Sybil (23 page)

"Poor what?" asked the doctor. "Life," Mary replied promptly. "These bivouacs, where the soldiers are, are bad. We can't all be heroes."

"A bivouac," the doctor pointed out, "is not where the soldiers are. A bivouac is any encampment."

"I'm telling you the way it was," Mary replied with a tinge of irritation. "A word doesn't matter. The bivouac, where all of us were, was bad. We were soldiers in a losing battle. That's the way it was. Still achieving, still pursuing, we learned to labor and to wait. We tried to be patient. We were very good all the time when we were little. We learned a lot, and we tried and tried and tried. Sybil tried. I tried. We all tried. But it didn't work."

"Mary," the doctor remarked gently, "perhaps something stood in the way of the trying. Perhaps the trying will work when we discover what that something was."

"So you see," Mary answered, ignoring the doctor's comment, "you can't always trust the poets. I don't trust anybody."

"You trusted grandma?"

Mary nodded.

"You trust your father."

"Yes." The yes was emphatic. "He's an almost perfect human being." Mary, it was apparent, loved her father unreservedly.

"You must trust me, or you wouldn't be here."

"Well, we'll see," said Mary.

"But what about the trying?" the doctor said, returning to the question that Mary had evaded. "Do you think we can find what keeps the trying from working?"

"The word is opportunity," Mary replied. "We have to make the most of our opportunities. We all want Sybil to do that." It sounded like an echo of the platitudes of Willow Corners.

"But, Mary," the doctor persevered, "you still haven't answered my question."

"Like the gardener," Mary replied slowly, "we must pull up the weed and destroy it."

"That's exactly right," the doctor agreed. "But what is the weed?"

"For the soul is dead that slumbers," Mary recited nonresponsively, "and things are not what they seem."

Mary continued to be evasive. For a moment, when she had talked of pulling up the weed, the doctor had thought her on the threshold of revealing something of the nature of the original trauma. But with poetry as a mask behind which to hide, Mary kept the trauma obscure. Still, it was the doctor's distinct impression that Mary, who was thoughtful and contemplative, did have some access to the traumatic truth. It seemed clear to the doctor, too, that, although mournful, lachrymose, and torn by religious conflicts, Mary was positive in seeking solutions to the problems that beset Sybil and Sybil's selves. It was apparent that Mary had a genuine desire to destroy the hidden weed.

The hour was up. Dr. Wilbur walked her new patient to the door.

"Do you know "The Egotist," by Sarah Fells?" Mary asked. "Both Sybil and I liked it when we were little girls. This is how it goes:

"In a self-centered circle, he goes round and round, That he is a wonder is true;

For who but an egotist ever could be Circumference and center, too.""

Who is the circumference, the center? the doctor wondered. Is Sybil the center or is one of these others?

The search for the center was complicated further by the arrival the next day of two selves Dr. Wilbur had not met before. From the moment Vicky introduced these newcomers, the consulting room seemed so alive and there were so many impressions, that, gazing at the woman beside her, who at the moment was simultaneously Marcia Lynn and Vanessa Gail Dorsett, the doctor, who had thought herself inured to the surprises that a multiple personality had to offer, could not refrain from being excited by this simultaneous sharing of the body. Nor could the doctor keep from speculating on how so many diverse characters could simultaneously flourish in the small, slight frame of Sybil Dorsett.

The thought was fanciful because occupancy was not a matter of inhabiting space but of sharing being.

The little that Dr. Wilbur knew about Marcia and Vanessa had come from Vicky. "Marcia," Vicky had said, "feels what Sybil feels --only more intensely. Vanessa is a tall, red-haired girl who plays the piano and is full of joie de vivre. The two have many tastes in common and enjoy doing things together."

Yet after she met Marcia and Vanessa, the doctor knew less about them than about Mary.

Since the body was now simultaneously occupied by Marcia and Vanessa, the doctor wondered how she was going to be able to tell them apart. But after the first exchange of pleasantries, she was able to distinguish one from the other by the difference in their voices, which, even though both spoke with English accents in similar diction and speech patterns, were markedly individual. Vanessa talked soprano, Marcia alto. Vanessa's voice had a lilting, Marcia's, a brooding, quality.

As she had with Mary, the doctor began their conversation by asking, "What do you girls like to do?"

"Travel," said Marcia.

"Go places," said Vanessa. "We're always interested in new and different places to see and things to do. Life is for living."

Marcia and Vanessa then talked about how they both enjoyed airplanes, big cities, the theater, concerts, places of historical interest, and buying choice books. "We have our own likes," Marcia explained, "but Vanessa and I enjoy things most when we do them together." It became clear to the doctor that, just as Vicky and Marian Ludlow were special friends in the world, Marcia and Vanessa were special friends within the "circumference" of Sybil Dorsett.

"Tell me a little about how you feel, Marcia," the doctor suggested.

"You don't know what you're letting yourself in for, Doctor," Marcia replied with a slight smile. "You've opened Pandora's box with that question."

"Doctor," Vanessa chimed in, "you shouldn't ask her. She might tell you!"

"I see you girls have a sense of humor," the doctor observed.

"You have to have humor to survive in the Dorsett clan," Vanessa replied promptly. "Mary, Peggy Lou, and, of course, Sybil worry so much that they make life sound like a Russian novel. It's really comical to watch them. It's so out of character with the town of Willow Corners, whence we hail. When I got there, Sybil was twelve, and I stayed a long time. But I couldn't stand that town. Honest, you should see it. God-fearing and man-hating. Sugar. Sugar. There was so much sugar in the way they pretended to treat each other that I suffered from diabetes of the soul."

"That's a good phrase," Marcia interrupted. "I never heard you use it before. Are you sure you didn't steal it from me? I'm the writer! Why don't you stick to your piano playing and let me coin the phrases?"

"But I'm the one who came up with it. I'm the one ..."

"Oh, Vanessa, please. I was only kidding."

"Careful," Vanessa cautioned with a satiric overtone. "As our mother would say, "Kidding is not a word we use when people are around."" Vanessa's voice had changed. It was clear that she was mimicking Hattie Dorsett. Then, turning to Dr. Wilbur, Vanessa said, "We were never "kids," Doctor, outside the family circle. And in the home even the word heck was not allowed."

"It's not right to criticize mother," said Marcia.

"Oh, you make me sick with your clinging. You never were able to untie the umbilical cord. That's what they call it, Doctor, isn't it? That is why this nice lady is going to have to help you to grow up."

"Vanessa, please ..." Marcia pleaded. "It's not a crime to want to be loved."

"Lands ... lands--I'd say God if I hadn't been brought up in the Dorsett household--you sound like a soap opera." Vanessa punctuated each word with an extravagant gesture.

"Vanessa, it isn't fair for you to talk like that," Marcia replied tearfully.

"Fair! What do any of us know about fairness?" Vanessa countered. "Is it fair that we've been denied what other girls have? Someday I'll break loose, be on my own, and you, my dear Marcia, will come with me. You have the taste for life, the vitality for it, and we've always been together even though you entered Sybil's life long before me. Marcia, you'll learn that you can sleep at night and feel good when you wake up in the morning only if you will stop looking back. You remember what happened to Lot's wife!"

"Vanessa," Marcia pleaded, "you've said enough. The way we're talking to each other, the doctor will think we're one person talking to herself."

"No," the doctor interrupted, "I understand perfectly well that you are two different people. I want both you girls to feel perfectly free to come here whenever you like and to say whatever you want to say."

"When we don't have competition from the others," Marcia said mischievously. "Vicky, for instance. She's pretty smart, and she helps us out a lot. But she talks too much--almost as much as Vanessa."

Then, since the hour was up, the doctor asked, "What do you plan to do when you leave here?"

"I'd like to go to International Airport and go somewhere," Vanessa said without hesitation. "But last time I did that Peggy Lou gummed up the works. I was going to buy a ticket for San Francisco, but she bought one for Cleveland. So I guess I'll just go home and play a little Mozart."

"I'm going home," Marcia volunteered, "to work on my article for Coronet."

"Now, feel free to come back," the doctor reminded her patients.

When they had gone, Dr. Wilbur thought of the mechanics involved in Vanessa's pounding Mozart on the piano while Marcia pounded her article on the typewriter. They were two persons, but they had, after all, only two hands.

For three days in a row Marcia and Vanessa came back, and the doctor began to wonder what had happened to Vicky, Mary, Peggy Lou, and Sybil herself. Through the three successive visits, however, the doctor was able to resolve her initial incredulity that Marcia and Vanessa, who seemed so different, were good friends, closely linked. What linked them, the doctor came to believe, was that they were equally dynamic.

Still, there were differences. There was an excitement, an electric quality about Vanessa, who was full of energy, used extravagant gestures, and dramatized everything, that neither Marcia nor any of the other selves, at least among those the doctor had met, shared. Marcia was a calmer version of Vanessa, more somber and brooding. Even though Marcia could be light-hearted, she was basically a pessimist. She found escape with Vanessa or in books, but essentially she thought of life as "horrid and futile" and of people as being "simply awful."

What Vicky had said about Marcia's sharing yet intensifying Sybil's feelings seemed true. What Vanessa had said obliquely about Marcia and soap operas also seemed true. When Sybil and the others watched something sad on television, Marcia was the one who cried. Whenever a child or dog returned to its home or was taken back to its parents or found its mother again, Marcia would weep copiously. And Marcia, who had criticized Vanessa for criticizing their mother, was the one who seemed to need her mother most. "Marcia," Vicky told Dr. Wilbur, "will weep just because she's lonely for her mother."

Shortly after Vanessa and Marcia arrived at the doctor's office for the fourth time, Vanessa put on a show. "Goodbye, dear," Vanessa said in dulcet tones, "I'm sorry to be leaving you. I shall miss you, but I will try to have fun in Europe. Try, my dear. But it will be hard because I shall miss you." Then, changing her position and speaking in an aside, Vanessa exploded: "I can't stand the sight of her. I wish the bitch would go home and get off this pier."

Changing her voice and position, Vanessa slipped into the role of the second woman on the pier, who was seeing the first woman off. "I'm sorry you're leaving me, but take good care of yourself and have a simply marvelous time in Europe." Then, turning for an aside, Vanessa, still playing the woman who was not sailing, muttered with a taut, twisted curve of the lips, "I hope she drowns!"

Dr. Wilbur could see clearly the two women saying goodbye to each other on a pier near a ship about to depart. The scene was so well done that the doctor remarked: "Vanessa, you missed your calling. You should be in the theater."

As the summer of 1955 gave place to autumn, Dr. Wilbur found the analysis reverting to the spring of 1934, the time of Sybil's return after the two-year absence between the ages of nine and eleven. The bewilderment Sybil had felt had been compounded by the discovery that for the first time in her life she no longer was required to sleep in her parents' bedroom. As this pivotal realization came into focus, so did the experiences she endured in that bedroom from the day of her birth to the age of nine. Those experiences, spanning the years 1923 to 1932, provided a continuum that Dr. Wilbur saw as the matrix of Sybil's attitudes toward sex and, perhaps even more important, as an incubator of the illness itself.

The evening meal was over on the first day of Sybil's return in March, 1934. The Dorsetts were in the living room. Hattie was reading a volume of Tennyson and listening to the radio. Willard was absorbed in the pages of Architectural Forum. Sybil was trying to do a charcoal sketch, but she found it difficult to concentrate because of the strange concatenation of events she had recently experienced.

"It's time to go to your room, Peggy," Hattie ordered.

Sybil was accustomed to being called Peggy, but she didn't understand her mother's instructions. She had never had a room of her own. Always she had slept in her parents' bedroom.