano teacher. “A gracious, cultivated lady,” Flora wrote in her notes.18 For a rural woman, she seemed exceptionally intelligent and sophisticated. If she had seen pathology among the Masons, Flora was sure that Crouch would remark on it, but she said nothing of the sort. Shirley had seemed moody, Crouch said. Mattie was aloof but dignified. Flora waited for tales about defecation on lawns. Nothing came.
Next on Flora’s list was Grace Sorenson, a distant Mason cousin by marriage whose voice and mannerisms Mattie had taught Shirley to imitate many years ago. Sorenson was elderly and half deaf now, but she struck Flora as energetic and “peppery.” She described Mattie as “odd,” and when Flora asked why, she told a story about Mattie once walking into the hardware store where Walter worked and taking over her husband’s job selling to customers.19 Odd, indeed; and Flora waited for what would follow. Sorenson said no more.
Next she visited Mrs. Howe, who had once run a maternity home in Dodge Center, where she’d delivered many babies; she’d also been Mattie Mason’s “good friend.” Mattie was “lively” and “full of fun,” Howe told Flora. And “nervous,” too, but when Flora asked her to elaborate, she said merely that Mattie used to bite her nails.20
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