Jennie

by Douglas Preston

  [FROM Recollecting a Life by Hugo Archibald.]

  Jennie had been with us two months when the weather turned cold. No longer could she sleep in her little tree house; she would have to move inside, and the question naturally arose as to where she would spend her nights.

  This problem, for the first time, made us see the full ramifications of having an ape in our lives. While she was living in the tree house, we could still, however improbably, think of her as a pet. Once she moved into the house, it became clear that she did not regard herself as a pet and would not tolerate the assumption in others.

  We first tried her in a nice dog bed in the kitchen. The very idea was an insult: the floor was where the despised dogs slept. The first night we tried to bed her down there, she was soon up and pounding on Sandy’s door, hooting and screeching. Sandy did not take well to this attack on his domain.

  “Get out of here! This is my room!” he shouted. “Go find your own room, stupid!” Then Jennie came to our door and started hammering on it with her tiny fists.

  We tried her in one of the spare bedrooms, but she hated to be shut in an empty room. As soon as we had withdrawn for the night, she was up, out, and banging on our doors. We tried to lock her in, but the tantrum that resulted threatened to shift the foundation of our house.

  We decided to try her in our room. We piled her blankets in the corner and cajoled her to bed down there, but Jennie would have none of it. As soon as Lea and I were in bed, Jennie hopped up and began bouncing around, laughing and smacking her lips.

  “Jennie!” I shouted the first night. “Bad chimp! Get off!”

  Jennie jumped off and jumped on and off again in a whirlwind of motion.

  “Stop it! Bad, bad Jennie!”

  She crouched in her corner, whimpering. I must have dozed off, for the next thing I remember were the covers being pulled off.

  “It’s that damn chimp,” said my wife. And there was Jennie, braced at the corner of the bed, tugging the covers with all her might. She was determined to spend the night in our bed.

  “Jennie!” I yelled. “No!”

  She dropped to a crouch on the floor and covered her head with her hands, shrieking miserably.

  “Jennie, goddamnit, stop screaming!” I hollered.

  She rocked back and forth on her heels, screaming louder.

  “Hugo, you know when you yell at her all she does is scream louder,” said Lea.

  I gathered Jennie up and put her outside, locking the door between us. She redoubled her efforts, pounding, snuffling, rattling the doorknob. When I got up I could see her fingers curling under the door, while she heaved and stamped on the other side.

  “I don’t care what you do,” I heard Lea’s muffled voice say from the bed. “Just make her shut up.”

  I opened the door to discipline her, but she shot past me and dove under the covers, burrowing madly.

  “What!” my poor wife said, now wide awake, laughing in spite of herself. “Hugo! There’s an ape in our marriage bed!” She found it very funny. It was impossible to be angry at Jennie.

  Jennie was moving around under the covers, laughing and clacking her teeth.

  “If we let her sleep in here once,” Lea said, “we’re done for.”

  I should have heeded my wife, but at the time, having fought battles with Jennie for four nights running, I didn’t have the energy for another try.

  “She’ll be all right,” I said. “If we can just get her to stay on one side and shut up. We’ll put her outside again in the spring.”

  “Good luck with that,” said Lea.

  We tried to sleep. Jennie kicked and jerked and wriggled until Lea and I were huddled at the edges of the bed, while Jennie lorded the middle. Periodically, she reached out with a hairy hand to check if we were still there. Lea finally reached her limit. With a cry of frustration she got up and whipped the covers off Jennie, who sprang up with a hoot, thinking a wonderful new game was about to begin. Lea tried scolding Jennie, but the chimp began one of her whirling dervish acts, screwing the sheets around herself. Lea seized her and together we managed to get her deposited into a nest of blankets in the corner. She sensed that this time we were serious, and she went to sleep without further ado.

  For three or four nights after that, Jennie slept in the corner, in her tangled nest. She never snored and we never heard a peep out of her, so we concluded that everything was going to be all right. Then one night I became amorous, and before I knew what was happening Jennie was on top of me, screaming and hitting, clearly distressed. When I tried to push her off, she bit my arm. It was not a serious bite, just a quick pinch, but it surprised me. As far as we knew, she had not bitten a human being before.

  When I related this story to Harold Epstein, he asked if I was familiar with Dr. Jane Goodall’s research on chimpanzees in Tanganyika. Goodall had made the interesting observation that infant chimpanzees become violently upset when males mate their mothers, and often try to interfere with and prevent the copulative act. Harold was deeply interested in Jennie’s reaction and he felt that it showed this kind of behavior must be genetically programmed.

  That was the end of Jennie’s nights in our room. We forced Jennie to sleep in the spare bedroom. It was a long, painful process, entailing many sleepless nights while we listened to Jennie’s muffled screams echoing through the woodwork. She felt she had been given shabby treatment indeed. She never did reoccupy her tree house, except during the day. The spare bedroom became Jennie’s room forever.

  Jenny, we came to understand, had a highly developed sense of justice. She sincerely believed that she was human and should enjoy all the perquisites pertaining thereto. She would not allow herself to be treated in any way different from how we treated our children. If she perceived a difference—if, for example, Sandy was given a candy bar and she wasn’t—she took it as a great injustice. Her sense of fairness was almost as highly developed as it is among human siblings, who, as any parent knows, are ready to protest any hint of favoritism.

  Not long after Jennie arrived Harold asked me whether Jennie had ever seen herself in a mirror. Harold took a scientific interest in Jennie and questioned me at length about her behavior. In this case, I thought back and realized that, in fact, she had not. Much has been written about the chimpanzee concept of “self.” Cognitive tests using chimpanzees and mirrors have proven, beyond doubt, that chimpanzees do have a sense of self.

  That evening, Jennie saw herself in a mirror for the first time. We wondered how she would react, since it was clear to us that she considered herself human and probably never realized she looked any different from the rest of us. It was our first “experiment” with Jennie. I removed the dressing mirror from Lea’s closet door and placed it at the top of the stairs. Then we called Jennie.

  She came bounding up the stairs without a care in the world, but when she reached the top and saw her image in the mirror, she stopped dead. Her hair bristled up and she “displayed” by swaggering about, stamping her feet on the floor, and staring aggressively. When the image did not flee as expected she became angry and charged. Naturally, her double showed equal fearlessness and charged right back, and this frightened Jennie half to death. She skidded to a halt and backed off screaming and grimacing in fear. Then she turned and fled down the stairs. If she had a tail it would have been between her legs.

  At the bottom she gathered her wits and crept back up. Again, she had the unpleasant experience of seeing this black, hairy creature staring at her from the mirror. She stood there transfixed. Suddenly her expression changed. What was this? The ugly brute was wearing a hat just like hers! Her hair gradually subsided as it dawned on her that the image in the mirror was of herself. She took the hat off her head and looked at it, and put it back on, and went up to the mirror and ran her hands all over the mirror’s surface. Then she simply walked away.

  After that, mirrors held no interest for her, and she ignored them. It was not until much later that other experiments showed jus
t how complex an image of “self” Jennie had.

  It snowed in late December, the first storm of the season. It was a big one, and we were curious to see how Jennie would react. It began in the afternoon. With the cold weather, Jennie had been spending much of her time in the library, where she could bang on an old upright piano, wait at the window seat to spot Sandy returning from school, or warm herself by the fire. There was scant potential for mischief in the library, since the books and other breakables were safely locked up behind screens. Lea eventually installed a big box in the library and filled it with Jennie’s dolls and toys.

  On this particular day, Jennie was sitting on the window seat, as usual, waiting for Sandy, when a few flakes wandered out of a leaden sky. As the snow became heavier she stood up and pressed her face to the window. As it fogged up from her breath she kept wiping a little hole with her finger, just large enough for her eye. She peered at the falling snow with fascination. Finally she went to the coat closet where we kept her jacket and booties, and drummed on the door with her little fists. This was her signal that she wanted to go out.

  Lea and I dressed her and we all went outside. By this time, the snow was heavy. She looked into the sky and was startled and annoyed by the cold flakes striking her face. She began to shake her head and rub her face, swatting at the flakes as they swirled about her, becoming more excited, whirling about and flailing her arms. Her excited hoots echoed through the neighborhood.

  The next day was bright and cold, and Sandy took her out on the sled. She sat while he pulled her along the snowy street in front of the house. Jennie would not stop eating snow. Whenever any snow got on her booties she would raise her foot to her mouth and carefully eat it off. Soon more children had appeared with their sleds, flying saucers, and toboggans, and they went off to a favorite sledding hill on the golf course. For hours, we could hear Jennie’s excited screams drifting across the snow-covered course. After that, she often went sledding with Sandy and the other neighborhood children.

  The library was Jennie’s living room during the winter. She loved to roast apples in the fire. Eventually she was able to wrap them herself with tinfoil, chuck them in the fire, and fish them out with a poker when they were done. Then she would squat by the cooling apples, staring at them while issuing grunts of anticipation and clacking her teeth. Seized with impatience, she would often try to grab one before it had sufficiently cooled, burn herself, and screech with frustration while drumming a tattoo with her feet on the hearth.

  When not in the library, Jennie spent most of her time in the den with Sandy, watching television. She was curiously attracted to westerns, and she loved the sound of the shooting guns and galloping horses. Most of all she liked the food advertising on television. Whenever food was depicted on the screen, she would start making her “hungry hoot” sound and crowd the television screen, poking it with her fingers, trying to get as close a look as possible. She always seemed to hope, against all odds, that some attractive morsel might suddenly fall out of the screen into her hands. There was one advertisement in particular that saturated the airwaves at the time. It showed a refrigerator opening up to the sound of a swelling orchestra, with a great mass of fruit tumbling out as if from a cornucopia. All her favorite fruits were there: apples, grapes, bananas, peaches, and oranges. Jennie erupted with delighted screams when the advertisement came on. Even hearing the music would start her pant-hooting or racing from an adjacent room into the den. The advertisement had an electrifying effect on her. As soon as it concluded she often headed straight for the refrigerator and hammered on the door. Jennie confirmed my suspicions that television advertising is directed mainly at people with the IQ of a pongid.

  [FROM an interview with Lea Archibald.]

  In a twinkling, Jennie changed our lives. If you think having a baby changes things, you ought to get a chimp. She had so many tricks up her sleeve. During dinner, she’d get under the table and untie all our shoelaces. Thank goodness she never learned how to tie knots, or we’d all have been tied together. And then there was that vulgar sound she made, that Bronx cheer. A razzing of the lips. Well! Hugo tried to tell me this was a natural sound they make in the jungle, but I happen to know he taught it to her. In secret. Hugo had a mischievous streak a mile wide. And those lips of hers! Hugo used to make this demonstration in front of guests. He would hold a piece of candy right in front of Jennie’s mouth, and her lips would pucker to a point, right where the candy was. Then he would move the candy from side to side, and the little puckered point of her lips would travel from one side of her mouth to the other! It was the funniest looking thing!

  Jennie imitated everything we did. When Hugo was finished with the paper in the morning, Jennie would pick it off the table and take it to the floor. It was so dear. She would go through all the motions of reading the paper, unfolding it, staring intently at it, turning the pages, and clacking her teeth. Occasionally she would stop to sniff a picture. Pretty soon the paper would start to fall apart. A page would drop out, or the top would collapse on her head. And she would start to get mad, and whack the paper. Well! That just made things worse. And she would shake it angrily, and paper would fly out, and pretty soon she’d be sitting in a heap of crumpled papers, screeching in frustration.

  She watched me put on makeup. Just fascinated. As soon as my back was turned, white powder would be flying everywhere and there she was, looking just awful, like the creature from the black lagoon, her little black eyes blinking out of this horrid white face! Oh my goodness. She used to drag Hugo’s briefcase around. Clomping around looking very important and officious. If Hugo left it unlocked, she’d reach inside and then the papers would be all over! Or she’d dump it out and stir up the papers to make a nest. Served Hugo right. He always had that briefcase. I’d come down when we were going to Maine for a weekend, and there it was sitting by the door. And he’d say that he just had a little bit of work to do. Then he’d work all weekend and we’d only see him at dinner! How I hated that horrid briefcase!

  There, you see. I’m off the subject again.

  [FROM an interview with Harold Epstein]

  Simia quam similis, turpissima bestia, nobis! Write that down. That should be the motto of our book. “How like us is the ape, vilest of beasts, and how noble!” Cicero, I think. . . . Anyway, how true it was. Jennie displayed the worst and the best of all the human qualities. It was a revelation to watch her. I can’t begin to tell you. It made me question our species’ claim to some kind of special status.

  During that first year and a half, Hugo brought Jennie into the museum several days a week. The museum has very long straight corridors. Jennie learned to ride a tricycle and she went wheeling down the halls, chattering and hooting, and making a hairy menace of herself. It used to startle visiting scientists. [Laughs.]

  While Hugo worked, Jennie made the rounds. She stopped at office doors and knocked. This was no polite tap, mind you, but a pounding and kicking that threatened to separate the door from its hinges. She was an unruly child, like that bad girl in the children’s books, Eloise. When she came swaggering into your office, man alive, you had better batten down the hatches, for anything loose was going to get broken, eaten, or stolen.

  You may wonder why we all put up with her. The answer is simple: everyone adored her. I take that back; there was one fellow who did not like Jennie. He was the elevator man, a sour old Scotsman named Will. To this poor man’s sorrow, Jennie learned how useful the elevator was. She seemed to be under the impression that the more she pushed the elevator call button, the sooner the elevator would come. I’d see Jennie at the elevator, pressing the button, and I’d hear Will’s voice echoing up the shaft (I hope I can do justice to his brogue): “All right, I’m coming, I’m coming! Knock off, you bluidy ape! Have done!” [Laughs.]

  Jennie often stopped by my office. We were great pals, Jennie and I. I’d hear the rattle of the trike and a tattoo of pounding would shake the office. She immediately demanded a hug, her arms outstretc
hed. That vital business being taken care of, she wandered about, poking at papers, picking up things and putting them in her mouth, climbing on tables and chairs, making the odd snatch at my pipe. She was determined to have that pipe! But I was too quick for the hairy devil. I kept a stack of old Natural History magazines and she poured over those, turning the pages and running her fingers over the photographs. As if verifying their two-dimensionality. Very interesting. She had a bad habit of tearing out pages. She favored pictures of animals, but pictures of humans held no interest for her.

  One issue had an article on chimpanzees, and I showed it to her as a kind of experiment. Her reaction was extremely interesting. The first picture stopped her cold. By this time she knew what she looked like, having seen herself in the mirror.

  She scrutinized the photographs, turning the pages back and forth, holding the magazine up to her nose. She then touched her face. It was as if she were trying to see if the pictures were a reflection of her. She made a low “oooooo ooo” sound—a sound she made only when she was intensely curious. She spent a good half hour examining the pictures before moving on to something else. And my friend, half an hour for Jennie was quite a long time.

  She lunched with Hugo in the staff dining room, at the curators’ table. She occupied the seat of honor. Hugo and I often went to lunch together. As we approached the dining room Jennie became more and more excited, riding ahead on her tricycle, pedaling furiously, her maniacal hoots echoing along the corridor. There was a bump, a ridge, on the stone floor right before the dining room entrance. Most of the time Jennie would stop and carry her trike over the ridge, but in her excitement once in a while she forgot. She whizzed along, hooting away, her legs pumping, and she turned the corner and we heard a clunk! crash! and then an eruption of screams. We would try to warn her, calling: “Look out, Jennie! Don’t fall!” But when she was hungry she never minded anyone. When she was full she never minded. She never minded, period.