Jennie officially joined our cocktail hour. We then heard from another quarter; Sandy did not like Jennie receiving any special privileges.
“No fair! How come she can drink and I can’t?” he complained.
We explained it was bad for him.
He cornered us on that one. “So it’s good for Jennie but bad for me? Or you don’t love Jennie as much as me? Is that what you’re saying?”
I could not extricate myself from my son’s logic, so I finally told him the truth: Jennie’s tantrums were far more intolerable than his were. That did not sit well with him either.
“You always let her do everything and I can’t do anything!” Sandy cried. “She gets away with murder and if I do something I always get punished. You stink.” And he stormed off to his room.
This was a common complaint of his as he entered his preteen years. It is perhaps a sign of their deep friendship that no matter how much Sandy complained about Jennie getting favored treatment, it never interfered with their relationship.
When Jennie began to drink, she also insisted on having a glass of wine at the table. We shortly found that our stock of expensive wine—I have always had a weakness for Bordeaux—was vanishing down the throat of an ape. I simply could not adjust to seeing a chimpanzee slurping down a full glass of my Léoville-Poyferré ’56, which I had laid down ten years ago and watched mature with infinite patience.
I therefore bought a case of Cold Duck for Jennie, since I thought she would like the sweetness and, more importantly, because it cost ninety-nine cents a bottle. When we first gave Jennie the Cold Duck, she drank a little, but then she noticed that her wine was a different color from the Chateau Petrus we were drinking. A different color, and no doubt inferior, must have been her conclusion. She was outraged: we were trying to fob off a shabby product on her, while reserving the best for ourselves. She promptly set her glass down, grabbed my glass, and swallowed five dollars worth of Bordeaux in a single gulp. Then she settled back in her chair with a defiant expression on her face.
We solved the wine problem by buying Jennie bottles of cheap red and white wine of the same color and appearance as what we were drinking. As long as the bottle was the same shape, and the wine the same color, Jennie did not notice that she was getting Gallo Chablis while we were getting Puligny-Montrachet.
Just as with human siblings who are close in age, Jennie and Sarah did not often see eye to eye. Jennie and Sarah were both five years old in the summer of 1969. Their relationship could be characterized as a Mexican standoff. They had very different personalities. Sarah, even from a young age, was quite fastidious, and she objected to Jennie’s rambunctiousness. Where Sarah liked order, Jennie liked chaos. Sarah liked silence; Jennie liked noise. Sarah was a thinker; Jennie was a doer. Sarah was always smiling and quiet and sweet; Jennie was loud and liked to tease. They did not have much in common. Sarah had not learned ASL with the enthusiasm of Sandy, but she knew enough to scold, insult, and threaten Jennie, and set her firmly in her place.
Sarah, for all her sweetness, had a toughness underneath that intimidated Jennie. Jennie’s modus operandi was to identify and exploit weakness, but she never could find a chink in Sarah’s armor. On the other hand, Sarah knew all of Jennie’s weaknesses—her greedy materialism, her fear of rejection, and her upset at seeing human beings cry. She exploited them whenever the need arose. Sarah did not go out of her way to put Jennie in her place, but when Jennie crossed some invisible boundary Sarah knew how to react.
Even at five, Sarah was adept at controlling Jennie. One time in Maine Jennie broke a toy of Sarah’s and hid the pieces under a chair in the living room. Sarah found them and, without saying a word to anybody, went up to Jennie’s loft and scattered the pieces in Jennie’s bed, carefully pulling up the covers. Another time Jennie stole one of Sarah’s favorite shirts and got it filthy playing in the dirt. Sarah caught her, but instead of trying to get the shirt back (which would have been impossible), she went up to Jennie’s room, took out a shirt of hers, and flapped it around in Jennie’s face. Jennie was protective of her “things,” and when she saw Sarah waving her shirt about she tried to take off Sarah’s and get her own back, signing Give shirt! Give shirt! Sarah just signed Phooey and walked away, while Jennie screamed in frustration, whacking the ground with both hands.
Jennie always seemed to know when the Maine vacation was coming up, and she became restless in the weeks leading up to August. When we started packing the car for Maine, she became almost uncontrollable. She would race about the house, scurrying up and down the stairs, out to the car and back in, signing Go! Go! Go car! Hurry! Sometimes she would pound on the car parked in the driveway and sign Bad car! Bad! as if the car itself were holding things up.
Jennie knew every landmark on the drive, and as we neared the farmhouse Jennie would become more and more excited. A large wooden Indian outside a shoe factory outlet always set her off, because it meant we were about to turn off the highway. Ten minutes later, as we turned in the driveway and the barn loomed into view, Jennie would lose control entirely and begin a pant-hoot that would build in intensity until it ended in a drawn-out scream of magnificent intensity.
[FROM a telephone call to Sarah Archibald Burnham of Manhattan, October 23, 1992.]
I got your letters, I got your messages. You can call me until the end of time, and I won’t talk to you. I just won’t. I have nothing to say. I don’t think you or anybody else has any business prying into our family’s private affairs. I will not read a letter; I will not answer a letter. So please don’t bother. I don’t mean to be rude, and maybe you’re even a nice person, I don’t know.
I will say one thing, just one thing. I’ve never said this before. But why not. My father’s dead and it can’t hurt him now. It should be said. It took me a long time and a lot of help to figure this out. I want at least this one thing in your book, if you have the guts to print it. I mean it. Print whatever garbage you’re going to print, but put this in there somewhere:
I hated that chimpanzee. And I’ll tell you why. My father loved that chimpanzee more than he did me.
So now it’s said. Good-bye.
[FROM an interview with Lea Archibald.]
The truth is that by the time Jennie reached four or five our lives had become—how shall I say it—anarchistic. When you’ve got a chimp living in your house, you find out soon enough who your real friends are. Many of our friends stopped visiting. Some of them were afraid of Jennie. Others found her noise or activity too trying. But we had many friends who loved Jennie. You had to love her to enjoy a visit to our house, particularly because you were likely to go home with broken glasses, a soiled tie, or a mussed hairdo. If you were lucky. Jennie’s ability to create mischief knew no bounds.
People talk about the terrible twos with children. With chimpanzees, I’d call it the terrible twos, threes, fours. And fives and sixes. Oh, when I think about the things she did! I’ll just give you a few examples. She’d climb up to the kitchen cabinets, take out a jar of honey, eat a few mouthfuls and then leave it sideways on the living room carpet. Open. I would be furious, but Hugo would say, “Did you see how she unscrewed that lid? Isn’t that amazing?” He didn’t have to deal with the mess. Or the time Jennie removed the back of the television set and ripped out the tubes and wires with a great shower of sparks. She could have burned down the house. You see, Hugo, in one of his experiments, taught Jennie how to use a screwdriver. What a mistake that was! We took away the screwdriver, but she found one later and hid it. We found that one, but a few weeks later she’d gotten another one. We started finding handles unscrewed, and door hinges dangling, and locks removed from doors. I was beside myself, but for the life of me I couldn’t find where she had hidden that darn screwdriver.
I tried signing to Jennie: Where screwdriver? But she was a little liar and kept saying, Don’t know. That’s another thing she learned from those experiments, how to lie. I got mad and signed Angry! Phooey! Where screwdriver? But she
stayed cool as a cucumber. Don’t know don’t know, with a guilty look in her eye. Wild horses would not drag that information out of her. This went on for a few days, and then there was a quiet spell, and we thought maybe she had lost the screwdriver. Well! One day, the screws on the liquor cabinet were removed and the bottle of gin gone. I went running up to her room and, sure enough, there she was, lying on the floor, giggling and clicking her teeth. Dead drunk! She’d taken a bottle of gin and a tube of toothpaste, and a dish, and she’d squeezed out a little toothpaste, and mixed it with gin, stirred it around with her finger, and slurped it up. And then repeated the process. She reeked of Crest and gin. It was revolting.
When she saw us, she tried to get up but she fell back laughing. And then she was sick all over herself. I was wild, but Hugo found the whole thing fascinating. Why, he says, do you see what this means? Jennie has the ability to deceive! To plan ahead! Or some such rot. I can’t remember what it proved, except that it proved Jennie needed a good licking. So I locked her in the bathroom, which coincidentally happened to be where she had hidden the screwdriver, and the little vixen unscrewed the doorknob and escaped. That’s how I found it. It was in the bathroom cabinet. Here I had turned the house upside down and there it was, in plain sight.
That was the way it went. Jennie would find ever more clever ways to get into mischief, Hugo would go on and on about her ingenuity while I cleaned up the mess. Do I sound a little resentful? I suppose I am. Hugo had all the fun, while I was mopping the floor.
Sometimes we gave dinner parties. Less frequently as Jennie grew older. It was a special guest who could enjoy a meal with Jennie. Some of them were disastrous. Oh dear, I remember one time we had President Julius Whitehead of Harvard University over for dinner. With his wife. My goodness. This wasn’t long after Jennie’s triumphal coming-out at the Museum of Fine Arts benefit. Hugo had been given an adjunct professorship at Harvard, you see, and we felt an obligation to invite President Whitehead over for dinner. Besides, Whitehead and his wife had read all about Jennie in the society columns and just had to meet her. Well! They met her all right.
First, we had cocktails. President Whitehead had a daiquiri, and Jennie a gin and tonic. I think the Whiteheads were a bit scandalized to see Jennie drinking in the first place. We only put a tiny bit of alcohol in Jennie’s drinks. Anyway, Jennie took one look at her boring glass and another at Whitehead’s nice green drink, and made a decision. She sidled up to Whitehead and handed him her drink. He said, “Oh, is this for me? How nice!” while he put his drink down to accept it.
That’s what Jennie had been waiting for. Her hairy hand flashed out and swiped his drink, and she scurried under a table and drank it with a great slurp while Hugo scolded in his usual ineffectual manner.
“Oh my,” was all President Whitehead said. He was a rather stiff person, you know. He should have objected more strenuously. If you were a stranger to Jennie, you had to show her who was boss right away. Or she would test you again and again. So, at dinner, Jennie ate her fruit cocktail very fast and reached over and took his, before the poor man had even lifted his spoon. He was so busy pontificating he hadn’t begun to eat. I tried to tell her, No, Jenny, give back. But she just signed back Phooey!, which was a rather vulgar gesture. Then she opened her mouth, and dumped the fruit in, spilling it all down her shirt and on the table. Then she started picking up each piece with her lips. Oh dear. President and Mrs. Whitehead just sat there. There was a . . . a passivity or weakness about him that Jennie sensed and took advantage of. It was his upper-class Boston upbringing, you know, being a member of a dying class. He didn’t last much longer and then Harvard wised up and hired that wonderful fellow, I forget his name. Bok. At any rate, I signed No! Bad Jennie, leave table next time. She hated to leave the table and I thought that would make her obey.
The next course was steak. Jennie didn’t like steak, so I felt Whitehead’s meal would be safe. We’d prepared her a bowl of oatmeal, fruit, and honey, which she loved. But no, she had to have President Whitehead’s steak, so she reached over, grabbed it off his plate, and shoved it into her mouth. Then she made a face, pulled it out, and threw it into the kitchen! I was just mortified.
We sent her from the table, screaming piteously, and locked her in the bathroom. For the rest of the dinner we had to endure a screaming tantrum, with the whole house shaking from her pounding. Naturally, the Whiteheads couldn’t wait to leave. I was so embarrassed, but Hugo thought it was rather funny. He thought Whitehead was a bit of a stuffed shirt. I was worried it might get him into trouble at Harvard, but Hugo said he was just a figurehead, a fund-raiser.
What else can I tell you about those years? Jennie loved to drive in the car. She was like a dog. She’d stick her head out the open window into the wind. She screamed and pounded on the outside of the car when she saw something interesting.
When we stopped at a light, and Jennie saw something interesting in the car next to us, she would scream with delight and start signing and hooting and waving her hands. All heads in the car would turn and stare. The utter shock on those people’s faces! People are so unimaginative. Anything slightly out of the routine upsets them so. And heaven forbid if there was a dog in the car! Dogs went crazy at the sight of Jennie.
One time, I think it was around 1970, we were driving and Jennie had her head out the window as usual. She pulled back in and signed Go, go, pointing down a street. I couldn’t for the life of me understand what she wanted. But I was curious, so I turned. From then on Jennie directed me, signing Go and pointing. We turned and turned and finally we drew abreast of an Ice Cream Palace and Jennie signed Stop! Stop! and let out a gust of food sounds, hooting and grunting. She tumbled out of the car and scooted up to the window, cutting the line, of course, just shoving everyone aside. Oh my goodness. Then she started pounding on the counter and reaching in the window, making her hungry-hoot sound. The girls behind the window were squealing “The chimp’s back! Jennie’s back! Hello, Jennie!” They made a terrific fuss over her. I asked Hugo about it later and he said that the weekend before he had taken Sandy and Jennie to the Ice Cream Palace. She remembered how to get there! Isn’t that remarkable? She was quite a genius.
She got to know the location of many of the fast-food places around town, and after this success she was constantly signaling Go! and Stop! while we were in the car, and pounding on the door in frustration when we drove by a Howard Johnsons or an Ice Cream Palace, or even a vending machine at a gas station. It became a rather annoying habit, to tell you the truth.
Sarah was six at this time, and she and Jennie had reached a kind of understanding. Sarah had her room and Jennie was not allowed in. That chimp respected her. Oh yes. Sarah wasn’t going to take any guff from Jennie, and Jennie knew it. Sarah was no la-di-dah little girl. Once in a while they had their clashes, but Sarah always won. Jennie took some food off Sarah’s plate once, some noodles. Sarah was only five, but as calm as you please she picked up a fistful of noodles and mashed them down on Jennie’s head. Jennie was so surprised, and really quite humiliated when we all started to laugh. That was the last time she ever took food from Sarah. Another time she got into Sarah’s room—which we usually kept locked, but somebody must have forgotten—and stole a great armful of toys. She hid them in her own toy box.
Well! Sarah wasn’t going to take that lying down. She went into Jennie’s room—which made Jennie nervous because Sarah never went into her room—opened the toy box, and proceeded to take her toys back and all of Jennie’s toys. Normally Jennie would have been furious, but she knew she was guilty and sat there. I think Sarah made four or five trips, stealing every one of Jennie’s toys, while Jennie sat in the corner, signing Bad, bad! and whimpering. It was only after Sarah left that Jennie started a commotion, screaming and banging on her toy chest. And then Sarah, still calm, proceeded to return Jennie’s toys. Keeping her own, of course. It showed Jennie that Sarah was in control, and it was a brilliant little ploy on Sarah’s part. Jennie almos
t never touched any of Sarah’s toys after that. In some ways I think Sarah handled Jennie better than any of us.
[EXCERPTS from an unpublished manuscript titled “Conversations with a Chimpanzee” by Dr. Pamela Prentiss.]
Setting: Archibald yard, under the crab apple tree, 4:00 P.M. Wednesday, April 16, 1970.
Pam: What’s that?
Jennie: Bug.
Pam: What kind bug?
Jennie: Bug bug.
Pam: Butterfly. Sign butterfly.
Jennie: Attempts to sign. Butterfly is a sign Jennie knows but has not learned well.
Pam: Butterfly.
Jennie: Red butterfly.
Pam: Pretty butterfly yellow not red.
Jennie: Red butterfly yellow.
Pam: Yellow.
Jennie: Red.
Pam: Yellow.
Jennie: Yellow, yellow, phooey.
Pam: Phooey to you.
Jennie: Chase tickle Jennie.
Pam: Ignores request and points to ant. What’s that?
Jennie: Chase tickle Jennie!
Pam: What’s that?
Jennie: Bad bug.
Pam: Ant. Sign ant.
Jennie: Black bug. Squashes ant with her foot.
Pam: Ouch! Ant dead.
Jennie: Ant. (Dead is not a sign Jennie knows.)
Pam: Sign dead. Dead. Molds Jennie’s hands in the sign for “dead.”
Jennie: Dead. Dead.
Pam: Ant now dead. Pam picks up dead ant, shows to Jennie.
Jennie Page 17
