Jennie

by Douglas Preston

  Most of the boys came right back. And then! There was utter pandemonium! They raced around the yard, Jennie screeching, the kids hollering. I’m surprised old Mrs. Wardell didn’t call the police.

  The kids came back the next day with a big red wagon. They hauled Jennie around the neighborhood. If Kibbencook didn’t already know a chimp was in residence, they knew it then. She stood in the wagon, gripping the sides, swaying back and forth with that ridiculous hat on her head. For some reason she reminded me of that silly painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware. And the noise she made! They went up Benvenue Street and down Dover and all around. I could follow their progress through the neighborhood by Jennie’s hoots and shrieks. How her voice carried. Hugo used to say that she had a loud voice because chimps needed to communicate in the jungle. I believe it. If you could hear her ten feet, you could hear her a mile.

  Another time the kids came around on bikes. Well! Jennie was so excited to ride a bike. She hopped up and down and tried to wrestle a bike away from a boy. And then some fool hoisted her up on one and, of course, it toppled over. There was Jennie at the door, screaming and pounding. She had skinned her poor little knee! When I opened it she came rushing into my arms—just like a hurt child, looking for comfort. I washed it and put a Band-Aid on it. She immediately picked the Band-Aid off, like she always did, peering underneath with fascination. I don’t know what she expected to find, but we never could keep a Band-Aid on that chimp.

  When I told Hugo about the bike, that was when he got the idea of getting Jennie a tricycle.

  The tricycle! Oh dear . . . Of all the memories I have, none stands out more than that hairy little thing riding around on her tricycle. I still have it, after all these years. I’m not a sentimental person, but I didn’t have the heart to throw it out. It’s in the barn in Maine. We have a summer place up there, you know. Not long ago I came across that trike, all rusted and useless. The bright red paint was all gone. It was so sad, so . . . so forlorn, that I burst into tears! Can you imagine?

  Hugo had the idea of buying Jennie the trike. He wanted to do it right. Buying a tricycle, he said, is a great moment in a kid’s life. He was so proud. Just like a father. Poor Hugo, he was terribly attached to Jennie. He never got over her, you know. So one glorious fall weekend, the kind when the air practically sings, we all went down to Kibbencook Cycle. As long as I live, I’ll never forget that day.

  It was the only bike shop in town and it was down there by the railroad bridge. Of course it’s long gone. Now it’s one of those dreadful pasta shops, selling the homemade spaghetti at ten dollars the pound. The dry cleaners next door is now a gourmet cookie shop, and the old Kibbencook Dry Goods across the bridge is some kind of fancy housewares store selling those two-hundred-dollar coffee machines. Can you imagine? Oh! But it isn’t called coffee anymore, it’s called espresso. Lord save us.

  Kibbencook Cycle had two huge plate glass windows in the front, with the name in gold paint. Behind the windows sat a row of the most marvelous bicycles you ever saw, with fat tires and swept-back chrome trim. Powder blue bikes for the girls, candy apple red for the boys. They made bikes back then like they made Cadillac cars, big and shiny and goofy.

  Anyway, the shop was run by old Sam Hoyt and his son. Old Hoyt! He was dry and silent, with a face as smooth as Buddha. That man never said a word. When you asked for something, he’d shuffle off and go get it. Not a word. I’ll tell you, he could sure ring up a cash register fast enough. And try to get a refund out of the old skinflint! His wife ran away with the Fuller Brush man.

  The Hoyt son was fat and he never stopped talking, and he always tripped over the bikes or the hockey sticks. I can’t remember his first name. He enlisted to go to Vietnam and his father was so proud, and then he was blown to bits in some kind of booby trap, helping himself to souvenirs at some Vietnamese village. We felt so sorry for poor Mr. Hoyt. But he never said a word, just sold the shop and disappeared. We all wondered where he went.

  Sandy went in first, dragging Jennie by the hand. Without even giving the Hoyts time to think, he announced: “We’ve come to buy a tricycle for my little sister Jennie!” and he shoved Jennie forward. My goodness! The sister business was, to say the least, a surprise. We asked him later why he said that. He said he thought it would sound really dumb if he said we were buying a trike for our pet chimpanzee. And anyway, she could easily be a sister; she didn’t look all that different. We had started dressing Jennie in shorts and a little T-shirt. I have to admit, she was starting to look just like a little person. It took an effort to think of her as an animal. It really did.

  Sandy was so proud. He had trained Jennie to shake hands, and so she shook everyone’s hand. Old Sam Hoyt, he stood there without the slightest change of expression. He just shook Jennie’s hand like it was the most normal thing in the world. After all, a sale is a sale.

  Hugo and I didn’t say a word. This was Sandy’s show.

  Young Hoyt, the fat one, stood there thunderstruck. He couldn’t believe it. “What, your sistah?” he blurted out, spraying saliva all over the place. Hoyt and his son both had these appalling North Shore accents. Danvers, I think.

  Sandy came right back at him. “Yeah,” he said. “My sister. What of it?”

  I’m sorry, it was just so funny. [She wipes her eyes.] Sandy was so . . . so creative in his approach to life. His sister! Oh dear . . .

  Anyway, young Hoyt said “Oooh” as if everything had suddenly been made clear.

  So Sandy told him in no uncertain terms that his sister wanted a tricycle. Poor Hoyt was so nervous. He led us over to a row of trikes, all the while trying not to look at Jennie. He must have thought her terribly deformed. Sandy told him that Jennie wanted a red bike, not a blue one. Hoyt rolled one forward with his finger. And then Jennie gave a hoot. Really, it was a perfect chimpanzee hoot. Young Hoyt jerked as if he’d been slapped. His nervous eyes were darting everywhere but at Jennie. And then he finally looked at her and said:

  “Get outta here! That ain’t no kid!”

  [Laughs.] Oh my goodness! There was a shocked silence. Sandy turned on Hoyt with all the dignity he could muster, and said to him: “Shut your big mouth, fatso! She is too!”

  Dear oh dear . . . Hoyt started apologizing all over the place. I don’t know what the poor boy thought Jennie was after that. Sam Hoyt just watched from behind the cash register, ready to ring up the sale as if nothing out of the ordinary were going on.

  So we rolled out the red tricycle for Jennie to try out, and Sandy picked her up and put her on the seat.

  You must remember that Jennie’s last experience on a bicycle had not exactly been pleasant. That chimp had a memory like a steel trap. She opened that pink mouth and let fly a shriek that fairly blew out the plate glass windows in the front of the shop. Poor Hoyt, he was just sweating with nervousness. Sandy lowered Jennie to the floor and she shut up. Thank goodness. Then she bent over and examined her knee. It was so touching; you see, she was worried she might have skinned her knee again!

  Sandy got on the tricycle and pedaled around the shop, saying, “Look, Jennie, isn’t this fun?” And Jennie started her usual hop of excitement and stretched her arms toward the trike. She wanted to do everything that Sandy did. Sandy gave it to her and she climbed aboard. There was a tense moment of silence. Young Hoyt was looking on, his eyes popping. You see, Jennie had opposable thumbs on her feet like all chimpanzees. Her feet were really hands. What do you call that? Prehensile; she had prehensile feet. So instead of placing her feet on the pedals, she actually grabbed them with her feet. She gave a push with one leg and the trike inched forward. Then she gave a big push and the trike moved a few feet.

  Well! When she felt herself moving, did she get excited!

  She stood up in the seat and gave a big hoot of triumph. And then she began pedaling furiously. She was much more dextrous with her feet than a human child. The trike shot forward and went careening around the shop. She knew how to pedal, but she didn�
�t know how to steer. Sandy tried to grab the bars as she went by. Oh dear! She went straight into a row of bikes and they all came crashing down. Hugo whipped out his wallet and said we’d buy it right away, before any more damage was done.

  But Jennie wanted to ride again. She grabbed the handlebars and began trying to pull the trike away from Sandy. A tug-of-war began. And Jennie began screeching with frustration. The noises she made when she was upset! Sandy wouldn’t let her have it, and I started to yell at Jennie too. But of course nothing worked. She hung on to that trike with every ounce of her energy. Jennie never listened to me; I was just her mother. Hugo was the only one she would obey, and even then not always.

  We tried to pry Jennie away, but she just gripped harder. When that chimp held on to something, she had four hands to do it with, and you couldn’t get anything away from her. And her grip! So Hugo, he just scooped her and the trike up together, carried them out to the station wagon, and shoved them both in the back. It was just one big tangle of shiny chrome and hairy limbs.

  When we got home, Hugo pulled her out, still clinging to the trike, and put them on the lawn. We all backed off to watch. When Jennie saw that we were far enough away she untangled herself and got back on it. It wouldn’t go on the lawn. So she gave it a few good whacks and when that didn’t work, oh, did she get mad then! When Jennie had a tantrum, she would work up a screaming that was quite magnificent to hear, until she lost her breath and began to choke and gasp in her fury. At first I was positively frightened by her tantrums, but after a few of them I could only laugh. She was like the boy who held his breath until he turned blue. Chimps are just as silly and absurd as human beings. Thank goodness we’re not the only ridiculous species in the world!

  Well, she finally got it working on the driveway, and Sandy showed her how to steer. And then Sandy got out his bike, and the two of them went riding off into the sunset.

  Anyway, that was how Jennie acquired her famous trike.

  [FROM the journal of the Rev. Hendricks Palliser.]

  October 25, 1965

  A chill wind out of the northeast removed the last leaves from the birch. I watched the last one flutter and carouse in the gray morning light, and it filled me with thoughts of God. The clouds thickened at midday, a dreary rain began to fall, and the fog of the season closed over the brook. The garden in the back, with its vacant beds, the cherry tree blackened by rain and stripped of its leaves, the damp turf matted and brown, all reminded me of the great system of life and death. I opened the study window and breathed in the damp air. It smelled cold, but pregnant with dormant life, and it was a wonderful smell—truly a gift from God. And it also reminded me, in a peculiar way, of those still mornings in Belgium, before dawn, when the mist rose from the fields, so beautiful, just before the sounding of the artillery.

  I thought that we are like the last leaf of autumn, the matted grass, the sleeping tree—all part of some great invisible plan, a plan as incomprehensible to us as the cycle of seasons is to the fallen autumn leaf. Perhaps, as the cells of the leaf freeze and turn glorious color and die, the leaf does suffer in a dim way. But the leaf, as it blazes its last glory, can no more know the source of its suffering than we can. Thus we human beings suffer for the glory of God, and know not whence the suffering comes, or why.

  It is a powerful image. I shall work it into a sermon someday.

  I continued laboring over Sunday’s sermon until lunch, sketching out the main idea. I’ve called it “Predestination and Postum.” The thought I am developing is how one goes about integrating the mystical side of Protestant Christianity with quotidien living. My church suffers from being too prosaic. We lack a sense of the mystical, the unknowable, the ineffable. When I walk to the pulpit on a Sunday and see my parishioners seated so properly in their rows, so neatly dressed, so assured and expectant, I am filled with a sense of panic. I have not done what I set out to do. In forty years, what have I given these people? Only a sense of complacency?

  I am not satisfied with the title. “Predestination and Porridge”? They both have a bathetic sound. I am not, I regret, very facile with words.

  This all leads me to an extraordinary occurrence that happened this day. For some days now, at three o’clock, the boy Sandy from across the street has come riding past on his bicycle with the monkey in hot pursuit on a tricycle. The professor must be training her for an act of some kind. They generally head down to the brook path and thence into the park.

  As they passed the house, where the street slopes downhill, the poor monkey lost control of her tricycle and ran up on the lawn before ending up in a heap. I heard the most heartbreaking sound coming from her, so I rushed out to help. I bent over her, not quite knowing what to do. The poor thing held up her arms to me! And allowed me to pick her up! She hugged me in a most endearing way. She was terribly distressed.

  Without even thinking, I invited them inside for comforting, cookies, and milk. I dabbed some Mercurochrome on the animal’s knee, and she set up a loud whimpering. R. came downstairs from her afternoon nap. “What is all this caterwauling?” she said, etc., etc. Not an altogether felicitous scene followed, but mitigated by the presence of the Archibald child. But the dear little animal is so captivating that even R. was softened. She even went into the kitchen and fetched cookies and milk.

  Jennie and Sandy sat at the breakfast table, the chimp with her hands folded on the tabletop and her bright happy curious eyes darting about. When the cookies came she took one as polite as you please, from the correct (i.e., near) side of the dish. She nibbled it daintily while Sandy grubbed about with dirty hands looking for the three or four biggest, cramming one after the other into his mouth. The contrast was amusing and not lost on R. Indeed, R. was speechless. Jennie drank the milk with a rather unpleasant sucking noise and when she lowered the glass her muzzle was dripping, but then she politely wiped her mouth with the napkin and so all was well. Sandy wiped his mouth with his hand, and not—I might add—before wiping his nose.

  Jennie was wearing the hat. I had an uncomfortable moment when R. remarked on what a peculiar hat the ape was sporting. But I needn’t have worried. The hat was much altered. It was quite dreadful and unsanitary, and Jennie did not remove the hat at the table. Her manners still need work. The professor and his wife, I hasten to add, would do well to start with Sandy, however, whose lack of the finer graces is appalling.

  I made a grave error in referring to Jennie as a monkey; Sandy was quick to inform me that she is an ape, that monkeys are a much lower form of primate, and that any such reference to Jennie was as insulting as it was inaccurate. And apparently, she is with the family for good.

  I watched Jennie as she ate. I had not forgotten my earlier feelings about the animal. She seemed so alert and intelligent that I once again wondered whether she could possibly comprehend the love of God, and the love of Jesus Christ. As children do, through feeling, pictures, and story, rather than ratiocination.

  When Jennie finished her cookie and milk, she sat back in her chair and in the satisfaction of the moment she looked right at me. There was a flicker of something—a flicker of that questioning, wondering, hoping, seeking? It was that mysterious self-awareness that I see in the eyes of children as they start to understand the world. That questioning is the first step to God. Then the chimp laid her hand on mine! It seemed a kind of thank-you for my help. A brief, warm touch full of affection, while she looked at me with those eyes, as if she wished to ask something of me. It was a gesture of kindness that bridged the chasm between Man and Beast, a gesture which effaced millions of years of evolution. For the pressure of her fingers spoke to me not through the intellect but through the heart. It was a universal gesture of love, and in the electricity of that touch, I knew that Jennie had a soul. My question had been answered.

  Sandy took Jennie’s hand and they rose to go. I quickly asked them to stay for a moment, while I went into my study without really thinking what I was doing, knowing only that I desired to give Jennie
something. There I found a silver Mexican crucifix on a chain, given to me by Henry Cruikshank after his dear wife’s funeral. It is a lovely little hammered cross, intricately chased and decorated.

  When I came to the foyer, Jennie looked up at me. I kneeled in front of her with my hands behind my back. “I’ve got a present for you,” I said. I don’t know whether she understood the words, but she stretched out her hand readily enough. I gave her the crucifix and she immediately inserted it in her mouth! I gently removed it and draped it around her neck. She picked it up and gazed at it, sniffed it, tasted it with her tongue, turned it around and around. Such fascination! I watched her with great care, thinking she would try to swallow it. Finally she let it drop and Sandy and Jennie departed.

  I later found a lovely picture of the Baby Jesus that I will give Jennie on her next visit.

  I have reached a curious resolution. There are many who would ridicule the idea. I am now resolved to see what I can do to help this animal experience the love of God. As I write this, seeing in my mind’s eye those alert black eyes, I cannot help but think that the chimpanzee has a mind capable of understanding the love of God. For love is an emotion present across the animal kingdom, and combined even with a modicum of intellect can grow from the instinctual love between beasts to a higher love of the ineffable.

  N.B. So charming was Jennie that after she left R.’s steady complaints about the animal subsided. We shall see. R.’s great gift to me has been forcing me to learn patience and kindness, two qualities which are all-powerful. Patience and kindness.