T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

Reproduced there, in filigree, were the initials JAM, for John Anthony Milk. “These are my initials,” I said stupidly.

Tommy regarded me out of eyes that ran down the depths of two long tunnels. He’d listened to my mother and aunt for hours on end and who could blame him for being on the far side of sober? “You bet,” he said.

There were five of us at dinner that night — my mother, my aunt, Tommy, Iris and myself. The restaurant was on the ground floor of a downtown hotel (not the one where my aunt and mother were staying, which was much more modest), and it had the reputation of being Bloomington’s best, at least in that sleepy, provincial era before the war. There were potted palms to shield the tables from one another, the maitre d’ was decked out in his best approximation of a tuxedo and had managed to paste his hair so tightly to his scalp it was like a black bathing cap with a part drawn down the side of it, and the menu ran from onion soup au gratin to grilled veal chops, whitefish and, of course, beef in all its incarnations. We all started out with shrimp cocktails, the shrimp perched prettily up off individual goblets of ice, and Tommy and I ordered beers while the ladies had a round of gin fizzes. I was feeling elated. Not only was I the center of attention — this was a fete for me, and because I was an adult now, a college graduate who’d achieved something in his own right, it had none of the constraint of the regimented birthday parties my mother used to arrange right up until the time I left high school for the university — but there was the flask to consider too. Its contents had gone a long way toward fueling my enthusiasm. Was I tipsy? I don’t know. But I saw things with a kind of blinding clarity, as if the world had suddenly been illuminated, as if I’d been living in two dimensions all my life, in a black-and-white picture, and now there were three and everything came in Technicolor. Iris, for instance.

She sat across the table from me, her shoulders bared in a strapless organdy gown — blue, a soft cool pastel blue, with a tiny matching hat pinned atop the sweeping shadow of her hair — and I saw that she’d plucked her eyebrows and redrawn them in two perfect black arches that led the way to her eyes. To this point we hadn’t said much to each other, she absorbed with my mother and aunt, Tommy and I reliving old times with a series of sniggers and arm cuffs and all the rest of the adolescent apparatus that still imprisoned us in boyhood though we would have been mortified if anyone had taken us for anything less than men. My mother said, “We have to intervene. There’s no choice to it now. God forbid my son should have to go — I don’t have to tell you he’s the only thing I have left in this world — but we can’t afford to divorce ourselves from the rest of humanity, we just can’t, not anymore.”

“That’s what they want you to believe,” Iris said, setting down her fork. She’d ordered the fish, and the white flakes of it gleamed on the tines against an amber puddle of sauce on her plate. “Why should we get drawn in? Forgive me — I know Holland’s been occupied — but it’s happened before, hasn’t it? War after war?”

Tommy was in the middle of a reminiscence about a prank he’d pulled off after a football game against our biggest rival, and he was mistaken in thinking that I’d been part of it, but he was so wrapped up in the memory that I didn’t want to disabuse him. But now he looked at his sister as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. “Oh, come on, sis, are you kidding me? France’ll be gone in a week, two at the most, and then Hitler can pound England till there’s nothing left but rubble, and you really think he’ll be satisfied with that? You think he’ll send a box of chocolates to Roosevelt and kiss and make up?”

“Exactly,” my mother said, and her chin was set. “It might take him years to get here — a decade even, who knows? But the world is smaller than you might think, Iris, and nobody is safe as long as that madman is in it. Did you see him in the newsreel last week? The goose-step. Aren’t you sick to death of the goose-step?”

“You don’t understand. It’s not our war,” Iris said. “It has nothing to do with us. Why should our boys die for some crumbling empire, for, for — John,” she said, turning to me, “what do you think?”

What I thought was that the celebration had gone sour. What I thought was that Iris looked like the prettiest thing I’d ever seen in my life, her eyes lit with indignation, her mouth puckered, the whitefish at her command. I tried on a grin. “I don’t know,” I murmured, “but personally? I don’t want to die.”

I was trying for levity, trying to take us all someplace else and expunge the strutting dictator from my celebratory dinner, but no one laughed. They just looked at me — even Aunt Marjorie, the mildest person I’ve ever known — as if I’d admitted to fraud or child rape or murder. War. We were in the grip of war, and there was no shaking it off.

It was Iris who came to my rescue. She’d taken a moment to slip the fork between her lips and masticate her fish and a sliver of green bean. “That’s my point,” she said, still chewing. “I don’t want to die either. Nobody does.”

My mother waved a hand in dismissal. “You’re too young yet. You don’t understand. There’s a larger picture here, and a larger issue—”

“Hey,” Tommy said, as if he were awakening from a nap, “anybody want another beer — or cocktail?”

We walked my mother and Aunt Marjorie back to their hotel, then went out for a nightcap, just the three of us, and finally took Iris back to the dorm just before curfew. A dozen couples were sitting around the lounge gazing into each other’s eyes. One of the girls had a conspicuous grass stain on her skirt — a stripe of vivid green against a beige that was almost white — and a guy I vaguely recognized was on the sofa with his girl, leaning in so close he looked as if he’d been glued to her. Her feet were on the floor, though — that was the rule — and so were his. The RA — the same blonde with the limp hair — had her head buried in a book.

Tommy had slowed down considerably as the evening wore on, and now, as we crossed the lounge to a semi-private spot against the far wall, behind the RA’s desk, he wasn’t so much walking as lurching. Iris’s arm was linked in mine. We stood there bunched against the wall a moment, while Tommy struggled to light a cigarette — he dropped the cigarette twice to the carpet, then dropped the matches. “Listen,” he said, straightening up and squinting round the room as if he’d never seen men and women necking before, “I’ve got to — it’s hot in here, isn’t it? Listen, I’ve got to go find a lavatory somewhere, all right?”

We watched him pull one foot and then the other up off the carpet, moving as if the solid floor had suddenly been converted to a trampoline, and then he was out the door, a smell of the scented night air trailing behind him. “Good old Tommy,” I said, for lack of anything better to say. “He must be a swell brother. You’re really lucky, you know that?”

Iris was drawn into herself, leaning back against the wall, her shoulders narrowed as if she were cold. She was watching me closely. Her arms — lovely arms, beautiful arms, the shapeliest, most perfectly formed arms I’d ever seen — were folded across her breasts, but she dropped them now to her sides, as if she were opening herself up to me. We had kissed here before, in this very spot, just out of sight of the RA, but the kisses had been constrained and proper, or as proper as they could be given the fact that we were pressed up against the wall in a place where the lamplight was dimmest and our tongues had just begun to discover a new function altogether. She didn’t believe in petting or premarital sex of any kind, raised a Catholic and haunted by it, diminished by what had been imposed on her and helpless to escape it. “You don’t mind, do you?” she’d whispered one night, her breath hot on my face, the taste of her on my lips. “No,” I’d said, “no, I don’t mind.”