Even more frustrating was Dessie Blood Engbard, the Masons’ former maid. Shirley had visited her in 1964, accompanied by Connie, and now, six years later, Engbard had even more photos of Shirley hanging on her walls, plus letters from Shirley, new paintings and drawings, and a housecoat she’d sent as a gift. The two were so close, Engbard told Flora, that she considered Shirley her oldest daughter. Finally, Flora thought, she’d found someone who knew the family intimately—who had lived for years with them behind closed doors—and who loved Shirley without reserve. Engbard would have seen child abuse and battering. She would not keep it a secret now.
But Engbard had nothing critical whatsoever to say about how Mattie Mason treated her daughter. On the contrary, she was full of praise, swearing that she had “never met such kind people as the Masons.”21 Flora waited for at least a hint about domestic torture and defecation on neighbors’ lawns. Nothing.
And nothing from anyone else, either.
Flora went for a walk, passed the Masons’ old house, and was invited inside. She stood in the sunroom, where Shirley remembered her ribs being broken. She went down in the basement, where Shirley recalled Mattie squatting shamelessly in front of Walter’s workmen and fouling the floor with her feces. Outside, Flora noticed the so-called “carpentry shop and wheat crib” in the backyard. But it was only a squat little coal shed, much too tiny to have served as a horror house where a homicidal schizophrenic could leave a child to die.
Flora also searched Dodge Center for the forested area and the bushes where Mattie was said to have conducted lesbian orgies with Shirley in tow. As hard as she looked, she could not find any woods. There was only flat Midwestern prairie.
Had orgies really happened? Was Mattie Mason actually mad? Or were her crimes merely her daughter’s fantasies gone awry? Mulling these questions, Flora felt uneasy.
To erase her doubts, she planned to interview Dr. Otoniel Flores, the Masons’ old family physician. Surely he would have noticed a little girl’s broken bones and her damaged genitals. From his office file cabinets he would pull manila folders with yellowing records, corroborating Shirley’s most terrible memories. Then Flora learned that Dr. Flores had been dead for twenty-seven years.22 His records were gone.
There were plenty more people in Dodge Center to talk to, but Flora didn’t feel up to further frustration. As she was heading out of town she passed a small, white building with a lintel over the door. It was the Seventh-Day Adventist church. “Made of wood,” Flora wrote in her notes. “Victorian in feeling. Neat as a pin.”23
Back in Manhattan, Flora anxiously contacted two of her closest friends, Aubrey and Val Winsey. Aubrey had met Flora during their days on Madison Avenue, where he’d been a prize-winning copywriter. Now he worked in the public relations department at John Jay College. Val was an anthropology professor.24 They invited Flora to their apartment in mid-summer after she asked them to listen to some recordings she was using to write Sylvia. The material was beginning to confuse her, she said, and she wanted their opinion. The three of them spent hours reviewing tapes of Connie’s old Pentothal and hypnosis sessions with Shirley. Then they talked for hours more.
Both of the Winseys expressed profound skepticism about Shirley’s mental problems, not to mention the reasons she claimed she was ill. Val and Aubrey could not believe so many horrible crimes could have been perpetrated by Mattie Mason without anyone’s noticing.25
“The fact that the mother was defecating on the lawns,” Val asked Flora. “Wouldn’t the town people get to know about this?”
“I didn’t pick that up,” Flora said. “I doubt if they would have withheld it … it seems to me that if she had done that she would have been committed or hospitalized.” Connie had also told her Mattie had “homosexual affairs with girls in the woods.” Yet in Dodge Center, Flora confessed, she had not been able to find “where the hell the woods are.” Val asked if anyone there had confirmed the lesbians-in-the-forest story. “Absolutely not,” Flora answered.
“What the hell!” Val exclaimed. “You’re dealing with a psychiatrist who is obviously having a homosexual relationship with this girl. And you are dealing with a girl who has been diagnosed time and again as a hysteric.” Flora was quiet; Val continued. “Unless you have some of the evidence, I don’t see how you can take this whole thing on faith.”
Aubrey hypothesized that “Sylvia’s” stories of abuse were fantasies, and he offered Freudian explanations for their origins. Sylvia’s father, he reminded Flora, “was such a serious, religious person,” much more so than her mother. In Sylvia’s oedipal stage of early psychological development, when she wanted her father all to herself, she might have tried to “reject in the mother” what her father disapproved of in his wife. Yet Sylvia loved her mother, and she might have had “strong feelings of guilt” at identifying with Mattie’s vestigial Methodism and relative lack of devotion to the tenets of Seventh-Day Adventism. Maybe, Aubrey speculated, the little girl had unconsciously “desired to be punished” for being like her mother. Hence her fantasies of being raped, and her obsessions with vaginal assaults and enemas.
But why was her mother the culprit? Perhaps, Aubrey mused, little Sylvia wanted to hurt Mattie but couldn’t admit it. So she turned her unconscious urge into fantasies about her mother hurting her.
“Say that again,” Flora said. “I’m not sure I fully understand.”
“Projection,” Aubrey explained. “It’s a simple projection of your otherness onto someone else, so you can take it out on them rather than on yourself.”
“You know,” Val added, “the thing I think is very important is for you not to get trapped, Flora, into the psychiatrist’s diagnosis.”
“I can’t simply be an echo for Connie and Sylvia,” Flora agreed. Still, she told the Winseys, Sylvia’s stories of her mother’s insane behaviors were essential to the book, whose structure, she explained, “has already been established. It’s official.”
Val could sense Flora’s unease. “So you feel very motivated about doing this book?” she asked.
Yes, Flora answered, she did. But she wasn’t sure what she had left in the way of compelling facts—except for Amsterdam. She told the Winseys the story about Shirley’s spy-versus-spy trip there on a plane in 1942.
They were singularly unimpressed.
“1942?” Aubrey echoed, incredulous. “But wasn’t Holland at that time occupied by Germany? Weren’t we at war with Germany?” His implication, of course, was that Holland’s airports were under military control by the Nazis during the time Shirley said she’d gone there. The idea of her arriving from Minneapolis was absurd.
Flora left the Winseys more confused than ever. Some weeks later she had her secretary’s husband drive her to Lexington, Kentucky, to meet with Connie and Shirley26 and try to do damage control. What followed was an Alice in Wonderland conversation about Amsterdam.
“I inquired from a friend,” Flora announced, “and found out it would be impossible for an American to come there in April 1942 because we were at war then. You could not come on a commercial plane.”27
“It wasn’t a commercial plane,” Connie interjected, though Shirley previously had said she traveled on TWA. Shirley chimed in and reported that the flight was full of British soldiers.
“What was a British transport plane doing in Minneapolis?” interrupted Flora.
Shirley didn’t know, but she insisted she was in Amsterdam “a day or two before the actual occupation” and “Nazi soldiers were in the airport.”
When the group attempted to fix an exact date, however, they realized that Shirley had always said her fugue to Europe occurred while she was in college. But Holland had already been invaded by the time she finished high school.
“Did you go back on the same plane?” Flora asked.
“No. I went back on an American plane.”
“You couldn’t have gone on an American plane. There were none flying,” Connie allowed.
“Well,” Shirl
ey concluded blithely, “one thing I know for sure: I got back, because here I am.”28
Things only got worse after Flora told Connie she wanted Shirley’s and Mattie’s old medical records. Flora knew that Mattie had been treated decades earlier at the Mayo Clinic, and Shirley had, too, when she’d been hospitalized at age three—for malnutrition caused by the enemas, Shirley and Connie said. This was the period, presumably, when she’d been so traumatized by Mattie that alter personality Peggy had first appeared.
Connie had never bothered to request these records, but at Flora’s insistence she asked for them now. When they arrived, Flora noted with alarm that Mattie had been diagnosed with “asthenia”—what today would probably be called depression—but never with schizophrenia. As for Shirley, the records showed that her hospitalization at age three had lasted for only a few hours, and it was due to tonsillitis—there was not a word about malnutrition.29 If Flora’s archives are an indication, no records regarding the gynecological surgery ever came. Or if they did, Connie never passed them on.
If the discrepancies in the medical records weren’t disturbing enough, Flora also leafed more carefully through Connie’s therapy materials and found Shirley’s five-page, single-spaced letter from 1958 denying she had multiple personality disorder. Reading the completely believable recantation, Flora was stricken with the realization that Sylvia: The Many Multiples of One was, quite possibly, one big lie. No, it wasn’t, responded Connie—Shirley had falsely repudiated her illness simply because she’d been “apprehensive” about having her case written up for public consumption.30 Many patients issued fake denials at the end of analysis. It was a trivial matter, and there was no reason for Flora to include Shirley’s letter in her book.31
Issuing her demurrals, Connie seemed as oblivious as Shirley had been about Amsterdam. Flora’s sinking feeling sank deeper; she was tempted to trash the project.
Yet how could she? Not only had she told her friends, her colleagues, and all the famous psychiatrists she knew that she was writing Sylvia, but she had already accepted an advance for the work and was contractually obligated to deliver a finished book within just five months. Yet every time she checked one of Shirley’s abuse claims, it came up questionable. Was it possible that her diagnosis derived from her psychiatrist’s suggestion? What if Shirley had never had alters before she met Connie?
But she had possessed alters early on, Shirley insisted, even when she was a teenager, and there was solid evidence. She handed Flora her journals from high school and college—from before she’d been exposed to psychiatrists. In the journals, Shirley said, Flora would see evidence of multiple personalities long before Connie or any doctor could possibly have planted ideas in her head.32
Flora opened a sheaf of papers labeled “1941 Diary,” penned neatly in Shirley’s hand. Its dozen or so pages each contained several brief entries.33 They began in the voice of a normal teenaged girl:
Feb. 20—I went to the basketball game but we were so late we couldn’t both sit down front so I sat in back and Lois went down.
Feb. 26—I got B+ on my autobiography … I am reading Patricia by Grace L. Hill and I think the story is good.
Some entries brimmed with angst that sounded self-pitying but typically adolescent:
March 17—I have such overwhelming feelings of being alone, and how I wish someone could understand me!
But other entries, dated after Shirley’s graduation from high school, were darker, hinting at serious mental distress. These passages strongly suggested she was battling alterations in consciousness, as though something or someone else controlled her. There was even evidence of fugue states.
Oct. 7—Four days. Oh what will I do? I was in and out of the dorm—didn’t eat here but came back nights. Am very tired. Can’t find out much.
Oct. 8—I must be very careful so no one will know. They would put me out and I just love it here.
Oct. 25—Started for class yesterday a.m. but didn’t get there …
One entry must have particularly struck Flora. It was dated late in 1941, when Shirley had moved from Dodge Center to Mankato and was finishing her first semester at the state teachers college. According to the diary, however, Mankato did not yet exist for her.
Dec. 31—Almost through high school. Am I ever glad! Only go so I can go on to college. I want to learn. Care nothing for social life.
It is as though an alter personality had written these sentences—one whose consciousness was trapped in the calendar of a year before, back in Dodge Center. The diary was proof that Shirley’s mind had fragmented long before she met Connie. Flora refastened the loose pages with a paperclip. She must have felt tremendously relieved.
She wouldn’t have if she had looked into the diary more carefully. A closer examination might have stopped her at this entry:
Sept. 29—Been reading A Surgeon’s World by Max Thorek—he is a Jew.
Max Thorek was a famous American physician in the 1940s. He developed a new technique for removing gall bladders; he was also one of the first doctors to do cosmetic operations on women. And Thorek wrote a A Surgeon’s World, a popular account of doctoring, which Shirley’s diary had her reading in 1941.
But she could not possibly have read A Surgeon’s World that year. The book was not published until 1943. Furthermore, according to forensic document specialists Peter Tytell and Gerry LaPorte, who examined the diary during the process of researching this book, Shirley’s “1941” entries were written in ballpoint pen. But ballpoints were not used in the United States until 1945.
The diary was a fake.34 Most likely Shirley and Connie had cooked it up together in order to trick Flora into staying with Sylvia. She fell for it.
And she decided that, while the details of Shirley’s case history were confused and often patently false, the story as a whole was “emotionally true,” which was all that mattered. Truman Capote’s rules were irrelevant, Flora rationalized. She could make Sylvia into a nonfiction novel even if she took tremendous liberties with the facts.
Soon she had completed her opening chapter. It dealt with a fugue from Columbia University to Philadelphia that was said to have lasted from January 2 to January 7.
Five days lost, Flora wrote in eye-catching italics. She continued in spell-binding language reminiscent of her style in the women’s magazines, piecing together a narrative based on Shirley’s accounts of several different trips to Philadelphia, including the incident with the children’s clothing.
[I]n a corner of the dresser, was something that she hadn’t noticed before: a receipt for a pair of pajamas purchased at the Mayflower Shop, 5007 Wayne Avenue, telephone Victor 3-7779 …
Pajamas! Where were they? She searched the drawers and the closets, but she couldn’t find them.
She searched the bathroom. At first she saw nothing; then she saw the pajamas on a hook behind the door, hanging like an accusation.
The pajamas were rumpled, slept in. Had she slept in them? They were loud and gay and bright orange and green stripes. Not her style. She always chose solid colors, usually in varying shades of blue. The pajamas she found were the sort a child might select …
Her knees sagged. The self-recrimination she had felt upon discovering that she had lost time was suddenly intensified … She had to get back to New York while she was still herself.35
In subsequent chapters, Flora changed Mattie’s name to Hattie and concentrated on her cruelty and sexual perversions.
She wrote a grain-crib scene: Then the mother placed the child in the wheat and left, pulling the stairs up into the ceiling. Encircled by wheat, [Sylvia] felt herself smothering and thought that she was going to die.36
She included sex in the woods with teenagers: Their dresses, pulled up, were tucked above their waists. Naked from the waist down, she continued, mother and the girls were lying on the ground, their hands intermingling, their buttocks visible. Fingers moving. Palms stroking. Bodies gyrating. Ecstatic ex-pressions.37
She created
a primal scene, too: The shades were usually halfway down in the twelve-by-fourteen bedroom. The crib was placed so that a street light shone in the bedroom window, silhouetting the penis … until she was nine years old, parental intercourse took place within her hearing and vision … the various selves had different reactions … Marcia feared for mother’s safety. Mary resented the denial of privacy. Vanessa was revolted by the hypocrisy … Peggy Lou … sobbed all night.38
In a scatological-walk-in-the-neighborhood passage, Flora described how Hattie pulled down her bloomers, squatted, and with ritualistic deliber-ateness and perverse pleasure defecated on the elected spot.39
Finally, she wrote an especially long section detailing the way Hattie would separate her daughter’s legs with a long wooden spoon, tie her feet to the spoon with dish towels, and then string her to the end of a light bulb cord, suspended from the ceiling. The child was left to swing in space while the mother proceeded to the water faucet to wait for the water to get cold. After muttering, “Well, it’s not going to get any colder,” she would fill the adult-sized enema bag to capacity and return it to her daughter. As the child swung in space, the mother would insert the enema tip into the child’s urethra and fill the bladder with cold water. “I did it,” Hattie would scream triumphantly …40
Flora also included riveting yet wholly fictional portrayals of “Sylvia” first presenting herself to Connie as Peggy, then reacting to Connie’s revelation that she suffered from the presence of multiple personalities. In reality, Peggy had announced herself quite calmly, and Shirley had seemed calm, even pleased when she found out about her diagnosis. But Flora knew these behaviors would bore readers, so she changed them. The face of the emergent Peggy, she wrote, contorted with fury as she jumped up from the desk chair … She headed with rapid, spiderlike movements toward two long casement windows. Swinging the green draperies aside, she clenched her left fist again and pounded with it at a small windowpane. “Let me out,” she screamed. “Let me out!” It was an agonized plea—the call of the haunted, the hunted, the trapped … there was a crash. The pounding fist had gone through a windowpane.41
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