Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir

by Wednesday Martin

  One by one, daily, day after day, they were in touch. They took me to lunch, and sent flowers, and invited us to their summer homes. They emailed just to say hello. They told me their own stories. “I lost twins when I was twenty-two weeks along. Well, I mean, one was stillborn, and one lived for another two weeks, but then he died. And I just wanted to tell you I understand. I do.” Another woman from my son’s school told me how she had lost her baby at nineteen weeks and nearly died of blood loss. She had transfusion after transfusion and dreamed of her other children. We walked up and down the bridle path in Central Park in our exercise clothes, and she listened to me and I listened to her and I wondered how many other women in the park just then, or in the buildings around it, and how many mothers in wider and wider concentric circles across the city and the country and the world, were thinking about similar losses just then, just as we rounded the corner and saw what my toddler called the “crooked tree,” a perfect place for someone tiny to sit, with the arm of someone who loved him propping him up from behind.

  Women told me stories of losing babies the week or the day before their due dates. A woman I had considered cold beyond comprehension, I learned, had walked into her baby girl’s room and found her dead, at nearly six months, of SIDS. One woman told me of her baby who died, apparently of nothing at all, eight months after she was born. She told me this story as if in passing, as if my own loss were the real point, and I reached out and touched her arm. “It won’t ever be okay, but it will,” she said with an apologetic smile as we stood there on the sidewalk.

  I was ashamed and confused and relieved in equal parts when I realized that many of the other mothers I had written off, whose reserve or downright tribal clubbiness I had been hurt by, intimidated by, I had dismissed far too quickly. A good number of the women I had found so bitchy and off-putting would now not let me put them off. They offered to host my older son for a sleepover, or take him to the movies. They sent over dinner. And when people invited us away for the weekend, we went. We ate and talked, and we swam with our children and their children in their pools. We called it the Dead Baby Tour. I thought my loss would widen the chasm between me and them, but it closed it. They had lost, too. We joked, the other mothers who had lost and I, that we should make T-shirts that said, “I threw up for six months . . . and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.” I had okay days and worse days and much worse days. But the other mothers, some of them the sidewalk chargers and the Birkin wielders, the ones who had made me feel that my sons and I were playdate pariahs, did not give up on me. Some of the very ones who had hazed and harassed me came over for a glass of wine. They sat and they listened and they showed an amazing and impressive ability to just be there with my pain and rage, and to care. For weeks and months and in some cases, for years.

  One of the biggest shifts in the last decade of anthropology, one of the discoveries in the field that has changed everything, is the realization that we evolved as cooperative breeders. Bringing up kids in a nuclear family is a novelty, a blip on the screen of human family life. We never did child rearing alone, isolated and shut off from others, or with just one other person, the child’s father. It is arduous and anomalous and it’s not the way it “should” be. Indeed, for as long as we have been, we have relied on other females—kin and the kindly disposed—to help us raise our offspring. Mostly we lived as Nisa did—in rangy, multifamily bands that looked out for one another, took care of one another, and raised one another’s children. You still see it in parts of the Caribbean today, where any adult in a small town can tell any kid to toe the line, and does, and the kids listen. Or in Hawaii, where kids and parents alike depend on hanai relationships—aunties and uncles, indispensible honorary relations who take a real interest in an unrelated child’s well-being and education. No, it wasn’t fire or hunting or the heterosexual dyad that gave us a leg up, anthropologists now largely concur; it was our female Homo ancestors holding and handling and caring for and even nursing the babies of other females. That is in large part why Homo sapiens flourished and flourish still, while other early hominins and prehominins bit the dust. This shared history of interdependence, of tending and caring, might explain the unique capacity women have for deep friendship with other women. We have counted on one another for child care, sanity, and survival literally forever. The loss of your child weighs heavily on me in this web of connectedness, because he or she is a little bit my own.

  I knew that. I had learned about cooperative breeding and communal nursing in school and in my research. I had thought about it and written about it. But now I felt it.

  What had happened to me must have been terrifying for the mothers who hadn’t experienced it, and a nearly unbearable reminder for those who had. But they did not stop asking me how I was, and they did not stop wanting to know. There is frequently astonishing competition and aggression among women with children in Manhattan—the sartorial showdowns and calculating once-overs in school elevators. But there is also, I learned after I lost Daphne, extraordinary cooperation and support when it comes to looking out for one another by looking out for one another’s children. Just like mothers in a small town, just like mothers long ago, women with children on the Upper East Side form tight relational networks that function in part as emotional support and in part as surrogate child care. They did not give up on me, because they couldn’t.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Summary Fieldnotes

  After some six years of fieldwork on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, among a group of approximately 150 mothers of young children living in an area of roughly 250 acres, my immersion in and identification with the tribe I studied was comprehensive. Nothing would have suggested such an outcome. I was initially a new transfer to this particular troop of higher-order primates: I had dispersed at sexual maturity from a geographically and culturally distant group, then lived in the southern corner of the island for many years, embracing the practices and ways of being that prevailed there, before migrating to their far-northern habitat, a niche of superabundance, in search of opportunities for me and my offspring. I did not practice the religion of the tribe I studied; I undertook distinct personal adornment and costuming practices and ablutions until learning their ways, and then frequently continued to avoid conforming to those; my seasonal voluntary migration patterns were distinct from theirs; and I had diminished resources in relative terms. It was no surprise that I, like many other new female transfers to human and nonhuman primate groups the world over, had low status and was hazed, even harassed, by higher-ranking troop members—who had usually inherited their status, generally from their fathers and their husbands—for many, many months after my arrival. Sometimes I suspected it would go on forever.

  But primatologist Robert Sapolsky and others have observed, based on years of fieldwork among nonhuman primates, that while low status can create stress and high status is inherited and confers all types of benefits, rank is perhaps more flexible and less static among primates than many field scientists initially believed. For example, a low-ranking baboon may, through shrewd coalition building (via grooming, forming alliances during skirmishes, food sharing, and infant care), engineer agreeable life circumstances and outcomes for him- or herself and his or her offspring. Sapolsky and others further suggest that betas may have lower stress levels than alphas in nonhuman primate groups. Life might just be better when you’re not at the very top, constantly fending off the envy and coup attempts of others.

  While the implications of these discoveries for humans are unclear, after months of assiduous work to find allies and build coalitions, I was ultimately content with my rank, friendships, and, most important for a primate, my offspring’s prospects, after several years of living among what I eventually came to think of as my tribe. In part the improvement of my lot could be attributed to my social “work”—cultivating attachments and affiliations for me and my sons; doggedly (and, arguably, pathetically) persisting in attempts to build alliances while ignoring being ignored, and
thus not losing face; and optimizing the brief attentions of an alpha male. But the precipitating event of the transformation in my status may well have been the loss of a pregnancy at an advanced stage, which elicited unexpected compassion from my conspecifics. This event likely activated deep tendencies of generosity, care, and empathy among a group of women who evolved as cooperative breeders, and whose ancestors regularly cared for the children of their kin and fellow band members. While this practice no longer prevails in utterly changed ecological and environmental conditions, it is clear that when it comes to cooperative breeding, communal caretaking, and simply caring, in the words of anthropologist Steve Josephson, “the software is still in there.”

  IN ANTHROPOLOGIST Bronislaw Malinowski’s Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, the personal underside of his official ethnography of life among the Trobriand Islanders off the coast of New Guinea called Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1917), we see him unravel. Having moved to a remote archipelago in the name of a burgeoning social “science” whose practitioners struggled to distinguish themselves from missionaries, traders, and colonial administrators, Malinowski frequently offers a portrait of himself as “lost.” This eminent founding father of anthropology experiences rage at his informants, who sometimes walk away after he gives them tobacco, ignoring their “obligation” to offer, in turn, truths about themselves and their culture. He expresses all manner of personal and professional insecurity, and even a kind of emotional and psychological free fall, as he adjusts to bewildering surroundings—living in a hut, the sweltering sun, a foreign language, and an entirely alien way of life. He imagines, again and again, that he is deathly ill. He feels anxious, lonely, and sexually frustrated.

  I often thought of Malinowski, about whom I had written in my doctoral dissertation, as I went through my days on the Upper East Side. I thought of his searing honesty about a conundrum beyond his control, yet essentially of his own making. I thought of how flawed and resentful and petty and unscientific he sometimes seemed, how shallow and biased he could come across in his personal, private writing, versus the cool, analytic, distant, professional voice of Argonauts. Malinowski, along with a handful of others, basically “invented” anthropology, a discipline I have always loved for its powerful blending of storytelling and insight, its uneasy but undeniable juxtaposition of one individual outsider’s personal experience and the overarching narrative of a culture. I am not an academic anthropologist—I did not major in anthropology, even as I studied it and later made a career of understanding it and writing about it and teaching its history in my cultural-studies courses. Nor did I ever go anywhere remote and observe and record the behavior of chimps, apes, baboons, or monkeys as primatologists do. Anthropology and primatology were simply disciplines and ways of seeing that I studied and fell in love with, and then applied to my own experience of moving to and adjusting to life in a foreign culture, a society whose unfamiliar rites, beliefs, and rituals initially left me feeling baffled and alienated.

  While I never left Manhattan and did not need to learn a new language, the experiences Malinowski wrote about in the Diary—of exasperation and cultural dislocation—are nevertheless utterly familiar to me. I longed to belong, and sometimes intensely resented the people around me who seemed so indifferent to, sometimes even contemptuous of, anyone who was not one of them; I felt spurned when my overtures of friendship went unreciprocated and unacknowledged; I experienced a version of culture shock from such novel, unfamiliar surroundings and cultural practices, and from being ignored and on the outside; and I sometimes fought back a petty desire to send up those I sought to understand. Not infrequently, even knowing that the hazing I experienced was not precisely personal, I felt downright hostile about it (“My feeling [about my informants is sometimes] ‘Exterminate the brutes,’ ” Malinowski wrote in a moment of rage). I understood many of these “fieldwork feelings,” every day.

  But the tribe of mommies I had studied and lived among for years ended up surprising me. I cannot recall ever feeling more intensely hazed than I did in the initial months and years of my fieldwork, it is true. But nor had I ever felt more cared for and tended to, more truly befriended, than I did after I lost my unborn daughter, Daphne. The previously implacably Other-seeming other mothers who reached out to me—the ones who had seemed haughty and even heartless, the ones by whom I had felt stared down, snickered at, pointedly ignored, and turned into a playdate pariah, the ones who had, themselves, lost or had sisters or friends who had lost—did so with a sense of purpose and dedication and generosity that took me by surprise. Eventually, I think, they forgot what had brought them to me and motivated them to be tender and generous, rather than callous and indifferent and occasionally even nasty, in the first place. And then, they simply continued to be kind. “How did we become friends again? I’m so glad we did . . . I guess it was school?” a shiny-haired friend in Chanel sunglasses reminisced as we lingered on Madison in the sun after coffee one morning. I did not tell her what had brought her to me because we were friends now, and the kernel of the friendship was deep and it seemed a shame to disturb it. I let it be.

  Sometimes, I still meet women with young children on the Upper East Side who are friends of a friend, or on a committee or board with someone I know—a tenuous connection—and they strike me, upon first or second or even third impression, as standoffish or unfriendly. I am no Pollyanna about my species, but now, as I take in the indifference of another mother, or her distraction or harshness, or a dismissive or competitive comment, I have a sense, born of experience, that under dire circumstances I would likely see a better, deeper part of her, and she would see the same in me.

  Primatologist Frans de Waal is at the forefront of the emerging field of animal empathy, which deals not only with primates but also with canines, elephants, and even rodents. All of these mammals, but perhaps especially primates, he explains, “are sensitive to each other’s emotions and react to those in need.” The claim seems modest enough, one de Waal and Jane Goodall and Robert Sapolsky have been making, based on the evidence from their fieldwork, for many years. There are literally thousands of documented cases, de Waal points out, of chimps consoling conspecifics who are upset by hugging and kissing them. Apes “will voluntarily open a door to offer a companion access to food, even if they lose part of it in the process.” Capuchin monkeys will seek rewards for others, coming to prefer, when offered two different tokens, the “prosocial” one, which rewards both the capuchin itself, and its companion. Science is slow to accept anything that smacks of anthropomorphism—projecting our own human traits onto animals—because it seems soft and sentimental and inaccurate.

  Yet it is impossible to ignore the preponderance of evidence suggesting that animals care for one another, often at a cost to themselves. The frozen heart of science is melting when it comes to accepting a “less blood-soaked” version of our evolutionary history (de Waal’s characterization), one that emphasizes how we were shaped by cooperation and compassion as well as violent conflict and indifference. In part this hypothesis about the cooperative origins of humanness stems from watching what nonhuman primates do every day. Yes, chimps can be violently aggressive and are attuned to power in ways that would no doubt elicit the admiration of the most cutthroat Manhattan hedge-fund manager. Certain nonhuman primates are virtually Machiavellian, de Waal observes—he even studied Machiavelli early in his career to better understand the ways the chimps he has observed “schmooze and scheme” and don’t bat an eyelash at killing a rival. Yet they also live in tight communities and may show remarkable care for others, as when a female named Daisy who loved wood shavings hoarded hers—in order to bestow the entire cache upon a sick male named Amos, so he could make the nest where he rested more comfortable. Extrapolating how he might feel from her own feelings—“Love those wood shavings, they’re so comfy!”—she took a personal hit (no wood shavings for her that day or night) in order to ameliorate Amos’s discomfort. This act of altruism was based not on�
��or not merely on—a calculation of what she stood to gain in return. It was instead motored by a deep sense of empathy. She was, de Waal observed, essentially plumping the pillows of the hospital bed of someone she cared for, knowing it would feel good.

  Why care?

  De Waal suggests that “for mammals, maternal care is the prototypical form of altruism, and template for all the rest.” Gestating a fetus, giving your body (and, as many a human mother can attest, your mind) to something developing within you, and then delivering it, lactating in order to nurse it (or otherwise provisioning it), and making it the center of your universe not for hours or days or even weeks but for years—these everyday acts of motherhood blur in fundamental and profound ways the line between self and other, between self-interest and literally exhaustingly comprehensive compassion, empathy, and care for someone else.

  Sarah Hrdy suggests that the origins of empathy, the deep mutual understanding that leads us to do for others as we know we would like others to do for us, even at tremendous cost, lie in not only maternal care but also in cooperative breeding, the “it takes a village” practice and philosophy, mostly just quoted by Hillary Rodham Clinton in the industrialized West, but amply evident still in other cultures, where, as it is said in several West African countries and tongues, “A child has many parents.”