Jennie (11 page)

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.

[F
ROM
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.

[F
ROM
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 outstretched. 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.

When she heard the clatter of the dishes, and smelled the food, and saw the place crowded with people, she broke into excited screams of joy, and so loud and piercing! All conversation in the dining room ceased. Jennie had arrived! Those who knew Jennie, of course, were amused. But more than once I saw visiting curators or new employees spill food on themselves when Jennie screamed her arrival.

Jennie sat in a high chair at the curators' table, where she ate with impeccable manners. Well, perhaps not
quite
so impeccable. When we finished eating, many of the curators took out their cigarettes. Jennie loved to light cigarettes. She went around the table with a box of kitchen matches and lit each curator's cigarette. These were the days, mind you, when everyone still smoked. One day a curator offered Jennie a cigarette, and she tried to smoke it while sitting in his lap, but it didn't agree with her. The curator paid for his poor judgment with a lapful of ape vomit.

During that first year and a half, I found myself observing Jennie with growing interest, I mean
scientific
interest.
Simia quam similis
. She was so very
human-like
. She appeared to understand at least as much as a human child her age. She showed astonishing intelligence. I'll give you two examples. There was a woman who came in three days a week who did “public relations” for the museum. She was really quite marvelous, a real
type
, with the bouffant
hairdo, high heels, long red nails, lots of makeup. When she first saw Jennie she screamed, which frightened Jennie and made
her
scream, which made the woman scream even louder. It was not a felicitous beginning!

Jennie knew right away this woman disliked her. Whenever she passed the woman's office on her trike, she would stop, quietly open the door, and issue a sudden hoot. You could hear the woman inside give a big shriek, and then her voice yelling, “Get out of here! Stop that noise! Somebody get that animal out of here!” When the woman began locking her office door, Jennie gave the door a kick on her way by.

Now I can see you think this is very funny. And it was. But stop for a moment and think, if you will, about what this behavior involved. Let us dissect what Jennie had to know in order to torment this woman. First, it showed Jennie had the ability to impute a state of mind to another human being. Forgive me, I mean
a
human being. She knew this person disliked her presence. This was sophisticated reasoning, my friend! This was not a dog biting an unfriendly man. Jennie deliberately tormented her, making her startled and angry. It showed that she had the ability to
manipulate
a human being's state of mind. It showed a mastery of human psychology that I found extraordinary.

The second incident was even more unusual. It occurred after Jennie had been at the museum a year. For a while she had a Barbie doll which she carried around, dressed, undressed, fed, kissed, and so forth. Sometimes she would hand you the doll for a hug, and then take it back. One day, Hugo called me down to his office. Jennie was there, sitting in her wing chair, apparently cradling her doll. Only there
wasn't
any doll. She'd forgotten it, left it at home. Instead, she was cradling an
imaginary
doll, chattering to it, stroking it. Hugo said, “Jennie, hug.” Jennie got up,
still cradling the doll
, and came over to Hugo. Hugo hugged her and then Jennie
offered Hugo the imaginary doll to hug
. Hugo hugged it and Jennie took back the pretend doll.

Do you see the
significance
of this? I saw it immediately. I felt my skin crawl. You see, ethologists had always believed that one of the traits distinguishing humans from animals was the ability to imagine and to create. Creativity was supposed to be one of the defining characteristics of what it
means
to be human.

What we had just witnessed was nothing less than the toppling of this grand idea.

Let me get a little technical here. If it's too much for your readers you can edit this out.

There are people who continue to insist on the uniqueness of the human animal, who continue to feel that man stands in isolated splendor. They come in two types: religious zealots and ethologists. The religious bigots can be dismissed out of hand, but the ethologists require a serious response.