We Love You, Charlie Freeman: A Novel

by Kaitlyn Greenidge

  I put a monument to Daisy beside my parents’ grave in the Courtland County Cemetery, but I kept her bones. I had a portrait made of me, in this library, sitting at this very desk, her little skeleton upright, keeping vigil beside me. The portrait painter made me seem much older than I actually was, but he got the skeleton correct.

  After Daisy died, I could not bear to think of another chimpanzee. I mourned her terribly. Daisy’s bones on my desk, I swear, click clacked to me constantly our whole sad adventure together. So I ordered them packed away in storage, and they are there now, somewhere in a box, in some attic upstairs, yellowing under tissue paper.

  Doubled down again with that familiar grief of failure, I hired Dr. Gardner and gave him full range of the Institute. I let him do whatever he wished, as long as he could get a monkey to talk. He promised me he could. And for a long time I did not pay attention to anything he did. So I cannot rightfully be held responsible for it. If You are being fair, African American people.

  Dr. Gardner only stayed with us a year and left suddenly —right after the triumph of the birth of one of our first chimpanzees, after Daisy. One of his assistants went to his room and found it destroyed—pages torn from his books, his ledgers dashed with ink and his pencils splintered and scattered across the floor. A few days later, he sent a postcard to the Institute with a postmark from Miami, claiming he would be gone for only a few days. He was never heard from again. Professor Gorey claims that she has traced his whereabouts to a cemetery in Florida, to a grave with an alias on a headstone. She believes he hanged himself in Miami, but it is too sad, too horrible, to imagine such an end for Dr. Gardner, even if he was as terrible as described.

  I did not know he was dead until Professor Gorey told me, over fifty years later. At the time, I sat here and waited a few months for him to return, and when he did not, I was crushed again by my own failure. I dismissed his research team and had all his papers boxed up, and I hired other doctors, different doctors, to meet my goal and I didn’t think of You, African American people (I hadn’t been thinking of You to begin with), until Professor Gorey came along.

  So, You see, African Americans, this was all I knew of the story. I can’t be blamed. I cannot be held responsible. I certainly cannot be judged for it. My money funded these experiments, it’s true, and many people were hurt. But I didn’t personally do it. So where does my guilt lie? I feel it, but I don’t think it’s justified. So I do not think it’s a real emotion. But I feel it in my breast just as keenly as I’ve felt any other sorrow, so I write it out for You, hoping it will be enough for the both of us.

  I began my work not out of a wish to hurt. And not to “establish and honor my cultural hegemony,” as Professor Gorey would have you believe. Everything I did, even this, especially this letter that I write to you, I do out of love.

  I seek your forgiveness, African Americans, in earnest. I’ve lived long enough to know that faith and trust in the kindness of others is a hard-won oblivion, is a very strong armor. It may hurt, in the short run, to have an open, trusting heart. It may mean, in the short run, that you are weak. But in the long run it can mean survival.

  It takes a kind of courage to be kind. So I ask, African Americans, that you be kind to me. That you not blame me for wrongs I knew nothing about and that have nothing to do with me. I hope to play some small part in restoring You, African Americans, to bravery and love. In restoring You to hope. In restoring You to Your trusting nature.

  Because You must understand the importance of what I’ve been trying to do. I’ve waited over seventy years to hear an ape speak, to finally get it right. And African American people, it’s bigger and weightier than anything You think I’ve done to You.

  With love,

  Julia Toneybee-Leroy

  Charlotte

  “You can order whatever you want,” my father told me.

  We were in a diner in Spring City. I had crawled out from under my drum the morning after Thanksgiving and slipped back into the apartment, where my father was lying on the couch, staring at the ceiling. “Let’s go before the others wake up,” he told me, and I’d followed him to the car and he’d driven us across the border to Spring City, to the only open restaurant, to a sticky booth that smelled like whitening bacon grease.

  I got the shrimp cocktail, because it was the most expensive thing on the menu. I wanted to hear him protest, but he only raised his eyebrow at the request and ordered coffee.

  “So.” A grubby glass trough of shrimp and cocktail sauce sat between us. “So.”

  “So.”

  “Charlotte, I’m not mad at you. You were just being loyal to your mother. That’s what good daughters do. You and Callie have been really good throughout all of this. We’ve asked too much of you.”

  “I can do more,” I said, uneasy.

  “We can’t keep living like this.”

  “But I haven’t even been trying that hard,” I said. “I can try harder.”

  “It’s not a question of trying harder.”

  The waitress came and poured more coffee. We both stopped talking.

  She left and I started to scramble again. “Please,” I said. “I won’t have any more secrets. I won’t cause any more trouble. I can do better.”

  “Charlotte, after all of this, after what your mother told me. Now that I know the truth about all of this—”

  “I told her to tell you. I did.”

  “It isn’t your fault.” He looked out the window. “I can’t live in that place anymore, Charlotte. I just can’t. I can’t in good conscience stay a part of that, for lack of a better word, experiment. So . . . So,” he said this last bit in a rush, “I’m moving out.”

  He waited. “You can come with me if you’d like. I want you to come with me. Or you can stay with your mother.”

  “What about Callie?” I panicked.

  “She’s too young. She should stay with her mother at least.”

  “Well, where are you going to go?”

  He took a sip of his coffee. “I have the teaching contract for one more year, so I’ll be close by until spring. We won’t be apart. But,” he said, “I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t know if they’ll hire me again if I’m not, you know, part of the Toneybee. If I’m not part of the game.”

  “So you would go back to Boston?”

  “I can’t say yet. It’s a while off, though. We can worry about it when we come to it.” He reached across the table and touched my hand.

  “I really can try harder,” I said feebly.

  “You have to decide if you want to come with me. And of course you and Callie will visit with me. On the weekends.”

  “Does Charlie have to visit with us?”

  “No.”

  “That was a joke,” I said miserably.

  “Oh,” he said. “Good one.”

  Tractor trucks passed by on the highway. The one that passed outside now was bright white, and on the side was a long, splashing river of cola, surging from the back end to the cab.

  “You’d really leave Callie there?” I said. “I read the book, you know.”

  He sat back, truly defeated, his whole face slack.

  “She didn’t tell me you knew that, too.”

  “You can’t leave us there,” I began to cry, furious.

  “I don’t have a choice,” he replied, dully. “Not right now, anyway.”

  “Why did you bring us here?”

  “I thought—” He stopped himself. “Your mother and I thought that it could be different.”

  “So we’re supposed to leave Callie there,” I said, sobbing. “And she’s just supposed to be stuck, and you and I leave? We’re not supposed to care about her at all?”

  “Your mother thinks the odds of her doing well with a . . .” He hesitated, then he said swiftly, “A single father are worse, frankly, then being raised with a chimpanzee. I think a little bit differently. But she, and Dr. Paulsen, and the Institute: they won’t leave me much of a choice. You know wh
at a contract is, Charlotte?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “So there’s your answer.”

  We both sat for a while, sopping up the bitterness of this statement. He pointed at the plate between us.

  “You aren’t going to eat that?” he said wanly. “I’m paying good money for shrimp in the Berkshires in November.”

  “I can’t leave Callie.”

  “I know.” He touched my hand. “Good girl. It was worth a shot.”

  The waitress came back. “Everything okay?”

  “We’ll take all of this”—he made a sweeping gesture across the tabletop—“to go.”

  While we waited for her to come back with our bags, I said, “I knew it.”

  “You knew what?”

  “I knew this whole thing was terrible.”

  “Well, you should have told me.” And then quickly, when my face began to fall again, “It’s a joke, Charlotte. A joke.”

  When we got back to the institute, my mother and Callie and Charlie were in the living room, a turned-over Monopoly board on the coffee table. Charlie was holding three plastic hotels under his tongue and wouldn’t give them up. My mother and Callie both knelt in front of him, trying to coax his mouth open with the offer of an orange wedge.

  Callie turned to our father, pointedly ignoring me.

  I tried to force the Styrofoam container into her hands. “Here,” I said. “Take this.”

  She opened it, curious. “You guys got shrimp?” She glared at this sign of further betrayal.

  “Come on, Cal,” he said. “Come with me into the kitchen. We can sit down and eat it together. Just the two of us.”

  She followed him happily.

  My mother hadn’t turned at first, when we came in. She finally got Charlie to open his mouth long enough to hook her finger and fish around under his tongue and pulled out a gleaming red hotel. She dropped it back on the Monopoly board. She signed, Good boy.

  Then she said, quietly, her back still toward me, “So?”

  “I’m staying. But for Callie, not for you.”

  “Of course.” She turned to me. “You’re a good sister, Charlotte.”

  I shook my head.

  She sighed, annoyed that I wouldn’t take the compliment. She held out her arms to Charlie and he climbed into them. Then she staggered up, the bones in her knees cracking under the weight of him. “Oh,” she said. “Jesus, he’s heavy.”

  Charlie pinched the fabric of her blouse between his fingers, impatient. I got up and left the room before I could see her duck her head toward him.

  I went and lay on my bed. I kept the lights out, listened to my own breath in the dark until I heard the door creak open.

  I knew it was Callie standing over me before I turned on the bedside lamp. I opened my arms wide to her, but she stiffened.

  “You and me are in a fight,” she announced. “We aren’t doing any discussions.”

  “I’m sorry, Callie.”

  “Everyone gets to have secrets except me.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “I’ve got secrets, too.”

  “Callie—”

  “I have a lot of secrets,” she sang as if I hadn’t spoken at all.

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  Her eyes were red and swollen. “Don’t ever say I’m not making sense.” She breathed. “I am making perfect sense.”

  I’m the only one in this family who makes sense, she signed.

  “You want to know why I make sense?” She put her hands down. “Because I am not a liar. I don’t lie to my sister and I don’t lie to my father, either.”

  I got angry at that. “I’m not a liar.”

  “Yes, you are.” She smiled very slowly. “I know all about you.”

  And then she was gone.

  I waited until I heard her close her own door and then I sat up. I pulled the worn-up speech from my skirt pocket. The greasy pencil markings were smeared, but the words were still legible, written in Adia’s surprisingly girly script: big swooping cursive letters that curled with painstaking accuracy around the lines on notebook paper.

  I tore it into long, thin strips and let them fall to the floor.

  OUR FATHER TOLD us it was a trial separation, but we heard the lie. Dr. Paulsen wanted me and Callie to do a round of tests, to assess our levels of depression and possible emotional disturbance, but my mother wouldn’t allow it.

  Still, Max came around more often with his camera, a fail-safe, documenting.

  “Stop sniffing around here with that,” I told him. We were in the living room, spending a miserable, snowy afternoon indoors.

  “Why don’t you just fire my mother already, you and Dr. Paulsen? Why don’t you just get her to leave?”

  “We can’t.” Max sighed. “It’s complicated. And”—he remembered himself—“you don’t mean that. You shouldn’t talk about your mother that way.”

  Down the hall, we could hear her and Charlie babbling to each other. Max turned, grimaced. My mother claimed, to anyone who would listen, that she was weaning Charlie, but nobody really believed her.

  “You’re afraid of her,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t say afraid.” Max blushed.

  “Yes, you are.”

  “That’s very harsh, Charlotte.” Max hurried to pull the camcorder back on his shoulder, obscuring his face with the viewfinder so I couldn’t read his expression anymore.

  I looked straight into the lens, trying to catch Max’s eye behind all that machinery.

  He didn’t move the camera away from his face. Only swallowed. “I’m sorry, Charlotte.”

  Me and Callie had to visit Dr. Paulsen in her office. We couldn’t go together, though. They separated us.

  “You don’t have to talk, Charlotte.” She blinked. “I know you know about the book. I know you know how terrible things have been here. In the past. The things that happened here, they make me sick,” she said.

  She began to speak, and it was strange, she seemed to be begging me for something. She told me she was determined to save what she could of the experiment. She told me she felt they were close to greatness. She told me we only had to wait a little while longer and good things were coming soon.

  Finally she asked me, her yellow tongue soft, to put what my mother had done into perspective. “What she did isn’t so bad,” Dr. Paulsen said, “when you think of the past. And what happened in the past here—that was an act of malice. What your mother did was an act of love. Do you see the difference?”

  She waited for me to nod, but I didn’t.

  “Think of it in terms of history.” Dr. Paulsen ran her fingers across the softened end of the stick of chalk in her fist. “In terms of all of history, what’s happening now is not that terrible.”

  Everything in my heart said not to believe her. But I was weak because my heart was broken.

  Callie

  At least her father tried to make it up to her. Callie knew he would. He took her downtown and he told her to pick out a present. This was after he told her that he was moving out.

  She already knew what she wanted. It was on Main Street, in Griffin Books and Occult Supplies.

  When she opened the door, a heavy breath of New Age halitosis—incense and crumbling paperback bindings and cat dander—hit her in the face. The books on the front table all called to Callie with the ubiquitous use of you and your in their titles: Finding Your Center of Power, Your Personal Magic, You and the Universe.

  But the book she wanted had the loneliest title in the world: Magick for the Solitary Practitioner. The first few pages were nonsense: prints of sextants and astrological charts and words Callie did not understand, like gibbous and godhead. She skipped ahead a few chapters and then she found the one that promised what she wanted: “How to Master Those You Love.”

  Callie ran back out to the car parked on the curb. She panted on the sidewalk, until her father powered down the passenger window. “Please.” She stretched her hand throu
gh the gap. “You have to give me forty dollars.”

  “Forty dollars?” He laughed. “Jesus, Callie, you trying to hustle me?”

  “Please,” she repeated, urgent, half mad. “I need it for my soul.”

  Charles laughed again, but it was sadder. He would have given her the money either way, but when she said that, deadly serious, “I need it for my soul,” he reached down into his pocket for his cracked and doubled-over billfold and slipped her two ragged, wrinkled bills.

  The book said to master your love was to contemplate your love. Callie found this impossible to do. Charlie hated direct scrutiny. A full gaze made him charge. So Callie took to sneaking down to the reception hall of the institute, to look at the bright white skeleton in the picture beside Miss Toneybee-Leroy, to imagine it alive and covered in muscle and hair and spirit, a loving placebo for ornery Charlie. But it didn’t work. The real Charlie still didn’t love her back.

  The next step the book recommended was making an idol of your beloved. Callie asked her mother to drive her back to Griffin Books where she purchased, from the begrudging clerk, a block of soft clay. At night, before she went to sleep, she worried the stone till her sheets and blankets were smudged with mud and her fingers cramped.

  It was harder than Callie thought it would be, to first form the top of a head, then the bend of a back, the humps for knees. She pricked the palm of her hand by accident, when she was using a nail file to add a flick of a tail.

  Magick for the Solitary Practitioner told Callie that she had to keep the likeness of her beloved with her at all times, sleep with it close by, and memorize its features so that she could manipulate it in her dreams. Callie did all of this, and dutifully dreamed of clay that turned into half-formed monkeys with bulbous noses. But even though she slept with the idol tucked under her pillow for weeks, she mastered no one. Charlie still overruled her and would not love her back.

  She couldn’t figure out what went wrong, but she was sure it must be her own fault. She went back to the book, to the chapters she’d skipped, and way in the back she found an appendix with a list of magical fabrics. Velvet was at the top. “To summon the magickal,” the chapter heading said, “one must feel magick at all times.” It was clear: her very skin had to be covered for her new cause. She asked her mother to make her a red velvet cape.