Sybil (17 page)

In time Hattie grew to think a great deal of Willard, even to care about him. He was good to her, and she tried to reciprocate. She cooked what he liked, fussed over recipes for good pies and cakes, and always had his meals on time--dinner precisely at twelve noon and supper at 6:00 P.m. sharp. Although she didn't especially enjoy housework, she became a frantic and fanatic housekeeper. In the early days of marriage, too, Hattie and Willard had long, pleasant musical evenings.

She was indeed the accompanist he had envisioned.

During the first thirteen years of the Dorsetts' marriage Hattie had four miscarriages, no children. Both Willard and Hattie began to think that they never would have children. Neither was sufficiently aware, however, to question whether the miscarriages had any psychological significance. Yet psychological components seemed likely in the light of Hattie's ambivalence about having a baby. She enjoyed taking care of other people's babies and on at least one occasion joked with the mother of a newborn child about "stealing the baby." But expressing herself as urgently wanting a child of her own at one minute, Hattie would express opposite sentiments the next minute. The actual prospect of having to care for the child often made her antagonistic to motherhood.

Later, Dr. Wilbur speculated that the powerful surges of conflicting emotions upset Hattie's hormonal system and became a psychosomatic component of the miscarriages. In any case, when Sybil was conceived, Willard was afraid that this baby, too, might not achieve life. He therefore exerted over Hattie a dominance he had never shown before, forbidding her to appear in public during the pregnancy. Thus secrecy and concealment surrounded Sybil even in the womb.

At birth Sybil weighed five pounds, one and one-fourth ounces. As if ashamed that she was so tiny, Willard took great pains to have the one and a quarter ounces included on the birth announcements. Willard took it upon himself to name the baby, and Hattie, who did not like the name of Sybil Isabel, decided to use that name only when absolutely necessary. At other times Hattie was determined to call her daughter Peggy Louisiana, which later was often abbreviated to Peggy Lou, Peggy Ann, or just Peggy.

But it was more than Sybil's name that disturbed Hattie in the first months of the infant's life. The old ambivalence about being a mother reasserted itself. Thus Hattie, seeing her daughter for the first time, remarked darkly: "She's so fragile, I'm afraid she'll break."

In fact, it was Hattie herself who "broke." Severe depression overtook her after giving birth and lasted for the first four months of Sybil's life. In this period Hattie's only contact with the baby was to breast-feed her. Otherwise, the care of the infant fell to a nurse, to Willard, and, chiefly, to Grandma Dorsett.

When Hattie was well enough to be up and about, she had a head-on collision with Willard about nursing the child when there was company in the house. Even though Hattie wanted to take Sybil into the bedroom and close the door, Willard issued the stern injunction: "No. Everybody will know what you're doing."

Hattie pointed out that other women--the women in the back pew at church, the farm women who came to town on their lumber wagons and often lunched with the Dorsetts--nursed their babies not only when other people were around but also in other people's presence--which Hattie was not proposing to do. But Willard remained obdurate, pointing out that Hattie was not a "farm woman."

Hattie acquiesced but resented her acquiescence. For her part, Sybil, unfed, cried. In turn, Hattie blamed the baby for the crying, which made Hattie nervous, and it was the nervousness this crying produced in Hattie, more than an awareness of any adverse effect that the lack of feeding might have on the baby, more even than resentment at being throttled by Willard, that made her scream, "I could just go through the ceiling!" This was one of her favorite expressions of her chronic frustration.

The depression that followed Sybil's birth intensified the volatility and anxiety that had always been characteristic of Hattie Dorsett. As time went on, Hattie became less and less concerned with pleasing Willard. "I don't care. It's a free country," she would sputter when he complained about an omission in her hitherto painstaking care of him. No longer did she have the patience to sit still long enough to accompany him at the piano. Indeed, no longer could she sit still under any circumstances for more than a few minutes without getting up to straighten the curtain or to flick off a little dust from the furniture. She would even act like this in other people's houses. Although she knew how to sew, her hand wasn't steady enough for her to thread a needle. Willard sewed all of Sybil's baby clothes. Restless, frenetic, Hattie played with words as she played with curtains and dust. She tossed off rhymes and fell into the habit of repeating the ends of people's sentences. If someone said, "I've got such a headache," Hattie would repeat, "Such a headache."

By the age of eight, Sybil had come often to sit on the back-porch steps or on the trunk in the attic or on the box in the front hall and, leaning her head on her knees, to wonder why in the world she felt ... not able to find the right word, she would settle for a "lack of something." But why in the world, she wondered, should something be lacking when she lived in one of the best houses in Willow Corners and had better clothes and more toys than any other child in town? She particularly enjoyed her dolls, her crayons and paints, and her little iron and ironing board.

The more urgently she tried to define the lack, the more elusive it became. All she knew was that some indefinable omission made her feel, as her mother would put it, "sad, down, and blue." What was most disturbing to Sybil was her feeling that she had no reason to be unhappy and that, by being so, she was somehow betraying her parents. To assuage her feelings of guilt she prayed for forgiveness on three counts: for not being more grateful for all she had; for not being happy, as her mother thought she should be; and for what her mother termed "not being like other youngsters."

Disconsolate, tortured, Sybil would sometimes hasten from the porch steps, the attic, or the front hall to the upper floor of the house, where Grandma Dorsett lived.

Her grandmother's place in Sybil's life was pivotal; it was, after all, her grandmother and not her mother who cared for Sybil as an infant. Then, too, while her mother was volatile and ambivalent, her grandmother was balanced and constant. And in the sanctuary of Grandma's home were many mansions--the recollections of small experiences that loomed large in the retrospect of Dr. Wilbur's consulting room.

Grandma would take Sybil in her lap. Sitting there, the child would draw pictures on the drawing paper that her grandmother always had ready for her. Proud of what Sybil drew, her grandmother would hang the drawings on the wall beside the oil paintings she herself had made many years before. Grandma, who had many jars of dried prunes, apricots, and figs, would take Sybil to the kitchen cupboard and let Sybil choose whatever she liked. Grandma let her open the drawers and fold everything she wanted to fold. One day Sybil found a baby picture of herself in one of the drawers. When she saw that picture, stored so carefully, she realized freshly that Grandma really liked her. There was even greater proof when Grandma came to Sybil's defense when Hattie accused the child of being bad. "Now, Hattie," her grandmother would say, "she's just a child." And Sybil remembered, too, the times when she felt sick. When, finally, Grandma came down to stay with her, Sybil, who had been unable to take food, suddenly could eat. Besides, when Grandma laughed, it was nice; it didn't hurt at all.

The visits upstairs with Grandma were never long, however. Her mother allowed only a set time and, as the visit proceeded, Sybil could feel that time was running out. There was so great a need and so little opportunity for its fulfillment that when her mother mounted the stairs to reclaim Sybil, the child could feel time literally slipping away.

When Grandpa came home, however, it was Sybil herself who brought the visit to a close. She didn't like her grandfather, a large, burly man, given to rough play. The sound of his wooden leg on the stairs, which heralded his approach, made her tell her grandmother: "I have to go now." In reply Grandma would smile understandingly.

When Sybil was four years old, her grandmother had a stroke and was sometimes not herself. She would wander around Willow Corners not knowing her way. Sybil made it her job to find her grandmother and bring her home, protecting Grandma until she recovered as for so long Grandma had protected her.

For five years after her recovery, Grandma Dorsett continued to protect Sybil. But, when Sybil was nine, Grandma was afflicted by a new illness--cancer of the cervix--which worried Sybil and made her afraid.

There was a coffin in the big house in Willow Corners, and they were going to take it away. It was almost one o'clock, and through the window of the white kitchen with its speckled linoleum Sybil could see the men from the funeral home bringing in the folding chairs for the service.

"Go to your room," her mother told her. "Mama will come and get you when we're ready and you can come down for the funeral."

Her mother then gave her a lollipop to lick while she waited. She lay on the bed, toying with the lollipop. She could hear voices downstairs, distant voices that, since she had been removed from them, had nothing to do with her. Then for a while she heard nothing.

Suddenly her father was standing over her. "Come on," he said, "the service is all over. You can come with us to the cemetery."

They had forgotten her. They had promised she could come down for the service, but they hadn't kept their promise. She was nine years old. The service had taken place in her own house. But they left her upstairs, with a fool lollipop as if she were a baby. She could not, would not forgive her parents.

On went her coat, on went her tam and plaid scarf. Down the stairs she went, past all those people, silent and motionless, on to the sidewalk. "You're to go in this car, Sybil," the minister said.

Inside the car were her uncle Roger and his wife, another Hattie, whom she didn't like. Her uncle and her father looked so much alike that the minister had put her with the "wrong" daddy. She was upset.

She was also disturbed because this was her grandmother, yet she was the one her father and mother, so busy with all those other people, overlooked or pushed around. It was unfair. The tears, ice cold, stayed within her. She never cried aloud.

The car had stopped. They were walking toward the Dorsett family plot on a road in a cemetery in the village of her grandfather's birth. He was the first white male to be born in the county.

Walking here, Sybil thought about death. Death, she had been told in church, was a beginning. She couldn't quite see that. Her grandmother had told her that someday Jesus would come to raise from the graves those who loved Him. Then, Grandma had said, she and Sybil would be together forever in the earth made new.

Uncle Roger and Aunt Hattie led Sybil to where the family was standing: mother and daddy, Aunt Clara and her husband, Anita and Ella (two years old), and, of course, grandpa. Together they stood some ten feet from her grandmother's grave, silent beneath an overcast Wisconsin sky. It was a cold, windy April day.

The gray metal casket, with banks of flowers over it, had been placed near the grave. The minister was standing beside it. "And I saw a new heaven," he began, "and a new earth ... and I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. ... and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain. ... And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new."

Sybil saw not the metal casket, the flowers, or the people; what she saw was Mary, her Canadian grandmother married to a native of Willow Corners, living in .his town. An outsider to the people in his church, Mary had been forced to do his bidding. She loved to read, but he had stopped her with the injunction: "Anything but truth is false." Religious writings alone were true, he thought.

Sybil could see her grandmother in her long skirts, her hightop shoes, her white hair, her small blue eyes, her warm, sweet smile.

What Sybil heard were not the words of the minister but her grandmother's gentle voice saying, "It's all right, Hattie," when her mother had said, "Sybil, you mustn't bounce on grandma's bed."

Her grandmother's big bed was high and soft. Sybil bounced on it all she liked. Her grandmother would scoop her up, rock her and say, "Sybil, Sybil, Sybil." When she was with her grandmother, there was no hollering. Home, just downstairs, seemed miles and miles away--a memory to forget.

Sybil would show her grandmother her drawings, and her grandmother would say, "Wonderful," and hang them on the wall. Her grandmother had a big box by the window, and she had a lot of magazines and papers in it, with all the children's pages, which she saved just for Sybil. And she let Sybil draw pictures, and Sybil stayed inside all the lines, coloring neatly. Her grandmother liked what Sybil did.

Her grandmother let Sybil set the table and didn't say Sybil did it all wrong. If Sybil did do something wrong, her grandmother didn't get mad at her. Sybil could tell her lots of things, pleading, "You won't tell mother, will you?" Her grandmother would say, "I never tell Hattie anything that you tell me." And she didn't.

There were flowers in the woods where Sybil had walked with her grandmother to the river, but now the minister was saying, "For so much as it has pleased Almighty God to permit our sister, Mary Dorsett, to fall asleep, we do tenderly commit her body to the ground ..."