Authors: Debbie Nathan
In 1923, when she was almost forty—old enough to be a grandmother, and with hair that was prematurely and strikingly white—one of Mattie’s pregnancies finally went to term. Shirley was born in January. She was a small baby, just under six pounds, but lively and healthy. Mattie should have felt overjoyed, but instead she fell into a severe, postpartum depression. Grandmother Mason and women hired by Walter cared for Shirley for four months until Mattie rallied.
6
She began thinking she should convert to Seventh-Day Adventism. Walter had returned to the church four years earlier, but Mattie, still a Methodist, had resisted joining. For the three years that followed her birth, Shirley was the child of a mother and father who were “unequally yoked”—the Adventists’ derisive term for a couple in which one spouse was not a member of the faith. But when Mattie finally took baptism as an Adventist, the Masons started putting things right. Walter became active in church affairs and Mattie joined the women’s group. She tried to become devout.
7
The Masons started sending Shirley to Sabbath School. About a dozen boys and girls attended each Saturday morning. Back at home after church, Walter and Mattie probably also took out
Bible Readings for the Home Circle
, a popular book among Adventists in the 1920s. It featured Bible verses, followed by questions that parents and children were supposed to answer together. “And I stood upon the sand of the sea,” went one verse, “and saw a beast rise up out of the sea. Having seven heads and ten horns. And upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the names of blasphemy.”
Family members of all ages took turns answering the questions which followed these frightening readings—questions about the hated Catholic church, which celebrated Sabbath on Sunday, and about the end of the world. Shirley had trouble concentrating. She fussed and squirmed until Mattie scolded her with “Land sakes!” and “Stand still!” To relax, Shirley emptied her head of beasts and horns. In their place she conjured tales based on stories in Adventist children’s books—stories their authors swore were true, about mischievous kitty cats and winsome little girls and boys who often misbehaved but were usually forgiven by Jesus. Soon imaginary friends started visiting Shirley—Vicky, whose family was Catholic but gentle and honest, and little Sam, whose name came from Shirley’s initials: S.A.M. Immersed in fantasies, she forgot the long, grim hours of her family’s day of rest.
8
While still in her fantasy world, she often heard scolding outside. It came from Mattie, who was angry that Shirley had just done or said something objectionable. Shirley came to, unable to remember doing anything wrong. “I did
not
!” she would protest, and Mattie grew angrier. “I stood right there and heard you, young lady!” she would yell, and warn Shirley about “talking back to your mother like that.” Shirley would slink off, confused and angry. Her parents would laugh at her “pouting.”
9
In the bleak little Adventist meeting house, fights would break out about who was devout and who was reprobate. Someone yelled once at Shirley’s grandmother Mary for not being sufficiently faithful. Mrs. White taught that even Adventists would be barred from Heaven unless they scrupulously controlled their bodies and their baser instincts. Sex was strictly for procreation, and even married couples should indulge only moderately. Masturbation—the “solitary vice” and “secret vice,” Mrs. White called it—was a horrible sin for boys and men, worse than fiction reading. For women and girls it was virtually unforgiveable.
10
To keep sex temptation at bay, Adventists followed a radical, vegetarian diet related to the health reform movement, which was tremendously popular in America in the nineteenth century, among many groups besides Adventists. The people who developed the menu included Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister who obsessively feared masturbation and
excessive sex. Graham blamed this degenerate behavior on meat, gravy, butter, jam, eggs, pastry, white bread, coffee, pepper, tobacco, tea, beer, and liquor. These substances inflamed the nerves and the genitals, he believed, and he invented a flat biscuit to replace the offending foods. He named it the graham cracker.
Adventists came up with other products: peanut butter, soy milk, Granola, and Kellogg’s corn flakes, invented by John Harvey Kellogg, who was raised in an Adventist family. Today’s widely available veggie burgers from companies such as Worthington, Loma Linda, and Morningstar Farms also have an Adventist legacy.
As part of the health reform movement, Americans during the nineteenth century also gave themselves “internal baths”—known nowadays as enemas. Many believed constipation caused sexual excitement in males and nymphomania in females. John Harvey Kellogg gave himself several enemas a day, and by the early twentieth century, Americans of all classes and faiths were enthusiastically flushing their bowels, even giving enemas to their children. Mattie had an enema bag hanging over her shower in Dodge Center that she probably used on Shirley.
11
Mattie tried to be a good wife, mother, and member of the community. Usually she functioned quite well. With extraordinary energy she did volunteer work for the church, collecting money for missionary work and taking minutes at meetings of the women’s society. She made house calls to the town’s less fortunate. She yelled greetings to people on the street and laughed her odd laugh. Following the recipes in Adventist cookbooks, she kneaded dough from wheat flour, then washed and washed it until the starch was rinsed out, leaving a wad of glutinous plant protein. She mixed the gluten with ground peanuts and tomato sauce, pressed it into tin cans, baked it, and sliced it into rounds of substitute meat.
But then she would slow down and turn worried, snappish, and distant, confusing her daughter terribly. After weeks of laughing with Shirley and playing dolls with her, she would ignore her, or worse, call her names. Mattie labeled her moods “the blues.” Sometimes they got so bad that she would sit motionless in a chair for hours.
Mattie got the blues in 1927, after she miscarried a male fetus. It was
so well developed that she and Walter named it Willard before they buried it.
12
If losing the baby was not upsetting enough, the Masons had to move five miles out of town that year, to a piece of farmland they owned. The only habitable building was a one-room structure originally intended as a chicken house. The move apparently was made because of bank failures in the Dodge Center area, which wiped out Walter’s capital, and because of Walter’s lackadaisical business sense even when times were good. He would buy lumber and cement on credit, then build barns and houses in spring and summer without yet being paid by his clients. He would wait till fall to collect, when the farmers got their crops in. But if the harvest turned out badly, he was in trouble.
It seems that Walter had problems with creditors, and to hide from them he moved his family to the chicken house. Mattie was devastated. Her home in Dodge Center boasted a piano in the parlor, heirloom china in polished cabinets, and light streaming through the sunroom. The chicken house had none of these luxuries, and Mattie got the blues so bad that she spent days barely moving.
The Masons left the farm in spring 1928 to enroll Shirley in kindergarten. The Adventists had their own school, which all their children were supposed to attend, to protect them from what the Adventists called the “polluting, corrupting” influence of secular education. Virtually all parents supported the denominational facility, but not the Masons: For reasons unknown, they chose public school for Shirley. They may have felt they could not afford the church’s modest tuition. More likely, they were venting their own conflicts about Seventh-Day Adventism through their daughter.
13
Shirley’s matriculation took the Masons out of the chicken house and back to town, where Mattie had not only her nice furnishings but also her women’s magazines. She had subscriptions to
Ladies’ Home Journal
and
Good Housekeeping.
The magazines’ lavishly illustrated pages celebrated the latest in home appliances, interior decorating, and the season’s hats from Paris and New York. And there was more. They carried short fiction with seductive teasers on the cover: “Another Glamorous Story of the Theater by Booth Tarkington,”
“A New Hollywood Series by Frederick Collins.” These stories, with their focus on actresses, vanity, and romance, were poison for Adventists.
14
Mattie knew the faith’s warnings about such material
but could not help loving it. She read even on Saturday and tried to keep her habit under wraps.
Shirley knew, and she had her own secrets. On Saturdays she stared at her paper dolls, wondering: Is it OK to dress them on the Sabbath?
15
She certainly couldn’t ask, especially not on the sacred day of the week. So she only
thought
about doll clothes. But angels could read minds. According to Adventist theology, they took information about people’s bad ideas to Heaven, where—as one of Shirley’s children’s storybooks warned—they jotted the information into a holy record book. Shirley squirmed.
She felt bad about other things, including Mary Mason, her paternal grandmother. Mary was an easygoing, affectionate woman who had helped care for Shirley when she was a baby but suffered a stroke when her granddaughter was four, and by then also had cancer of the cervix. Grandma Mary sometimes lived on the second floor of the Mason house with Grandpa Neill. Her room was filled with fascinating objects: paintings she had done on panes of glass; little pots she’d helped Shirley pinch from clay dug out of the riverbank; big, farm-supply-store calendars with paintings of cows. But as the cancer worsened, Mattie began timing Shirley’s visits to conserve her mother-in-law’s ebbing strength. She seldom allowed Shirley’s to stay upstairs for more than half an hour.
16
After Grandma Mary died in 1931, Shirley stopped eating and lost weight. The third grader appeared distracted in class. When the teacher called on her, she sometimes seemed in a daze. Her teachers noticed but hardly intervened. As children they, too, had seen death, and adults seldom asked them how it felt. Shirley had no brothers or sisters, and experts had been warning teachers for decades that children with no siblings were peculiar: they tended to social awkwardness and they played with imaginary companions. As one psychologist put it, being an only child was a “disease in itself.” And Shirley was mollycoddled by her parents, the teachers thought. Her mother held her hand and walked her to school every day, even though school was just across the street from home. Leave it to the Masons, the teachers huffed, to aggravate Shirley’s “disease” of only childhood.
17
Her parents did dote on her. Walter was a man who rarely talked, but like his daughter, he was gentle and artistic. Shirley loved how he taught her to use hammers and saws, and how in the dead of Minnesota winter, he
dressed her in little boys’ overalls for warmth and called her Mike. When Mattie didn’t have the blues she and Shirley often played games. Mattie had not outgrown her own childhood love for dolls, and she often compared her daughter to them. “Oh you’re so cute, Peggy Ann,” she would say to Shirley, laughingly referring to a very popular fourteen-inch girl with a winsome face and molded Dutch-boy hair topped with a bow. Delighted, Shirley would laugh back.
During her periods of “nervous” energy, Mattie loved to mimic people in town. She could do a perfect rendition of distant cousin Grace Sorenson, who attended the Adventist church. She could parrot the squawks of demanding customers on Main Street and the long-suffering sighs of the salesclerks. Shirley imitated her mother’s imitations. “That’s not very nice!” Walter would protest. But he laughed anyway. Copycatting people’s voices was great fun, and Shirley had picked up her mother’s gift for it.
Then Mattie would get the blues. In the living room she would obsessively polish her cut glass and Haviland dishware, turning the pieces over and over, murmuring about their beauty. When Shirley interrupted to play the Peggy game, Mattie kept talking about dishes.
“Look at the cat!” Shirley would implore, and Mattie would snap. “I can’t look at the cat. I’ve got work to do. Who do you think would get things done and meals ready on time if I stood around looking at the cat?” Shirley would feel enraged, with an overwhelming urge to smash her mother’s glassware. But she stayed quiet and docile. For Adventists it was a sin to be angry.
18
Shirley had few friends, but there was one boy she adored—Bobby Moulton. Skinny and snaggletoothed, Bobby was pitied by other children because his mother was ill and he had to push his baby sister’s stroller through the neighborhood. But he and Shirley were kindred spirits in creativity. At age eight Bobby was tap dancing professionally. He loved dolls and doll clothes, and could sew costumes for Shirley’s Peggys and Peggy Anns. He made little playhouses out of wood and cardboard, and recruited Shirley’s dolls to stage Shakespearean dramas in the sunroom.
And there was a pretty little girl named Anita Weeks, who was almost three years younger than Shirley. She was the only other Adventist in public school besides Shirley, and the two girls saw each other in church.
19
____________
The Second Coming seemed nigh to the congregation after the stock market crashed in October 1929. Walter lost his contracting business then and felt lucky to have an $18.50-a-week job as a hardware store clerk on Main Street. Not long after, the Dust Bowl blew out of the Dakotas, blackening the Minnesota sky even by day. Soon the countryside was withered with drought.
Desperate to make ends meet, Mattie took in a $12-a-week boarder, an elderly man from church who was so sick that he needed her help eating and using the toilet. He died in 1935. So did Walter’s father, Neill, who had spent his final years rejoicing in international financial collapse and its prophetic relationship to the End Time. After his death Mattie accepted more boarders. The Masons, once one of Dodge Center’s “best” families, were financially strapped and practically running a hotel.