T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

The dean — compact, busty, tough as a drill sergeant — was at a loss. She was always in command, overseeing her charges and ruling the dorms with an iron hand, but the situation was clearly out of her control. “Yes, this is my mother, Leonora. Mother, Professor Kinsey of the Zoology Department.”

Prok took the old lady’s hand and gave it a squeeze. There was a sheen of sweat on his chest, the long muscles and veins of his arms stood out in work-hardened definition, his lower abdomen bristled with pale blond hairs that were beginning to turn gray. He loomed over the old woman like a naked troglodyte, all flesh and presence, and yet what she heard coming from his mouth was the language of culture and civility. “I understand you’re from Cleveland?”

The old lady’s eyes had retreated into her head. She could barely croak out an answer in the affirmative.

“A jewel of a city,” Prok said, idly scratching at the axillary hair under his left arm. “First-rate museum. Absolutely. Not to mention your symphony orchestra — I do envy you that, Mrs. Hoenig. But, please, don’t let’s stand out here in the street, come and let me show you my pride and joy — you do like lilies, don’t you?”

The dean’s mother nodded in a numb way, then shot a helpless look at her daughter. Dean Hoenig was wearing a tight smile, and it wasn’t a welcoming smile, not at all. “I’m afraid we must be going, Professor Kinsey, though I do thank you for thinking of us—”

Prok cut her off. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, taking the old lady by the arm and steering her toward the gate, “it’s no imposition at all, my pleasure, in fact, and how often does your mother get to see a botanical wonder like this and at a time when it’s looking its very best too, I might add? Isn’t that right, Mrs. Hoenig?”

The dean’s mother didn’t have an opportunity to express an opinion one way or the other because that was when she caught sight of me standing there in front of the hydrangeas, all but naked myself. (Prok had lectured me on what he saw as my excessive modesty, and I’d gradually come round to his way of thinking — though my gardening attire wasn’t as minimal as his, I was at the time wearing nothing but a kind of dun loincloth he’d fashioned for me and a pair of earth-stained tennis shoes, sans socks.) She jerked back as if an electric current had just passed through her, but Prok held firm and guided her up the path to me, the dean following grudgingly behind. “Mrs. Hoenig,” he was saying, “I’d like to introduce my assistant, John Milk. Milk, Mrs. Hoenig. And I think you know the dean …”

Even as I took the old lady’s hand in my own and gave it a gentle shake, I could feel the dean’s eyes probing me. She was out of her element here, already defeated — she was going to see the garden with her mother and listen to Prok’s nonstop monologue and in the process learn something about the natural condition of the human animal whether she liked it or not — but she couldn’t help making a thrust at me. “Yes, certainly,” she said. “From the marriage course. But I guess you’re waiting till after graduation to tie the knot, is that it, John?”

I was learning. From Prok. From the master himself. And I didn’t flinch, didn’t drop my eyes or let my face give me away. “Not really,” I said. “Not actually, that is.”

The old lady let out an exclamation over the bearded irises, a kind of long, attenuated coo, and Prok encouraged her, delighted, but before the dean could come back at me, he looked over his shoulder and said, “He’s met someone else, isn’t that right, Milk?”

What could I do but nod?

After the women left, laden with cut flowers, Prok and I finished up the chore that had been interrupted out front and then put in a good solid hour of pick and shovel work in the backyard (Prok was then constructing the lily pond, and there was plenty of hard labor involved in digging out rocks and hauling and spreading the dirt we removed). Just after noon, Mac came out with sandwiches and soft drinks and the three of us sat on the ground contemplating the contours of the hole and chatting. She was barefooted and dressed in the khaki shorts and blouse she wore as a camp counselor and troop leader for the Girl Scouts. I noticed that she’d parted her hair on the left, swept it across her brow and pinned it in place with a barrette over her right ear. I don’t know what it was, but on this particular afternoon she was as gay and lighthearted as I’d ever seen her. She drew up her legs and rocked back against them as she ate and laughed and broke in on Prok’s running monologue to make one point or another, and though she was in her early forties then, she seemed insouciant and girlish, not at all what you would expect from a housewife and mother.

What did we talk about over lunch that afternoon? I don’t know. The pond, most likely, its depth and dimensions, the plantings Prok was planning for it, pickerelweed, irises of course, with their feet right in the water, and what did we think of Sarracenia purpurea for the transitional zone? I found myself stealing glimpses of Mac, of her legs, her ankles, the place where her tanned thighs vanished into the crotch of her shorts. That was what prompted it, I suppose, what made me dare something I would have been incapable of even a few weeks earlier, but as I say, my education was rapidly advancing. Here it is: when Mac gathered up the plates and Prok and I had watched her saunter across the lawn and disappear into the rear of the house, I turned to him. “Prok, I hope you won’t, well, take this in the wrong way,” I began, “but I’ve been thinking — with regard to my education and my needs too — about what we were talking of yesterday, my need for a female outlet, that is?”

He was in the act of pushing himself up, already anxious to get back to work. “Yes,” he said, “yes, what of it?”

“Well, you see, I was wondering how you would feel about, well, about Mac—?”

He looked puzzled. “Mac?”

“Yes,” I said, and I looked him right in the eye, apt pupil that I was, “Mac.”

It took him a moment. “You mean, you want to — with Mac ?”

You can say what you will about him — and everybody has an opinion, it seems — but Prok was no hypocrite. He preached sexual liberation for men and women both and he lived what he preached. A wan smile came to his lips and his eyes sparked with amusement, as if the joke were on him, then he laid down the shovel and told me he’d put the proposition to his wife that night, and that if she consented, I had his blessing.

As it turned out, Mac was as surprised as her husband, surprised but flattered too, and when I came to work in the garden the following weekend I found that she was alone in the house. I was out back, knee-deep in the crater Prok and I had excavated, wondering where he was — had he slept late? (an impossibility in itself; even when his heart was failing him in his late fifties he never slept more than four or five hours a night) — when I became aware of the susurrus of bare feet in the grass and looked up to see Mac standing there before me, a soft shy smile pressed to her lips. “Hello, John,” she said, her eyes shining, that cloying catch in her voice, “I just came out to tell you that Prok has taken the children to Lake Monroe for the day. To do a bit of hiking and collect galls. He said—”

It felt as if the chambers of my heart had been wedged shut. I was having trouble breathing. The sun was a palpable thing, a weight on my shoulders I could barely sustain. I thought I might lose consciousness, and maybe I did, for just an instant, swaying there on my feet while the earth spun out of control beneath me.

“He said you really didn’t have to work today. Not if you didn’t want to.”