T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

One night I was at the library, reshelving books in the second-floor stacks, when I glanced up at the aisle directly across from me and there was Prok — Dr. Kinsey — down on one knee, scanning the titles on the bottom shelf. He was a tumult of motion, grasping the spine of one book or another and at the same time shoving it back in place, all the while scooting back and forth on the fulcrum of his knee. It was strange to see him there — or not strange so much as unexpected — and I froze up for a moment. I didn’t know what to do — should I say hello, ignore him, grab an armload of books and duck round the corner? Even if I did say hello, would he remember me? He had hundreds of students, and though he’d conducted private interviews — like mine — with all of them, or practically all of them, how could he be expected to recall any one individual? I watched him out of the corner of my eye. He seemed to be muttering to himself — was it a call number he was repeating? — and then he found what he was looking for, slipped it from the shelf and sprang to his feet, all in one motion. That was when he brought his eyes forward and saw me there.

It took a moment. I watched his neutral expression broaden into recognition, and then he came down the aisle and extended his hand. “Milk,” he said, “well, hello. Good to see you.”

“Hello, sir. I’m — I didn’t think you’d remember me, what with all your, well, students—”

“Don’t be foolish. Of course I remember you. John Milk, out of Michigan City, born October two, nineteen eighteen.” He gave me a smile, one of his patented ones, pulling his lip back from his upper teeth and letting the two vertical laugh lines tug at his jowls so that his whole face opened up in a kind of riotous glee. “Five foot ten, one hundred eighty pounds. But you haven’t lost any weight, have you?”

“Hardly,” I said, my smile a weak imitation of his, and I was thinking of those other measurements, the ones I’d inscribed on a postcard and sent him in the mail. And beyond that, my secrets, and my shame, and all it implied. “My mother’s cooking, you know. Over the holidays.”

“Yes,” he said, “yes, yes, of course. Nothing like a mother’s cooking, eh?” He was still smiling, smiling even wider now, if that was possible. “Or a mother’s love, for that matter.”

I had to agree. I nodded my head in affirmation, and then the moment detached itself and hung there, lit from above with the faint gilding of the electric lights. I became aware of the muted stirring of library patrons among the stacks, a book dropped somewhere, a whisper.

“You’re working here, I presume?”

I told him I was, though they’d cut my hours recently and I could barely make ends meet. “Reshelving, mostly. Once we close the doors, I sweep up, empty the wastebaskets, make sure everything’s in order.”

He was standing there watching me, rocking up off the balls of his feet and back again. I couldn’t help glancing at the title of the book: Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, by Hans Licht. “Late nights, eh? Isn’t that a bit tough on your studies?”

I shrugged. “We all do the best we can.”

He was silent a moment, as if he were deciding something, his eyes all the while fixed on mine. “Do you know, Milk — John,” he said softly, almost musingly, “I have a garden out at my place. Mrs. Kinsey and I do. Clara, that is. In season, it’s the pride of Bloomington, a regular botanical garden on two and a half fertile acres — I grow daylilies, irises, we’re planning a lily pond. You should see it, you really should.”

I wasn’t following him. I’d been keeping late hours and I was pretty well exhausted. For lack of a better option, I gave him my fawning student look.

“What I mean is, I’ve been thinking for some time of hiring somebody to help me with it — of course, it’s nothing but husks and frozen earth at this juncture — but in the spring, well, that’s when we’ll really bring it to life. And until then — and beyond that, in addition, as well — we’re going to need some help in the biology library. What do you say?”

A week later I was working in Biology Hall, with expanded hours and no late nights. The biology collection was considerably smaller than that of the main library and the patronage proportionately reduced in size, so that I found I had more time to myself at work, time I could apply fruitfully to my own studies (and to be honest, to daydreaming — I spent a disproportionate amount of time that semester staring out into the intermediate distance, as if all the answers I needed in life were written there in a very cramped and faint script). I didn’t see much of Prok — he kept to himself for the most part, in his office on the second floor — and as the sex survey was then in its incipient stages, he didn’t yet need anyone to help him with the interviewing or tabulating of results. He was, as you no doubt know, one of the world’s leading authorities on Cynipids — gall wasps — and he was still at that time busy collecting galls from oak trees all over the country, employing his assistants (three undergraduate women) exclusively in helping to record his measurements of individual wasps and mount them in the Schmitt boxes reserved for them. Taxonomy — that was his forte, both as an entomologist and a compiler of human sexual practices.

At any rate, the job was something of a plum for me, and for the first week or two I snapped out of the funk that seemed to have descended on me, exhilarated by the free nights and the extra change in my pocket. I went bowling with Paul and his girlfriend Betsy, and then insisted on treating them to cheeseburgers and I don’t know how many pitchers of beer after Paul took me aside and told me they wanted me to be the first to know they were engaged to be married. The jukebox played “Oh, Johnny” over and over, Betsy kept saying, “You’re next, John-Johnny-John, you’re next,” and I barely flinched when Laura Feeney and Jim Willard sauntered in and took a booth in the back. We stayed up late that night, Paul and I, pouring out water glasses of bourbon smuggled upstairs right under Mrs. Lorber’s nose, and though I overslept the next morning, I woke feeling glad for Paul and hopeful for myself.

Unfortunately, the mood didn’t last. It struck me that my room-mate — a man of my own age and inclinations — was going to be married and that he already had a job lined up with his father’s feed-distribution company, while I had to look at myself in the mirror every morning and admit I had no idea what was to become of me. I was at loose ends, as most seniors are, I suppose, worrying over my course work and facing June graduation without a single notion of what I was going to do in life — or even what I was going to do for gainful employment. All I knew was that I’d rather be sent to Devil’s Island as underassistant to the assistant chef in the soup kitchen than go back to Michigan City and another summer with my mother. And as if that weren’t enough, looming over it all was the prospect of war in Europe and talk of conscription.

So I was feeling blue, the weather going from bad to worse, Paul always off with Betsy somewhere till I’d begun to forget what he looked like, and the books on the library cart growing progressively heavier (I felt like a bibliographic Sisyphus, the task unending, each shelved volume replaced by another and yet another). And then two things happened. The first had to do with Iris, as you might have guessed. Though she was an English major, like me, she showed up at the biology library one afternoon in desperate need of information on the life cycle of the Plasmodium parasite for a required introductory course in biology she was taking from Professor Kinsey himself. “We have to cite at least three scientific journals,” she told me, still breathless from her dash across campus in the face of a steady wind, “and I have to write it all up by tomorrow, for class.”