Memoir: NAMING THE ANIMALS by Peter Cooley
The Audubon Zoo in New Orleans is hushed near closing time at five p.m. A few lost tourists wander by, here at the southwest extremity where I stand, staring down into the tapir pool.
The tapirs are not out. The tapirs are rarely out. Part of tapir-watching is the thrill of catching sight of an animal so shy it rarely shares the public spectacle of the other animals.
I am looking for my mother who died two weeks ago at ninety-three-and-a-half. I have sought her here because she is now memory, and memory, I’ve discovered, begins soon after a loved one’s death to rewrite the past into touchstone moments. This waiting, both hands gripping the guardrail, is one such moment.
Growing up in the city of Detroit in the aftermath of World War II, I shared the zoo with Mother each summer until I pushed her away from me in preadolescence when we moved to the suburbs. All little children love animals, I’ve discovered as father to two girls and a boy, but in most kids the fascination is replaced by others – ballet, gymnastics, art, or nowadays for my fifteen-year-old son, cross country, tennis, soccer. I had some of these interests later. But until age ten the Detroit Zoo was my obsession, and I nagged my mother, who had a house full of relatives to care for when I was growing up, to take me there two or three times a week. There was a guardrail at the Detroit tapir pool, too. I am touching it now, standing here.
The light is falling at four-thirty, the radiant New Orleans light which I sometimes feel drew me down here from the Midwest and would keep me here even if I were not bound by the obligations of my teaching job. Since I arrived twenty-five years ago, I’ve felt the light here is mystical; it shapes a nimbus around objects; it draws out some glow within them. Nothing, however, is being drawn out of the tapir pool but memory.
My hand is in my mother’s hand. We’re in the tunnel at the Detroit Zoo; it’s cool and dark. My mother squeezes my hand. I have put my hand into hers because I’m scared. Of what I’m not even sure. Mothers are our first protection from the world; fathers protect us later. And this afternoon the lunging of the miniature train, the squawk and whine as we round corners invisible in the dark, sends shivers of excitement and fear through my arms and legs and hollows out the insides of my mouth. My mother doesn’t speak either. This is a moment winding through time in its own tunnel and it’s all touch.
Suddenly gold light appears on the tunnel’s walls and all at once we’re racing faster toward it, then bursting forth into the sticky July day. I let go of my mother’s hand, even though when we leave the zoo later I will dutifully take it as we cross the street to the parking lot.
My hands continue to grip the New Orleans railing. The wood is a little splintery, as is the railing my little hands grip to descend from the zoo train with Mother. Now I am jumping off, scampering a few steps from her, daring my mother to shout after me since she is a protective mother – too protective, I will tell her later when this time in my life is over and I begin to push her from me. But she does not shout; she crosses to me in several angry steps and grabs my hand again. I cannot hear what she says from this distance in time, but I know I fear the harness will be mentioned. As far back as I can remember, my mother would put me, in situations where she felt I was in peril, into a harness, attached to a leash she kept at her wrist. The harness came out especially at the supermarket, where formerly I had run up and down the aisles, grabbing canned goods from the shelves. Wearing it, I felt the humiliation of a boy-as-pet-dog and I had begged my mother to release me from this bondage with the promise of good behavior. Lately, I had been rewarded, but I still feared the harness threat and speculated that mother kept it in her purse.
My mother is a protective mother, a good mother. We are living in the era of the polio scare, an epidemic so rampant that even now, just as I am learning to spell out words, the newspaper headlines announcing the death of another infant in Detroit, the bold black print, graced sometimes with exclamation marks and a photograph of a child in an iron lung, keep me on edge. Often I will awake at night in the black stupor of our unairconditioned house, listening to the push of my breath against my chest, wondering if I will die before I wake, in the words of the prayer my non-religious parents have taught me.
So my mother’s hand in mine is meant to rescue me from all sorts of polio germs said to flourish in the world surrounding children at this time. In fact, it is only because she cares about me, my mother tells me, that she will take me to the zoo at all in the face of the polio epidemic. And it is only if I mind – this word is repeated throughout my childhood by parents and teachers alike – that I am permitted to go at all.
Gripping my hand, my mother leads me away from the train. All at once I am thirsty. If you are a parent, you know how children always have a thirst at those moments we would least expect or desire. Just before us, in an oasis of cool, surrounded by a cluster of children both black and white, is a drinking fountain. I know already the trials which await on my pursuit of this ambrosial liquid. I have been through this before.
If I mind, my mother will assure me, and not for a second touch the handle of the drinking fountain, she will let me have a drink. She has her procedure: with a hand wrapped in a handkerchief scented sweetly of a perfume, which always makes me think of light purple, she will touch the handle and turn it for me, lifting me across the belly to hover above the fountain. I must not touch a single soul lest the contagion approach me and, as always, I nod dutifully, wondering why I would touch a soul in any case. And what is a soul, anyway?
We queue up, and all at once I am above the gold basin where water erupts from a two-pronged spray to splash wildly over the sides in an abundance of potential contagion if I do not mind, keeping my mouth dancing above the spray. How delicious this moment is, my mouth, so hollow within the tunnel, now aching with the cold water which is mine at last. No liquid since has ever tasted so quenching. How I wish, I think, I could float above the silver spray forever, staring down at my reflection in the gold basin. But there are other kids in line, many of them loose from their mothers. Now my mother is lifting me down, down from the magical water, into the hot asphalt and again I feel her take my hand.
Now she releases it since our primary undertaking, so long delayed, must begin. For this, as always, I am to be the leader, she the follower. I may pick the animals we will give names to this afternoon. Of course, the tapir must be held back for later, for last if possible. Our visit to it will depend on the feeding times of the other animals, on zookeepers who will disrupt the faux paradis of the other exhibits by looming up from a lion’s cave or behind a zebra’s tree in khaki uniforms which remind me of soldiers I have seen in newsreels of the war just done.
The Detroit Zoo is one of the first zoos in the United States to put animals on islands surrounded by moats rather than in cages. Few animals, except an ancient lion and rare birds in the Bird House, are separated from us by the prisons which enclose their brothers in other habitats. To one of small stature, there is the thrill of looking directly across a moat you can choose to ignore, into the eyes of a tiger or hippopotamus. Such moments can be spellbinding, as on one trip from that garland of summers forty-five years back, when I found myself face-to-face with a panda so docile of eye he could have been my cuddly companion for bedtime at home. The next moment he stood up on his hind legs, further confirming his role as toy; the next moment bared a set of pink jaws from which yellow teeth zigzagged.
Some of the animals come with names already if they have been donated by an organization or, as is most likely in Detroit, some enterprise associated with the automobile industry. A troop of white-tailed deer had been given by a firm devoted solely to the manufacture of padded dashboards. A ball bearing factory was responsible for a polar bear couple. Nothing struck my mother or me as strange in this. In the public school I attended no one’s father worked for any company not associated with automobiles. Mothers did not work but could belong to clubs, such as my mother’s Roman Catholic friend, Mrs. Grady, who sashayed among a half dozen, all of them bent on helping the infirm or poor who were willing to swallow steady doses of 1940s Catholicism. My mother had her house and family to take care of, she assured us all; she had no time for causes. Her house had four bedrooms and three baths and few of the conveniences of today: no dishwasher, automatic washer or dryer. Her family included my grandmother, Mother’s mother, prematurely senile and helpless, who often called me by the name of the family dog, Frankie; my aunt Nana, her sister, who sold Fannie Farmer candy at night after her divorce since her genteel pre-marriage career as elocution teacher had been obliterated by the Depression, never to return; my sister, ten years older than I; my father, a self-made man, an insurance executive who, like my mother’s father, dead at forty-five, worked dawn to dark and was seldom present. In good health, my ninety-two-year-old father lives on, playing the stock market conservatively, refusing to invest in Internet or technology stocks.
Besides, I have you to look after, my mother would assure me. Looking after always brought forth images of the harness, but only after becoming a parent did I understand how much shepherding children require as they grow and grow away from us. At the time, besides the harness, her phrase called to mind years of being lifted above fountains as I took in the odor of my mother’s handkerchief, the mysterious process of going up a dark tunnel, terrifying except for these familiar guardrails.
Oh, the names of the animals! They were real names; they were made-up names. They were all mine. A ring-tailed monkey I proclaimed “Jo-Jo,” doubling the name of my best friend who had moved to the mysterious Pittsburgh, destroying my first friendship. An elephant I renamed “Raja” instead of “Bill,” the name the zoo had given him, since I had gleaned the story from a book of stories in the corner of my grandmother’s bookcase. A tortoise I baptized “Hortense,” God knows why, or where I had heard the name, but when I first announced it to my mother she burst into laughter and swore I was an “unusual child.” All mothers say that, don’t they, when confounded by their sons? There were other names, monosyllabic and polysyllabic, nicknames and brand names (some animals were named for cars such as the black leopard I called “Imperial,” for the most expensive Chrysler of the time, or the chimpanzee monikered “DeVille,” after my mother’s powder blue Cadillac. Fat names, thin names, names delicious like the vanilla ice cream of childhood dripping from cones onto your hand, or freak names like “Waneenan” for an anteater, a creature so strange he perplexes me even today, names made of sugar and syrup so sweet they hurt your teeth repeating them, names which opened on vast plains, “Dakota” or “Nebraska,” I had seen on our tiny black-and-white TV that my father – an archconservative even then – insisted be kept in the infrequently used dining room since TV, he announced, was a fad which wouldn’t last.
Animal names which lifted me or sent me skidding along the ground. Names which hurt they were so beautiful of sound, which soothed: a rhino named “Jaabbo,” a peacock named “Unguent” (I knew the word from a substance my mother rubbed on my summer knees). To all of my choices my mother lent her approval, laughing or nodding as I ran ahead with my latest addition to this menagerie of nomenclature. During the naming, I never thought of the harness nor of the safety of Mother’s hand in the tunnel. I am always wearing shorts in memory of this time, shorts with straps which wrapped about the shoulders as if in their own kind of constriction. But I felt free during this time together. I was naming the animals.
The choice animal, to be saved for last if possible, was the tapir. My fascination with this beast is, perhaps, explicable: maybe his sheer ugliness or the fact he looks like a combination of deer and pig? Whatever, the tapir was my favorite and though there were, according to the guidebook, five tapirs in the Detroit Zoo, they never appeared except as a solo performance and were thus referred to by mother and me as “The Tapir.”
Walking toward this creature who, as in the New Orleans zoo, occupied the nether reaches of the zoo, was in itself a special experience, to be belabored if possible. It was always up for grabs if his royal highness would make an appearance at all. In my memory today, however, the tapir is visible on his little island as we approach. I experience a frisson of delight. My mother, though her interest in the animal is something only to be shared by me, expects me to look back at her – I do – and she returns my smile of delight. Together, we approach to bask in the glory of the thing-I-am-afraid-to-name.
The tapir, whose familiar expression I realize now is perpetual insouciance, met our stare and moved off to redescend into the pool. The tapir moment is done. But it has been enough. I will go home now to construct my own zoo on the floor of my bedroom until dinner time, the tapir in a cage which I constructed out of fences I borrowed from my Lone Ranger Ranch, in the center of all.
And as I stand here in New Orleans, I see a tapir emerging from the black waters before me. Why he is making an appearance today I do not know. I know I am not necromancer enough to bring him forth. How very peculiar he is, I think again, an amalgam of beasts slowly emerging from unknown depths. Only a supernatural power could have conceived of him.
My hands still rest on the rail as I hear the groundskeeper calling out the closing hour. In Detroit, my mother would have insisted she start home long before this, as she had a 1940s dinner to prepare for half-a-dozen people. But I can let go of the guardrail now and allow the tapir to descend to his tapir-evening, tapir-night. My mother has brought him forth. She has been with me a solid hour during this visit to the zoo, and that is long enough for even a good son to spend with his dead mother now. The presence of my mother is gone as I turn away from the tapir pool. She has left without saying good-bye or sharing some words of wisdom as she should if this were a parent-child object lesson tale. I know my animal naming was the beginning of my first poems uttered before written down, poems conceived out of the desire to fix something of my own on creatures of the world I loved. To order, with music and color, my way, though I have never especially written about zoos, mothers, or flora and fauna. But this is no Portrait of the Artist. It’s just a memory of my mother, missing from me again now as the afternoon’s gold light will soon be, an afternoon among afternoons, a string of moments I will carry with me. As I too am some depository for a currency of moments, spending myself and depositing myself anew as I write these words down.
Peter Cooley’s seventh collection of poetry, A Place Made of Starlight, was recently published by Carnegie Mellon. His poems also appear in New England Review, North Dakota Review, and Best American Poetry 2002.