The Inner Circle (43 page)

“Sorry I'm late, Prok,” I said, snagging my hat and trench coat on the clothes tree behind my desk. The coat was wet—the temperature had dropped twenty degrees overnight and it was spattering rain—and my heel prints left gleaming arcs on the linoleum tiles. “But I had to stop by Iris's school and tell them she wasn't coming in today.”

Prok glanced up sharply. We were working on the text of the male volume now, and he was driving himself through sixteen- and seventeen-hour days, puzzling over the figures, pushing through organization to interpretation, and he'd become increasingly rigid under the pressure of it. He'd been up till one himself, and though he must have been feeling elated over the finalizing of the Rutledge situation and the success of the previous night's demonstration, he might have been just the smallest bit under the weather too. “You're holding up the project, Milk,” was all he said, and he gave me a sour look.

Normally I would have been mortified—I hated for anyone to question my devotion and loyalty, especially Prok, to whom I owed everything, and he was in the right, of course: I was late, I was irresponsible, I was holding up the project—but I felt an almost otherworldly sense of well-being, as if nothing could touch me, not fear or disease or recrimination. No reply was called for, but I had one at the ready, and I held it a moment to tease out the pleasure of it. I didn't move. Just stood there at my desk, gazing out over the sanctuary of the office, the golden pools of lamplight, the galls, Prok. Iris was home in bed, too sick to go in and minister to her seven-year-olds. I'd listened to her retching over the toilet. I'd held her hand and wrapped her in a quilt and put her back to bed with dry toast and a glass of leftover ginger ale. “I have news, Prok,” I said. “Good news, great news.”

He'd already dropped his eyes to the page, and now they came up again, searching and hard. The pulsing arrhythmic din of Mrs. Matthews's typewriter choked off on the downstroke. Corcoran looked up from his desk.

“It's Iris,” I said, and I felt inflated, bigger than life, the actor, the hero, the marathoner at the tape. I knew what they must have thought of me. I was the youngest, the least-trained, Prok's puppet, unable even to perform the most elemental biological function of them all, but that was all behind me now. Now I was anybody's equal. I was a man, and wasn't this the very definition of it? “She's, well, we're going to have a baby,” I said. “She's pregnant.”

Prok let out a low whistle. Mrs. Matthews—she was in her fifties, a grandmother and a widow—gave me a melting look. And Corcoran, from his desk in the back room, put two hands together in a smatter of applause, which brought Rutledge's head up out of his book in time to give me a quizzical glance.

“We found out last night. Yesterday, I mean. When I got home, after the, the—”

Prok had already crossed the room, grinning wide. He seized both my arms and held me in his grip till the familiar scent of him—of soap, astringents, the faintest whiff of witch hazel—penetrated me. “But you'll need advice—you'll need Mac,” he was saying, looking beyond me to the clock on the wall as if the baby were due in the next fifteen minutes. “And a good obstetrician. Whom did you say she was seeing? Because I have just the man—”

Unfortunately, as it turned out, I was away with the team much of that fall and winter, and as often as not Iris had to endure her bouts of morning sickness alone. She wasn't due till June, and so we both agreed that she would fulfill her obligations at the elementary school as long as she could—it was the right thing to do, of course, but we were also in need of the money because now we would have to move to a bigger place, and my raise at the Institute had yet to come through, though I was sure it would once the grant situation was ironed out. When I was home I did my best to help out around the house, preparing meals at night, washing up, laying out her clothes for the morning. She was brave about it, never once complaining over my schedule—it was a fact of life at this stage, a fait accompli—and I remember the way she pushed herself up stiffly from the table in the mornings, her face
clenched as she tried to keep down half a soft-boiled egg and three sips of coffee.

I felt bad about it. And I would have been happy to stay home with her, to help see her through it, to be with her and share the wonder of the transformation going on inside her, but this was a crucial time for the project. We'd managed to reach a milestone the year before—ten thousand histories in the books—and yet Prok kept pushing frantically for more as he got deeper into the writing up of the results, afraid of having the figures attacked for being skewed in one direction or another (“We have five hundred and five female alcoholics,” he would mutter, “but a paltry smattering of upper-level blacks and virtually nothing on ministers, rabbis and the like, not to mention drug addicts and traveling salesmen”). To complicate matters, we were still working shorthanded, as Rutledge wouldn't complete his dissertation and join us till just before the holidays, so while Iris put on weight and felt her breasts grow tender and her feet leaden, we were bouncing from city to city, Prok lecturing nearly every day, and the three of us staying up into the wee hours recording histories. We went to Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington and any number of smaller municipalities along the way, and we were in residence at the Astor Hotel in New York for nearly three weeks in December, interviewing a succession of male hustlers and female prostitutes.

In the meanwhile, I wrote Iris regularly, if only a line or two, and made sure to telephone her at least every other day, no matter the cost. I owed her those phone calls, and before long I found that I needed them as much as she did. The sound of her voice became an itch in my head as I showered, breakfasted, climbed aboard the train or slid into the Buick beside Prok and Corcoran, her soft tentative “hello” whispering to me over the thump of the rails and the measured beat of the tires. She was subdued on the phone, shy of it, and I'm afraid we didn't communicate very effectively. Still, the important thing was that we did talk. I told her I loved her. Couldn't wait to be home with her—and the baby. Was the baby kicking yet? No? Too early? Well, the baby would kick, wouldn't it? Eventually? Yes, she assured me, the baby would kick. Christmas, I told her, Christmas would be our time together.

A word here about the Astor Hotel, incidentally. This was, in its time, an open gathering place for homosexuals—the long black oval bar on the ground floor was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with men till all hours of the night every day of the week—and it was ideal for our purposes in securing H-histories, our chief purpose on that particular trip (though, as I say, we were also interviewing female prostitutes as well as a number of young college and career women, most of whom were brought to us by Vivian Aubrey, a sexually prodigious graduate of Columbia University whose history Corcoran had first taken on our last foray to New York, and more on her later). Most important, at the Astor, no one asked any questions. And this was significant, because we'd been requested to leave the Lincoln Hotel the previous year (that is, we were thrown out), an incident Prok was always able to recount with equanimity, though he was furious at the time.

None of us had seemed to notice anything amiss, but for one reason or another—prudery, antiquated notions of respectability—our activities began to attract notice. We'd been interviewing at the Lincoln for some days, a whole succession of ragtag hustlers, underage boys and effeminates parading through the lobby, where Prok, Corcoran and I would meet them and escort them upstairs to our rooms, when the manager rang Prok and demanded to speak with him. Prok was in the middle of an interview and put the man off till there was a break in the schedule, at which point he summoned Corcoran and me for reinforcements and went down to confront him.

The manager was a very proper-looking character with swept-back hair, silvered sideburns and the trace of an Italian accent—a real swell, as we used to say, pompous and self-important. “We can't have this,” he said.

Prok folded his arms and leveled his gaze on him. He knew what was coming. “Have what?”

“All this sex,” the man spat. “Fags and streetwalkers. Whores. I can't have you undressing these people in my hotel.”

“But I've explained to you—this is a scientific survey we're conducting. You know perfectly well we're not undressing anybody.”

“Oh, no? Maybe not their clothes, but you're undressing their
minds,
and I won't have it, not in my hotel.”

But this time, at the Astor, there were no such problems. The management looked the other way and everything went smoothly and professionally, except in one instance that still manages to disturb me, though I don't know why. The subject was a young man not long removed from the war and missing the lower portion of his right arm. He was my last interview of a long night, I'd been drinking and smoking with the previous subjects, and I guess I was feeling pretty wrung out. I met him in the lobby, there was a brief contretemps with the handshake—he offered his left and it took me a moment to follow suit—and then we rode the elevator up to the room Prok had reserved for interviews. The subject had been with the Navy, and though his tan had faded he might have been a modern Billy Budd, with his fair hair parted just to the left of center and the cocky gait and rigid musculature of his class. He was nineteen. He'd been educated to the eighth grade, had parents living in Oklahoma City, and he'd been earning his living as a male hustler since he got out of the hospital. I gave him the dollar we'd agreed upon, he took the bed and I the armchair, and we began to chat.

The preliminaries went well enough, but it soon became apparent that he was wound up on something—Benzedrine, as it turned out, which he obtained by dismantling nasal inhalers and swallowing the drug-soaked pads within. He became loquacious, overly so, each question provoking a breathless running interminable response that went so far afield I began to forget what I was doing there with him in the first place. We'd been trained in the rapid-fire technique I described earlier, and to interrupt and interject where necessary in order to steer the subject back to the matter at hand, but this man—this sailor—just wouldn't yield. At one point, in the middle of a reminiscence about the fifty-three varieties of plants in the hothouse where his first homosexual contact, an older man, had worked, I became so exasperated that I got up out of the armchair and began pacing the floor.

He stopped in mid-sentence and gave me a curious look—an aggressive look, actually. “What,” he said, “you're not interested? Because I
thought you said we agreed you wanted information, right, the story of my life and all like that for a buck? But what? Is it something else?” He held my eyes. “You want more than just a story?”

“No, not at all. I just wish you would—well, don't take this the wrong way because I don't mean to sound impolite or guide your response in any way—but I wish you'd just stick to the format of the interview or we'll be here all night.”

“So what's so bad about that?” He'd risen from the couch and he was giving me what I suppose he assumed was a seductive smile, his bathhouse smile, the smile he used at the urinals at Grand Central Station or downstairs at the Astor bar. “You don't want to get rid of me, do you? Already?”

“Of course not,” I said. “But the whole survey becomes suspect if we can't finish out an interview, you understand that, don't you?”

He didn't say anything, just crossed the room to me, the right sleeve of his velour shirt dangling empty, and pressed himself to me. His hand went to the crotch of my trousers, and I froze—that was what we were trained to do in such cases, to remain impassive and reject all advances. He tried to kiss me then, but I turned my face away and his lips grazed my cheek. “Come on,” he murmured, his voice low and furred with lust or its counterfeit, “you know you want it. Drop the charade, why don't you? Science. You're no more a scientist than I am.”

I pushed away from him and sank back into the chair, all business—this was business, after all—and assured him I was there for one purpose only, all the while cursing myself for having left the chair in the first place. It was unprofessional, it had broken the spell and given him the wrong impression. “And your second contact,” I said, trying to regain control of my voice. “Do you recall that? How old you were? Was it just after your experience with the hothouse man?”

He didn't answer. For the first time since he'd entered the room he had nothing to say, as if the drug were a freight train driving through his veins and it had hopped a curve and derailed all of a sudden. He stood there a moment, weaving from foot to foot. His good hand clenched and released and I could hear the erosive friction of his teeth grinding,
molar to molar. “Listen,” he said finally, “don't you find me attractive? Is it because of this?” He held up the arm, with its dangle of empty sleeve.

“That's not what I'm here for.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, I just felt you. I just had your prick in my hand.”

“What about women?” I said, because you can never let the subject distract you, not if you're going to be a professional. “When was the first time you saw a naked female?”

“I'll suck you for a buck,” he said, and he was leaning over the chair now, staring into my eyes.

“I've told you, I'm not here for that. Now answer the question.
Please.
”

He leaned forward and tried to kiss me again, but I pushed him firmly away, or as firmly as I could while remaining seated. He slowly straightened up and stood there over me, swaying his hips and grinding his teeth. “You aren't fooling anybody,” he said.

The point of all this, I suppose, is that I got the interview, one more set of data to feed into the Hollerith machine, and that I always got the interview, just as my colleagues did. Unfailingly. We persisted against all odds, and isn't that something to be proud of? At any rate, we were up early the following day, the cold shower, the stale hotel breakfast, and conducted interviews till about noon, after which we packed up and wandered round the city streets in anticipation of boarding the
Spirit of St. Louis
at 6:05 p.m., arriving in Indianapolis at 8:45 the following morning. It was December twentieth, the air was thin with the cold, and there were Santas and bell-ringers on every corner, pigeons bobbing underfoot, the smell of charcoal and chestnuts blowing across the afternoon like the charred odor of history, Christmas in Manhattan, and every storefront shimmering with elaborate seasonal displays, toys, foodstuffs, liquor, lingerie, hats, furs, jewels. Prok had already bought something for Mac, and Corcoran had found a crystal brooch with matching clip earrings for Violet—she loved jeweled pins, wore them over her left breast in the way men wore handkerchiefs or boutonnieres—but I had yet to find anything for Iris.