T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

I took a pull at the flask and glanced down at Iris. She lay there like a stone. They’d given her an epidural for the pain and Dr. Bergstrom had begun to talk about inducing labor or even operating because there was the danger now of an infection setting in, and the nurses had begun to bustle a bit because one way or the other the moment was coming. “Iris,” I said, and I suppose I was half-drunk at the time, the flask doing wonders for my jangled nerves, and I didn’t want to think about the delay and the consequences and the fatality that hung over the bed like a palpable nightmare, because I was going to look on the bright side of things, I was going to buck her up as best I could. “Iris, you know what?”

She was exhausted, drained, all her energy and her optimism gone. She barely lifted her eyes.

“Looks like John Jr. — or Madeline — is going to share a famous birthday.”

Nothing.

“With Prok. In forty-five minutes it’s Prok’s birthday, June the twenty-third, did you realize that? Isn’t it amazing?”

She let out a sudden gasp, as if a bottle of champagne had been unstoppered, and then, seconds later, another, and then another, and the curtains flew back and the nurse was wheeling the gurney into the delivery room, and as I sat there in surgical mask and scrubs and tried to contain the hammering of my heart, I watched my son come into the world at 11:56 p.m. on June 22, 1947.

I’d like to say that we gave birth to the male volume at the same time — and we should have, according to the schedule Prok had laid out for himself — but the parturition of the text was a bit more difficult and protracted than any of us could have imagined. As the summer broiled around us and we darted off for abbreviated field trips to this venue or that, Prok worked ever more furiously on the manuscript, writing everywhere — in the car, on the train, at home before work and in the office after the doors had been shut, composing the latter chapters even as the early ones came back to us in galleys from W.B. Saunders. He was putting in eighteen-hour days, sleep a luxury, food nothing more than fuel for the engine, Mac, Mrs. Matthews, Corcoran, Rutledge and I coopted into reading proofs, our offices a blizzard of paper, graphs and spread-eagled texts, always another chart to complete or a fact to check. The absolute final date for completed copy was September 15, and as late as the end of August there were five chapters yet to finish.

I’d never been so busy in my life, nor had Prok ever been so demanding — or short-tempered — and when I wasn’t at work there was the nonstop turmoil of the house, diapers in the laundry, boiling away on the stove, strung up like miniature flags of surrender on the line out back, bottles everywhere and the smell of formula hanging over the bedroom and kitchen till I began to think the walls themselves were lactating. There were late-night feedings, John Jr.’s symphony of shrieks, yowls and sputters, the aching quiet of the house at three a.m. and Iris’s maternal calm. And her mother, her mother, of course. Her mother was there for the first month, a sponge clamped in each hand, wiping down every horizontal surface till it shone, carting in groceries, sweeping like a robot and forever cooking up vats of lamb stew or succotash or four-inch pans of macaroni and cheese with hunks of sliced frankfurter spread like gun emplacements across the top.

I was neutral toward her. She was like Iris, only older, independent-minded, contentious, and she could never bring herself to address me directly, instead referring to me in the third person, as, for instance, “Is he hungry? Does he sit here?” But she took some of the pressure off me and kept Iris company and that was fine by me, because, as I’ve indicated, this was the busiest and most critical time the project had ever seen. Once she did leave, though, to go back home to Michigan City, the onus fell on me, and the timing couldn’t have been worse. I tried my best. Iris still hadn’t recovered her usual level of energy, and I did what I could to help out, picking up groceries, doing a load of laundry, that sort of thing, but naturally things began to slip and I couldn’t help feeling overburdened and resentful.

And yet I don’t mean to sound negative, because a kind of miracle grew out of it all: I got to know my son. To this point he’d been bundled and diapered and whisked from one room to the other, from my mother-in-law’s arms to Iris’s, and if I got more than a peek at the reddened amorphous little face that was saying a lot, but as soon as her mother left — as we came up the walk on our way back from the bus station, in fact — Iris just handed him to me as if he were a sack of groceries she was tired of shifting from one hip to the other. “Go ahead, hold him, John,” she’d said, and there he was, the surprisingly dense bundle of him, thrust into my arms. I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid of dropping him, of failing to properly support his neck, afraid of his weight and his movements and the way he had of effortlessly sucking in air and letting it out again in a maddened inconsolable shriek. He was a time bomb. He was made of lead. He had the lungs of Aeolus. “It’s just a baby, John, that’s all — he won’t bite. He doesn’t even have any teeth.” She looked at me, at the expression on my face, and burst out laughing.

I wasn’t laughing. I was in awe. He was my son. I held him in my arms, felt the weight of him, the vitality, and something moved inside me. John Jr. The wedding of the chromosomes. This was what we’d worked for, the end result, and it was research no longer.

But the book. The project. That was the focus of the summer of 1947, and if our domestic lives intruded on it — Corcoran’s, Rutledge’s, Iris’s and mine, even Mrs. Matthews’s — Prok was there to remind us of our priorities. As he became more demanding, he became more anxious as well, and the press did nothing to assuage his fears, the reporters becoming more importunate and ingenious as the summer went on. I’d escaped Skittering, but there were dozens of others hot on the trail of the story, each of them looking to be the first to reveal our findings to the public. We were besieged with letters, wires, telephone calls, and not just from the plebeian ranks, but from editors and editors-in-chief and even, in some cases, the distinguished owners of various media outlets themselves. Never underestimate the power of sex to incite the public. We were interested in science, but the press was interested in commerce and commerce alone. They wanted to sell copies because copies sold ads and ads sold product and product bought more ads, and none of us of the inner circle had any doubt that they would twist our work in any way they saw fit.

Ultimately, it was Prok who came up with the solution. He’d been feeling increasingly harassed, and one reporter in particular — very persistent, wouldn’t take no for an answer — provided the catalyst. Every day, for a period of more than a month, we received a wire from this gentleman (or pest, as Prok called him), begging for an interview, Prok firmly refusing him time and again till one morning he showed up in the anteroom, hat in hand, trying to wheedle his way past Mrs. Matthews. We were working away at our desks when at some point we became aware of a duel of voices from the anteroom, the closer’s sanguine inflections and Mrs. Matthews’s deft parries, and I remember Prok, in exasperation, raising his head from his work. “Who is that, Mrs. Matthews?” he snapped.

We all saw him there through the open doorway, a slope-shouldered man of middle age in a humble brown suit, looking wounded and lost. “Ralph Becker,” he bleated. “Of the Magazine of the Year? I wired you.”