T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

Again, I want to be frank here — if Prok taught me anything, he taught me that. Euphemism is the resort of the inauthentic, the timid, the sex shy. I don’t deal in euphemism and I believe in telling it like it is. Or as it is. To put it simply: I became intoxicated with Mac. She was my first, the woman who relieved me of my virginity, or to put it in the crudest possible terms, just to get it out, to express it in the way our lower-level subjects would in countless interviews — in the vernacular that so often gets to the truth so much more powerfully than the loftiest circumlocution — she was my first lay. There, I’ve said it. And if Iris should ever listen to this once events have played themselves out — or transcribe it for a book, and that’s what it should be: a book — I have nothing to hide. She knows my sex history. She’s known it from the beginning, just as I’ve known hers.

But on that June day in the garden with the flowers in riot and the air so soft and sustaining it was like a scented bath, with the faerie house looming behind us and the dense drugged stillness of the morning insulating us from the world, Mac reached out her hand to me and I took it. She didn’t say a word. Just tugged gently till she conveyed what she wanted and I came up out of the dirt and let her lead me to a place at the back of the yard where the trees closed us in. There was a blanket there, spread out on the grass, and the sight of it made me surge with excitement: she’d planned out everything in advance, thought of me, wanted me, and here was the proof of it.

“Here,” she said, “sit,” and I obeyed her, my breath coming shallow and quick as she stood above me and unbuttoned her blouse, stepped out of her shorts, and with a slow graceful dip of her body, knelt down beside me and let her hands flow over my chest and abdomen, all the while exerting the gentlest soothing pressure on the strung-tight cords of my shoulders and upper arms, until finally I was resting on my elbows, then my back, and I could feel her fingers at the sash of the loincloth. The moment seemed to last forever, then the cloth slipped free and I felt her take hold of me in the one place that mattered. I knew what I was doing. I’d seen the slides, transcribed the histories. And I’d taken Professor Keating’s classics course and I knew Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus and I knew that Prok was the old king and I was the son and Mac the mother. My eyes were open. I was no victim. And this was sex — not love, but sex — and I came to it as if I’d been doing it all my life.

I graduated the following Saturday.

My mother — and more on her in a moment — drove all the way down from Michigan City with Tommy McAuliffe and my Aunt Marjorie in Tommy’s Dodge (we’d never had a car; it was a luxury, according to my mother, that we just couldn’t afford, hence I’d never learned to drive, not till Prok took it upon himself to teach me later that summer). This was in June of 1940, and events in Europe — the evacuation at Dunkirk and the imminent fall of France — overshadowed what must have been one of the glummest graduation celebrations in IU history. Everybody was unsettled, and not just the seniors going out into the world. Conscription was a virtual certainty now. All the undergraduate men would be affected.

But I was graduating — magna cum laude, no less — and my mother was going to make an occasion of it, Hitler or no Hitler. She’d booked rooms for herself and my aunt a full year in advance so as to outmaneuver the other parents, the ones who might not be quite so astute or forward-looking, and Tommy was going to sleep on a cot in the room I shared with Paul Sehorn, everything arranged on the up-and-up with Mrs. Lorber beforehand. Now, as to my mother. I feel I should give her her due here, though one could argue that her role is hardly central to Prok’s story, and yet I find it difficult to talk about her (she’s alive and well, as of this testimonial, still teaching elementary school in Michigan City and not yet sixty). Hers was — is — a character formed by circumstance, and by circumstance, I mean, specifically, having to raise a son on her own during the Depression, widowed at thirty and with her parents nearly a thousand miles away and unable (and unwilling) to help. She was frugal, precise, as efficient and predictable as a machine, and nothing anyone had ever done or could ever do was quite up to her standard. But that sounds harsh and I don’t mean to be harsh — she gave me clothing, food, opportunity, and if her emotional self went into retreat after my father disappeared, then certainly I’m not in any position to blame her. Nor is anyone else for that matter. She absorbed her sorrow, drank it up like a sponge, and then hardened with it till she calcified. But that’s not right either. She’s my mother and I love her unconditionally, in the way any son loves his mother. That goes without saying. Perhaps a physical description, perhaps I’d better stick to that.

My mother was taller than average — five foot seven — and she played intramural basketball when she was in high school, loved swimming and hiking and gossip. She was of Dutch descent — her maiden name was van der Post — and she had a natural wave to her hair, which was an amalgam of red and brown that in summer went to gold on the ends. She had a dramatic figure (I’m aware of this, in retrospect, not so much from observation — you just don’t think of your mother in that way — but because she was proud of it, forever dispensing the information that so-and-so had complimented her legs or made some reference to the way her sweaters fit her like a model’s and how she ought to have a screen test in Hollywood), but if she had any sexual outlets after my father’s death, she was careful to conceal them from me, and I wouldn’t mention the subject here at all but for what transpired between her and Prok. And for the sake of inclusivity, of course.

In any case, I was watching at the window that Friday afternoon when Tommy’s Dodge pulled up to the curb in a flash of reflected sunlight and my mother and Aunt Marjorie got out, looked round them as if they’d been delivered to the Amazon instead of Bloomington, Indiana, and adjusted their hats a moment before mounting the front steps of the rooming house. I could have met them at the door, but I held back a moment, and I don’t really know why. This was a time of celebration, of joy — for once I had the prospect of being spoiled a bit; there would be a nice dinner certainly, oysters, celery sticks with blue-cheese filling, steak served up medium rare on unchipped plates against a field of linen so white it could have been manufactured that very morning — but I just stood there at the window and never made a move to go downstairs till I heard her voice in the hallway. I don’t know what she was saying — greeting Mrs. Lorber no doubt, making some sort of animadversion on the state of the roads or Tommy’s driving, or the weather: Wasn’t it hot? — but the tone of it took hold of me and I went downstairs to her cold embrace, the dutiful son, John, her boy John.

The three women stood there in the vestibule, turned slightly toward the staircase, as if posing for a group portrait, which I suppose you might call Awaiting His Footsteps in a Time of Quiet Jubilation or Who Will Save the Day? “Mother,” I said, taking the steps one at a time, slowly, with dignity, no bounding or undergraduate hijinks here, “welcome. And Aunt Marjorie — thanks so much. And Mrs. Lorber — have you met Mrs. Lorber?”

My mother embraced me in her stiff, formal way, but her eyes told me she was proud of me and pleased too. She was about to say something to that effect — or at least I assumed she was — when Tommy came rocketing up the steps from the street and burst through the door to wrap me up in a bear hug. “Hello, professor!” he shouted, spinning me around like some oversized package he was about to raffle off. “You know it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing!” Everyone smiled as if he’d lost his mind. Which he had. A moment later, when we were alone up in the room, he showed me the agency of his temporary derangement: a flask of whiskey convenient to the inside pocket of a sports coat. He handed it to me and I automatically took a long burning swallow, and when I tried to pass it back to him, he wouldn’t take it. “Look at the initials on it,” he said, sinking into Paul’s bed as if his legs would no longer hold him.