Sybil (31 page)

The shattered door was swung open by the aunts and uncles, who, drawn to the scene by the crash, stood staring at the dish. Now the dish lay on the dining room floor in pieces.

The adults stared at the children; the children returned the stare. "Who did it?" was written in those accusing adult faces, which moved compulsively from the minuscule glass shavings on the floor to the frightened faces of the two children. As the heavy silence was intensified, Lulu announced, "Sybil did it!"

"You broke it," came Hattie's accusing voice, directed at Sybil.

"Now, Hattie," Fay cautioned, "she's only a little girl. She didn't mean any harm."

"No harm? For land's sakes, Fay, you can see she didn't drop it. She flung it out of malice. How did I get a child like that?"

Sybil stood dry-eyed, but Lulu began to cry. "Sybil did it," Lulu intoned between tears. "Sybil did it."

Then Hattie's daughter headed for the dining room window, pounded against the window with her fists, pleading, "Let me out. Oh, please let me out. I didn't do it. She did. She's a liar. Let me out. Please. Please!"

Sybil had become Peggy Lou.

"Go to your room," Hattie ordered. "Sit on the chair in the corner until I call you." (sybil forgot the incident of the pickle dish, but it was a scene that Peggy Lou not only remembered but relived and reenacted many times. In New York between October, 1954, and October, 1955, the first year of the analysis, Peggy Lou, who had broken a window in Dr. Wilbur's office during that period, had also smashed $2,000 worth of old-fashioned crystal in Fifth Avenue shops. With each crash, Sybil would reappear and would say to the clerk, "I'm terribly sorry. I'll pay for it.")

The other disquieting Elderville episode took place during this same July, 1927. Hattie was out in the yard, laughing in her special way. Hearing the familiar sound, Sybil rose from the kitchen table, took a large stride forward to look through the kitchen window, and saw that her mother was off by herself near the stable. The laughter came again.

Sybil saw that her cousin Joey and her uncle Jerry were about five feet from her mother. They were carrying a box, which Sybil had seen on the kitchen table. Aunt Fay, coming to the window at that moment, stood near Sybil. Ashamed of her mother's eerie, unmotivated, haunting laughter, especially in the presence of relatives from whom Hattie usually tried to conceal it, Sybil shuddered and turned away.

"Let's go inside, Sybil," Fay said softly. "We'll play a duet."

"Later," Sybil, who could not move from the window, answered.

Then Sybil heard her Aunt Fay calling through the window to Joey and Jerry about saying something to Hattie. Joey's voice came from the yard: "Leave her alone, Fay." Sybil knew that Hattie was Joey's favorite aunt and that he was trying to protect her.

A coffin, Sybil thought, as she looked at the box Joey and Jerry were lifting. It was smaller than the boxes and caskets she often saw in the funeral parlor in back of her home in Willow Corners. ... It was Marcia who completed the thought: the box is big enough to hold Mama.

Standing very still, Marcia continued to muse: boxes grow just as trees grow and people grow. The box will get bigger and will be big enough for Mama. But Marcia felt that she should have gone out to stop Joey and Jerry from putting the box on the dray, that she should have been worried about her mother, and that she wasn't worried because she wanted her mother dead!

Marcia, however, could not have known that the death wish for a mother frequently occurs in little girls, among whom the first affection is normally for father. Marcia didn't know that the wish grows because little girls find their mothers disturbing rivals for the affection of their fathers.

However, when Hattie, who was usually well behaved in Elderville, laughed as she did in Willow Corners, her daughter's wish, propelled by new fury, was accentuated.

Because of the intense guilt her wish aroused, Marcia pushed the wish from her thoughts and returned the body to Sybil, who didn't know about Marcia's little box grown big.

In her solitary ruminations about the Dorsett case Dr. Wilbur over and over again reviewed the evidence in the strange saga of a child's being violated, abused, deprived of a normal childhood, and thus driven into psychoneurosis for the most paradoxical of reasons--in order to survive. Yet all of the assembled facts had come from just one source--Sybil and Sybil's selves. Other testimony, Dr. Wilbur realized, was needed to substantiate the truth of the findings.

The mother was dead. Apart from the patient herself, the father was clearly the only witness in whom the nearly three years of analysis could find verification. So in April, 1957, after the doctor had minutely explored the available evidence about the mother-daughter relationship, she decided to bring Willard Dorsett into the case. Sybil asked him to come to New York.

Both Dr. Wilbur and Sybil would have been more sanguine about bringing seventy-four-year-old Willard Dorsett to New York from Detroit, where he lived, happily remarried and still working, if this were a court not of human emotions but of law. Willard Dorsett, whose relationship with both his daughter and the doctor had become strained, might not, they both felt, come of his own volition.

Willard had already let it be known that he thought that at thirty-four Sybil was too old to be supported by him, despite the fact that, after her money had run out at the end of two years in New York, he had agreed to pay her expenses so that she could continue treatment. (although she had undertaken analysis without his knowledge, she had informed him about it at the end of the first year.)

The doctor was inclined to regard the support as payment of a debt, the debt of a father to a daughter who through analysis was literally struggling to become whole. He was supporting her grudgingly, erratically. Yet at this stage of her life she had no bank account, no permanent job, and her only sources of income were occasional sales of her paintings, sporadic work as a tutor, and an intermittent part-time job as an art therapist in a Westchester hospital. Willard Dorsett's obligation to Sybil, the doctor thought, was also the debt of a father who had squandered his daughter's money. He had sold Sybil's piano, bedroom set, and several of her paintings without consulting her and without giving her the money accruing from the sales. He had even made her pay half of her mother's funeral expenses. The doctor's attitude had been exacerbated when Willard had once failed to send Sybil her monthly check, a default that had been the more distressing because it was a repeat performance of an episode that had taken place in Sybil's undergraduate days. Her father's failure to send her money, together with the prohibitions to borrow under which she had been raised, had forced her to live for five weeks on oranges and cookies, rationed to two each a day.

Both the present and past episodes made Sybil feel that her father gave her things under pressure or out of a sense of duty, not because he cared about her. Noting her depression in the present instance, Dr. Wilbur wrote Willard Dorsett that the default had caused anguish that his daughter was not well enough to withstand. He replied that he was a busy man and could not always keep track of details. Nor did the fact that the doctor was not now being paid for treatment bother him. Vicky had reported his having said: "Dr. Wilbur is a rich Park Avenue doctor. Let her absorb it."

The Willard Dorsett of 1957, who had written that he was too busy to concern himself with his daughter, moreover, was clearly the same man who in the analysis had so far emerged as being preoccupied behind his drafting board, encircled and isolated by the sound of his drills. That the encirclement was quite complete seemed evidenced by this exchange within the analysis:

"Vicky," the doctor had asked, "didn't Mr. Dorsett ever see the atrocities Mrs. Dorsett inflicted on Sybil?"

"He would ask Sybil, "What's the matter with your arm"--or whatever the injured part was," Vicky had replied, "and then he'd shrug and just walk out."

Before sufficient time had elapsed for Willard to reply to Sybil's letter, she found a letter from him in her mailbox. Afraid to read it while she was alone because several of his letters had caused her to become somebody else (as the doctor put it) or "to black out," as she herself still described it, she waited until Teddy Reeves came home.

The letter read:

Dear Sybil, Frieda just reminded me that it was time to write Sybil. Frieda is getting more like the Dorsetts. She has told me several times that she is enjoying life. I think she had some enjoyment coming her way for once if anyone should ask me. I am glad to see her happy. We received your welcome letter yesterday. We are always glad to hear from you. Hope this semester will not be too hard or too much work. Hope you got along okay in your tests. Ha!

My work is going ahead well. Weather has been cold. Good to be home for a couple of days each week. But I am glad I am still well enough to hold a job and earn my way. Seems to be quite a lot of jobs ahead for the coming year. Frieda still likes her work. Social Security went up 7%, so now I have a raise in S.S. I get $104.00 per month now. Helps a lot. Glad I went into Social Security. That was many years ago. Getting old now. I stopped to watch "Lassie" on TV and now must go to bed. Have to get up early. No news. So bye for this time. From your Dad, Willard Sybil felt no untoward annoyance, only a grinning acceptance of her father's preoccupation with Frieda and himself and a bemused awareness that his emphasis on Social Security as the all-bestowing gift that muzzled poverty was a recondite way of reminding her that he was not a Rockefeller. He owned his own house and three other properties, had a substantial bank account, and was earning a good income, supplemented by Frieda's salary, but he wanted Sybil to believe that the Social Security pittance made a crucial difference.

There was also a wry amusement at his signing himself, as he had never done before, "Willard." Peripheral, aloof, he was suddenly reaching out in sudden informality, in a hail-fellow-well-met gesture of inclusion and intimacy.

In this instance Sybil was able to remain herself. That she could do so in less than three and a half years of analysis indicated a growing maturity, an acceptance of the kind of situation that in the past had triggered dissociation.

Her nose leading, like the large horny bill of a predatory fowl, Frieda Dorsett fluttered into her husband's shop, in the basement of their spacious, comfortable home in suburban Detroit. Wordlessly the wife handed the husband a letter and departed on lightly clicking spike heels.

Ten minutes later the heels clicked back into the room, and, talking above the noise of the drills, Frieda chirped staccato: "The letter. It's from her?" Frieda's narrow lips twitched ever so slightly, and her torso quivered almost imperceptibly. "I can tell it disturbs you."

Willard shrugged, then said, "We'll talk about it tomorrow."

"What does she say?" The chirping was renewed in an ascending scale.

Frieda Dorsett didn't like women, and her husband's daughter was no exception, especially since Sybil posed a threat. The year of marriage to Willard represented the first real happiness Frieda, who was fifty-seven, had known, and she wasn't about to submit to any interference, real or fancied, from his daughter.

Frieda's overzealous parents had married her off at the age of fourteen to a man of thirty-one. At sixteen she had given birth to a son. Karl Obermeyer, her first husband, was a mover and shaker in Willard's church, but Karl didn't move her, and she had found both marriage and childbirth bewildering.

After Karl had died of a heart attack when he was thirty-eight, she had had a series of affairs, become a bookkeeper, and learned to support herself and her son. She had always bristled at the fact that her intelligence outstripped her education, and after her husband's death she began reading and studying in a stepped up drive for self-education.

Self-made, she had also "made" Willard --some people said for money, others for love. They met in San Francisco in 1949, but they were not married until 1956. When he moved to Detroit, she moved there too, took an apartment next to his, prepared his meals, took care of his laundry, and nursed him when he was indisposed. Willard, who in San Francisco had told Sybil that he didn't want to remarry and wouldn't marry Frieda even though she had been a good companion, wrote Sybil in New York of his change of heart. "I guess," he explained, "I'm going to have to marry Frieda because she is always over in my apartment, and it looks bad."

Still persistent, Frieda counseled coyly, "Willard, Sybil's a sick girl. You're still a vigorous, healthy man. You must think of yourself first." Frieda let her hand slip onto Willard's palm, allowing her fingers to dwell lightly. "Promise me you won't let her interfere with your happiness."

"Our happiness," he replied slowly, thoughtfully. He rose from his chair and paced the room. "But I love my daughter and have always tried to be a good father."

"I sometimes think you try too hard," Frieda replied decisively, "and she doesn't try hard enough to be a good daughter."

"She's a genius, Frieda--a brilliant, gifted girl," he replied with conviction, "no matter what else she is."

"Then why doesn't she get herself a job like everybody else? Or why doesn't she get married? If she could let me get close to her, I'd get her a man. Why doesn't she wear high heels? Why does she wear a man's watch? I'd like to put lipstick on her, shorten her dresses, put curls in her hair."