T. Boyle: The Inner Circle

I was turning it over in my mind, wondering what sort of things Dr. Kinsey would want to know and whether I could dare equivocate — or lie, outright lie — when the outside door swung open and Laura emerged. She was wearing a dark, belted coat, white socks and saddle shoes, her lower legs bare against the cold, and she looked small and fragile in the lee of the building and the big weighted slab of the door. A gust came up and both her hands went automatically to her hat, and if she hadn’t glanced up in that instant and seen me there, I don’t know if I wouldn’t have just turned heel and vanished. But she did glance up. And she gave me a curious look, as if she couldn’t quite place me — or was somehow seeing me out of context. I had no choice but to continue along the path and up the stone steps, and now she gave me a rueful smile. “Your turn, huh?” she said.

She was poised on the landing, holding the door for me. “What did he ask?” I puffed, taking the steps two at a time. The corridor behind her was deserted. I saw the dull gleam of linoleum tile, the lights set at intervals, the dark stairwell opening like a mouth at the far end.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, her breath streaming in the cold, “everything.”

“Did he ask about, about us?”

“Uh-uh. Frankly, I don’t think he cares one way or the other. He’s — he really believes in what he’s doing, and he wants people to … open up, I guess you’d say. It’s all about the research, about getting at the real truth of things, and the way he does it — I mean, it’s not what you’d think. It’s not embarrassing, not at all. You’ll see. He just puts you at ease.”

I didn’t know what to say to this. She was right there beside me, so close I could smell the faint aroma of her mint toothpaste, which was all mixed up with her perfume and the scent of the shampoo she’d used on her hair. Her face was open and her lips parted, but her eyes looked beyond me, as if she expected Jim Willard — or Prok himself — to issue from the line of trees across the street. She simply stared, as if she’d just woken up — or been hypnotized by one of the charlatans at the county fair. The wind was at the back of my neck and I could feel the heated air of the building like the breath of some beast on my face. “He doesn’t hypnotize you, does he?”

Her back was propped against the door and she gave me a long, slow look of appraisal. “No, John,” she said, patronizing me now, “no, he doesn’t hypnotize you. But listen”—she reached up to tuck one last flowing curl under her hat—“I never really got to thank you for what you’ve done — a lot of the boys I know wouldn’t have been caught dead in that course — and it was really white of you. So, thanks. Really.”

“Sure,” I mumbled, “my pleasure,” and then she let the door go and I caught it with one hand and slipped into the building as she retreated down the steps.

Dr. Kinsey’s office was at the end of the corridor on the second floor. My appointment was the last of the day, and the halls that had been thrumming with students an hour ago were deserted now. The staff had gone home too, all the offices and classrooms darkened up and down the length of the building — even the janitor was apparently busy elsewhere. I paused at the water fountain — my throat had gone dry — and then continued down the hallway, my footsteps echoing like gunshots in the empty innards of the building. There was a small anteroom, windowless and drab, and beyond it, the softly lit confines of the office itself. The door stood open and I could see two crammed metal bookcases reaching all the way to the ceiling, and then the blond flash of what I took to be Kinsey’s head bent over a desk in a nimbus of yellow light. I hesitated a moment, then rapped my knuckles on the doorframe.

He swung his head out away from the desk so he could get a clear view of the doorway, then immediately sprang to his feet. “Milk?” he called, rushing to me with his hand extended and a look of transport on his face, as if I were the single person in all the world he was most happy to see. “John Milk?”

I took his hand and nodded, fumbling through the usual gestures of greeting. “It’s a pleasure,” I might have said, but so softly I doubt if he would have heard me.

“Good of you to come,” he pronounced, still squeezing my hand. We stood there in the doorway a moment, and I was conscious of his height — he was six feet tall at least — and of his sheer physical presence, thinking he would have made a match for Jim Willard if he were so inclined. “But please come in,” he said, releasing my hand and guiding me into the office, where he indicated the chair stationed on the near side of his desk. “Milk,” he was saying, as I settled in the chair and he in turn eased himself back behind the desk, “is that of German derivation — originally, that is?”

“Yes, we were Milch in the old country, but my grandfather changed it.”

“Too overtly Teutonic, eh? Of course there’s nothing hardier than good Anglo-German stock — except maybe the Scots. We’re Scots in my family, you know, though I suppose you surmised that from the surname … Care for a cigarette?”

On the desk before me, spread out like an offering, were fresh packs of cigarettes in four different brands, as well as an ashtray and lighter. I didn’t know then how much Prok detested smoking — he thought it should be banned in all public places, and no doubt in most private ones as well — nor that he provided the cigarettes despite himself, in addition to soft drinks, coffee, tea and, in the appropriate venues, alcohol, all in an effort to make the interviewing process more congenial. What he wanted above all else was to gain the sort of intimacy that yields up confidences, and he had a true genius for it — for putting people at ease and bringing them out. Absent it, the project would never have gotten off the ground.

At any rate, I selected the brand I liked best but couldn’t really afford, lit up and took a deep, palliative pull and let the gentle pulse of the nicotine calm me. All the while Prok was beaming at me, the kindliest, friendliest man in the world, and you would have thought from his expression that he’d invented cigarettes himself and owned a controlling interest in the Pall Mall company. “I hope you’ve enjoyed the marriage course,” he was saying, “and that any misconceptions you and your fiancée may have had — charming girl, by the way, lovely, very lovely — have been cleared up …”

I looked away from him — a mistake, as it was one of his cardinal rules to engage the subject at all times in direct eye contact, as the first indicator of veracity. I said something noncommittal. Or rather mumbled something both noncommittal and non-audible.

“Don’t be afraid, Milk, there’s no one here going to bite you — or sit in judgment either, and I’m well aware that any number of ingenious undergraduates are forming, let us say, convenient attachments in order to satisfy Dean Hoenig and the other self-appointed moral guardians of the campus and community.”

I tapped my cigarette in the ashtray, studying the perfect cylinder of pale ash that dropped from it, then looked him in the eye. I felt my face flush in an instant, the old exposure. “I’m sorry, sir,” I said.

He waved an impatient hand. “Nothing to be sorry for, Milk, nothing at all. I’m interested in getting information out to people who need it, and if it were up to me and me alone, there would be no prohibitions of any kind on the course. But tell me about yourself — you’re how old?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Birth date?”

“October second, 1918.”

“Are you a native of Indiana, born here, that is?”