Jennie

by Douglas Preston

  Hugo freed the study of human evolution from abject dependence on the fossil record.

  I’ve no doubt I’m boring you. Perhaps at my age I’m no longer making any sense at all. I am a very foolish fond old man. By all means, edit what I say, make it sound comprehensible and even intelligent—if such a thing is possible. If your publisher works as fast as mine, I’ll be dead by the time your book appears.

  What was Hugo like? Physically, you mean? During the Jennie years he was a lean, bony man. His hair was black and unfashionably long. He had dark eye sockets in which lived two restless black eyes. My, that sounds good. Maybe I should be writing this book. He looked like a British schoolboy, with his hair flopping down over his forehead. He had shifty eyes, not out of guilt, but out of curiosity. His mind was always clicking away while his eyes darted about. His posture was bad; his mother never taught him to stand up straight. That’s one advantage of a Jewish upbringing, you know, having good posture. My mother never would have let me get away with that slouch! Hugo’s breathing was distinctly audible. We’d be examining a specimen and I could hear him wheezing next to me like a set of bagpipes. He was missing the very top part of his left ear. He used to say it was a machete cut, and he had a marvelous story to go with it, but in fact it was a small birth defect. He had inherited many fierce prejudices from his father—what an eccentric man that was!—but he was far too innocent to understand his prejudices, let alone understand himself. His prejudices included a dislike of businessmen, movie actresses, policemen, people who drove Cadillacs, people who voted for Goldwater, and the annual Botolphstown Cotillion. He would become excited, raving about one thing or another. And then in the next moment he’d have forgotten all about it. He licked his plate after eating. He picked his nose when he thought no one was looking. He had a bit of the exhibitionist about him. In a quiet way. He did what he pleased and the hell with ’em. I mean the rest of the world. What was it Voltaire said? “To the living we owe respect, but to the dead only truth.” I honor Hugo’s memory by telling the truth about him.

  I have not, in my lifetime, had another friendship I valued as much as his. When I first met Hugo, he was thirty and very eager. And naive. He was going to do great things. He used to bemoan the fact that the Nobel Prize was not given in his field. And he did accomplish great things. By the time he was forty, he had done more than most scientists do in a lifetime. With Jennie and her celebrity, he was forced to grow up in a great hurry, and this was a terrible shock to him. It was a shock that something awful could happen to him. Most of us, as we launch into adult life, feel invulnerable, or at least puissant, but some of us are more ready for tragedy than others. Hugo was not at all ready. Or if he was ready, he was blindsided; he never thought it could come from the direction it did.

  It changed him. It changed all of us; she changed all of us. But Hugo, in particular, was never the same. I will tell you what I think. After Jennie, his science was no damn good. You see . . . Excuse me, I believe I’m telling you the moral of the story before you’ve heard the story. I will only say this. He was like so many scientists: he thought he could separate object from subject. He ignored the human dimension of scientific work, the effect of the observer on the observed. And vice versa! You see, what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our questioning. And what we are, of course, is a response to what we observe. This is what tripped Hugo up.

  To the story, then. We can moralize later.

  Hugo returned from the Cameroons in the early fall of 1965. A few days later he brought Jennie to work with him. She caused a sensation. He got off the fifth-floor elevator and came down that hall, with that little black chimp riding on his neck. Everyone started coming out of their offices. Hugo’s office was at the end of the hall, in the corner. It was smaller than most offices but had a splendid view. He had a hideous old Victorian wing chair, which Jennie promptly claimed as her throne. He plopped her down in that chair and she sat back like a princess receiving courtiers, her legs sticking straight out, her eyes half closed, extending to each visitor a languid hand. She was wearing only a diaper, a T-shirt, and a hat. That hat! It was absurd, and it sat like a crown on her head, nearly obscuring her eyes, propped only by her big ears. I remember shaking her hand while her eyes wandered about the room, looking over my head, at my feet—like a rude guest at a party.

  Even at six months she was full of the devil. At one point she snatched a pair of glasses from some hapless secretary—one of those marvelous cat’s-eye glasses decorated with rhinestones—and they had to be pried out of her hands while she screamed piteously. It was as if she were being deprived of her last possession in the world. The glasses arrived back to their owner in a sad condition. Poor Hugo was always paying for something that Jennie had broken.

  Jennie was a terribly captivating animal. There is something fascinating in looking at a chimpanzee, seeing an echo of humanity in the thing. I stayed on after everyone had left. Hugo gave Jennie a National Geographic magazine while we lit our pipes; I my Dunhill with Balkan Sobranie; Hugo that drugstore pipe filled with rum-soaked Borkum Riff Ready-Rubbed. Ugh.

  Jennie was so small, she had to drag the magazine by both hands across the floor. She hauled it to my chair and hauled it up, where she settled in my lap, turning the pages. She then made a grab for my pipe.

  I raised it out of reach. I told her that she was too young to smoke.

  She did not like to be crossed. She gave my tie a yank, and then pulled off one of my buttons. Hugo scolded her, but she paid no attention.

  The chimpanzee went back to her National Geographic, and coming to an especially interesting and colorful page proceeded to tear it out. Hugo took away the magazine and there was a brief struggle for the page, while Jennie screamed again.

  Hugo told me his wife, Lea, was adapting well. Now that is one fine woman, Lea. Very capable. Did you talk to her as I suggested? Quite an imposing figure, isn’t she? She comes from an old Boston family. The Dickinsons. Emily was her great-aunt. And the first sexologist, before Masters and Johnson, was also a Dickinson. Very distinguished family. Of course, she is like all of those blue bloods, very diffident. You’ll never get her to admit it. And, of course, the Dickinsons lost their money when the Boston and Albany defaulted on their bonds in ’32.

  There is one thing a good Brahmin upbringing gives to the women, and she had it: a voice that could freeze water. Only when she wanted to, of course. When she disapproved of something, and that tone of voice was directed at you, it was zero at the bone. [Laughs.] With that voice, she controlled Jennie better than anyone. Jennie respected her. Hugo, on the other hand, was a bit of a pushover.

  They were an odd pair, Hugo and Lea. She was a good three inches taller than Hugo, but he slouched while she stood as straight as a queen. What a presence! And her hair. It was iron-gray when I first met her, some thirty years ago, and it turned snow-white after that. But she was very beautiful. In those days, it was almost scandalous to be thirty and have gray hair. She never wore much makeup, or ever dyed that hair, and still she was radiantly beautiful. She’s still beautiful, but in a different way of course. They were an odd pair, but somehow just right.

  Hugo asked me if he could bring Jennie to work from time to time. That was fine with me. I remarked that she was in a diaper and wondered how long that would last, but Hugo assured me they were working hard on her toilet training, and that already Jennie loved to flush the toilet. Now if they could only get her to go in it, he said.

  I was very much interested to hear the story of her capture. As a cultural anthropologist, I naturally saw the significance of it before Hugo did. He was only a physical anthropologist, poor man. [Laughs].

  I remember clearly that first conversation we had about Jennie. Let me see if I can recall it for you.

  I said to Hugo something like. “So! You whelped the beast.”

  Yes he had. And he said it with a great deal of pride, as if he were the father himself.

  I asked him i
f Jennie had any contact with her mother after the birth.

  Hugo said she hadn’t. The mother was paralyzed and dying. He didn’t even think the chimp had noticed her mother, she was so busy clinging to Hugo and looking into his face.

  I asked him if she had met any chimpanzees later.

  Hugo thought about that for a minute. No, she hadn’t.

  So, I said, Jennie’s never seen one of her own kind.

  That’s right, Hugo said.

  So I asked Hugo if he had read any Konrad Lorenz.

  I had finally aroused Hugo’s suspicions. He wanted to know just what I was driving at.

  I told him he should read Lorenz’s work on the greylag geese.

  This, of course, irritated Hugo, who certainly knew of Lorenz but had never gotten around to reading him. As I said, he was a physical anthropologist. Behavior did not interest him.

  When Hugo was irritated, he became very dignified and formal. He said he would “look into it,” but I don’t know if he did. Until much later, of course.

  I, of course, recognized immediately the significance of Jennie’s birth and early upbringing. Konrad Lorenz, as any educated person knows, had discovered that a newborn greylag goose is imprinted with the first thing it sees moving. It will then follow that thing around thinking it is its mother. Normally, it is the mother. But Lorenz was able to show that anything would imprint the gosling—a football, for instance, or a vacuum cleaner. Lorenz himself offered his head for imprinting, and dozens of geese grew up following Lorenz’s magnificent bushy white head around in a Bavarian lake, believing it was their dear lovely mother. The idea occurred to me right away that Jennie had been, in a more sophisticated way, imprinted by Hugo. Not only did Jennie believe she was human, but she had probably been imprinted to believe that Hugo was her mother.

  I explained all this to Hugo. Might that, I suggested, be cause for concern? The idea seemed to irritate him further. He said he thought anyone who tried to extrapolate the behavior of a goose to a chimpanzee was an idiot. He was quite defensive about this chimpanzee and why he had brought it back.

  “Harold,” he told me, “this is purely an informal little experiment in primate behavior. An experiment. Let’s not get all worried about this thing. She’s like a pet, only I’m curious to see what will happen to a chimpanzee that is raised like a human child. That’s all. An informal, anecdotal experiment. I can’t see any harm in that, can you?”

  I pointed out that in no way could this be called an experiment. What were the objectives? Where was the control? What was the hypothesis? And I said he was naive to think there might not be any harm in it. This was not like raising a puppy. But all he did was start shaking his head and smiling. “Harold, Harold, Harold,” he said. “Okay, Harold, you win. You’re right. It’s not an experiment. It’s just for laughs. Strictly for laughs.”

  Ah, but you see—Now who was it that said: “The joker loses everything when he laughs at his own joke”? Hmmmm. Well, it isn’t important. Schiller, maybe.

  At any rate, what even I did not realize at the time, although it is painfully clear to me now, is that imprinting can sometimes work both ways.

  [FROM Recollecting a Life by Hugo Archibald.]

  In his old age, my father, Henry S. Archibald, became interested in death. As he was an avowed atheist, this interest took a rather peculiar form. Instead of worrying about the ultimate disposition of his soul, he became obsessed with the family burial grounds. He had a brush with death when I was away at college—a minor bout with phlebitis—and by the time I returned for the summer his new interest had blossomed. He insisted on involving me. My father’s family was originally from Newburyport, Massachusetts, and we made many trips to obscure and overgrown cemeteries there.

  There were six graveyards in Newburyport and four of them contained the precious remains of an Archibald. There was a graveyard on Plum Island that had two Archibald graves. During the last years of my father’s life I came to know all these graves and more.

  My father took it upon himself to tend these graves. He waded in among the wild tea roses wielding a fearsome brush hook, carving a swath around each of the Archibald headstones. He scrubbed off the lichen, weeded and trimmed the grass, and laid down fresh flowers. I found the concept as strange as Japanese ancestor worship. But I was young then, and I found my father’s excessive concern with death amusing.

  My father had become increasingly cranky in his old age, and accompanying him on these trips was the only way I found to maintain a relationship with him. He complained frequently. “Your brother,” he would say, “has no interest in the family graves. I’m glad that at least one of my sons has taken an interest in the family history. Tending the Archibald graves is hard work, and when I’m gone it’s going to take quite a bit of your time. I hope you realize how much of a responsibility you have taken on.”

  I did not recollect taking on any responsibility, and I certainly had no intention of carrying on my father’s work after he was gone. I did not, however, have the heart to set him straight.

  During World War I, my father was an engineer first class aboard a ship in the U.S. Navy. During that time he had a small idea relating to an improvement in the science of refrigeration. He married my mother, who at the time was a sixteen-year-old girl from Cincinnati, and moved to Waltham, Massachusetts, where he developed and patented his idea. He licensed the invention to General Electric and made a small fortune.

  My father then spent the rest of his life tinkering and practicing a kind of genial crankiness. The grounds around our house looked like a junk heap. There was a windmill connected to an electric generator that lit a bulb inside a turning fresnel lens acquired from the old Shadd’s Rock Lighthouse. In short, it was a wind-powered lighthouse. No one was interested. Then there was the experimental air-cooling machine that my father built in the twenties. It weighed eight hundred pounds and sat in the corner of the barn like a square bull. It thumped and shuddered and issued a massive blast of chill air for three or four minutes before it blew the fuses. Whenever some naive visitor to our house introduced the subject of air-conditioning (and you would be surprised how often that subject comes up in normal conversation), my father would stamp off to the barn to prove that he, Henry S. Archibald, was the actual inventor of the air conditioner. My poor mother would cry out, “Henry, the fuse box,” and he would answer in heroic cadence: “Damn the fuse box!”

  As a boy, I never developed an interest in machines or tinkering. I was captivated by the far more complicated workings of animals. I loved bones, their shapes, the way they fit together, the puzzle of assembling them. I loved the play of sunlight through the hollows of a skull and across the parietals, giving the skull the mysterious glow of a Greek temple. I loved the curve of the orbit and the delicacy of the zygomatic process. It was a wonder to me that such structures could exist, formed in secret under the covering of flesh, exposed in their beauty only by death.

  At that time, woods and pastures surrounded our house outside Boston, and I often collected dead animals and skeletons and brought them home in a wheelbarrow. The larger animals, such as cows and horses, I laid out on the roof of an old shed near our house, where they would be beyond the reach of dogs, but where the crows could peck off any remaining meat. The smaller animals I buried for a month or two. My parents, to their credit, allowed me the full indulgence of my hobby, although my mother often worried about germs and fire from the kerosene I used to degrease the bones.

  My most exciting discovery of those years was finding a dead bull moose near the Sudbury swamp. I found him by tracking the smell for over a mile through the woods. He lay peacefully on a bed of sphagnum moss, a massive animal with a magnificent rack. He had expired recently and was in no condition to be transported, but I went back again and again, collecting the odd leg or antler as the dogs tore apart the carcass. Sometimes bones would be dragged hundreds of yards into the woods, and I had to search the underbrush for hours. In three months I had everything
but the rib cage and pelvis, which needed more time, and those I was able to rescue in the spring, just as the snow was melting.

  When the bones of one of my animals had been stripped of flesh and skin, I set to work. I boiled them in a kettle behind the barn, carved off the cartilage, soaked them in a tub of kerosene, and then washed that out with soap and water, bleached them, and laid them back on the shed roof for a final sunning. When the bones were a pure lovely white, and light as seasoned pine, I mounted the skeleton. It was a tedious process of drilling, screwing, gluing, wiring, and hanging. The end result was never, to my great disappointment, as elegant as the mounted skeletons in the Boston Museum of Natural History. Nor did my larger skeletons stay standing very long. The mounted moose lasted until I tried to set an antler in the pedicle. That was the proverbial straw, and the whole thing came tumbling down with a noise that sent my poor mother out into the yard in a panic, thinking I had fallen off the roof. It was a bitter blow and I never had the heart to rebuild it.

  My father was a staunch atheist. In New England at the time, atheism was tolerated as an eccentricity, not like Unitarianism, which was much worse. He said he had been converted to atheism at the age of six, when his Sunday school teacher had described with relish the eternal fires of Hell. He trotted out his atheism with great pride, while everybody rolled their eyes. I always believed (at least until the end) it was a case of the lady protesting too much. “Mary and Joseph,” he said, “turned a very embarrassing situation into one of the greatest coups in history. Clever, clever, clever!” And he wagged his fat finger back and forth in everyone’s deliciously scandalized faces.