Sybil (20 page)

Then, on a brisk October day, as Sybil and Danny sat on the front steps, Danny said, somewhat awkwardly, "Syb, I have something to tell you."

"What?" Sybil, sensing his tone, asked anxiously.

"You see," Danny continued, "my Dad-- well, he bought a gas station in Waco, Texas, and, well, we're going there to live. But you'll come see me. I'll come back here. We'll see each other."

"Yes," Sybil said, "we will."

That evening, when Sybil told Hattie Dorsett that Danny was leaving Willow Corners forever, Hattie shrugged and said, with great deliberateness: "Well, Daddy didn't like you to spend so much time with that boy anyway. Daddy thought you were too old to be playing together."

When Sybil reported to Danny what her mother had said, he answered quietly, "If your mother knew it would hurt you, she'd tell you." Sybil was surprised that Danny should say that.

The next month, while Danny's family got ready to leave Willow Corners, seemed like a reprieve, as if they had been spared the parting. Between Sybil and Danny nothing was changed except that they did everything together more intensely because they knew that time was running out. It was the same feeling that Sybil had experienced during her truncated visits with her grandmother.

Ultimately, however, the day came for Danny to say goodbye. Sybil, sitting with him on the front steps, which for so long had been the scene of close communion, was quiet and composed.

"You'll come see me," Danny reminded Sybil.

"I'll come," Sybil temporized.

"We'll see each other," Danny repeated. "We'll see each other," Sybil echoed.

Danny rose to go. Sybil sat motionless on the steps. "Well, Sybil," he said. "Well ..." Overwhelmed by adolescent embarrassment and unable to complete the sentence, he fell silent, bending over instead to where Sybil was still sitting. He kissed her swiftly on the cheek, pulled away, turned, and was gone.

Sybil, who, since early childhood, had shunned even the most casual physical contact, was now transported by a joyous tingle. At first she was not even aware that Danny was no longer beside her. Then, when awareness did come, she panicked, apprehensively searching for Danny. There he was--his blond hair, his lithe body--moving, retreating.

As he turned from Vine Street into Main Street, he faded out of sight. Sybil sank down onto the steps. The rescue that Danny represented had been withdrawn. The town was deserted. All that existed now was an unmitigated aloneness.

And there still was something funny about time, which, like invisible soap in imperceptible water, slipped away.

The sky is blue, Vicky thought, as, getting up from the front steps, she stepped into the time from which Sybil had just departed.

Vicky walked around the white house with black shutters thinking about how nice it was to be able to give locomotion to the body, which for the very first time belonged wholly to her, Vicky.

At last, the eyes were Vicky's alone to see the world steadily and to see it whole, to look up at the blue sky, clean and clear.

Having reached the back porch steps, Vicky decided to enter the house through that route. "That you, Peggy?" Hattie called from the kitchen window.

No, Vicky thought, it isn't Peggy, or Sybil. It's a person you haven't met before. I'm not your daughter in reality, but I'm here to take Sybil's place, and, although you will call me your daughter, you will discover that I'm not afraid of you. I know how to cope with you.

"That boy gone?" Hattie asked as Vicky entered the kitchen.

"Yes," Vicky said.

"You had no business sitting out there in the cold. You'll come down with pneumonia. You know you're not very strong."

"I'm used to our midwestern winters, and by comparison this autumn weather is child's play," Vicky replied.

"Don't act smart with me," Hattie warned.

"I was only stating a fact," said Vicky. "Well," Hattie answered as she changed the subject, "I'm expecting a package from Elderville. Go on over to the post office and get it for me."

Vicky went.

Strange that it should be autumn. The time of beginnings is spring, she thought, as, listening to the rustling of the dry leaves, she walked down the back porch steps and along the alley that led to Main Street.

Autumn without, it was nevertheless spring within--the spring that followed the long, subduing winter of a little over eight years of secret residency within the recesses of being. Subdued, quiescent, nameless, she had been from the autumn of 1926 to this October day in 1934, from the time Sybil was three and a half until she was eleven. Quiescent, yes. Powerless, no. During that period, by exerting a variety of internal pressures upon Sybil and the other selves, Vicky, still nameless, had become silently instrumental.

It had been a momentous decision--Vicky knew--that she had made as Danny Martin receded out of sight and she rose from the inner recesses of being to the surface of life. Yet at that moment there had been no other possible course of action, for Vicky had realized that the time of instrumentality had passed and that of active intervention had come. She realized that to be effective she would have to take command of the body away from Sybil, who was obviously too traumatized by the parting to carry on. And so, christening herself by a name borrowed from Sybil, who in the fantasy of the pretend world of childhood had created a girl, bright and unafraid, by the name of Victoria Antoinette Scharleau, this hitherto quiescent self entered the world.

It was good, Victoria thought as she walked along Main Street, to feel the bitter, biting wind and to be in control of the body that did the feeling. A newcomer to commanding the body that walked along the street, she felt like an old-timer in the street itself. She had seen everything many times before.

Vicky knew what had happened in the life of Sybil Isabel Dorsett, whether or not Sybil herself had been present. Paradoxically, while time had been discontinuous for Sybil, who had lived in the world, it had been continuous for Vicky, who had existed in the recesses of being. Time, which had been capricious and often blank for Sybil, had been constant for Vicky. Vicky, who had total recall, served as a memory trace in the disjointed inner world of Sybil Dorsett.

This solidity of memory, combined with the fact that, in surfacing into the world, Vicky incorporated within herself a powerful fantasy of Sybil's own coinage, became the source of Vicky's strength. The Victoria of the fantasy, like the new Vicky, an alternating self, was confident, unafraid, immune from the influence of the relationships that had disturbed Sybil.

Vicky thought wryly of the persons who, seeing the slender frame of Sybil Dorsett, would expect the repeated crossing of the street in flight from people. Well, they will not see it now, Vicky thought, as she entered the post office.

The package from Elderville was waiting. This was a good beginning, Vicky decided. If that package hadn't been here, Mrs. Dorsett would have blamed her. How well, Vicky felt, she knew this woman--no mother to her--with whom all these years she had tried to help Sybil cope.

Home only long enough to give Mrs. Dorsett the package, Vicky again walked down the back porch steps and headed for the swing. It was natural for her to do so, for it had been she who had prevailed upon Sybil to adopt the swing as the perfect solution to Hattie Dorsett's constant haranguing for not "doing something." When Sybil, absorbed in thought, sat quietly, Hattie would harp, "Don't just sit there. For land's sakes, do something!" In the swing it had been possible to think and "do something" at the same time.

That evening when supper was over, Hattie suggested to Vicky that they go for a walk. In silence Hattie and Vicky walked, Hattie's controlling hand holding the putative daughter in check. Passing the Stickneys' house, twice the size of the Dorsetts', Hattie snorted, "Old man Stickney is senile. I hope they put him away." As they walked, Hattie talked of Ella Baines, who "did nasty things with a teacher in town" and should be "harpooned by the authorities"; of Rita Stitt, whose mother wasn't really her mother and who some months before Hattie had confounded by telling her so. (vicky thought: you're not my mother, and I could retaliate for Rita by telling you so.)

Hattie Dorsett talked of Danny Martin. "I'm glad to see you're not blue because that boy went away," Hattie said. "I told you that Daddy objected to your playing with him."

"You did tell me," said Vicky, knowing that it had been not to her but to Sybil that Mrs. Dorsett had conveyed that cruel intelligence.

"Well, young lady, there's something else," Hattie added with a childishly triumphant expression. "You don't know that Daddy had a talk with Danny's father a few months ago. Daddy told him straight from the shoulder that it was wrong for you to mix in with people like the Martins, outside our faith."

Vicky winced. The Martins, like Hattie Dorsett herself before her conversion, were Methodists. Willard Dorsett had married a Methodist, yet he objected to his daughter's friendship with one. What hypocrisy! But Vicky said nothing.

"Well," Hattie continued, "Daddy looks down on the Martins for other reasons, too. He feels that they have no class, no background, no style. The father came here from New Jersey looking for gold, and he ended up driving a milk truck. Now he's on his way again, still looking. Where he got the money to buy a gas station down there in Texas nobody can figure out. Anyway, Daddy had a good long talk with Danny's father. Mr. Martin said they would be leaving town soon, so nobody did anything. But, young lady, I thought you should know what Daddy thinks about Danny and Danny's family."

"Danny's gone," was all Vicky said.

"A good thing, too, according to Daddy," Hattie reported, careful to remove herself from the judgment.

Vicky thought: it's a good thing that Sybil will never know what her father did.

"Well, let's go back," Hattie said.

"I wanted to tell you this when Daddy wasn't around. Now that you know, we can go back."

At school the next morning Vicky was in command of both the body and the school work. And although the other children were aloof, Vicky understood that the aloofness was rooted in the happenings of the two years that followed the death of Mary Dorsett, Sybil's grandmother.

Vicky had watched with close scrutiny how, during those two years, Peggy Lou, in complete control of the body, the person who did the actual living, had lost all Sybil's school friends. Peggy Lou would sit at her school desk during recess and make paper dolls instead of going into the yard to play with the other children. At lunch and at the end of the day she would dash out of school, snubbing the children who attempted to talk or walk with her. When asked to go someplace with them, she replied cryptically, "I can't."

Then she'd run. After a while nobody asked her to go anywhere or do anything.

Vicky knew that Peggy Lou had isolated herself from the other children not because she disliked them but because being with them made her angry at not having what they had--a home in which there were brothers and sisters, where there was no reason to be afraid. Rather than go with the other children to those homes, she persuaded herself that she didn't need anyone and, fully persuaded, raced alone to the white house with black shutters, where what made her angry lurked in every corner.

Her bitter loneliness had one compensation. She had a real sense of accomplishment at being independent and doing exactly what she desired, with no one stopping her or telling her what to do. Isolated, she managed somehow to feel free-- albeit with a freedom that made her want to smash a hole in the very center of the universe.

Sometimes Vicky regretted having let Peggy Lou take over at Mary Dorsett's grave. But Vicky had felt then--and still felt when she recalled the event--that no other course of action had been possible.

Too, Vicky assured herself, even though Mary Dorsett was a lovely person, she wasn't her grandmother, and there was no reason for her to involve herself in that macabre business. It seemed fitting to let Peggy Lou take over. Besides, Sybil, standing at the grave, was angry. Dealing with anger was Peggy Lou's function--not Vicky's.

Moreover, the two Peggy years hadn't been all bad. It had been Peggy Lou's emergence more than the restraining hand that had kept Sybil from jumping into Mary Dorsett's grave. After the funeral Peggy Lou, an active child, had been able to do what Sybil, an inactive child, could not have done. When the mourners stayed on as the Dorsetts' houseguests, Peggy Lou had earned the gratitude of Mr. and Mrs. Dorsett by taking Cousin Anita's obstreperous two-year-old Ella off their hands. The Dorsetts, in fact, were pleased that their daughter was active at last, and Vicky had been amazed to discover that Hattie Dorsett got along better with her daughter after than before the death of Mary Dorsett. The daughter who came home from the funeral and stayed for two years talked back and walked on the furniture in a rage, but she also seemed more winsome than the daughter who lived in the white house before Mary Dorsett's death.

Peggy Lou was much more "l" other youngsters than was Sybil. Although Vicky wasn't certain, she felt that this was because Peggy Lou, the daughter of the years after the death, was so much more like Hattie herself than was Sybil. It had been amusing, too, to observe that, upon Sybil's return, Mrs. Dorsett regarded Sybil, not Peggy Lou, as the "different" one. "That child is so different now," Hattie screamed. "I could go right through the ceiling!"