Sybil (52 page)

This time it was Sybil who rose to her feet, pacing. Forgive the lost time, the lost years? The anger that so newly seethed in her precluded forgiveness. "Let the dead past remain buried," was as close as she came to conciliation. She was ready to forget, not in the old sense of retreating from what she couldn't face but in the altogether new way of not making an issue of what had been done long ago.

The moment passed, and her outer mood shifted. Willard and Sybil began to talk of less painful things and the pleasures in store for her during the visit. But before Frieda called to say that lunch was being served, Willard Dorsett for the very first time talked to his daughter about her blackouts. "If I gave you more money," he asked, "would the blackouts end?"

"Money always helps," Sybil said simply, "but after thirty-six years of having blackouts, more money is not directly the answer." Then she added, "But they are becoming less frequent. I'm getting better."

"While we're talking about money, Sybil," Willard went on, "I want you to know that if anything happens to me, you'll be taken care of. The new duplex I'm building will belong to you."

"Thanks, Dad," Sybil said, half daring to trust in the caring he had at long last expressed.

At this point Willard made a curious remark: "Tell me, Sybil, who are these people you talk to and think you know?" Startled, she scrutinized the man who for so many years had lived under the same roof with the Peggys, Vicky, Marcia, Vanessa, Mary, and the others.

"Dad," Sybil said, "you misunderstood what Dr. Wilbur told you about these other people. I don't talk to them or think I know them. I was unaware of their existence until Dr. Wilbur told me about them. I'm only now getting to know them, beginning to talk to them."

This declaration was too much for Willard to absorb. Groping for meaning, he managed to say, "There is so much about you, Sybil, I can't understand." Still profoundly perplexed he led her into the dining room for the lunch Frieda had prepared.

That night, in the guest room of her father's house, Sybil dreamed about the sunroom of the Dorsett home in Willow Corners.

Hattie was dead, and Sybil had come expressly to visit her father. The only bed in the house--the familiar large white iron bed in which her parents had slept--was now placed in the sunroom. Since Sybil had to sleep somewhere and this was the only bed in the house, she was asleep on one side of it. Her father slept on the other side. Awaking suddenly, she saw a man's face at the window. The lips moved. To someone unseen the stranger was saying, "They are mating."

"Don't move your eyes, Dad," Sybil called aloud, waking him. "There's a man watching through the window. He thinks we're sleeping together." Then, observing that the accuser at the window had a camera, she covered her eyes with her arm to avoid being recognized in the photograph. "Dad," she pleaded, "please get me a glass of hot milk so I can sleep better." As her father silently complied, she studied the accuser's face so as to make an accurate sketch of him for the police. She was disturbed because the accuser at the window had blonde hair.

Carefully reaching her arms through the bars at the head of the bed, she felt for the phone on the floor.

"Operator," she said, "get me the police." She heard a voice answer, "They're gone for the night."

"Then please try the constable," Sybil persisted. "Gone for the night," the voice iterated in sepulchral tones. "But I have to have help," Sybil cried. "There's a man at my window."

"Does your father carry any insurance?" the voice queried.

"What has that got to do with it?" Sybil shouted.

"I'll call the insurance broker, madam," the voice replied obligingly. "If you have the number ..."

Sybil suddenly found herself clutching a handful of small business cards of insurance companies. As she groped for a name, she found the print too small to read. "Number, please; number, please," hammered at her brain. "I can't read the numbers," she protested helplessly. "The cards keep slipping." Her hands tried vainly to control the cards, which, of their own momentum, kept shuffling themselves.

"Drop this call, please," the operator's voice finally said.

"Please," Sybil pleaded, "someone must help."

The shattering silence that followed told her the truth, a truth she had never before been able to face ---that nobody was going to avenge the accuser at the window or indeed ever come to her rescue in anything.

Three months later, a letter from Frieda Dorsett, dated April 12, 1962, arrived in Dr. Wilbur's office. It read:

My husband's doctor called me this noon and told me that Sybil's father would not last much longer. As I wrote before, Mr. Dorsett is suffering from terminal cancer.

The doctor suggested that I write you and let you know that he will be glad to talk to you and tell you the situation if you will call him. Enclosed is his card.

Neither Sybil nor her father has mentioned whether she is planning on coming home to see him. I have not suggested anything about it because I do not know whether she can get along without you. It seems they do not realize the seriousness of his illness. Mr. Dorsett keeps saying he will be better in a day or two. The doctors have given him enough medication to take away his pain, but it has also taken away his mind. He has not asked about Sybil's letters in over a week now, and they were always of great importance to him. The last time I tried to read one to him, he stopped me.

I will be glad to have Sybil come home if I can take care of her, but frankly that has worried me for a long time. You know I have to work and cannot stay with her during the daytime.

I will be glad to hear from you if you have anything to suggest.

Two weeks later Dr. Wilbur informed Sybil of Willard's death. Sybil took the news quietly, but Mary, who had loved her father unreservedly, did not. Sybil didn't want to go to the funeral, and it was Sybil's decision that prevailed. The night of the funeral, however, Sybil dreamed that she was at a party at which Dr. Wilbur told her that her father was dead. "He is not. He is not," Sybil heard her own protest. Then rushing to the sunroom, she found him alive and in bed, with people standing around him. She threw herself on the bed beside him, still protesting, "He is not dead.

He is not dead."

But Willard was indeed dead for Sybil in a more devastating way than she could have remotely suspected. News from Frieda that Willard had left his daughter penniless confronted Sybil with the terrible truth, for which her dreams had already prepared her. "You see, Sybil," Dr. Wilbur said consolingly, "you have always had strong Oedipal feelings for your father, but you've also always hated him. The original Sybil hated both her mother and her father."

The hatred was buttressed by the irony of her father's words, which now returned to mock her: "If anything happens to me, you'll be taken care of."

Taken care of? With her allowance from her father now ended and no inheritance, Sybil found herself barely getting by. Fortunately, she already had her masters degree in art and had dropped out of the premedical program that had wed her to chemistry. There were therefore no tuition fees. The analysis, however, had to go unpd--Dr. Wilbur's investment in the future of achieving the integration of Sybil. As far as Sybil was concerned, however, this was a loan that would be paid. For rent, food, clothes, and other necessities Sybil was dependent upon gifts from friends. These gifts she also regarded as loans. In addition, there were her own slim earnings from intermittent tutoring and sales of paintings (she no longer worked at the Westchester hospital). And there was the temporary job in the laundromat to which Vanessa had led her.

Meanwhile, the analysis, propelled by the momentum of the anger Sybil could now feel, made measurable strides. Vicky was effectively bringing the various selves together by telling them about the past and the present of the total Sybil Dorsett. "The gang," Vicky told Dr. Wilbur, "is getting chummy."

No longer were there two Peggys but a return to Peggy Louisiana. The consolidated Peggy, moreover, was accepting with humor the prospect of becoming one with Sybil. On a morning in May, 1962, wearing a trench coat and peering through the corners of her eyes, Peggy strode into the doctor's office, looked under desks and chairs, and finally announced in pontifical tones: "We must get to the bottom of these traumas. It takes good detective work, Dr. Wilbur-- I mean Dr. Watson."

"Well, Mr. Holmes," Dr. Wilbur asked. "What shall we uncover today?"

Peggy replied: "The pieces, Dr. Watson, all the pieces that will solve this unusual case."

For three successive days Peggy continued to play the role of Sherlock Holmes while she cooperated in disinterring and eradicating the traumas of the past.

Then all of a sudden, just as Dr. Wilbur began to believe that integration was within easy grasp, Mary went into a severe depression.

Sitting in the doctor's office in early June, 1962, Mary was so depressed that she couldn't talk. The next day none of the selves turned up for the appointment. When Dr. Wilbur telephoned the apartment, there was no answer. When she finally managed to get into the apartment, she found Mary under the dresser, refusing to come out. Finally extricating Mary, the doctor put her to bed. The next day, when again no one kept the appointment, the doctor returned to the apartment to enact the same scene. There were many such repeat performances.

On one occasion Mary fumed: "I'm in here."

"Where?"

"A place of stone with no doors, no windows, curved and open above," Mary replied. "There isn't any way I can get up to the opening up there. There is no exit. I'm caught inside these walls."

At first Dr. Wilbur thought that the walls symbolized Mary's frustrated wish to have a home of her own.

"What is this place, Mary?" the doctor asked.

"It's shaped like an igloo," Mary answered. Remembering Mary's earlier discussions of religion, in which she had talked of being caught "inside these walls," the doctor asked, "Could the igloo be the Church?"

"I don't know. I don't know," Mary sobbed.

When it became apparent that religion was the imprisoning igloo and that the igloo had formed a stranglehold on the progress of the analysis, Dr. Wilbur had to tear the igloo down stone after unyielding stone. This involved analyzing again the underlying religious problem. The more they concentrated on religion, however, the more depressed Mary became. The greater Mary's depression, the more depressed--and the more suicidal --became the total self. Marcia wanted to jump into the Hudson River. This time Vicky, who had protected Sybil on the earlier occasion, told Dr. Wilbur: "Marcia wants to jump into the river, and I think I'll let her."

"Wait till I get there," Dr. Wilbur urged. And though Vicky had responded to the contagion of Mary's intensely pervasive depression, Vicky waited.

The suicidal nightmare continued as Mary explained, "Even if you burn forever, you can only hurt for a little while," or, "I don't care if I don't go to heaven. The only reason I'd like to go there is to be with my grandmother, and if mother is there, she'll keep me from Grandma anyway." Then, weeping, Mary would talk of what she called "my sorrowful childhood" and the barren walls of the church in Willow Corners.

Peggy protested: "We want to do things, but Mary drags us down."

It was paradoxical that, with the liberation of Sybil from her mother that had taken place on the West Side Highway, there should still be so strong a desire for suicide among some of the other selves. Dr. Wilbur had always regarded Sybil's suicide wish as an expression of the hatred for her mother turned against herself. The doctor hypothesized, however, that Sybil's liberation had not affected Marcia, who had always carried the burden of that wish and who at the same time had, as Vicky explained, a greater need for her mother.

Mary, for her part, had not been deeply affected by Sybil's liberation from her mother, for her mother was not one of Mary's major problems. This personality's chief concerns were with Grandma Dorsett and her father and the fundamentalist religion that had informed their lives. As long as Mary accepted Grandma's simple faith of living an exemplary life, Mary was serene.

When, however, she had allowed herself to be overwhelmed by the church and the theology that Grandma eschewed but which her father and Grandpa Dorsett embraced, she had carried the burden of religious entrapment that in some measure most of the selves, including Sybil, shared. For Mary there could be no resolution, no diminution of her suicidal inclinations until she was freed of her religious conflict.

The years between 1962 and 1965 were torn by conflict. Year after year Mary remained trapped in her igloo; year after year there was the struggle between survival and suicide, between getting well and remaining ill. "We're all afraid to get well," Marcia confided in Dr. Wilbur. But there was also another fear--subtle, indefinable, existential--a fear that Mike and Sid had voiced earlier when they had asked, "Are they going to kill us?"

"Am I going to die?" each of the selves asked Dr. Wilbur. For some of the selves integration seemed synonymous with death. The doctor's assurances that, although one with Sybil, the individual selves would not cease to be seemed at best only partly convincing. "There are many things I have to do," Vanessa told Marcia. "You see, I won't be here very long." Even Sybil, misunderstanding what Dr. Wilbur meant by saying that Vicky was endowed with more of the original Sybil than was Sybil herself, remarked with intensity, "I don't want to die and yield to that blabbermouth."