God's Grace Page 13

  They liked holding hands as they walked together. Mary Madelyn, after consuming a passion fruit he had picked for her, kissed Cohn full on the lips.

  Buz complained high in a tree. He shredded bark with his teeth, obviously deeply jealous.

  He had told Cohn he was old enough for sexual experience and wished to copulate with Mary Madelyn. He didn’t know by what right his own dod interfered with his courtship of her. She was his kind, not Cohn’s.

  Cohn said that on this island there was only one kind—sentient, intelligent living beings. “We’re sort of affectionately in love,” he told Buz, “or something close to it.”

  Buz wanted to be in love too, and Cohn replied his time would come. He mentioned Hattie, and Buz hooted in ridicule. The chimp stomped away but got over being angry with Cohn in less than a week. Instead of following the lovers, he began to collect rare stones and shells on the beach. Cohn had taught him the rudiments of polishing stones, and had also told him some appealing stories of sublimation. Buz said he didn’t like the stories, yet it was apparent he had learned something. On the other hand, he formally moved out of the cave, taking along eight cream coconut bars and an old hat of Cohn’s.

  Cohn agreed it was time Buz had a place of his own, though he expected him to drop in at the cave whenever he felt like it. If he happened to be busy, he was sure Buz would understand.

  On their wandering walks, or as they rested in the warm grass, or sat together in a tree, Mary Madelyn and he talked about Romeo and Juliet. Cohn had read her the first act three times, and she greatly enjoyed the balcony scene. She liked to say, “‘What wov can do, that dares wov attempt.’”

  She had never seen a balcony and imagined a vine-entangled baobab in which Juliet was confined by two hefty, threatening guardian apes. Then Romeo, a youthful, handsome chimpanzee, appeared, scared off the offensive apes with a display of strength, and released Juliet from her prison-tree. They lived together, afterwards, in his happy flowering acacia.

  Cohn didn’t tell her about the sad future fate of the lovers. He would let her find that out herself. Mary Madelyn was not the curious reader Buz was, yet she liked to be read to and learned well by ear.

  “Am I wovwy as Juwiet?” she asked Cohn.

  “You have your graces.”

  “Wiw you ever wov me?”

  He couldn’t say yes nor did he say no. Cohn said love was complicated but they were obviously affectionate to each other.

  “What is wov ?” Mary Madelyn asked.

  Cohn said it was a flame that lights a flame. “That’s how a romantic would put it.” He was eager to educate her.

  Mary Madelyn, listening dreamily, wanted to know what other kind of love there was.

  “A living-together kind of love, however romantically it may have begun, something trusting, sustaining, committed to life.”

  “Can I wov wike that ?”

  “I hope so.”

  “If I do, wiw you wov me ?”

  He said he thought so.

  “I wov you,” she said to Calvin Cohn.

  He said he found her engaging. She was even alluring these days, amiable brown eyes, silken black hair; her features approached human. Though Mary Madelyn could not be said to be classically beautiful—facts were facts—still beauty existed, derived to some degree from her intelligent, generous nature. She came to something. Having become aware of her quality, her spirit, Cohn thought, accounted for his growing feeling for her.

  Sensing receptivity, Mary Madelyn presented herself to him, crouching low. Her sexual skin, after four weeks, had blossomed overnight, like a repellent flower.

  Cohn said he was sorry but he couldn’t possibly oblige—couldn’t mount her.

  “Why not? You said you fewt affection for me.”

  He admitted he did but could only embrace her face to face. “I wouldn’t be surprised if love began that way—evolutionarily speaking,” he said, “when two lovers were able to face one another.”

  She said she was perfectly willing to embrace him face to face, and afterwards they could mate as nature demanded.

  Cohn then said the act was forbidden to him—“to copulate with an animal.”

  “Is that aw I am to you?”

  “Certainly not. But I have to take other things into account. My father was a religious man. I’ve been influenced by his teaching, not to mention his moral vision, and also his temperament.” Cohn said that as a young man he had broken from his father and gone his own way, but he was still bound to him, although he had been dead for years and Cohn’s own world had been destroyed.

  Mary Madelyn, getting back to the practical, said she had taken a bath that morning. She told him she was pure. “I have kept my virginity for you ever since you expwained the word to me when you first read me Romeo and Juwiet.”

  He now understood her frantic flights from the male apes, and admired her for saving herself for him on his terms, an astonishing feat for an animal, even a primate.

  Yet he replied, “It says in Leviticus, ‘Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind—’”

  “I am not a cattew.”

  “It also says, ‘If a man lies with a beast he shall be put to death; and you shall kill the beast’ And it says more or less the same in Deuteronomy: ‘Cursed be he who lies with any kind of beast.’

  “Do you think of me as a beast, Cawvin?”

  “Not really,” he admitted.

  Mary Madelyn asked him if he had a mind of his own; and the next moment she was in flight, having spied a band of males in a nearby tree—Buz among them—who had beheld, and were discussing, her shivering pale flower.

  Cohn, shouting and waving his arms, diverted them as Mary Madelyn took off for, and escaped, into the rain forest.

  How can I love her? he reflected in his cave, except as I loved my dog?

  During the tropical night a haggard Mary Madelyn appeared in the cave, and when Cohn sleepily lit the lamp, she presented herself to him.

  He blew out the light and turned toward the wall.

  She slept in Buz’s cage and in the morning swept the floor with a bramble broom and was gone.

  She did not appear in the schooltree, and neither did the young males. Only Melchior and Hattie attended class that day, squatting on a branch of the eucalyptus, holding hands.

  And George, in his coniferous cedar, sat alone as usual, cracking palm nuts with his rock-like teeth as he listened, the short hair on his sloping dark skull rising as Cohn lectured on the development of the great apes and ascent of homo sapiens during the course of evolution. He had several times lectured on natural selection—the maximization of fitness, someone had defined it—a popular subject with his students. It promised possibilities if one made himself—or in some way became—selectable.

  And the chimpanzees liked to learn where they might have originated. They enjoyed the mysteries of being and becoming, of guessing and knowing. Cohn used some of the fossils he had dug out of the earth to illustrate and trace the anatomical development of mammals. He said he had had great hopes for the future of man, until the Day of Devastation. Cohn had at one time theorized that evolution might produce a moral explosion via a gifted creature, homo ethicalis; but man, as he was, had got there first with a different kind of explosion.

  In class the next morning, after a night of sleepless thinking of Mary Madelyn, he was not as carefully prepared as usual, yet he addressed himself to the subject of the close relationship of chimpanzees and the creature who had once lived on earth as man, a closer relationship than Darwin might have imagined. They were descended from a common ancestor, perhaps Ramapithecus, who lived about twenty million years ago, a gifted ape-like primate who may have been struck—it seemed to Cohn—by a crafty desire to improve his lot in life, if not altogether to change himself into something better than he assumed he was.

  “The physical similarities of chimpanzee and man show in their blood and brain,” Cohn lectured, “as well as in their appearance and behavio
r. Human beings—this will interest you—and great apes have almost identical genes—more than 99 percent of the amino-acid sequences in human beings and African apes are identical, despite morphological differences. And the African apes’ albumin antibody reactions are (let’s say) closer to men’s than they were (let’s say) to Asian apes. All this indicates about five million years since we diverged from a common ancestor on the molecular clock, which is very impressive, I’d say.”

  Cohn cited Dr. Walther Bünder as his source, and the two old chimps in the tree clapped heartily. The gorilla, still cracking palm nuts with his teeth, listened raptly, sometimes forgetting to chew.

  Cohn went on: “Also in their sensory apparatus, the nature of their emotions, and their expressions and grimaces —perhaps even in who they think they are, chimpanzees are more like men than some men, or any other primate.

  “Though they can be as nasty, brutish, and mean as men, their natures are essentially affectionate. They kiss and hug on celebratory occasions, and some—I have heard—even die of broken hearts.”

  Here Hattie dabbed her eye with eucalyptus leaves, and Melchior sniffed once.

  But George the gorilla gave his chest a muffled thump, as if in doubt he was hearing good news; and sighed to himself.

  “The idea I wish to propound,” Cohn suggested, “is that it seems entirely possible that chimpanzees, as they progress in their evolution may, if their unconscious minds insist, incite molecular changes that will sooner or later—sooner, I hope—cause them to develop into a species something like man, perhaps better than man was when he fell from grace and vanished”—Cohn coughed to dislodge a frog in his throat—“from the face of this earth.

  “And if these forthcoming chimps do, in the long run, turn out to be more fortunate than man—maybe a little more richly endowed, more carefully controlled, more easily inclined to the moral life; in the larger sense more”humanly behaved than the species of which I am the last survivor; then maybe the presently disaffected Almighty Being Who began the creation of us all may bestow on them a more magnanimous fate than homo sapiens achieved—I mean suffered.”

  Cohn personally felt that the Lord, when He saw such good-willed alteration going on among the chimps who had selected themselves, might once more love His creation.

  “God’s there, sure enough,” he said, “sitting in his judgment seat, but not always attentive to what’s going on, as if He has on His mind one of His new concerns—in this case a gob of bacteria He had that day laid under a warm rock on Pluto; and as a result he suffers a cosmic absentmindedness caused by being conscious of everything at every instant of existence, or duration, or whatever it is that, among infinite other qualities, we call God’s Being—That-Which- Is-Above-Is-Below-and-What-Is-Inside-Is-Outside-Kind-of-Being. Yet surely He will welcome, when He notices, a species of adventurous chimps developing into a species of superior-sort-of-men?

  “Amen,” Cohn muttered.

  Melchior and Hattie, at the conclusion of this inspired address, applauded enthusiastically, and quickly descended the schooltree for their banana beer.

  George dropped out of his cedar like a long lump of putty, as if dismayed he hadn’t heard a gorilla mentioned once, and he loped away.

  Cohn then reconsidered a daring plan that had filtered through his thoughts last night as Mary Madelyn slept in his cave. In the morning he plotted it on a sheet of paper he afterwards destroyed.

  He had decided that the extraordinary act he had in mind might be worth a stab in the dark. Doubts assailed him—contemplating a fantastic act of daring was like a trumpet blast, the soldiers of doubt woke and charged—but Cohn cleverly sidestepped them.

  If he and Mary Madelyn, in mutual affection, lay with each other, and however he aimed and entered, he succeeded in depositing in her hospitable uterus a spurt of adventurous sperm: that—if it took—might sooner or later have the effect he was hoping for. Assuming fertilization, and carrying her fetus to full term (the odds against that, he had learned from Dr. Bünder, were high), she would, with luck, give birth to a baby in eight months. Whatever happened thereafter was uncertain, but the beginning—without which nothing began but God Himself—would have begun.

  In sum, a worthy primate evolution demanded, besides a few macroevolutionary lucky breaks, a basis of brainpower; and commencing with a combination of man-chimp child, the two most intelligent of God’s creatures might produce this new species—ultimately of Cohn’s invention—an eon or two ahead on the molecular clock.

  Let’s see what happens now.

  Cohn reasoned thus: Already his citizen-chimps had mastered language as speech and foundation of rational thought. Assuming the presence, not too long from now (Look how quickly Adam and Eve, a single couple who did not work hard at it, had peopled the earth), of the necessary females, and as a result of Cohn’s “experiment” a rich pool of genes to work with—sooner or later the developing man-apes would inherit larger, more complex, more subtle brains than either now possessed; and who knows what other useful characteristics, also freely bestowed, might be achieved in comparatively less future-time, evolutionarily speaking, if God did not interfere with (indeed, secretly sanctioned and blessed) the process.

  Who knows—Cohn let it play in his mind—maybe the Lord had reconsidered His Second Dismal Flood and was regretting it. He Himself, possibly, had inspired the revolutionary impulse in Cohn’s head—(His vessel)—that he mate with a lady ape; despite which act He would omit cursing him, and thereafter killing the innocent “beast,” such primeval punishment null and void in these ineluctably post-Torah times?

  And wouldn’t Cohn be playing a role in purpose like that of Lot’s daughters, who lay down with their wine-drunk father after Sodom had been smoked off the map, to preserve the future of mankind and its successors, not excluding the Messiah?

  If two daughters, in a dark cave on separate nights, lay incestuously with their wine-sotted, love-groaning father, why not Cohn, a clearheaded, honest man, lying with bio-philial affection and shut eyes, against the warm furry back of a loving lady chimpanzee who spoke English well and was mysteriously moved by Romeo and Juliet?

  He considered renaming the island, “Cohn’s Lot.”

  But his doubts were these: he had recalled the fable of the cat changed into a princess, who as pretty princess—to the prince her husband’s astonishment—pounced on a befuddled gray mouse who had blundered into the parlor. The next day the cat was back in the cat life.

  What’s bred in the bones lives there. Similarly, with or without speech, Mary Madelyn had armies of ancient chimp-genes tucked away in her flesh, that might overwhelm Cohn’s civilized genotypes trying to make a living in her warm ape-womb. If they perished in the struggle to survive in a semi-alien fetus, how could Cohn contribute anything of lasting value to the child?

  Or suppose the child was born a monster and for some inevitable genetic reason developed as King Kong, unless the old monster appeared on the scene as Queen?

  Fooling around with evolution—for wasn’t that what it ultimately came to?—despite good intentions, was a mad act for a hitherto responsible scientist. Besides, the future was beyond invisible reach, and he would never know what he had stirred up.

  On the other hand, with so many doubts and maybes staring him in the face on this broken island, yet with fantastic possibilities on the horizon, or boiling up in the surrounding seas—maybe about to fly at him from another planet—so much one could not begin to foretell—therefore what else to do when there were no practical prospects at hand but “take a chance”? Some good might come of it. What worked, worked; what hadn’t, might.

  Therefore monkey with evolution? That much chutzpah?

  Why not—in these times—if one took into account the eschatological living trauma the Lord had laid on the world?

  That decided the matter for Cohn.

  After the day’s work, he unfolded the portion of stiff sail of the Rebekah Q that he had used as a seder tablecloth. Guiding
a pair of tinsmith’s shears along a charcoal line he had drawn to outline a simple dress pattern he had found in his one-volume, all-purpose, popular encyclopedia, Cohn cut out a portion of the canvas material into front and back panels of a simple white chemise.

  With a waxed twine inserted through an eye he had punched into a nail, he sewed together the two halves of the dress; and Cohn considered adding a pair of white drawers, but gave that up when it occurred to him they would only get in the way. When Mary Madelyn, groggy from outrunning pursuing males all day, returned to the cave, Cohn presented the white garment to her as a friendship gift.

  She asked what she could do with it, and Cohn said he would like her to dress in it, and he would help if she needed help. Apparently she didn’t. She went through the motions of clothing herself and seemed to enjoy dressing, though she swore she had never before in her life worn any garment except a hat of flowers she had once made for herself.

  Cohn, stepping back to admire her elegant appearance in the white dress, said she looked like somebody’s bride.

  “Do I wook wike Juwiet?”

  “Sort of, though I’m no Romeo.”

  “I wov you, do you wov me?”

  “Sure enough,” said Cohn. “I sure do.”

  Perhaps her eyes misted, perhaps not, but it seemed to Cohn that she would have cried a little if chimps could. Maybe someday—another step in their humanization.

  Turning the lamp low, he proposed that she and he mate, and Mary Madelyn modestly assented.

  He lifted her white skirt from the rear, and with shut eyes, telling himself to keep his thoughts level, Cohn dipped his phallus into her hot flower. There was an instant electric connection and Cohn parted with his seed as she possessed it. He felt himself happily drawn clean of sperm. Mary Madelyn was at once calmed. She waited a minute for more to happen, but when nothing more did, she chewed up a fig and fell asleep in his bed.