Jennie

by Douglas Preston

  Anyway, when Jennie saw the kitten she signed Bad cat bad cat angry! and rushed at it, her hair all sticking up, and we barely saved its life. We were horrified. Then Jennie went and skulked in a corner while we talked about what we were going to do. Meanwhile, the kitten started wandering around. The next thing we knew it was heading in Jennie’s direction. Sandy jumped up to fetch it, but Jennie reached out and tenderly picked it up and started stroking it. She’d just been frightened, that’s all.

  After that, they were inseparable. Jennie lugged that poor kitten around night and day. She put it on her back and Booger would cling for all he was worth while Jennie went about her business. At other times she would cradle it in her arms just like a baby and rock while it purred away like a little motor. She even tasted its food and made horrid faces. Cat food was the epitome of what Jennie considered bad food. All meaty and fishy tasting.

  She showed real tenderness toward Booger. Booger wasn’t quite so thrilled, I think, to be the property of a chimpanzee. If Booger was eating and Jennie heard something interesting going on in the other room, she picked it up and carried it with her, not thinking that maybe the poor little thing would like to finish its dinner first. That poor cat was carried around day and night. It was never allowed to just sleep on the sofa and be a kitten.

  Jennie and Sandy used to argue about the kitten. There was no role in “Space Invaders” for a cat. Sandy would tell Jennie to put the cat down and Jennie would refuse, putting the cat on her back and taking up her position on the lawn. And Sandy would order her to put down the cat, and she’d sign Jennie’s cat! Of course, while she signed she’d still be holding the cat, and the poor thing would be slung about. Once, when Jennie finally put down the cat, she signed Stay, stay! I could hardly stop laughing.

  Jennie signed to everything: animals, people, pictures in books. She never figured out that animals couldn’t sign and that only a few people could sign. I told you about how she signed to the toilet. She just couldn’t stop expressing herself.

  Jennie had Booger for only three months. Then one day, in the morning, we heard Jennie scream in her room and pound on the door. By this time we simply had to lock her into her room at night, or she would go wandering about and cause no end of trouble.

  We rushed in and found Booger dead. His neck was broken. Jennie was simply terrified of the dead cat. She would reach out to touch it with a trembling hand and jerk away at the last moment. She was whimpering and hugging herself over and over again. With that hideous grimace of fear. Cat, cat, cat, she signed, and then Bad cat, bad bad bad. I think she had rolled over on the cat during the night. The cat used to sleep in her bed, you see. Or maybe she played with it too roughly. Anyway, that was the end of Booger T. Archibald.

  I’ll tell you a most interesting story. Years later, at least three years later, we were looking through some old photo albums. And there was a picture of Jennie holding her cat. She slapped her hand on the page and looked intently at the picture. She wouldn’t let us turn the page.

  Then, all of a sudden, she signed Jennie’s cat! Like this, with both hands, Jennie’s cat! And she fell silent—I mean she stopped signing, of course—and she just stared at the picture with the saddest expression on her face. Every time we tried to turn the page, she’d put out her hand to stop us. She looked at that picture for a good ten or fifteen minutes and then started signing, very slowly and clumsily, as if to herself, Sorry, sorry, sorry. It was awfully sad.

  [FROM Recollecting a Life by Hugo Archibald.]

  In the late 1960s, when it seemed as if the country were falling apart, my work at the museum was proceeding apace. My phylogenetic analysis of the primates had allowed me to construct a revision of the “evolutionary tree” of the primates, Homo sapiens sapiens included.

  There are many popular misconceptions of the evolutionary tree—or, as I prefer to call it, a phylogenetic schema. It is not, as many believe, a diagram showing how “man evolved from the apes”—for, in fact, man did not evolve from the apes. Man and the great apes all evolved from a common ancestor, each species taking its own evolutionary pathway.

  The most controversial result of my work—still not generally accepted—was to eliminate the family Pongidae entirely and place the pongids in with the family Hominidae. Thus the genus Homo shares the same family with the genus Pan (chimpanzee), the genus Pongo (orangutan), and the genus Gorilla (gorilla). Put in simpler terms, I grouped man with the other great apes. Man, clearly, does not merit a separate family all to himself. Man is a mere variation of the great ape pattern—in morphology, genetics, and basic behavior. Cultural development—which is where humans differ from the apes most dramatically—is not biologically based and should not be taken into account in a classification.

  We humans, even human scientists, are still suffering from that disease known as egocentria. One primatologist, my good friend Stephen I. Rosen, stated it best when he wrote that “man and ape are separated more by ego than anatomy.” This is the affliction that once caused us to place the earth at the center of the universe, and it still infects some taxonomists who wish to award mankind its own exclusive genus. I, personally, do not see the danger in sharing our family tree with a few of the more intelligent apes. It would be a small step in recognizing our relatedness to all life on earth, something we must do in order to survive as a species. We are not the result of a special creation.

  My preliminary reclassification of the primates used only skeletal morphology as the basis for determining the relationships among the apes. I wanted to extend this work to DNA and blood protein analysis. How closely related are the apes using these methods? I received a generous National Science Foundation grant to make these studies. My graduate students, Ellen Bitterbaum and Giancarlo DiLuglio, did much of the work on this project and I wish to acknowledge their fine contributions here. Ellen is now at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and doing splendid research there on isolating antibodies from human archaeological remains. Giancarlo was tragically killed in a car accident some years ago, and the world lost a promising young scientist.

  Many readers of this memoir will already be aware of one “startling” conclusion from this research: humans and chimpanzees share roughly 98 to 99 percent of the same DNA. This fact was widely reported in the press, but—as is usual with popular journalism—it was reported out of context and with no understanding of what the numbers meant. For example, humans share 40 percent of the same DNA with termites. Extremely small differences in DNA sequences can mean very large differences in morphology and behavior. The conclusion that we share up to 99 percent of the same DNA with chimpanzees alone was not all that startling: what mysteries lurk in that 1 percent!

  What was more significant from a biological point of view were the many similarities between humans and chimpanzees in brain structure, the endocrine system, chromosomes, blood albumen proteins, and the immune response. This is what makes chimpanzees so important in medical research, especially for studies of human pathogens such as the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Chimpanzees are susceptible to almost all the same diseases as humans. When Dr. Jane Goodall was studying the chimpanzees of Gombe, a terrible polio epidemic, introduced from a nearby African village, swept the chimpanzee community; and only through administering the human polio vaccine to the chimpanzees was she able to prevent a worse tragedy.

  To me the most startling result of the research was that we found the differences between humans and chimpanzees were much smaller than had been supposed. To put it another way, chimpanzees are more related to humans than they are to gorillas and orangutans.

  In a curious way I was discovering this same conclusion in my own home, with Jennie. By 1968 Jennie was signing fluently, using almost a hundred signs. Being able to communicate with Jennie changed our family in a profound way. I am not exaggerating when I say that it changed Sandy’s life. He became extraordinarily fluent in ASL and he and Jennie carried on conversations together, he signing so fast that one c
ould hardly see his fingers move, while Jennie watched spellbound, and then fumbled her reply, always eager to keep up.

  I have always been a verbal person, and when I began to communicate with Jennie using ASL it carried my relationship with her to a new level. Not that we discussed anything profound; Jenny’s utterances usually revolved around such necessities as food, play, and bodily functions. Nevertheless, it seemed so natural that I found myself thinking of Jennie as my own daughter, and when I looked at her, I did not see an animal; I saw a child. Anyone who has lived with a severely handicapped person knows that the handicap, so shocking when first seen, eventually becomes invisible. In just this way Jennie’s “animalness” became invisible to us—so much so that I will relate a rather embarrassing story illustrating this.

  It was a snowy Sunday during the winter of 1968. I was in my study going over a grant proposal. Sandy and Jennie had gone sledding on the golf course, and Lea was out with Sarah. Toward late afternoon, I heard a loud simian screaming coming from a distance, and I looked out the window. I saw Sandy jogging along, pulling a toboggan on which Jennie sat, screaming her head off. These were not normal screams. I rushed downstairs as they arrived at the back door.

  Jennie had sledded into a tree and was badly hurt. I immediately got her inside and on the sofa. She had a bloody nose, which had bled over her clothing. We got her jacket and shirt off but she screamed every time we tried to remove her pants. I then slit her pants off with a knife and felt her leg. To my horror I discovered a badly displaced double fracture of the tibia and fibula. The broken ends of the bones had not pierced the skin but I could feel the broken end of the tibia pressing into the calf muscles. Jennie was frantic with pain.

  Sandy was also upset, so I told him to stay put and I would bring Jennie to the emergency room. He insisted on coming, so we bundled her up and roared off to the Newton-Wellesley Hospital. By the time we got there Jennie had quieted down somewhat. I was even more worried, because she had a glassy look showing the beginnings of shock. But she was still coherent, and as I carried her into the emergency room she feebly signed Jennie hurt, Jennie hurt. I bundled her up on an empty cot and a nurse came over with a clipboard to sign us in. She was an older woman, stout, one of those unflappable nurses who had seen just about everything. I was immediately reassured.

  “What’s the problem?” she asked.

  “Displaced fracture of the tibia and fibula,” I said. “Sledding accident.”

  She looked up with a slight raising of the eyebrows and asked, “Are you a doctor?”

  “No,” I said.

  She lowered her head.

  “Patient’s name?”

  “Jennie Archibald,” I said. I gave her the address and signed the release.

  “Let’s take a look,” she said, and we went over. The nurse bent over the cot and let out a very short scream. She spun to me.

  “What is this?” she demanded.

  “What? What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Is this some kind of joke?” Her voice was ice cold.

  “What the devil are you talking about?” I said. I could not understand what had suddenly come over her.

  ”Get this animal out of here,” she said. “This is not an animal hospital.”

  I remember stammering “What?” It still took me a few seconds to understand what she was exercised about. Jennie, of course, was an animal, and this was a human hospital. When I realized this I became angry.

  “You mean you’re going to refuse her admission?” I cried. “Can’t you see—”

  “I see an animal,” the nurse said. “We have a strict rule against animals in the emergency room. I’m sorry, if you don’t remove her immediately I’m going to call Security.”

  Jennie signed Jennie hurt to Sandy. Sandy signed back, in his wonderfully fluent way, No worry, Sandy love Jennie, Jennie feel good soon.

  Jennie then signed Jennie hurt, Jennie hurt, hug.

  The nurse was staring at the two of them, and a peculiar expression developed on her face. She asked, “Are they speaking ASL to each other?” It turned out she had done work with deaf children and knew some ASL.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Jennie is a member of our family. She speaks ASL.”

  “Oh lord,” said the nurse. “I can’t believe it.”

  I finally collected my wits. “May I speak with the admitting physician?” I asked.

  “I’ll get him,” she said.

  He was a young nervous intern, short and stocky. He followed the nurse on stumpy legs with a worried expression on his face. He looked so young and earnest that I girded myself for a big fight. There was no chance I was going to take Jennie to another hospital, let alone a veterinary clinic. She was in serious shock.

  “This is Jennie,” I said. “She’s a member of our family. She has a very badly broken leg.”

  The doctor stared. Sandy was signing comforting words to Jennie, while Jennie was still signing Jennie hurt.

  “What’s this?” he said. “A talking chimpanzee?”

  “In a way,” I said.

  “Why did you bring it here?” he asked.

  I replied, not altogether truthfully: “Because a chimpanzee’s physiology is a lot more like a human than a dog or cat. A veterinary hospital wouldn’t know what to do with her.”

  The doctor nodded. Emergency room doctors are trained to make fast decisions, and he was no exception. “Okay,” he said, “let’s go.”

  “Doctor, how should I admit her?” the nurse said.

  “As Jennie . . . Jennie . . .”

  “Archibald,” I said.

  “Archibald. We don’t have to say what she is. There’s no line for ‘species’ on that form of yours, is there?”

  And that was that.

  six

  [EXCERPTS from the journals of the Rev. Hendricks Palliser.]

  February 12, 1968

  Last week I purchased, somewhat belatedly, a book on American Sign Language for the Deaf. It is a textbook with many instructive pictures. It is indeed great fortune that Jennie has begun learning ASL and can now communicate with people. I have wondered about the fortuitous series of events that have led to this juncture. It is too much to believe in coincidence; indeed, I am once again reminded that there is no such thing as coincidence.

  I practiced my signs all week, and when Jennie arrived I greeted her with a big “Hello!” (in sign language, of course). Jennie signed something in return, but I am afraid I missed it. It is possible she was scratching herself. Her signing is rather sloppy and sometimes I wonder if it is signing at all. We sat down for the morning’s lesson.

  I brought out a picture book of the life of Jesus, which had been my favorite book as a child. It is much dog-eared but the pictures are still fresh and colorful. Jennie perused it with much grunting and poking. When we came to the picture of the Baby Jesus in the manger, surrounded by the animals, Jennie stopped and made some more signs, at least I think she did, looking into my face with a hopeful, questioning expression. I could find no sign for Jesus in the textbook so I signed baby and Jennie immediately signed it back. Such an intelligent creature! When we arrived at the Sermon on the Mount, I created a sign for Jesus, which I thought rather clever: the hand placed behind the head, tracing out in circular motion a halo. This Jennie did not understand. I pointed to the picture and made the sign, and pointed again. Then I helped Jennie fashion the sign with her hand. By the end of an hour she almost had it, placing her hand on her head and rubbing it vigorously. She did not, however, seem to connect it to the image of Jesus. These things perhaps take time.

  R. has blossomed under Jennie’s influence. It breaks my heart to watch her walking with Jennie, hand in hand, around the room, thinking how much she wanted a child. Thinking that she might have had a daughter of her own but for me. R. brought out cookies and milk. We perused the book slowly, and Jennie became restless. She finally stood up and wandered about the house, picking up objects. R. became cross and slapped her hand. Jennie
crouched on the floor screaming and holding her hands over her head, and it was a rather upsetting scene. I brought Jennie back to the Archibalds’ and R. later felt very sorry and even wept a little. A child would have made such a difference in her life.

  February 19, 1968

  Jennie is now signing Jesus, making an unmistakable connection between the image and the sign! We were perusing the picture book, and when we arrived at the Sermon on the Mount she rubbed the dome of her head while pointing at the picture. I think we shall leave the head rubbing as our sign for Jesus; the halo seems beyond her now. I have been endeavoring to inculcate in her some concepts, simple ones naturally. Such as God as a man who inhabits the sky. Of course, I am not one of those who believe God is a bearded man seated on a throne in the clouds, but as a concept it is appropriate for children and those with weak intellectual faculties. I have adopted as a sign for God the “one way” sign of the Christian evangelists; that is, the index finger pointing upward. Really, it is surprising that the books on ASL do not address religious words. It is perhaps another sad indication of the increasing secularization of our society, as if deaf people do not need to speak or know of God.

  My approach is this: all good things come from God. Therefore, when Jennie receives anything that delights her, such as a tickle or cookies and milk, I make the God sign and point upward. I have also been “explaining” to her who God is, using other signs, such as person and good and beautiful and love. I do not know which, if any, of these signs she knows, except love, which she uses in its earthly sense, as in “affection.” Is she capable of understanding a higher “love”? Only time will tell.