Aerogrammes (5 page)

When finally Nana returned to the group, she chased Henry into a tree, but none of the other females joined her. The next day, Henry retaliated by staying his ground, bristling his coat and baring the dagger-sized canines that she lacked. When Nana growled at him, he slapped her across the face so hard that she fell and rolled onto her side. Screaming in protest, she fled to the other females, who embraced her and calmed her, but did not defend her.

•

Over the next ten years, keepers came and went. A Bengal tiger died after a visitor threw it a fudge brownie that had been sugared with ground glass. The zoo curator was fired, replaced by a woman intent on raising more money. The new curator used the negative publicity to hold a fund-raiser, which supplied the budget to enlarge several quarters so that animals were now kept at a greater distance from the visitors, behind a transparent plastic shield.

The shield proved frustrating for Henry, who was used to flirting in close proximity to blond women. Before, when a blonde would peer at the cage from behind the hip-high visitor bar, Henry would hoist himself onto the rock closest to her and blow kisses. He’d then drop to his hands and began swaying back and forth, his fur ruffled, ready to mate.

The visitors were amused by the spectacle, especially the blondes, who were happy to play Fay Wray and blow kisses in return, until they noticed his erection, and recoiled. It was no game to Henry. Rejected, he wandered away from the blondes to sit on a distant stone.

His attraction to blondes rendered him completely uninterested in females of his own kind. He refused to mate with any female chimp, even when she offered herself in times of estrus, the brief window in which she was willing. He kept at a distance, scrutinizing his nails or searching the sky. The youngest female, Gigi, became so enamored of Henry that when he didn’t respond, she would run up, thrust a hand between his legs, and try to manually raise his interest. This only provoked him to move away, at which point Gigi would throw herself to the ground, screaming until Max came along.

Max was now entering his adolescence and eager for every opportunity among the females. But unlike most alpha males,
Henry did not grow jealous when Max mated with another female; nor did Henry exercise his dominance by disrupting the couple and chasing Max away. Ever the gentleman, and possibly relieved, Henry looked the other way as yet another orgasmic shriek split the sky.

“Give him time,” Joseph told the perplexed curator. “He might be depressed. Or gay.” The smile slid off her face.

Joseph sensed a long-steeping sadness in Henry, dark as his own. His girlfriend had been trying to snap him out of it. Elaine had even taken to stitching ugly pillows with Bible verses, and he loved each wobbly seam. He loved her, too, but he wondered when she would leave him. Joseph could tell that she was tiring of him, especially since he had refused to seek the services of a pastor or a shrink. He couldn’t help his beliefs—namely, that there was very little to believe in, though he did believe in Henry’s right to withdraw from females if he felt like it, to withdraw from the whole world when it seemed too harsh to weather. Sometimes it was a wonder that more people were not huddled like Henry, praying for life to pass quietly.

But in time, after the glass shield was erected, Gigi prevailed upon Henry. The keepers were unsure of when and how exactly this happened, but Joseph was the first to notice Henry mounting Gigi on a tranquil Saturday afternoon, without excitement or energy, simply because it seemed required of him. The act inspired a variety of responses among the zoo visitors. Some snickered and laughed; others primly turned away. As for Joseph, he sensed Henry’s sadness and surrender. On some occasions, Henry continued to court the blondes, even if from a distance, even if their rejections led him to perch among the branches of a dead oak and sullenly watch the clouds.

• • •

Henry was in his early twenties when a new volunteer joined the Willow Park staff, and at first, no one recognized her. Only Joseph, the oldest keeper still in employment, squinted at her in the sunlight and asked, “Aren’t you the Groves girl?”

Neneh smiled through her headache, caused by the red headband cinching her close-cropped hair. At twenty-seven, she was probably too old to be wearing a headband. At least that was what Pearl would have said, as she believed in “dressing your age, not the age you want to be.” In her last days, Pearl always wore her antique pearl-drop earrings, even to sleep, even to her grave.

Only a few people had attended the funeral the month before. Pearl had been sick for years, and over time, she’d withdrawn from her remaining friends and kept to the house. Toward the end, there were many nights when she tossed in her sleep, calling out for Henry until Neneh crept into bed and held her.

Pearl hadn’t spoken his name in years. She had refused to visit Henry, in spite of the contract; nor would she allow Neneh to do so, believing that he would survive among his fellow chimps only if he forgot his old life, his more human behaviors. “He can’t be two things at once,” she said, to which Neneh wanted to ask,
Why not?
But Neneh said nothing, knowing that Pearl also wanted to forget Henry, and the family they had been.

While in high school, Neneh found an article about Henry in a Florida newspaper, titled “The Ape Who Loved Blondes over Baboons.” She didn’t show it to Pearl.

Several years later, Pearl’s kidney began to fail. Neneh decided to live at home throughout college, to watch over Pearl. She accompanied Pearl on her thrice-weekly trips to the hospital, where Pearl was attached to a dishwasher of a machine that cleansed her blood and sent it back into her forearm.
When they finally got the letter that a kidney was available, Neneh baked a kidney-shaped red velvet cake. “Ugly and damn good,” Pearl declared with a red velvet grin, and suddenly it seemed to Neneh that everything would be fine.

But soon after the operation, Pearl’s body began to refuse the new kidney. Her face swelled from the antirejection drugs; her limbs dwindled. Neneh could feel her own body humming with terror and energy. Whenever the hospice nurse tried to take Neneh aside and carefully talk about Pearl’s hypertension, “a bad sign,” Neneh bit at her fingernails so intently that all she heard was the sound of her clicking teeth. When Pearl began to murmur of funeral arrangements, Neneh went in search of fluffier pillows. Neneh made every effort to be of use, to pave the way toward Pearl’s decline with petals and prayers, as if death were a graceful thing, not the gradual gouging of life from Pearl’s eyes until what was left was only a decimating, and yet ordinary, stillness.

And now, here she was, at the Willow Park Zoo, a place she had longed for ever since she left it.

“How is your grandmother?” Joseph asked.

“She’s fine, just too old to travel.”

Neneh hadn’t planned on lying, but the truth would have led Joseph to treat her as everyone did, with equal portions of care and discomfort. Neneh knew how she was often perceived: a girl who had revolved around Pearl for decades and now, having no one else, was a planet spinning out into the unknown.

But as strong as her pull toward Pearl had been, Neneh had always felt an equal pull in Henry’s direction. She had done her college thesis on “Cooperative Behavior Among Captive
Chimpanzees”; she had kept the newspaper clipping about Henry and the blondes; she had brought along the contract with the Willow Park Zoo. She could not have admitted it to herself when Pearl was alive, but as the end approached, Neneh had felt a small and terrible part of her waiting to be released.

• • •

Nervous about seeing Henry, Neneh wandered the grounds on her first day at the zoo. Many animals were new to her, like the antlered blesbok behind rusted grids of wire and the Chilean flamingos with their knotted knees. She meandered through the Bird Hut, filled with the soft hiss and squeak of the Balinese mynah, the toucan, and the fruit dove, mingled with the noise of stroller wheels and shouting children, disappointedly searching the cages.

Eventually, Neneh made her way through the Primate Forest, past the red-nosed mandrills and the goateed colobus monkeys, finally arriving at the chimp enclosure. A zoo worker named Britta was sitting on the bench in front of the enclosure, a pretty face if not for the poorly dyed orange blond of her hair. She seemed to know a great deal about the different chimpanzees, their alliances, their diets, their “mouth-mouth contact.” Neneh searched the enclosure, unsuccessfully, for a face she recognized.

Britta pointed out Henry, who was crouched before a termite mound, a stick in his fist, which he dipped into the mound to fish for termites. He looked darker and rangier than Neneh had expected, especially compared to Max, whom Britta called “the new alpha male.” Max’s thick, bristly hair was being groomed by one of the females while Henry sat alone. Neneh searched Henry’s face, but she was too far away to tell whether his eyes were still the hue of maple syrup. She
waited for him to look up and notice the red headband she was wearing, which she had bought from a department store back in Canton, thinking that this might jog his memory to the first time they’d met in Bo. But he did not look up from his termite mound.

Britta explained last month’s upheaval, how Max had overthrown Henry through a mounting assault of bluff displays, which often ended in blows. Over the years, Max had grown to be Henry’s physical equal, and by nature Max was confrontational, often violent. Once, during a more brutal fight, Max tore a gash across the sole of Henry’s foot so that Henry limped for days. Presuming that this was a game, two of the newer children, Crouch and Walt, followed Henry in a single-file line, mimicking his limp.

As Britta chattered on, Neneh felt a thickening knot in her throat. “But no one stepped in to help Henry?” she demanded.

“Well, we can’t butt in whenever we want,” Britta said tautly. Neneh looked out at the man-made boulders, the man-made trickle of water between them. “We can’t just impose our world on theirs. Chimpanzees abide by their own rules, even if they’re in captivity.”

At that moment, Henry looked up. Neneh sat perfectly still. She imagined his world and her world, two distinct, delicate bubbles floating toward each other, hovering as he fixed her with his faraway gaze. Did he see the red headband? Did he recognize her voice?

He dropped his eyes and went back to poking the ground.

For that week, Neneh rented a room at the Motor Inn, which came equipped with a hot plate, a coffeepot, an iron, and a mirror that took up the entire wall opposite the bed. With
the blue-green wallpaper and drawn shades, the room had a contained, nautical feel.

Here, she ruminated over Britta’s words, the note of accusation when she’d said “impose our world.” It was the same accusation Pearl had inflicted upon herself ever since leaving Henry at the zoo.
By rescuing him, they had ruined him.

Sometimes Neneh wondered if Pearl had felt similarly about rescuing her. Pearl had never tried to contact Neneh’s relatives in Bo, and gradually Sierra Leone had come to seem to Neneh like yet another photograph in
National Geographic
, the natives serene and strange, the land lush and yet unyielding of its mysteries. With or without Pearl, Neneh would never visit Sierra Leone. Her birth mother was dead, and her grandmother had died soon after she’d left. Strangely, the only face that remained in her mind’s eye, like an icon, belonged to the boy who’d sold them baby Henry. She remembered the high, delicate bones of his cheeks, the sweatless sheen of his skin, but he would certainly never remember her. Maybe he was dead as well, or disfigured, or handless, another casualty in a war that was mentioned only marginally in their local paper. Neneh had sought out other newspapers, had read articles that displayed pictures of bandaged limbs and hard-eyed children holding guns. She had been spared.

In college, she had dated a boy, Carl, whose mother was black and whose father was white, both of them from Atlanta. He was proud of his parents’ union, forged at a time when some states still declared such intermixing illegal. He kept their picture in his desk drawer, his mother in a sleeveless white dress, bright against her smooth shoulders, smearing cake across her new husband’s mouth.

As for Neneh and Carl, the relationship ended in a matter of months. Neneh rarely spent a night away from Pearl, and
evetually Carl started dating an Iranian girl who lived down the hall. “She’s chill about things,” Carl told Neneh. “She gets me.”

“Really? Even though she’s not your tribe?”
Our tribe
was a phrase that Carl had coined, referring to the racial kinship he shared with Neneh, their twinned experience. Whatever that meant. She would’ve given anything to have a single picture like the one in his desk, a captured second of ordinary love from the people who made her. Or maybe just her mother. What she had was her own reflection, which told her nothing.

So Neneh had come to the zoo without a plan, with only the belief that, at the very least, she had Henry. As a child, she had felt unrestrained around him, able to breathe freely, at ease with her place in the world. And despite the intervening years, she had come to believe that she shared more with him than with anyone else. They were two ruined souls doomed to wander their minds, if not the earth, trying to remember from whence they came.

Some of the keepers expressed concern over the fact that Neneh would have direct contact with an adult male chimpanzee. Neneh argued that she wanted only to interact with Henry, away from the other chimps; it was a demand that had to be met according to the contract Pearl had signed long ago.

The first reunion was arranged for the afternoon. A keeper named Ben called Henry into the cages while the other chimps remained outside. When Henry entered the cage, his eyes went to the Dole fruit cup, still sealed, sitting close to the bars of the opposite wall. Neneh was kneeling on the other side. Henry no longer moved with a limp, but it seemed to her that his
spirit had atrophied, sucked from his frame. She wondered if he thought he was being punished. She raised her hand and waved, a gesture he used to mirror, but now did not.