The Inner Circle (15 page)

“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 had 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?”

A low spear of sun transfixed the interior of the car and illuminated Prok's face from the lips down, as if he were wearing a beard of light. He gave me a dour look, head slightly canted, eyes showing white. “And where, exactly, did you get that notion?”

“I—well, Laura Feeney. Laura Feeney told me yesterday morning. You know, the girl I took the marriage course with?”

“With whom.”

“Yes, right—the girl with whom.”

The planks of the bridge rattled under the wheels and I saw the heron stiffen and protract its wings. Prok's eyes were fixed on the road. He was silent a moment, then murmured, “I suppose Miss Feeney had an audience with President Wells himself? Or was it the Board of Trustees?”

“You're making light of it, Prok, and that's not right. I'm just, well, I'm concerned, that's all, and there
are
rumors, you can't deny that—”

He let out a sigh. Gave me a glance of commiseration, then turned back to the road. “I feel like Galileo,” he said, “if you want to know the truth. Hounded and oppressed and denied the basic right of scientific investigation, simply because some cleric or some dried-up old maid like Dean Hoenig or a has-been like Thurmond Rice feels threatened by the facts. They can't face reality, and that's the long and short of it.”

My heart sank. So it was true. I stared out the window on the fierce geometry of the cornfields, the engine moaning beneath my feet, the world slipping by.

“They're going to offer me an ultimatum: drop the marriage course or give up the research, one or the other.”

“But you can't—that would be like an admission that sex
is
dirty, that they were right all along—”

Another sigh. The hooded look. His hands were claws on the wheel. “You see, the problem is with doing the course and the interviews combined,
not to mention the advisement on sexual matters that has been so much a natural concomitant of the information we dispense—”

He shifted down as the car hurtled through a pothole, rising up off its springs and slamming down again with a shudder, and then he laid a hand on my knee. “It's the research they're after. They just can't abide the idea of our getting impressionable young things behind closed doors, because you never know what might happen.” He gave my knee a squeeze. “Isn't that right, John?”

We were on a tight schedule, but we were fortunate that day because the DePauw subjects all appeared on time, delivered up their information and went back about their business so that we could go about ours. Trail mix and aqua pura in the car, Prok dodging farm wagons, overladen trucks and the odd cow, a long running trailer of intensely green fields alternating with flagrant forests and shadowy bottoms, and we were there, arrived safe and sound in West Lafayette three quarters of an hour before the lecture was scheduled to begin.

I don't remember much of the hotel, though I should, because that trip was a real watershed for me, but all the hundreds of towns and hotels and motor courts we've visited over the years seem to have produced a generic impression. It was a brick building from the last century, most likely, in need of sandblasting and paint, and it was, as likely or not, located on the main street near the courthouse. There would have been shade trees, a dog curled up on the sidewalk out front, cars parked on the diagonal. The building itself would be three stories, with a separate entrance for the restaurant and bar. We doubled up on the room, to save money—Prok was a prodigy of thrift—just as we would triple and quadruple up in later years, when we added Corcoran and finally Rutledge to the team.

As for the lecture. Did Prok need anything? No, he was fine. He stood bare-chested in the bathroom, shaving before the mirror, then he changed his shirt, knotted his bow tie, slipped into his jacket and went off at a brisk gait for the university, his host, Professor McBride of the Sociology Department, struggling to keep pace. I brought up the rear.
When we arrived, the auditorium was already full (the word was spreading, even in those early days, and if the combined sociology classes could boast sixty students among them, there must have been three hundred of the idle and curious there as well, hoping for a bit of titillation). As usual, Prok spoke ex tempore, without notes, and, as usual, he cast a spell over the audience from the first words out of his mouth to the last. (The subject might have been premarital sex, the psychology of sexual repression, the function of adolescent outlets, the history of sex research or the frequency of masturbation in the comparison of males and females of a given age group—it didn't really matter to Prok; all speeches were one speech. And I should say here too that he had a particular gift for delivery that never resorted to tricks or theatrical gestures, his voice clear and distinct and largely unmodulated, every inch the man of science expatiating on a subject of deep interest to all humanity. He was no Marc Antony or even a Brutus, but he got the job done as no one else could have.)

And again, as usual, a whole mob of potential subjects came forward to volunteer their histories at the conclusion of the lecture and Prok and I sat side by side at a long table set up behind the lectern and scheduled them. Dinner? I don't remember if we did eat that night—it might have been sandwiches sent up to the room—but we both started right in on taking histories as soon as the lecture hall had cleared and we'd had a chance to get back to the hotel. Prok conducted his interviews in our room and I was accommodated with a private conference room located just behind the restaurant. It must have been past midnight by the time I was finished (three undergraduate men, sociology students out to earn extra credit with Professor McBride in coming forward as volunteers, the expected responses, nothing I hadn't heard before), and I remember sinking into an armchair in the lobby, a watered-down drink at my side, watching the hands crawl round the clock as Prok conducted his final interview of the night.

Afterward, we compared notes as we got ready for bed, and that was when we discovered a discrepancy in the schedule for the following morning: we had inadvertently scheduled two females for the same
hour, rather than one female and one male. Which meant we were either going to have to cancel or I would be forced to record my first female history, a step Prok to this point hadn't deemed me qualified to take. He looked up from the schedule, shook his head slowly, then rose from the sofa and padded into the bathroom to see to his dental prophylaxis (he was a great one for maintaining his teeth in good condition, a hygienic habit that allowed him to take the full set to his grave with him). “I don't know, Milk,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of running water, “but I do hate to cancel. It's inefficient, for one thing. And it could cost us data, for another. No. There's nothing to do but go through with it.”

A moment later he was back in the room, hovering over me, fully clothed, which in itself was odd because the moment we were done for the day he usually stripped to the skin and encouraged me to do the same. (Yes, we were alone together a great deal on these trips, and we continued to have sexual relations, though my education—and my predilections—were taking me in the opposite direction. I revered Prok—I revere him still—but gradually I was growing away from him in this one regard and toward Mac, toward Iris, toward the coeds in their loose sweaters and tight skirts who drifted across the campus like antelope on the plain. No matter: I enjoyed being with Prok—I felt privileged to be with him—and I looked forward to these trips because they took me away from the tedium of my desk and the constriction of small-town life and enabled me to see and absorb something of the larger world, of Indiana certainly, but eventually of Chicago and New York, San Francisco and Havana too.) “We're going to have to accelerate your training,” he said, and there was no trace of levity to his tone.

I was exhausted. The travel, the skimped meals, the force of concentration required to record five histories in a single day—all of it combined to sap me as surely as if I'd spent the day at hard labor, chained to a convict and breaking up rock with a mallet. “We are?” I echoed.

“The interview for women requires, I would think, a little more finesse than the men's, especially the ones you've been conducting with undergraduates near to your own age, where you appear as a sort of fraternity
colleague or perhaps an older brother. No, I am aware of how you feel in these matters, with regard to women, that is, and Mac and I have discussed it thoroughly”—he let that hang a moment—“and I wonder if you're capable of being absolutely disinterested and professional.”