Alive and Dead in Indiana (4 page)

Clara and I, during the first hot summers in Bloomington, would walk its streets and alleys, mildly interested in the bees collecting around the backdoor rubbish bins of restaurants. Pleased when we distinguished characteristics readily. Family, order, class. The tiny mass of Latin, yellow and brown, lighted on the red bricks. Their abdomens pulsed and touched. The wasps scribbled on the surface of a pool of water. Genus, species, variety. We went to Dunn Mcadow and turned the oak leaves over in our hands, recognizing the wasp by the disruption of the cells, the black gall on the dull side of the leaf. Rummaging through campus to where the Jordan River disappeared underground, we read the leaves until it was too dark to see the beauty marks, left, and grabbed a bench on Kirkwood. From there we watched the couples collect under the yellow lights of the Von Lee as they waited to buy their tickets. We saw them touch each other. We did not care who was watching us watching. Paying no attention to the miller in the light or the cricket in the dark, we rounded the corner to the Book Nook, empty and quiet between terms. The soda jerk behind the counter told us again where the speaks were that summer as he screwed his towel into the glasses while I sat down at the piano where Hoagy Carmichael had composed “Stardust” and played Chopin and Beethoven, without distinction. We closed the place, circled back to ours, and. without turning on the lights, stumbled by the sheets of insects under glass, the cotton and the chlorides, the spreading boards and pins, and, with nothing left to identify, fell in bed with the house as hot as it had been all day.

My secret was never to show surprise. I told my interviewers to assume that everyone had done everything. Anything that could be imagined is humanly possible. We had only to ascertain when and how many times.

Clara would sometimes bring my lunch down to Jordan Hall when the Institute was just setting up house. “Honey,” I said to her, “this building will one day house more pornography than the Vatican.” We laughed. She always understood when I was joshing. We sat on the steps where Dellenbeck liked to take our picture and watched the young men across the way strip down to the waist and knock off for lunch. The WPA was building Sycamore and the Auditorium, and the CCC was adding a wall around the campus. Everything was done in the local limestone, which would turn from pink to gray in winter. That summer those boys with their farmer’s tans molted into men. Thomas Hart Benton used some of them in the murals he did for the Auditorium. I took his history when he was on the campus. That afternoon we shared a lunch Clara brought, back in the woods where the river traced through the exposed bedrock. He wore overalls and talked about Missouri. Clara sat with her legs curled under her skirt. He stretched out his hand and touched her cheek saying, simply, “Bounty.”

Pomeroy thought I derived some pleasure from keeping secrets. That was the psychologist in him talking. I never would reveal anything, of course, nor hold anything over anyone’s head. It wasn’t power that interested me.

I remember when Pomeroy broke my code, found and read my history, and Clara’s and the children’s. Of course, I was upset. But it pleased me even more that he was so willing to learn.

Her waist was gone. She was white in the moonlight. I remember, because the curtains were gone. Laundry. The baby was showing and had already moved. It was past the time we had agreed upon to do anything more. Her waist was gone, and she was a different creature. But it was summer, I remember, because I would stay up after she went to sleep and listen for insects. She had longings for cream puffs. I could keep nothing from spoiling. She could no longer move. There was no surprise. The introduction of love is its own undoing.

I told my researchers that there were only three ways a subject could not be reporting accurately. He could exaggerate, conceal, or remember imprecisely. Our methods took care of all three. The number and speed at which we ask our questions took care of most problems. No one could prepare a life, especially a sexual one, on the spur of the moment. The rest was in the follow-up, to see if the same story could be told twice.

I no longer ask myself certain questions. Donald died the year of my first
Biology
. It was Mill, I believe, who began his autobiography with a reference to his father’s book on India. Author and Father. At the Institute, we interviewed each other every year or so. I have gone through my sexual history over twenty times. I’ve never found the slightest inconsistency; my stories match from year to year. The repetition makes everything clearer in my mind. In others, this justifies our methodology. The story is to remain the same. I am not so sure in my own case. I have been over everything again and again, but no single night presents itself to me as the one during which Donald was conceived.
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
took ten years to write, and I can still recite the seed of that story. I even remember what the woman wore, the pearl at her throat. Perfection out of irritation. She was one of the students in the marriage course. In conference, she asked me how much passion she should expect from her fiancé. And I didn’t know. Not then. Donald was three when he died. My first son. Some passion spent long ago.

I told my interviewers that some subjects would make advances. I prepared them for this as best I could. I knew it would happen. I had instructed them to remain impassive, always impassive. Nothing cools ardor more than impassivity. We did not want to lose the oral history, though. We did not want to lose anything.

There were about fifty different measurements taken on each specimen of gall wasp. And this was only morphology, not phylogeny, host relationships, geographic distribution, life cycles and history, or gall polymorphism. I no longer had the time for the rest of it, and couldn’t find a graduate student so inclined. I was caught up in the other work. By this time I had finished two books on the
Cynips
. That was enough of a contribution.

I remember watching Clara once as she measured the third segment of antennae. She would still work on the plates with water colors and go over the Leach drawings after the children were in bed. She would use the colored pencils to write me notes. I told her the new study interested me more. No more pictures to draw. “Imagine,” she said, “the illuminated manuscript of this. A different box of colors.” I gave the rest of the specimens to Harvard and went to the field again, collecting.

That man in the West Side bar in New York, I remember every word. “I am Dr. Kinsey, from Indiana University, and I am making a study of sexual behavior. Can I buy you a drink?” What could he say? I took his history. He was a homosexual prostitute and was so pleased that I had been telling the truth that for years after that he encouraged his friends to be interviewed. I took his history. I got it. But what impressed him more, my innocence or my knowledge?

I always hired interviewers with stable marriages. It was the nature of the work. My experience of Americans led me to believe that they were skeptical of those who cannot keep house and home together. Of course, we had to travel a great deal, we really did, and then be alone with those consenting adults in any little bit of privacy we could find. Very little was lost on us.

Clara stayed behind with the children. I left with the men, and Clara finished the pictures she had started years before of the gold bands on the abdomen of
Sphecids
.

So many people wanted to tell me things. I let them. I simply let them talk. That was what was important. Let them hear themselves. I just listened. They wanted to tell me secrets so that someone knew they kept them, that they had secrets to keep. When the study started, I, of course, interviewed myself, following my life until its history ran out. Clara’s history, the one Pomeroy came across, was contrived from the things I knew. She could never tell me things. I made it all up.

There are many ways of saying yes. I have trained myself to hear them all. When I interviewed, the code we used could represent every subtlety by making each different affirmation a different word. There is even a yes that means no, of course, and the many ways of saying no. This is all I have needed to understand the lovers of the world.

Winter in Indiana. The brown oak leaves stay on the tree through the winter. The dry leaves say yes. The stones turn from pink to gray. I will die of this enlarged heart, my doctor says, because there is no time to take the rest I need.

To get to the fort, you have to cross the St. Mary’s River on an arched footbridge made of concrete and steel. The bridge is steep enough to make you lean forward. There is nothing moving on the river that needs this kind of clearance.

The St. Mary’s runs down under the Spy Run Bridge, and then it meets the St. Joe River, to form the Maumee, which flows on to Toledo and Lake Erie.

The fort is built on the tongue of land between the two rivers. So it floods a lot. But this summer they’ve lifted the rollers down on the Anthony Street Dam, and the rivers are almost dry.

I can see the Three Rivers Apartments down by the confluence from here, the elevated tracks built over the old canal, and the whole sweep of Fort Wayne’s skyline—bank towers, the golden dome of the courthouse. It is the kind of picture they like to show before the local news. Along the river, I can still see some piles of sandbags from the spring’s flood and the lines each crest left through the summer. The riverbed is beginning to dry and crack below the levee. I like to stand here each morning on my way to the fort and watch all the flags go up on the buildings downtown.

I work at the fort. The bridge is supposed to make it easier for the visitors to imagine they’re walking into the past. You have to leave your car on the lot next to the ticket booth and cross the bridge to the fort. Spy Run, after it crosses the river, goes right by the fort, but they do it this way instead. The ticket booth is also a gift shop with little brass cannons, postcards, pens and pencils. There are racks with all the literature. At night the bridge is closed off. There is a gate made out of cyclone fencing that hangs way out over each side of the walkway so nobody can climb around it. I think it’s funny, a little screen fence protecting a fort.

The oak logs of the fort are white and unweathered. They would have been unweathered then. It is always the summer of 1816.

We do all the regular things other places do—like dip candles, card wool, spin, and weave. The soldiers make shot and clean their weapons. Someone plays the fife. The children hold their ears when we shoot off the six-pounder. But we’re not saying all the time, “This is how they make stew on an open fire” or “This is where the men sat and read their Bibles.”

Everybody plays a person, somebody who was really here in 1816, and we make up stories to get the facts across. Otherwise, we just go about our business, answer questions when we can.

“Do you think Polk will be President?” We just look at each other and scratch our heads. “Who’s he, mister?”

There are fifteen stars on the flag and fifteen stripes. They are running out of room. The Congress is trying to figure out what to do next.

When I head in the gate, Jim is working out the flogging with Marshall. There was a flogging on this day in 1816.

I am George Washington Whistler. I’ll die during an epidemic in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1849.

I was in Russia as an engineer, building the railroad between St. Petersburg and Moscow for the Czar, making harbor improvements, looking over the dockyards. One of my sons will be the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who was in London when I died. He was only sixteen. That’s why you never see a portrait of his father.

In the summer of 1816, I am sixteen too.

My father designed and built this fort, the third and last American fort on the site, as well as the one that was standing here in 1800. That’s the fort I was born in.

Most of what I know about George is all going to happen to him after he leaves here—his marriage, his work on the border between the U.S. and Canada. That doesn’t help me much now. So I just do what I think a sixteen-year-old would have done back then. I fetch things. I haul water. I whittle. I run across the compound while the soldiers drill. I tag behind Jim, who is Major John Whistler, my father, until he pretends to send me on errands. I sulk in the corner of his office while he lectures on strategy and boasts of the fort’s design to a group of visitors. I gripe about school to the other kids. We’ve got some books from the time—primers and things. Or I tell them about how it was when we walked here from Detroit. Most of all, I talk about leaving and heading off to the military academy at West Point.

That’s what’s going to happen to my person pretty soon, and that’s most of what I know, things that will happen soon.

Late in the day, with my chores all done, I’ll go down to the river and skip a few stones. The people crossing back over the bridge will be able to see me there on the bank.

Most of the other people who work here—the soldiers and their wives, the settlers, the traders—are history majors out at Indiana-Purdue University on the bypass. They are always telling me a new fact they’ve come up with in the library—like a diary that mentions something a person did, or what was in a letter found folded in an old book. They’re always building things up from just a few clues. My sister, Harriet, for instance, is supposed to have been a real gossip and mean. That’s what they decided from some letters they found along with a recipe for cornbread. She fretted greatly over Major Whistler, our father, who seems to have not gotten along at all with B. F. Stickney, the Indian agent, or with his son-in-law, Lieutenant Curtis. I’ve seen Jim—who is really a professor out at the campus—have yelling matches with the man who plays Mr. Stickney. Visitors will come through the gate, and the two of them will be shouting. Major Whistler is out on the balcony of his quarters. Mr. Stickney is over by the hospital. It’s something about the payments and the sale of alcohol.

Nobody tells the visitors what they’re getting into. They just have to catch on. It must seem like these are real fights at first.