Sybil Exposed (29 page)

“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,” Shirley concluded blithely, “one thing I know for sure: I got back, because here I am.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 …
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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.
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And after learning she had multiple personalities, Flora added, Sylvia exploded, toggling crazily from alter to alter:
She really blew … one moment she was a ranting child, walking on the furniture, leaving her fingerprints on the ceiling. The next moment she was a self-possessed and knowing woman … then … quaking … lying inert on the bed.
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Then, to assure readers that this outrageous behavior was caused by real abuse, perpetrated by an actual maniac, Flora wrote a scene in which Connie got Walter Mason to confess that his wife was, in fact, psychotic. Nothing of the sort had ever happened. But the passage was narrated in the third person as an interrogation, with Connie relentlessly grilling Walter, whom Flora called Willard Dorsett:

Had he been aware that Hattie’s behavior was peculiar?

He moved jerkily in his chair and became defensive … “At times she was difficult … nervous … she had some spells … Hattie was odd.”

“It was more than odd, Mr. Dorsett …” Was he aware that as a child Sybil sustained an unusual number of injuries, the doctor wanted to know …

“Why yes,” he replied, screwing up his thin lips …

Did he remember the burns on his daughter’s hands, her black eyes?

“Yes,” he replied slowly …

The wheat crib over his carpenter’s shop? …

“Oh, merciful Father, not Hattie!” … Then he told Dr. Wilbur about his having taken Hattie to a psychiatrist at the Mayo Clinic … The doctor there had diagnosed Hattie as a schizophrenic.
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Shirley probably knew her mother had never been diagnosed as a schizophrenic. And she certainly must have remembered that her home had no grain crib. Yet she rarely objected to Flora’s falsifications. Only two
of them seemed to bother her. One involved an erotic scene with Mario, the Brazilian man she had dated in the 1960s. For the book Flora changed his name to Ramon.

Ramon caressed her. Her head moved against his chest. He embraced her tightly. “When I have an erection,” he told her, “I measure. It’s seven inches. Good?” … He moved back toward her and began gingerly to unzip her dress.
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When Shirley read this passage in Flora’s draft chapters, she swore she’d never acted sexually with Mario, and she asked to have the material deleted. She also objected strenuously to paragraphs about the “primal scene”—her parents having sex in front of her—though she had once described something similar to Connie while she was high on Pentothal. “Nothing like that went on!” she insisted now. “Oh, no, no, no, no, no!” She recorded herself demanding the passage be removed and sent the tape to Connie and Flora.
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