T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

Dear Dr. Kinsey: Can you tell me why our servicemen, after liberating France and defeating Nazi Germany, have to spend all these months away from home living with the enemy? Because my husband of seventeen years never wrote me once until he came home on leave two weeks ago and told me that he was moving out of our house that we slaved for together because of some if you’ll pardon the expression ex-Nazi floozy who’s only idea is to pray on lonely servicemen in her foreign country. I love him. I want him back. But he says he loves her. Thank you and God bless. Mrs. Thomas Tuttle, Yuma, Arizona

Dear Doctor: I am a young teenaged girl and I like to play with myself and with two other girls in my class and I don’t really think there’s anything wrong with that, do you? Anonymous in Chicago.

Dear Dr. Kinsey: My father was my first lovver and he had a brother I never liked and he was my second I am a young Mulatto girl of mixed race because my father is White and my mother from Trinidad (Black) and my ex-husband Horace wants me to turn tricks in a furnished room and I still love him but my boyfriend Naaman says he will kill me first and I don’t know what to “do” can you help me please with any advise? — May

Of course, with all the other pressures on him, Prok nonetheless took it upon himself to answer each letter personally, and sometimes in great detail, though after a while even he became inured to this outpouring of heartbreak and ignorance and either referred his correspondents to the relevant chapters of the male volume or advised them to seek counseling from professionals in their own hometowns ( I regret to say that we are not clinicians, and that while we are interested to hear of your dilemma, we can do no more than to point you toward professional help ). Still, the sheer volume of the correspondence, coupled with the travel and interviews and the desire to move forward with the female text, all began to take their toll.

Prok’s first collapse had come some three years earlier, in the spring of 1945, after a hectic round of lecturing at the Menninger Clinic and then at a conference for some of the leading lights of the military, during which he bent over backward trying to convince them that no sexual behavior was deviant (H-behavior, specifically, the old martial bugbear) and that even if it were it would pose no threat to military discipline. You can only imagine the sort of reception he must have met with, the hidebound officers and the tight-lipped military bureaucrats, and the energy he must have expended in the process. I was the one who picked him up at the station in Indianapolis, and I remember the look of him, his pallor that extended even to the dulled irises of his eyes, his slouch, the deadness of his voice. “It’s just a cold,” he told me, but it was more than that. It was his heart, enlarged and arrhythmic, the legacy of his childhood bout with rheumatic fever, the thing that would kill him, though none of us could imagine it then — other people had coronary problems, other people died, but not Prok. Prok was a pillar. He was indefatigable. He was our leader, our mentor, and we couldn’t do without him, couldn’t even conceive of it.

The doctor called it nervous exhaustion and ordered three weeks’ bed rest, but Prok was back in action within the week, taking histories at the Indiana State Penal Farm, and then the whirlwind descended again and I forgot all about it, even in the face of the evidence. And now, under the weight of his sudden celebrity, he’d begun to flag once more, and I tried to protect him — and so did Mac, we all did — but it was impossible. He was wound tight, and there was nothing that could loosen him but for sex, and sex, for all its meliorating effects, only lasted through excitation to orgasm.

It was Professor Shadle who stepped into the breach. He was, as you might recall, one of the pioneers in the recording of animal sexual behavior on film, the man who first photographed coitus in the porcupine and other unlikely creatures. Prok had met him at the University of Buffalo when we’d gone there some years earlier to lecture and collect histories, and ever since had pursued him over the subject of his films, which would be an invaluable addition to our library. Finally, after a lengthy exchange of letters, Shadle had agreed to leave his porcupines for a week and come out to Bloomington with his films. As usual, I was the one delegated to meet the professor at the train, and I brought Iris and the baby along for the ride. It was late summer, the male volume still riding high on the bestseller lists, “The Kinsey Boogie” paralyzing the airwaves, the southern Indiana heat like a living thing attaching itself to your pores in order to suck all the minerals and fluids from your body. We were early for the train and I bought Iris an ice cream and watched her lick the cone round the edges and bend to the baby as he tried to suck and kiss his way through this new medium, this dense stuff that was sweet and wintry at the same time, the idea of it fastening in his infantile brain in the place where the pleasure centers take their stimulus: ice cream. Ice cream. It was an exquisite moment. And what would his first words be, as the gift of language descended on him right there on the platform under the gaze of the Indiana sun?

“Did you hear that?” Iris was bent over the stroller, vanilla ice cream running like white blood over her fingers, our son’s hands jerking in clonic display, and the train just pulling into the station with a long attenuated shriek of the brakes.

“What?”

“The baby. He just said ‘ice cream’ clear as day.”

“No,” I said, “did he?”

“His first words, John. ‘Ice cream.’ I heard him.”

I have a picture of that moment in my head, Iris squatting over the baby, her hair in a ponytail, shoulders bare and freckled with the sun, her shorts riding up her thighs, her sandals and painted toenails and the shining arches of her feet, and the train standing there like an illusion, a moving wall, abracadabra. I bent to my son, one eye on the passenger cars as the doors wheezed open. “Ice cream,” I said. “Ice cream, Johnnie.”

A jerk of the fleshy arms, the glutinous hands clapping together in accidental percussion. And the reduced gurgling glissade of sound: “Iiiice,” John Jr. said. “Iiiice.”

When I looked up, Professor Shadle was standing there with his suitcase in hand. He was in his mid-sixties, short — very short, almost dwarfish — with a pronounced midsection and clumps of white hair that might have been cotton balls stuck randomly to his skull. “Beautiful baby,” he murmured.

“Oh, excuse me,” I said, rising to my feet to take his damp dwarfish hand in my own. “Professor Shadle, welcome. To, well, to Indiana. We met in Buffalo, you remember?”

“Yes,” he said, in a lisping rasp, his eyes ducking away from mine. “Of course.”

“And this is my wife, Iris. And our son, John Jr.”

“He just said his first words,” Iris put in. She was beaming. “Aside from ‘mama’ and ‘dada,’ I mean.”

The professor lifted his eyebrows. “Really? And what were these momentous words?”

“Ice cream,” we said in unison, and then there was the echo of the little voice beneath us, John Jr. mute no more. Two words, thin as wire: Iiiice keen.

“Beautiful,” the professor breathed. “Just beautiful.” And he left it at that.

In the evening there was a dinner in Professor Shadle’s honor at the house on First Street, Prok having whipped up one of his goulashes with a side of homemade coleslaw (“For the cooling effect”), after which we retired to the living room to watch the films on equipment Prok had borrowed from the audiovisual department at the university. Shadle had eight films in all, each sequestered in a round tin, and he chattered happily with Prok as he meticulously threaded the first of them through the projector. We were all there, all of us of the inner circle, and the atmosphere was relaxed and convivial — in fact there was a real air of pleasurable anticipation, as if we’d all gone to the picture show and were sitting there in the dark awaiting the first flickers of light to illuminate the screen.