Sybil (33 page)

"You ought to tell your father in your dream," Dr. Wilbur said in analysis, "that you are looking for him. The dream expresses a sexual yearning for him because he was seductive toward you but also a denial of the desire." Sybil had admitted that she had been aware of sexual feelings toward her father when he talked to her about sex. "There are some things about sex for which I don't have the answers yet," he would say, for instance, while he was dating Frieda. "You young people know a lot more about sex than we ever did."

It was clear to the doctor, indeed, that Willard had stimulated Sybil sexually not only when she was an adult but also as a child, both in the long-run primal scene and by his denials of physical closeness after she had become what he had called "too big."

In another dream:

Men were pursuing her sexually. Her father was not there to rescue her. The pursuit continued and, too, the lack of rescue.

Long having waited for her father to intervene on her behalf, to come to her rescue, Sybil was waiting again. And, as the days followed without an answer to her letter, she was caught in a web of ambivalent feelings. The feelings would have been simpler if Willard had been a typically rejecting father. However, she did have a relationship with him, one in which he habitually failed her, out of passivity, but which was quickened by accentuated Oedipal desires and by a close affinity of similar tastes.

When an art critic in St. Paul, Minnesota, had assured Willard that Sybil's talent for painting was genuine, he had been proud of her work. He had even made it a point to mount and frame her paintings. When father and daughter looked at a painting together, it was like two eyes looking at the same work. Between them there was a mutuality, an attunement, made all the stronger as a result of two childhood happenstances.

First, when Sybil was only six weeks old, she had developed a disease of the middle ear. No one had been able to tell what was the matter with her, and she was comforted only when her father held her. By chance, when he held her, he always sat next to the kitchen stove. The warmth, which she associated with her father, had soothed her: the attachment to her father was begun.

Second, because she was unable to make identification with her mother, who abused her and made her feel ashamed, Sybil had more and more been compelled to make identification with her father. She had to have someone, and she persuaded herself that her father was the figure on whom she could depend, especially since she looked not like the Andersons but like the Dorsetts.

Thus on a conscious level Sybil had always protected her father's image, yet there were times when that image was not an invincible fortress. "In college," Sybil wrote in her diary as an undergraduate, "I had roommates, classmates, a big sister, an adviser. My adviser, Dr. Termine, was fat and jolly. He had a moustache. He was warm. He was like a father I never had. He'd always take time to talk to me. It was so different."

And when Dr. Wilbur had asked Sybil directly, "Does your father love you?" Sybil had given a qualified reply: "I suppose he does."

So the wait for Willard Dorsett's reply was long.

At 4:00 P.m. on May 4, 1957, Willard Dorsett entered Dr. Wilbur's anteroom--an assured, complacent, well-defended, passive, and unreachable figure who took his responsibilities lightly.

Some ten minutes later, his defensive armor had begun to crack and he felt himself faltering. He wiped his forehead gingerly with a freshly starched handkerchief, as, sitting on the little green desk chair in the consulting room, he realized that the questions Dr. Wilbur was asking were not what he had anticipated. He had expected questions about Sybil's status as a thirty-four-year-old woman, alone in New York, trying to get well. Instead, the doctor was taking him back to Willow Corners and the years of his marriage to Hattie. The year with Frieda had been a good year, a veil across the face not only of Willow Corners but also of Omaha and Kansas City. But now the doctor was mercilessly ripping the veil, inch by dreadful inch.

Willard's anxiety was intensified by the awkwardness of being in Dr. Wilbur's presence after the voluminous correspondence that in recent months had passed between them about Sybil's finances. He had had to force himself to come. Now that he was here, he was constantly reminded that the doctor was not the same woman he had known in Omaha.

He was not aware, however, of the reasons for the change. In Omaha she had not been a psychoanalyst, and the psychoanalytic approach placed strong emphasis on the deterministic power of childhood. In Omaha the doctor did not know that Sybil was a multiple personality and did not have the wealth of information that Sybil and the other selves had since revealed--information indicting Hattie and pointing an accusing finger at Willard for the genesis of Sybil's illness. It was chiefly to ascertain the truth of Hattie's and Willard's role in spawning the illness that the doctor had urged this meeting.

Yet there was also another purpose.

The increasingly unsatisfactory and evasive tone of Willard's letters and his omissions in supporting Sybil financially and psychologically were shocking to his daughter's analyst. Whatever his role in the past, Dr. Wilbur firmly believed that in the present he had condemned himself.

As an analyst, Dr. Wilbur withheld judgment about the past, but as Sybil's friend, she was determined to provoke Willard into assuming greater responsibility as a father. She therefore viewed the interview as both a search for verification of the initial parental guilt and as a confrontation with a father who was currently failing his daughter. The doctor was determined to mince no words, nor to repress the accusatory tone in her manner that under the circumstances came naturally. Taking Willard Dorsett's measure, it was clear that the only way she could get the verification she was seeking was by taking the offensive and waging a direct attack.

"Why, Mr. Dorsett," the doctor asked, "did you always entrust the full care and upbringing of Sybil to your wife?"

Willard Dorsett was not a man who studied himself or looked at those around him to weigh or measure their moods. In Willow Corners he had been a busy man, away from home from dawn to sundown. He hadn't known all the details of his domestic life and had felt that he couldn't have been expected to know them. How, he asked himself, could he possibly answer the doctor's questions about these details, so far off, so forgotten?

Why had he always entrusted to Hattie the full care and upbringing of Sybil? He merely shrugged in reply. The question obviously seemed to him irrelevant. It was like asking a butcher why he sells meat or a farmer why he plants corn. A mother should take care of a child.

Had he been aware that Hattie's behavior was peculiar? He moved jerkily in his chair and became defensive. When he finally spoke, it was to say, "The first Mrs. Dorsett was a wonderful woman, bright, talented." He hesitated.

"And?" the doctor asked.

He became flustered. "Well," he said, "we had a lot of trouble. Financial and otherwise. It was hard on Hattie. At times she was difficult."

"Just difficult?" the doctor asked. "Well, she was nervous."

"Just nervous?"

He mopped his forehead, changed his position. "She had some bad spells."

"Is it true that she was in a bad state at the farm when Sybil was six?"

He averted his eyes and finally said yes. "Was it true that when she came out of her depression, she tore down the hill on Sybil's sled?"

He squirmed while saying, "Yes. Sybil must have told you it was a big hill. A child's imagination, you know. But the hill wasn't really very high." (he had an almost comic way of wriggling out of facing the real issue.)

"But your wife came down that hill, large or small, on a child's sled, laughing? What did you make of her behavior in that instance?" The doctor was trapping him into an admission. "Was it safe, Mr. Dorsett, to allow this strange, nervous woman, who had what you call spells, to have the sole responsibility for raising your child?"

Instead of answering directly, he murmured nonresponsively, "Hattie was odd."

"It was more than odd, Mr. Dorsett. She was more than nervous if what I've been told is true." The bombardment of recollections made the room gyrate. Each recollection, rising from the buried past, reawakened the dull, sad ache in his hands, the after-image of the neuritis from which he had suffered after he had lost his money.

"Well," Willard explained, "Hattie and Sybil never got along. I thought a mother and daughter should be close, and I was disturbed by their arguments. When they were at each other, I used to say, "Hattie, why don't you rest a while or crack some nuts?"' I used to hope Hattie and Sybil would get over it in time."

"That was when Sybil was a teenager," the doctor reminded the father. "But weren't there certain things that occurred when she was a very young child--even an infant--that couldn't be settled by cracking nuts?"

"You must know something I don't know," he replied defensively, fiddling with his fingernails.

Was he aware that as a child Sybil sustained an unusual number of injuries, the doctor wanted to know. With annoyance he answered quickly, "She had accidents, of course, like any child." Did he remember any of these accidents? No, he couldn't say he remembered. Was he aware that Sybil had had a dislocated shoulder, a fractured larynx? "Why yes," he replied, screwing up his thin lips.

How had they happened?

He made no answer, but the involuntary twitchings in his face betrayed uneasiness. Flustered, he finally replied, "I never saw Hattie lay a hand on Sybil."

Did he remember the burns on his daughter's hands, her black eyes? "Yes," he replied slowly, remotely. "I seem to recall these things now that you take me back." He became even more flustered and said, "After all, I didn't see them happen. They must have taken place when I was away from home."

Did he remember the bead in Sybil's nose? He replied defensively: "Sybil put the bead in her nose. You know how children are. Always putting things in their noses and ears. Mrs. Dorsett had to take Sybil to Dr. Quinoness. He got the bead out."

And now, the doctor was asking pointedly, "Is that what your wife told you?"

Willard Dorsett clasped his hands together to reaffirm his own solidity and put up some resistance, saying, "Yes, Hattie told me that. I had no reason to question her."

Dr. Wilbur insisted, "What did your wife tell you about the larynx and the shoulder? Did she say that Sybil had fractured her own larynx, dislocated her own shoulder?"

He knew an answer was expected of him, but he took time to think about the doctor's question. "Well," he said at last, "I can't remember exactly what Hattie said. But she was always telling me that Sybil had many falls. I suppose I never really thought about how these things happened, now that you ask me. Ignorance is one of my failings."

The wheat crib over his carpenter's shop? He shut his eyes as if by doing so he could hide from the horrors that had been evoked. He opened his eyes and plucked up courage to listen. Yes, he remembered that incident well. "How did you imagine that Sybil had gotten in there and then put the stairs up?" He knew that such a thing could not have happened, but what Hattie had told him came to his rescue. He told the doctor: "The town bully did it."

"But did he?" the doctor asked.

"Well," Willard replied slowly, "the boy said he didn't know anything about it."

"Who was guilty?" the doctor insisted. The edifice of Willard Dorsett's complacency was crumbling, and he sank back in his chair. His voice was normally soft and low. Now, scarcely audible, he mumbled, "Not Hattie?"

It was an important moment. Like a mollusk, Willard Dorsett had always stayed within his shell, insulated in the private sea of his own concerns. He had been resolute in pursuing a path of conformity, refusing to look in any other direction. Now the mollusk, out of the sea, was steaming in hot water, its shell cracking. The many years of aloof nonseeing, of refusing to know, converged in a moment of sudden realization in which, by instinct, by powerful recollection, Willard Dorsett came to believe that Hattie had placed Sybil in the wheat crib; that Hattie had been responsible for his daughter's fractured larynx, dislocated shoulder, assorted burns, the bead in the nose. "Not Hattie?" Willard repeated in a frightened monotone. This time, however, it was to convince himself. "Oh, merciful Father, not Hattie!" His head was bowed. He was praying.

"Hattie," Dr. Wilbur replied.

"If what Sybil has told me is true." Willard wondered what to say next. He stared at the green draperies and then at the doctor. Once again he shut his eyes, but only momentarily, for the doctor was saying, "Mr. Dorsett, there are some things that Sybil says happened in the early morning ..." He had been caught in a confrontation that was shattering the peace he had belatedly secured for himself with Frieda after the memories of Willow Corners, Omaha, and Kansas City had been put to rest. "In the early morning," the doctor was saying, and as she recounted the morning ritualistic tortures, he felt himself inwardly writhing. When she referred to the buttonhook, he again bowed his head. It was a moment of revelation.

"That's why Sybil screamed so on the Sabbath," he murmured, "when we tried to button her white kid shoes." Then, still thinking about his daughter's screams of anguish at the buttonhook's evocation of a hideous pain, he said that what had been described was quite beyond his comprehension. He added also that he had been away from home and couldn't know what was going on. Why these things should have taken place, he said, he could not fathom.