Authors: Debbie Nathan
Connie left town frequently, for American Psychiatric Association meetings and other professional events. Shirley often threatened suicide during these absences, and Connie asked Spiegel if he would take over when she was gone. He saw Shirley a few times in his office.
During one session she posed an odd question:
“Well, do you want me to be Helen?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” Spiegel replied.
“Well,” said Shirley, “When I’m with Dr. Wilbur she wants me to be Helen.”
“Who’s Helen?”
“Well, that’s a name Dr. Wilbur gave me for this feeling.”
“Well, if you want to it’s all right but it’s not necessary.”
35
Shirley did not mention “Helen” again. Spiegel concluded that Connie was pressuring her to come up with alter personalities.
Spiegel continued to conduct hypnosis research on Shirley in his office, and he sometimes let Connie stay in the room and watch. Once Shirley produced a new personality named Natalie. Where had that name come from? Spiegel’s wife was Natalie Shainess, also a psychiatrist, and she often came into her husband’s office. Shirley had run into Shainess not long before being hypnotized, and that is undoubtedly how she came up with her Natalie role.
36
No one took her Natalie seriously, not even Connie. But Connie was present once when Spiegel hypnotized Shirley and told her to be a baby. She complied, and later, back in her own office, Connie defined the baby as a newly appeared alter. She asked for a name. “Ruthie,” Shirley said, and Ruthie joined Peggy Ann, Peggy Lou, Mary, and the rest.
37
Dr. Spiegel, meanwhile, never knew that he had served as midwife for one of Shirley’s alters.
Though he probably didn’t have as much information as he would have liked to about Shirley, Spiegel knew that hypnotic virtuosos are exquisitely sensitive to suggestion and that they constantly scan their therapists’
postures and utterances to guess what they were thinking and what they want to hear. In addition, they demand constant attention, and if they do not get it they can become more ill. None of this behavior is conscious. But, Spiegel cautioned, it can create serious problems for a psychiatrist suffering from “grandiosity strivings.” Urges to be heroic or famous can suck an unwitting doctor into the seductions and exactions of a hypnotic virtuoso.
Apparently, Connie did not attend the segments of Spiegel’s lectures that discussed these risks. Either that or she ignored the warnings.
Using hypnosis as a substitute for the Pentothal during therapy sessions with Shirley, Connie would drone, “Your eyes are getting heavy, your eyes are getting heavy. Your eyelids are very heavy, they’re very heavy, your eyelids are very heavy, your eyelids are very heavy… . Just relax. Just relax. Just relax, just relax.”
38
Shirley did relax. Soon she was in a trance and calling herself “Peggy.”
“Now what were you afraid of today?” Connie asked.
“Well, I see all these animals,” “Peggy” answered. “Camels in the desert, a mule’s head.”
“… Did you ever see a man’s penis?” Connie probed.
“No. I don’t know … I can just remember up to it.”
“What do you remember up to it?”
“Daddy came upstairs in the morning, to tell me that grandma died, and he had on a nightshirt.”
“And you looked over and you could see down the nightshirt, and you could see his penis then … Well, Daddy had pubic hair, remember you thought the penis was hidden in feathers?”
“But I don’t remember …”
“But I’d like you to remember now, Sweetie …”
“I didn’t see it.”
“Well, of course you did, Sweetie. And his penis wasn’t very big.”
“Now I remember.”
During other sessions Shirley recalled “primal scenes”—her parents having sex in front of her. And once, she said, she saw her mother pull up her skirt and sit down. “Did she urinate or defecate?” Wilbur cued. “She
did that at different places all over town,”
39
Shirley replied. From this Wilbur deduced that Mattie had sneaked around neighbors’ homes in Dodge Center at night to foul their lawns with her feces. No matter that Shirley didn’t remember any details. Connie assured her that under hypnosis, she would eventually remember them “like a dream.”
Soon Shirley developed images of Mattie raping babies and holding secret, lesbian orgies with teenaged girls. Connie responded by stressing that Mattie was “wicked, bad, cruel.” “If you don’t hate her,” she told Shirley, “you ought to,” and “there is something the matter with you if you don’t.”
40
Hearing this, Shirley wrote an essay about Mattie on pink stationery. “I hate her,” the essay repeated seventeen times. “Shit,” it added. “I want to kill my mom.”
41
Connie finally had her breakthrough.
Shirley’s $90-a-month home was in Manhattan’s Yorkville section, a few minutes’ walk from luxurious Park Avenue and Connie’s office. The apartment was a garret. A fourth-floor walkup, it had only one room, though it was slightly indented in the middle to suggest separate rooms. The whole thing was two hundred and fifty square feet, about the size of a foyer in Connie’s apartment. A bed and bookcase took up half the room; a kitchenette and table filled the rest.
42
Shirley found solace in letter writing. She spent hours with stationery, greeting cards, and postage stamps, penning missives not just to Florence, her stepmother, but also to her art teacher from childhood and many former classmates from college in Minnesota—Alice in Albert Lea, Neva in Vernon Center, and Merlaine in Cokato were just a few. The letters talked at length about the weather but were cryptic when it came to exactly what Shirley was doing with her life. Some mentioned her “dear friend,” a doctor she’d met back in Omaha and run into years later in New York. Others alluded to her dreams of being a child psychiatrist.
43
Many letters said she was sick but left the details vague. She was close-mouthed with Florence, as well, though the women mailed each other one or two letters a week.
She wrote every day but Sabbath, when writing was forbidden to Adventists. Her boredom and loneliness on Saturdays were unbearable, and in May 1963, after Connie flew to the Far East to lecture Filipino psychiatry
students about how to cure homosexuality, Shirley called Dr. Spiegel and threatened to commit suicide. Spiegel called Connie’s mother-in-law, and she took Shirley to Park Avenue to live there for several days until Connie came back. Shirley passed the time by kneeling and praying: “Let not thy heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”
44
When Connie returned she decided it was time that Shirley start thinking seriously about getting well, and she arranged another restaurant date with Flora. Not long after, she summoned Flora to her office to show her Shirley’s panoply of personalities. As Flora looked on, the doctor chanted to the patient to relax, relax, relax. Shirley’s face loosened, her eyes fluttered, and Peggy Ann came forth, then Peggy Lou, Vicky, Sam, Mike, Helen, Ruthie, Shirley Ann, Mary, Clara, Nancy, Lou Ann, Marcia, Vanessa, and Marjorie. Each emerged for a few seconds before being replaced by someone else, while Flora stared at their shape-shifting postures and listened to a theater of voices, astounded.
45
She felt as though she’d fallen into Shakespeare’s play
The Tempest
—the scene where Miranda declaims, “O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world / That has such people in’t!”
Then and there, she vowed to write the book.
T
HE SUN HAD JUST COME
up one Sunday in November 1964 when Robert Moulton, of southeast Minneapolis, heard a knock at his front door. He opened it to a redheaded woman with steely eyes and a younger, shy brunette. Moulton recognized neither, but the younger one introduced herself as Shirley Mason, from Dodge Center. Astounded and delighted, Moulton waved her and her companion inside. Almost thirty-five years had passed since he had sat in the Mason family’s home crafting Elizabethan stages from scraps, and sewing costumes for the members of Shirley’s doll collection who would play Puck, Romeo, and Hamlet.
Everyone called him Bobby back then, but he had long since abandoned his childhood nickname. He had gone on to become a professional dancer, actor, play director, and choreographer, and now he was a professor of theater at the University of Minnesota. To people who didn’t know him well he was Dr. Moulton.
To Shirley he was just Bobby, and the two old friends settled over breakfast to gossip and reminisce. They remembered Bobby’s visits to Shirley’s Seventh-Day Adventist church, her reciprocal attendance at his Methodist congregation, and the way the two children, inspired by their friendship, each kept two Sabbaths: Saturday and Sunday.
1
Bobby glanced curiously at the woman with the bright red hair, asking with his eyes who she was. “Dr. Wilbur,” he was told, Shirley’s psychiatrist. Bobby was amazed; he had always considered Shirley to be a typical
Dodge Center girl and had never imagined she had emotional problems. No one in the room that Sunday morning mentioned multiple personality disorder, and Bobby tried to make light of the fact that his old friend was in therapy. After all, he chuckled, Shirley’s mother always
had
been strange. Connie’s ears perked up; she waited for more. But Bobby changed the subject, the reunion wound down, everyone said goodbye, and Connie and Shirley got back in their rented car. The morning had been delightful for Shirley, but it had not taught Connie anything.
The women were on a weekend jaunt—they’d flown to Minneapolis the day before and were doing a quick trip through Shirley’s childhood haunts before returning home. In a café in Dodge Center they ran into Hattie Halmbrecht, Shirley’s eighth grade teacher from twenty-nine years ago. Hattie was delighted to see Shirley all grown up. But who was the woman with her? A doctor friend, Shirley said. Connie again listened intently as the elderly teacher reprised old times with her student. Not a word was mentioned about a schizophrenic mother.
Nor was anything revealed in the modest home of Dessie Blood Eng-bard, the woman who had worked as the Masons’ maid and lived in their household when Shirley was a child. Dessie, a plump, uneducated woman, fussed over her prodigal guest, hugging her, calling her “daughter,” and pointing to drawings by Shirley that hung on the walls. Clearly, Connie could see, Dessie adored Shirley and had been in a position to see and hear Mattie mistreating her when she was young. Yet she seemed to have witnessed nothing remarkable. For Shirley’s mother Dessie had only sterling words.
2
Connie had thought about talking with Dr. Otoniel Flores, the cigar-smoking family physician who’d cared for Shirley when she lived in Dodge Center. Under Pentothal and hypnosis, Shirley had recalled Dr. Flores treating the fractured larynx, bruised ribs, and other injuries she said Mattie inflicted on her in the 1920s and 1930s. Dr. Flores could corroborate Shirley’s memories of abuse and open her medical records.
And there was Shirley’s home, ground zero for Mattie’s tortures, including her attempts to suffocate her daughter in the corn and wheat crib. The property was close by, just a few feet from Main Street. But Shirley refused to go near the house. Her memories were too awful, she said. Besides, she wanted to visit a public park she’d frequented during summers when
she was a child. Connie drove her there, and by the time they finished looking around, night was falling and it was time to get to the airport for their return flight. The women left Dodge Center without looking for Dr. Flores or viewing Shirley’s old house.
Back in New York City a few days later they mentioned their Minnesota visit to Flora but gave few details.
3
That was fine with Flora: she was much too busy to pay attention. The popular magazine
Science Digest
had started a psychiatry section and appointed her co-editor.
But she sometimes saw more than she wanted to of Shirley, who was desperate as ever for mothering. She was as anxious as always about money, too, because shortly after meeting Flora, Connie had decided to quit her director’s job at Falkirk and buy her own mental hospital.
4
Left in the lurch without a ride from New York City, Shirley soon resigned from her art therapy position. She was blithe about leaving at first; Connie had her eye on a private sanitarium upstate on the Hudson River, and she promised that as soon as the sale was clinched she would hire Shirley as a therapist and pay her well.
5
But the hospital deal fell through, and by fall Shirley was frantic. She made endless rounds of employment agencies, hunting for work teaching English or art to normal children. She proved unemployable despite her earlier years of experience. Due to modifications in New York’s teacher education requirements, she was a few college credits short of a certificate.
6
The change had been announced long ago, but during her time on the couch she had completely lost touch with the world. Her time in psychoanalysis now comprised more than a quarter of the years she had been alive.
It had finally become obvious to Connie that Shirley would never make it into medical school, and she might never get well. Connie started wondering what to do with this perpetual patient, who might be mentally ill—and materially dependent on Connie—for the rest of both of their lives. Money from a book by Flora was Shirley’s only hope for financial independence. But as Flora had earlier demanded, the book needed a happy ending.
Connie had already predicted Shirley would be cured by 1965, yet here it was, already the end of 1964. She tried to get the wheels turning by telling Shirley to get a job—any job. Shirley obeyed, first sewing doll clothes again, then working as a desk clerk at a hotel.