Sybil Exposed (4 page)

How was it that the three women did not foresee the risks? Why had an otherwise reputable psychiatrist helped to concoct sixteen alter personalities in a patient? What made a seasoned journalist charge ahead with her writing even as she realized that the story she was crafting contained more falsehoods than truth?

And what about Sybil? How, exactly, did she take on that parade of personalities? If she used them to speak an idiom of distress, what, exactly, was she trying to
say
? After the best-sellerdom and the Emmy-winning movie and the glitz and brouhaha, did it bother her that no one knew her true identity? What kind of emotional shape would she have to have been in that she would go along with anything a doctor and a journalist cooked up for her? Did she understand the full implications of what they were cooking? How did she help stir the pot?

Sybil
affected millions of readers, thousands of psychotherapists, and the tens of thousands of people they diagnosed. It spurred the writing of hundreds of articles and scores of medical texts, and resulted in dozens of movie, television, and book spin-offs. The three women behind this amazing proliferation each had a life and a self full of conflict.

What follows is a cautionary exposé of their—and our—grand and disordered multiplicity.

M
ANY YEARS LATER, THE WORLD
would come to know her as Sybil. But in 1933, the little girl with the colored pencils in her hand was simply Shirley Ardell Mason, a sensitive and confused fifth grader in the tiny town of Dodge Center, Minnesota. She was quiet and slender back then, with crisp clothes, dark hair trimmed in a Dutch-boy bob, and skin so milky that the veins stood blue on her forearms. She had no brothers or sisters so she spent hours alone, playing with baby dolls and paper dolls. In her bedroom she tended an enormous collection of large matchboxes, ordered precisely in stacks. Sheets of paper lay on the floor, and she drew chickens on them in crayon and painted rabbits in water colors. To all who knew her, she seemed like a pleasant, well behaved girl. But young Shirley felt like a hopeless sinner.

She was a sinner because she loved to pretend, and pretending was the work of the Devil. It was forbidden by her family’s fundamentalist religion, which also banned the novels and short stories that Shirley loved to read and write. Art done in strange colors was evil, too, yet she adored making her chickens purple and her rabbits green. Her mother warned her to use yellow for her chickens and to stop inventing phantom playmates. To do otherwise was an affront to God, Mrs. Mason said. Hearing this, Shirley’s eyes grew wide. She squeezed them shut in church and prayed for strength to abandon her wayward imaginings. But God did not answer. He left her struggling with her stories, her art, and her sin.

____________

Shirley’s family were Seventh-Day Adventists. As the religion’s name implies, members mark the Lord’s day of rest not on Sunday, the first day of the week, but on the last one, Saturday. When Shirley was a child, Adventists met all day on Saturday and prayed. During Shirley’s youth in the 1920s and 1930s about a hundred thousand members of the denomination lived in the United States and four dozen resided in the Dodge Center area. The whole town had eight hundred people.
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Dodge Center back then was a muddy depot for southeastern Minnesota farmers shipping their crops to the city. It was like thousands of other towns in the Midwest: Each burg had a raggedy main street, usually named Main Street. Each had a dairy cooperative, a grocery or two, a gas station, and a clothing store. Each was filled with churches, church ladies, church gossip, Masonic orders, tea parties, ministers, and young people buying railroad tickets to St. Paul, Chicago, and New York: one way only, please. Barely two generations had passed since the founding of these toiling, pious towns. Already the youth wanted out.

Shirley’s grandfather, Neill Mason, was an Adventist, and so was his mother—which made the Mason family pioneering members of this mystic, all-American faith. Adventism goes back to a barely educated farmer named William Miller, a devout Baptist who lived in upstate New York in the 1820s. He had a passion for arithmetic, and as a young man he began to study the numbers in the Bible. These sacred figures, he felt, could predict God’s plan for the future.

Miller found a sentence in
Daniel
: “Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.”

Miller decided that “the sanctuary” actually meant the world. He changed 2,300 days to 2,300 years. He reckoned further and finally landed on 458 B.C., when King Artaxerxes of Persia approved the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. Miller subtracted 458 from 2300, adjusted for the modern calendar, and determined the year Jesus Christ would make his Second Coming to earth, resulting in the Apocalypse.

That year was 1843.

Miller began spreading his End Time prediction to the Protestants of the northeastern United States. He held meetings with the young farmers
and shopkeepers who had streamed west from New England after the American Revolution, in search of land to be gotten from driving out the Indians. To the frontier these newcomers brought religion that turned enthusiastic, even ecstatic during mass revivals where thousands of people fell down together, writhing and singing to the glory of God. Their excitement made it feel as though anything was possible, not just in the everyday world of America, which was moving toward perfection, but also in the firmament of Heaven. Time would cease when Salvation came, they believed, but until that happened, it was imperative for the devout to fix their minds on Time. Those who neglected to do so, by distracting themselves with mundane things and fantasy, would never enter Heaven.

When William Miller first foretold that the world would end in 1843, believers left their crops unharvested, closed their businesses, and quit their jobs. But 1843 turned into 1844. Disillusioned, many Millerites left the fold, but others pressed on, doing more math and fixing new dates. By summer 1844 they had settled on October 22. That day dawned and they climbed hills together, wide-eyed and trembling to await Heaven’s parting. When Heaven stayed closed they wept piteously. This non-event would go down in American religious history as The Great Disappointment.

Miller’s disappointed spent weeks trying to understand what had gone wrong. Then, Ellen Harmon, a sad-faced teenaged girl from Maine, received a divine answer.

For years Ellen had been a sickly but highly devout girl. By late adolescence she had become an excited Millerite, given to entering trances and communicating with God. One day in December 1844, just weeks after the Great Disappointment, Ellen bent low in fervent prayer. Suddenly she felt bathed in light, and she saw “Advent people” in the sky, traveling on a path toward Heaven. The Lord told her the Millerites had not mistaken the date of the Coming—they’d only misinterpreted it. Jesus really had descended on October 22. But instead of coming all the way down, he had stopped off in a “sanctuary” of heaven. He planned to stay there a while before proceeding to earth.

When He finally came, God told Ellen, the Savior would fashion a New Jerusalem, a paradise. First, though, God and Christ would deal with the wicked—with people who had sinned and defiled their minds. Along
with Lucifer, they would be incinerated in a vast, lava-filled lake, boiling with fire and brimstone.

When would this holy cataclysm occur? No one knew exactly. Still Christ
would
come soon. The faithful must remain devoted and focused on time and not get distracted with the glitter of Satan’s fiction and make-believe.

After Ellen developed her theology she married a man named White and took his last name. As Mrs. Ellen G. White, she became the leader of a new religious movement. It adopted Saturday as the Sabbath and called itself Seventh-Day Adventism.
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Shirley felt bad about her make-believe art. But at least she was painting chickens, and even if she used impossible colors, chickens were real. The stories she made up, though, were not. Jesus was the Son of God and he walked by the side of Christians, but imaginary mortals, like her friends Vicky and Sam, walked nowhere except through a falsifying mind that should be thinking about God’s truth instead of characters forged from fancy. No doubt about it, Shirley’s stories were fictions. They were displeasing to the Lord and they might evict her from the grace of eternal life. How could she save herself?

She got an idea. She would do writing that wasn’t really writing. And she would do it in secret.

Genuine writing required a pencil or pen, but there were other ways to fashion words. All Shirley needed were her parents’ old magazines, her paper dolls, and her matchboxes. Her father, Walter, was away from home all day working. Her mother, Mattie, ran errands. The maid went to the grocery and the boarders left for their jobs. Shirley took advantage of her solitude by spending hours cutting single letters from the magazines. She scissored hundreds of A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s, F’s—all the way to the end of the alphabet. She snipped words, too, like a kidnapper preparing a ransom note. She stuffed the clippings into her matchboxes and covered them with paper dolls. She labeled the boxes with dolls’ names—Anna or Alice or Arlene for the letter A and words starting with A; Barbara or Bonnie for B; Peggy Ann for P; and so on and on, to fool the adults into thinking the names on her boxes stood for dolls’ names, not letters and words for writing fiction.

When Mattie and the others left, Shirley dumped out the matchboxes. Lining up letters on the floor, she formed long, snaking stories about the exploits of her imaginary friends, Vicky and Sam. At the first sound of footsteps, she collapsed the snakes and crammed the print back in the matchboxes under the paper dolls, to be sorted and used another time in different stories.

Then she sat dreamily in the sun, on the porch steps of the Masons’ house. On good days she glowed with pleasure at how she’d created her fictions on the sly, without even writing. On bad days, she knew the angels had seen her even if Mattie and Walter hadn’t. When the Second Coming arrived and all the righteous Adventists ascended heavenward, she would be one of the bad ones left behind, burning to ash in the Holocaust flames of His reckoning against the sinful.
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In Dodge Center, the Adventists had a small, white building with rude chairs and walls so bare that not even a cross was hung. Neill Mason had started attending services when he was in his thirties, with his wife, Mary. Their son, Walter—Shirley’s father—had taken baptism as a teenager in the 1890s.

The Masons did not go to church just on Saturdays. They also attended “testimonies” on Wednesday nights, where the faithful confessed their latest sins and recounted recent miracles. (As one elderly Adventist from the rural Midwest remembered recently, testimonies consisted of statements such as: “I was working on my combine and lost the header bar, then I knelt down and prayed to Jesus and found it.” “Praise God!” the congregation would shout. “Isn’t Jesus wonderful?”)
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In addition to attending church, Adventists regularly traveled to camp meetings where hundreds of families lived in tents and listened to preaching in the open air. Neill became an aggressive Adventist proselytizer. He ranted to his Methodist and Baptist neighbors about the coming time of trouble such as the world had never seen before. Throughout America, he proclaimed heatedly, Protestants and Papists were conspiring to make people work on Saturday. This conspiracy was part of the run-up to a series of plagues that would precede the Second Coming. Before the plagues poured down, God would smite the bad people.

____________

Walter Mason had not always been so passionately devout. At one time, he had rebelled completely against Adventism. As a young man he’d spent one year at a denominational college, but his father had insisted the Second Coming was imminent, so Walter dropped out at age nineteen to prepare himself. The Coming did not come. Disappointed with his religion and his father, he left the church.

When he was twenty-six he met Mattie Atkinson. She was a year older and lived in another farming community, Emmetsburg, Iowa. Mattie’s family was Methodist and had minimal interest in the End Time or the perils of fiction.

Mattie was slender, with an aquiline nose and hair she pulled back tight to show off a delicate face. She had a good education for a small-town girl: at seventeen she was still in school, and she’d used her years of study to memorize “Evangeline,” “The Village Blacksmith,” and dozens of other poems. She was flamboyant, moving in a flurry and rushing from room to room. Sometimes she talked loudly, and her laugh came out shrill, like a cackle. She loved reciting verses and occasionally, in a driven mood, she repeated a word from someone’s conversation then rattled off syllables that rhymed with that word. Mattie was nice, people thought. A little strange, but nice.

When she met Walter he was tall and wiry, with a full head of hair, a thoughtful face, and a quiet voice. The couple married in 1910 and Walter became an architect and a contractor in Dodge Center. By the 1920s the Masons were one of the little town’s most respected couples. They lived in a small but handsome two-story wooden house that Walter had designed himself in the middle of town, just across the alley in back of Main Street. The house boasted built-in cabinets and a room off the dining room with a deck of windows facing south. Beneath the windows was a built-in bench for sitting and basking in the natural light. In the bleakness of Minnesota winters, the sunroom was magical.

Mattie wanted children but kept miscarrying. She had health problems: her hips hurt, she tired easily, she sometimes got nauseated and lost weight, her body twitched, and she felt nervous. The brand new Mayo Clinic was fifteen miles east of Dodge Center, and in 1912 Mattie went there to find
out what was wrong. A doctor diagnosed cardiac damage from the rheumatic fever she’d had as a child. The old illness caused the hip pains and body spasms, the doctor said. But Mattie had two additional problems, he concluded: anemia and asthenia. The second term was synonymous with neurasthenia, a word also applied to people in the early twentieth century who felt tired, discouraged, and anxious. Asthenia was supposed to come from overworked nerves. Though not as serious as hysteria, it was thought to be related. Mattie worried that her bad health would keep her from becoming a mother. She longed for sons and daughters to fill the house and the cheery sunroom.
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