Дуглас Престон - Jennie

There is one thing a good Brahmin upbringing gives to the women, and she had it: a voice that could freeze water. Only when she wanted to, of course. When she disapproved of something, and that tone of voice was directed at you, it was zero at the bone. [Laughs.] With that voice, she controlled Jennie better than anyone. Jennie respected her. Hugo, on the other hand, was a bit of a pushover.

They were an odd pair, Hugo and Lea. She was a good three inches taller than Hugo, but he slouched while she stood as straight as a queen. What a presence! And her hair. It was iron-gray when I first met her, some thirty years ago, and it turned snow-white after that. But she was very beautiful. In those days, it was almost scandalous to be thirty and have gray hair. She never wore much makeup, or ever dyed that hair, and still she was radiantly beautiful. She’s still beautiful, but in a different way of course. They were an odd pair, but somehow just right.

Hugo asked me if he could bring Jennie to work from time to time. That was fine with me. I remarked that she was in a diaper and wondered how long that would last, but Hugo assured me they were working hard on her toilet training, and that already Jennie loved to flush the toilet. Now if they could only get her to go in it, he said.

I was very much interested to hear the story of her capture. As a cultural anthropologist, I naturally saw the significance of it before Hugo did. He was only a physical anthropologist, poor man. [Laughs].

I remember clearly that first conversation we had about Jennie. Let me see if I can recall it for you.

I said to Hugo something like. “So! You whelped the beast.”

Yes he had. And he said it with a great deal of pride, as if he were the father himself.

I asked him if Jennie had any contact with her mother after the birth.

Hugo said she hadn’t. The mother was paralyzed and dying. He didn’t even think the chimp had noticed her mother, she was so busy clinging to Hugo and looking into his face.

I asked him if she had met any chimpanzees later.

Hugo thought about that for a minute. No, she hadn’t.

So, I said, Jennie’s never seen one of her own kind.

That’s right, Hugo said.

So I asked Hugo if he had read any Konrad Lorenz.

I had finally aroused Hugo’s suspicions. He wanted to know just what I was driving at.

I told him he should read Lorenz’s work on the greylag geese.

This, of course, irritated Hugo, who certainly knew of Lorenz but had never gotten around to reading him. As I said, he was a physical anthropologist. Behavior did not interest him.

When Hugo was irritated, he became very dignified and formal. He said he would “look into it,” but I don’t know if he did. Until much later, of course.

I, of course, recognized immediately the significance of Jennie’s birth and early upbringing. Konrad Lorenz, as any educated person knows, had discovered that a newborn greylag goose is imprinted with the first thing it sees moving. It will then follow that thing around thinking it is its mother. Normally, it is the mother. But Lorenz was able to show that anything would imprint the gosling — a football, for instance, or a vacuum cleaner. Lorenz himself offered his head for imprinting, and dozens of geese grew up following Lorenz’s magnificent bushy white head around in a Bavarian lake, believing it was their dear lovely mother. The idea occurred to me right away that Jennie had been, in a more sophisticated way, imprinted by Hugo. Not only did Jennie believe she was human, but she had probably been imprinted to believe that Hugo was her mother.

I explained all this to Hugo. Might that, I suggested, be cause for concern? The idea seemed to irritate him further. He said he thought anyone who tried to extrapolate the behavior of a goose to a chimpanzee was an idiot. He was quite defensive about this chimpanzee and why he had brought it back.

“Harold,” he told me, “this is purely an informal little experiment in primate behavior. An experiment . Let’s not get all worried about this thing. She’s like a pet, only I’m curious to see what will happen to a chimpanzee that is raised like a human child. That’s all. An informal, anecdotal experiment. I can’t see any harm in that, can you?”

I pointed out that in no way could this be called an experiment. What were the objectives? Where was the control? What was the hypothesis? And I said he was naive to think there might not be any harm in it. This was not like raising a puppy. But all he did was start shaking his head and smiling. “Harold, Harold, Harold,” he said. “Okay, Harold, you win. You’re right. It’s not an experiment. It’s just for laughs. Strictly for laughs.”

Ah, but you see— Now who was it that said: “The joker loses everything when he laughs at his own joke”? Hmmmm. Well, it isn’t important. Schiller, maybe.

At any rate, what even I did not realize at the time, although it is painfully clear to me now, is that imprinting can sometimes work both ways.

In his old age, my father, Henry S. Archibald, became interested in death. As he was an avowed atheist, this interest took a rather peculiar form. Instead of worrying about the ultimate disposition of his soul, he became obsessed with the family burial grounds. He had a brush with death when I was away at college — a minor bout with phlebitis — and by the time I returned for the summer his new interest had blossomed. He insisted on involving me. My father’s family was originally from Newburyport, Massachusetts, and we made many trips to obscure and overgrown cemeteries there.

There were six graveyards in Newburyport and four of them contained the precious remains of an Archibald. There was a graveyard on Plum Island that had two Archibald graves. During the last years of my father’s life I came to know all these graves and more.

My father took it upon himself to tend these graves. He waded in among the wild tea roses wielding a fearsome brush hook, carving a swath around each of the Archibald headstones. He scrubbed off the lichen, weeded and trimmed the grass, and laid down fresh flowers. I found the concept as strange as Japanese ancestor worship. But I was young then, and I found my father’s excessive concern with death amusing.

My father had become increasingly cranky in his old age, and accompanying him on these trips was the only way I found to maintain a relationship with him. He complained frequently. “Your brother,” he would say, “has no interest in the family graves. I’m glad that at least one of my sons has taken an interest in the family history. Tending the Archibald graves is hard work, and when I’m gone it’s going to take quite a bit of your time. I hope you realize how much of a responsibility you have taken on.”

I did not recollect taking on any responsibility, and I certainly had no intention of carrying on my father’s work after he was gone. I did not, however, have the heart to set him straight.

During World War I, my father was an engineer first class aboard a ship in the U.S. Navy. During that time he had a small idea relating to an improvement in the science of refrigeration. He married my mother, who at the time was a sixteen-year-old girl from Cincinnati, and moved to Waltham, Massachusetts, where he developed and patented his idea. He licensed the invention to General Electric and made a small fortune.

My father then spent the rest of his life tinkering and practicing a kind of genial crankiness. The grounds around our house looked like a junk heap. There was a windmill connected to an electric generator that lit a bulb inside a turning fresnel lens acquired from the old Shadd’s Rock Lighthouse. In short, it was a wind-powered lighthouse. No one was interested. Then there was the experimental air-cooling machine that my father built in the twenties. It weighed eight hundred pounds and sat in the corner of the barn like a square bull. It thumped and shuddered and issued a massive blast of chill air for three or four minutes before it blew the fuses. Whenever some naive visitor to our house introduced the subject of air-conditioning (and you would be surprised how often that subject comes up in normal conversation), my father would stamp off to the barn to prove that he, Henry S. Archibald, was the actual inventor of the air conditioner. My poor mother would cry out, “Henry, the fuse box,” and he would answer in heroic cadence: “Damn the fuse box!”