Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life Read Online Free PDF

real.” During the first few decades of its existence, Christian Science was the fastest growing religious movement in America, increasing from just under 9,000 members in 1890 to more than 60,000 in 1906; the church’s first San Francisco branch was established in 1895, the year of Geraldine’s birth. At its height, in the 1930s, the movement claimed more than 260,000 members—about one in every 500 Americans.
    The rise of Christian Science coincided with a general surge of interest in spiritualism and occult phenomena; Eddy herself was known toconduct séances. The Ouija board, popularized in its modern form by Baltimore inventor William Fuld, could be found in virtually every parlor across the country by the late 1910s. Even President Woodrow Wilson was a devotee: when asked in 1914 whether he would be reelected, Wilson replied, “The Ouija board says yes.” Numerous people claimed to take dictation from spirits, including one woman who said she had recorded a new novel by Mark Twain, then dead for seven years. Back in the Bay Area, Contra Costa County was the site of an outbreak of “ouijamania,” in which a teenager allegedly forced her mother and sister to sit by the Ouija board day and night, believing that they were in contact with a relative who had been hit by a car several weeks earlier. Mimi, too, experimented with a Ouija board; Shirley’s brother recalled her and his mother using it with him and Shirley when they were children.
    Christian Scientists are famous for their belief that illness can be cured through thought alone. “Sickness is a dream from which the patient needs to be awakened,” Eddy proclaimed. Perhaps Mimi suffered from a chronic illness or handicap that she believed Christian Science could cure. Or she may have been drawn by its message of personal empowerment, its exhortations that belief alone could suffice to improve one’s lot in life. But it could not cure her marriage. In the early 1920s, she and her husband separated, and Mimi moved in with her daughter and son-in-law. Around the same time, Maxwell began designing a new house for his daughter’s family, complete with an extra bedroom for his own wife. He died in 1927, shortly after it was finished. His granddaughter, then ten years old, would barely remember him.
    “ YOU COULD MAKE A story out of . . . Pop’s life,” Shirley’s mother once told her. Leslie Hardie Jackson’s family history, a classic American up-by-the-bootstraps saga, would seem more at home in a novel by Sinclair Lewis. A wealthy English family suddenly loses all its money under mysterious circumstances, perhaps in a business deal gone wrong. The father disappears, leaving a teenage son to look after his mother and two sisters. They change their name, burying all traces of their past, and travel across an ocean and a continent to San Francisco, bringing amongtheir few possessions an heirloom wedding gown that had been Leslie’s grandmother’s. For a decade, the son supports his family by working a series of odd jobs, serving as a clerk, a salesman, and finally a printer’s apprentice. At age twenty-four, he marries the daughter of one of the city’s most established families, his bride—“one of the prettiest girls in the neighborhood, tall, brunette type, with quantities of brown hair and a clear lovely complexion”—elegant in his grandmother’s dress. Their marriage took place on March 15, 1916, the date chosen to coincide with Maxwell and Mimi’s anniversary.
    Leslie and Geraldine must have seemed an unlikely couple. Her family, San Francisco elite, could trace its heritage to before the American Revolution; now she was marrying an immigrant with an unknowable past. But their goals were strikingly consonant, first among them a desire for material wealth. By the time of the marriage, Leslie was already working at the rapidly growing Traung Label and Lithograph Company, where he would ultimately rise to chairman of the board. Established by