Sybil (4 page)

Staring at the food on the tray, Sybil felt a different kind of panic from what she had felt among the massive, ugly buildings of the warehouse district. The waiter. The woman at the desk with a bosom like a hill.

The pajamas. The black and white drawing of the female figure on the cliff. It all made sense--terrible sense. The panic she had experienced in the warehouse district because of not knowing what had happened had been superseded at the newsstand by the even greater panic of partial knowledge. And now the torment of partly knowing had yielded to the infinitely greater terror of knowing precisely. The pajamas and the black and white drawing left no doubt.

Sybil gulped the milk, pushed the soup aside, hastily put on her shoes, her still-wet coat, her scarf, mittens. She stuffed the pajamas and sales slip into her zipper folder. She had planned to spend the night, but suddenly, even though she could see that the snow hadn't stopped and she knew that the trains might be delayed, she had to get back to New York to avoid the risk of what might happen if she stayed.

Sybil Isabel Dorsett knew that she had to get back to New York while she was still herself.

Wartime Within

Trains.

These dragons in the night fascinated Sybil, thrilled her and held her entranced. In the past they had usually meant escape. This train, however, was taking her not away from but toward. And she knew that she had to get back to New York not because of the chemistry lab and her other classes but because of Dr. Wilbur.

Sybil tried to envision what had taken place in her absence: the regular daily session with the doctor missed, the doctor's possible attempts to search for her, and above all the doctor's disappointment upon surmising what had probably happened.

Then Sybil dismissed these disturbing thoughts. The mood of calm that had come over her since boarding the train was too pleasant to lose in idle speculation, remorse, self-recrimination.

Sybil Isabel Dorsett thought instead of the very first time she had seen Dr. Wilbur and of the events that surrounded that meeting. Unleashed was a flood of recollections so powerful that not until the train pulled into New York's Pennsylvania Station did it cease.

Sybil was twenty-two years old. Adrift in her feelings, she was living in despair with her parents--Willard and Henrietta "Hattie" Dorsett--that summer of 1945. Wartime without, it was for Sybil also wartime within. Hers was not a war of nerves in the customary sense but a war of nervousness in a special sense, for the nervous symptoms that had plagued her since childhood had become so bad at the midwestern teachers' college where she had been majoring in art that the college authorities had sent her home the previous June, saying that not until a psychiatrist deemed her fit could she return. Gwen Updyke, the college nurse, afraid to let her travel alone, had made the trip with her. But homecoming, which took Sybil from an unmanageable academic career to an even more unmanageable relationship with her parents, who were at once overprotective and unsympathetic, had served only to aggravate her symptoms. in August, 1945, Sybil was earnestly seeking a solution to a problem that had been a lifetime dilemma but that neither she nor anybody else understood.

In this state of mind Sybil had made her first trip to see Dr. Lynn Thompson Hall, her mother's doctor. That time it had been her mother who had been the sick one, with a swollen belly, and Sybil had come to the office as the daughter of the patient. But while talking to Dr. Hall about her mother, Sybil had experienced a fleeting wish that he would ask about her. She liked the tall, soft-spoken Dr. Hall, and she realized that what she liked most about him was that he treated her like an intelligent adult. The very realization, however, was disquieting. Being twenty-two entitled her to adult status. Having an IQ of 170, according to a standard intelligence test, should have earned her the right to be treated as if she were intelligent. Yet she never felt like an intelligent adult around her mother or even around her father. Her parents were forty when she was born; she had never known her mother without gray hair. She supposed that it was this Isaac-Jacob setting, with a generation gap spanning not one but two generations, coupled with her being an only child, that accounted for the fact that in the presence of her mother and father she remained a child. Somehow she had never been able to grow up in her parents' eyes.

Sybil wanted to reach out to Dr. Hall. During the first visit she wished he would ask her, "What is the matter with you? What can I do to help?" On the second visit, which took place three days later, the wish was even stronger and more insistent. But as her mother and she sat in the crowded waiting room hour after hour--because of the war doctors were scarce--she felt discouraged. It was unreasonable, she knew, for her to think that Dr. Hall would ask about her.

Her mother's turn finally came. Then the examination, during which, at her mother's insistence, Sybil was always present, was over. As her mother, Sybil, and the doctor were leaving the examining room, Dr. Hall took Sybil aside and said, "I'd like to see you in my office for a moment, Miss Dorsett." Her mother went to the dressing room as Sybil followed Dr. Hall into his office.

To Sybil's surprise, the doctor did not talk about her mother. Looking firmly at Sybil from his swivel chair, Dr. Hall said forthrightly: "Miss Dorsett, you look pale, thin.

What's troubling you?" He waited an instant and added, "What can I do to help?"

Exactly what she had hoped would happen had happened, but she was anxious. Although she had wished for this opportunity, it was puzzling when it actually came. How could Dr. Hall have divined her plea? It was unreal that he should instinctively have tuned in to her unexpressed wish. That people regarded him as an astute physician, probably the best internist in Omaha, was not a sufficient explanation.

Suddenly realizing that this was no time for reflection since Dr. Hall, who had been straightforward with her, was waiting for her answer, she replied slowly, "Well, I don't have any great physical complaints, Doctor." She desperately wanted his help, but, afraid to tell him too much, she merely added, "I'm just nervous. I was so nervous at college that they sent me home until I could get well."

Dr. Hall was listening attentively, and Sybil sensed that he did really want to help her. Because of her overdeveloped capacity for self-effacement, however, and because of her longtime conviction that she wasn't important, she couldn't understand why.

"You're not at college now?" the doctor was asking. "Then what are you doing?"

"Teaching in a junior high school," she replied. Although she wasn't a college graduate, she was able to teach because of the wartime teacher shortage.

"I see," Dr. Hall said. "And this nervousness you speak about--what form does it take?"

The question terrified her. What form indeed? That was something about which she didn't want to talk. No matter how much Dr. Hall wanted to help her, no matter how much she wanted his help, she could not tell him this. She had never been able to share the information he was requesting with another human being. She could not share it, moreover, even if she wanted to. It was a sinister force that shrouded her life and made her different from other people, but it remained nameless even to her.

All Sybil said was, "I know I have to see a psychiatrist." That, she supposed, was a fair appraisal of the situation, but she studied Dr. Hall's face uneasily to see how he had reacted. He showed no surprise, and he seemed to make no judgment.

"I'll make an appointment for you," he said matter-of-factly, "and tell you the time when you come with your mother on Thursday."

"All right. Thank you, Doctor," Sybil replied.

The brief, stiff phrase of gratitude, with its conventional words, rang hollow. Those words, she knew, could not convey the impact of the powerful feelings that were overwhelming her. It was important for her to see a psychiatrist not only to secure relief from her nervousness, if indeed her condition was treatable, but also because her going back to college depended upon psychiatric help. She wanted desperately to return to school and knew that this was the only way she ever would.

Sybil said nothing of this to her parents, but on Thursday, in her mother's presence, Dr. Hall remarked, "Your appointment is with Dr. Wilbur for August 10 at 2:00 P.m.

She's especially good with young people." Sybil could feel her heart skipping, then throbbing. The excitement about seeing a psychiatrist was overshadowed, however, by the pronoun she. A woman? Had she heard correctly?

All the doctors she had ever known were men. "Yes," Dr. Hall was saying, "Dr.

Wilbur has had a great deal of success with the patients I've sent her."

Sybil only half heard him because the initial terror of seeing in her mind a woman psychiatrist almost eradicated his words. But then suddenly the fear lifted. She had had a warm relationship with Miss Updyke, the college nurse, and she had had a devastating experience with a male neurologist in the Mayo Clinic. The neurologist had dismissed her case after a single visit, handing out an easy nostrum by telling her father that if she continued to write poetry, she would be all right.

Dr. Hall leaned forward to put his hand on her mother's arm as he said firmly, "And, Mother, you're not to go with her."

Sybil was startled--even shocked--by the tone that the doctor had taken with her mother and by her mother's apparent acquiescence. It had been a fact of Sybil's existence that her mother went with her everywhere, and she went with her mother. Never, even though she had tried, had Sybil been able to alter that fact. Her mother's omnipresence in her life had been almost a force of nature, as inevitable as the rise and setting of the sun. In a single sentence Dr. Hall had reversed the reality of a lifetime.

There was something else about that sentence that defied understanding, too. Nobody--not family, not friends, not even Sybil's father, and certainly not Sybil --had ever told her mother what to do. Her mother--the self-proclaimed "great Hattie Dorsett" --was a towering, unrelenting, and invincible figure. She didn't take orders; she gave them.

Leaving the office with her mother, Sybil fervently wished--irrationally perhaps but nonetheless powerfully--that the woman psychiatrist, whom she was soon to see, would not have white hair.

Precisely at 2:00 P.m. on August 10 Sybil entered the office of Dr. Cornelia B. Wilbur on the sixth floor of Omaha's Medical Arts Building, and the doctor's hair wasn't white. It was red, and the doctor was young, perhaps no more than ten years older than Sybil. Her eyes seemed kind-- unmistakably, undeniably kind.

Still, churning within Sybil was the same set of opposing feelings that she had experienced in Dr. Hall's office, the sense of relief that at last she was doing something about her nervousness but the terror that nothing could be done because hers was a unique, untreatable condition.

Dr. Wilbur was patient as Sybil, trying to mask these contradictory feelings, rattled on about being terribly nervous and so shaky at college that she often had to leave the classroom.

"It was pretty bad at college," Sybil recalled. "Miss Updyke, the school nurse, was worried about me. The school doctor sent me to a Mayo Clinic neurologist. I saw the neurologist only once, but he assured me that I would be all right. But I kept getting worse. They sent me home and said that I should not come back until I was well enough."

Sybil found comfort in the doctor's smile. "Well," Sybil continued, "I'm home now. It's dreadful, simply dreadful. I'm with my parents every minute. They don't let me out of their sight. They look at me with long faces. I know that they're ashamed that I was sent home from college. They were counting on my education and centered their hopes on it. But I'm going back when I'm well enough."

The doctor still hadn't said anything, so Sybil just went on talking. "I'm an only child," she said, "and my parents are very good to me."

Dr. Wilbur nodded as she lit a cigarette.

"They worry about me," Sybil continued. "Everyone worries about me--my friends, our pastor, everybody. I'm illustrating the pastor's lyceums on Daniel and Revelation. As he talks, I paint the beast about which he's talking. It's really very impressive. I'm suspended on a scaffold ten feet above the stage. I usually chalk on heavy drawing paper my interpretations of what the pastor says. He's keeping me busy. He ..."

"How do you feel? Dr. Wilbur interrupted. "You've been telling me what everybody else thinks about you. But how do you feel?"

A compendium of physical complaints followed as Sybil talked of her poor appetite, of weighing only 79 pounds even though she was five-feet-five. The recital also included her chronic sinusitis and her poor eyesight, so poor that, as she put it, "I sometimes feel as if I'm looking through a tunnel." After a pause she added, "I'm not at all well, but I've been told I'm really healthy. Ever since I was a little girl, I've been sick but not sick."

Did she remember her dreams? the doctor wanted to know. No, she didn't remember them. As a little girl she had nightmares, which she didn't remember, either.

Sybil froze when the doctor tried to get her to talk about her feelings, but the doctor persisted. Finally Sybil had said enough for the doctor to be able to tell her: "You should come back. You have difficulties that can be worked on." Of that Dr. Wilbur was sure, but she also knew that it would not be easy to reach Sybil.