Sybil (30 page)

Picture: Peggy Lou's tempera self-portrait shows "lips like a Negro," a description applied to her by Hattie Dorsett. Picture: Sybil's self-portrait, painted in 1957. The original is done in low-tone blue watercolors.

Picture: A 1959 crayon drawing by Sybil. Her comments on the back: "The world is blue. I'm the purple spot. I'm not part of the world. ... I do not like it this way. ..."

Picture: A crayon drawing of Sybil Ann. She shows herself alone in a world composed of folded cardboards. Picture: Pages from Peggy Ann's sketch book.

Picture: Drawings in Peggy Ann's sketch book record items associated with pain, anger, and fear. Each can be traced to a specific event, usually related to the activities of Hattie. Many of the sketches frightened Sybil, especially the one of knives; she was unaware that they had been done by Peggy Ann. Picture: Sybil's pastel painting of Dr. Cornelia B. Wilbur's office, the scene of Sybil's eleven years of psychoanalysis. Picture: Peggy's drawing of the Willow Corners church attended by the Dorsett family.

Picture: Geometrical patterns from Peggy Ann's sketch book. The designs of boxes were often repeated in her work.

Picture: Peggy Ann's sketches of music, always associated with fear and anxiety.

Picture: The pattern of the superimposed boxes.

Picture: Multiple Christmas greetings to Dr. Wilbur from Vicky, Vanessa Gail, Mary, Mike, Sybil Ann, and Peggy. By 1958 no message was sent from Clara, Nancy, Marjorie, Ruthie, Helen, or Sid. Peggy Lou and Peggy Ann were represented by a single Peggy.

Picture: A 1958

Christmas message from Sybil to her doctor.

Picture: Blue is the Color Love, by Sybil.

Hattie Dorsett's behavior, as presented in the analysis of her daughter, seemed to Dr. Wilbur clearly schizophrenic. The doctor, moreover, was convinced that this schizophrenic mother was the taproot of Sybil's dissociation into multiple selves. It therefore seemed essential to probe into what had caused the schizophrenia and to unravel what had made Hattie what she was.

In the account of Sybil's visits, for two weeks every summer until she was nine, to the large white house in Elderville, Illinois, that was Hattie Anderson Dorsett's birthplace and girlhood home, the doctor was able to find some clues.

The Andersons' sprawling home housed a family of thirteen children (four boys and nine girls). Winston Anderson, the father, who was well respected in town and an autocrat at home, demanded from his brood not only general deference and obeisance but also precise individual attention. Aileen, the mother, having to divide herself among many children, had little time for any of them. The children clearly lacked nurturing.

Hattie, a tall, slender girl with wavy, auburn hair and blue-gray eyes, whose elementary school report cards revealed a solid phalanx of A's, who wrote poetry and whose music teachers had such high regard for her ability that they supported her dream of going to a music conservatory and of becoming a concert pianist, saw the collapse of her ambitions when she was twelve years old. At that time her father yanked her out of the seventh grade to work in his music store. She was to replace in the store an elder sister, who had left to get married. There was no economic justification for making Hattie give up her studies, no plausible argument for requiring her to renounce her dreams.

"The smartest child in the class. One of the best students I've ever had," said the seventh-grade teacher. "It's a crime to take her out of school."

"Extraordinary musical talent," said the nun who was Hattie's piano teacher. "She could go far if given the chance."

The chance, however, was not given, and the scene in which it was denied lived on in Hattie's memory. The scene began one evening when Winston, in his quilted smoking jacket, was seated in his special chair smoking his special cigar. "You're not going back to school tomorrow," he announced to Hattie bluntly. His coal black eyes were riveted on her. "You're going to work in the store."

No one talked back to her father, and Hattie knew better than to try. She just started to laugh. The cacophonous laugh continued to echo through the house even after she had gone to her room and closed her door. After the family was asleep, she strode down to the living room and, finding the purple quilted smoking jacket in an adjoining hall closet, cut off its sleeves. When questions were asked the next day, she feigned innocence and left the house to walk the four blocks to the music store. Winston bought a new smoking jacket identical to the old one.

One of Hattie's jobs at the store was to demonstrate pianos. Improvising music that wasn't actually on the sheet, she increased the marketability of her father's merchandise. When a rare customer, astute enough to detect the difference, came back to complain, Hattie, her face a complete deadpan, would protest, "I played what was there." When the store was empty, she just played and played. On Thursdays after work she would walk to the convent for her music lesson.

Hattie's dream had crumbled, and Hattie herself became ill with chorea, a physical illness that made her jerk and twitch. There were nervous components. The neurosis became so virulent that members of the family had to take their shoes off before coming up the stairs so as not to disturb Hattie, and the family's dishes had to be placed on flannel because Hattie couldn't stand the rattle. Although the concessions were out of keeping both with the lack of nurturing and the educational deprivation, the concessions were daily as long as the acute part of the illness lasted.

Striking back for the lost dream not by open rebellion or outright confrontation but through little acts of mischief and practical jokes, Hattie became a family enfant terrible.

A recurrent joke was connected with Hattie's task of bringing the cows home from the cow pasture, which was at the edge of Elderville. Dallying on the way home, she would stop to visit friends en route while both the cows and the Anderson family waited.

Another joke was specifically directed at Winston, who led the Methodist choir and who had assigned Hattie the task of pumping the bellows of the church's pipe organ. One Sunday Hattie ran off before the last song, leaving the bellows and her father flat. Resplendent in his Prince Albert coat, Winston Anderson raised his baton as the chorus readied itself for song. His coal black eyes flashed fire when the only sound issuing from the organ was silence.

Hattie struck back again when her father was in his early fifties and began to show signs of the effects of a wound he had suffered during the war.

A pellet that had entered his shoulder when he was shot during his service in the Civil War had never been removed, and it affected his circulation, causing his legs to swell and to become so heavy that it took two persons to lift him. When he began drinking to ease the pain, his wife and children raised such a row that liquor was no longer kept in the house. When, however, Winston managed to get the liquor on his own, the family elected Hattie to find out how. Discovering a row of bottles on the shelves in back of the piano, the detective, asking triumphantly, "Where else would a musician put a bottle?" succeeded in thwarting the father who had thwarted her.

The paradox of Hattie's anger was that during her father's lifetime and after his death she buried her resentment against him, transmuting it into idealization, idolatry, and pathological attachment, which was evident when she fondled his surviving smoking jacket.

Occasionally slipping through the protective armor of the overcompensating memory, however, was the fact that Hattie sometimes said that she blamed her "trouble" on her father. Even though she never defined what that trouble was, everybody who knew her knew also that she had a problem. The trouble was epitomized by a McCall's magazine photograph Hattie clipped and saved with the other mementos in her overstocked array of keepsakes. The photograph was of an attractive woman standing at a fence. The caption read: No, she was not particularly loved. She sensed it.

Unloved, Hattie Anderson Dorsett was incapable of loving. Unnurtured herself, she became a nonnurturing person. A lonely isolate in a large brood, she later isolated emotionally her only child. The anger, a result of the frustrated dream of a music career, was the environmental heritage that, transmitted from generation to generation, eventually made Sybil its target.

Sybil's emotional heritage from Winston Anderson, who died before she was born but who was represented to her as a mythological figure, was thus threefold. The recipient of Hattie's repressed fury against Winston, Sybil, who could not measure up to Hattie's idealized image of him, was also the victim of Hattie's father idolatry and of the repressed conflict that resulted from Hattie's idealizing and blaming her father. It was because of this conflict that Hattie counseled her daughter that all men were worthless.

Other ingredients in the Anderson family syndrome also were instrumental; the Winston-Hattie interaction was a dependent fragment of the larger family neurosis.

Aileen, the mother, whom Hattie talked of as a "marvelous woman, a wonderful woman," revealed no particular emotional problem except perhaps passivity in allowing her husband to tyrannize over the family. Yet problem there must have been to have spawned emotional problems in all of the sons, who in turn bequeathed emotional problems to their sons. (one of the grandsons of Winston and Aileen Anderson committed suicide.)

Four of the Anderson daughters, including Hattie and her oldest sister, Edith, who tyrannized over all the girls in the family, were similarly volatile and aggressive. Four of the others were too docile, too quiet, too unconcerned, and all four married tyrants. Fay, the youngest of the sisters, displayed the family neurosis by weighing two hundred pounds.

Hattie and Edith were very much alike in build, looks, and attitude. In later years they displayed the same symptoms: severe headaches, very high blood pressure, arthritis, and what was vaguely termed nervousness. In Hattie nervousness became virulent after the crushing experience of being yanked out of school. It is not known whether Edith became schizophrenic or at what point Hattie did. That Hattie was schizophrenic at the age of forty, the time of Sybil's birth, is clear.

Edith's sons had a variety of psychosomatic illnesses, including ulcers and asthma. Her daughter was sickly with undefined complaints until she became a religious fanatic, joined a group of faith healers, and proudly announced a return to health. The daughter of the religious fanatic, however, suffered from a rare blood disorder and was a semi-invalid all her life. The daughter of one of Edith's sons had almost all of Hattie's physical illnesses and emotional attitudes, although to a milder degree.

Even more important in terms of the germination of Sybil's illness was that two members of the family--Henry Anderson, Hattie's youngest brother, and Lillian Green, the granddaughter of Edith--gave evidence of possibly being multiple, or at least dual, personalities.

Henry would often suddenly leave home, disappear, and be unable to return because of amnesia, which kept him from knowing his address or his name. On one occasion he contracted pneumonia. He was delirious when a Salvation Army worker found him. Then, by means of the identification card uncovered during a routine search, the army volunteer was able to return him to Elderville.

Lillian, who married and had three children, often absented herself from her family without warning. After a number of these episodes her husband hired a detective to follow her and to bring her home.

Harry and Lillian provided some evidence for ascribing Sybil's malady to a genetic predisposition, but Dr. Wilbur remained convinced that the taproot, induced by her mother, lay not in the genes but in the childhood environment.

The Anderson home in Elderville seemed far from being the incubator of neurosis. For in Elderville, which Sybil visited every summer, there was a break as clean as surgical gauze, with Hattie's angry tyrannies and persistent perversions. Here it seemed that the borders of Sybil's pretend world spread to include reality itself; reality became so transformed that it paralleled some of the aspects of the pretend world.

Here aunts and uncles hugged and kissed Sybil, held her high in the air, listened intently when she sang or recited for them, and said that everything she did was wonderful.

No visit was complete without Sybil's going to the movie theater, where her aunt Fay played the piano in this era before talkies. Sitting on the piano bench beside her aunt in the empty theater, with the piano shut off and the keys moving without making sounds, Sybil would pretend that she was playing for the movies. Staying for the matinee while Fay played, Sybil would look up at her aunt and pretend that she was her mother.

Not until it was time to go back to Willow Corners did Sybil realize quite how much she wanted to remain in Elderville. One summer she turned to her aunt Fay and said, "Will you keep me?" Stroking Sybil's hair and straightening the child's bangs, Fay replied: "You're a Dorsett. Your place is with the Dorsetts. You'll come back next summer."

Just twice during nine glorious summer vacations were there occurrences in Elderville that made the illusion of the pretend world collapse.

One Sunday in July, 1927, Sybil and her cousin Lulu were in the kitchen of the Anderson home, helping her aunt Fay with the dinner dishes. Aunt Fay, who saw Lulu all the time and Sybil only for two weeks in the summer, was paying more attention to Sybil than to Lulu. When Aunt Fay left the room to take some tea up to Grandmother Anderson, Lulu and Sybil continued their chores in silence. But Sybil, who was drying silver soup spoons, couldn't keep her eyes off the beautiful rainbows in the cut crystal pickle dish Lulu was drying. Then all at once the rainbows were moving through the room as the pickle dish, which Lulu hurled at the French doors between the kitchen and the dining room, floated in space. In the panic following the crash of glass Sybil's head throbbed, and the room seemed to swirl.