Sybil (38 page)

Sybil herself, however, looked at the drawings at the close of each of the three Sunday night performances and wondered how it had come to pass that on that paper was more, much more, than she had drawn.

The real importance of the great spectacle in the Omaha church, withheld at that time but revealed in the analysis, was that on the scaffold Sybil had not been alone. The beasts that rose from the sea to the paper had been put there more by the other selves than by Sybil herself. The greatest part of the drawing had been done by Mike and Sid. Even more significant was the fact that among the selves on that scaffold were five Dr. Wilbur had not yet met: Marjorie, Helen, Sybil Ann, Clara, and Nancy Lou Ann.

Marjorie was a small and willowy brunette with fair skin and a pug nose. Helen had light-brown hair, hazel eyes, a straight nose, and thin lips. Sybil Ann was a pale, stringy girl with ash-blonde hair, gray eyes, an oval face, and a straight nose.

Of the three, Marjorie alone was serene. Helen was intensely fearful; Sybil Ann, listless to the point of neurasthenia.

Marjorie was vivacious and quick to laugh. She enjoyed many things--parties and the theater, fairs and travel, most especially games of intellectual competition, from which Sybil almost invariably withdrew. Marjorie had no hesitation in expressing annoyance or impatience, but she never showed anger. Most remarkably, Marjorie Dorsett neither was depressed in the present nor gave evidence of having been depressed in the past. Through some special immunity she had emerged unscathed from the battering in Willow Corners.

Marjorie enjoyed making wry little jokes and was also something of a tease. Asked, for instance, whether she knew any of the other selves, she raised her eyebrows, rolled her eyes coyly, and bantered, "I'll never tell!" A moment later she grinned. "But maybe the answer is yes," she said. Then she added cryptically, "I like helping these other people."

"They laugh or cry," Marjorie reported, "and I often hear them mumbling beside me, heads close together. It's quite a hum, and it always was-- ever since I came."

Marjorie Dorsett never spoke Sybil's name. When referring to the person who bore that name, Marjorie resorted to "you know who."

Dr. Wilbur couldn't understand why Marjorie, who didn't paint and who was interested in neither art nor religion, had been on the scaffold of the Omaha church with Sybil.

Helen, who seemed unassertive in manner, was nevertheless ambitious, determined "to be somebody, to do things in my own way, and to make you, Dr. Wilbur, proud of me."

At the mention of Hattie, Helen broke away from the couch, where she had been seated quietly, to clamber on all fours toward and then under the desk. Her arms folded over her breasts, her head bent over her neck, her eyes wide with terror, Helen sat huddled in a heap. Her teeth were chattering noisily.

"Helen?" the doctor, placing a hand on the patient's shoulder, asked gently.

"She's in this room," Helen screamed, beginning to tremble even more violently than before. "Behind the curtains."

"Who?"

"Mother."

"There's nobody here, Helen, but you and me."

"I never want to see my mother again."

"You never will."

"Never?" Her teeth ceased to chatter, and the terror departed from her eyes. As the doctor helped the patient from under the desk and on to her feet, Helen remarked in a suddenly realistic tone that broke the reenacted terror of childhood: "My muscles are cramped."

As in the instance of Marjorie, Helen, who neither painted nor had any special religious concern, seemed to have occupied an anachronistic place on the scaffold.

Sybil Ann shrank into the consulting room. She didn't speak to the doctor but whispered. After the introductions were over, Sybil Ann sat silently, staring into vacancy. It was as if she were erasing herself from the scene, almost as if, by implication, she were saying, "I'm not fit to occupy space. Excuse me for living."

When Sybil Ann was in command, moreover, the body itself underwent a marked change. It seemed literally to grow smaller. That first time she appeared, as the body seemed to shrink, the trim gray suit Sybil Ann was wearing seemed to stretch. On the other selves the suit fit perfectly. On Sybil Ann, it assumed the proportions of a sack. Within the recesses of the expanding gray suit Sybil Ann seemed to be hiding.

Out of the awkward enveloping silence there did finally come words with measured tread. Sybil Ann told Dr. Wilbur: "I have to force myself even to move my eyeballs. It's so easy just to stare."

This fragile personality, Dr. Wilbur learned later, seldom ate, slept little, and generally evinced only slight interest in her surroundings. Often she would say: "I don't feel anything." When she was in one of her better moods, she enjoyed libraries and museums, preferred music to painting. On the very rare occasions when she herself painted, she invariably produced a dreary picture of solitary characters with faces either covered or turned away. On the Omaha scaffold she had brought a measure of gloom to the faces of the beasts.

Characteristically, Sybil Ann assumed command of the body when "everything was too much." The "takeover," however, was a response to, rather than the means of coping with, the given situation; of all the selves the most profoundly depressed was Sybil Ann, who could sit for hours as mute and unmoving as the pelican on the piano in the Dorsett home in Willow Corners.

When, at the end of the first visit to Dr. Wilbur's consulting room, Sybil Ann finally rose to leave, she walked at a slow, dragging pace. "It's an effort," she said wearily, "to put one foot ahead of the other, and I have to keep thinking about it--or I stop."

Noting Sybil Ann's great lassitude and weakness, Dr. Wilbur diagnosed her as suffering from neurasthenia, a type of neurosis resulting from emotional conflicts that usually are characterized by fatigue, depression, worry, and often, localized pains without apparent objective causes. Sybil Ann, Dr.

Wilbur also felt certain, was an identification with Hattie Dorsett in her catatonic phase on the farm.

Clara, who had been in the consulting room during the reliving of the episode on the Omaha church scaffold during the Christmas holidays of 1957, continued silently to follow the running dialogue about religion, which extended through the rest of December and the early months of 1958. In March she presented herself to Dr. Wilbur with terse autobiographical information. "I'm twenty-three. I never had a mother. I just exist." She proceeded to explicate her religious role in the Dorsett conglomerate of selves.

"I know more about religion than the others do," Clara Dorsett said. "I was in the sandbox with Ruthie, at church school with Sybil and the others. Religion is as important to me as it is to Mary, even more important, I sometimes think. I believe in God without reservation, in the Bible as the revelation of His Truth, in Satan, who is His antithesis."

Suddenly the room was like a chalice in which the wine of wrath is contained. Clara was pacing the floor, uttering a vehement indictment: "Sybil's such a deplorable character. Honest, it's disgusting. The thing about it is that she gets the idea that she's going to try. She can't do anything!"

"You sound as if you don't like Sybil," the doctor said.

"I don't," Clara replied bluntly.

Self against self in a woman divided. "Why not?" the doctor asked.

"Why should I?" Clara replied resentfully. "The only thing I want to do, she keeps me from doing."

"What do you want to do?" the doctor asked. "Oh, it isn't anything spectacular," Clara explained. "I like to study and learn. She stands in my way."

"What do you like to study?"

"Music and English. Especially history, medical things--chemistry, zoology," Clara replied.

"So does Sybil," the doctor was quick to point out.

"No, she doesn't," Clara said contemptuously. "A big steel wall goes up, and she just can't study. Can't do anything, in fact. It wasn't always that way. But that's how it is now."

"Why, Clara?" the doctor asked, to ascertain how much this newcomer really knew about Sybil.

"Anger," Clara replied authoritatively.

"I have some good drills for hacking that wall of anger down," the doctor asserted. "Clara, will you help me?"

"Why should I?" Clara's pique had become even more pronounced. "What has she ever done for me?"

"Then," the doctor suggested artfully, "help me take a whack at that wall--not for Sybil but for yourself."

"For me?" Clara drew up her shoulders in dismay. "I'm afraid, Doctor, I don't see the connection."

"Clara, can't you see that if you help me help Sybil to get well, she will no longer stand in the way of your doing the things you want to do?" The doctor's tone was urgently insistent. "Can't you see that in helping Sybil you will be helping yourself?"

"Well," Clara hesitated, "Sybil's still so far away from everything. I couldn't reach her if I tried."

"Try, Clara!" The doctor's urging had become an entreaty. "For your own sake, Clara," the doctor said softly. "Tomorrow morning when Sybil wakes up, I'd like all you girls to do something."

"The boys, too?" Clara asked.

"Yes, all of you," the doctor replied. "What?" Clara wanted to know. "Go to church? It's Sabbath tomorrow."

"No, I don't want you to go to church," the doctor replied firmly. "Just sleep late and then tell Sybil that the reason she can't do all the things she'd like to do is that the complications of the illness are holding her back."

Clara, who had been pacing as she talked, came to an abrupt stop. "But, Doctor," she protested, "you told Sybil that she could manage school in spite of the illness, even though the analysis was consuming much of her time."

"Yes," the doctor explained, "I did tell her that. But that was before I knew how much pain had to be dealt with. At that time I thought that the basic trauma was the grief over the grandmother's death--that it was because of that that Sybil dissociated into other selves. I also thought that grief was kept alive because Sybil, who had been absent for two years, had never had the opportunity to get it out of her system. I didn't know then how much pain there had been or how complicated the roots were of Sybil's case."

"You know," Clara replied confidentially, "Sybil's worried because she lost several years of things, and she's afraid that you'll find out."

"That's ridiculous," the doctor averred. "Sybil knows I know about those lost years."

"She keeps reliving the past," Clara reported. "She keeps thinking her mother is going to hurt her." Clara paused. Then she added, "I'm glad I never had a mother."

The doctor allowed the comment to go unnoticed, as she replied, "We're going to free Sybil of the past."

"Yes, she wants to be free," Clara replied edgily. "Wants to forget everything and not face anything."

"She'll have to face it all before she can be free of it," the doctor replied. "But she can do it. She has great stamina, great courage. All of you have."

"Courage?" Clara asked with a sarcastic overtone. "She can't do anything. Can't face anything. You call that courage?"

"She has great ability and is gifted in many things," the doctor replied with conviction. "When we hack that wall of anger down, she'll be free to realize herself."

Clara shook her head gravely. "There never was a drill that could do that," she said.

"My drill," the doctor maintained, "will do that--on one condition."

"Condition?" Clara seemed puzzled. "We can tear the wall down, Clara," the doctor replied firmly, "if you and the others will work with me." Clara looked even more perplexed. "Tomorrow," the doctor continued, "when you tell Sybil about the analysis, also begin telling her the various things you know."

"Things? What things?" Clara asked uncertainly.

"What you have learned, feel, remember. ..." the doctor coaxed.

"I remember a great many things about the Church," Clara reminisced. "The incidents in the Willow Corners church are vivid."

"Tell Sybil."

"What's the use?" Clara shrugged. "Sybil's not a good listener. That big wall, you know."

"We're going to demolish that wall," the doctor replied. "All of us working together." The doctor looked at Clara unflinchingly. "Then Sybil will be able to do the things you want her to do. She won't interfere with your studies anymore."

"Well, I don't want to help her," an uncompromising Clara replied. "Why should I?"

"Then, why don't you get together with the others?" Dr. Wilbur persevered. "You can all do the things you enjoy. You can do them together."

Clara rose to her feet, began to pace once again. Then with a wry smile, she turned to the doctor. "You never saw such a pack of individualists," Clara said. "They all want to have things their own way."

"Try!" The doctor renewed her entreaty. Clara laughed. "You should hear us squabble. I can feel them now. The Peggys are just simmering."

"Clara, listen." The doctor was now standing close to the patient. "What I'm asking of you is for your own good, for the good of all of you. I've already mentioned it to some of the others. All of you must work together. All of you must try to reach Sybil. That, Clara, is the only way you're going to be able to persuade Sybil to do the things that don't interfere with your own self-realization. Don't you see what's at stake? Won't you try to see?"