T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

I told him I didn’t know.

“That’s all right. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the research, and I wonder if any of these people”—and he let his hand rise and fall in a characteristic sweep, as if all the politicians, the forces of the Army and Navy, as well as Hitler and his Wehrmacht were no more than errant students who’d missed a key question on a biology exam—“if any of them have even the slightest idea of what it takes to train an interviewer? No,” he snapped, answering his own question, “I doubt if they do. But you know, John, don’t you?”

I nodded. We’d sat together through hundreds of hours of training, Prok quizzing me unceasingly, jumping up impatiently to snatch the position sheet out of my hand and make his own corrections, looking over my shoulder for hours at a time, putting me through mock interviews — I must have taken his history fifty times — and sitting perched behind me like a wooden Indian as I conducted my first live interviews. As I’ve said, he was a perfectionist, and he knew no other way to do anything but the Kinsey way, and whether that can be considered a flaw or not, I can’t really say. His method worked, no question about it, and worked in an arena where so many before him — Krafft-Ebing, Hamilton, Moll, Freud, Havelock Ellis — had fallen short. But he had a point: the training was not to be undertaken lightly. And certainly you had to have a certain type of personality — the personality of a recruit, I suppose, or maybe even a disciple — to undergo it in the first place.

He’d come out from behind the desk now and he was striding back and forth across the confined space of the office, hands pinned behind his back. “No,” he said finally, drawing himself up before me so that our faces were no more than inches apart, “no, I simply will not allow it.”

And so, Prok began a vigorous campaign to keep me at his side throughout the war, though it may be interesting to note that he never really consulted me on the matter, but operated on the assumption that I was one hundred percent in accord with him, that sex research — the project and the advancement of human knowledge — was more vital to the welfare of the country than prosecuting a war on the European Front or in the Pacific. He never pressured me. Never knew, in fact, that I spent long hours propped on the edge of the bed in my room with Ezra and Dick Martone and some of the others, debating the merits of joining up, of doing my part, of sacrificing everything for the cause of freedom. In the end, I acquiesced. That is, I did nothing, and let events take their course.

In the meanwhile, even as Prok was filing an appeal and soliciting letters on my behalf from President Wells, Robert M. Yerkes of the National Research Council and other purveyors of influence and power, he was at the same time very seriously contemplating the hire of another researcher to increase our strength. That researcher, as most people will know, was Purvis Corcoran. Corcoran, as I’ve said, was a smoothly handsome and outgoing young psychologist and sexual wunderkind, who had taken his degree some ten years earlier at IU, completed his Master’s in Chicago and was working incrementally toward his Ph.D. He was married — his wife’s name was Violet — and the father of two small children, both girls. Prok first met him after lecturing to a group of social workers (“the most prudish and the most restricted in their understanding of sex you could find”) in South Bend, while I was away on my honeymoon. Corcoran volunteered to give his history — which was extensive to say the least, both in heterosexual and H-experience — and Prok was impressed by him. So impressed, in fact, that he invited him to Bloomington, to visit the Institute (as we were now officially calling our cramped quarters) and interview for a position with us.

When I mentioned it to Iris — that Prok, in anticipation of new grants both from the NRC and the Rockefeller Foundation, was bringing Corcoran to town for a job interview — she was suspicious of the whole thing. “Can’t you see he’s trying to replace you,” she said. “He’s letting you go, leaving us high and dry, and I’ll be here all alone and you’ll be God knows where — in some desert in Africa fighting Rommel or whoever he is, some goose-stepping Prussian with a gun and bayonet.”

We were in the Nash, parked in our favorite spot overlooking the black serene waters of a quarry and its ghostly monuments of rock, having a post-coital smoke. “You’re wrong,” I told her. “It has nothing to do with the draft or the war or anything else — we need more hands, that’s all.”

She was silent a moment. “You know,” she said, “he’s been making overtures—”

“Who?”

“Your boss.”

“Prok?”

It was very dark in the car, but I could just make out the nod of her head. We were naked and the smell of her sex was all over me. I put an arm round her, drew her to me and began fondling her breasts, but she pushed away. “Yes, Prok, ” she hissed. “He’s — when I was waiting for you the other day? He told me he was going to do everything he could to get you off, letters to the draft board back home, even a personal appeal if it comes to that — you know, because the research is vital to the national security and all the rest, and I said I was grateful. But it was more than that. I guess I just about got down and kissed his feet, because you know how strongly I feel about this — you are not going to war, not while I’m alive, John Milk — and he gave me a look, and I know you think he’s God Himself come down from on high with all the angels singing in rapture, but it was the coldest look anybody’s ever given me in my life. And you know what he said then, as if it were some kind of bargain we were entering into? He said, ‘We don’t have your history yet, Iris, do we?’”

“Yes,” I said, “and so what?”

“So what? Aren’t you listening to me?”

“Look, Iris,” I said, and all the wind went out of me, “I’ve told you myself, a thousand times, you have to give up your history because of how bad it’ll look if you don’t — how bad it already looks.”

“He’s a blackmailer.”

“A blackmailer? Have you gone completely nuts?”

“Don’t give me that, don’t pretend you’re blind.” I reached out a hand to her again, but she shifted away until her shoulders were pressed up against the window and the light of her cigarette revealed her face there, in shadow. “I give him my secrets, I tell him what I’ve never told anybody, not even you, and he’ll get you off.” A beat, time enough for the bitterness to saturate her voice. “And if I don’t — well, goodbye, Johnny, huh?”

A week later, Corcoran arrived. He’d come alone, without his wife, arriving early one Saturday when I was off someplace with Iris — at Prok’s behest. Prok was interested in my impression of Corcoran, of course, but on that first day he wanted him to himself, and I didn’t know what, if anything, happened between them, but Prok, I’m sure, was his usual courtly self and wound up giving Corcoran the VIP tour of the facilities, ending up with an intimate, Mac-prepared dinner at the faerie cottage on First Street. The following evening, on Sunday, Iris and I were invited to Prok’s for one of his weekly “musicales” as he called them, in order to socialize with a select group of his friends and colleagues, listen to a recorded program Prok had selected for the occasion, and, expressly, to meet Corcoran.

We were a few minutes late, nothing to worry over, though Prok had asked me to come early so as to have some time with Corcoran before the others arrived. Iris was the one at fault here. She seemed to take forever with her dress and makeup — maddeningly so — and I must have had the RA ring for her five times before she finally came down the stairs and through the door at which I’d been staring so hard and for so long I actually began to believe I could force it open by will alone. I was impatient, maybe even a bit angry, though I have to admit it was worth the wait: Iris was stunning that night, all in black, with a single strand of heirloom pearls her mother had given her and an especially vivid shade of lipstick that lent her all the color she needed. I don’t know what it was — the pearls, maybe — but she looked transformed, as if she’d suddenly gained five years and the sophistication of a socialite, and forgive me if I couldn’t help thinking of Mrs. Foshay and her savoir faire.