Free Sybil Exposed by Debbie Nathan Page B

masturbatory acts she’d performed in front of her four dozen baby dolls.
    For a while she’d shown some improvement. As Shirley advanced through her final months of high school, Walter picked up construction work and recovered somewhat from the Great Crash. One of his new jobs was building Dodge Center’s first movie theater, in 1940, and he’d paid Shirley to act as his assistant. She’d ordered all the building materials, “down to the seats,” as she recalled years later. 1 She kept track of expenditures with the bookkeeping skills she’d learned in school. She collected the workers’ time cards, added up their hours, and climbed the scaffolding every Friday to give out their paychecks.
    Shirley had also begun private painting and drawing classes; her parents had accepted that the only thing that made her happy was art, whether the abstractions in her style were acceptable to Adventists or not. Her instructor was Wylene Frederickson, a young woman who had just arrived in town to teach at the public school. Frederickson gave private lessons,and she came to the Masons’ with paints, chalks, and pencils. She soon announced that her new student had talent, and Shirley basked in the praise. She thought she might like to be an artist. 2
    She still felt angry with her mother, and shut off from her classmates. She continued to spin scenes in her head, knitting real events with fantasy. In the summer before senior year started, John Greenwald, a junior-high-school-aged boy, was accidentally shot to death while playing in a barn with a loaded .22 rifle. The barn was not in Dodge Center; it was a few miles away, in another small town, and the witnesses were some other boys who were playing with him when the accident occurred. 3 Nonetheless, Shirley imagined watching the shooting, cringing at the sight of John’s blood, and trying desperately to save his life.
    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