The Inner Circle (59 page)

I never took my eyes from him, that much I'd learned. I could put up a front as well as he could. I said, “I can't.”

“You can. You will.”

“Iris—” I began, and I didn't know what he'd heard or how much he knew. I wanted to tell him she was gone and that nothing, not the project, not him or Mac or all the charts and tables in the world, was worth that. But I couldn't get the words out, the whole business complicated by that image of him, naked and erect and hanging over her like an animal—not a human animal, just an animal—an image that bludgeoned my sleep and festered through the waking hours. What right did he have? What right?

“She'll come back.”

“How can you be so sure?”

He sighed, broke his own rule and gazed up at the pipes a moment before shooting me a quick sharp look of impatience. “Women have the same physiological needs as men, and our figures will show that, as you're well aware. Especially with regard to the physiology of arousal and orgasm, the correspondence of organs and glands—the fact is, females need and respond to sex as much as males. Every bit as much. And it's a crime to deny them or put them on some Victorian pedestal as blushing virginal brides who tolerate sex once a month in the dark in order to reproduce the species—how many interviews have you conducted, John?”

“I don't know. Seventeen or eighteen hundred, I suppose.”

Now it was the old look, the grappling eyes, the triumphant set of the mouth: “Exactly.”

I felt myself calming, the engine slowing, and it wasn't hypnotism—there were no tricks or carnival acts necessary, nor psychoanalysis either. It was just Prok, Prok himself, Prok in the flesh. My wife had left me, Elster was a cancer, I'd toppled my God, if only for a moment, and here I was sinking into the cushion as if I didn't have a concern in the world.

“By the same token, and again you already know this, intuitively if not empirically,” he said, “there's another side to the female altogether, and this is where things become problematic for so many males—for you, John. For you.” Prok was settling into his lecture mode now, getting into the rhythm of it, relishing it, and I let myself go. There was nothing
I could do, nothing I could say. I embraced the chair. I listened. I suppose I should have taken notes.

“Women are not the initiators of sexual activity, as you know, but rather the reactors. Once they are embraced, arousal begins. But men, on the other hand—the average man from puberty to senescence, or the climacteric, in any case—are aroused any number of times throughout each and every day of their lives. Mentally aroused. Aroused by the sight of the female form, by paintings, music, art, by the fantasies they indulge, while women, the females, are all too rarely aroused by anything other than contact itself and in most cases regard the male genitalia as ugly and loathsome. Given that, it should come as no surprise that they've been forced into their roles as inhibitors, as prudes, as the watchdogs of what society calls morality.” He paused, let his eyes bore into me. “Do you see? Do you see what I'm saying?”

I didn't. But then this wasn't a conversation, not anymore.

“John. I'm saying that you have to allow for your wife—if she remains sex shy, then that is certainly a part of her nature, but more, her acculturation, and that can be changed only if she'll open herself up to what we're trying to accomplish here. Like Violet Corcoran, for instance. Or Hilda, Vivian Brundage or that young woman friend of Corcoran's—Betty, isn't it? These things aren't written in stone. Think of
physiological
response, John.
Physiological.
”

I was reminded of what Prok had said privately to a woman after a lecture one night in which the term “nymphomania” had come up.
A nymphomaniac,
he explained,
is someone who has more sex than you do. Period.

I took a moment and then I told him that he was right and that I would consider it, absolutely, because Iris needed more experience, more variety, more physicality. For a moment, I was back in that attic, the women's breasts shining with their sweat, the men hard and anxious, all my hopes and fears and inadequacies on display for everyone to see. “You're right,” I repeated, “you are.” But then my voice cracked and I very nearly broke down right there in front of him. “Prok,” I said, miserable, absolutely miserable, as miserable as I've ever been in my life, “Prok, I
love
her.”

The word seemed to bounce off him like a pinball hitting a baffle,
love,
such an unlikely term to incorporate in the scientific lexicon, but give him credit: he bowed to it. “Yes,” he said dryly, “and I love Mac. And my children. And you too, John.”

He pushed himself back in his chair then and let his gaze wander, the pipes rattling overhead, the sun gracing the windows a moment and then vanishing. The interview was over. But there was something more; I could read it in his expression. He refocused his eyes on me and let just the hint of self-satisfaction creep over his features. “You know, I've arranged two lectures in Michigan City,” he said, “on very short notice. We'll be taking some histories in conjunction, of course, two nights at the hotel there.” He paused, moved the pen from one corner of his desk to the other. “I thought you might like to come along.”

The drive up to Michigan City was uneventful, no different from a thousand other drives Prok and I had taken together, he at the wheel and I in the seat beside him, staring through the windshield and calling out directions because he tended to get involved in what he was saying and cruise right on by the crucial left-hand turn or miss the junction we were looking for and have to swing a U-turn a hundred yards up—at the risk of both our lives. Prok was getting older, less attentive to detail, and his driving had suffered. Of course, he would never consider asking me to get behind the wheel, not unless he'd been knocked unconscious. What else? It was spring again, another spring. The sun was unimpeded and the shoots of green things were springing up everywhere. We kept the windows down to feed on the glory of it.

We didn't talk about Iris, but she was there with us the whole way, one more hurdle for Prok, the beginning and end of everything for me. I'd called, again and again, but she wasn't coming to the phone and her mother's voice could have crushed the hulls of icebreakers. I didn't know what she expected from me. Didn't know if this was the end or not, if we would divorce and my son would be taken from me—and my job. Because Prok wouldn't have a divorced man on his staff—or even a remarried one. That was the rule, simple and final.

What we did talk about was Elster. “I don't mean to say things behind anybody's back,” I said, “but I think, well, I think it's a mistake to hire the man. In any capacity. But especially not as our librarian, where he has access to our—well, you know what I mean.”

Prok didn't know, and he interrogated me nearly the whole way there, his eyes gone cold and hard. He made me go over the details six times—“Fred Skittering? The reporter? And Elster put him on to you? How long ago was this?”—and he was still questioning me, still brooding over this treachery in his midst, when he pulled up to Iris's girlhood home. It was a modest house on a street of modest houses, two stories, with rust streaks under the gutters and a battered Pontiac in the driveway. “This is it, then?” he asked, waiting for a car to pass before he backed in at the curb.

“Yes,” I said, my stomach sinking, “the white house, right here, number fourteen.”

He shut off the car and turned to face me. “What was the name of Iris's mother again?”

“Deirdre. They're Irish.”

“Irish. Yes. Right. And the father?”

I glanced at my watch. “Frank,” I said. “But he'll be at work still.”

And then we were at the door, Prok running a hand through his hair while I rang the bell and the dog—a sheltie named Bug, which Iris's father delighted in calling Bugger every chance he got—began barking at the rear of the house. There was the sound of footsteps, the scrabbling of the dog's nails on the bare floor, more barking, and I tried to compose myself even as Iris's mother pulled back the door and gave me a look of iron while the dog whined and leapt at my legs. “Um, well, hello,” I said, and I tried out her name, “Deirdre. Oh, yes, and this is Dr. Kinsey, my, well, my boss—”

Everything changed in that instant. Iris's mother let her face bloom with a Kilkenny smile and the door swung wide. “Oh, yes, of course,” she said, “I would have recognized you anywhere, and please, please come in.”

I stepped through the door and froze:
Iris. Where was Iris? And my
son?
I thought I heard the piping of a child's voice from upstairs, from Iris's old room, and I had to force myself to put one foot in front of the other. The dog whined and flapped about the floor and I stooped mechanically to stroke it.

I hadn't been to the house in six months or more—we visited when we could, both Iris's parents and my mother, but my work didn't allow much time off, of course, as I think I've made clear here. At any rate, the place didn't seem to have changed much, the same coats on the coat tree, the same umbrellas in the umbrella stand, even a pair of galoshes that looked vaguely familiar set aside in the corner. I noticed all these things with a kind of heightened perception—the dog looked shabbier, Iris's mother older, the carpet was worn in the living room—because I was snarled up inside, twisted like wire. All I could think of was Iris. Would she talk to me? Would she see me even?

“Here, please, have a seat,” my mother-in-law was saying, “but you must be exhausted—did you drive all the way up today?”

“Yes,” Prok said, easing himself down on the sofa, “but John and I are used to it, isn't that right, John?”

I stood there hovering over him, incapable of decision—I didn't even know if I could sit, if the muscles would respond or the factory of my brain issue the command. “Yes,” I murmured.

Iris's mother was transformed, as inflated as I'd ever seen her—there was a celebrity in the house, the great man himself, parked on the sofa in her living room at 14 Albion Drive. “Tea,” she said, extending her smile even to me, “would you like some tea? And sweet buns, I have sweet buns—”

Prok, at his most courtly, in the voice that had mesmerized how many thousands I couldn't even begin to guess, said that that would be very nice indeed, a real treat, and my mother-in-law practically fell at his feet. I wondered, even in my distracted state, how long it would take before she volunteered to give up her history.

I was on the verge of breaking in, of demanding to know where my wife and son were and why she hadn't gone to get them, first thing, when suddenly the sound of the clarinet came drifting down from
above, something hesitant, broken, infinitely sad, as if all the sorrows of humankind had been distilled to the single failing breath of that melody. “That's Wagner,” Prok said. “The ‘Liebestod,' isn't it? From
Tristan and Isolde
?”

“Honestly, I don't know,” Iris's mother said, throwing up her hands. “With Iris, it could be anything—”

And then I was gone, through the door and up the steps two at a time, and I didn't care about Prok or the project or anything on this earth but her, Iris, my wife, the woman I loved and needed and wanted. I flung open the door and there was my son, sprawled out asleep in the middle of the bed as if he'd dropped down from the sky, and Iris at the window with her clarinet. She was wearing a pair of child's slippers, fluffy and oversized, and a blouse that fed off the color of her eyes. She played two notes more,
sostenuto e diminuendo,
and then, very slowly, with infinite care, she laid the instrument aside and held out her arms. And can I tell you this?—I never let go of her, never once, never again.

Bloomington, Indiana

August 27, 1956

I'd like to be able to report that everything continued on an even keel, that Iris and I were able to make the necessary adjustments and live in harmony ever after—or until the present, at any rate—and that the project came to fruition and Prok received the recognition he deserved as one of the great original geniuses of the twentieth century, but in life, as distinct from fiction, things don't always tie up so neatly. Iris never attended a musicale again, and she never again mounted the stairs to the attic at the house on First Street. She was present for the social occasions, the picnics, the occasional staff dinners at Prok's, the holiday celebrations, but she saw them as an obligation, nothing more, and gradually she began to withhold her friendship from Mac and Violet Corcoran and Hilda Rutledge and take up with a new circle of people she'd known from her days at school, even talking about going back to teaching once John Jr. matriculates from the lower grades. In the interval, I've continued with the business of the Institute, with the interviews and the travels and the filming, sometimes as an observer, sometimes a participant. Iris and I don't discuss it. I try to leave my work at the office, as they say. And Elster—Prok had him transferred back to the biology library the day we returned from Michigan City and he's been persona non grata in Wylie Hall ever since. Good riddance, is what I say.

As for Prok, his life was too short. Dead at sixty-two, buried this morning. He wanted to record one hundred thousand histories—that
was his grand ambition, the definitive sample—but at last count we had something less than twenty percent of that figure. And he projected another several volumes in the series to take advantage of all that raw data, a volume on sex offenders to follow the female, but everything is in flux now. His last words to me, as they bundled him off to the hospital, were: “Don't do anything till I get back.” I don't know. I'm too distraught right now to see things clearly, but if there was a catalyst in all this—in his exhaustion and the wear and tear on his heart that ultimately killed him—it was the female volume. Less than three years after its publication, he was dead.