Sybil (6 page)

After a silence Dorsett himself remarked, "I would be more comfortable if the Chicago psychoanalyst were of our own faith. I'm afraid that a doctor outside our faith will use drugs, hypnosis, and other techniques to which I am opposed."

Pacing the floor of the church, the pastor was thoughtful and perplexed. When he finally spoke, it was only to say, "You'll just have to decide for yourself, Brother Dorsett. I'd like to help you, but frankly I don't know what to advise."

This time it was Dorsett who paced. He replied apprehensively, "If God isn't part of the therapy, they'll have a hard time leading me into this channel."

"Yes," the pastor concurred, "it's like leading a mule in Missouri into a new barn. You have to blindfold him first." After a long pause he added, "I believe in freedom of thought, of conscience and conviction. Brother Dorsett, you know I can be very persuasive, even overpowering. But the only form of persuasion I've ever used is just talking to people. I've never used force in my life. And I'm not at all sure that psychoanalysis doesn't involve the use of force. But I'm not opposing Sybil's going to Chicago. The decision is not mine to make but yours and hers."

Willard Dorsett reported to Sybil his conversation with the pastor, and, finding that there was no more effective defense against his own fears than to displace them, he did leave the decision to her. "I still want to go to Chicago," was Sybil's fixed and unflinching answer.

At church the following Sabbath Sybil talked briefly with the pastor. She stared at his black suit and studied his penetrating brown eyes. It was a study in darkness, the visible symbols of the fears that had been expressed. Feeling her gaze, the pastor said gently, "Your father and I are only looking at this from our own point of view. We have to admit that there is another. If this is what you really want, we shouldn't stand in your way."

Sybil's decision remained unchanged.

While waiting for a bed at Clarkson and for word from Chicago, she saw the immediate future as a stepped-up assault on the "terrible thing" that had enshrouded her life. There was comfort in having taken the first affirmative action after long years of vacillation and temporizing on the parts both of her parents and of herself. The decisiveness that she had been unable to show when she was younger she felt able to exert at last.

Suddenly everything changed. The instrument, though not the cause, was the pneumonia that she contracted as a concomitant of a strep throat. Her head ached terribly; her throat was raw; and although she tried to get out of bed to call Dr. Wilbur to cancel her October 6 appointment, dizziness and weakness intervened. Sybil asked her mother to telephone Dr. Wilbur.

Sybil heard Hattie Dorsett give Dr. Wilbur's number to the operator, announce herself to the doctor's secretary, and then talk to the doctor herself. "Yes, this is Mrs. Dorsett, Sybil's mother," Hattie spoke into the phone. "Sybil is ill and can't keep her appointment with you on October 6. Yes, everybody seems to have these bad throats, but she also has pneumonia. Anyway she asked me to call you. Thank you."

With a click her mother hung up.

"What did the doctor say?" Sybil asked. "What did she say?"

"She didn't say anything," her mother replied.

"Nothing about another appointment? Nothing about the hospital?"

"Nothing."

The train had reached Trenton and still Sybil's reverie continued. The echo of her mother's voice could not be stilled. What she said in Omaha she seemed also to be saying now. Her words, as distinct as if she were in the seat next to Sybil, had their old cacophonous ring. The train moved on toward New York as the memories came, unbidden, propelled by what Sybil supposed was their own logic. The doctor had started all this, the doctor to whom she was returning.

Learning that Dr. Wilbur had said nothing about another appointment, Sybil quickly dismissed the feeling of disappointment with the reassuring thought that probably the doctor had assumed that, when she was well enough, she would call. However, when, fully recovered, she did call, she was told that Dr. Wilbur had left Omaha permanently. A feeling of rejection was natural.

After all the bitter battles at home, after the agonies involved in persuading her parents to let her go into treatment and then to agree to hospitalization at Clarkson, the road to getting well had been ripped from under her. The bravest of the emotionally vulnerable, she felt, could not sustain this blow.

She walked away from the telephone and sat limply on the bed. She thought of how her mother would scoff and her father would become silently critical. She thought about Dr. Wilbur and about how puzzling--incomprehensible--it was that she should have left town without a parting caution, without so much as a swift backward glance in her direction. Had she offended the doctor? Had the doctor thought that she had not really been ill and thus had deliberately called a halt to the treatment? Certainly these were possibilities.

What now? A letter from Chicago, stating that the analyst was booked for two years and wasn't accepting new patients, had ruled out analysis. The loss of Dr. Wilbur had ruled out Clarkson and the continuation of treatment. Then, in the stillness of her room, Sybil faced the fact that somehow she would have to manage to carry on alone. She even persuaded herself that, with Dr. Wilbur's departure and the cancellation of her Chicago plans, she would be freer to do as she wished. And what she wished most of all was to return to college.

Was she well enough? She wasn't certain, but she realized that the treatment by Dr. Wilbur might serve as the means of readmission. After all, she had seen a psychiatrist.

She wrote to Miss Updyke about her desire to return, and Miss Updyke promised to use her influence to make the return possible. In the meantime Sybil continued teaching at the junior high school and painting. Her painting City Streets and a pencil piece were exhibited at an Omaha art gallery. But the nameless thing still pursued her. When a day came that she felt free of it, she recorded that day in her diary with the euphemism: "All went well today." In January, 1947, Sybil returned to the campus.

During the first week Miss Updyke was curious to know how things really were, and when Sybil told her that she was able to sit through classes without the inner disturbances that in the past had made it necessary for her to leave, Miss Updyke seemed very pleased. "She could see," Sybil wrote in her diary of January 7, 1947, "I'm well more nearly." On January 8, 1947, Sybil, referring to the nameless thing, recorded in the diary: "Am so proud --most thankful I could talk with Miss Updyke as I did yesterday and stay on a level. No inclinations ever. The one thing I desired for so long. God has heard my pleas surely."

The nameless thing, the "inclinations" that kept her from staying on a level, however, had not been put to rest. Her diary, virtually infallible as a clue to the presence or absence of the "inclinations" because when Sybil was in command of the situation, she never failed to make an entry, shows clearly that there were unrecorded days even in this period, when she thought herself "well more nearly." In fact, for January 9, the day after the splurge of optimism, there was no entry. Good days were often followed by bad days.

There were enough good days for Sybil to complete almost three years of college and to move triumphantly into the second semester of her senior year. But then in 1948, shortly before the end of her last semester, Sybil received a telephone call from her father summoning her to Kansas City, where her parents were then living.

Her mother was dying of cancer of the spleen, and she insisted upon having no other nurse than Sybil. "If this is what your mother wants," Willard Dorsett told his daughter, "this is what she will have."

Sybil did not know what to expect when she arrived in Kansas City. Old fears reasserted themselves. But Hattie Dorsett had never been as calm and as rational as she was in Kansas City. Paradoxically, in this period of crisis mother and daughter got along better than they ever had before.

The very calm became an ironic background for the events of what started out as an ordinary evening. Hattie Dorsett, relatively free from pain, was sitting in the big red easy chair in the living room of the Dorsett's home. She was reading Ladies Home Journal by the light of a small table lamp. Sybil came in with her supper tray. Then, seemingly apropos of nothing, Hattie Dorsett remarked, "I never made it."

"Made what?" Sybil asked softly, thinking that her mother was voicing some retrospective regret, some unfinished business that haunted her.

"I never made that call," Hattie Dorsett said.

"What call, Mother?"

"That call to Dr. Wilbur," her mother explained.

"You did," Sybil insisted. "Don't you remember? I heard your conversation. Every word of it."

Hattie Dorsett was composed as she replied, "Well, I held my finger on the button. I never made it. I never made that phone call."

Never had this possibility occurred to Sybil. It was inconceivable that her mother would have so determinedly blocked the route to her good health, inconceivable that her mother would have condemned her to the uncertainty and doubt about the doctor with which she had lived since October, 1945--almost three years ago.

A little insight here, a slight revelation there, picked up during the all-too-brief treatment, had been enough to maintain the inner balance that made it possible for Sybil to go back to college. That nameless thing that Dr. Wilbur had glimpsed the day her patient headed for the window had continued in Omaha, at college, and in Kansas City. And it had been her mother, nursing her bizarre secret, who, by preventing the continuation of treatment, had deliberately shaped her daughter's destiny.

The horror, the pain, the sadness of it! Yet there were no recriminations. Nobody ever criticized Hattie Dorsett. There was no flare-up of anger against her. Anger was evil.

Hattie ate her supper. Sybil took the tray back to the kitchen. Neither mother nor daughter ever again mentioned to each other that phone call or Dr. Wilbur.

The revelation about the phone call, however, completely changed Sybil's attitude toward the doctor. It seemed obvious that, not knowing that Sybil had been ill, the doctor had simply thought that she had fled from treatment without even having the grace to say she was not coming back. No wonder the doctor had left Omaha without calling her. It was not Sybil Dorsett but Dr. Cornelia Wilbur who had a right to be deeply disappointed.

Before hearing about the unmade phone call Sybil had deliberately ejected Dr. Wilbur from her thoughts. Now, however, the doctor loomed large again, and Sybil felt a sudden surge of hope. Returned to her was the glorious dream of getting wholly well, of picking up where she had left off with Dr. Wilbur. But this time the serpent must not be allowed to intervene. The dream would have to be delayed until Sybil, wholly on her own, could afford to pay for her own treatment.

Dr. Wilbur, Sybil learned from a directory of psychiatrists, was now a psychoanalyst in New York. And it was to New York that Sybil was determined to go.

Never, through the six years--from 1948 to 1954 --that intervened between the decision and its execution, did Sybil breathe this dream to anyone.

Her intention was one thing more she had to keep to herself. In July, 1948, Hattie Dorsett died and was buried in a Kansas City cemetery. For the next two months Sybil kept house for her father, and in September she returned to college. She was graduated with a bachelor's degree in June, 1949, and it took the intercession of one of her professors to convince her father, who was with Pastor Weber in Denver, Colorado, to attend the commencement exercises. At one o'clock on commencement day Sybil left with her father for Denver.

For the next few years she lived with her father, taught school, and worked as an occupational therapist. Willard Dorsett's building schedule kept him constantly moving, and she went with him. However, by the summer of 1954 she had saved enough money to go to New York to get a master's degree at Columbia University and to resume treatment with Dr. Wilbur. Her father, told only that his daughter was going to New York to study, drove her there.

Sybil arrived in New York on Labor Day, 1954, but she waited until October before calling Dr. Wilbur, fearful both that the doctor would reject her and that she would accept her.

Rejection was plausible because of the seemingly cavalier way in which Sybil had closed the door on treatment, but it was more likely--and this hurt even more--that the doctor wouldn't remember her. The envisioned rejection was compounded by the fact that Sybil, who felt guilty for unjustly blaming Dr. Wilbur for failing to call Sybil before leaving Omaha, neatly converted that feeling of guilt into additional feelings of rejection.

Acceptance held a different kind of terror. If she were accepted, Sybil knew that she would have to tell the doctor about the end-of-the-rope feeling she had experienced toward the end of her three years in Detroit, her last residence before coming to New York. While she was teaching, she had seemed to be all right, although there were times in the classroom that she couldn't remember. The moment she left the classroom, however--it was too horrible to recall--strange, incomprehensible things had happened to her. These things were not new, had in fact occurred since she was three and a half and had filtered into awareness at fourteen. But in Detroit they had become not only more frequent but also more menacing. She was no longer able to endure the terrible burden of the secret she didn't dare tell, of the answers she had to improvise to implement the pretense of normality.