Sybil Exposed (28 page)

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 suspecting 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

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 Shirley
26
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.