Sybil (53 page)

Then two new developments occurred that made the promised land recede even further.

Dr. Wilbur had thought that Mike and Sid had been integrated shortly after the age progression to thirty-seven. It had seemed theoretically impossible for thirty-seven-year-old "men" to find sustenance in a woman's body. It had seemed probable that they would just yield to the totality of being the male in every woman. But one day in 1964 there came the crisp, "I'm Mike, and I want to talk to you, Dr. Wilbur."

"Hi, Mike," the doctor replied.

Well, she reasoned, she hadn't treated a multiple personality before, and she didn't really know what to expect. Why should she be surprised?

"I want to know something," Mike asked belligerently.

"What's that?"

"How long are you going on with this farce about integrating Sid and me with all these women?"

"But I explained to you long ago," Dr. Wilbur reminded her patient, "that you live in a woman's body and have to accept that fact."

"Then why did you make us men? A Godlike sort of thing to do. Doesn't it bother you?"

Mike was cornering the doctor in the way that some of the selves had complained that she cornered them. "I didn't make Sid and you men," she finally replied. "Just as you were never really boys, you're not men now." She added quietly: "You still don't have penises."

"It's a lie," Mike replied angrily.

"A bare-faced lie. Like anything else, a penis exists in the eye of the beholder. In my mind's eye my penis exists. I'm a man among men." He held the doctor's eye fixedly and added: "I'm not going to be part of a woman. Sid isn't either."

"Where is Sid?" The doctor stalled for time.

"Right here," Sid answered. "I came with Mike. He spoke for both of us. Now that our dad is dead, we're the men in the family, and no sissy doctor is going to stand in the way."

"Sid," the doctor asked, "what have I done to make you speak this way? I thought we were friends."

"Then act like our friend," Mike responded. "Give us our freedom to be what we are."

"That is what I'm trying to do," Dr. Wilbur protested.

"Don't try to trick us with double meaning," Sid snapped. "Integrating us with that gang of women is not freedom. It's bondage."

"I've been their hostage long enough," Mike added ruefully. "The time for our freedom is at hand. Whether you like it or not, we're not going to be part of a woman. We're going to be men in our own right."

"You are what you are," said the doctor. "Well, let me tell you something," Mike declared. "You're getting Sybil ready to go into the world on her own. You've encouraged her in her dream of being an independent woman and making a place for herself. A teacher? Maybe.

But the big jobs in education are held by men. But Sid and I aren't going to help her as we did in the past. We're not going to build anything for her or play Mr. Fixit in her house. As far as that silly dream of being a doctor is concerned, she doesn't have what it takes. All these years of studying science subjects that haven't come naturally have gotten her nowhere. Medical schools are very selective about the women they take, and they're not going to settle for her. This is still a man's world, and women don't really have a chance. Doctor, it's time to wake up to the truth about Sybil Dorsett. She's a woman, and a woman can't wow the world."

Then they stalked out of the office. From the door Mike pronounced an ultimatum: "Give us our freedom, lady doctor. The world belongs not to you but to us!"

With Mike and Sid in revolt, with Mary still in the igloo, the time was out of joint. Once again Dr. Wilbur had to summon the patience of the previous eight years.

The next morning the patient was Sybil, fortified by Vicky, Peggy, and Ruthie, all of whom were close enough to give her strength. As in the beginning of the analysis, Sybil talked of music, although not in the same way. "I haven't played the piano since I was a child," Sybil said willy. "I lost all that. It bothers me."

"You will play," Dr. Wilbur promised in much the same tone that Dr. Taylor had used about the violin in the old Willow Corners drugstore. "You will play beautiful music on the piano."

"How can you say that?" Sybil asked in perplexity.

"It may surprise you," Dr. Wilbur replied, "to know that one of your other selves does play beautifully. When you are one with her, she will return to you the ability to play the piano in the way that Peggy has returned the capacity to get angry."

Bewilderment shrouded Sybil's smile. "Which one?" she asked.

"Vanessa," Dr. Wilbur answered. "I'm going to have a talk with Vanessa and will try to persuade her to come closer. She's still pretty far from you. But, soon, Sybil, when all fifteen of you are one, it will be otherwise." Thinking of Mary, Mike, and Sid, the doctor hoped she was not being unduly optimistic.

In March, 1964, Mike and Sid were still recalcitrantly fighting integration, but Mary had stepped out of the igloo. In an analytic session she announced, "The church doesn't matter. What is important is to live a good, Christian life and love your fellow man." It was the very philosophy, Grandma Dorsett's philosophy, Mary had enunciated earlier in the analysis, but which had become obscured as the church had reached out to trap her.

With the problems carried by Marcia and Mary resolved, Sybil was now well enough to hunt for her first full-time job since coming to New York.

"Vanessa," Vicky told Dr. Wilbur, "doesn't think we have the right clothes for our reentry into the world."

Dr. Wilbur went shopping with Sybil and bought her several new outfits. Fortified with new costumes and the assertiveness that Peggy had returned to her, Sybil, who had difficulty in getting back into teaching because of not having taught in ten years, paced the pavements of New York to a variety of employment agencies.

Waking up at 4:45 A.m. on August 8, Sybil recognized that she had very definite "Peggy feelings." She closed her eyes and drifted for a few seconds to see if she could discover what Peggy wanted. Purple boats with green sails came into Sybil's mind's eye. She had once done a painting of sagebrush in Professor Klinger's class, but she had never had a very high regard for the combination of purple and green. Then Peggy said, "See, there are three pink flags on the ship." Sybil got out of bed. It was 5:00 A.m., too early to go job hunting. She decided to give Peggy the chalk and paper to make purple and green boats with pink flags. A dreadful mixture, Sybil thought, but why not please Peggy? At six Peggy's completed boats were sailing high. Peggy wanted to call the drawing Pink Flags; Sybil preferred Of Ships and Sailing, but in the end Sybil let Peggy have her way.

Later that morning Sybil visited the agencies, feeling calm and energetic. She attributed her happy mood to having allowed Peggy to color. That morning Sybil secured a job as a receptionist at a New York Hotel.

She had been working there for a week when Ramon Allegre asked her for a date. She accepted. From the first, her response to Ramon, an accountant on special assignment to the Gotham and soon to return to his native South America, was positive.

The day after their first date Dr. Wilbur left for a medical convention in Z@urich and a vacation abroad. Accompanying the doctor to the airport, Sybil talked about Ramon. "I like him," she said with an unabashed forthrightness that the doctor had never seen her display toward any man. "He's asked me for another date tonight."

"He's rushing you," the doctor said smiling. "Is that what you call it?" Sybil asked. "It's been so long since I've had a date, I've forgotten the vocabulary."

As Dr. Wilbur's plane shot up steeply into the air, Sybil watched until nothing was left. Then, finding a set of benches out in the cool air, Sybil sat down to enjoy the sights. She felt peaceful and not alone even though Dr. Wilbur was not beside her. The thought of Ramon contributed, too, to the feeling of well-being.

Was this euphoria? That word had never been in her vocabulary until this moment.

That night, after Sybil had returned to the apartment and before Ramon called for her, Sybil continued to feel as if the doctor were still with her. Dr. Wilbur had often said that this was how it should be, but the feeling hadn't come before. This time, however, Sybil really felt it. She was so pleased to have been able to tell the doctor about Ramon. Sybil knew that the togetherness that Sybil had enjoyed with the doctor outside the office had been an important, perhaps the most crucial, part of the therapy. And now Ramon. There was also peace in the thought of him--a man against whom she hadn't shut the door.

Ramon Allegre had aroused feelings in Sybil that to her were entirely new. Always afraid to see the same person, man or woman, too many times for fear that the friend would discover her lapses of time or meet one of the other selves, habitually unable to make plans in advance since the morrow might not belong to her, Sybil had dared to be with Ramon in the course of eight weeks of continuous dating.

By day she had glimpses of him, preoccupied but not remote. At night and on weekends, they enjoyed concerts, theaters, art galleries, long walks in Central Park, and an occasional evening in the Morningside Drive apartment. Since Teddy's departure only two people had been admitted to closeness: Laura Hotchkins, a friend from Whittier Hall, and Flora Rheta Schreiber, a friend and professional writer to whom Dr. Wilbur had introduced Sybil in 1962. Yet while Laura and Flora knew that Sybil was a multiple personality and Flora had met the other selves, Ramon knew nothing about Sybil's "condition." In seeing him, therefore, Sybil was declaring her confidence in her own ability to remain herself.

Indeed, while cooking dinner for Ramon one Thursday evening, Sybil suddenly realized that no longer was she what she had been--a depleted person, incapable of loving or of personal involvement. Shortly before meeting Ramon she had confided in Flora, whom Dr. Wilbur and she had brought close to the analysis, "I can't feel anything. How can you feel when you have such a mix-up in your emotions? You're too busy with the feelings complicating existence to have any others."

But now Sybil was no longer the shell of a self she had been when Stan--who had proposed a sexless marriage and had been comfortable with her just because she had not been intense--had wooed and rejected her.

It was different with Ramon. She was gripped with intensity of feeling. Was this love? The feeling was new, as new as the experience of solidity that had replaced the floating feelings of the past.

Was she well? she wondered. Was it health that had ripped away the heavy weight and had brought her to a metaphorical gate, through which she was reentering the world?

What lay beyond the gate? Sybil didn't know. She had glimpsed what she knew belonged to the world of well people, yet she also knew that she was still set apart. This was so even though, despite Dr. Wilbur's absence and an altogether new experience with Ramon, she had not once dissociated during these eight weeks. But some of her other selves still existed.

Vicky had told her, "Ramon's a nice person, but he's pushing too fast." Peggy had said, "He comes from Colombia. How exciting. It's a place I want to go." Vicky and Peggy were close to her now. Some of the others, however, had never been close, and they were fighting integration. Even though she had concealed the fact from Ramon, she was still a multiple personality.

As Sybil worked on preparations for dinner, she also admitted to herself that her depression and suicidal feelings had not been put to rest by the euphoria of her romance. Even during these eight weeks there had been tugs of despair, desire for surcease. The surcease of death.

She went into the bedroom, started to dress, looked into the mirror. Until her meeting with Ramon, mirrors had been ruled out of her existence. Finally daring to look, she had not been displeased with what she saw. Lingering at the mirror, Sybil was also aware that the truth about herself that she had tried to conceal from Ramon was changing. At the age of forty-one she was waiting for him with the expectation of a teenager. For the very first time she was experiencing love.

The doorbell roused her. There stood Ramon, holding a bouquet of red roses. "Cara," he said as he kissed her, "I missed you." It had been precisely two hours since they had seen each other at the office, less than twenty-four hours since their last date.

"Ramon," she replied, "I missed you, too."

To Sybil, who often personified people, moods, and things in colors, who had described her lost two years as blue and had conceived of chickens with blue feet, Ramon seemed all brown, like the earth. He took her in his arms so easily, touched her so expressively, that she, to whom the slightest touch had once been abhorrent, did not withdraw.

"A new drawing, cara?" Ramon called as his eye rested on the mantel, where there was a brooding figure of black and white chalk. "A self-portrait?"

Sybil was embarrassed. It was Peggy's drawing of Sybil.

"The figure looks omnipotent," Ramon remarked.

Silence.

"I've always liked that one," Ramon commented as he walked toward an abstract figure of blue on a background of darker blue. This time Sybil felt more comfortable, for that painting was her own.

"Notice the shading," she said. "All the shades of blue that are love."

"I never thought of love as blue," Ramon replied.