T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

The smile died on Corcoran’s lips. I dropped my eyes.

“If this should get out to the news magazines — to Time, Newsweek, any of them — it will bury us before we get started.”

There was a silence. I became aware of the heat clanking on somewhere in the depths of the building. Rutledge was the first to speak up. “But, Prok, as far as I can see from a quick scan, there really isn’t much in the way of figures here—”

“Oh, no?” Prok waved the paper as if it had caught fire. “What about this then—‘Because of the unrealistic and proscriptive nature of existing sex laws, Dr. Kinsey asserted, the general populace is driven to what is now branded criminal activity; in his home state of Indiana, population three million, five hundred thousand, the Indiana University zoologist estimates that there are some ninety million nonmarital sexual acts performed annually’?”

Rutledge was sitting ramrod straight in his chair. He lifted a hand to stroke his mustache, then thought better of it. “Well, yes, Prok, I see what you mean, but that hardly qualifies as tipping our hand, if that’s what you’re afraid of — this is one statistic out of a thousand. Ten thousand.”

“He’s right, Prok,” Corcoran put in. “Or you’re both right. They shouldn’t have printed that, shouldn’t have printed anything other than maybe a general description of the talk, but I think you’re blowing it out of proportion, I mean, this is just some podunk—”

“And that’s where you’re wrong, Corcoran, categorically. Any slippage weakens us. And you, Rutledge, with your experience in the military, you above all should appreciate this—‘loose lips,’ eh? Wasn’t that the motto?” Prok was pacing now, working himself up, alternately brandishing the paper and balling his fist. “The interest is building out there, you know it is. Once they get a whiff of it, they’ll come after us like hounds, and they’ll take our figures out of context and make us out to be charlatans or cranks along the order of the Nudists or Vegetarians or the Anti-Vivisection Society. Imagine what they’ll do with a table like the one John drew up for us contrasting the peak age of sexual activity for male and female? Or the prevalence of H-activity? Or extramarital relations?”

No one said a word.

“Well you’d better imagine it. And you’d better brace yourselves. Because the invasion is coming.”

That was the beginning of paranoia, and throughout the year, as Prok struggled through the writing of the first volume and we punched data cards and produced the calculations and traveled as a team to collect histories while he lectured across the Midwest and in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Washington, we were never clear of it. Prok had given over a thousand lectures in the past five years, and the ground rules for every last one of them were the same: no publication of specifics, no statistics, no sensationalizing. Since he’d never charged a fee for his public lectures (and wouldn’t begin to do so until after the male volume was published and the expenses of the Institute demanded it), at the very least he expected civility, probity and discretion from his auditors and sponsors. For the most part, he got it. But there were leaks, as with the paper from the little town in Ohio, and as Sexual Behavior in the Human Male neared completion and was set in (closely guarded) proofs, the press went mad after the scent of it, trying one gambit after another to pry loose information from us. We got letters, wires, telephone calls, people showed up at the door from places as far afield as Oregon, Florida and Maine, and in one case, Lugano, Italy, and Prok was polite but firm with them all: there would be no exclusives, no excerpts, no information whatever dispensed prior to publication for fear of sensationalizing a very sensitive subject. And, of course, the more we denied them, the more eager they were.

Even I was drawn into it. I recall an incident from later that year — it must have been late May or early June, Iris big as a house, the weather turned brooding and muggy. I was overworked, keyed up, feeling the stress of Prok’s ceaseless push to produce — and the sting of his temper too, as nothing I nor anyone else did seemed to be quite up to his standards — and after a long day of calculating correlation coefficients, medians, means and standard deviations from the mean, I wasn’t ready to go home. I felt — blue, I guess you would call it. The house, as Prok had predicted, was in need of more attention than I could give it — a windstorm had taken the gutters and half the shingles off the roof over the bedroom, for one thing, and the pipes were so rusty our drinking water looked as if it had been distilled and bonded over the state line in Kentucky, and that was just the start of it, termites in the floor joists, mice in the walls, dry rot behind the tub — and the Dodge, my pride and joy, the one possession I truly loved, was up on the lift at Mike Martin’s garage with a frozen transmission. Five point two miles each way, a real trek, and Prok had been right there too. Corcoran had swung by for me that morning and Prok had offered to give me a lift home, but I didn’t want to impose, and as I say, I wasn’t going home. I called Iris and told her I was planning to head over to the garage to see about the car, and then, if it wasn’t ready, I’d probably have a couple drinks and catch a ride home later.

“And if it is?” she said, her voice small and distant.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But don’t wait dinner for me.”

There was a pause. We hadn’t been getting on as well as we might have, and that was my fault, I admit it, what with the pressures of work and her moods — you would have thought no woman had ever been pregnant in the history of the world before. As she put on weight, as she settled into the awkwardness of pregnancy, flat-footed, distended, sloppy in her personal habits, I began to have second thoughts about this baby, this child, and I suppose every father goes through that sort of thing — one day you’re ecstatic, and the next you think your life is over. Or maybe I had it worse. Maybe I wasn’t ready, after all. Did I resent the child? Did I resent the fact that my wife was in her eighth month and we weren’t having marital relations anymore and that just the night before she’d declined to satisfy me with her mouth or even her hand?

“That’s all right, John,” she said after a moment. “You need a break, don’t you? I understand. Go out and have a couple of drinks, but be careful if you do wind up driving home.” There was a click over the line, and I thought she’d hung up, but then her voice came back: “Did Mike say how much the car was going to be?”

“I don’t know. Fifty dollars, maybe sixty, seventy. Who knows?”

“Oh, John.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I know.”

There was no one I recognized at the tavern, a new crop of students, two men my age at the end of the bar who might have been lecturers or assistant lecturers, a smattering of women sitting with men in shirtsleeves, the jukebox going, the bartender presiding with his swollen, tenderized face. It was hot and the ceiling fan wasn’t doing much to improve the situation. I settled in with a beer and bourbon chaser and lost myself in the newspaper. After a while — I might have been on my second round, I suppose — I became aware of movement to my right, of someone hovering there on the periphery, and I looked up absently into the face of Richard Elster. He was smiling, as if he were glad to see me, and there was another man with him — tall, thin-faced, in a dark wool suit that looked expensive and much too heavy for the place and the season — and he was smiling too, as if we were old acquaintances. “Hi, John,” Elster said, “nice to see you. This is Fred Skittering. Fred, John.”