Sybil (26 page)

"You shouldn't have steered the sled so hard with one foot, mother. That's what made it go sideways into the plowed field," Sybil said softly. Then, turning to her father, she asked, "How did you get her to the house alone?"

Looking up into the child's face, her father dryly remarked, "Well, you helped me pull her back up the hill on the sled, didn't you?"

Had she? Sybil only remembered being in the field, dropping the saw, and then being beside the stove.

Now her father was asking, "How do you feel, Hattie?"

"I'll live," said her mother. "Hattie," her father said, "you shouldn't give in to your moods."

"I can do what I like," her mother laughed--that laugh again.

"Lie down, Hattie," her father said. "Later, Willard," her mother answered. "Get water."

Her father took a pail and went to the spring for water. Sybil put arnica on her mother's legs, which were snow white and bony. Her left leg was turning all colors now; it had marks all over it.

"Hurts, mother?" Sybil asked.

"Well," her mother said, "use your head. What do you think?"

"Oh," Sybil said.

Her father wasn't here. Would her mother hurt her? Fortunately, her father soon came back with the water. He bathed her mother's leg and made hot packs for it. Then he made supper while Sybil set the table.

"You're doing it wrong," her mother said. "The forks are in the wrong place." The Willow Corners mother had returned.

Her father took a plate of food over to her mother.

Her mother laughed and said, "I'm coming to the table. Help me." Her mother came to the table and sat with them, for the first time in months, and she fed herself.

When supper was over, Sybil helped her father wash the dishes. Then they put more hot packs and arnica on her mother's leg. Hours passed. "Time to go to bed, Sybil," her mother said. It was the first time in a long time that her mother had said that.

Sybil didn't move.

"I told you to go to bed," said her mother. "I mean now, this minute."

"What do you want of her, Hattie?" her father asked. "She's just a youngster. And she was a big help getting you back here."

Sybil said nothing. When people said she had done something she didn't know about, nothing was all she would say.

She walked over to her crib, which they had brought with them from Willow Corners. Her crib, her dolls, her doll crib, her doll table and her little chairs--they had brought all her things. She put on her nightgown and her stocking cap. Her mother wasn't laughing now, but Sybil could still hear her mother's laughter coming from the top of the hill. She could still see that black cape against the white snow. And then her father bending over her ... how had he gotten into all this trouble? The loss of the house in Willow Corners--overnight, as her mother used to say, from the richest man in town to the poorest. Why had Satan struck him? Was this the beginning of the end of the world that her father and grandfather were always talking about?

"Sybil, get a move on," her mother called.

From her father: "Sybil, rinse this rag."

Sybil took the rag, rinsed the rag, and gave it back to him. He put it on her mother's leg. Yes, Sybil did things to make her mother's bruised leg better.

Learning of Hattie Dorsett's catatonia at The Forty and of her later aberrations within the Willow Corners community, Dr. Wilbur became increasingly convinced that it was impossible to treat Sybil without having a fuller understanding of Hattie. Hattie, it was becoming evident, had forged an intolerable reality from which Sybil had to defend herself in order to survive. Even though the doctor, aware that it was a psychiatric cliché to make a scapegoat of the patient's mother, had resisted pinpointing Hattie Dorsett as a major cause of Sybil's dissociation into multiple selves, it was becoming increasingly difficult to resist the notion.

In late 1956 and early 1957, as Dr. Wilbur came closer to the source of the original trauma that had led Sybil to become a multiple personality, there was little doubt that the trauma seemed to revolve around her mother. It was the Willow Corners mother, who returned from immobility at the farm, on whom the analysis then turned.

Sybil scuffed along the cement path of the alley behind the white house with black shutters as she approached the Willow Corners Drugstore for the first time since coming home from the farm.

The familiar fly-covered screen door with its high bent-iron handle intrigued her, and standing on tiptoe, she grasped the piece of iron and swung wide the door. As she stepped over the worn wooden threshold, the acrid odor she had always known behind this special door assailed her.

Sybil tried not to breathe, not wanting to inhale this hated smell. She wanted to hurry through this back room with its high tables and shelf-lined walls filled with bottles, glass stoppers, bowls, herbs, colored liquids, and white powders, the room in which medicines were made by the white-coated, tall, slightly bent, old Dr. Taylor, whom Sybil had known since memory began for her. But she could not hurry, could not move her feet to make the transition from back room to "up-front," where the drugstore blended shelves of medicines with huge glass cases of penny candies, dolls, combs, and hairbows.

Sybil's eyes sought the open wooden stairway standing between the room she had entered from the alley and up-front. The stairs led to the fascination of her childhood--the great, bewildering "something" known as Dr. Taylor's balcony. None entered there unbidden, and few were bidden. It was the doctor's retreat.

Following the hand rail of the stairs, Sybil looked hopefully for Dr. Taylor's white-haired figure near the high ceiling. She couldn't speak, couldn't ask, but breathlessly she hoped for the druggist's notice of her. Pausing between hated odors and adored soft-voiced invitations, she saw the druggist's kind, wrinkled face peer over the rail of the balcony. Dr. Taylor smiled and said, "Come on up, Sybil. It's all right."

Swiftly, with toes barely touching the steps, Sybil raced to the top, where abruptly she stopped, hand on rail and eyes wide with anticipation and delight. Hanging on the walls and lying in parts on work tables were the violins, the music makers of Dr. Taylor's creation.

Here was the special music reached through a special door, the music accompanied not by pain, as it was for her at home, but by friendship and the comforting softness of the druggist's voice. Smiling, Dr. Taylor played a little on his violin, and Sybil entered her private world of dreams. "Someday when you are bigger," the doctor promised, "I shall make a violin just for you. You shall play music, too."

Sybil dreamed of music and also of pictures. She could see trees, dark trees, white trees. She could see horses running and all kinds of chickens. The chickens were all of different colors. Some had blue legs. Others had red feet and green tails. She drew these chickens, and although her mother reminded her that chickens were white, plain black, or brown, Sybil continued to draw chickens as expressions of the feelings her mother denied. And Dr. Taylor had said: "You shall play music, too."

At that moment a voice, sharp, loud, and shrill, was heard from the bottom of the stairs. It was her mother's voice, calling. Her mother, who seldom let Sybil out of her sight, had followed her here. Quickly Sybil took her leave of Dr. Taylor, descended the stairs, and appeared at her mother's side.

As Sybil and her mother approached the drug counter, a clerk remarked, "I told you, Mrs. Dorsett, you'd find her with Dr. Taylor." While the clerk was wrapping the bottle of medicine for which Hattie had left a prescription, Sybil rested her elbow on the counter and her head on the hand of her upraised arm. Inadvertently her elbow knocked against a bottle of patent medicine that had been left on the counter. The bottle crashed to the floor, and the crash of glass made Sybil's head throb.

"You broke it," came her mother's accusing voice. Then there was her mother's contemptuous laugh. Sybil panicked, and panic produced a sensation of dizziness that made the room swirl.

"You broke it," her mother repeated as she grasped the iron handle and swung wide the door with its complaining creak of rusty hinges. As her mother and she stepped over the threshold into the alley, the odor suddenly assumed the coloration of all the hated medicines her mother had poured into the child. The short walk along the alley, so filled with expectation minutes before, became a prisoner's walk.

Hattie turned abruptly from the alley into the street, and Sybil wondered where they were going this time; for many were the walks with her mother that Sybil would rather not have taken.

Hattie walked briskly toward the wagons that the farmers brought to town, lined up for four or five blocks along Main Street. Sybil's mother approached the wagons after the farmers had left them and helped herself to peas and corn, which she put in her apron. Other people did this, too, but Sybil was embarrassed because her father had said it was stealing.

"Now you get some, too," her mother ordered, but Sybil refused, as she also did when her mother asked her to get tomatoes from the Tomley's vegetable garden or apples, asparagus, lilacs, or some other produce from the loading platforms behind the stores. Even though her mother explained that the items stolen never would be missed because the owners had more than they needed, or that the products on the loading platforms were out in the sun and would spoil anyway, Sybil felt it was wrong to steal. It continued to seem wrong even when her mother explained to the farmer, the storekeeper, or the neighbor: "I didn't have a chance to ask if I could have some. But you have plenty, and I'm sure you won't mind."

It somehow seemed especially wrong that afternoon, as, leaving the wagons, Sybil and her mother went to the fruit and vegetable garden belonging to the Bishop family. Her father had warned her mother to leave the neighbors' property alone.

"Let's get some," Hattie suggested conspiratorially as Sybil walked with her toward the Bishops' rhubarb stalks. Hattie bent over the stalks, but Sybil hung back. "You'd be the first to eat the rhubarb pie," Hattie taunted as she pulled the best stalks. But neither then nor at any other time could Sybil eat the rhubarb pie or reconcile herself to the fact that the Willow Corners mother had returned.

This was the mother who embarrassed Sybil not only on the streets but also at church functions. On these occasions Hattie would be loud. Willard would caution, out of the side of his mouth, "Don't say that," and Hattie would announce loudly to everybody, "He says I shouldn't say that."

"It was unbelievable," Vicky stated in analysis. "The things Mrs. Dorsett did. Who would have thought that a woman of her background would make a spectacle of herself at church or turn out to be a Fagin? But Fagin she was in wanting us to cooperate with her in taking things. Not one of us ever did. Not one!"

But there was a feeling that Hattie also awakened that went deeper than embarrassment. That emotion was shame--the raw, naked feeling of a daughter's watching her mother's voyeuristic peering into other people's windows or her gossiping about the sexual peccadillos of persons who came from what she called the "lower crust."

"Hattie Dorsett is odd," declared the townsfolk of Willow Corners. But, if by virtue of her filching neighbors' rhubarb stalks, or being loud at church functions, or spontaneously getting up from her table to do a solo dance in a restaurant where there was no music or dancing, Hattie Dorsett qualified as "odd," other public performances in which she indulged had to be described as "crazy."

There were, for instance, Hattie's nocturnal escapades. Sometimes, as the shades of evening drew on, or after supper, she would summon Sybil with a brusque, "We're going for a walk." Filled with intense foreboding and dread because she knew what was coming, Sybil at the ages of three, four, and five would quietly follow her mother out of the house and walk apprehensively through the town.

The walk, which began as a casual stroll, was destined to become a demonic ritual. For, with her head held high and her carriage proud, as befitted the daughter of the mayor of Elderville and the wife of one of the wealthiest people in Willow Corners, Hattie Anderson Dorsett advanced from the sidewalk, the lawn, or the backyard, to the bushes. Watching, Sybil cringed with repugnance as her mother pulled down her bloomers, squatted, and with ritualistic deliberateness and perverse pleasure defecated on the elected spot.

Election it was, and besmirchment was a badge of honor. For these escapades of Hattie Dorsett were part of a grand design to single out the town's elite for her hostility and contempt. During the years in which the escapades took place--1926, 1927, and 1928--the Stickneys and Mrs. Vale vied with Willard Dorsett for the title of the wealthiest person in town. As editor of the newspaper of which Hattie was an unpaid stringer, Harrison Ford was Hattie's superior. And so Hattie chose for the expression of her defecatory contempt locally prestigious targets that threatened her own feelings of omnipotence. Converting the more normal "I shit on you all" into an actual performance, she responded in the manner of a psychotic, acting upon the power of the unconscious, which regards all secretions as gifts of power.

Hattie Dorsett didn't silently hypothesize that her feces were directed at the Stickneys, Mrs. Vale, or Harrison Ford, or for that matter at Willard Dorsett, when she similarly performed in the basement of his (and her) house. Hattie deliberately defecated on the property of her victims, at the very spot on which her contempt could be concretely symbolized. It was an act of psychotic cruelty, manifesting the wish of the unconscious to pour upon special persons its fecal wrath.