“And Leo had died a few weeks earlier,” Hilary said, “so he wasn’t around to remind her of what she had forgotten.”
Joshua took his hands off the airplane controls for a moment, wiped them on his shirt. “I thought I was too damned old and too cynical to respond to a horror story any more. But this one makes my palms sweat. There’s a terrible correlation to what Hilary just said. Leo wasn’t around to remind her–but she needed to keep both of the twins around to reinforce the new delusion. They were the living proof of it, and she couldn’t put either of them up for adoption.”
“That’s right,” Tony said. “Having them with her helped her maintain the fantasy. When she looked at those two perfectly healthy, unquestionably human babies, she really did see something different about their sex organs, like she told Mrs. Yancy. She saw it in her mind, imagined it, saw something that was proof, to her, that they were the children of a demon. The twins were part of her comfortable new delusion–and I say ‘comfortable’ only in comparison to the nightmares with which she had lived before.”
Hilary’s mind was racing faster than the airplane engine. She grew excited as she saw where Tony’s speculations were leading. She said, “So Katherine took the twins home, to that clifftop house, but she still had to keep the Mary Gunther lie in the air, didn’t she? Sure. For one thing, she wanted to protect her reputation. But there was another reason, much more important than just her good name. A psychosis is rooted in the subconscious mind, but, as I understand it, the fantasies a psychotic uses to cope with his inner turmoil are more the product of the conscious mind. So … while Katherine believed in the demon on a conscious level … at the same time, deep down, subconsciously, she knew that if she went back to St. Helena with twins and let the Mary Gunther story collapse, her neighbors would eventually realize that Leo was the father. If she had to deal with that disgrace, she wouldn’t have been able to support the demon fantasy that her conscious mind had fabricated. Her new, more comfortable delusions would be replaced by the old, hard, sharp-edged ones. So to maintain the demon fantasy in her own mind, she had to present only one child to the public. So she gave the two boys just one name. She allowed only one of them to go out in public at any one time. She forced them to live one life.”
“And eventually,” Tony said, “the two boys actually came to think of themselves as one and the same person.”
“Hold it, hold it,” Joshua said. “Maybe they were able to double for each other and live under only one name, one identity, in public. Even that’s asking me to believe a lot, but I’ll try. But for sure, in private they still would have been two distinct individuals.”
“Maybe not,” Tony said. “We’ve come across proof that they thought of themselves as … sort of one person in two bodies.”
“Proof? What proof?” Joshua demanded.
“The letter you found in the safe-deposit box in that San Francisco bank. In it, Bruno wrote that he had been killed in Los Angeles. He didn’t say his brother had been killed. He said he, himself, was dead.”
“You can’t prove anything by that letter,” Joshua said. “It was all mumbo-jumbo. It didn’t make any sense.”
“In a way it does make sense,” Tony said. “It makes sense from Bruno’s point of view–if he didn’t think of his brother as another human being. If he thought of his twin as part of himself, as just an extension of himself, and not as a separate person at all, then the letter makes a lot of sense.”
Joshua shook his head. “But I still don’t see how two people could possibly ever be made to believe they were only one person.”
“You’re accustomed to hearing about split personalities,” Tony said. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The woman whose true story was told in The Three Faces of Eve. And there was a book about another woman like that. It was a best-seller several years ago. Sybil. Sybil had sixteen distinct, separate personalities. Well, if I’m right about what became of the Frye twins, then they developed a psychosis that’s just the reverse of split personality. These two people didn’t split into four or six or eight or eighty; instead, under tremendous pressure from their mother, they … melted together psychologically, melted into one. Two individuals with one personality, one self-awareness, one self-image, all shared. It’s probably never happened before and might never happen again, but that doesn’t mean it can’t have happened here.”