We Love You, Charlie Freeman Page 7

  As soon as she was finished, Charlie looked down at the ball in his own lap, then up at the reflection of the chimp with the red ball in his lap. He didn’t make a sound, just stared for a few moments at the face in the mirror. His eyes flitted for a second to Callie, to my mother, both of whom were nodding, holding out their hands for him to roll the ball back. Charlie glanced again at his reflection and then he drew his little bullet head deep into his neck, hunched his shoulders, raised his fists—and my mother, on instinct, lunged quicker, lunged faster, held him back before he could beat up his own shrieking reflection.

  It was worse than his scream that first night. That one was unbearable because it was so sad. This one was angry. He tore and scratched at my mother’s arms. His lips drew back so that we could see his yellowing teeth and black gums. If he’d wanted to, he could have bitten my mother, gashed her good. But he didn’t. Instead, his eyes still fixed on his reflection, he raised his hands to his own face and scratched at the skin there until he drew red. He calmed down when he saw that, stopped thrashing in my mother’s arms, sucked some of her shirt’s cloth in between his lips, gathered what he could of her between his teeth and held it there, trying to calm himself.

  My mother rocked him back and forth and Callie was crying and I was standing up, I was at the door, I was calling for my father, for help.

  Max came first, then Dr. Paulsen, dry tongue clacking, green-gloved hands plucking at the fake pocket square at the front of her blazer, ready to wipe Charlie’s spit and tears off my mother’s face.

  At dinner that night, my mother insisted she was fine. She squared her shoulders when my father pointed to the damp spot on the front of her shirt. She tried to recount the story as if it was a joke—“He just didn’t recognize himself, poor thing”—but her voice shook as she spoke.

  “Were you scared?” my father asked Callie. “It’s okay to be scared.”

  Callie wouldn’t answer. “What’s going to happen to Charlie?” she asked.

  He was not with us at dinner. He had been taken to some unknown part of the institute. “They gave him a sedative,” my mother said carefully.

  “Having to spend a night on sleeping pills with Dr. Paulsen is punishment enough for what he did.”

  My mother shot me a look.

  “This is Charlie adjusting to us and his surroundings,” she began to say, but my father shook his head.

  “Enough.”

  “I’m telling you Charles,” she started again, “it was the mirror that did it. We’ll take the mirrors out and he’ll be fine. He must have thought it was another chimp in there, playing with us.”

  But that’s not what happened. I’d watched in the mirror, the light in Charlie’s eyes change. I didn’t tell my mother. She would have said I was projecting, that it was impossible. But after that I became even warier of him. Callie and I stayed away from my mother and Charlie during the day, and Max and Dr. Paulsen came back to their posts in Charlie’s bedroom. My mother doubled down on her efforts to love him. She carried him on her hip or in her arms, and when he grew too heavy for her, she put him down but always held his hand in hers. “He only has to get used to us,” she said. “Then he’ll be better.”

  Nymphadora of Spring City, 1929

  Dr. Gardner officially lived at the Toneybee Institute with the apes and his army of assistants and the heiress Julia Toneybee-Leroy. But he’d taken rooms near the border of Spring City for his anthropological study. They were just a block or two from the train tracks that made up the border of Spring City and white Courtland County, in a tall, rickety wood-frame house whose back let out on a creek and a scruff of woods.

  To get to Dr. Gardner’s rooms, I had to walk first outside of town, then circle back into the woods and through the underbrush, and then, heaving from all that effort, sweating with anxiety, crouch in the rooming house garden while he made sure his landlady was out, and that no one from Spring City, and no white person from Courtland County, was around.

  When he was certain it was safe, he came down near the little bit of woods and stuck his hand through the branches to take my own sweaty one and led me very politely up to his room, as if I were coming in from the street like a proper visitor. But once I was inside, he turned and locked the door.

  I started at that. He said, “I can leave it open.”

  “I would prefer it if you did.” I pulled my bag closer to my chest. Why I even brought a handbag on this errand, I did not know. It was empty anyway.

  “It’s just, if my landlady returns, she could walk in at any moment and interrupt and then you’d be discovered.”

  He was cunning, that Dr. Gardner. I saw his point. I let him keep the bolt across the door.

  “What will we do if she comes?”

  “You’ll jump out the window.” He smiled with those stony teeth, but I did not, so he closed his mouth. “No,” he said. “I’ll tell her I’m indisposed, that will get her away very quickly, and then I’ll go down first and keep her occupied and you can leave through the back door. I can just talk to her about the weather and she’ll listen as if I’m reciting great news. She says she loves my accent, that it’s very distinguished.”

  His room was actually quite large, nearly the whole length of the house. There wasn’t a bed, only a low couch and an easel, and near the window, but not in front of it—he was that careful—he’d taken the trouble to set up a tray with a saucepan of steaming water. “I couldn’t get a teapot,” he said sheepishly. He had a dish filled with pale-colored cookies that looked far too expensive for him.

  “Those aren’t from Spring City.” I was fishing for information, but I didn’t have to press hard because he told me straightaway that Julia Toneybee-Leroy—“Julia,” he called her, not Miss Toneybee-Leroy—had them shipped to the institute from London and allowed him to take as many boxes from her pantry as he liked.

  I took one cookie, then a second, then a third. Dr. Gardner didn’t eat or drink anything. Instead, he began talking to me about musculature.

  Did I know that an adult male chimpanzee had the strength of five grown men?

  No, I did not.

  Did I know that chimps had distinct calls, as far as he could tell, detailing their love of nature and their love for their companions, danger and fear and apprehension, and even a cry so keen and piercing that Dr. Gardner and his staff had only been able to describe it as “homesickness,” and though this explanation delighted Miss Julia Toneybee-Leroy, it embarrassed him because it was so unscientific.

  He meant this as a joke, of course, so I laughed. “What are you doing up there with those apes, anyway?”

  “Julia thinks they can talk.”

  I laughed again. “I may not be a fine evolutionary mind like you, Dr. Gardner, but I know talking apes are impossible.”

  “Don’t be so certain.” He pulled at the cuffs of his sleeves until they were down closer to his wrists.

  “They can’t really talk.”

  “But Julia thinks they can. That’s why she hired me. To prove her right.”

  “I don’t believe it.” I was annoyed that he was trying to trick me.

  “You don’t have to. It doesn’t change the fact that I was hired, and have a staff and nurses and a cook, all to prove that chimpanzees can learn to speak a human language.”

  “But you’re supposed to be a genius.”

  He flashed all those yellowing teeth again. “Who told you that?”

  “It’s all anyone over there in Courtland County says about you.”

  “Think of that. I’m a genius.”

  “But even if you are not,” I said, impatient, “aren’t you worried people are going to think you’re a fool when they learn what you’re studying? You have to have had better career prospects than proving a rich girl’s fantasies correct.”

  “How do you know I don’t believe they can talk?”

  “You’re smiling too much when you talk about it. And I’m not an idiot.”

  “Well.” He sat ba
ck in his chair and closed his eyes halfway. “The truth is, she pays me a lot of money.” Even though he blushed slightly and his tone made it sound like another joke, I could tell that he was proud.

  “But aren’t you worried about your scientific reputation?”

  “I’m young,” Dr. Gardner said, his eyes still half closed.

  He sounded so smug and satisfied, so full of promise that I wanted to reach out and pinch those blushing eyelids till they opened stark and wide.

  “Besides,” he said, “My real work, my real name, won’t be made here. I’m very lucky she asked me to do it. What I wish to study, what will make me famous, I am able to investigate at the same time I do this work for Julia. Courtland County and Spring City are so perfectly aligned with my study. And the apes. They just make my study so much better. A controlled population, you see.”

  I understood him in a flash. I thought of all those sketches of my students, running and jumping and playing with mouths wide and the sweet in my mouth turned to ash.

  “Is that why you’re so intent on sketching us, then? You’re going to compare us to your chimpanzees?”

  “No.” Dr. Gardner sat up straight now. He sang, sincere. “I’ve told you before. I love the Negro people with all my heart. Since I was young, I’ve been fascinated by your vitality and culture and—”

  “I feel sick.” I put my fourth cookie back on the plate.

  “Please,” Dr. Gardner said, “let me be direct. You have to believe me. I wish nothing but good for American Negroes and I believe my studies can right great wrongs done by science. I can provide a service to you. I can speak to your greatness, just like your Dr. Du Bois. I just need to find the right collaborator.”

  I eyed the dead bolt on the door, and Dr. Gardner followed my gaze. He said, sadly, “Please eat another cookie.” When I didn’t move, he leaned across the table and began pouring me a cup of tea.

  “Do you know, some scientists still think our musculature is different from yours? They say Caucasian skulls and bones are different. But they’re not. Not at all. There has been no unbiased biological study done of the American Negro, by one trained to study human beings. At least, I don’t think there has. And as I’ve told you, the citizens of Spring City are excellent specimens.”

  “We are people, Dr. Gardner, not specimens. If you’re going to profess to love us so much, you should learn to use the correct term.”

  He sat back. I was certain he would start with his nervous twitches again after this reprimand, but his thumbs and shirt cuffs rested in peace, unmolested.

  “I call everyone a specimen. It’s not meant to be an insult. Julia Toneybee-Leroy is a specimen, just as my assistants are specimens, just as the oldest chimp in the colony is a specimen, just as I am a specimen and you are, too.”

  He leaned forward here, in his seat. “What I propose to you, Miss Jericho, is that you work with me to create a proper monument to the American Negro race. A very good study. Like what you were asked to do for Dr. Du Bois. I think we understand each other well. We already laugh together. This tells me we can work together.”

  “It tells you I’m being polite.”

  “See?” He was excited now. “See? You wouldn’t make that joke with any other white person. We’re already comfortable together! I think I can trust you to work with me, to realize something great.”

  Mumma had always warned against being fresh, of course, of even joking slightly with white people. “They can’t tell when we are fooling,” she’d scolded. “They take everything we say so serious.” But here, with Dr. Gardner, I was beginning to think that maybe Mumma was wrong.

  “So you want to sketch my portrait?”

  “Of a kind.” And here he did not hesitate anymore. He took a deep breath. “In the past, the science of racial prejudice and ignorance thrived because of biased and inaccurate readings of specimens. What is necessary is an unbiased, clear-eyed measurement of the American Negro’s frame. I hope, with you, I can start this process.”

  “Well, where do you want me to sit?”

  “I would rather you disrobe and lie on the floor,” he said, quick as a flash.

  At this, I stood up and walked toward the door.

  “Please, please, don’t misunderstand. One of the many ways my people have done your people injustice is because we insist that you are built for exploitation. That your behinds and stomachs and backs and brains are somehow destined for it. I need, I absolutely need, a specimen—”

  I put my hand on the dead bolt.

  “Fine, fine, a person like yourself to prove this wrong. When I have drawn your body as it actually is, I shall also divulge your history. That you’re a chaste and respectable and intelligent woman. That you’re a schoolteacher and a wit. That none of these things are written on your body. Or rather, they are there, if people care to see—” Here, he got excited, caught up in some internal argument.

  I still pulled at the door. He saw, and he made his final push.

  Dr. Gardner told me that he would use the sketches to advance the cause of my people, of Negroes everywhere, but as he spoke, all I could think was, My people killed my parents. And I realized if I was being honest, I haven’t cared about the cause of my people since Pop and Mumma died. I don’t care about their future.

  To be fair, Mumma and Pop poured the cups themselves; they were the ones who drank. But it was my people, with their grasping and jealousy and desperation for morsels of an always-better life that drove my parents to do it. And now it does not matter that I am a grown-up Star. I realized, as he babbled on and on about the majesty of sable hues, that it does not matter if I lie on my stomach and show Dr. Gardner my ass, even though he claims it’s all for science. None of that matters at all, because Mumma and Pop are dead. The sun is just a ball of light and nothing really matters anymore, so Dr. Gardner can do what he likes and my people can burn in hell.

  To be a Star of the Morning means you put your faith in the potential of things to come. You believe in a bright shining future for the Negro Race. You believe in promise. You speak only in terms of faith. There is no past when you are a Star of the Morning, only the infinite future of goodness and justice and fairness and light, sweeping out before you.

  I thought of this future goodness, this future greatness. And I thought of the women in the Police Gazette, unburdened by history or expectations, only quivering, present flesh suspended in a lithograph. All that freedom. “You will be seen,” he promised. To be seen was better, I felt it in my bones: it was better than self-denial, better than shining like a Star.

  There was a screen in the far corner of his room. It was dark green silk and printed with tumorous flowers. I walked behind the screen and counted the flowers as I unbuttoned my dress and stepped out of my skirt, imagining, as I bumped up against them, that they could rub off the old silk and on to my skin, covering me, at least a bit. I have spent hours standing on my bed frame, studying myself in the dresser mirror in my rented room. I have come to the conclusion that despite my face, my flesh is good, and wished many times that someone else could confirm it. Drawers off, last of all. I pinched my hips and my middle and then I thought, You are in it now, Nymphadora. You cannot turn back, and I walked from behind the screen and over to where Dr. Gardner stood. I looked him in the eye the whole time and to his credit, he held my gaze.

  “Just . . . lie down there,” he said, “and make yourself comfortable.” I looked to where he pointed, but I didn’t get down. Dr. Gardner kept his eyes on my face. “It is awkward, isn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “It should be like this . . .” And he got down on his knees and then slid onto his stomach and grinned up at me like an idiot, until I laughed again, because he really did seem ridiculous and I felt what I thought was that freedom. It was a joke between us, a good grand joke, and he was smart enough to get it.

  I got down on the floor.

  He sat on the floor as well and took up his sketch pad and began to talk about England
. It turned out he was not the son of some Baronet or industrial captain, like I had imagined. In England, he was poor. He told me, “Any Englishman can tell by some slips in my accent, but here in America it just sounds refined.” Dr. Gardner was smart and studied hard and won a scholarship to a public school, but he was poor, and he apparently had never forgotten it.

  As I lay on his floor, the front of me pressed into the rough planks, the back of me up in the air, he told me he spent every afternoon of his childhood in nearly the same position: on his stomach, lying on his bedroom floor, reading a set of children’s encyclopedias. They were castoffs from the family his mother cleaned for. That other, richer family had long since outgrown them.

  He read each volume through at least five times before he was sent off to school. He liked them all, but he was drawn to “A,” because in its frontispiece was an engraving of the Great Chain of Being. He would study it again and again. The Great Chain of Being was drawn as a kind of staircase, each organism on earth assigned its proper step. “I would lick my finger,” Dr. Gardner told me, “and trace what I thought were the bones of the world.”

  He followed earth to air, flesh to spirit, from mineral to plant to animal to man to the angels. “In the subset reserved for people, the spindly feet of the staircase went from Negroes, to white women, to white boys, and then men: each accompanied by a small cameo representing their perfect form, their progression of being precisely illustrated from lowest to highest.”

  Here, he glanced up from his sketch pad. “Stay still please, Miss Jericho. Would you like a cushion to rest your head on?”

  I said I would. He got up from his seat and tossed me a very thin pillow. I placed it under my head. It smelled like horse sweat, but I appreciated the gesture. I adjusted myself again, and he was quiet for a bit.

  “Why did you like the Great Chain of Being so much?”