T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

The owner was an assistant professor in the Chemistry Department who’d been offered a promotion at DePauw and was pulling up his roots. He met us at the door, along with his wife, exchanged a cryptic look with Prok, and invited us in. I saw a gleaming oak staircase and handsome wallpaper in a floral pattern; Iris saw a cramped vestibule and a house aching in its ribs, with rooms like freight cars and windows that opened up on the place next door like a claustrophobe’s nightmare. She wore her disapproving face (eyes sunk back in her head, brow locked in a rigid V, teeth and lips poised as if to spit out some bit of refuse) through the entire circuit of the place, including the lecture in the basement during which Prok and the chemistry professor took turns extolling the virtues of the furnace, and the culinary tête-à-tête with the lady of the house at the narrow table in the tunnel of the kitchen. Prok, the professor and I came back from a tour of the yard and potting shed to find her drinking tea and staring blankly at a platter of gingerbread cookies while the professor’s wife (late twenties, styleless, childless, her face a scroll of anxiety) nattered on about Iris’s condition and what a blessing children were. Or must be.

“Well,” Prok said, “what do you think? Milk? Iris? A tight little ship, wouldn’t you say? And convenient to campus, never underestimate the value of that.”

The chemistry professor, and I suppose I may as well give you an account of him, since I’ve managed to dredge up his wife from the memory banks (he was ten or twelve years older than his spouse, IV-F from the Army during the late war because of a congenital deformity — club foot — and so turgid in his speech he must have bored insensate a whole legion of aspiring chemists), averred that there was no finer house in the world and that he and his wife were deeply conflicted about having to give it up. “I’d even thought of commuting, but then, what with wear and tear on the car—”

“Not to mention the wear and tear on yourself,” the wife put in, glancing up from her teacup with a look of acuity.

“Yes. That’s right. And so we’ve had to put the place up for sale, but reluctantly. It’s just one of those things. Life moves on, right?”

Prok was stationed just behind the wife’s chair, shifting impatiently from foot to foot. His coat hung open, the gloves and soft hat stuffed bulkily in the pockets on either side so that he looked as if he were expanding out of his clothes. “And the price,” he said. “Is that firm?”

I was watching the professor’s face as it went through its permutations. “Within reason,” he supposed. “But there’s always wiggle-room”—that was the term he used, wiggle-room —“if the Milks are really interested and not just here to entertain us with their presence.” He gave a little laugh. “And we are entertained, aren’t we, Dora, to have such a delightful young couple here with us in this festive season and to think that we can be fortunate enough to give them a hand as they start out on the road ahead—?”

“Would you consider ten and a half then?” Prok said. “With fifteen percent down?”

That was when Iris spoke up. “I think I’d like to have a word with my husband,” she said, looking at each of us in succession before letting her eyes come to rest on mine. “If no one minds.”

Oh, no. No, no. No one minded.

In the vestibule, while the others sat round the table at the far end of the house, she spread her feet for balance and lashed into me. “You’re such a fool,” she snapped. “Such a sap. You’re soft, that’s all. Soft.”

“You don’t like it?”

“I despise it. And they’re manipulating you, can’t you see that? Prok, your precious Prok, and the professor and his wife, as if they can’t wait to unload this, this crackerbox. Do you really think I want to spend the rest of my life here? And you. Do you want to? This place stinks. It has no style, nil, zero, nothing. I’d rather stay where we are. Or what — move back to Michigan City, to my parents’ place, and live at the dairy. Milk cows. Anything but this.”

“Can you keep your voice down? What if they hear?”

“What if they do?”

There was a moment during which we both just stood there glaring at each other while the small sounds of the house — groans, creaks, the dwindling patter of rodent feet — ticked round us. “I don’t know,” I said. “I kind of like it.”

“Like it? You’re out of your mind. I won’t even talk to you. Forget it, hear me? Forget it.”

The result was that Prok had to tell the professor and his wife that we would get back to them — Iris wasn’t feeling well, a difficult pregnancy, her first, and that was why she’d had to go out to the car without saying goodbye and thanking them for their kindness and hospitality — and then the two of us slammed into the front seat and Prok started in on her. She was passing up a golden opportunity. There was real value here. Yes, there were other houses in the world, plenty to look at, or some, at any rate, given the postwar housing shortage, and, yes, he had to account for differences in taste, but really, at our level — and here he gave me a significant look over the expanse of the front seat — we couldn’t expect to find anything more practical or economical.

Iris heard him out as we sat there at the curb and Prok preached at her over his shoulder, then finally turned the key in the ignition and brought the Buick to life. And then, in a small but firm voice, she said, “I have an ad here.”

Prok gave her his profile, the hat clamped down over the stiff brush of hair. “An ad?”

“I clipped it from the paper. Listen: ‘Charming three-bedroom farmhouse, kitchen, dining, stone fireplace, indoor plumbing, built solid, 1887’—and it’s less than this place.”

“Eighteen eighty-seven?” Prok was incredulous. “A farmhouse? What would you want with a farmhouse? But wait a minute — where did you say it was?”

She gave the address.

“But that’s got to be eight or ten miles out of town. At least. You’d need a car.”

“John’s wanted a car all his life. Don’t you think, at twenty-eight, he deserves one?”

I kept mum. The heat vent beneath the dash began to hiss and the exhaust roped back in the wind and tied itself in knots outside my window.

“That’s not at issue, Iris. That’s not it at all. You have to think of economy, that’s what I’m saying. A car is just one more expense, the gasoline, oil, upkeep. And the project, our collecting trips — do you really want to be left way out there in the country all by yourself? And with a baby to care for, no less?”

Iris’s voice, the stubborn little nugget of it: “We can at least look, can’t we?”

The farmhouse, by Prok’s odometer, turned out to be 5.2 miles beyond the town limits, just off the Harrodsburg road. There was no farm attached to it — the farm had failed during the Depression — but there was the acre of land the house sat on and a small orchard of fruit trees out back, apple, peach and pear. The owner was an old man, bowed in the back and with hands like baseball mitts, a widower who was planning to move in with his son’s family in Heltonville. Iris liked the fireplace in the main room, a massive thing that had once been used for cooking, and she liked the scuffed oak floors and the gentle warp underfoot that rolled you down through the glade of the parlor and into the valley of the kitchen. She’d never seen anything sturdier than the stone foundation and the hand-hewn planks of the front porch — or the well, the well was a thing of beauty in itself. Prok hated the place. It was impractical, a headache in the making, and he appealed to me—“Do you really want to spend all your free time at home with a hammer in one hand and a paint brush in the other?”—but I had already begun to see what Iris was talking about, already begun to envision what she could do with the place given her taste and her resourcefulness, and so I said nothing.