Sybil (8 page)

Libido down, reserve up. At first the doctor had attributed the reserve to Sybil's strict upbringing. But that could not account for the aloofness masking the terror in her eyes. "She's fooling around," the doctor thought. "She isn't being candid with me."

On December 13 Sybil did finally strike a new note: "I'm concerned about Christmas vacation."

"Why?"

"Vacations bother me."

"In what way?"

"There's so much to do. I don't know what to do first, then I don't do anything. I get mixed up or something. I can't describe it."

"Why don't you come three times a week during the holidays?" the doctor suggested. "That way we can get more said and ease the tension."

Sybil agreed.

And it was on December 21, 1954--when the analysis was just three months old--in an hour that began innocuously enough with Sybil's saying, "I want you to see the letter I received from Stan this morning," Dr. Wilbur came measurably closer to the truth about Sybil Isabel Dorsett.

Sybil seemed calm that morning and talked of Stan's letter with her customary lack of emotion. But when she opened her purse, she became suddenly flustered. She saw that only half of the letter was there, a half with a zigzag edge.

She hadn't torn it. Who had?

She ransacked her purse in search of the missing half. It was not there.

She shuffled the other two letters she had received that morning in her lap. They were intact, exactly where she remembered having put them. But she also remembered having put Stan's letter--it had been whole then--with them. Now the missing half of his letter was not even to be found. Who had removed it? When? Where had she been when it happened? She had no memory of the moment.

It had happened again--this terrible thing that happened to time. It had followed her here, to the haven of the doctor's office, this black shadow that followed her everywhere.

Gingerly, stealthily, in an effort to conceal what had happened from the doctor, who was sitting away from her on the chair at the head of the couch, Sybil slipped the mutilated letter behind the other two. But the doctor was asking, "Do you want me to see the letter?"

Sybil started to stammer ... and the stammer dissolved into something else.

The prim, gentle midwestern schoolteacher, her face contorted with fear and fury, jumped up from the desk chair, and, moving so fast that she seemed to do everything at once, ripped up the letters that had been in her lap and threw their remains in the wastebasket. Then, clenching her fists, she stood in the middle of the room, ranting, "Men are all alike. You just can't trust 'em. You really can't."

She headed with rapid, spiderlike movements toward two long casement windows. Swinging the green draperies aside, she clenched her left fist again and pounded with it at a small windowpane. "Let me out," she screams "Let me out!" It was an agonized plea--the call of the haunted, the hunted, the trapped.

Dr. Wilbur moved swiftly but not swiftly enough. Before she could reach her patient, there was a crash. The pounding fist had gone through the windowpane.

"Let me see your hand," the doctor insisted as she grasped the wrist. Her patient shrank from her touch. "I only want to see if you cut yourself," the doctor explained gently.

This time the patient stood absolutely still, her eyes wide with wonder as she looked at Dr. Wilbur for the first time since jumping up from the chair. In a plaintive "little-girl" voice, a voice quite different from the one that had denounced men, the patient asked: "You're not mad about the window?"

"Of course not," the doctor replied. "I'm more important than the window?" The tone was one of curious disbelief.

"Of course, you are," the doctor remarked reassuringly. "Anybody can fix a windowpane. I'll call the handyman. He'll do it."

Suddenly the patient seemed more relaxed. This time, when the doctor took her hand, she offered no resistance. "Come. Let's sit on the couch," the doctor suggested. "I want to have a good look at your hand. Let me see if it's bruised."

They turned away from the window and walked toward the couch, past the purse, which had fallen on the rug when the patient had jumped up, past assorted papers, drawing pencils, the outpourings of fury that had belched forth from the fallen purse. But now the fear and fury were gone.

Sybil had always maintained a safe distance from the doctor by sitting at the desk. This time, however, Sybil sat right up beside the doctor and let her hand linger in the doctor's even after the latter had declared: "No cut. No bruise."

But once again there was a shift of mood. "There's blood," the patient said.

"No blood," replied the doctor. "You didn't cut yourself."

"Blood in the hayloft," the patient explained. "Tommy Ewald was killed. I was there."

"You were there?" the doctor echoed. "Yes, I was. I was, too."

"Where was the hayloft?"

"In Willow Corners."

"Did you live in Willow Corners?"

"I live there," came the correction. "Jist everybody knows I live in Willow Corners."

Jist. Sybil didn't talk that way. But, then, the Sybil the doctor knew didn't do any of the things that had been done since the patient jumped up from the chair. Gradually, as Sybil continued to relive what had transpired in the hayloft, the doctor was overtaken by an uncanny, eerie feeling.

Since the patient had jumped up from the chair, the feeling had been there--muted yet insistent, like the traffic noises that trickled into the room through the broken windowpane. The more Sybil talked, the more insistent the feeling became.

"My friend Rachel was sittin' with me in the hayloft," Sybil was saying. "And some other children. Tommy said, "Let's jump down into the barn." We jumped. One of the kids hit the cash register. There was a gun there. The gun went off. I went back, and Tommy was lyin' there, dead, a bullet through his heart. The other children ran away. Not Rachel and me. She went for Dr. Quinoness. I stayed with Tommy. Dr. Quinoness came and told us to go home. We didn't go. We helped him remove the gun and put a blanket over Tommy. Tommy was only ten years old."

"You were two brave little girls," Dr.

Wilbur said.

"I know Tommy's dead," the childlike voice continued. "I understand. I do. I stayed because I didn't think it right to leave Tommy lyin' there dead."

"Tell me," the doctor asked, "where are you now?"

"There's blood," was the reply. "I see blood. Blood and death. I know what death is. I do."

"Don't think about the blood," the doctor said. "It makes you sad."

"You care how I feel?" Again there was the look of curious disbelief.

"I care very much," the doctor replied. "You're not jist tryin' to trick me?"

"Why should I?"

"Lots of people trick me."

The sense of being tricked. The anger. The terror. The feeling of entrapment. The profound distrust of people. The will, plaintive conviction that a window, a thing, was more important than she. These feelings and attitudes, expressed in the course of this hour, were symptoms of some profound disturbance. And all had turned up in the tortured mind of the patient like a dark deposit in a turbid well.

From the moment the patient had dashed to the window, the doctor had been aware not only that her behavior was uncharacteristic but also that she actually looked and sounded different. She seemed smaller, shrunken. Sybil always stood as tall as she could because she considered herself small and didn't want to appear so. But now she seemed to have shrunk into herself.

The voice was also quite different, childlike, not like Sybil's voice. Yet that little girl voice had uttered a woman's words in its denunciation of men: "Men are all alike. You just can't trust 'em." And the word jist. Sybil, perfectionist schoolteacher, strict grammarian, would never use a substandard word such as jist.

The doctor had the distinct impression that she was dealing with someone younger than Sybil. But the denunciation of men? The doctor couldn't be sure. Then the thought she had reined back broke forth: "Who are you?"

"Can't you tell the difference?" was the reply, accompanied by a resolutely independent tossing of the head. "I'm Peggy."

The doctor didn't answer, and Peggy continued: "We don't look alike. You can see that. You can."

When the doctor asked for her last name, Peggy replied airily, "I use Dorsett and sometimes Baldwin. I'm really Peggy Baldwin."

"Tell me something about yourself," the doctor suggested.

"All right," Peggy acquiesced. "Do you want to hear about my painting? I like to paint in black and white. I do charcoal and pencil sketches. I don't paint as much or as well as Sybil."

The doctor waited a moment; then she proceeded: "And who is Sybil?"

The doctor waited, and Peggy replied, "Sybil? Why, she's the other girl."

"I see," the doctor replied. Then she asked, "Where do you live?"

"I live with Sybil, but my home, as I told you, is Willow Corners," Peggy replied.

"Was Mrs. Dorsett your mother?" the doctor asked.

"No. No!" Peggy backed away, cowering against the small pillow. "Mrs. Dorsett's not my mother!"

"That's all right," the doctor remarked reassuringly. "I just wanted to know."

There was sudden movement. Peggy had left the couch and was moving across the room with the same swift, spiderlike movement with which she had earlier rushed to the window. The doctor followed her. But Peggy had vanished. Sitting on the small mahogany chair near the desk was the midwestern schoolteacher --Sybil. This time the doctor knew the difference.

"What's my purse doing on the floor?" Sybil murmured. She leaned over and with patient restraint replaced the scattered contents of her purse. "I did that, didn't I?" she said, pointing to the window. "I'll pay for it. I'll pay for it. I'll pay." Finally she whispered: "Where are the letters?"

"You tore them up and threw them into the wastebasket," the doctor replied with conscious deliberateness.

"I?" Sybil asked.

"You," the doctor replied. "Let's talk about what happened."

"What is there to say?" Sybil remarked in hushed tones. She had torn the letters and broken the window, but she didn't know when, how, or why. She leaned toward the wastebasket and salvaged parts of the letters.

"You don't remember, do you?" the doctor asked softly. Sybil shook her head. The shame of it. The horror of it. Now the doctor knew about the terrible, the nameless thing.

"Have you broken glass before?" Dr. Wilbur asked quietly.

"Yes," Sybil replied, hanging her head. "Then this is not different from what you've experienced before?"

"Not entirely."

"Don't be frightened," the doctor said "You were in another state of consciousness. You had what we call a fugue. A fugue is a major state of personality dissociation characterized by amnesia and actual physical fright from the immediate environment."

"You don't blame me, then?"

Sybil asked.

"No, I don't blame you," the doctor replied. "Blame has nothing to do with it. We need to talk more about this, and we'll do it on Friday."

The hour was up. Sybil, fully in control, rose to go. The doctor followed her to the door and said: "Don't worry. It's treatable."

Sybil left.

"What do I have here?" the doctor said to herself as she dropped into her chair. She seems to be more than one person. A dual personality? Sybil and Peggy, totally different from each other. It seems quite clear. I'll have to tell her on Friday.

The doctor wondered about Miss Dorsett's next appointment. Or should she say the Misses Dorsett? She (they) was (were) now coming three times a week because of the Christmas vacation. Well, Sybil had better continue to come that often. This case was more complicated than she had first thought. Miss Dorsett would be back on Friday. Who?

Peggy Lou Baldwin

It was Sybil. Sybil calm; Sybil collected.

"I want to apologize for not keeping my appointment on Wednesday," she began this December 23, 1954. "I ..."

"You did come on Wednesday," Dr. Wilbur replied with deliberate bluntness. "But you were in one of those fugue states, and you don't remember."

Using "fugue states" as a framework, the doctor planned to tell Sybil that, while she herself blacked out during these states, someone called Peggy appeared. But Sybil, skillfully changing the subject, did not give the doctor the chance. "I'm relieved," Sybil said, "that I didn't let you down. And now I have something I want to tell you. I really need to get it off my chest. May I tell you right now?"

The "important" revelation was, however, only: "You should have heard Klinger this morning. That man has no instinct for modern art. He has repeatedly disappointed those of us who believe in it."

Sybil was so effectively evasive that, when the hour was over, the doctor still had not told her about Peggy. Nor did the doctor have the opportunity during the next appointment. When she stepped into the foyer to greet her patient, it was Peggy who was waiting. The doctor had no difficulty recognizing her. Hatless, gloveless, Peggy was looking at two enlargements of sea and island scapes the doctor had photographed in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, the pictures that Sybil had observed on her first visit.