The Inner Circle (56 page)

She ignored me. The glass went to her lips and came away again. “And Hilda. She encouraged me—she plays herself, you know, and we're planning on getting up a duet for the picnic this spring, on Memorial Day, maybe, just Hilda and me. I didn't think I'd get my embouchure back, but I have.” The fire gave a sigh, then subsided, because it was built of twigs instead of the painstakingly split oak that was stacked up in the woodshed perhaps fifty feet from where we sat. “I wanted to surprise you.”

“I didn't know Hilda played.” I tried to picture Rutledge's wife, angular and airily blond, with her stingy lips and small high breasts, perched at the edge of a chair with the sheet music spread before her, taking the instrument into her mouth.

“All through college. Like me.” She smoothed her thumb over the pale glistening surface of the reed. “We've got to do something, what with our men gone all the time.”

“Oscar was here.”

“Yes,” she said, “that's right. But you weren't.”

At this point, John Jr., who'd gone back to his toys, looked up and announced that he was hungry. “Mommy, I'm hungry,” he piped, as if he'd just discovered some essential truth about the nature of existence and himself in particular.

“Maybe we should just go out,” I said.

Iris gave me a look. “Can we afford it?”

“Something cheap. Hamburgers. A pizza.”

“Pizza!” John Jr. cried, taking up the refrain. “Pizza!”

“Hush,” she said, and he'd flung himself at her legs now, burying his head in her lap. “There's no reason why I can't whip something up, because we really don't have to make a celebration of it, do we? I mean, you go away and you come back. Isn't that the way it always is?”

I had nothing to say to this, and we sat there a moment in silence, even as John Jr. tugged at her blouse and keened, “Please, Mom, please?”

“I'd have to change,” she said. “And put on some makeup. And I do want to get right back—”

I tipped my glass to her. “For what—more practice?”

She was smiling now, John Jr. all over her—
Please, please
—something playful in her eyes, as in all is forgiven and why wrangle when love,
the love between us, between two young healthy male and female human
beings,
was so much more than the sum of its losses and hesitations. “No,” she said, “it was something else. A statistic you could maybe help me with because it's been a while.”

“Yes?”

“What was the average frequency of s-e-x”—spelling it out so that our son wouldn't make a pet word of it, as he had with “bra” and “jock”—“for couples married at least five years? Once a week, wasn't it?”

“Oh, no,” I said, wagging my head in a professorial way, “it's at least twice that.”

The next day, at work, Rutledge and I took a coffee break together, and that was when I learned about Elster. We'd started out on the subject of the clarinet—I'd said something like, “I hear Hilda's rediscovered her musical inspiration”—and then we'd gone on to discuss the Pacific Coast trip and how happy he'd been to stay behind this time because he really was getting tired of conducting interviews like a hired hand (“No offense, John”) when he thought he'd been taken on to do original research. As Prok's equal, or at least his partner. And then, casually, as if it didn't matter a whit, he dropped the news about Elster.

I was dumbstruck. “Elster?” I repeated. “But he's, well, he's no friend of the research. He—did I ever tell you about Fred Skittering, that whole incident?” And I told him, at length.

Rutledge was imperturbable. That was his chief characteristic. The building could be on fire—his hair could be on fire—and he wouldn't raise his voice or move any more precipitately than he would at a funeral. I remembered the night in the hotel room with Mac and how he'd squared his shoulders and strolled into the bedroom with her as if it were a military matter, orders given, orders received. But now, as I revealed Elster's perfidy—or his potential for it—his face took on a new look altogether. Finally he said, “You don't think he can be trusted then?”

“No,” I said. “I don't.”

He stroked his mustache, glanced down the hall to see if Prok were in sight, and lit up a cigarette. I watched him shake out the match, drop it to the floor and grind it underfoot. “Well, we'll just have to be careful,
that's all, make a note of it, be sure Prok's aware of the situation, because really, nobody's in on anything here except for us, and I don't have to tell you how the shit would hit the fan if anything, even the least tidbit, got out to the public. But look at Mrs. Matthews and the other women we've taken on, Laura Peterson and what's her name. They haven't got a clue, have they? And they're right there with us every day in the office.”

I wasn't convinced. Maybe I was overreacting, maybe I'd misread the man—but then there was that night at the tavern when he tried to get me to talk, and it wasn't even for his own sake, but for some third party's, for a journalist's. Had he been paid off? Or was he just constitutionally a snake?

“By the way,” Rutledge said, squinting against the smoke of his cigarette and taking a sip from his coffee mug at the same time, “did you hear about the musicale Sunday?”

I held out my palms in response, and I suppose I must have looked bleak over the prospect. “Uh-uh,” I said finally. “No.” It wasn't that I didn't enjoy the opportunity to learn about classical music—as I say, I've really come to appreciate it, even opera—but that the musicales seemed just another extension of work, of the Institute's tentacles. And Iris hated them. “I don't know,” I said. “I'm tired. I've had it up to here with musicales, if you want to know the truth.”

Rutledge was watching me steadily, his lips composed round the butt of his cigarette and the thin tracery of his mustache. “Yeah,” he said, “I know what you mean. But something's up—it's going to be just us. And the wives.”

“Just us? That
is
odd. Because Prok, not to my knowledge anyway, has never given a musicale with fewer than twenty or thirty guests—that's the whole point, to educate people.”

“And to show off.”

This seemed to suck the wind out of the conversation. I wouldn't hear any criticism of Prok, and especially not from one of my own coworkers and colleagues, and I gave him a look to warn him off.

Rutledge shrugged, threw a furtive glance up the hall, then came back to me. “Listen, John, loyalty is one thing, don't get me wrong, but he's
not above criticism, you know. He can be a real pompous ass at times, with his
obbligato
and his
menuetto
and
largo e cantabile
and all the rest of it, and then there's that look he gets on his face, the same look he gets when he comes, like a penitent nailed to the cross.”

I felt as if I'd been slapped across the face. “Listen, Rutledge—Oscar—” I said, and my voice went cold, “I have to tell you I don't feel comfortable with any sort of criticism or bad-mouthing of Prok, I just don't, I'm sorry, so please, in future, if you would just keep it to yourself—”

“But you've seen it. You've seen that look on his face. You've been on the receiving end of it, haven't you? Well so have I. It's part of the job, isn't it?”

“No,” I said. “No, I don't want to talk about this.”

He was still watching me, holding my eyes as if he were taking my history. “And Ted, of course. Ted'll be there,” he said. “With his camera.”

The sunday came, wind-whipped and bathed in a tentative March sunshine that hinted at better times ahead. Crocuses were blooming, pussy willows, azaleas. Townspeople were out in their yards, raking the grass, thinking about where to string the hammock, and the students were everywhere, crowding the sidewalks in clusters of three and four, their jackets open to the waist, grinning and frolicking and shouting to one another as if it were May already, as if it were June and finals were over. It was kite-flying weather, and though I hadn't flown a kite in twenty years, Iris and I bought a cheap paper version at a novelty shop and took John Jr. to the park to launch it. All well and fine. But before we'd gone to the park we'd done something even more out of the ordinary, and I didn't know how I felt about it or what it meant exactly. We went to church. It was Sunday, and we went to church.

As I've said, Iris was raised in the Roman church, but she'd given it up in college, and certainly I myself had neither the faith nor reason to enter any ecclesiastical structure of any denomination. But Iris had awakened that morning with an idea fixed in her head—we were going to church because it was Lent and because she missed the ritual of it, the
mumble of Latin, the immemorial fragrance of the censers—and I couldn't argue with her. I wouldn't want to say that she was reverting to childish things because that wouldn't be fair to her, and yet she'd begun to write long missives to her mother almost daily, about what I couldn't imagine, and she
had
taken up the clarinet again … and baking. She told me she'd loved to bake as a girl. And now, over breakfast—eggs poached just the way I like them, lean strips of bacon, crude crumbling hunks of a homemade bread that hadn't risen—she'd announced that we were going to church. The whole family.

“Church?” I'd said.

“That's right.”

“But why? What are you thinking? You know that I don't, well—I've got better things to do with my day off, don't you think?”

“Because I miss it, that's why. Shouldn't that be enough? Can't you do anything for me, just for me, just once? And for John Jr.?” We were at the kitchen table, the aforementioned boy nearly four years old now and perched on the edge of his booster seat, making an improvisatory scramble out of his own eggs. She paused to wipe his chin, the cheerful yellow splotch there, and then came back to me. “He's growing up a pagan. Doesn't that bother you?”

“No,” I said, “not at all.”

“You know what the other mothers say? The other children?”

It would have been useless to point out that I didn't care in the least what the other mothers might say or that Prok would have a fit if he knew that I'd been within fifty feet of a church, temple, tabernacle or mosque—he hated them all, all religions, with equal fervor. Religion was antithetical to science. The religious simply couldn't face the facts. They were living in the Dark Ages, et cetera. I couldn't have agreed with him more, but Iris wanted to go to church, and that was all that mattered.

I will say that the experience was at least mildly interesting from a sociological perspective. The women had their heads covered, most with spring hats, but a good number with simple black or white scarves knotted under the chin, and the men—and the children too—were turned out in their best in deference to the God they'd come to worship. There was the smell Iris had spoken of—some sort of herb or aromatic gum
reduced over hot coals, a holdover no doubt from the days when the devotees went largely unwashed and it was thought that contagion was bred spontaneously out of the miasma of foul air—and a whole panoply of ritual that Iris performed with a simple grace that stirred me more deeply than I wanted to admit. I watched her kneel, cross herself, dip her fingers in the holy water and let her lips move along with the priest's in the ventriloquism of rapture, even while John Jr. gurgled and writhed at her side and she turned to hush him. In a way, the whole thing was quite beautiful, not that it meant anything and not that we've been back since—or not that I've been back—but it was like being at a concert, I suppose, when you're free to let your mind empty itself and wander where it will.

Yes, and then we went to the park and John Jr. ran wild with the release of it, like a puppy let off the leash, and we had a picnic, though the wind made its presence felt whenever the clouds obscured the sun, which they did, off and on, all afternoon. We'd bought a box kite and assembled it at home, despite the fact that studying directions on a sheet of paper and translating them into action wasn't my strong suit, and when I ran with it twirling and twisting above my head, my son let out a whoop of the purest, elemental joy. I paid out the line and felt the tug of nature on the other end, and it goes without saying that the sensation brought me back to my own childhood. “I want,” my son said. “Give me, Daddy. Me, me!” And I sat myself down in the naked grass with John Jr. in my lap and together we held tight to the string.

It might have been that day when he lost hold of the kite, or maybe it was another occasion, another day, another year. But I remember being confident enough to let him take it himself, to feel that mysterious suspensory tug all on his own and master it, and he ran with the thing, giggling like a maniac, paying out string, getting cockier by the minute—and that was good, all to the good—until there was no string left. Before I could reach him, before I could leap forward and snatch at it, the thing was gone, receding in the sky on its bellying tether as if we'd never had hold of it at all.

Then there was dinner, a roast turkey Iris had put in the oven before we went out, the smell of it heavy on the air as we came in the door, and
the fire I made to take the chill out of our fingers and toes. We dropped John Jr. at the sitter's—Were we going to be late? she wanted to know. No, we didn't think so, not too late—and then drove over to Prok's.

As it turned out, we were the first to arrive, which was unusual in itself. Mac took our coats, and Prok, absorbed in mixing cocktails—we were having Zombies, I saw—called out a brusque greeting from the chair he'd pulled up to the coffee table in the inner room. There was no fire that night, and yet the house was warm, bearing the faint olfactory traces of radiated heat, of the furnace in the basement and its conduit of pipes and radiators, and that was odd, given Prok's Spartan tastes. He rose to greet us as we came into the room, a peck to the cheek for Iris and a handclasp and his famous smile for me, and it was like coming home all over again, arriving at a foreordained destination, the place I was meant to inhabit in my fatherless transit of the planet. Prok's house. Prok and Mac's. A wave of emotion swept through me, and I can't say why or what it was about that particular moment that moved me so, though it had to do with continuity, I think, and with my sudden apprehension of it. I suppose Prok would have classified it as a chemical reaction, a fluctuation in the hormonal levels originating in the endocrine glands. Just that, and nothing more.