Shirley was a graduate student at Teachers College of the world-famous Columbia University, in New York City—the same school Flora Schreiber had attended years earlier. Connie had become a psychoanalyst, and she now saw patients, some of them Broadway stars, in her posh home-office complex on Park Avenue. When she and Shirley reunited there, nine years had passed since Nebraska, and in many ways each had changed dramatically. But when it came to their relationship, things picked up exactly where they had left off. On the Upper East Side of Manhattan in 1954, the two women were as smitten with each other as they had been in 1945. How, they asked, had they ended up a second time in the same city? What had brought each of them to Manhattan? Seated at a small table in Connie’s office, Shirley poured out her story. She had gotten no more psychotherapy after Connie left Omaha. But thanks to their work in that city, she had done fairly well in the years that followed. Thinking positive, peaceful thoughts when she was nervous, and popping an occasional sleeping pill at night, Shirley generally controlled herself so well that she was able to teach part time.1 Her Adventism seemed like less of a problem, too.
