Sybil

by Flora Rheta Schreiber

  Aubrey, an avid churchgoer, found in evangelical rantings, uncontrolled bellowings, and hallelujahs intoned with ecstatic passion the substitute for the swearing denied him as a pious man. The evangelical rantings from the first row of the church had their counterpart at the front of the Willow Corners post office, where Aubrey inveighed against the "Romans" and the "horn of Rome" (the Pope), denouncing the hated Catholics to a gathering crowd. Aubrey Dorsett predicted the country's doom if a Catholic ever came to power. Hostile not only to the hated Romans but also to members of his own faith, indeed to everybody, including his own family, Aubrey sought the Achilles' heel in everyone around him, often exploiting it in public with a verbal vigor that matched the physical powers of his wrestling days. Then having spotted and descended upon the weak spot, he proceeded to save his victim's soul.

  A particular target was Mary, whom Aubrey had married on the rebound and whom forever after he taunted with Val, the love of his life, who had rejected him. At various times in the course of his marriage he would turn the saw mill he owned and operated over to a subordinate and silently fade away to take up with Val in New York. Thence he would return to parade his infidelity to Mary.

  As a father, Aubrey demanded unquestioning obedience and required his three children--Theresa III, the eldest; Willard, the middle child; and Roger, eighteen months younger than Willard--to smile at all times, as becomes a Christian, and never to laugh, which was sinful. Although all three siblings were musical, Aubrey never asked them to play or sing. He feared that if they did so, they would feed on the sin of pride. He didn't want his children to have "swelled heads."

  Ashamed of his father's belligerence, Willard resorted to passivity. Embarrassed by his father's haranguing hallelujahs, aggression, and gruffness, Willard retreated into a shell of silence. Unable to see himself in the image of a father who embarrassed him and of whom he was ashamed, the father with whom his own sensitive, artistic nature was in conflict, Willard made identification instead with his gentle, artistic, but passive mother. And the identification with his mother was responsible for the paradoxical nature of the peripheral Willard Dorsett.

  Indisputably male, sexually vital despite his professed puritanical rigidities, attractive to women and lustily pursued by them during the nine years of being a widower, a man who worked and thought in brick and mortar, Willard also had a distinctly feminine side. As a boy and young man he often helped his mother with the housework. He canned fruit and vegetables and later taught Hattie these skills. He sewed and supported himself in college by working as a tailor, just as later he sewed all of Sybil's baby clothes. He had superb taste in interior decoration, and, respecting his taste, Hattie had trusted him to decorate their first home.

  Willard's identification with his mother, moreover, not only helped mold his personality; it also affected his choice of a mate. Like Aubrey Dorsett, Hattie Anderson Dorsett was overly aggressive, constantly conspicuous and downright cruel. Willard married his father in female form.

  In fact, both Willard and his brother Roger appear to have married their father. The two brothers somehow managed to find strong-minded and strange women, both named Henrietta. Too, Roger, like Willard, married outside his faith. Roger's wife was a Roman Catholic nurse, whom he married probably in rebellion against the hysterical anti-Catholic feeling of the people of his own church, especially of his father. Roger's Hattie smoked when no other woman in Willow Corners dared, and she used rouge and lipstick, which affronted her fundamentalist in-laws. But her real eccentricity lay in the originality of her moonlighting. In her spare time this Hattie Dorsett ran a gambling joint and a house of assignation for nuns in the basement of her red brick home in Rochester, Minnesota. She even provided the nuns with a change of costume to speed them on their worldly way. Roger remained aloof from both enterprises, but it was said that he managed to have a few assignations of his own.

  This Hattie had two sons, but she didn't like having boys, and she wanted to take Sybil away from her mother. The motivation, which has never been made clear, probably revolved around the fact that she always wanted a daughter, but it could also have been spurred by insight into Sybil's predicament. As a psychiatric nurse this Hattie could conceivably have realized that her sister-in-law was unfit to raise a child.

  Willard's sister, Theresa III, didn't marry her father; she reacted against him and the total milieu by becoming a neurotic loner and eccentric. As a girl Theresa loved and lost; then she blamed her loss on her brothers. At the age of forty she married a wealthy old man and moved to his farm, in another state. She returned to Willow Corners only twice after that, once when her mother had a stroke and again when her mother died. At home on her farm she scandalized the neighbors by wearing men's clothing and the church, which hounded her for money, by giving none. The money, which neither Theresa nor her husband trusted to the banks, was scattered in assorted nooks and crannies in the spacious farmhouse. At the time of the 1929 crash these homespun banks did not fail.

  When Willard and Roger lost the timberland in which Theresa had invested with them, she demanded her money. Because of the old wounds occasioned by her thwarted young romance, the brothers mortgaged their homes so that Theresa could have her pound of flesh. Then when she owned the mortgage to Willard's house, Theresa decided that her parents should occupy it. She had no compunction about ordering Willard and his family to move.

  Surrounded by wealth, Theresa acted like a pauper after the death of her husband. Boarding up all the rooms of the farmhouse except one, she retreated into that room, which was heated in winter only by a small kerosene stove. In the last years of Theresa's life there was a reconciliation with Willard. After Hattie's death Willard and Sybil visited Theresa. Sybil, who had seen her aunt Theresa only twice before, now understood why people mistook her for Theresa and why her father often called her Theresa.

  Willard was always even more quiet and low-voiced than usual, almost reverent, when he talked about his mother. He would become louder and almost dogmatic about his father and his father's brother Tom, then quiet again about Roger and Theresa. Willard always had disquieting feelings about both his sister and his brother --Roger died at the age of fifty-six--and it was never easy for Willard either to remember them or to forget them.

  Willard, who had a stronger ego than did either Roger or Theresa, erected a protective shell against domestic disturbance, but he did not otherwise appear meek. Silent but strong, he could not infrequently make his will prevail. Faced with the fact that both his wife and his daughter had emotional problems, Willard acquitted himself in terms of hereditary responsibility for his daughter's illness. His father was a boor and Theresa an eccentric, but neither was actually emotionally disturbed, Willard convinced himself. Observing the descendants of his father's four brothers, he had to admit some oddities in the clan, but he was swift to attribute the oddities to the families into which his uncles had married.

  His uncle Thomas, for example, who had all kinds of land and money, had five wives, three of whom he buried and one of whom deserted him. It was the wives, Willard thought, who were at fault, not Uncle Tom. Tom's first wife went crazy, lost her hair and her fingernails, turned an alabaster white, and died of general paresis. Bernard, the son of this marriage, was willful as a child, and although largely indolent as an adult, he had become an inventor. The first sentence that his son, Bernard, Jr., spoke to his mother was: "I will kill you." And gossip had it that his behavior did kill her. Bernard, Jr., was later hospitalized as a schizophrenic.

  Frances Dorsett, the wife of Willard's uncle Frederick, and Carol, a daughter of that marriage, were subject to elations and depressions as part of a manic-depressive psychosis. But because this illness has a very strong familial trend, Willard was on solid ground in maintaining that Carol had inherited the gene from her mother, not from the Dorsetts. Because Frances and Carol were in and out of state hospitals and frequently visited Willard's family when they were out, Willard often asked Sybil if she was worried
that she was like her aunt Frances and cousin Carol. Then, as if the damage were not already done, he would remind her: "No need to worry. They're not Dorsetts."

  All of this family history was known to Sybil, of course. Even more important, she was aware of her father's needs and fears. Thus, as she waited in New York for his letter from Detroit, she had two fears--that he would not come and that he would come. Night after night, over and over again, during this period of watchful waiting, she dreamed:

  She was walking through a tremendous house, looking for her father, or in the same house he was looking for her, or they were searching for each other. She would go through room after room in a frustrated quest, knowing that her father was there some place, but knowing, too, that she couldn't find him.

  "You ought to tell your father in your dream," Dr. Wilbur said in analysis, "that you are looking for him. The dream expresses a sexual yearning for him because he was seductive toward you but also a denial of the desire." Sybil had admitted that she had been aware of sexual feelings toward her father when he talked to her about sex. "There are some things about sex for which I don't have the answers yet," he would say, for instance, while he was dating Frieda. "You young people know a lot more about sex than we ever did."

  It was clear to the doctor, indeed, that Willard had stimulated Sybil sexually not only when she was an adult but also as a child, both in the long-run primal scene and by his denials of physical closeness after she had become what he had called "too big."

  In another dream:

  Men were pursuing her sexually. Her father was not there to rescue her. The pursuit continued and, too, the lack of rescue.

  Long having waited for her father to intervene on her behalf, to come to her rescue, Sybil was waiting again. And, as the days followed without an answer to her letter, she was caught in a web of ambivalent feelings. The feelings would have been simpler if Willard had been a typically rejecting father. However, she did have a relationship with him, one in which he habitually failed her, out of passivity, but which was quickened by accentuated Oedipal desires and by a close affinity of similar tastes.

  When an art critic in St. Paul, Minnesota, had assured Willard that Sybil's talent for painting was genuine, he had been proud of her work. He had even made it a point to mount and frame her paintings. When father and daughter looked at a painting together, it was like two eyes looking at the same work. Between them there was a mutuality, an attunement, made all the stronger as a result of two childhood happenstances.

  First, when Sybil was only six weeks old, she had developed a disease of the middle ear. No one had been able to tell what was the matter with her, and she was comforted only when her father held her. By chance, when he held her, he always sat next to the kitchen stove. The warmth, which she associated with her father, had soothed her: the attachment to her father was begun.

  Second, because she was unable to make identification with her mother, who abused her and made her feel ashamed, Sybil had more and more been compelled to make identification with her father. She had to have someone, and she persuaded herself that her father was the figure on whom she could depend, especially since she looked not like the Andersons but like the Dorsetts.

  Thus on a conscious level Sybil had always protected her father's image, yet there were times when that image was not an invincible fortress. "In college," Sybil wrote in her diary as an undergraduate, "I had roommates, classmates, a big sister, an adviser. My adviser, Dr. Termine, was fat and jolly. He had a moustache. He was warm. He was like a father I never had. He'd always take time to talk to me. It was so different."

  And when Dr. Wilbur had asked Sybil directly, "Does your father love you?" Sybil had given a qualified reply: "I suppose he does."

  So the wait for Willard Dorsett's reply was long.

  Part III

  Unbecoming

  18

  Confrontation and Verification

  At 4:00 P.m. on May 4, 1957, Willard Dorsett entered Dr. Wilbur's anteroom--an assured, complacent, well-defended, passive, and unreachable figure who took his responsibilities lightly.

  Some ten minutes later, his defensive armor had begun to crack and he felt himself faltering. He wiped his forehead gingerly with a freshly starched handkerchief, as, sitting on the little green desk chair in the consulting room, he realized that the questions Dr. Wilbur was asking were not what he had anticipated. He had expected questions about Sybil's status as a thirty-four-year-old woman, alone in New York, trying to get well. Instead, the doctor was taking him back to Willow Corners and the years of his marriage to Hattie. The year with Frieda had been a good year, a veil across the face not only of Willow Corners but also of Omaha and Kansas City. But now the doctor was mercilessly ripping the veil, inch by dreadful inch.

  Willard's anxiety was intensified by the awkwardness of being in Dr. Wilbur's presence after the voluminous correspondence that in recent months had passed between them about Sybil's finances. He had had to force himself to come. Now that he was here, he was constantly reminded that the doctor was not the same woman he had known in Omaha.

  He was not aware, however, of the reasons for the change. In Omaha she had not been a psychoanalyst, and the psychoanalytic approach placed strong emphasis on the deterministic power of childhood. In Omaha the doctor did not know that Sybil was a multiple personality and did not have the wealth of information that Sybil and the other selves had since revealed--information indicting Hattie and pointing an accusing finger at Willard for the genesis of Sybil's illness. It was chiefly to ascertain the truth of Hattie's and Willard's role in spawning the illness that the doctor had urged this meeting.

  Yet there was also another purpose.

  The increasingly unsatisfactory and evasive tone of Willard's letters and his omissions in supporting Sybil financially and psychologically were shocking to his daughter's analyst. Whatever his role in the past, Dr. Wilbur firmly believed that in the present he had condemned himself.

  As an analyst, Dr. Wilbur withheld judgment about the past, but as Sybil's friend, she was determined to provoke Willard into assuming greater responsibility as a father. She therefore viewed the interview as both a search for verification of the initial parental guilt and as a confrontation with a father who was currently failing his daughter. The doctor was determined to mince no words, nor to repress the accusatory tone in her manner that under the circumstances came naturally. Taking Willard Dorsett's measure, it was clear that the only way she could get the verification she was seeking was by taking the offensive and waging a direct attack.

  "Why, Mr. Dorsett," the doctor asked, "did you always entrust the full care and upbringing of Sybil to your wife?"

  Willard Dorsett was not a man who studied himself or looked at those around him to weigh or measure their moods. In Willow Corners he had been a busy man, away from home from dawn to sundown. He hadn't known all the details of his domestic life and had felt that he couldn't have been expected to know them. How, he asked himself, could he possibly answer the doctor's questions about these details, so far off, so forgotten?

  Why had he always entrusted to Hattie the full care and upbringing of Sybil? He merely shrugged in reply. The question obviously seemed to him irrelevant. It was like asking a butcher why he sells meat or a farmer why he plants corn. A mother should take care of a child.

  Had he been aware that Hattie's behavior was peculiar? He moved jerkily in his chair and became defensive. When he finally spoke, it was to say, "The first Mrs. Dorsett was a wonderful woman, bright, talented." He hesitated.

  "And?" the doctor asked.

  He became flustered. "Well," he said, "we had a lot of trouble. Financial and otherwise. It was hard on Hattie. At times she was difficult."

  "Just difficult?" the doctor asked. "Well, she was nervous."

  "Just nervous?"

  He mopped his forehead, changed his position. "She had some bad spells."

  "Is it true that she was in a bad state at the farm when Sybil was six?"


  He averted his eyes and finally said yes. "Was it true that when she came out of her depression, she tore down the hill on Sybil's sled?"

  He squirmed while saying, "Yes. Sybil must have told you it was a big hill. A child's imagination, you know. But the hill wasn't really very high." (he had an almost comic way of wriggling out of facing the real issue.)

  "But your wife came down that hill, large or small, on a child's sled, laughing? What did you make of her behavior in that instance?" The doctor was trapping him into an admission. "Was it safe, Mr. Dorsett, to allow this strange, nervous woman, who had what you call spells, to have the sole responsibility for raising your child?"

  Instead of answering directly, he murmured nonresponsively, "Hattie was odd."

  "It was more than odd, Mr. Dorsett. She was more than nervous if what I've been told is true." The bombardment of recollections made the room gyrate. Each recollection, rising from the buried past, reawakened the dull, sad ache in his hands, the after-image of the neuritis from which he had suffered after he had lost his money.

  "Well," Willard explained, "Hattie and Sybil never got along. I thought a mother and daughter should be close, and I was disturbed by their arguments. When they were at each other, I used to say, "Hattie, why don't you rest a while or crack some nuts?"' I used to hope Hattie and Sybil would get over it in time."

  "That was when Sybil was a teenager," the doctor reminded the father. "But weren't there certain things that occurred when she was a very young child--even an infant--that couldn't be settled by cracking nuts?"

  "You must know something I don't know," he replied defensively, fiddling with his fingernails.

  Was he aware that as a child Sybil sustained an unusual number of injuries, the doctor wanted to know. With annoyance he answered quickly, "She had accidents, of course, like any child." Did he remember any of these accidents? No, he couldn't say he remembered. Was he aware that Sybil had had a dislocated shoulder, a fractured larynx? "Why yes," he replied, screwing up his thin lips.