We Love You, Charlie Freeman Page 8

  “I didn’t like it. It made me nervous. All those steps, one, two, three. I used to have a three-legged cat and I would wonder where he fit on the chain, if he was inferior or superior. In my heart, I knew he was as good as an angel, but according to the chain he was below my ma and dad. And that didn’t seem right.”

  “That’s very observant of you.” I couldn’t keep the sarcasm from my voice, but this seemed to delight Dr. Gardner further. It seemed he liked to be teased.

  He stopped talking for a bit, leaned over the edge of the pad of paper to look closer at me. I wanted to blush; in fact, I believe my behind did blush because the skin on it suddenly felt very warm, but Dr. Gardner was good enough not to say anything about it.

  Instead he said, “I worked hard and when I left my place in primary, my teachers recommended me as a scholarship student to a good secondary school and when I got there, I was relieved that no one mentioned the Great Chain of Being. When someone finally did, it was my teacher, Mr. Townes. And he only mentioned it to say it wasn’t proven by science. He said it was more of a metaphor. It took me a long time to understand what he meant. At the time, I thought he was agreeing with me, that the ideas that lead to the creation of the chain weren’t real, that they were false beliefs. But I learned that he actually meant the opposite. He meant that the chain, to him, was more real than any science.”

  Mr. Townes taught Dr. Gardner and his fellow students the fashionable evolutionary theories of neoteny. Little Dr. Gardner learned that white men alone retained the intelligence and imagination endowed to children’s brains well into adulthood; that women and coloreds bloomed too quickly into a stupefying maturation, a runny adolescence and old age that spoiled their intelligence and clouded their sense of reason.

  “That seemed wrong, too,” Dr. Gardner explained. “But everyone went along with it. You were supposed to be able to tell maturity by measuring earlobes, if you can believe it.”

  “Earlobes?” I turned my head on the pillow.

  “Yes,” he said. “We were separated off into pairs and we had to measure our own earlobes and our friends’. Except nobody wanted to pair with me because they knew I was a charity case. Mr. Townes ended up pairing me with a boy named Jessop, who protested, saying, ‘Why are we measuring his ears, anyway?’ Meaning me. Jessop said, ‘He’s low class. He’s going to have women’s earlobes or, worse, a black’s.’

  “And Mr. Townes told us, very gravely, ‘Gardner’s all right, Jessop. He’s not that kind of low class. He’s as evolved as you and me.’ ”

  I heard the pencil stop scricking for a moment, then the heavy, dull rub of the eraser across the page. “Ah, hell,” Dr. Gardner exclaimed suddenly. “I’ve ruined it.”

  I took the opportunity to get out of my pose. I sat up and wrapped my arms around myself. “What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t capture the angles correctly. From where I am. I can’t get the curve right at all. It’s coming out all wrong. I keep ruining it.” He looked down at the paper, frustrated.

  “Don’t get so upset,” I said. “What angle do you need to make it better?”

  He kept looking at the paper angrily. “I don’t want to impose.”

  “You are already imposing.”

  The tip of his pencil wavered over the paper.

  “Could I sit a little closer?” he said. “Just . . . to see the lines better.”

  I felt my whole skin prick with apprehension. “I suppose.”

  He inched a little closer to me. He crossed his legs and settled the sketch on his lap and generally seemed much happier. I trundled back over to my spot on the floor, glanced down at the planks for a moment trying to remember exactly where my knees and elbows had been. Then I sighed, told myself it didn’t matter, and lay myself down, my cheek back on that horsey pillow.

  “So, you liked Mr. Townes?” I said, after a bit, trying to get used to him being so close, urging him back to his story. “He defended you?”

  “No.” The pen went scrick scrick scrick busily over the paper. “I hated Mr. Townes. I suppose he thought he was giving me the utmost compliment, telling that idiot Jessop that I was really one of them. But right then and there, I wished for the shortest earlobes imaginable, shorter than a lady’s, shorter than a black’s if that was possible, if it meant I could get that smug smile off that dumb prat’s face. I didn’t ever want to be considered good enough to be one of whatever he was.

  “I know it sounds silly now. But it was the first flash of feeling I ever had. I knew in my heart that Mr. Townes was wrong, just like the Great Chain of Being was wrong, but since all of what he said was printed in a book I thought it must be true. I was convinced my heart was wrong and this made me uncertain. Ashamed, actually. So it was a kind of freedom to find out that it wasn’t my heart that was wrong. Knowledge could be untrue.”

  One more long, satisfied scrick and Dr. Gardner stopped for a moment, entirely pleased with himself and the results.

  “You can sit up now, Miss Jericho.”

  I sat on my knees and crossed my hands demurely in my lap, but it didn’t matter because Dr. Gardner wasn’t studying me anymore. He was looking at the drawing, and I could tell by the set of his mouth he was quite pleased with it.

  “May I see?”

  He looked up then. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry Miss Jericho, but I can’t allow it. Self-consciousness would spoil these drawings. Just absolutely ruin them. I can’t have that.” Then he began to busy himself with putting his pencils away.

  I got up then and moved back behind the silk screen with flowers.

  I pulled on my slip and the sack dress Nadine Morton had given me secondhand, then the bloomers that reached to my knee, gray with so many washings, and all that cloth was cold on my skin and then I felt something sick and sad come over me.

  Nymphadora, I said to myself, through tears, you are a selfish little Star. You’ve known this since you were a child, sitting in that church cellar, sucking on your tongue and dreaming of greens dressed with bacon fat instead of abnegation. As much as you wished to please your mother with self-denial, as much as you begrudge her and Pop for lacking it, you know you don’t have it in you, either. It’s not part of your constitution. Any light you had in you that made you a Star, was because you were simply reflecting Mumma’s shine. Nymphadora Jericho, you are petty and weak, and with every fiber of your being, in every piece of your overexposed flesh, in every rotten bit of your heart, you’ve just knocked out whatever light was put in you.

  I had lain naked on my stomach and only listened to his stories, and made up louche and sarcastic replies. One of the most important things Mumma drilled into me was never to let a white person think that they knew you. In Spring City, Mumma and Pop and all the other Stars and Saturnites were planets, possessing deep and mysterious seas, complicated deserts, forests of knowledge and pain. But step across the border into Courtland County and they were little more than rocks, pebbles really, to the white people that lived there. Small and insignificant, without the weight or density to command even the smallest orbit. Mumma told me that this underestimation was an advantage. It meant you could do things white people would never even know about. Your invisibility was your power.

  I give it up, I almost said out loud to myself. I realized, through my shame that I wanted to be seen by Dr. Gardner. I wanted it very much, and that made my disgrace worse. Giddily, I began to argue against my shame. I told myself that I was in his sketchbook now. I was no longer invisible to Dr. Gardner or to any of the white people who would see his studies. Mumma was wrong. I was seen, and, I thought, I knew I flattered myself, but I thought it anyway, that I would finally be known for my true self, my self that wasn’t pure but still was equal to any Star of the Morning, any married woman, any white person, anyone who believed themselves better than me. And still, a part of me was enough my mother’s daughter to know I was being a fool. And for that particular kind of foolishness, I could never be forgiven. Who cares? Who cares? I thought.
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  I knelt and showed my ass for Dr. Gardner, and I knew I would do it again. But I was planning to do worse than that. An ass is just an ass. I was less ashamed of the drawings of my behind than the fact that I wanted to tell Dr. Gardner my true history. I longed that he should know every fault and failing, know when I cried and when I raged and when I just sat dumb. I wanted Dr. Gardner to know my very worst self.

  When I came out from behind the screen, I saw he had slid himself back into his seat at the tea table. He noticed my expression and immediately made his own soft to match it. He patted the handle of the pan of water.

  “It’s lukewarm by now. But have one more cup of tea with me?”

  And even though I knew he only said it to be kind or, rather, to make sure there was no awkwardness between us, to take away any whiff of a whorish transaction, I accepted the offer. See, I told myself, as I drank, we are equals. Almost.

  “So you must understand,” Dr. Gardner said suddenly, as if we had been talking the whole time, “I know what it means to be misclassified. For the very system of classification to be so utterly wrong and backward and unfair. That day in class, when Mr. Townes defended my earlobes and said they were as good as any others, I knew he was full of it, the school was full of it, and it led me to question so much more.

  “Sometimes it feels like I am always in revolt against my own kind. I am always in revolution against what people who look like me think. It used to make me sad and very lonely. But there’s a joy that comes in constant revolt. It becomes a comfort. And I am glad to betray my own kind when their motives are so false. Why are you crying? Did I upset you?”

  But I couldn’t answer. I could only double over, feel my clothes warming to my skin, and the tears on my face. Dr. Gardner pushed the plate of cookies under my nose. It was all he could think to do and to make him less embarrassed I took one and managed a bite. He reached out a rough and well-chewed hand to pat my shoulder, but I only felt it distantly. I was overcome with the taste of snot and salt and refined sugar in my mouth.

  Charlotte

  We tried hard to make the Toneybee ours. Callie and I left the apartment every morning, skirting past the portrait of Julia Toneybee-Leroy, giving a joking salute to Daisy’s bones. Downstairs, we scribbled halfhearted graffiti in obscure places, tucked wads of chewing gum under windowsills, made a point of running up and down every hallway as loudly as possible, if only to impress on the still bulk of the institute that we were there.

  But that was impossible. There was just too much space. The downstairs rooms were already set aside for official business; the apartment belonged to our mother and Charlie. The front hall was Lester Potter’s domain—he sat in its shabby gloom, only leaving to keep sweaty lookout in the overheated guard box. Every two hours, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., we heard the faint whine of the golf cart he used to patrol the grounds, as he made his truncated orbit from the front hall to the front gate and back again.

  The very top floor of the Toneybee Institute was a warren of old rehearsal rooms. Callie and I found the back staircase that led up there. We tried to be quiet the first few mornings, but very quickly gave that up once we figured out nobody cared about the attic.

  The doors to the rehearsal rooms were haphazardly shut off, a few pieces of plywood nailed across them. We forced the flimsy planks off and rummaged through the spoils we found behind them: dead and dying instruments; reams of old musical scores; brocade and lace left in piles to rot. Each room had the vinegary odor of old resin, sticky brown on the ragged split ends of limp violin bows. We forced ourselves to stay up there until the backs of our necks were slick with sweat. We found five brass pipes—the mute ends of some dead organ, the metal beginning to spot with age—scattered across the floor of one of the rooms. We screamed into the ends of them until our throats were hoarse. We found a whole orchestra’s percussion section. Callie pried metal slabs off the xylophones and threw them against the wall while I heaved a balding timpani onto its side. When I got it turned over, I tore a slit in the drum skin with the foot of a music stand. I convinced Callie to wiggle through it and lie in the bowl and then I pulled the slit closed and beat on the skin with a nearby mallet until she fell out of the drum’s belly, laughing, bruises on her forearms.

  When we were bored and bruised enough, we’d come back downstairs in time for lunch in the staff cafeteria. Dr. Paulsen joined us. Her yellow tongue flicking back and forth, she told us all of Charlie’s sorrows. Max, beside her, looked pained but didn’t interrupt.

  For the first year of his life, Charlie was raised by the Toneybee researchers. They tried to teach him sign language. He showed an interest in the beginning. He watched curiously whenever someone began to move their hands. Every two weeks, a different lab assistant fed and bathed and dressed him. “But so many people caring for him,” Dr. Paulsen said, “it got too confusing.” Some put his socks on the wrong feet. Most forgot that he hated bananas and tried to feed them to him. Often, they grew bored when he simpered and cried out to be petted through the night.

  “He didn’t like anyone,” Max said.

  “Max is being modest,” Dr. Paulsen countered. “Charlie only likes him. He’d do anything for Max. Max can get him to wear overalls, to sign doll. Max even trims his ear hair. He learned the first initial of Max’s name, didn’t he?”

  Max nodded. “When he was smaller, he’d lie on my lap and press the letter M into my arms. He was sweet. He used to just grin and grin, he was so happy.”

  “But he has a temper,” Dr. Paulsen said. Charlie was prone to shrieking bursts of annoyance. “We could never figure out what would set him off. When he’s very, very mad, he won’t sign to us at all. He balls his hands up into fists and tries to sit on them.”

  “You should understand,” Dr. Paulsen continued, “Charlie is used to a lot of attention, but he doesn’t know love. He’s learned a very cruel lesson. And now he thinks that it doesn’t matter how often he kisses someone’s neck or how lovingly he grooms you, or how well he performs or how sweetly he nestles into you. He thinks—and why wouldn’t he when he’s never seen otherwise—he thinks that everyone, every last person, will always leave him.”

  The table was quiet as we took this in. Callie swallowed.

  “But,” Dr. Paulsen said excitedly. “That’s why you girls are so important.” She glanced at Max. “We’ve been working for so long at the Toneybee Institute, for nearly seventy years, to understand how much a chimp can communicate. And we can’t do our work if one of our own is lonely or in pain.”

  “Why can’t you keep raising him?” I asked.

  Dr. Paulsen’s eyes shone. “We need a family like yours.” Her tongue darted across her lips. “To make him feel loved.”

  “Imagine,” Dr. Paulsen continued, “a chimp who truly felt like he was part of a human family. Who could tease you and love you like a brother—that would be a very interesting chimp indeed. And with a real live family, Charlie can prove not only that chimps can learn sign language, and understand the signs for blue and book and ball, but he can understand something else, too. He can know love,” she finished, the words so earnest they stung.

  She likes families, I signed under the table, into Callie’s arm, because she doesn’t have one.

  Lunch in the cafeteria became unbearable. Our mother sometimes joined us, but more often she ate with Charlie in the apartment. Our father preferred to read or prepare for classes, rarely eating lunch at all. But Callie and I were popular in the cafeteria. We felt the eyes of the research assistants and the secretaries on us as we moved with our trays, as we sat at our table, as we ate our food. Dr. Paulsen sometimes came to sit with us, but every day Max and a different assistant joined us for lunch. They asked us the same questions over and over again: What were our favorite subjects in school? Did we like to read? What were our favorite books?

  Nothing would stop the flood of small talk. Whatever answers we gave, Max and the other assistant would glance at each other as if we had said somethin
g important but it was unclear what profound thing we were saying to them. Callie told them once her favorite book was The Phantom Tollbooth, and Max and the assistant with him, a chubby woman named Ronnie, had nodded gravely at this answer. Every question they asked, though, seemed like a buildup to something they would really prefer to know. It was as if they were avoiding a larger question and they always lost their nerves before they would get to it. Back home in Dorchester, we had been proudly obscure and I was beginning to miss it.

  “It’s like they want something from us,” I told my mother.

  “What do you mean?”

  We were at dinner, the one time when we all came back together. Charlie sat at the head of the table. Before she served herself, my mother painstakingly divided the largest cut of meat into bite-sized pieces for him. When she turned her attention to her own plate, every bite of food she raised to her mouth went through Charlie’s fingers first, ground down and kneaded and knuckled and sniffed, thoroughly investigated before Charlie would allow it to pass between her lips.

  Charlie raised a handful of smashed macaroni up to my mother’s mouth and I looked away.

  “It’s like they’re watching us for something,” I said. “Like they want us to say something different.”

  “They’re curious about you because you are in the experiment. This is new for them. They’re just excited.”

  “But what do they want from us?”

  My mother sighed. I don’t know, Charlotte, she signed. Then she said, “We should talk to Dr. Paulsen about it, you and I.”

  “How could that possibly help?”

  My mother said, “I’ll talk to her.”

  Charlie struck the table with his spoon, and my mother turned to him.

  MAX SAID HE would take us to the Toneybee’s lake. My father had been asking him about it, and so he offered to walk us all there—me, Callie, my father, and Charlie.

  I stood in my bedroom, pulling at the straps of the previous summer’s bathing suit.