Sybil (13 page)

What, the doctor wondered, would Mademoiselle Scharleau have said if she had been asked how she had gotten into the Dorsett household or when her family was coming for her? As the doctor walked to her desk to write some notes about the Dorsett case, she asked herself, "How is Sybil to become one? Out of how many?"

New York, Vicky thought as she walked out of the doctor's building, isn't like Paris or like any other city in which I've lived since leaving Willow Corners. On a gray day like this, this bustling, ever-changing city seems like a shadow of itself.

She walked briskly because she was late for her appointment with Marian Ludlow at the Met and because she felt free at having left behind her--for the time being--the shadows of those others in whose lives her own was intertwined.

She thought of Marian Ludlow. Tall, with a strikingly good figure, handsome rather than beautiful, Marian was a volatile person. She had bright brown hair, bright brown eyes, and three freckles across her nose. Those freckles were the blemish that rescued her friend from a physical perfection that she herself, with a capacity for idealization, was always too prone to bestow.

Marian and she had shared a world of wonder since their accidental meeting in early November, 1954, in the Teachers College cafeteria. Since then, they had been to Carnegie Hall, where they heard the Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony, Walter Gieseking and Pierre Monteux. They had been to the United Nations Conference Building, where they had witnessed a stormy session of the Security Council.

Nothing had been as exciting as the art exhibits. The two of them especially enjoyed those at the Brooklyn Museum, where they had been enchanted not only with the collection of American artists but also with the marvelous contemporary watercolor gallery and with an entire floor devoted to a display of American furniture.

Antique furniture for both Marian and Vicky was the past made tangible, a mirror of a departed way of life in which they both rejoiced. Heppelwhite tables, Chippendale chairs, lowboys, and highboys filled their conversation. There had been fascination for them in the dissection of a fine point in a Virginia cupboard or in a tastefully scrolled scrap hinge in a Pennsylvania chest.

Marian had exquisite taste, developed as the result of a wealth that she no longer had. She had been educated in exclusive private schools, had been graduated from Barnard in the 1930's, had gone to finishing school, and, chaperoned by a maiden aunt, had made a typical Henry James grand tour of Europe.

Born to wealth, Marian had married into still more wealth. After her husband's death, Marian had used her fortune for her pleasure. Seeing it dwindle and discovering that, for the first time, she had to work for a living, she had come to Columbia to prepare herself for teaching by taking graduate courses in art education. That's how she happened to be in the cafeteria at Teachers College the afternoon they had first met.

Suddenly realizing that she was within a block of the Met, Vicky abruptly emerged from her reverie, quickened her steps, and headed swiftly toward the Fountain Restaurant.

Standing at the doorway of this immense room designed as a Roman atrium, with its rectangular pool in its center, arched glass ceiling, towering columns, and tables with simulated marble tops, Vicky was overwhelmed by the mass, of baroque art confronting her. Although she had been here many times, her reaction had always been the same.

Seated at one of the tables to Vicky's right was Marian Ludlow.

"I'm afraid I'm late," Vicky remarked as she approached her friend. "I must apologize. It was a business appointment. I just couldn't get away."

"I've been enjoying my solitude," Marian replied. "I was thinking about what this room will be like when Carl Milles's fountains are installed in the pool."

"That won't be until summer," Vicky said as she sat down. "I've read that there will be eight fountain figures. Five will represent the arts."

"Milles," Marian replied, "has always been at home in the classical world. We'll have to come back in the summer and see for ourselves."

Vicky could feel Marian's eyes, languorous but with a tinge of sadness, resting softly on her. It was an exquisite feeling to be in this woman's presence, a feeling, too, of infinite satisfaction to know that it had been Marrin who had made the initial move toward friendship.

It was the tinge of sadness in Marian's eyes that proved most compelling to Vicky, who, in spite of the fact that she herself was a happy person, had had long experience in responding to the sadness of another. Vicky's empathy had quickened their friendship.

If Marian had a daughter, Vicky thought surely, it should have been I. We would have put an end to the generation gap. Though Marian is old enough to be my mother, the years make no difference at all.

"Let's go," Marian was saying. "They'll be out of everything if we don't."

They walked through the immense room toward the food counter. "Cafeteria food on marble tables," Vicky remarked, as Marian, obviously concerned with the contours of her excellent figure, reached for a salad of sliced pineapple and cottage cheese. "It gives a pedestrian flavor to a continental atmosphere." Vicky, slender beyond her desire because Sybil kept her that way, selected macaroni and cheese.

Back at the table beside the rectangular pool, Vicky and Marian talked of silk-weaving in France, the subject of a term paper Marian was preparing. "You know so much about it," Marian said, "I'm certain you can give me invaluable advice." And so they talked of early inventories of the royal furniture repository of Louis XIV, of how the first known material to originate in France was a piece of velvet having the crown as an emblem, dating from the reign of either Henry IV or Louis XIII. "If you can establish which king it is," Vicky said, "you'll have a coup."

The conversation turned to the pictorial and landscape patterns that had reemerged during the early eighteenth-century period as a result of the rediscovery of Chinese motifs. "Did you know," Vicky asked, "that these artists were very much under the influence of Boucher, Pillement, and Watteau?"

"And weren't those artists influenced by the Chinese motifs of Meissen porcelain?" Marian asked. "That was the period of Chinese influence, after all."

"I give you an A," Vicky said with a smile.

Marian finished her coffee, Vicky her hot chocolate. Marian lit a cigarette and remarked, "I'm glad you don't smoke. Don't ever start."

"There's little fear of that," Vicky replied. "It's not one of my vices."

"I haven't noticed any others," Marian teased.

"You'll have to look harder," Vicky replied in the same spirit.

"Well," said Marian, "we have our jewelry class at six. That gives us just time to see "Word Becomes Image.""

The exhibit, which was in the Great Hall, was intriguing. There were interpretations by American and European artists from Durer to Alexander Calder of scenes and characters in some of the world's best-known literary masterpieces-- Aesop's Fables, Dante's Inferno, Faust, Don Quixote, Hamlet, and King Lear, The Eclogues of Virgil, and the legends from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Among the biblical illustrations was an interpretation of the beasts with seven heads and ten horns from the Apocalypse engraved by Jean Duvet in the sixteenth century.

Lingering over the Duvet work, Vicky remarked, "I used to paint beasts."

"You've never mentioned it," Marian said. "No. It was back in Omaha some ten years ago when I used to illustrate our pastor's fiery sermons about the beasts rising from the sea."

"I'm glad to hear you talk about your painting," Marian replied. "You've always been so reticent about it, Sybil."

Sybil. The mention of that name didn't really disturb Vicky. That was the only name by which Marian and everyone else knew her--the name on identification cards and checks, in mail boxes, telephone books, in registrars' offices. As a realist Vicky had always accepted these as facts of her unique existence.

Victoria Scharleau couldn't disavow the name even though it actually belonged to "the other girl," as Peggy Lou called her. It was the name of the lean, frightened figure who was never seen at a time like this, among people, relaxed and happy. The real bearer of the name Sybil was the reserved, contracted being who walked alone and who, Vicky knew, was seeking a self that to her not only had come naturally but also was the substance of her very existence.

So she was used to the idea of "Sybil." She was discomforted more by the fact that she knew that it was this other Sybil, more than she, who, along with some of the others--those whom Vicky had mentioned to Dr. Wilbur--had really painted the beasts. Vicky felt that even in casual conversation she had been wrong in claiming those paintings as her own.

"I'm reticent about my paintings," Vicky said aloud, "because I know better painters than I."

"Well," Marian replied, "that's always true. By that standard no artist would ever have any sense of according-complishment. But you're no slouch. After all, the head of the art department said that he hasn't had anyone in the department with as much talent as you have for better than twenty years."

"Marian, let's change the subject,"

Vicky replied uneasily.

It was impossible for Vicky to accept the professor's evaluation of the work of the total Sybil Dorsett as her own. Sybil painted, Vicky painted, and so did most of the other selves of Sybil. Of them all, Sybil, in Vicky's opinion, was the most gifted painter. This ability had manifested itself in childhood. When Sybil's art teachers were impressed by her work, her parents had been confounded until her father had taken her work to be evaluated by an art critic in St. Paul, Minnesota. Only then was there parental acceptance of Sybil's ability. In high school and college Sybil had commanded good sums for her paintings, which were exhibited in prestigious places.

None of the paintings, of course, was Sybil's alone. Most were collaborative efforts of several of the selves. Collaboration had proved constructive at times, destructive at others.

But despite diversity of styles and tell-tale lapses in the paintings, Sybil--the total Sybil Dorsett with Sybil herself as the dominant painter--had always had the potentiality of being an important artist. And although that potentiality was never realized became of the psychological problems that deflected Sybil from that course, there had been realization enough for the Columbia art professor to regard Sybil-- as Marian had reported--as the most gifted student who had been in the department in the course of over twenty years.

As these thoughts moved through Vicky's mind, she realized how impossible it was to explain her feelings of reticence about talking about her--their-- paintings to Marian Ludlow or anyone else who thought that there was just one artist answering to the name of Sybil Dorsett.

Vicky and Marian had an early dinner on the roof restaurant at Butler Hall, an apartment hotel near the Columbia campus. Marian ordered Salisbury steak, and Vicky had spaghetti and meat balls. Then they went to the six o'clock jewelry class.

The jewelry class was a place to which Vicky went because Sybil couldn't. Taking place in a basement aglow with blow torches used by Vulcanian figures wearing goggles and black aprons, the class stirred in Sybil memories of Willow Corners. And the memories reawakened old, unresolved fears.

Vicky, stepping into the breach when Sybil blacked out or, as tonight, attending the class on her own because she was in the ascendancy, not only was making an A in the subject but also was helping Marian, who had little previous experience, to score an A.

Vicky always enjoyed this class. Some nights she sketched designs for jewelry or executed the designs she had already sketched. This night she was making a link necklace of copper and was helping Marian with a silver pendant.

After class Vicky and Marian went back to Vicky's dormitory room, in which lights from other rooms, turning on and off, were reflected in the window facing the courtyard. Vicky turned on the radio, and they listened to the news and to "The Great Gildersleeve." As the evening came to a close and Marian was getting ready to leave, Vicky very cautiously began putting away the jewelry supplies they had brought back with them. She was determined to leave the room exactly as it had been before they started working.

"Why are you so fussy?" Marian asked. "You room alone. These things won't bother anybody."

"Yes, I know," Vicky replied with a wry smile. Then, trying to disguise her feelings, she chatted amiably with Marian as they walked to the door.

After Marian was gone, Vicky thought of the time that Sybil had brought a sample sketch to Dr. Wilbur's office and had told the doctor that she was afraid to use the sketch because she didn't know if it had come out of a book or just where it came from. It had been Vicky's sketch. Thinking how disturbed Sybil had been then and how disturbed she would also be if she found any jewelry supplies in the room, Vicky wanted to protect her from another terrifying discovery. Vicky thought: "I live alone yet not alone."

And Vicky felt that she was moving toward the shadows of something from which she had been free almost all day.

Sybil was in her dormitory room, studying for an exam in Professor Roma Gans's education course. There was a knock on the door. She thought that it was Teddy Reeves. Standing at the door, however, was not Teddy but a tall, good-looking woman with bright brown hair and bright brown eyes, a woman who was probably in her early forties. Sybil didn't know the woman.