Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 110, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 673 & 674, September/October 1997

Gertrude by Ann Bayer

© 1997 by Ann Bayer

Ann Bayer is a veteran of EQMM with several pieces published in the eighties and early nineties and a second-place Readers Award win in 1987. Ms. Bayer worked for some years as a staff writer for Life magazine, and her fiction has appeared in many other distinguished publications, including Harper’s, The Saturday Evening Post, Mademoiselle and Seventeen.

My wife always wanted to be a lemur. I don’t know why this should be so. The only place lemurs occur in the wild is Madagascar, and I used to say to her, “Gert, give me one good reason why living in a tree in Madagascar is preferable to living in a house in Cleveland.” I never got a satisfactory answer. It’s something she can’t explain. By some evolutionary quirk of fate, Gertrude seems to have been born with the body and mind of a human being but the heart and soul of the pre-monkey suborder, Lemuroidea. The British writer Cyril Connolly wrote that when he thought of lemurs, depression engulfed him. On my wife these purple-tongued entities have a different effect. When she thinks of them she’s engulfed by a delusion of grandeur. Their grandeur, her delusion.

I met Gertrude when I led a group of Clevelanders on an expedition to Madagascar. At the time I was still curator of physical anthropology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Gertrude was head of the English department at a private school for girls. It wasn’t until after we were married that she confided that her secret wish was to be a lemur.

At first this didn’t seem to me all that unreasonable. Nearly two hundred million years ago the mini-continent of Madagascar broke off from Africa and drifted eastward to its present position in the Indian Ocean. Finding itself stranded, a small squirrel-like mammal, our mutual progenitor, took a Darwinian detour and evolved into the lemur. It was not as if my wife wanted to be a dog or a cat. Lemurs are the flip side of us.

I asked Gertrude which of the forty or so types she wished she was. I started to name them. The red-bellied lemur, the broad-nosed gentle lemur, the fat-tailed dwarf lemur... But no. It turned out the lemur she most wanted to be was the rare and solitary aye-aye.

She said she considered the aye-aye her doppelganger, the physical embodiment of her truest self. I was aghast. My wife was then fifty-four. She had gray hair and wore glasses. She looked like a typical, everyday Midwesterner. The word lemur originates from Lemures, Latin for ghostly spirits, and the nocturnal aye-aye is by far the ghostliest spirit of all. It has beaver teeth, bat ears, bug eyes, a rat snout, and a tail very like a witch’s broomstick. But its strangest feature is an elongated middle finger, so supple it can bend in any direction. It’s the sort of digit a skeleton in a hooded cape would use to tap you on the shoulder. In Madagascar it’s common knowledge that a person who’s pointed at by an aye-aye is marked for death.

Last summer I had to go to Madagascar to evaluate some fossilized remains of an extinct lemur, Palaeopropithecus maximus, for the museum. Gertrude was on vacation and insisted on coming along as my assistant. We were at the lemur subfossil site when a telegram came inviting me to participate in a symposium at the Duke University Primate Center in Durham, North Carolina. The topic was to be the hairy-eared dwarf lemur. The first ever seen alive by scientists had been recently discovered in a leech-infested Madagascan rain forest. At three and a half ounces, the hairy-eared dwarf lemur is the world’s second smallest primate. (Only the two-ounce lesser mouse lemur is smaller.) The telegram said that as an expert on prosimian zoology, I would be an invaluable addition to the panel.

It was a fantastic opportunity. There was just one hitch: I’d have to leave for the States immediately. Fortunately, I’d already arranged for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History to acquire the Palaeopropithecus maximus bone fragments. Gertrude generously volunteered to remain behind a day or two and deal with all the bureaucratic red tape involved in shipping them home, so off I went to Duke University where I engaged in fascinating discussions about lemurs. When the symposium was over I flew to Cleveland. By the time I reached our house in Cleveland Heights it was night. Upstairs I found my wife lying in bed watching TV. But there was a man lying beside her. No, not a man, an aye-aye. I grabbed the remote control from Gertrude’s hand and switched off the set. I was seized by an icy sense of foreboding.

“How could you do this? How could you do anything so completely — so utterly—”

“Please, Arnold, I can explain.”

“Oh, why why why did I leave you alone over there?”

“You’re getting yourself all worked up for no reason. The aye-aye’s very happy. I’m very happy. How did the symposium go, by the way? I’m yearning to hear all about the hairy-eared dwarf—”

“I knew you had this absurd — fixation — but I never dreamed you were capable of — of this.”

The aye-aye sat up in bed and looked from one to the other of us, its bulging eyes glowing like tiny headlights, its bony finger clawing the bedspread.

“Sit down, Arnold, you’re making it nervous pacing around like that. I’ll tell you what happened but only if you stop acting like a nervous wreck.”

It seemed that no sooner had my plane taken off from Madagascar than Gertrude had made her way to Nosy Mangabé, a remote island off the northeast coast that had been turned into an aye-aye refuge. There she’d howled, “Tonk-tonk-brrr-RAWW-RAWWW,” the unearthly cry of the greater bamboo lemur. This was answered by “Ha-hay, ha-hay, ha-hay,” the nasal hoot of the aye-aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis). The two had ululated back and forth until dawn. Finally a bizarre black and silver apparition had emerged from the jungle and climbed into Gertrude’s outstretched arms. She’d transported it back to the subfossil site. There she’d opened the crate and placed the Daubentonia madagascariensis beside the Palaeopropithecus maximus, drilled some air holes, and smuggled it to Cleveland.

All during Gertrude’s recitation I’d been sitting on the bed with my head in my hands. When I spoke, my voice was hoarse with anger. “What you have done is unconscionable,” I began. “The aye-aye is the most endangered lemur on earth.”

“I realize that, Arnold, but—”

“Do you have any idea what the penalty is for sneaking an endangered species out of its country of origin?”

“Well, not exactly, but since no one’s going to find out, it doesn’t really make any—”

“You could very possibly end up in prison.”

“Not if we keep the aye-aye a secret.”

“You could end up in prison and I could end up in prison, as an accessory. We could both be behind bars for a very, very long—”

“Really, Arnold, you make it sound like I’ve committed murder or something.”

“You have. Don’t you see? The aye-aye is as good as dead right now. For your information, the climate of northeast Ohio is not compatible with the climate of northeast Madagascar. If it stays here, there’s no way the aye-aye can survive the winter.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. We’ve got a fireplace. We’ve got radiators. We’ve got hot-water bottles. We’ve got—”

“And if you think for one moment that the beetle larvae in Cleveland are the same as the beetle larvae in Nosy Mangabé, think again. Even if the aye-aye doesn’t freeze, it will definitely starve. I’m sorry, Gert, but the little critter has to go.”

It stayed, of course. Gertrude gave it the run of the house. During the day it slept on an overhead beam in the attic where it fashioned a nest out of a Cleveland Indians pennant that it dragged up from the basement. Food turned out not to be a problem. The aye-aye liked everything: fish food, birdseed, takeout Szechuan dumplings, gerbil pellets. It also foraged on its own. As soon as the sun went down, it would leave its nest and press its flaring ears against the rafters. Suddenly it would begin to chisel a hole with its eighteen teeth (most lemurs have thirty-six), sending out a shower of splinters. When the hole was big enough, it would poke its long spindly finger in and out, in and out. Each time the finger reappeared, there sat a row of termites. Once the aye-aye got through lapping them up, Gertrude would put it on a leash and take it for a walk in the backyard.

Sometimes after it got dark we took the aye-aye sightseeing. I drove and Gertrude sat beside me holding the aye-aye upright on her lap so it could shine its lugubrious orange eyes on the city’s points of interest. It seemed particularly taken with the Epworth-Euclid United Methodist Church with its oil-can steeple jutting into the night sky. We showed the aye-aye the Ameritrust Bank, the closest it would ever come to seeing an Italian Renaissance temple. If we circled the low-rise brick Georgian buildings of Shaker Square, the aye-aye would wrap its plumed tail over its face. But when we drove past the Cleveland Museum of Art, with its neoclassic marble facade and Ionic columns, it would prop its clawed front feet on the dashboard and lean forward to get a better view.

Labor Day came and soon afterwards Gertrude went back to her teaching job. By now our social life had become nonexistent. We’d stopped having people over because we couldn’t risk the aye-aye being discovered. The house was a mess. The aye-aye wasn’t housebroken and the floors were covered with soiled copies of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and strewn with half-gnawed mangoes and coconuts. Gertrude was up most of the night because she couldn’t bear to be asleep while the aye-aye was awake. At school she began showing signs of exhaustion. Once during a grammar lesson she found herself unable to explain what a dangling participle was. Another time she insisted to a class of eighth graders that Emily Bronte had written Jane Eyre and Charlotte Bronte had written Wuthering Heights, instead of the other way around. Things got so bad that the headmistress even called me at my office and said she was worried that my wife might be having a breakdown.

I knew we couldn’t go on this way. I begged and pleaded with Gertrude to give up the aye-aye but always to no avail. Eventually my higher primate brain came up with a plan. Without telling Gertrude, I arranged with the museum to take the following week off.

When Monday came I pretended to drive to work as usual. Instead I parked a block from the house and waited until I was sure Gertrude had left to catch the rapid transit to school. Then I drove home. I stuffed some clothes into a suitcase, ran up to the attic, snatched the aye-aye out of its nest, and maneuvered it into a travel kennel. While I was loading everything into the car, it occurred to me that I’d better leave Gertrude a note so she wouldn’t worry. I went back inside and sat down with a piece of paper at the kitchen table and drew a big heart in which I wrote in wobbly letters, “DEAR GERTRUDE, THANK YOU FOR A VERY NICE TIME.” I signed it, “THE AYE-AYE.” Then I drove to the Cleveland Hopkins Airport. At the check-in counter I explained that I was traveling with my pet dog. The airline representative became suspicious when she saw a skeletal licorice stick of a finger poking through the mesh window of the kennel. “It’s a Heinz 57,” I told her and the clerk seemed satisfied. At JFK in New York I checked the kennel through to Madagascar.

It took thirty hours and two stopovers before we touched down in Antananarivo, the capital. I hired a car and bumped along the rough terrain to the eastern coast with the kennel bouncing around in the backseat. I speak a little Malagasy, enough to talk a fisherman into ferrying me across to Nosy Mangabé. The island is completely covered with dense foliage. I set the kennel down on a tangle of houbouhoubou vines and swung open the little door. The aye-aye stuck out its head and took a whiff of good old Nosy Mangabé air. Home at last. Then it tottered out of the kennel and disappeared among the trees without so much as a backward glance. I stood still for a time, wondering what was going on inside its mind. I hoped that some night as it skewered grubs with its ebony finger, it would recall its months in the United States. Most of all, I hoped the aye-aye would remember Gertrude and how she had sung to it as we drove along the moonlit shoreline of Lake Erie, the towers and spires of Cleveland shimmering in the distance.

Retracing my route took me the better part of three days. Night had fallen by the time I finally swung my car into the driveway. I went in and tiptoed up to the bedroom. No Gertrude. I thought that maybe she’d gone for a midnight stroll. Ever since the aye-aye had come into our lives, she’d become more and more of a night person. I went to bed and immediately fell asleep. Something woke me. I opened my eyes. “That you, Gert?” I said. It was. I could just make out her silhouette in the darkness. She was standing beside the bed, one hand raised and clenched into a fist. I eased myself up on my elbows. Gertrude said not a word. Slowly she detached a single finger, the middle one, from her fist and pointed it at me. I shrank back against the headboard. Her finger seemed to be not so much pointing as aiming. Then she uttered a series of horrifyingly familiar cries. “Ha-hay, ha-hay, ha-hay.”

Madagascans know that when an aye-aye points its long skinny finger at you, there’s just one thing to do: crumble a tobacco leaf and smear your face with its juice. The only trouble was, I didn’t have a tobacco leaf. In Cleveland you just never think you’re going to need one. So there was no way I could deflect the full force of Gertrude’s malevolence. Sheer unmitigated terror, not to mention jet lag, overcame me and I blacked out.

When I next opened my eyes it was morning. Gertrude’s side of the bed hadn’t been slept in. I showered and shaved. By the time I came downstairs Gertrude apparently had left for school. I made myself breakfast, got in the car, and headed for the office.

It was October and Cleveland was in its autumnal splendor. As I drove along Euclid Avenue I felt more and more exhilarated. The aye-aye was safely back in its forest refuge. Sure, Gertrude was a little upset, but that was to be expected. She missed the aye-aye. In time she would come to realize that keeping it would have been impossible. Now she and I could resume living like normal Clevelanders. We could go out and enjoy all the cultural advantages the city had to offer: the art museum, the symphony orchestra...

My train of thought was interrupted by a billboard up ahead. It featured a rendering of Uncle Sam, looking just as he had in recruiting posters during World War II, and the words: “I WANT YOU FOR THE U.S. ARMY. ENLIST NOW.” Beneath his starred top hat and bushy eyebrows, Uncle Sam’s eyes glowered. He had his fist raised and he appeared to be pointing his index finger straight at me. Immediately the horror of the night before came rushing back. I let go of the steering wheel and crossed my arms in front of my face to blot out Uncle Sam’s accusatory finger. A moment later the car smashed into an abutment and I was knocked unconscious.

I came to in the emergency room of the Cleveland Clinic. I was bruised and disoriented but had sustained no internal injuries or broken bones. The ambulance driver who had transported me to the hospital stopped by and informed me that my car had been damaged beyond repair. It was a miracle I was alive and that no one else had been injured.

When the ambulance driver left, I rose from my bed of pain and stumbled down the corridor to a pay phone. I dialed my office. My secretary said that the director of the museum had been trying to reach me all day and that he sounded as if he was on the warpath. She connected me to his extension. “Hi, boss,” I said. “Wait till you hear where I’m calling—”

“I couldn’t care less where you are,” he bellowed. “Last night I read your article in the new Prosimian Biology Monthly. Your findings are hogwash. You’ve made the Cleveland Museum of Natural History a laughingstock. Every primatologist from here to Antananarivo must be shaking his head in disbelief. I want you out of here. Permanently.” Then he told me I was fired and slammed down the phone.

I stood in my hospital gown, stunned. What was the director talking about? What article in the Prosimian Biology Monthly? I’d never written for that publication. Or had I? I couldn’t think straight. Everything ached. I looked at my watch. It was late afternoon, which meant Gertrude should be back from school. I needed desperately to hear her voice. I was out of change so I cadged a quarter from a passing orderly and called our home number. To my amazement, a man answered. He identified himself as a police officer and said that my wife had just obtained a court order of protection and that if I set one foot inside her door he would personally arrest me for trespassing. I demanded to speak to Gertrude. The policeman said she didn’t wish to come to the phone. “Please, please put her on,” I said, beginning to sob. He told me to buzz off.

In a single day I had lost my car, my job, my house, and my wife. Plus I had very nearly gotten myself killed. Could it all be just some nightmarish coincidence? No, it was Gertrude. Somehow she had acquired the aye-aye’s mythic ability to do harm.

The hospital kept me overnight for observation. The next day I took the rapid transit downtown and checked into the Y. I considered going back to our house and picking up some belongings, but I was sure Gertrude had changed the locks and I didn’t want to get caught breaking and entering. I used what little money there was in my bank account to buy some clothes and then started looking for work. That’s when I discovered how little demand for primatologists there is in Cleveland. The zoology department of Case Western Reserve University didn’t have any openings. The local high schools said I was overqualified. I tried to contact a few ex-colleagues from the museum but each refused to take my call.

Just when my unemployment insurance was about to run out I managed to wangle a job as a security guard at the Cuyahoga County Courthouse. I’d been there less than a week when a jealous coworker fabricated a story about how I had come to work drunk and I was canned. I was down to my last ten dollars when the deskman at the Y mentioned that the East Ohio Gas Company needed a night watchman. I applied for the job and got hired. A month went by and then the gas company announced it was cutting back and laid me off. I was beginning to think I would never find another job when finally I found an opening as janitor at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. My job was to clean the Primate, Cat, and Aquatics Building, and so once again I found myself in the proximity of lemurs. The zoo had six: four ringtail lemurs in one enclosure, two ruffed lemurs in another. Both species have a reverence for the sun. Struck by a beam of sunlight, they fall backwards, front legs spread, faces raised — a pose reminiscent of a saint ecstatically receiving the stigmata.

One winter afternoon, as I was mopping the floor, I stopped to see if any of the lemurs were engaged in sun worship. None were. The zoo building has skylights, but the day was overcast and they were all just sitting around on their haunches amid a less-is-more assortment of branches and rock formations. Except for some crackpot who had her face squashed against one of the glass partitions, no one was bothering even to give the lemurs a glance. It took me a moment to realize that the crackpot was Gertrude.

I was so surprised to see her that I dropped my mop. The wood handle hit the floor with a thud. In my confusion I took a step backwards and my leg slammed into my bucket, sending soapy water sloshing over the side. I was sure all the racket would make Gertrude turn around, but she took no notice. Her attention was fixed on the two lemur cages. Just then a ringtail lolloped forward and splayed its gray fingers against the glass. Gertrude began speaking to it. I edged closer. “Hello, O perfect one,” I heard her say. They stared at each other, two lost Clevelanders, distant cousins a zillion times removed.

I pushed the cart containing my floor-cleaning implements over by the orangutans and attempted to regain my composure. I shook all over. Incredibly, I’d been given a chance to get my old life back. To get Gertrude back. There was no time to lose. I had to think what to do. Instantly an idea came to me. I would go to Gertrude and fall on my knees and beg her forgiveness for returning the aye-aye to Nosy Mangabé. Here in front of these ruffed and ringtail lemurs and whatever representatives of genus Homo sapiens happened by, I’d prevail on her to take me back. And she would, she would. She’d wait while I changed out of my janitor’s overalls and then we’d drive back to our house in Cleveland Heights. That night in the bedroom we would embrace in the manner characteristic of our species. In the morning Gertrude would go off to teach English and I’d start looking for a decent job.

At that moment, standing in the Primate, Cat, and Aquatics Building, I believed myself the happiest man in Cleveland, Ohio. At last, I thought, the spell of the aye-aye has been broken. I emptied a nearby trashcan and lined it with a heavy-duty plastic bag. Then I went to find Gertrude. But when I got to where I had left her, my wife who always wanted to be a lemur had gone.