Howard Sr. seemed to mull this over, while unbeknownst to him, Konrad was slipping down from the coat tree and creeping up at his back. “Is it that bad,” he said finally, “or is it the difference between Connecticut and the, the—” He was interrupted by the imposition of a long, sinuous, fur-cloaked arm which snaked under his own to deftly snatch a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. Before he could react, the arm was gone. “Eeeee!” screamed Konrad, “eeee-eeee!” and he retreated to the coat tree with his booty.
Beatrice rose immediately to her feet, ignoring the sharp pain that ground at her kneecaps, and marched across the room. She wouldn’t have it, one of her chimps indulging a filthy human habit. Give it here, she wanted to say, but then she wouldn’t have one of her chimps responding to human language either, as if he were some fawning lapdog or neutered cat. “Woo-oo-oogh,” she coughed at him.
“Wraaaaa!” he screamed back, bouncing down from his perch and careening round the room in a threat display, the cigarettes clutched tightly to his chest. She circled him warily, aware that Howie and his father loomed behind her now, their limbs loose, faces set hard. “Miss Umbo,” Howie’s voice spoke at her back, “do you need any help there?”
It was then that Konrad tore round the room again — up over the couch, the banister, up the ropes and down — and Howard Sr. made a calculated grab for him. “No!” Beatrice cried, but the warning was superfluous: Konrad effortlessly eluded the old man’s clumsy swipe, bounced twice, and was back up in the coat tree before he could blink his eyes.
“Heh, heh,” Howard Sr. laughed from the top of his throat, “frisky little fella, isn’t he?”
Beatrice stood before him, trying to catch her breath. “You don’t,” she began, wondering how to put it, “you don’t want to, uh, obstruct him when he displays.”
Howie, the son, looked bemused.
“You don’t, I think, appreciate the strength of this creature. A chimpanzee — a full-grown male, as Konrad is — is at least three times as strong as his human counterpart. Now certainly, I’m sure he wouldn’t deliberately hurt anyone—”
“Hurt us?” Howie exclaimed, involuntarily flexing his shoulders. “I mean, he barely comes up to my chest.”
A contented grunt escaped Konrad at that moment. He lay sprawled in his nest, the rubbery soles of his prehensile feet blackly dangling. He’d wadded up the entire pack of cigarettes and tucked it beneath his lower lip. Now he extracted the wad of tobacco and paper, sniffed it with an appreciative roll of his eyes, and replaced it between cheek and gum. Beatrice sighed. She looked at Howie, but didn’t have the strength to respond.
Later, while Konrad snored blissfully from his perch and the boy and his father had accepted first one bowl of chicken soup and then another, and the conversation drew away from the prosaic details of Beatrice’s life in Connecticut — and did she know Tiddy Brohmer and Harriet Dillers? — and veered instead toward Makoua and the Umbo Primate Center, Howard Sr. brought up the subject of airplanes. He flew, and so did his son. He’d heard about the bush pilots in Africa and wondered about her experience of them.
Beatrice was so surprised she had to set down her tea for fear of spilling it. “You fly?” she repeated.
Howard Sr. nodded and leveled his keen glistening gaze on her. “Twenty-two hundred and some-odd hours’ worth,” he said. “And Howie. He’s a regular fanatic. Got his license when he was sixteen, and since we bought the Cessna there’s hardly a minute when he’s on the ground.”
“I love it,” Howie asserted, crouched over his massive thighs on the very edge of the chair. “I mean, it’s my whole life. When I get out of school I want to restore classic aircraft. I know a guy who’s got a Stearman.”
Beatrice warmed up her smile. All at once she was back in Africa, 2500 feet up, the land spread out like a mosaic at her feet. Champ, her late husband, had taken to planes like a chimp to trees, and though she’d never learned to fly herself, she’d spent whole days at a time in the air with him, spying out chimp habitat in the rich green forests of Cameroon, the Congo, and Zaire or coasting above the golden veldt to some distant, magical village in the hills. She closed her eyes a moment, overcome with the intensity of the recollection. Champ, Makoua, the storms and sunsets and the close, savage, unimpeachable society of the apes — it was all lost to her, lost forever.
“Miss Umbo?” Howie was peering into her eyes with an expression of concern, the same expression he’d worn that afternoon in Waldbaum’s when he’d asked if she needed help with the bananas.
“Miss Umbo,” he repeated, “anytime you want to see Connecticut from the air, just you let me know.”
“That’s very kind of you,” she said.
“Really,” and he grinned Agassiz’s grin, “it’d be a pleasure.”
Things were sprouting from the dead dun earth — crocuses, daffodils, nameless buds, and strange pale fingertips of vegetation — by the time the first of her scheduled lectures came round. It was an evening lecture, open to the public, and held in the Buffon Memorial Auditorium of the State University. Her topic was “Tool Modification in the Chimps of the Makoua Reserve,” and she’d chosen fifty color slides for illustration. For a while she’d debated wearing one of the crepe-de-chine dresses her sister had left hanging forlornly in the closet, but in the end she decided to stick with the safari shorts.
As the auditorium began to fill, she stood rigid behind the curtain, deaf to the chatter of the young professor who was to introduce her. She watched the crowd gather — blank-faced housewives and their paunchy husbands, bearded professors, breast-thumping students, the stringy, fur-swathed women of the Anthropology Club — watched them command their space, choose their seats, pick at themselves, and wriggle in their clothing. “I’ll keep it short,” the young professor was saying, “some remarks about your career in general and the impact of your first two books, then maybe two minutes on Makoua and the Umbo Primate Center, is that all right?” Beatrice didn’t respond. She was absorbed in the dynamics of the crowd, listening to their chatter, observing their neck craning and leg crossing, watching the furtive plumbing of nostrils and sniffing of armpits, the obsessive fussing with hair and jewelry. Howie and his father were in the second row. By the time she began, it was standing room only.
It went quite well at first — she had that impression, anyway. She was talking of what she knew better than anyone else alive, and she spoke with a fluency and grace she couldn’t seem to summon at Waldbaum’s or the local Exxon station. She watched them — fidgeting, certainly, but patient and intelligent, all their primal needs — their sexual urges, the necessity of relieving themselves and eating to exhaustion — sublimated beneath the spell of her words. Agassiz, she told them about Agassiz, the first of the wild apes to let her groom him, dead twenty years now. She told them of Spenser and Leakey and Darwin, of Lula, Pout, and Chrysalis. She described how Agassiz had fished for termites with the stem of a plant he’d stripped of leaves, how Lula had used a stick to force open the concrete bunkers in which the bananas were stored, and how Clint, the dominant male, had used a wad of leaves as a sponge to dip the brains from the shattered skull of a baby baboon.
The problem arose when she began the slide show. For some reason, perhaps because the medium so magnified the size of the chimps and he felt himself wanting in comparison, Konrad threw a fit. (She hadn’t wanted to bring him, but the last time she’d left him alone he’d switched on all the burners of the stove, overturned and gutted the refrigerator, and torn the back door from its hinges — all this prior to committing a rash of crimes, ranging from terrorizing Mrs. Binchy’s Doberman to crushing and partially eating a still-unidentified angora kitten.) He’d been sitting just behind the podium, slouched in a folding chair around which Doris Beatts, the young professor, had arranged an array of fruit, including a basket of yim-yim flown in for the occasion. “Having him onstage is a terrific idea,” she’d gushed, pumping Beatrice’s hand and flashing a zealot’s smile that showed off her pink and exuberant gums, “what could be better? It’ll give the audience a real frisson, having a live, chimp sitting there.”