T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

He was thinking. He kicked absently at the fringe of the comforter to better wrap it round his stocking feet. Two fingers licked over the shadow of his mustache. “So where do I go? Are you signing people up, or what?”

I was up off the bed and at the desk now, the blanket trailing across the floor, notebook in hand. “I’ve got his schedule right here,” I said.

Before the month was out, I was promoted from library underling to special assistant to Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, Professor of Zoology, and when I chanced to pass Elster in the hallway or on the steps of the biology building, he looked right through me as if I didn’t exist. I suppose there must have been some resentment among a faction of the biology majors as well — I had no training whatever in the field, aside from the introductory course I’d taken from Professor Eigenmann in my second year, and here I’d been rewarded with what might be considered one of the department’s plum positions — but what Prok was looking for above all was someone to whom he could relate, someone who could share in his enthusiasm for the inchoate project that would ultimately produce the two seminal works in the history of sex research. That person could have been anyone, regardless of discipline. That it was I, that I was elected to be the first of Prok’s inner circle, is something for which I will be forever grateful. And proud. To this day, I thank Laura Feeney for it.

At any rate, Prok installed me at a desk in the back corner of the office, where I was wedged between towering gunmetal-gray bookcases and enjoyed a forward view of the windows, which were piled high with galls wrapped in mesh sacks to contain any insects that might hatch from them, and these galls might have been collected in the Sierra Madre Oriental or Prescott, Arizona, or even in the Appenines or the rugged hills outside Hokkaido (interested parties were sending Prok samples from all over the world). There was an indefinable smell to the office, not unpleasant, exactly, but curious, arising from and connected only to that constructed and confined space on the second floor of Biology Hall. The wasps had something to do with it, of course, but a gall — this is the woody excrescence found on oaks and rose bushes, the growth of which is promoted by the larvae of the wasps living within it — really has a bit of a pleasant smell, a smell of bark and tannin, I suppose. (Break one from a tree next time you’re out in the woods and hold it to your nose a moment and you’ll see what I mean.) And the wasps themselves had no discernible odor, so far as I could detect. There were the lingering traces of the cigarette smoke Prok’s subjects exhaled in dense blue clouds as they gave up their histories, and the smell of Prok himself — bristling and spanked clean; he was a great one for the cold plunge each morning and almost obsessive about soap. Finally, into the mix went the perfume of the three female assistants, who shared the desk with me and rotated shifts round my schedule, plus the usual odors of a working office: ink, pencil shavings, the machine oil of the typewriters and (in this case) the chemical used to discourage a minute species of beetle that routinely wreaks havoc on entomological collections round the world.

On my first day, Prok helped me settle in and gave me my initial lessons in deciphering his secret code and translating the results to his files. He was very precise, a model of efficiency, and if his longhand was somewhat artistic, full of flourishes and great slashing loops, his printing, like mine, was an almost mechanical marshaling of block letters so uniform it might be mistaken at a glance for typescript. Looking over my shoulder, rocking from foot to foot, his energy barely contained, he would cluck over my writing, seize my hand impatiently or snatch the paper out of my hands and ball it up as a reject. This went on for hours that first day, he pacing back and forth from his own desk to mine, until finally, when he felt I’d got the hang of it, he eased one haunch down on the corner of my desk and said, “You know, Milk, you’re really doing quite well. And I have to confess that I’m pleased.”

I looked up at him and murmured something in reply, trying to indicate my pleasure for the praise but at the same time not sound too obsequious — Prok may have been firmly in charge, always in charge, a born leader, but he never demanded obsequiousness, no matter what you might have heard from other sources.

A moment slipped by. Then he said, “You’ve noticed the galls, of course.”

He moved easily up off the corner of the desk, went to the bookcase and lifted down a massive, bulbous, many-faceted thing that looked like the preserved head of some extinct beast, then laid it on the wooden surface before me. “Biggest known gall extant,” he said. “Twelve chambers, fifteen point nine ounces. Collected it myself in the Appalachians.”

We both admired it a moment, and then he encouraged me to run my hands over the craggy pocked surface of the thing—“Nothing to be afraid of, it’s simply the expression of a particularly vigorous colony of Cynipidae. But then you probably don’t know the first thing about Cynipids, do you? Unless, perhaps, Professor Eigenmann touched on them in the introductory course?” He was smiling now. Grinning, actually. This last was a joke, both on me — how could I have remembered? — and his colleague, who would have had to cover all of life on earth, from the paramecium to the horsetail to the giant sequoia and Homo sapiens, in the course of a semester and could hardly have devoted more than a single breath to the gall wasp, if that.

I grinned back at him, not quite knowing what was expected of me. “I know that they’re wasps,” I said. “And that they’re relatively small compared to the ones that would be flying around out there if it were summer now.”

“This is a parasitic insect, exquisitely adapted,” he said, looking down almost lovingly on the gall. “An all-but-sedentary species, flightless and living out its entire life cycle in a single gall on a single tree. Perhaps, once in a great while, the adults will emerge and crawl overland to another tree fifty or a hundred feet away, and that is the compass of their independence and the extent of their range, which makes them such an interesting study — you see, I have been able to trace the origins of a given species simply by following its geographic trail and noting variations in inherited characteristics.”

He began pacing again, stopping only to pluck off his glasses and gaze out the window a moment, before coming back to the desk to gently remove the exemplary gall and carefully replace it atop the bookcase. “But I’m afraid I have some bad news for you”—he was grinning; this was another joke in infancy—“they do tend to have a rather limited sex life. Unfortunately — for them, that is — males are very rare indeed in Cynipid society, most species reproducing through parthenogenesis. You do recall parthenogenesis from Professor Eigenmann’s course, don’t you?”

Another grin. His face dodged at mine and then away again. “Don’t think I bring up the subject of my Cynipids just to hear myself talk, and, yes, yes, I can see that questioning look in your eye, don’t try to hide it— What in God’s name is Kinsey up to now, you’re thinking, no? But there’s a method to my madness. What I’m trying to say is, your presence here is the hallmark of a new era: as of Monday, I will be reducing the hours of my three female assistants in your favor, Milk. I’ve gone as far as I can with the gall wasp, and now, with your help and the prospect of adequate funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Research Council, we are going to focus on one thing and one thing only, and I do think you know what that is …”