T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

I hesitated.

“Co-captain of the football team? He’s my steady. We’re planning to get engaged come Christmas.” She idly rotated the toe of one shoe and I couldn’t help stealing a glance at her ankles and legs. “Jim and I? We just didn’t seem to see eye to eye anymore, that’s all. But now”—and here she gave me the full power of her smile—“now I’m in love. Really. Truly. This is it. For life.” Another pause. Her face contracted round her mouth. Her eyes narrowed. “But what about you? If I hear right, you’re actually working with Dr. Kinsey now?”

I nodded, tried for a smile.

“Our old professor,” she said. “Dr. Sex.” She was still playing with the ring, but now she let it drop between her breasts again. “I hear that you’re conducting sex interviews yourself now, isn’t that true?”

I was an entirely different person from what I was a year ago, sexually experienced, out in the world, conversant with every sexual practice in the book, but still I couldn’t stop the blood rushing to my cheeks. “Only men,” I said. “Undergraduate men. Because, you see, well, they’re the least elaborate, if you know what I mean?”

“Oh?” The flirtation had come back into her voice. “But what about the girls? Aren’t they even less— elaborate ? All those vestal virgins in the dorms? Will you be interviewing them too, or will this be the kind of survey that just tells us what beasts men are — as if we didn’t already know, right, John?”

So I was blushing. I’d had intercourse with Mac, I’d missed Iris all summer with an ache so deep and inconsolable it was as if some essential part had been cut out of my body, and as I stood there willing the blood to drain from my cheeks, I wanted — why not say it? — to fuck Laura Feeney, no matter how many Willards she had. I saw her naked. Saw her without the dress and the little hat and the shoes, saw her breasts bared and her nipples erect with excitement. Laura Feeney, Laura Feeney: no other girl but you. That’s what I told her with my eyes and she saw it, saw the change in me, and actually took one step back — that is, shifted her weight and ever so minutely extended the distance between us. “No,” I said, and I was leering, I suppose, I admit it, “no, I’ll be doing women too. Prok promised me. But not here. Not on campus.”

A lift of the eyebrows. “Prok?”

“Professor Kinsey. That’s what we, what I—”

“I hear they’re going to fire him.”

That was the moment when all the birdsong and the trickle of the brook and the backfiring of an automobile in the faculty parking lot were suddenly cued out as if at the upstroke of a conductor’s baton. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t have been more surprised — or shocked, shocked is a better word — if she’d told me the Nazis were marching on Muncie. “They can’t do that,” I said finally, “he’s a starred scientist. He’s got tenure.”

“The marriage course is finished. You know what they’re calling it? They’re calling it a smut session. ‘That smut session,’ that’s what they say.” She was watching my face for a reaction. “President Wells himself is going to fire him — for, I don’t know, moral turpitude. That’s what I hear, anyway.”

The following morning, before the sun was up, Prok and I climbed into the Nash (I don’t recall the model or even the year of the thing, though he’d bought it used in 1928 and as far as I could see it seemed to be held together principally with C-clamps and rust), and headed off for West Lafayette, where he’d been invited to lecture to a combined group of sociology classes at Purdue University. Along the way, we were planning on stopping in Crawfordsville to pick up the remaining interviews we hadn’t managed to squeeze in when Prok had lectured at DePauw the previous week. And, of course, we were looking forward to taking the histories of the cohort that would attend the evening’s lecture, having budgeted the next three days to those. Lunch would be on four wheels, tepid water out of a jug I’d set on the floorboards behind the seat and a few handfuls of the trail mix (raisins, nuts, sunflower seeds and the odd nugget of chocolate) Prok consumed for lunch every day of his life, whether he was ensconced in the Astor Hotel on Times Square, wandering the withered foothills of the Sierra Madre in search of galls or sitting behind his desk in Biology Hall.

There was no radio in the car, but it didn’t really matter, as Prok provided all the entertainment himself, talking without pause from the minute I slid into the seat beside him in the uncertain light of dawn to the moment we disembarked in Crawfordsville, and then continuing without missing a beat till we arrived, in late afternoon, in West Lafayette. He talked about sex. About the project. About the need to collect more lower-level histories, more black histories, more histories from cabbies and colliers and steam-shovel operators — for balance, that is, because undergraduate interviews, as invaluable as they might be, only supplied a portion of the picture. If we passed a cow standing by the roadside, he went on about milk production and the leanness of the drought years. He talked of the topography, of riverine and lacustrine ecology, of mushroom hunting — had I ever tasted fresh-picked morels, lightly breaded and fried? I didn’t feel at a loss, not a bit. I let him talk. It was all part of my education.

We were coming up on the White River just outside Spencer when the sun rose behind us and spilled across the water, laminating everything in copper. A great blue heron stood out in relief against the mist rising off the surface, the cornfields caught fire, pear and apple trees emerged from the gloom, heavy with luminescent fruit. The surface of the road was wet with dew and as the sun touched it vapor rose there too until it fell away from the rush of the tires and fanned out over the rails of the bridge like a storm in the making. That was the moment that I chose to disburden myself of the unsettling information Laura Feeney had pressed on me and which I’d been turning over in my head now for the better part of the last twenty-four hours. “Prok,” I said, interrupting him in the middle of a story I’d heard twice before about a subject at the state work farm pulling out his penis in the middle of the interview and laying it on the table for measurement, “is it true that, well, I’ve heard rumors that pressure is being put on you again — more than you’ve revealed to me, that is — regarding the marriage course. They’re not going to, well, fire you, are they?”

A low spear of sun transfixed the interior of the car and illuminated Prok’s face from the lips down, as if he were wearing a beard of light. He gave me a dour look, head slightly canted, eyes showing white. “And where, exactly, did you get that notion?”

“I — well, Laura Feeney. Laura Feeney told me yesterday morning. You know, the girl I took the marriage course with?”

“With whom.”

“Yes, right — the girl with whom.”

The planks of the bridge rattled under the wheels and I saw the heron stiffen and protract its wings. Prok’s eyes were fixed on the road. He was silent a moment, then murmured, “I suppose Miss Feeney had an audience with President Wells himself? Or was it the Board of Trustees?”

“You’re making light of it, Prok, and that’s not right. I’m just, well, I’m concerned, that’s all, and there are rumors, you can’t deny that—”

He let out a sigh. Gave me a glance of commiseration, then turned back to the road. “I feel like Galileo,” he said, “if you want to know the truth. Hounded and oppressed and denied the basic right of scientific investigation, simply because some cleric or some dried-up old maid like Dean Hoenig or a has-been like Thurmond Rice feels threatened by the facts. They can’t face reality, and that’s the long and short of it.”