Sybil (32 page)

"The doctor, the doctor,"

Willard mumbled. "But it can't be long now. I expect Sybil will be well soon and making her own way."

"What does she write?" Frieda chirped insistently.

There was an awkward pause. "I may have to go to New York. We'll see," Willard, his resistance slipping, replied slowly. "Well, I won't be able to get up in the morning if I don't go to bed now."

Standing five feet eleven, Willard Dorsett cut an imposing figure. He was erect and had an appealing face with well-carved bones. His hair was a translucent fine-grained white, and not a jot of it had been sacrificed to the ravages of aging. His confident face retained a health-hued youthfulness; his teeth, unstained, were still intact. Never having partaken of a morsel of meat or a sip of alcohol, he had kept his figure and weighed scarcely more than he had the day he dropped out of college. His voice, which was soft and low, and his refusal to argue even when someone argued with him reflected his conviction that it was sinful to betray feeling. The expressiveness of his long, lean fingers was inconsonant with his overall aloofness. His tilted nose was Sybil's nose, the Dorsett insignia.

The fingers were the outward mark of a sensitive, artistic nature, which expressed itself in building a better building than his competitors and found an outlet in a variety of aesthetic interests. At college he had studied elocution and singing. In Willow Corners he had sung tenor in the church choir and the town glee club and had organized an excellent male quartet. He played the guitar in the Spanish style and had so avid an interest in classical music that even though his church was opposed to worldly things, he had bought one of the first Edison phonographs. He was interested also in economics, had a real sense of community responsibility, and was greatly respected in every town in which he lived. By the men who worked for him he was almost literally worshipped.

A perfectionist in his work, Willard wanted to perform perfectly not only for the sake of the work itself but because he believed that when people beheld the perfection of his craft, that perfection would glorify God. Beholding his handiwork, people did hail him with respect, and on the street he would often hear the deferential, awed "That's Willard Dorsett," which pleased yet faintly amused him. Ha, he would think. Being a Dorsett, I have a mind of my own and could have done more with it if over fifty years of my life had not been spent in Willow Corners. Wanting to use this mind of his own, he was in his glory when he met highly educated, gifted, and well-traveled people.

The compulsiveness that made Willard a perfectionist in his work also made him a stickler for details, and this preoccupation with details often blocked communication. "You can't say the bigger half," he would counsel Sybil. "If it's half, it's half. How can it be half and bigger at the same time?" The compulsiveness also made him a slave to habit. His standard lunch for twenty years was two fried-egg sandwiches and a slice of apple pie.

Of more than average intelligence, Willard was also of greater than average restriction and naiveté. He was an intelligent man in a primitive setting, a man who was appalled because Hattie's nephew Joey dared to smoke in the Dorsett home, a man who bowed sufficiently to the conventional wisdom to write in his daughter's autograph book: "Truthfulness, honesty, kindness, purity, and temperance are the greatest virtues of the best man." His mind, in fact, was a curious compound of humanistic interests and puritanical rigidities. His puritanism was an amalgam of Willow Corners, the church, the Victorian age, and his overreaction to the Roaring Twenties, which he considered an indication of the moral decay of civilization, a sign of the end of the world.

An intensely religious man, he rigidly adhered to the doctrines of his fundamentalist faith and was so literal in his readings of the Scriptures that, unlike more sophisticated members of his faith--unlike Pastor Weber, for instance, his mentor in Omaha--he took the church's preachings about the end of the world so literally that his entire life was spent on the precipice of the world's impending end. The church itself and the benighted Willow Corners congregation to which he belonged became so disquieting that, while still observing its doctrines to the letter, he left the church for fourteen years.

Perhaps the flight from the church was also a flight from his father--a belligerent and boorish six-footer with large features and a goatee who, a wrestler in his youth, found in the church a tailor-made outlet for aggression and hostility. Aubrey Dorsett, Willard's father, was the son of Arnold and Theresa, who came to Willow Corners as homesteaders and whose children, in addition to Aubrey, included Thomas, Emmanuel, Frederick, and Theresa II.

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.