Sybil (56 page)

I love life and living. The only thing that has stood in my way is that I wasn't free to be myself, to walk in the sun and face the world. But now that the others are about to face it, I shall go with them. Now that the others have shed their traumas, I will hold hands with the rest. My vitality will lend strength; my zest for living, buoyancy; my unscathed past, assurance. I, who have never been ill, will walk with Sybil in the unprotected world of well people."

"Welcome," said Vicky.

"You and I belong together, Victoria," the blonde, who still had given no name, replied. "Unlike the others, we were not cradled in traumas but in Sybil's wish. You and I are blonde--the only two of all sixteen of us who are. I understand there were a lot of blondes in Sybil's mother's family and that her mother glorified that hair color. We are blonde because Sybil wished to be blonde."

The blonde was a dream girl--the girl who had stood with Sybil at the mirror, throbbing with adolescent expectations, as they had waited for Ramon. And if her speech sounded unnatural, it was the affectation of a teenager, spouting her newly found knowledge and confidence.

"I've come to set Sybil free," the blonde announced.

"As she enters the world, she will throw away what were once Marcia's dead vines and walk with me among newly budding trees, not in the winter of life but in the springtime."

Silence. Dr. Wilbur tried to get the blonde to say more, but Vicky replied instead. "The blonde is Sybil's adolescence," Vicky said.

"Isn't this late?" Dr. Wilbur asked. "She needs to be with Sybil now," Vicky replied.

"Is there anybody else?" the doctor asked, as if she were reliving the first days of the analysis.

"Why should there be?" Vicky seemed to shrug vocally. "We didn't expect the blonde, true. But as she told you, she has been around for nineteen years, although inactive. How could she have been active when Sybil, carrying the weight of childhood, bypassed adolescence in anything but a strictly physical, developmental sense?" Vicky paused. Then she added, "It was hard for Sybil to have a normal adolescence. She left so much of herself behind, fixed in childhood. Now that Sybil has scotched these childhood traumas, you should expect to find the lost adolescence returning in search of the gratification of maturity."

As Vicky's words trailed off, the lilting yet stilted voice of the blonde was heard again. "I held back," she said, "until Sybil fell in love. When I realized that Ramon wouldn't work out, I rose to protect the adolescent Sybil from heartbreak. She was an adolescent, you know, when she was with Ramon."

"If Sybil still wants to feel like an adolescent in love, there's no reason why she shouldn't," the doctor said. "People of all ages do this. She can function as an eighteen-year-old blonde at forty-two. Sybil can integrate you."

"She has," the blonde replied. "I'm no threat to the final healing. In fact, I will make the wheels of that healing turn faster."

"Have you been listening, Sybil?"

Dr. Wilbur asked.

"I have," Sybil replied. "And I know that this part of me who gave no name is telling the truth."

The wish, personified by the dream girl, had brought new youth to the unlived life, to the womanhood aborted by depletion and discontinuity.

Baffling, terrifying, life-renewing, the episode of the blonde's appearance proved to be the climax of Sybil's illness. After the event there were many days during which she just sat and absorbed the emotions, attitudes, knowledge, and experiences that since early June of that year the other selves had voluntarily shared with her. And while she took a new look at her emerging self, within her a tremendous reorganization of personality was taking place. The past blended with the present; the personalities of each of the selves with that of the others. The past returned, and with it the original child called Sybil, who had not existed as an entity since she was three and a half years old. Not everything came to a conscious level all at once, but the significant things that did were normal memory and a new sense of time. After thirty-nine years the clock was no longer incomprehensible.

A week after the July 7 crisis Sybil was talking animatedly to Dr. Wilbur about her plans to become an occupational therapist. They would involve leaving New York.

"The old fears seem to be gone," Dr. Wilbur remarked. "You sound well."

"Oh, I am, Doctor," Sybil replied, smiling. "I've thrown my last fit. But I was fully conscious of everything that was happening during it. It was not the same way out I took in the past." She added: "And the blonde? Well, I feel she is with me. I know that I will never dissociate again."

"You've never said that before," the doctor replied, "even during all this time when none of the others appeared."

"I didn't say it," Sybil averred, "because never before did I feel that it was so."

"We can tell," the doctor explained, "if all the memories of the others are now yours. Let's test it."

Through the several hypnotic sessions that followed Dr. Wilbur matched Sybil's memories alongside those of the selves who still had individual identities.

Not one of these selves had a single memory that Sybil did not also have.

Sybil's attitude toward these selves, moreover, had completely changed, from initial denial to hostility to acceptance--even to love. Having learned to love these parts of herself, she had in effect replaced self-derogation with self-love. This replacement was an important measure of her integration and restoration.

Three weeks after the July 7 crisis Dr. Wilbur hypnotized Sybil and called for Vicky Antoinette. "How are things going, Vicky?" the doctor asked. "What progress is there underneath?"

"I'm part of Sybil now, you know," Vicky replied. "She always wanted to be like me. Now we are one. I used to say, "This or that event was before my time." Now I say, "It's after my time." You see, I'm no longer completely free."

That was the last time that Dr. Cornelia B. Wilbur talked to Victoria Antoinette Scharleau.

On September 2, 1965, Dr. Wilbur recorded in her daily analysis notes on the Dorsett case: "All personalities one."

On September 30 it was moving day at the old brownstone. Sybil's furniture and paintings went to Pennsylvania, where she had obtained a job as an occupational therapist; she herself moved to Flora's apartment to spend the last two weeks in New York.

The Sybil who entered Flora's apartment was new not only to Flora but even to herself. She was not what had been waking Sybil. Neither was she any one of the fifteen other selves. She was all of them. Like Miranda in The Tempest, she seemed to be standing on the threshold of discovery, almost literally crying out, "O, wonder: ar How many goodly creatures are there here: ar How beauteous mankind is: O brave new world, ar That has such people in't!"

The world seemed new because she was new, real because, for the first time in her adult life, she was a whole and real self. As she took off her coat, settled her bags, and sank into a chair, she was silent. Then she said, "I've been here before--yet I haven't."

"Who is the I?" Flora asked.

"The one who can feel," Sybil replied. "I have new feelings now, real feelings. It's not the way it used to be."

The "It's not the way it used to be" was the clue to the understanding that even though Sybil now had the feelings that for thirty-nine years the others had masked, her frame of reference was still that of the waking self.

Flora had prepared a snack, and as they ate, they talked for a while about impersonal things. Then apropos of nothing that had previously been said, Sybil remarked, "Memories make a person mature emotionally." Although stated as a generalization, it was obvious to Flora that Sybil was referring to herself and was saying in effect: now that the others have returned their memories to me, I have been able to mature emotionally; now that I'm whole, I'm mature.

Paradoxically, however, while this new Sybil seemed more mature, she also seemed younger than her forty-two years. The impression became even stronger when she remarked, "I'm discovering things that everybody else my age has known for a long time."

The next morning at breakfast Sybil said, "I hoped for a time when I would know what I was doing all the time I was doing it." Then she added with a compelling intensity, "Now I can account for every minute. When I wake up, I know what I did yesterday and can plan what I'm going to do today." She looked at Flora and Flora's mother and asked with fervor, "Do you know what it means to have a whole day ahead of you, a day you can call your own?"

At last, after thirty-nine years of having it otherwise, a day for her was all its hours. Before, time had to be done away with by relegating it to other selves. Now time presented the opportunity for self-realization.

Each morning as she planned the day ahead, her eyes sparkled and she betrayed an excitement that for anyone else would have been wholly out of proportion to the nature of the activity. The excitement continued with heightened awareness as the day unfolded and she did ordinary things--reading a book, watching television, talking.

"I see a name of some public figure in the newspaper," she remarked to Flora one evening. "Hear it again on television. Then someone talks about it. I always recognize it!" There was a reminiscent torment in her eyes as she added, "There were many times I couldn't do that--in the past." She lingered on the phrase in the past with the fascination one feels for a bygone horror. Then elucidating the isolation, the alienation of what it had been like to be a multiple personality, she explained, "I'd see the name in the newspaper, but by the time we ran into it again on television, it was often not I who saw it but one of the others. When it came up in conversation, still somebody else might have been there. The parts didn't go together."

Again she was using I as the frame of reference of the her, while waking self. Triumphantly she added, "Now the parts come together. The world seems whole."

Her expression became suddenly wild as, looking fixedly at Flora, she remarked with earnest, "I know it doesn't seem like anything to other people to be able to see a whole television program without interference from within, but to me it's revelation!"

Other insights continued to find expression. "It's quiet, very quiet around here," she said on another evening. "Come to think of it, I'm quiet, too, inside. There isn't any arguing with myself."

In yet another evening, when she returned with Flora and Flora's mother from a dinner engagement, Sybil summarized it with the supreme accolade by saying, "I was there all the time. I myself, Sybil. I see the food, recall every word of the conversation. All of it."

Simple things became momentous. One morning, for instance, when Sybil did the marketing, she discovered upon returning to the apartment that she had forgotten the orange juice. "It's wonderful," she observed humorously, "to be able to forget the way other people do!" More than humor, this statement was an avowal of inclusion--of being one with the human race.

One morning Sybil wanted to go to a store to buy some material for a dress. Flora went with her. The store was crowded. Many women were standing at the dry goods counter. The saleswoman started to wait on a customer who had come in after Sybil. "I'm sorry, but I was here first," Sybil protested. Flora held her breath.

In the past such assertive action would have been impossible for Sybil, would have had to come from one of the other selves, usually Peggy Lou. The only self who was present, however, was a newly confident Sybil.

Further indication of the success of the analysis followed. The saleswoman handed Sybil the receipt. Sybil scrutinized it, multiplying the number of yards by the cost per yard to see whether the total was correct. In the past Sybil would have appealed to her companion to check the accuracy of the receipt for her. But endowed with the knowledge Peggy Lou had hoarded since Miss Henderson's fifth-grade class and aided by a post-analytic phase of treatment during which Dr. Wilbur had taught the new Sybil how to use the knowledge the selves had returned to her, Sybil handled the transaction herself.

In the dress department Sybil decided on a brown dress with red and gold paisley print cuffs and belt. Leaving the store, she commented to Flora, "I got the brown dress for Sybil, but the paisley print for the Peggy part of me."

Outside the store Flora started to flag a taxi. Sybil stopped her, saying, "Let's take the bus." Recalling Sybil's intense terror of buses, Flora was very much aware of the significance of the remark. "Anybody can get on a bus and go places. It's so simple," Sybil remarked reassuringly. And on the bus Sybil gave voice to the thoughts that Flora had had while in the store. "I used to let other people do my arithmetic," Sybil said, "or I didn't do it at all. But now I can figure things out for myself. I can order the things I want, make change in a taxi, measure material for a dress or drapes, measure mats for framing pictures--do all the things I couldn't do before." Again there was a curious emphasis on the word before, accompanied also by a radiance at having expressed her new freedom.

There were still moments, of course, when Sybil demonstrated flashes of what used to be the other selves. The new Sybil would pace the living room, saying, "I'm going away. I'm going to build a new life. Everything's so exciting. There's so much to do, so many places to go." To Flora it rang of the time that Peggy Lou had planned to break with the others forever.