The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter Page 7

  During our last year in Kansas, Dad and Victor began corresponding. Dad wrote his letters on the manual typewriter in his home office, and we’d hear the steady tap-tap-tap of the keys as the rest of us watched television in the next room, the sound of Dad’s fingers on his typewriter as methodical and relentless as rain on a metal roof.

  Dad read Victor’s letters aloud to our mother sometimes, after Gail was in bed and Donald and I were settled in front of the television. He’d underline pertinent passages in the red pencil he used for marking papers at the Staff College, keeping it poised to highlight key passages as he and Mom discussed the content of the letters. I paid little attention to these ramblings and caught only bits and pieces of the conversations.

  Still, I understood that Victor Schwentker was my father’s idol. Victor was the sort of man who’d see a road and want to know where it went. As a young man, he had traveled down to South America to break polo ponies and then back up to Canada to run moonshine. Eventually he tried to settle down and worked as an engineer for General Electric in Philadelphia, where he met and married his wife, Mildred West, a society girl teaching private school. When the Depression cost Victor his job, the pair retreated to Brant Lake, where they lived at West Farm, Mildred’s childhood summer home.

  At first, the Schwentkers eked out a living by renting out summer cottages and selling milk and butter from their cows and vegetables from their gardens to the summer people. They had one child, a daughter, and Mildred, who was forty years old by the time she became a mother, longed to return to Philadelphia. But Victor was thriving on the farm. He’d finally landed in the one place that felt like home. Now he just had to find a way to stay there.

  It was Victor’s brother, Francis Schwentker, M.D., a Navy officer and well-known pediatric researcher, who gave him the means: Francis talked Victor into raising laboratory animals on the farm instead of cows. Francis was working with the military to develop vaccines for tropical diseases, and he knew there was a shortage of quality laboratory animals for scientific studies.

  Victor renamed their homestead Tumblebrook Farm and began with a colony of rabbits. Most of his business came from the military, which was shipping thousands of U.S. soldiers to the Pacific to fight in World War II. Military strategists had recognized during World War II that their deadliest enemies weren’t the opposing forces, but the infectious diseases the U.S. troops would encounter for the first time abroad. Developing the necessary vaccines and treatments for these new pathogens was a formidable challenge and would require many animals for experimentation. Thanks to this new military push for medical miracles and his handy family connection, Victor was soon providing not only rabbits but also guinea pigs and mice to researchers around the country. For many years, Tumblebrook Farm was like a Navy installation, complete with guards posted to keep the animals safe from evil Axis powers. Employees who worked there were even exempt from the draft, because what they were doing was considered so important.

  Like my own father, Victor designed and hand-crafted anything he could, whether it was a new kind of cage or a milking machine for guinea pigs. Despite breeding so many different kinds of animals, however, the only animal experiments that Victor performed were aimed at trying to develop a germ-free mouse. His plan involved birthing “clean” mice via cesarean section and then guarding the young against contaminants, a practice common today in animal research facilities. Victor even designed and built a special mouse cage with openings for his hands, and crafted a little operating table inside the cage.

  During World War II, the U.S. government ordered a million mice from Tumblebrook Farm to test a potential vaccine against malaria. Before the order could be filled, the atomic bomb ended the war, but Victor remained optimistic about the brave new world of laboratory animal breeding. He reasoned that scientists not only would continue needing the animals he’d been providing all along but also would want other, more novel medical models, too, as research studies grew more sophisticated. Victor created the West Foundation, named for his wife’s family, with the sole purpose of conducting “a systematic search for such animals that might provide medical research with new experimental models.”

  Victor knew that for animals to be truly useful for researchers, they would have to be small, easily handled, prolific, and easy keepers—that is, creatures that ate little, bred quickly, adapted easily to different climates, and were hardy enough to survive the rigors of being transported from one place to another. Along the way to discovering the gerbil—an animal that nicely fit this list of criteria—Victor bred cotton rats, snow ball rats, meadow voles, white-footed mice, wood rats, red-backed mice, jumping mice, short-tailed shrews, Chinese hamsters, rice rats, pine mice, lemming mice, long-tailed shrews, pocket mice, kangaroo rats, grasshopper mice, harvest mice, Philippine tree shrews, banana rats, and bandicoots.

  Victor marketed each of his new finds to laboratory researchers and breeders by mailing them thick manila folders containing press releases and photographs. He shared these with my father while we were in Kansas, who in turn showed them to us. These folders were like the media kits that Hollywood agents send out for the movie stars they represent. The folders each bore the bold headline “Announcing …” followed by the name of the animal, with a photographic portrait taken against an appropriate creative backdrop. The Chinese hamster’s portrait, for instance, was shot against a Chinese screen, along with a Chinese doll sporting a broad-brimmed hat and long white beard.

  With his zeal for providing the healthiest, highest-quality laboratory animals possible, Victor earned a solid reputation among researchers and other breeders. And with more than forty men working for him at Tumblebrook Farm, Victor also ranked as the largest employer in the Brant Lake area.

  By adventuring around the world, starting his own business from the ground up, studying exotic animals, and ultimately freeing himself from depending on anyone else for a livelihood, Victor Schwentker was everything that my father aspired to be.

  THE first written mention of gerbils was in 1866 by Father Armand David, a French missionary priest, when he sent what he called “yellow rats” from northern China to the Museum of Natural History in Paris. The scientist Alphonse Milne-Edwards named these gerbils Meriones unguiculatus a year later; this Latin name means “clawed warrior” in English and is derived in part from the name of the Greek warrior Meriones.

  Nobody knows how Victor Schwentker first learned about gerbils. Given his steady consumption of newspapers, books, magazines, and scientific journals, it was probably through reading. At any rate, Victor received his first shipment of gerbils from Japanese scientists in 1954 and promptly produced his usual promotional packet. The original black-and-white portrait on this publicity folder is of a gerbil standing on its hind legs, its long, silky tufted tail shown to best advantage. The gerbil appears to be reading the enormous book in front of it, which is titled A Natural History of Central Asia, volume XI: The Mammals of China and Mongolia, Central Asiatic Expeditions.

  Inside the packet, the promotional literature is heady, almost giddy The gerbil’s many virtues—friendliness, curiosity, smarts, environmental adaptability—made Victor rave, “Of all the animals that have been introduced as potentially useful experimental animals, perhaps the most remarkable has been the Mongolian gerbil.”

  Victor wrote those words at the end of 1967, precisely when my own father first contacted him for more information about breeding gerbils from our apartment in Fort Leavenworth. The two men exchanged several letters and agreed to meet early in 1968. By then, Victor was nearly seventy years old, and he’d been hoping to find someone to take over his gerbil colony, the last of his laboratory animals.

  My father, meanwhile, was growing increasingly disillusioned with military life and with the country’s involvement in Vietnam. “I can’t believe this,” he’d say at least once during every nightly television newscast, as the body count rose. “They have to know this war is a mistake. How can they not? We should really do som
ething.”

  “Like what?” Mom would say, coming into the living room and shaking her head at the TV as if it were to blame for the state of our country. “We have to support the war. We’re military.”

  Dad must have expressed some of his reservations about military life to Victor, for in a letter dated December 4, 1967, Victor wrote:

  You have said that you do not expect to get rich raising gerbils. In view of the fact that you chose the Navy as a career, I am justified in assuming that you never expected to get rich. “Comfortable” is, in my opinion, a much better state of finances, and I would like to predict that a properly operated gerbil colony will bring you an income of ten to twelve thousand dollars per year.

  This may not sound like much today. But in the 1960s, and added to my father’s pension when he retired from the Navy, it was such a princely sum that Dad used his red pencil to underline these heartening words as he read Victor’s letter to us.

  He flew out to see Victor in Brant Lake shortly after that, and the two men sealed their deal. Victor agreed to let my father have his business, including the name Tumblebrook Farm, for $60,000. Dad planned to buy his own farm after he got his orders and knew where we were headed after Kansas. Once we were moved in, he would gradually move Victor’s breeding stock of gerbils and his equipment to our own plot of land. Dad didn’t have $60,000, but that didn’t seem to bother Victor: in a gentleman’s agreement, the two men shook hands and Victor agreed to let my father pay him back over time. They were both that sure of Dad’s success in the gerbil-farming business.

  announced at the dinner table that he wanted to read us some fan letters he’d gotten in response to his latest Science News article just as Mom was serving dessert, a new chocolate cake recipe from the I Hate to Cook cookbook.

  “The beauty of this cake was that it was made in one bowl,” Mom said, ignoring Dad when he snapped the first letter free from its envelope with an eye-catching shake. “You just make three wells in the center of the dry ingredients for the oil, the eggs, and the milk,” she continued. “There’s really no mess at all.”

  Making recipes from I Hate to Cook was almost as easy as cooking with Campbell’s soup, her other favorite no-fuss mealtime helper, Mom added. “I think this will become my kitchen bible.”

  Dad cleared his throat and waved the letter in front of us. “This letter came to me from Delbert D. Thiessen, Ph.D., assistant chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas in Austin,” he announced. He repeated the man’s name and title to be sure that we were as impressed as he was.

  “You know,” Mom told him, “I worked hard on this dinner. You haven’t said a thing about it.”

  Dad looked bewildered. “But I love everything you cook. You know that.”

  “Still.” My mother lit a cigarette and pushed her own cake aside, untouched. The gauntlet was thrown. “You might at least acknowledge what I do around here. I’m your wife, not your slave. I don’t care how many gerbils you’ve got in that goddamn basement. I don’t want to hear about them anymore.” With that, she rose from the table and disappeared into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

  Donald, Gail, and I took this as a cue that we could eat our cake in the den in front of the TV. We stood up and gathered our plates, but Dad stopped us. “Wait,” he said. “Sit down. You haven’t been excused yet.”

  Gail ran off, as defiant as ever. But Donald and I sat down again and made faces at each other across the table while Dad, oblivious to our antics, shared the letter from Dr. Thiessen in Austin, Texas.

  Dear Commander Robinson:

  I read with great interest your article appearing in Science News on the epileptic gerbil. It was well done and informative …. We are attempting to work out the genetic mechanism for seizing and relate the effect to changes in blood sugar levels. Much hormone work is complete and will be written up for publications soon. I produced a film on gerbil behavior, part of which is scheduled for presentation this summer on an NBC program entitled Animal Secrets. In any case, work goes on …. As the studies crystallize, I’ll pass them on.

  Dad put the letter down and looked at Donald and me. “There, kids, what do you think of that? Gerbils on NBC!”

  “That’s great, Dad,” I said. I had to say something.

  “May we please be excused, Daddy, sir?” Donald asked.

  We raced each other to the television when Dad granted us permission, leaving our father alone at the table with his letter and cigarette and one-bowl chocolate cake.

  I WAS plain-looking, with a nose that would have been ordinary, except for the slight bump that remained after the newspaper delivery boy ran me over with his bicycle in Virginia. Not ugly, just unexceptional: I had an average sort of mouth, brown hair, and brown eyes with no hints of green or gold in them like the characters in the books I read. As if these utterly average looks weren’t enough to bear, I also had a snaggle tooth. One of my incisors had grown in crooked and ridged because my mother had contracted German measles during her pregnancy with me.

  Kids teased me about the tooth in elementary school enough so that I knew to smile with my lips closed. Nonetheless, there were those who noticed and remarked upon it in junior high at Fort Leavenworth, making junior high even more of a hell than it already was. In many ways, it was a hell devised by teenagers caught between rebelling and serving their parents, the way their parents served the country. The dances were the sort where the girls wore party dresses and stood on one side of the gym, miserably waiting for some brazen male to cross the great divide and ask them to dance; at my first such dance, I wore a pale blue gauzy dress with a bow in the back and, of course, a snow-white Peter Pan collar; I looked like a minister’s wife. I came home ecstatic because I’d been asked to dance exactly once, by a boy whose collar was whiter than mine.

  Meanwhile, various factions of the kids I went to school with were rebelling against Vietnam, so our teachers at General George S. Patton Jr. Junior High School did their best to maintain order in true Army fashion. Each morning, they lined us up in the cafeteria for inspection. Our skirts were to be no more than two inches above the knee; our bangs couldn’t touch our eyebrows; and girls were not allowed to wear makeup, heels, or dangling earrings. Naturally, these rules only provoked certain girls to roll up their skirts in the bathrooms, apply lipstick, and shake off their barrettes and hairbands the minute inspection was over.

  Among my Army brat classmates, I was already an outcast for having a father who was in the Navy. And, of course, Dad had that secret stash of gerbils keeping him basement-bound for reasons I could never reveal. I reacted to both the kids and the Army by becoming a pacifist and carrying a photograph of my horse, Ladybug, in a locket around my neck. There was no point in trying to fit in, so I might as well do what I wanted.

  By eighth grade I was a good enough rider to join the Pony Club, a group of riders who followed the more expert hunter-jumpers during Sunday morning fox hunts. The hunts were thrilling; we’d gallop through dew-heavy fields and along winding wooded trails, ducking low tree branches as we followed on the hocks of more experienced riders who careened over stone walls, ditches, and wooden fences. People were always being tossed off when their horses refused the jumps and scrambling out of the way of the horses galloping and leaping behind them. Occasionally, a horse dumped its rider and cantered merrily back to the barn with reins dangling and stirrups flapping. All of this was accompanied by the frantic baying of beagles following the scented trail laid ahead of time by one of the Hunt Club members, and by the trumpeting of a brass horn blown by our hunt master, a flamingo of a man with a skeletal build and a scarlet coat.

  The stable was my sanctuary, the one place where I felt comfortable in my own skin. But there was school to contend with, still, during all of those other hours. I was never asked to a sleepover or a party, and lately I had been longing to be not like Trixie Belden, girl detective, but like Lisa Agnew, the most beautiful girl at General George S. Patton Jr. Junior H
igh School.

  Lisa Agnew had blue eyes, a straight nose, and sleek blond hair parted in the middle that swung shut like a pair of curtains on either side of her oval face. Her teeth were straight and white, and she wore empire-waist, low-necked shirred dresses that emphasized her full breasts. Most impressive of all, she had a boyfriend in high school who took her on dates in his own car. I held my breath each time Lisa passed me in the hall, longing for her to notice me and terrified that she might.

  And then, suddenly, Lisa was gone. She was absent from school for so long that I was certain her father must have been transferred; like Virginia, our Fort Leavenworth classes were always gaining and losing students without warning. But Lisa returned after a time, transformed by an ugly red scar across her face.

  “What happened to you?” I breathed when I came into the girls’ bathroom later that morning and discovered Lisa there, alone, leaning toward the mirror to cake more forbidden makeup onto her scar.

  “My boyfriend crashed his car,” she said flatly.

  I nearly wept for her. “But you’ll get better, won’t you?” I asked. “The scar will fade.”

  Lisa eyed me in the mirror with pity. “Obviously, you’ve never known what it’s like to be beautiful.”

  It would be many, many years before I’d be able to look into a mirror without seeing the ghost of Lisa’s face next to mine, measuring what she had lost and what I would never have.

  GRADUALLY, I was spending less time at home and more time at the stables with the older teenagers who entered horse shows, that strange breed of competitive, no-nonsense child who spends hours working on perfect form during the posting trot. These were the kids Mom didn’t want me to ride with because she thought I wasn’t experienced enough.