The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (9 page)

To make matters worse, our fort housing wasn’t vacant yet. We were relegated to living for a month in cramped enlisted men’s quarters with no air-conditioning, thin walls, and a mysterious metal vent between the apartments big enough to pass a baby through. That first still, sticky night in Kansas, the noises seeping through the vent made it clear that the Army wife next door was no happier than my mother was to be cast away at Fort Leavenworth.

“You want out of here?” a man demanded.

“You know I do!” his wife screamed.

“Fine. I’ll be first in line to buy you a plane ticket!”

Our parents fought that first night in Kansas, too, as Mom walked around the table serving mashed potatoes.

“So tell me,” she said to my father. “What was the big goddamn rush to get here?” She dropped potatoes onto Gail’s plate first,
slap
.

“Sally, watch your language,” Dad said, giving each of us the hairy eye so that we’d know not to follow Mom’s example.

“You could have gone ahead of me just this once to set up house,” Mom said. She served the potatoes to Donald and me,
slap slap
. “The kids and I could have stayed with my mother.”

“Your mother.” Dad rolled his eyes. “Your mother, the Queen Mary.”

No sooner were these words out than Mom slapped the
scoop of mashed potato smack onto my father’s bald head instead of onto his plate.

“Jesus Christ, Sally!” Dad yelled, swiping at his head with a napkin.

“Jesus Christ, Sally!” Gail crowed, spooning mashed potatoes from her plate onto her own head.

Donald went to the vent leading to the apartment next door and put his mouth close to the grille. “Hey, guys!” he shouted to the neighbors. “Did you hear that through the vent?”

T
HE
Army finally housed us in a stately, high-ceilinged apartment on the first floor of a brick building dating back to the early 1900s, a prime spot on Fort Leavenworth’s parade ground, a vast expanse of rolling lawn that served as our front yard and the training ground for lines of soldiers marching and shouting in the shimmering heat as they readied themselves for Vietnam.

That first year in Kansas, Donald frequented the rifle range, where he earned the rank of sharpshooter at age ten. He also enjoyed using the parade ground as a launching pad for the Estes rockets he ordered from a catalog. The rocket kits came with ample warnings about careful parental supervision, but since our parents were always busy, Donald set them off on his own. It didn’t matter. With all of the practice gunfire around us, anyone who heard the blasts just assumed it was another military exercise. Meanwhile, I discovered that Fort Leavenworth was like a small city. I could go anywhere by foot or bicycle: stores, movies, the pool at the officers’ club,
and, most wondrous of all, the Fort Leavenworth Hunt Club, where I watched my favorite horses and riders with the ferocious devotion of a fanatic fan stalking rock stars.

One night, I’d just rigged up an ingenious basket on a pulley and ropes that my friend John and I could use to deliver messages back and forth from his bedroom window upstairs to mine down below when I heard Dad come in. I went to my bedroom door, intending to close it, and saw my father scurrying in a peculiarly hunched way toward his own bedroom, hiding something under his coat.

I tugged on the rope, sent a message up to John saying I’d be back later, and ran down the hall. I found my mother in the kitchen, coloring with Gail. “Mom, he’s doing it again,” I hissed.

“Who?” she said without looking up.

“Dad! He’s sneaking gerbils into the house under his coat!”

Mom took her time selecting a blue crayon and then lit a cigarette. She still wouldn’t look at me. “Don’t talk to me about it,” she said. “Talk to your father.”

“I will,” I said. “I’ll talk to him right now.”

I went down the hall to their bedroom and knocked hard on the door. Dad didn’t answer. I knocked again, harder.

The door opened a crack. “What is it?” Dad asked. “I’m busy.”

Behind him, lights were set up on stands and shining against a white screen as a backdrop. I knew he’d bought three pairs of gerbils in a Kansas City pet shop shortly after our arrival; he kept them in our basement storage room, a dark and musty space, under lock and key. For the past week, Dad had
been coming home after a full day of teaching and, as soon as the sun went down, he’d retreat to the basement and sneak back upstairs with gerbils stashed in his pocket or a cage tucked under his jacket.

“I want to know what you’re doing in there, Dad,” I said.

“What do you mean, what am I doing?” He didn’t open the door any wider. With the bright lights behind him, my father’s thin face was cast in shadow, his blue eyes dark pools. “I’m working,” he said. “What did you think I’d be doing? I’m always working.”

“I want to know why you have to sneak the gerbils up and down the stairs,” I said. “Can’t you just photograph them on the lawn like you did in Virginia?”

Dad looked at me like he was the one in his right mind. “Are you kidding me?” he asked. “Look, you can’t tell anyone, not
anyone
, about the gerbils in the basement,” he said. “Not even the other two Navy families at Fort Leavenworth. I could be discharged if the higher-ups found out what I’m doing. Now go on. I have to finish something here.” He closed the door.

I didn’t have to ask who the higher-ups were because I knew: the mysterious military brass, the generals and admirals housed in the Pentagon, a building that Dad told us was so vast, you had to wear roller skates to make it to appointments on time.

In the kitchen, my mother and sister were still coloring. “Mom,” I said, “did you know that Dad’s bringing his gerbils into your bedroom?”

“Yes
, I know, honey.”

“Don’t you even care?” I demanded. “It’s so strange! Can’t you stop him?”

“Why should I?” Mom asked. She stood up and went to the counter, which she began wiping again, though it was already clean. “That’s your father’s thing. I don’t have to know every last detail of what my husband does with his spare time. You won’t, either, if you’re smart.”

She wrung out the dish rag, folded it in half, and laid it carefully over the kitchen faucet before finally turning around to look at me. “Look, I know it’s bizarre, Holly, but that’s your father.”

W
HAT
was my father doing with a crop of gerbils in that dark, musty basement storage room?

He was breeding them again. The gerbils multiplied as easily in the basement as they had in our Virginia garage. We had a ten-by-twelve-foot space divided from the rest of the basement by thin walls—every apartment had a storage area like this—and Dad set up shelves for his gerbils just as he had in Virginia. Soon he had to move suitcases and odd boxes upstairs to make room for more shelves and gerbil cages. He continued to observe the gerbils and photograph them, so absorbed in his work that he made notes on a yellow pad of paper during dinner or held his head in his hands and gazed into space, his blue eyes unfocused. He might as well have been in a coma. Our family carried on dinner, conversations, arguments, and homework around him, as if Dad were a statue of himself.

While Dad trained Army officers at the Staff College to lead troops into Vietnam, he wrote a paper about gerbil seizures and the potential use of gerbils in research. The paper was accepted and published on January 6, 1968, in the prestigious journal
Science News
under the title “Animals Suited to Epileptic Research.”

The first we heard about Dad publishing the results of his scientific studies was when he passed the magazine around the dinner table. He made sure to hold the magazine pages open with his own hands because he didn’t want sticky pages, he said. In the article, he detailed his observations about gerbil seizures.

“After being handled,” he’d written,

Whatever my father couldn’t capture in words about gerbil seizures, his photographs did it for him. Stark in black and white, one of the pictures showed a gerbil in full seizure. It
looked like a monster in a low-budget Japanese horror movie. The gerbil’s body was stretched out and stiff, and its tail stuck straight out. Its teeth were bared in a terrified grimace.

Proud as he was about having his first article appear in such an esteemed publication as
Science News
, my father never told anyone else at Fort Leavenworth about it. Nor did he indicate anywhere in the pages of the magazine that he was a Navy commander. In fact, he didn’t even use his full name in the byline, only “D. G. Robinson Jr.”

This magazine article brought correspondence from all over the world. I saw envelopes with university and laboratory names on the return addresses from as far away as Sweden and Japan. Apparently Dad wasn’t the only man in the world with a thing for gerbils.

Encouraged by this brush with fame, he wrote a second piece for
Science News
. This one was published in the February 15, 1969, issue, and focused, surprisingly, not on gerbils but on sand rats and spiny mice.

Why would my father suddenly detour away from writing about the gerbil, the one thing that had succeeded in stirring up his passions to the point of forgetting all other outside pursuits?

Reading the article closely, I saw that the piece focused on diabetes and how the disease didn’t occur naturally in sand rats, as it did in some mutant mice and certain strains of Chinese hamsters. To induce diabetes in sand rats, Dad reported, you had to feed them standard laboratory pellets. And in writing about spiny mice—also known as “porcupine mice”—in this piece, Dad listed research studies that revealed how spiny mouse females that had already given birth often acted as
midwives to pregnant spiny mice if the mice were caged together.

The final paragraph of that paper is the only clue to Dad’s surprising defection from gerbils. There, Dad wrote, “The availability of sand rats and spiny mice suggests that they will be valuable for studying many interrelated factors involved in diabetes … researchers hope to be able to establish stable inbred strains of these species to increase their potential as experimental animals.”

In Kansas, Dad wasn’t content to just sneak gerbils upstairs like James Bond with his latest secret weapon. He was toying with the idea that he might escape the military by retiring early and raising gerbils on a large scale while still keeping his options open by researching the potential of breeding other laboratory animals.

As always, though, he kept his plans a secret. My father’s byline for the article on spiny mice and sand rats was again, simply, “D. G. Robinson Jr.” Clearly, very few people reading
Science News
knew that the author of these papers was a Navy commander who went to work every day with gold bars on his shoulders, his lectures on naval war tactics timed to the Army minute.

And even fewer people at Fort Leavenworth knew what my dad was up to in the basement of our Army issue housing. Not even, most of the time, us.