Sybil (55 page)

The avalanche had begun, but the earth did not yet crash down. The crash came when he chided bitterly, "You've rejected not only me but those three children you claimed to love even without knowing them. But once again I tell you: you can still undo what you have done." He turned from her, walked a few steps, and returned. He put the box with the ring in her hand. "Take it anyway," he said. "It's your birthstone. And you like pretty things. Take it in memory of the life you rejected, of your refusal to live."

She fled into the house.

She had rejected Ramon, Sybil thought, as she herself had so often been rejected. At three and a half she asked a doctor in a hospital, "Would you like to have a little girl?" He had turned from her in the same way that she had just turned from Ramon. She had turned her back on three children the way a doctor long ago had done to one.

Yet in an instant she also realized that she had no reason to feel guilty for her actions. Ramon's efforts to inflict guilt feelings on her had not succeeded. That realization gave her strength.

Have I been using my being a multiple personality as a mask for the real fears that keep me from what I most desire? she asked herself. Am I really so moral, so noble as to sacrifice myself to protect Ramon and his children from my malady? But Sybil knew that her very salvation depended upon her commitment to her dawning health.

As if in confirmation of this sudden insight, the first thing she did in the apartment was to empty the vase of the now-withered roses Ramon had given her three days before.

The next morning Sybil thought of not going to work, but she made herself go. Conscience again, she thought. But Ramon was not there. His special assignment had been completed, she learned, and he was not returning to the hotel.

No time. Ramon had meant what he had said. At the end of the week, finding it too painful to remain alone where Ramon and she had been together, Sybil gave up her job at the hotel.

Sybil was certain that Ramon did not harbor a spirit of vindictiveness toward her. Both by nature and principle he was superior to the mean gratification of hard feelings. He probably would never forgive her for having scorned his love, but that was another matter.

The memory was a lingering torture. It kept up a slow fire of remorse, a tremulous grief that would not ebb. She tried to propitiate her regret by an objective recollection of the practicality of his marriage suit and its implicit manipulation. Nevertheless, tears flooded her days. The remarks of the others still within her added to her distress. Vicky's: "He was a nice person. All of us liked him. You should have told him the truth." Peggy's: "He was great. We all wanted to marry him." The taunting of Vanessa: "You turned him down because underneath perhaps you didn't want him."

Dr. Wilbur, who returned shortly after Ramon had departed, was impressed with the growth in her patient. Sybil's letters had informed her, "This is the first time you've been away that I've managed to stay myself throughout." The psychiatrist who saw Sybil during this period verified Sybil's own account.

Moreover, both in the office and away from it during the first few weeks of the resumption of the analysis, Sybil seemed stronger, more confident. She had even gained weight, which in her case was always linked with an upswing in health, both mental and physical. There was a strong psychosomatic aspect of Sybil's grande hysterie.

The relationship with Ramon, however, troubled the doctor. The references to him in Sybil's letters had in no way indicated the seriousness of their relationship. She felt that if she had been in the country, the relationship could have been salvaged by her talking to Ramon.

Sybil, showing her new maturity, insisted, however, that it would have done no good because Ramon did not understand emotional problems or mental illness, and when Dr. Wilbur urged her to write to Ramon so that the doctor could talk with him, she replied: "I must first know when I will be well."

"You're so much better," the doctor replied. "You wrote me that you remained yourself in my absence. Did that continue to be true even after you parted with Ramon?"

"It did," Sybil replied confidently. "The others talked to me sometimes, especially at the end, but I ran things."

While Dr. Wilbur was absorbing the transformation in her patient, Sybil protested, "But you haven't answered my question. When will I be well?"

"Sybil, I don't know. You've shown health in your relationship with Ramon. But the boys are still fighting integration."

Sybil looked steadily at the doctor. "You've answered my question," Sybil replied. "If you had told me I'd be well in a month, two months, three months, I would have written Ramon and taken my chances on your making him understand. But time has betrayed me once again."

"If he loves you, he'll understand anyway," the doctor protested. "We can write him and try."

"No," Sybil replied quietly.

"Ramon is a practical man. He won't wait for a neurotic."

As Sybil left the doctor's office, she felt lonesome to the core. In songs, she thought, people belonged, loved, lived, danced, marched. What Sybil had loved had been torn away.

She didn't hope to love again. Yet there was triumph in defeat. In the old days a crisis like this would have caused Sybil to dissociate. Now, however, she had not only remained herself but also continued to recognize the new feelings of solidity. The grief she felt over Ramon, moreover, was real, as surely as the emotions of the past had seemed unreal. Although the grief was terrible, the new reality was good. For the first time, despite her grief, she felt solid enough to be able to defend her place in the world.

"Dead vines, old vines, barbs or briars," Marcia said under hypnosis in January, 1965. "I'm afraid of life and the world--afraid of going out into it. Afraid of being rejected, turned down, cast aside." It was a natural fear of reentry.

"I'm looking forward to being a well person among well people," Vanessa declared. "Life is for living, and I've waited too long."

"I think," Mike admitted during the same session, "Sybil's worth more than she thinks she is or Sid and I ever thought she was. People care about her--Flora, Flora's mother, and, of course, the lady doctor and Ramon."

"Maybe," Sid added, "Sybil can do the things Mike and I want to do but haven't been allowed to do. Maybe it's all right for a woman to build a partition. Maybe she can be the kind of woman she wants to be and do well in a career. With Mike's skill and my skill, with our enthusiasm, I'm sure she can.

What she wants to do is all right with Mike and me. We like the new Sybil."

The new Sybil? Who am I? she asked herself. Who is she? Dr. Wilbur likewise asked. For although Sybil was not yet a whole person, she was no longer a mere waking self.

The only person to appear for the Dorsett appointment these days was this new Sybil. When Dr. Wilbur wanted to communicate with the other selves, she could do so only through hypnosis.

Shortly after Mary had come out of the igloo, Mary and Sybil Ann had been consolidated. Vanessa, always closer to Sybil than most of the other selves, had moved further in the same direction. Vanessa's passionate denunciation of hypocrisy had now in fact sharpened Sybil's awareness of it, both in the past and the present, thus providing the waking self with new insights. Marcia, who previously had voiced a patient's typical fear of getting well, had gotten well by joining Sybil. The joining had taken place after Marcia, too, had accepted the death wish for mother.

Peggy did not appear even when summoned. Peggy Lou and Peggy Ann had already been consolidated as Peggy; now the consolidation had gone even further. These keepers of the unintegrated past with its angry and fearful memories had returned to Sybil. After doing the portrait that Ramon had admired--the very last work to come from her--Peggy had ceased to exist as a separate entity. But her assertiveness was very much in the forefront of the new Sybil.

The newly emerging Sybil, however, was very different from what Dr. Wilbur had originally expected. Since Vicky had all the memories and possessed more of the original Sybil than waking Sybil, the doctor had thought it might be a good idea to do away with all the selves, including waking Sybil, and allow Vicky to be the one self. Yet the doctor had discovered that Vicky, like all the selves, existed for the express purpose of masking the feelings that the waking or central self could not bear to face.

The answer, therefore, had been to preserve the waking self as such while returning to it all the memories, emotions, knowledge, and modes of behavior of the other selves, thereby restoring the native capacities of the original child. It also meant returning to the waking self the experiences of the one-third of Sybil's life that the other selves alone had lived. This was pioneer work for Dr. Wilbur.

The doctor knew that all the selves had come close to Sybil. As Sybil changed, the other selves changed as well. There had previously been two levels of denial of Sybil's mother. Sybil had accepted Hattie Dorsett as her mother but had denied the hatred. The other selves had denied that the woman whom they hated was their mother. After Sybil, in that moment of purging in the car, had accepted the hatred, the other selves had come to accept Hattie and now acknowledged her as "our mother." Even Vicky, whose parents had never come from France to reclaim her, finally had come to admit, "Sybil's mother is also mine."

Sybil had begun to assume the behavior of the others. For example, what had been the exclusive preserve of Peggy Lou had become Sybil's capacity to draw black and white.

In fact, an overlapping of painting styles had developed among all the selves. On the other hand, although Peggy had returned to Sybil the multiplication that had been learned in Miss Henderson's fifth-grade class, Sybil was still not proficient in its use. In May and June, 1965, the use of hypnosis had tapered off even more, now almost solely confined to communicating with the selves, who could not otherwise be reached. The days of Sybil's dissociation and the spontaneous appearance of the secondary selves seemed over.

Sybil was in her apartment, writing resumes for a teachers' agency with which she had registered in hope of getting a job outside New York. She now felt able to manage without Dr. Wilbur and was eager to prove her independence. As Sybil was typing, her fingers suddenly went numb. Frightened, she called Dr. Wilbur, but without success. She called Flora. By the time Flora came on the line, Sybil felt numb all over. "I'm sick," she cried into the telephone. "If anything happens to me, sell the stamp album--see that Dr. Wilbur is reimbursed for the analysis." Sybil tried to say more, but the receiver dropped out of her hand. Her arms and legs moved involuntarily. Pitching forward, she hit the wall, crashed across the room, and even hit the ceiling. Then she fell into an inert heap on the floor.

It was there that Flora found her, black and blue, a terrifying sight. Finally able to speak, Sybil said triumphantly, "I watched all of it. I was aware of what was happening every minute of the time."

Rising to her feet, Sybil seemed taller than her normal self. A voice younger than Sybil's, light, lilting, and cheerful, exclaimed, "I'm the girl Sybil would like to be. My hair is blonde and my heart is light."

Then she was gone, and Sybil was there. "I must have blacked out," Sybil said. "Still? How can it be?"

Flora knew at once that the blonde self who had instantaneously emerged was not any one of the fifteen selves she had previously met. A new self at this stage of the analysis, when Sybil was nearly integrated? The immediate matter at hand, of course, was to get Sybil into bed, to apply cold compresses to the injuries, and to reach Dr. Wilbur. And then?

"It was a major gastrointestinal upset," Dr. Wilbur told Flora later that evening, "accompanied by a waking seizure and spasticity. All through it Sybil was aware of what was happening."

Then Flora told Dr. Wilbur about the blonde. "The dissociation was brief, perhaps no more than a minute," Flora said.

"Last February," Dr. Wilbur replied thoughtfully, "I met this blonde in the office, although I didn't realize it at the time. Sybil had been talking; then she looked blank for a minute, as she did in the old days. Then I heard the voice you described. It was only a minute, a mere flash."

The next day in the office Dr. Wilbur hypnotized Sybil. Mary Ann was the first to emerge. "We had a fit," she explained. "There's lots to have fits about. The people in the old church in Willow Corners--the barren, ugly church. We hate those people."

Vicky said, "In our room last night there was someone else."

"Blonde hair--that one, I saw her," Marcia added. "I don't know her name."

"Who does?" Vanessa asked.

"I suppose Vicky does," Marcia replied, "because I think Vicky knows her. Who is she?"

"A new girl but not new," Vicky replied.

Suddenly the newcomer spoke--stiltedly, strangely, with the cadences of a rehearsed speech. "I'm not really new," she said. "I've been around for nineteen years. I'm the girl Sybil would like to be. Born in tranquility, I've lived unseen. An adolescent while the others still remained essentially children, I've carried no childhood traumas. I never knew either Hattie or Willard Dorsett, never lived in Willow Corners, never attended the Willow Corners church. I came in Omaha. I enjoyed college, and I love New York.

I would have joined sororities, would have had many dates, would have been a cheerleader at sports events, a campus leader in everything.