The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  We were talking of everything but the war, because the war was happening someplace else, far across the sea, and this was our day—Tommy’s, Iris’s and mine—and there was no reason to let the darkness intrude. My aunt, never a loquacious woman, not unless she was gossiping with her sister-in-law, sat in a wicker chair with her ankles crossed and smiled a faraway smile, thinking perhaps of her husband, who’d been killed at Ipres in the first war. Mac, when she was with us, held forth charmingly on any number of subjects, including the Girl Scouts, knitting—Aunt Marjorie perked up a bit here—and, of course, sex research. It was all very relaxed.

  At one point, just as the children ended their game with a shout of triumph from one of the girls, Iris pushed herself up off the lawn, patting down her dress as if she’d been lying there in the grass since it first sprouted. “Why don’t we play?” she said. “You, me and Tommy. Come on.”

  If I hesitated (and I might have, lulled by her presence—and Mac’s—as well as the golden fluid issuing from the flask on command), she wouldn’t hear of it.

  “Come on,” she repeated. “Are you afraid I’m going to beat you or something?” She was wearing a summer dress that left her arms bare, and she stretched, then brought her heels together and made a muscle with her right arm. “Because you ought to be. I’ll have you know I was croquet champion of the entire neighborhood.”

  “When you were nine maybe,” Tommy said, but he was already getting up from the grass himself.

  We played a languid game out on the lawn, the sun holding steady overhead, Iris chasing down our balls and hammering them into the flowerbeds whenever she had the chance. There were gales of laughter. The flask circulated. I don’t think I’d ever been happier, but for one thing—the look Prok gave us when he emerged with my mother from the rear of the property. His face was stripped naked for just a moment, his mouth screwed up in a kind of pout of disdain, and I wondered what sin we were committing, what transgression, until it came to me: Prok hated games of any sort. Games were nonproductive. Games were, by definition, a waste of time—a pastime, that is, which was the same thing. Only work had any validity for him, and he never understood when we (again, Corcoran, Rutledge and I) spent even a moment’s time engaged in any activity that didn’t directly serve the project. We might have spent twelve hours in a single day taking sex histories and then come back to the hotel to relax with the radio and a game of cards, and Prok would insist that we should be reading and studying the literature so as to better perform our function and advance the research.

  There was one time—and I’m jumping ahead here eight or ten years—when Prok, Corcoran and I had been on a research trip to take histories in Florida. We’d driven down from Indiana so Prok could address a group of college administrators who were holding a series of seminars in Miami, and we’d put in five intense days of recording histories from the moment we’d finished breakfast right on through to ten and eleven at night. On the final day, the day before we were to drive back to Indiana and the perennial ice of winter, we finished up by eight in the evening, and on a lark Corcoran and I pulled in at a miniature golf course. Corcoran—he was the ultimate extrovert, sunny, glad-handing, an obsessive serial sexual adventurer—was at the wheel because Prok was busy beside him with a flashlight and the sheaf of interviews we’d just concluded. “Say,” he cried out suddenly, “John—do you see that, up ahead there on the left?”

  I was in back. I leaned forward over the seat and saw what he was talking about—a glittering playland of lights leaching out into the Florida night, and a sign superimposed above them: TEETER’S MINIATURE GOLF.

  “Time for a little rest and relaxation?” he asked, already swinging the wheel wide as Prok glanced up distractedly from the papers in his lap.

  There was an anti-authoritarian streak in Corcoran, a boyish playfulness Prok tolerated in a way he wouldn’t have in anybody else, and I wakened to it in that moment. Why not? I thought. Why not get out from under the whip, if only for an hour? “Sure, yes,” I said, “that would be—that would hit the spot. And I’ve never, and we are going back tomorrow …”

  And before Prok could protest, it was a fait accompli, the car pulled up snug to the admission booth in the gravel lot, Corcoran and I paying for our tickets and selecting our clubs while the palms rustled in a breeze that was as warm as the breath of the furnace back at home. We must have played for two hours or more, feeling lighthearted and a bit silly, feeling like boys who despite the frivolity of the situation had always been in competition with one another and fought to win no matter how inconsequential the victory might have been. (As I recall, for the record, I wound up beating him that night, if only just narrowly.) But Prok. Prok tried to be good-natured about it, yet he was beside himself. He couldn’t understand it. Couldn’t imagine why grown men would behave like adolescents, why they would dissipate precious time that could be devoted to the project, to work, to the accretion of knowledge and the advancement of culture, and all in the name of a vapid amusement. He paced. He hectored us from behind the fence. “Corcoran,” he called, and his voice was a sorry bleat of remonstrance. “Corcoran. Milk. You’re holding up the project!”

  But on the day of my graduation, I didn’t yet know of Prok’s uncompromising view of what he considered frivolous pursuits—or at least not to the extent I one day would—and the look he gave us over an innocent game of croquet gave me pause. I tried to parse that look. Tried to decipher what it portended—was the celebration over? Had my mother said something to him—or he to her—that would have changed the complexion of the day? Did my mother know about Prok and me—or Mac and me—and had she said something?

  As it turned out, it was none of the above, just Prok being Prok. And we finished our game and went back to the shady spot on the lawn and Prok retired to the house a moment and came back with a gift for my mother—an especially convoluted but bred-out gall he’d shellacked as an objet d’art—and when she thanked him I saw the hint of a mutuality there and I didn’t know how I felt about it. There was something complicit between them, and I realized in that moment that it had nothing to do with me: Prok, I guessed, had been talking up the project and had convinced her, as he convinced practically everyone he ran across, to give up her history. My mother’s history. She would sit with him for two hours the next day, or maybe even that evening, and answer the three hundred and fifty questions about her masturbatory habits and how often she brought herself to orgasm and what men she’d slept with since my father died.

  Everything gets a bit hazy here, and I don’t know if what happened next was a direct result of this or not—again, that would take a psychiatrist to iron out, and Prok hated psychiatrists—but I do know that I excused myself from the group gathered on the lawn, left Iris there, and my mother too, and went up the winding path for the house, where I knew Mac was preparing something, a light snack, she’d said, for all us. I went in without knocking, an honored guest by this point, almost a member of the family. The children were nowhere to be seen. Everything was still. The furniture seemed to recede into the depths of the room, shadowy and skeletal, the records canted on the shelves as if awaiting the hand to bring them to life. Distantly, from all the way across the yard, I heard the buzz of voices.

  I found Mac in the kitchen, at the counter, her back to me. She was barefooted still, but she’d put an apron on over her dress and I could see where it was tied just above the swell of her hips. Do I have to tell you how much I needed her in that moment, how much a disciple of the master I’d become? I came up behind her—and she knew I was there, she was waiting for me—and pressed myself to her so she could feel the hardness of me against the softness of her buttocks, and I reached both hands round to embrace her breasts. The sweetest thing: she turned her head to kiss me, to give me the excitation of her tongue and underscore the reciprocity of the moment. And then—and then we were down on the kitchen floor, pawing at each other’s clothes. No children appeared. No one intruded. And I had coitus with her th
ere in a quick wild spate of thrusting and licking and biting that must have taken no more than three minutes beginning to end, and then I zippered up and went back out across the lawn to Iris and my mother.

  6

  Ever since the fall of 1938, when Prok inaugurated the marriage course, there had been whispers on campus and in the community too, and the whispers grew to a rumble of distaste and then outrage as the summer of 1940 gave way to autumn and a coalition of forces gathered against him. If I’d wondered at the number of faculty—and especially older faculty—attending the session of the course Laura and I had taken together, now I began to understand: these were spies, hostile witnesses, the drones of convention and antiquated morality who wanted to keep the world in darkness as far as sex was concerned. They weren’t there to be educated—they were there to bring Prok down.

  Foremost among them was Dr. Thurman B. Rice of the Indiana State Health Board and the IU medical faculty. Rice had himself taught a precursor to Prok’s course in the early thirties—“a hygiene course,” he called it—and it had been one of the running jokes of the campus, an exercise in innuendo, misinformation and Victorian nice-nellyism. Apparently, he’d sat through the lecture in which Prok showed his infamous slides, and protested, in writing, to President Wells, the Board of Trustees and Prok himself that the pictures were so graphic as to have stimulated even him—a man thirty years married, who had given the subject “real objective study”—and that, as a result, he feared for the student body. What if some innocent coed were to be so stimulated and wind up engaging in sexual intercourse, becoming pregnant and having to be sent home as damaged goods? What then?

  He was joined by the rest of his colleagues on the medical faculty, who as one felt that Professor Kinsey was appropriating to himself what was essentially a medical function: how could he presume to interview and advise students of both sexes on physiological matters—behind closed doors, nonetheless—when he had no medical training himself? Add to this the unanimous outcry of the town’s pastors, a cascade of letters from distraught Hoosier mothers who had heard rumors that this professor was instructing their daughters in the various methods of birth control and asking them to measure their own clitorises, and the undying enmity of Dean Hoenig, who would never forgive Prok that display in the garden and what she deemed his overzealous pursuit of the histories of some of the more reticent undergraduate women under her aegis, and you can well imagine that a public lynching was in the cards.

  I was crossing campus on a dead-calm, slow-roasting morning at the beginning of September, on my way to work, thinking of nothing more significant than what I was going to do about dinner, when all of this—the rumors, the rancor, the anti-Prok sentiment boiling up out of the cauldron of the community—came home to me in an immediate way. Laura Feeney, a senior now and even prettier and fuller of figure than I’d remembered, was coming toward me along the path by the brook, a text clutched to her breasts (between which dangled a chain decorated with a class ring presumably belonging to Jim Willard). When she glanced up and recognized me, a change came over her face and she stopped in midstride and just stood there motionless until I closed the distance between us. “Laura,” I said, awkward suddenly—awkward again—“hello.”

  It took her a moment. “John,” she murmured, something tentative in the tone of her voice, as if she were trying the name out to see if it fit. “Oh, hello. So nice to see you.” A pause. “And how was your summer?”

  We could have been having the same conversation we’d had a year ago, except that this time I hadn’t gone home to the crucifixion of boredom that was Michigan City and the attic room in my mother’s house, because I was out in the world now, working a full-time job, and I’d stayed on at Mrs. Lorber’s, though Paul Sehorn was gone and I would soon have a new roommate—that is, if anyone answered Mrs. Lorber’s ad. I watched her face through the formalized exchange of ritualistic chitchat—she was a master at it, or rather, a mistress—and then I got bold and commented on the chain round her neck. “I see you’re wearing Jim Willard’s class ring.”

  “What? Oh, this?” (An excuse to brush her own breasts and lift the ring to eye level.) She let out a laugh that was meant to be self-deprecating, but managed only to be flirtatious. My interest piqued. “You’re not going to believe this, but I’ve traded in one Willard for another.” Again, the laugh. “You know Willard Polk?”

  I hesitated.

  “Co-captain of the football team? He’s my steady. We’re planning to get engaged come Christmas.” She idly rotated the toe of one shoe and I couldn’t help stealing a glance at her ankles and legs. “Jim and I? We just didn’t seem to see eye to eye anymore, that’s all. But now”—and here she gave me the full power of her smile—“now I’m in love. Really. Truly. This is it. For life.” Another pause. Her face contracted round her mouth. Her eyes narrowed. “But what about you? If I hear right, you’re actually working with Dr. Kinsey now?”

  I nodded, tried for a smile.

  “Our old professor,” she said. “Dr. Sex.” She was still playing with the ring, but now she let it drop between her breasts again. “I hear that you’re conducting sex interviews yourself now, isn’t that true?”

  I was an entirely different person from what I was a year ago, sexually experienced, out in the world, conversant with every sexual practice in the book, but still I couldn’t stop the blood rushing to my cheeks. “Only men,” I said. “Undergraduate men. Because, you see, well, they’re the least elaborate, if you know what I mean?”

  “Oh?” The flirtation had come back into her voice. “But what about the girls? Aren’t they even less—elaborate? All those vestal virgins in the dorms? Will you be interviewing them too, or will this be the kind of survey that just tells us what beasts men are—as if we didn’t already know, right, John?”

  So I was blushing. I’d had intercourse with Mac, I’d missed Iris all summer with an ache so deep and inconsolable it was as if some essential part had been cut out of my body, and as I stood there willing the blood to drain from my cheeks, I wanted—why not say it?—to fuck Laura Feeney, no matter how many Willards she had. I saw her naked. Saw her without the dress and the little hat and the shoes, saw her breasts bared and her nipples erect with excitement. Laura Feeney, Laura Feeney: no other girl but you. That’s what I told her with my eyes and she saw it, saw the change in me, and actually took one step back—that is, shifted her weight and ever so minutely extended the distance between us. “No,” I said, and I was leering, I suppose, I admit it, “no, I’ll be doing women too. Prok promised me. But not here. Not on campus.”

  A lift of the eyebrows. “Prok?”

  “Professor Kinsey. That’s what we, what I—”

  “I hear they’re going to fire him.”

  That was the moment when all the birdsong and the trickle of the brook and the backfiring of an automobile in the faculty parking lot were suddenly cued out as if at the upstroke of a conductor’s baton. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t have been more surprised—or shocked, shocked is a better word—if she’d told me the Nazis were marching on Muncie. “They can’t do that,” I said finally, “he’s a starred scientist. He’s got tenure.”

  “The marriage course is finished. You know what they’re calling it? They’re calling it a smut session. ‘That smut session,’ that’s what they say.” She was watching my face for a reaction. “President Wells himself is going to fire him—for, I don’t know, moral turpitude. That’s what I hear, anyway.”

  The following morning, before the sun was up, Prok and I climbed into the Nash (I don’t recall the model or even the year of the thing, though he’d bought it used in 1928 and as far as I could see it seemed to be held together principally with C-clamps and rust), and headed off for West Lafayette, where he’d been invited to lecture to a combined group of sociology classes at Purdue University. Along the way, we were planning on stopping in Crawfordsville to pick up the remaining interviews we hadn’t managed to squeeze in when Prok ha
d lectured at DePauw the previous week. And, of course, we were looking forward to taking the histories of the cohort that would attend the evening’s lecture, having budgeted the next three days to those. Lunch would be on four wheels, tepid water out of a jug I’d set on the floorboards behind the seat and a few handfuls of the trail mix (raisins, nuts, sunflower seeds and the odd nugget of chocolate) Prok consumed for lunch every day of his life, whether he was ensconced in the Astor Hotel on Times Square, wandering the withered foothills of the Sierra Madre in search of galls or sitting behind his desk in Biology Hall.

  There was no radio in the car, but it didn’t really matter, as Prok provided all the entertainment himself, talking without pause from the minute I slid into the seat beside him in the uncertain light of dawn to the moment we disembarked in Crawfordsville, and then continuing without missing a beat till we arrived, in late afternoon, in West Lafayette. He talked about sex. About the project. About the need to collect more lower-level histories, more black histories, more histories from cabbies and colliers and steam-shovel operators—for balance, that is, because undergraduate interviews, as invaluable as they might be, only supplied a portion of the picture. If we passed a cow standing by the roadside, he went on about milk production and the leanness of the drought years. He talked of the topography, of riverine and lacustrine ecology, of mushroom hunting—had I ever tasted fresh-picked morels, lightly breaded and fried? I didn’t feel at a loss, not a bit. I let him talk. It was all part of my education.

  We were coming up on the White River just outside Spencer when the sun rose behind us and spilled across the water, laminating everything in copper. A great blue heron stood out in relief against the mist rising off the surface, the cornfields caught fire, pear and apple trees emerged from the gloom, heavy with luminescent fruit. The surface of the road was wet with dew and as the sun touched it vapor rose there too until it fell away from the rush of the tires and fanned out over the rails of the bridge like a storm in the making. That was the moment that I chose to disburden myself of the unsettling information Laura Feeney had pressed on me and which I’d been turning over in my head now for the better part of the last twenty-four hours. “Prok,” I said, interrupting him in the middle of a story I’d heard twice before about a subject at the state work farm pulling out his penis in the middle of the interview and laying it on the table for measurement, “is it true that, well, I’ve heard rumors that pressure is being put on you again—more than you’ve revealed to me, that is—regarding the marriage course. They’re not going to, well, fire you, are they?”