THEN I WAS FIFTEEN, biking on my own through the beautiful, autumnal IU campus. Someone shouted my name as I pedaled past. “Rosemary! Wait up,” this someone called. “Wait up!” So I waited up and it was Kitch Chalmers, now a student at the U and seeming genuinely glad to see me. “Rosemary Cooke!” she said. “My old buddy from back in the day!”
Kitch took me into the student union, bought me a Coke. She chitchatted a bit and I listened. She told me that she regretted the wildness of her youth and hoped I wasn’t making the same mistakes. She warned me that some things, once done, couldn’t be undone. But she was on a better path now. She was in a sorority and her grades were good. She was getting an education degree, which was something I, too, should think about. You’d probably be a great teacher, she said, and to this day I have no idea why anyone would have thought that, though it is what I eventually did.
She had a nice boyfriend, who was off on his mission in Peru, she told me, and he didn’t let a week go by without calling her. Finally, she asked if we ever heard from Lowell. She never had. Not one word since the day he’d left. She thought she deserved better than that. We all deserved better, she said, we were a nice family.
And then she told me something I didn’t know about the last time she’d seen Lowell. They’d been walking together to his basketball practice, she said, when they ran into Matt. Matt my favorite grad student, Matt from Birmingham. Matt whom, after Fern left, I’d never seen again.
Matt who’d known I loved him, but hadn’t even said good-bye.
It turned out, Kitch said, that Matt had left Bloomington with Fern. He’d seemed surprised when Lowell didn’t already know that. Other chimps, separated suddenly from their families, had sometimes just died with no clear cause but grief. So Matt had been sent along, had volunteered, in fact, to help with the transition. He’d taken Fern to a psych lab in Vermillion, South Dakota. This lab housed more than twenty chimps, and was run by a Dr. Uljevik, about whom Matt had nothing good to say.
Although Fern was clearly suffering from the shock and terror of the move, Dr. Uljevik insisted on limiting the time Matt had with her to a few hours a week. He’d put Fern at once into a cage with four larger, older chimps, and when Matt told him that she’d never been with chimps before and couldn’t they introduce her slowly, Dr. Uljevik said no. He said she had to learn her place. She had to learn what she was. Dr. Uljevik said, “If she can’t learn her place, we can’t keep her here.” He never once, in all the time Matt had spent there, had called Fern by her name.
“Then,” Kitch said, “Lowell just lost it.” She’d tried to make him go on to basketball practice. She was afraid he’d be benched for the Marion game. She’d told him he had a responsibility to his teammates, to the whole school, heck, to the whole town.
“‘Don’t effing talk to me about responsibility,’” he’d said (which I doubted. Lowell never said effing in his life). “‘That’s my sister in that cage.’” They’d had a fight and Kitch had broken up with him.
Kitch had never known Fern, and so, like everyone else in town, she’d never really understood; Lowell’s reaction still struck her as extreme and inexplicable. “I told him I didn’t want to be the girlfriend of the guy who lost the game to Marion,” she’d told me. “I wish I hadn’t said that, but we were always saying horrible things to each other. I thought we’d make it up later, like we always did. He sure used to say some horrible stuff. It wasn’t just me.”
But I barely heard that part, because I was still hearing what she’d said earlier. “Out there in South Dakota,” Kitch had said, “Matt said they treated Fern like some kind of animal.”
• • •
IT’S HARD ENOUGH here to forgive myself for things I did and felt when I was five, hopeless for the way I behaved at fifteen. Lowell heard that Fern was in a cage in South Dakota and he took off that very night. I heard the same thing and my response was to pretend I hadn’t heard it. My heart had risen into my throat, where it stayed all through Kitch’s horrible story. I couldn’t finish my Coke or speak around that nasty, meaty, beating lump.
But as I’d biked home, my head cleared. It took me all of five blocks to decide it wasn’t such a bad story, after all. Good old Matt. Twenty other chimps for friends, a new chimp family. The cage clearly just an interim measure before she was moved into Dad’s farm. Lowell had no gift for belief and faith. Lowell, I thought, Lowell was capable of leaping to some crazy conclusions.
Besides, if there had been a problem with Fern, Lowell had surely taken care of it by now. He’d gone to South Dakota and done whatever needed to be done. And then he’d moved on to Davis, California. The FBI had told us so. My own government. Would they lie?
At dinner, I adopted my usual strategy of saying nothing. The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you’ve gone over that cliff. Saying nothing was more amendable, and over time I’d come to see that it was usually your best course of action. I’d come to silence hard, but at fifteen I was a true believer.