Sybil Exposed (8 page)

She did not know Shirley Mason yet. But in the late 1930s, she began rehearsing for what would happen when they met.

F
LORA SCHREIBER NEVER STRUGGLED WITH
God when she was a child, or with chemistry, school, or the devil. She was an atheist, with atheist parents who would have been loathe to keep her from following her passions. Her mother and father encouraged Flora to experience everything, then to pick up a pen and write about it. By the time she was a teenager she was bold at seeking out novelty and keen at putting her observations on paper. She was a budding author.

But she was also wounded, a young girl made ashamed and confused by parts of her family life which would haunt her into adulthood and influence what she wrote about in magazines and books.

Flora’s parents, William and Esther Schreiber, were Jewish immigrants to America. William—or Willy, as everyone called him—was five years old in 1891, the year his parents arrived in New York City. They settled on the Lower East Side, a vast Jewish ghetto. Ignatz Schreiber, Flora’s paternal grandfather, found work as an insurance salesman. He immediately applied to have his family naturalized.

Willy learned English effortlessly and excelled as a student. After finishing high school he won a scholarship to Columbia University, where he got a masters degree in classics in 1908. He loved intellectualism and high culture—German literature over Russian, Wagner more than Bach.

Flora’s mother, Esther Aronson, arrived with her family in New York in 1889. Her father could read but not write; her mother was completely illiterate. But Esther finished high school, and by 1910 she was working as a clerk at the Astor Library. Founded decades earlier by multimillionaire John Jacob Astor, the namesake institution had just become part of the New York Public Library but still had its own elegant building, attended by doormen in uniform. It was a grand job for Esther, a dark-haired twenty-four-year-old with thick brows and deep-set eyes.

Willy worked in the Astor’s cavernous back rooms, in the cataloguing section. Quiet and bespectacled, he took to the the intricate, meditative Dewey Decimal System. Later, in 1921, he would move to the city’s recently built main library, a grand beaux-arts building on Fifth Avenue, graced by paired statues of lions. Appointed chief classifier and subject header there, he would take his place at one of the largest, most prestigious libraries in the world.

He and Esther wed in 1913 and moved into a small apartment in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section. The area was a haven for Jews escaping from the slums and overcrowding of Manhattan. Brooklyn had slums and poor people, but it also had residents who were upwardly mobile, and the Schreibers belonged to that group. They lived in a noisy tenement building, but their apartment was orderly and boasted glass bookcases containing Willy’s collection of phonograph records—particularly the symphonies of Gustav Mahler.
1

Flora was born at home in 1916. She was a strapping baby, weighing in at eight pounds. Esther quit her job, and her widowed father moved in, along with Esther’s unmarried sister, who had little education and could not support herself. Willy and Esther put their money into taking care of these kin, and they decided they could not afford more babies. Flora grew up as an only child.

She was lavished with attention. Her father conversed with her constantly, even before she first talked at eight months. She spoke her first sentence while cheerfully throwing pillows from her go-cart. “Now stop it, Flora,” Willy ordered. She kept throwing them. He warned her again. “But Daddy!” she explained, “I’m happy.” Willy thought that was brilliant. He was equally impressed when two-year-old Flora said she wanted to write letters to various people. She didn’t know the alphabet but she dictated her
correspondence. Willy was awestruck by his toddler’s literary abilities and predicted Flora would be a writer when she grew up.

Willy Schreiber wished that he, too, could be a writer. His job gave him access to virtually every fact in the world, but his writing was never done under his own name. Instead he contributed anonymously to other people’s work. He did behind-the-scenes research for a son-in-law of John D. Rockefeller who authored books about farming and dairy cows. And he compiled the index for Emily Post’s first edition of
Etiquette
, published in 1922. (Some of his entries:
Asparagus, how to eat; Bones, management of, at table; Ex-President of the United States, how to introduce; Vulgar woman, the
.)
2

He fantasized about seeing his name in print and felt that the isolation of the library was stifling his dreams. To be a writer, Willy thought, one must be out in the world, not cloistered in a catalogue room. But he saw no escape: he had a young wife at home, needy in-laws, and a child. To give them good, secure lives he needed good, secure employment. As the years passed he got quieter and quieter, and by late middle age he seldom smiled. Instead he walked. After work beginning at 5:00 p.m., he made a habit of silently strolling New York’s streets for miles and miles. It was his escape from the stasis of his life.

But his daughter didn’t feel stuck. He and Esther had big dreams for her, and from early on they instilled in her an appreciation for high culture, intellectual and professional aspiration, and plenty of derring-do.
3
Willy put his 78 rpm records on the Victrola and played classical music for Flora. He told her about Mahler and Wagner and poetry and Shakespeare. Her piano lessons were arranged to make her not just cultured but courageous; there were countless piano teachers in Brooklyn, but the Schreibers got Flora an instructor in the Bronx. Once a week she rode the subway more than thirty stops north. She went by herself. She was nine years old.

The bravado Flora was developing in the outside world did not help her in her own home. Years later, she would confide to a good friend that as a child she was sexually molested by a family member. She did not give details, and she took to her grave the name of her victimizer. From various facts about her family, though, and from memories of an elderly relative, we can surmise what happened.

____________

Dr. Stanley Aronson was eighty-eight years old and living in Providence, Rhode Island, when he was interviewed for this book about his first cousin Flora. Born six years after her, he grew up a few blocks away from the Schreibers and often visited them. His and Flora’s Uncle David lived in the same tenement building as the Schreibers. David had a son named Irving who was twenty-two by the time Flora was eleven.

Irving was a ham radio hobbyist. He tinkered at home, building shortwave sets and using Morse code to communicate with other ham enthusiasts worldwide. Irving was fanatical about his pastime. He spent days and nights cooped up in the tenement, listening to signals and tapping out his own.

His parents encouraged his obsession, because when Irving wasn’t absorbed with his radio he was acting out-and-out crazy. He was a schizophrenic, and eventually he would become too ill for his aging parents to deal with. But he was still at home when Flora was entering adolescence in the same apartment building. According to Stanley Aronson, various oddities about her behavior that he recalled from boyhood later led him to believe she was sexually abused around this time.

For one, she started dressing so modestly that she looked “as if she was going to a parochial school.” She almost always wore middy blouses with long, sailor’s flaps over the chest that completely hid the shape of her developing breasts. She seemed strangely silent and shy. When five-year-old Stanley would come over to visit she would chase him and beat him on the head. Stanley was frightened, and he learned to run when Flora came after him.

Her quiet, angry behavior lasted a year or two. Then, suddenly, she was a different person. She started using vulgar language, sexual words. And she began striking dramatic poses, with her back arched and arms akimbo as though she were on the stage of a Greek tragedy or a play by Shakespeare. She became extravagantly verbose. A nice night would start out as, “Oh! This is a lovely evening.” It would turn into “A magnificent evening!” Then, “A celestial evening!” “A stirring evening!”
4

By the time Flora was fourteen, she was writing as dramatically as she was speaking and moving. Her literary work began earning ribbons
in citywide student essay contests; her name appeared on winners’ lists in the
New York Times.
These accomplishments gained her acceptance into Brooklyn’s world-famous Girls High School. It was a female meritocracy filled with the smart daughters of the city’s salt-of-the-earth neighborhoods: Jewish girls, Italian girls, Irish girls, black girls.

The Depression was raging when Flora started Girls High in 1930. Like the rest of the country, New York was plagued by joblessness and bread lines, and Flora’s Brooklyn neighborhood roiled with left-wing politics. By 1932, brigades of Communist organizers and housewives with children were surrounding the apartment buildings of unemployed people who could not pay their rent, defending them against eviction by city marshals. Voters were electing Socialists to the State Assembly. People stood on soapboxes, calling for the downfall of capitalism, or at least for the rise of the New Deal. Even the revolutionaries liked FDR.

Willy Schreiber was the neighborhood’s political oddball. As a civil service employee with the library, he had a steady if modest income, and he was not a member of a union—no civil servants were. He worried that the New Deal would redistribute public funds, including his salary, to the unemployed. He despised Roosevelt, to the great annoyance and even anger of the rest of the family, including his wife. At birthday parties there were heated arguments between Willy and the other adults. Flora listened and felt divided. In her world, being as politically conservative as her beloved father was like being from Mars.

In school, Flora lacked friends despite trying hard to fit in with the rest of the girls. Her face was not pretty; her jaw was square and her nose too long. She compensated by carefully styling her hair, and shaping her face with powder and bright red lipstick. On a good day of primping she was handsome—a handsome young Jewish woman who looked like her peers. Still, she stuck out when she began broadening her vowels and dropping even more “r’s” than everyone else did in her community. She affected a British accent, speaking the way she fantasized Shakespeare had spoken—mixed with 1930s Brooklynese. Her voice irritated some people at school. It intimidated others.

But she still had two friends: her parents. After she was accepted to Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1934, her mother and father moved to upper Manhattan so Esther could visit Flora’s dormitory room
once a week, gather her dirty laundry, drag it to the Schreiber apartment, wash and dry it, then carry it back to the dorm.

Columbia in the 1930s was full of political ferment. In 1934, Flora’s freshman year, Teachers College was launching an innovative program called New College. Its aim was to push young people into the world. Its curriculum dealt with topics related to poverty, economic inequality, and racism. New College was hardly conservative, and Flora found herself in a unique environment.

New College had a rural branch, in a part of the nation almost beyond the imagination of people in New York City. “The Community,” it was called. It spanned 1,800 acres of Appalachia in North Carolina, and all New College students were required to spend time there. They studied social sciences and psychology, as well as home economics and agriculture. They also spent hours every day harvesting vegetables and tending barnyard animals, and they tutored impoverished rural children. These activities put them in contact with some of the poorest people in 1930s America.

Flora wrote extensively to her parents during her time at The Community. Often she described life in Appalachia, as in a letter she sent about a church service she’d just attended in a mountain church. The congregants, she told Willy and Esther, “have drooping shoulders. Their features are set. They are stern… . The preacher worked himself into a frenzy… . ‘God,’ he cried, ‘Help this people that is good. We are all good, God. We want to go to Heaven. Hear us—I’ve been larnin’ all these good souls here that you’ll make them welcome when they come. God, do you hear us?’”
5

Flora was nineteen years old and already a natural nonfiction writer.

But she fantasized about an acting career, and in 1937, as part of the study-abroad program at Teachers College, she won a fellowship to study in London, at the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art, one of the most famous schools in the world for would-be actors. It was run by Elsie Fogerty, a commanding eccentric. She was in her seventies when Flora arrived, and always wore a hat and a severe black dress on which, as one student recalled years later, “we could see the remnants of her breakfast.”
6

Besides acting, Fogerty taught speech, using turn-of-the-century methods that emphasized what was then called “the voice beautiful.” That meant speaking imposingly and forcefully, using pronunciation that mimicked
the elites in Oxford and London. Hollywood and Broadway stars talked this way in the 1930s. So did announcers on the radio and rich people such as President Franklin Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor.

In a booming voice, Fogerty would order students to chant, “Around the rugged rock the ragged rascal ran.” She exhorted them to “Roll those r’s! Roll them ’til they roar like lions!”
7
Flora developed her own “voice beautiful.” A pricey automobile turned into “ahhhn exxxpennnnsive nyoo cawwww.” If something was difficult to put up with, it was “jusssst toooo hahhhd to beahhhh.” This became her ordinary conversational style, even though she never did take up acting and instead decided to be a writer.