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they’d fascinated me. But I adored animals (in their living condition) and felt nothing but pity for the poor creatures who had been so unceremoniously cut into pieces, ending up pickled in Father’s closet. It suddenly occurred to me that I’d had no such qualms that morning in the human anatomy laboratory. But then, I had more love for animals than I did most people I knew.
    “While the human is fresh in your mind,” Father said, “you should have a look-see at the ape!”
    “That would be brilliant!” I called out, grateful enough for the extraordinary opportunity just offered to overcome the revulsion I felt for the unfortunate simian.
    Father was proud of his collection. Every summer for the past six years he had gone on expedition to Kenya, timed between that country’s two rainy seasons, in furtherance of his lifelong quest. He, like his friend and associate Eugène Dubois, had been searching for Charles Darwin’s missing link. Dubois, in 1891, had had the good fortune to find in the wilds of Indonesia the fossil remains of Java man, what my father believed was “stunning proof” of an interim species, part ape, part man. But this had, ironically, proved to be only the beginning of the poor man’s travails. The scientific establishment had, by and large, repudiated Dubois’s finding. Ever since his return to Europe with his precious bones, having nearly lost the case holding them in a shipwreck, the Limburgian paleoanthropologist had been compelled to defend his fossils against those “too dense or jealous,” as Father would say, to admit his accomplishment. And all this after years of intensive work and massive personal sacrifice—the appalling loss of an infant daughter to a tropical fever and a wife who had lost her love for the man with the death of their child.
    Father’s only dispute with his friend was one of location. Eugène Dubois, on the urgings of his professor at Jena University—the esteemed Ernst Haeckel—had gone looking for the ape-human link in the jungles of Asia. Professor Porter, a more literal Darwinist, was certain the fossils would be found in equatorial Africa.
    Dubois had returned home from Java carrying tangible evidence of an upright anthropoid with a large brain—far larger than any ape’s, though not quite as fulsome as the Neanderthal skulls discovered in Europe. Alas, it had no neck vertebrae or any evidence of the power of speech. But Father had so far found less than that. Nothing at all but fossils of extinct flora and fauna of the Pleistocene epoch. He had also harvested quite a collection of unwanted body parts as specimens from the carcasses of apes taken down by the numerous great white hunters now making a fine living in Kenya with their wealthy clientele, out for adventure and trophies for their library floors and walls.
    Certainly he was frustrated, but each year without fail he mounted a new, insanely expensive expedition, financed by my mother’s vast fortune. The money was grudgingly given, as Samantha Edlington-Porter loathed the months her husband disappeared into the “Dark Continent.” She was mortified by his theories and endeavors, which were similarly disavowed by his fellow scientists. While they might agree with Darwin’s theories in Descent of Man, few had any interest in finding physical proof of them. Well respected though Archie Porter might be in his professorship at Cambridge, he was merely an “enthusiastic amateur” in his paleoanthropological adventures. I always thought it to my mother’s credit that despite her dreaded misgivings and the whiff of scientific heresy that surrounded the hated safaris, she repeatedly funded them.
    Father did, however, pay a price. There were the acid comments at Mother’s dinner parties and the incessant harping about the dangers of these expeditions. In one respect, at least, she did have firm ground upon which to level her assaults.
    For beating in Archie Porter’s broad, manly chest was a