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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 materialbut 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, hedressed 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