Sybil (34 page)

The atmosphere was like melted rock issuing from a volcano as Willard Dorsett iterated and reiterated: "I don't know. How could I know when nobody told me? I believed Hattie." Then he added what was partly self-defense, partly confession, "I was so overwhelmed by Hattie that I didn't think."

"Think, Mr. Dorsett," the doctor enjoined. "Can you tell me whether these things Sybil reported to me actually took place? There are internal scars and injuries that lend credence to her account."

What a dreadful moment for me to live through, Willard thought, as he removed his handkerchief from the vest pocket of his gray-flannel suit and wiped the beads of gathering perspiration from his forehead. The wheat bin and the buttonhook were the undeniable evidence in the chain of his recollections. He could hear his daughter's piercing scream at the sight of that harmless buttonhook. And the scars and injuries also constituted proof. He folded his handkerchief neatly and returned it to his vest pocket. He then looked steadily at the doctor, seeing the past whole for the first time.

"Doctor," he finally said in a low voice, "I'm sure that Sybil's recollections are quite accurate in every respect. I didn't know about these things, but now that I look back I recall most of the physical injuries. There were times after they must have occurred when Sybil would be in bed, and her grandmother--my mother--would care for her. With her grandmother Sybil was fine." He stopped short as he realized what he had said. Then resuming, he explained, "I didn't know about these things, but, knowing Hattie, I do know that she was entirely capable of them." He added, with a strange, emotionless objectivity, "I'm sure not only that they were possible but that they happened."

It was a pivotal moment, the kind that the classic Greek dramatists describe as a peripety--the moment in which the action of a drama assumes a quick catastrophic new turn, a reversal. As a witness, corroborating the truth of Sybil's testimony about the atrocities, which Dr. Wilbur already regarded as the taproot of the multiplicity of personality, Willard Dorsett had also incriminated himself. His admission that Hattie was entirely capable of the atrocities attributed to her was tantamount to a confession that by failing to protect his daughter against a perilously destructive mother he had been partner to the mother's deeds. This was precisely what Dr. Wilbur suspected.

Indisputable now was the fact that the violent tyrannies of this nonneurotic father (the doctor was convinced that he was free of neurosis), consisting of bland evasions, the shrug that withheld concern, the lifelong retreat into his shell, had augmented the mother's violent tyrannies in driving Sybil to search for a psychoneurotic solution to the intolerable reality of her childhood. The mother was the taproot of Sybil's having become a multiple personality, but the father, Dr. Wilbur was now sure, through the guilt not of commission but of omission, was an important associated root. The mother had trapped Sybil, but the father, even though Sybil herself had never quite admitted it, had made her feel that from that trap there was no exit.

The doctor simply said, "Mr. Dorsett, you have just told me that you consider Sybil's mother entirely capable of the atrocities we've discussed. Then, to repeat an earlier question, may I ask why you allowed your daughter to be brought up by her?"

He wondered whether to answer or to withhold the self-incrimination that an answer would inevitably imply. "Well," he replied while measuring his words, "it is a mother's place to raise a child."

Once again the shell closed around him.

"Even, Mr. Dorsett, when that mother is clearly schizophrenic? Even, Mr.

Dorsett, when this schizophrenic mother came very close on at least three occasions I can think of to killing her child?"

Flustered, defensive, he replied, "I did what I could." Then he told Dr.

Wilbur about his having taken Hattie to see a psychiatrist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. The doctor there had diagnosed Hattie as a schizophrenic and had said that, although she didn't have to be hospitalized, she should be treated on an out-patient basis. "Hattie saw the doctor only once," Willard remarked. "She wouldn't go back because she said that all he did was stare at her."

Dr. Wilbur was both pleased and troubled by this new intelligence. The other psychiatrist's diagnosis confirmed Dr. Wilbur's own. It was the confirmation that made the atrocities doubly believable as part of a schizophrenic's mode of behavior. This, together with Willard Dorsett's observations, meant that the verification for which the doctor had been searching had been found. No longer did she have to ponder that even though the various selves of Sybil had told identical stories about Hattie's atrocities, that that in itself did not constitute confirmation. Again and again the doctor had rejected the evidence on the grounds that all the selves belonged to Sybil's unconscious and that although the conscious mind often doesn't know what the unconscious mind is doing, the unconscious absorbs what takes place consciously. What the other personalities had said could, therefore, have been but an echo of Sybil, an echo of Sybil's fantasy of torture, her delusion of cruelty, or even a perverse screen memory. The internal scars and injuries were, of course, objective data, but there was at least a remote possibility that they had been self-inflicted. But now there was no need to question further. The veracity of the reporting could not be doubted.

Hattie Dorsett's visit to the Mayo Clinic psychiatrist was disturbing, moreover, because it seemed to affirm the fact that Willard Dorsett had knowingly allowed his daughter to be cared for by a diagnosed schizophrenic.

In explanation, Willard Dorsett said only:

"She was her mother. I never dreamed a mother would hurt a child." It was an echo of a perennial stereotype. Or perhaps, more grimly, it was the same voice of denial in which the Germans, watching the mass slaughter of Jews in Nazi concentration camps, also claimed not to know.

The analogy was the more apt because Sybil had made identification with the Jews in German concentration camps. She thought of her mother as Hitler, the torturer, and of herself as a tortured Jew. Frequently, Sybil dreamed that she was a prisoner in a camp and her guard was a woman with white hair--the dreaming image of her mother. The thoughts and the dreams were given cogency by the fact that Sybil belonged to a religious group that thought of itself as a minority and that denounced dictators from the pulpit as the incarnation of the prophetic words to be found in the books of Daniel and Revelation in the Bible--that an evil man would rise and conquer the world. Indeed, when finally Sybil had resumed her existence after the two years of Peggy Lou's rule, it was to discover that an evil man was denying freedom to millions of people, just as her mother denied freedom to one.

The distaste Dr. Wilbur had felt for Willard Dorsett because of his financial derelictions to Sybil turned to outright anger. Willard Dorsett hadn't known, Dr.

Wilbur was convinced, because he had refused to know. At first she had thought him like fathers she had dealt with in other cases, aloof, passive, committed to not knowing facts that might distress them, too gentle to cope with the women they married, effectual in their business but ineffectual at home. It was a common complaint of many American males--the syndrome of the overpowering mother and the recessive father that had frequently been revealed as the root of family disturbance.

Now, however, the doctor believed that while these things continued to be true of Willard Dorsett, the cardinal fact about him was that he had not taken any action whatsoever against the most destructive mother of whom the doctor had ever had any knowledge.

From her knowledge of Willard's behavior as already revealed in the analysis, the doctor knew, too, that he had failed Sybil in accessory ways. It was to these failures to which the doctor unrelentingly addressed herself next.

Noting that Sybil was emotionally disturbed, Willard--the doctor told him--had reacted as if he hadn't wanted to know. He had evaded the issue by never asking her what the trouble was when they were alone and Sybil was free to communicate with him. Instead, he had asked her in front of Hattie or when there obviously wasn't time to talk. He had asked Sybil during the few moments he was alone with her while she did bookkeeping for him or between customers in the hardware store.

Instead of getting at the heart of his daughter's problem, he had embellished and smothered it with concerns of his own. He was worried about the imminent end of the world, a concern so real to him that he had dropped out of college because he wanted to utilize the time left to him (he never was precise about how much) not on the campus but in the "real" world. And so, when Sybil had shown symptoms of depression, he had evaded the real issue by asking, "Are you worried about the end of the world?" He was worried that Sybil was like his cousin who had been in and out of state hospitals; therefore, when Sybil was anxious, he projected his own worry upon her by asking whether she was worried that she was like this cousin.

He had resorted to instant solutions and pat panaceas--a guitar, for instance, to cure the emotional illness for which Dr. Quinoness had recommended a psychiatrist. When Sybil had complained that things felt unreal, he had laughed off the complaint in a grimacing sort of way or had said, "Dr. Quinoness will give you some shots, and you'll be all right." Willard Dorsett had also often dismissed Sybil's worries as imaginary. In short, through a variety of strategies of denial, the father had overlooked, ignored, refused to face the underlying problem that was his daughter's real worry.

The real worry? Had Sybil's behavior ever seemed strange? the doctor asked the father.

Yes, Willard recalled that there were times in which Sybil hadn't seemed to be herself, that, in fact, it had often been hard to say just what that self was because Sybil was seldom the same. She was very moody, and she seemed to be many different kinds of people. Sybil had not seemed like herself, the father recollected, after her grandmother died or in the fifth grade (when Sybil forgot all the multiplication that she had known) or in the sixth grade (when Willard had been called to school because, having wandered out of her classroom, Sybil was found in the cloakroom talking in a way that was not like her). There were also times, the father remembered, when Sybil and he gave guitar concerts or sang in the glee club, and she would forget the music she had previously known very well.

According to Willard, Sybil also had not seemed like herself in Omaha when she walked on the furniture after she had been sent home from college and had said, "You get out of my way. I might hurt you." Her behavior, he said, had been so strange at that time that Hattie and he had had to lock all the doors and hide the keys. Nor had he known what to make of it when sometimes Sybil would disappear.

"I don't know what I did wrong," he said, "but I'm sure there were things. I tried to be a good father."

Dr. Wilbur's list of the things he had done wrong was extensive. In addition to what had already been mentioned, the doctor claimed, he had been doubtful about everything, and his doubts had created false fears in Sybil. He had made decisions involving her without consulting her and had betrayed her many times. A childhood example of betrayal was that at the time of her tonsillectomy he had not told her what was going to happen but had lured her to Dr. Quinoness's home (the upper floor of which served as his hospital) by telling her she would spend the day playing with the Quinoness children. This bare-faced lie produced such intense fear that Sybil began to struggle the moment the ether mask approached her face. Her father held her legs down. She continued to struggle throughout the operation and forever after when any association with this betrayal entered her consciousness.

The father, who himself was not a rejecting father in all respects and who did have a relationship with his daughter, often made Sybil feel rejected, notably when he had not allowed her to be present at her grandmother's funeral service.

"I only did it to spare Sybil the agony it would have caused her," Willard explained.

"But," the doctor countered, "there was greater agony for Sybil in feeling that you had rejected her--greater agony in not being allowed to express her grief."

Agony and rejection there had been, too, when Sybil was thirteen and Willard, weary of Hattie's complaints about having to live under the same roof with his father, talked of renting a place for Hattie and Sybil to live in while Willard continued to stay with his father in their old home. "Girls should be with their mother," Willard explained.

Willard Dorsett, the doctor claimed, had let his daughter down by not permitting her to skip a grade (even though her I.Q. was 170 and she was held back by slower children), for fear she would get what he called a "swelled head."

When Dr. Wilbur accused Willard of having wanted to break up Sybil's friendship with Danny Martin, which had had a healing effect on Sybil and which could have developed into a marriage, for religious reasons, the father took umbrage. "I didn't want Sybil to be with that boy for her own good," Willard said. "I did only what I knew to be right. I didn't want her to marry out of our faith, and if she had been older, she would have agreed with me." He added, "She did, in fact, agree with that philosophy later. When a man she dated differed with her religious philosophy, she would immediately withdraw. Sybil was devout."

There were reasons for what Willard Dorsett had "done wrong" that the doctor suppressed because they were the answers that would have alienated him forever. In the instance of Danny Martin the doctor would have liked to have told Willard that he had sacrificed his daughter's happiness on the altar of a narrow religious concern. The doctor would have liked to have asked: what do you suppose your daughter was trying to say to you when she climbed into your bed and got between you and your wife when you were having intercourse? Why, the doctor would also have liked to have put to the father, are you such a hypocrite, preaching "decency" and yet thinking it moral and right to have sex for nine years in your daughter's presence? And why, while making too much of your daughter's being too big at two and a half to sit on your lap, too big for all the little intimacies that would have made her feel that she had a living, breathing father, did you later seduce her with words? The verbal seduction was an oblique reference to the fact that, while courting Frieda, Willard often had made remarks to Sybil such as, "You young people know so much more about sex than we do that I'm sure you can tell me a few things."