Music was the only interest Jennie and Sarah had in common. Unfortunately, their respective ways of appreciating music were very different. As soon as the sounds of a Chopin prelude floated out of the living room, Jennie would appear out of nowhere and sit on the sofa with her eyes half closed, her lips pursed. As the music swelled to a climax, Jennie would begin to make unpleasant noises. We charitably called her noises “singing,” although they sounded more like the wheezing of a dying poodle. Sarah could not tolerate noise while she listened to her beloved Chopin. She had many clever ways of dealing with Jennie. Sometimes she stopped the record, went to the kitchen, and rattled the padlock on the refrigerator. Jennie could never resist the sound of an opening refrigerator, and she scurried toward the kitchen. Meanwhile, Sarah quickly returned to the living room via the back hall, locked the door, and started the record again, while Jennie banged on the refrigerator and rattled the doors. (Like the Kibbencook house, our farmhouse in Maine had locks on both sides of all the doors, as well as on the refrigerator and cupboards.) If that ruse failed, she would take a banana and throw it on the lawn; when Jennie raced out to get it she would lock the door.
That spring I bought a boat, a secondhand Boston Whaler with an eighteen-horsepower engine. It was not a big boat, but it was seaworthy. We took it out for the first time that August. Jennie, naturally, insisted on coming. After we felt comfortable with the boat we allowed Jennie to steer it. She sat in my lap while I controlled the throttle. She weaved about the ocean, turning the wheel this way and that, hooting with pleasure and hopping up and down. She became so excited at one point that she let go of the wheel and whirled around and around, her ultimate expression of joy. Handling the wheel gave her a sense of power and control, which she found enormously exciting.
We took the boat to a place called Brackett’s Ledge, which was covered with seals at low tide. It was a low spine of rock, black with seaweed, which the waves pounded incessantly. Jennie had never seen a seal. We pointed them out to her and she looked and looked, but she could not distinguish the seals from the rocks. When we got too close and they all started to shimmy into the water, Jennie squeaked with fright and crammed herself under the seat, whimpering. The seals began popping up in the water around us, curious, and we eventually coaxed Jennie out to watch them.
Jennie stared at them intently, a look of deep interest in her face. After a while she lost her fear and signed Play, play! at them. We didn’t know what the sign for seal was, and we did not have the ASL dictionary with us, so we made up a sign and taught it to her.
From then on, all we heard from Jennie was begging to Go seal! Go seal! Go boat seal! She became a fanatic seal watcher.
After that we often took the boat out to Brackett’s Ledge and from there went on to Hermit Island. Hermit Island was an ideal playground for Jennie. One could not have created a better environment for a rambunctious chimpanzee. It was deserted, and Jennie could race around, climb trees, pull up plants, throw stones, beat sticks on the ground, scream, and break branches, all activities we had tried to discourage at home. The boat was anchored in a cove offshore, beyond Jennie’s reach. Jennie could be herself on the island without our having to keep track of her or worry about her.
On the northern end of the island was a thick stand of black spruce trees, which Jennie climbed. When she reached the top she sometimes held on by one hand and swayed back and forth, howling with abandon at the sea, drunk with freedom. When she came down she had sap all over her arms and legs. She ran through the meadows screeching with joy, and she spent many hours whirling around trying to catch the monarch butterflies that floated among the milkweed and chokecherries. When she caught them, she cupped them in her hands and smelled them, as if they were flowers. When she released them, some would drop to earth traumatized or crushed, while others flew off in a spiraling panic while she watched, her hands and nose dusted with the orange powder from their wings.
The island was named for an old hermit who once lived there, and his house still stood in the center of the island. It was made of beachstones cemented together, with a wooden roof. The walls were almost two feet thick and a fireplace was built in a corner. Other than a few holes in the roof it made a perfect place to spend the night. It sheltered us from the wind and the salt spray off the rocks and the soaking fogs of the mornings.
The hermit’s name was John Tundish, and he had a curious history. According to the locals, Tundish had been born on a farm on the mainland. He was a simple, friendly boy. The farthest he had ever been from his house, they said, was Blacks Cove, about five miles to the south. When World War II broke out he enlisted, and was sent to Fort Pendleton in California, and from there shipped to the South Pacific.
Little was heard from him. When he returned from the war in 1945, he had stopped speaking. Not a word would he say to anyone. He bought Hermit Island—it was called Thrumcap Island at the time—for twenty-five dollars and moved there, where he lived for ten years.
He shopped at a store on the mainland once a month. One month he did not appear. When he failed to show up the following month, some locals went to the island to see if he needed help or was sick. They found his boat, carefully pulled up on the beach, his bed made, canned goods stacked in a corner, clothes folded in a trunk. There was no sign of him, and he was never seen again. He had completely disappeared.
Some said he was caught in an undertow while taking a morning swim, while others said he inherited money and went to Boston. He had no family and title to the island was eventually acquired by the state of Maine.
The odd thing about it, or so the locals said, was that Tundish had been posted well behind the front and had never seen combat. Shell shock or the horrors of war were not the reason for his silence. The townsfolk had no explanation for what had happened to him, except to nod and say, “Well now, they was all a little crazy in that family.”
When we camped on the island, we sometimes took the boat out in the afternoon to catch a dinner of fresh mackerel. The first time we went fishing, Jennie watched intently the preparations, but when the first flapping fish was hauled in she screamed and dove under the seat. She soon got over her fright, and one day we let Jennie take the rod. Almost immediately she had a strike. Sandy hollered “Reel it in!” but at first Jennie was so excited all she could do was scream and hop up and down while the rod jerked and twitched. We finally got her reeling it in, and when the fish arrived she was beside herself with excitement. She grabbed it and banged it on the bottom of the boat and slapped and stomped on it. Jennie had seen us killing and cleaning fish, and this was her way of helping out. As soon as the fish was safely in the creel she started signing frantically Fish! Fish! and grabbing at the rod. She became a true fanatic.
Jennie reeled in one mackerel after another. It was a good year for mackerel and one could be certain of catching a fish by dropping a line in the water and trolling for a few minutes. As much as she liked to catch them, once they were dead she lost all interest in them, and she did not relish eating them. When we fried them up for dinner she made terrible grimacing faces at the smell and often moved as far away from the fireplace as she could.
She slept curled up in her blanket against Sandy in his sleeping bag. Lea took a photograph of them one morning as the light came in the cabin windows, a photograph which is now framed in my office. Sandy’s long hair is sticking out in all directions, and his mouth is open and drool is on the pillow, just like a little boy. All his radical trappings seem stripped away, leaving his innocence. Jennie lies next to him with her arm thrown around his shoulder and a look of deep contentment on her brown face. When I look at that picture I can still hear the gulls crying outside, the sound of the surf, and the smell of seaweed and salt air coming in through the broken window frames. It was a magical summer.
On a visit to the island near the end of the summer, Sandy made an extraordinary discovery. He was cleaning out the fireplace (under protest) and he discovered a loose stone in the back. He pulled it
out and found a secret hiding place. In the hiding place was a small, hexagonal wooden box.
He called us all inside and we watched him open it up. We were hoping for South Sea jewels or a stack of gold doubloons, but instead the lid crumbled in his hand, revealing a long letter and a bundle of photographs. Folded up in a piece of paper were a Morgan head silver dollar and a blue turquoise bead.
We were disappointed when we inspected our treasure. The photographs were completely ruined by time, water, and rot. One could see nothing. The letter, also, had rotted and the pages stuck together. Furthermore, the ink had been leached out by rain coming down the chimney. The silver dollar and the bead were the only items relatively unscathed by time. Sandy kept the silver dollar, but I do not know what happened to the rest.
After Labor Day we returned to Kibbencook. That was when Dr. Prentiss regretfully informed us that she could no longer tutor Jennie. Jennie had been very fond of Dr. Prentiss, and she took her departure hard, waiting on the appropriate days for her car, sulking all day long.
The most difficult change was yet to come. In October or November, Jennie went into estrus for the first time. This was not a full-blown estrus, but an early, pubescent version. Female chimpanzees, when they cycle, show a dramatic change in their genital region, which swells up and becomes pink. The sexual impulses of a female chimpanzee in heat are far more powerful than those of a human.
Jennie did not understand what was happening to her and had no idea how to deal with it. During this first estrus, she became restless and almost impossible to control. She acted in ways that were embarrassing and socially inappropriate. She became particularly irritable toward me and Sandy. She would not allow us to approach her, let alone touch her, and she often broke into loud screams if we approached. She also became curiously incommunicative and ignored many of our efforts to sign to her. Lea and I knew well that chimpanzees become difficult when they reach puberty. And yet, we had managed to persuade ourselves that Jennie would be different. We felt we knew Jennie even better than we knew each other. We were wrong.
While in estrus she found being confined intolerable, even though she had always slept in a locked room. We had to listen to her screaming and pounding much of the night, and one night during that first estrus she managed to break the lock and get out.
She wrought havoc in the kitchen, and even overturned the refrigerator in her efforts to wrench off the padlock. We had to hire a man to build a steel door to her room and put bars on the windows. We hated to see her room turned into a cage, but there seemed to be no alternative. We did not want her to hurt herself or anyone else.
During estrus Jennie also became incontinent. She seemed to have trouble retaining her urine, or for some behavioral reason she began urinating in various rooms of the house. Harold Epstein, Dr. Prentiss, and I consulted on this, but we could find no research on chimpanzees that indicated how or why this kind of problem might have occurred.
Up to this point, Sandy and Jennie had a true sibling friendship. Jennie’s cycling disrupted even this. She lost interest in being around Sandy, ceased to obey him, and became irritated when he tried to play with her. Sandy was sixteen and Jennie’s behavior angered and puzzled him. Sixteen-year-old boys are often quite inflexible in the way they relate to others, and Sandy could not understand that it was a natural change in Jennie. It caused a minor estrangement between them, and Sandy began going out without Jennie.
All this had one unfortunate result: it threw a great burden on Lea’s shoulders. Jennie could no longer come to the museum; she could no longer spend time with Dr. Prentiss; and she was going out less with Sandy. Instead, she stayed at home all day, fretted, grumped, and got into trouble. For her own sanity Lea was forced to lock Jennie in her room for hours at a time, where the chimp screamed and carried on. We even had to discontinue Jennie’s visits to the old Reverend Palliser’s house. Palliser had become increasingly forgetful, and we feared for his safety. Jennie was wild.
When she came out of that first estrus, her personality did not entirely return to normal, although things settled down. There were still cool relations between Sandy and Jennie. Several months later she cycled again and the difficult period started all over, only worse. I was being called home from the museum by Lea again and again to handle one crisis after another. My work was suffering badly. Sarah found Jennie’s presence even more odious, and she began spending inordinate amounts of time at a friend’s house.
By the beginning of 1974, it was starting to look as if our family was falling apart.
[FROM an interview with Harold Epstein.]
We live in a nation of ignoramuses. The average American knows nothing about science. A man asked me once if the stars went away when the sun rose, or if they were still there but you just couldn’t see them. He was a stockbroker I had the misfortune of employing, a man who made over one hundred thousand dollars a year! Well, I took my investments away from him, damn quick! And then the market climbed five hundred points. Oh well, that’s another story.
I do not begrudge the average American his ignorance. It’s a free country. But when you have elected officials, people who wield enormous power, who flaunt their ignorance, that is a different matter.
Senator William Proxmire was one of those people. Here we had a man of colossal ego and great power who was as ignorant as a—a poodle, who destroyed the scientific careers of many good people. Every year, the whole country would read about the Golden Fleece awards and laugh and snicker about these silly scientists with their absurd experiments. Now some experiments were trivial. It is a fact that most science is pedestrian. But Proxmire usually missed the real target—that is, faulty research—and demolished something important and worthy.
This was what happened to the Jennie project. Here we were, spending all this taxpayer money teaching chimps a few hundred signs. They had no clue as to how this would illuminate our understanding of human linguistic development. Or the evolution of language. Proxmire had no idea that this research might enhance the way we teach language to retarded or handicapped children. There was no understanding of the revolutionary results of our work, and how it revealed for the first time the mind of an ape—and how it helped us understand what it means to be human. No thought was given to what it would mean to be able to communicate for the first time with another species! No. It was framed as, “So, after half a million, what did the chimps say?” Well, not much, when you really analyze it. That wasn’t the point, for God’s sake! And the scientists who supported us were afraid to object. They didn’t want to attract Proxmire’s attention. Cowards, every one.
Anyway, going into 1974, things got very tough for Hugo and Lea. Hugo and I had had many discussions about what would happen when Jennie went into puberty. I was far more worried than Hugo. I tried to tell him that no family had ever kept a home-raised chimpanzee much past puberty. I emphasized that Jennie was not like a dog or cat, that she was a wild animal. Hugo didn’t believe it. He was optimistic and naive. He said that they had been through a lot with Jennie: They could weather anything. She was part of the family forever. He would never abandon her.
I pointed out to him that chimpanzees can live to be forty or fifty years old. Well, I said, who’s going to take care of Jennie after he and Lea became too old? Hugo sweated a little over that one but finally said that Sandy would probably take care of her. And what about Sandy’s future wife? I asked. How will she feel about a chimpanzee in the house? Had Sandy agreed to this?
Hugo then said that the problem was no different, say, than having a mentally retarded child. But (I pointed out) you can’t put Jennie in an institution. There are no social services for Jennie. She won’t qualify for governmental assistance, welfare, or Medicaid. She’s an animal, I said to Hugo. An animal. Was he financially able to create an endowed facility that would take care of Jennie for the rest of her life? Did he know how much principal it would take to yield, say, an income of one hundred thousand a year? Or was he going to put her in
a zoo?
Hugo became defensive under this kind of questioning. Angry, even. He accused me of being a Cassandra, of always looking at the bad side. I hated to make him face these issues, but who else was going to do it? At least, I thought, Hugo will be somewhat prepared. Or so I hoped.
The inevitable happened. Jennie reached adolescence and went into estrus. Her whole personality changed. This was a very sudden change. Very sudden. While things had been worsening for a while, this was a whole new ball game. You know how traumatic it is when human children suddenly find themselves with these strange and powerful new feelings. It was worse for Jennie, operating on a foreign biology. Female chimpanzees are much more promiscuous than human females.
Hugo came into the museum, and almost every day I heard another disaster story. Jennie was running Lea ragged. Every week there was another uproar, another crisis. Meanwhile, Sandy, who had been a stabilizing force for Jennie, was slipping away from the family and becoming more involved in radical causes and going around with unsavory friends. He refused to consider college. He refused to take his SAT tests. Hugo and Lea were sick with worry. The sixties might have been over and Nixon gone, but there was still a lot of radicalism around in the early seventies. People have forgotten that the so-called sixties, as a political era, was really the period from about 1964 to 1974. Sandy came of age at the tail end of that era, but he rebelled just as thoroughly as if he’d been born five years earlier.
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