Sybil Exposed (12 page)

She wanted to get away from home and pursue higher education. Though her religion had for years pushed marriage, motherhood, and homemaking on women, academic ambitions became more common among Seventh-Day Adventist girls during World War II. The church acknowledged the country’s labor shortage as men left to fight, and female church members were encouraged to work outside the house for wages. It also became more acceptable for young Adventist women to go to college as long as they attended Adventist institutions. Shirley still dreamed of being a doctor, but Mattie and Walter thought she was too sickly to go into medicine. It would be better for her to be a teacher. Maybe even an art teacher. For that they would send her to college.

Shirley ordered a catalogue from the Adventist institution that Walter had attended before dropping out to wait for the Apocalypse. But Frederickson, who had studied at Mankato State Teachers College in Minnesota, sixty miles west of Dodge Center, raved to Shirley about an art professor at her alma mater, Effie Conkling. She also raved to Professor Conkling about Shirley. Walter and Mattie drove Shirley to Mankato for a visit in the summer of 1941.

“Oh! You are the one Wylene Frederickson has told me so much about!” Effie Conkling boomed the first time Shirley walked into her art room. She was middle-aged and elfin, with a domed forehead, furrowed cheeks, and a bemused little smile. Her voice was ten times bigger than the rest of her, and Shirley was so thrilled by the attention that she “almost had a heart attack,” she would later recall. She couldn’t wait to start college,
though she was stricken with dread that she might not measure up to Miss Conkling’s expectations.

She measured up and more. As soon as classes began Shirley realized the other students were even more scared of their professor than she was. Her art background was based on what Wylene Frederickson had imparted to her, and as a Mankato graduate herself, Frederickson taught just like Miss Conkling did. Shirley was already used to mulling over cheap reproductions of the works of Michaelangelo and Gauguin, and discussing their technical features. When she did a drawing or painting she knew how to fill the canvas and give it energy. And after she finished the piece, she was accustomed to standing calmly as her teacher peered at the work and launched into a critique.

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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