The Inner Circle

1

For all my bravado that day at the tavern, I have to admit I had my qualms about the interview, and I know this must sound ridiculous coming from me, since I’ve contributed materially to the project to a degree exceeded only by Corcoran and Prok himself, and ultimately wound up conducting some two thousand interviews on my own, but if the truth be known, I was scared. Or perhaps “intimidated” would be a better word. You have to understand that back then sex and sexuality simply weren’t discussed — anywhere, in any forum — and certainly not in a public lecture hall on a college campus. Marriage courses had begun to spring up at other colleges and universities around the country, most pointedly in response to the VD scare of the thirties, but they were bland and euphemistic, and as far as counseling was concerned, as far as a frank face-to-face discussion of pathologies and predilections, there was nothing available to the average person aside from the banalities of the local minister or priest.

And so, as Dr. Kinsey reiterated in his concluding lecture, he was undertaking a groundbreaking research project to describe and quantify human sexual behavior as a way of uncovering what had been so long hidden behind a veil of taboo, superstition and religious prohibition, so as to provide data for those in need of them. And he was appealing to us — the prurient, feverish, sweaty-palmed undergraduates of the audience — to help him. He had just concluded his overview of the course, summarizing his comments on individual variation, as well as his remarks on birth control (adding, almost as an afterthought, that if condoms lacked the natural lubrication provided in the male by secretions from the Cowper’s glands, saliva could be used as an effective succedaneum), and he stood there before us, his face animated, his hands folded on the lectern in front of him.

“I appeal to you all,” he said, after a momentary pause, “to come forward and give me your individual histories, as they are absolutely vital to our understanding of human sexuality.” The light was dim and uniform, the hall overheated, a faint smell of dust and floor wax lingering in the air. Outside, the first snow of the season was briefly whitening the ground, but we might as well have been in a sealed vault for all it mattered. People squirmed in their seats. The young woman in front of me glanced furtively at her watch.

“Why, we know more about the sex life of Drosophila melanogaster — the fruit fly — than we know of the commonest everyday practices of our own species,” he went on, his voice steady, his eyes fixed on the audience, “more of an insect’s ways than of the activities that go on in the bedrooms of this country, on living room sofas and in the rear seats of automobiles for that matter, the very activities through the agency of which each of us is present here in this room today. Does that make scientific sense? Is it in the least rational or defensible?”

Laura was seated beside me, keeping up the pretext, though in the course of the semester she’d fallen hard for a member of the basketball team by the name of Jim Willard and had twice been caught in his company by Dean Hoenig, who had a fine eye for the temperature gradient of campus romances. Both times Laura had managed to wriggle out of it — Jim was a friend of the family, a cousin actually, second cousin, that is, and she was just taking it upon herself to help him with his studies, seeing that basketball consumed so much of his time — but Dean Hoenig was on to us. She’d bristled visibly as we came in the door together and made what I thought was a wholly inappropriate remark about wedding bells, and I was still fuming over it midway through the lecture. At any rate, Laura was by my side, her head bent to her notebook in the further pretext of taking notes, when in fact she was doodling, sketching elongated figures in dresses and furs and elaborate feathered hats and at least one palpitating heart transfixed by the errant arrow.

What Dr. Kinsey wanted from us — what he was appealing for now — was our one-hundred-percent cooperation in arranging private sessions with him to give up our sex histories. For the sake of science. All disclosures to be recorded in code and to remain strictly confidential — in fact, no one but he knew the key to this code he’d devised, and thus no one could ever possibly put a name to a given history. “And I must stress the importance of one-hundred-percent cooperation,” he added, gesturing with a stiff swipe of his hand, “because anything short of that compromises our statistical reliability. If we are to take histories only from those who seek us out, we will have a very inaccurate picture indeed of the society at large, but if we can document one-hundred-percent groups — all the college students present in this lecture hall, for instance, all the young men in a given fraternity house, the membership of the Elks’ Club, women’s auxiliaries, the incarcerees at the State Penal Farm in Putnamville — then we are getting an accurate, top-to-bottom picture.” He paused to run his gaze over the entire audience, left to right, back to front. A stillness descended on us. Laura lifted her head.

“Very well,” he said finally. “In the service of this end, I will be scheduling appointments directly after termination of this lecture.”

Because of our ruse, Laura and I were scheduled consecutively, as future husband and wife, though Laura’s use for me had by this time expired and she pointedly avoided me as she strolled around campus in the towering company of Jim Willard, who, at six feet one and one hundred ninety pounds, provided stability under the boards for our basketball team. We went separately to Biology Hall on a bitter, wind-scoured December afternoon, the husks of leaves chasing across a dead scrub of lawn, the trees stripped and forlorn, and everybody on campus sniffling with the same cold. Laura had been scheduled first, and as the interviews in those days averaged just over an hour, there really wasn’t much point in my escorting her there. Still, I’d got cold feet the night before and when I ran into her and Willard on the steps of the library I’d argued that we should nonetheless show up together for appearances’ sake — I didn’t mind, I’d bring my books and study while she was in Kinsey’s office — but she was shaking her head before I’d even got the words out. “You’re very sweet, John,” she said, “and I appreciate your concern, I really do — but the semester’s nearly over. What can they do to us?”

Willard was hovering in the background, giving me the sort of look he usually reserved for tip-offs at center court.

“Besides,” she said, showing her teeth in a tight little smile, “people do fall out of love, don’t they? Even Dean Hoenig has to be realistic — she can’t expect every engagement to last.”

I didn’t want to concede the point. I was feeling something I’d never felt before, and I couldn’t have defined it, not then, not with the powers available to me and the person I then was, but can I say that her face was a small miracle in the light spilling from the high, arching windows, that I remembered the kiss in the tavern, the feel of her stirring beside me in the lecture hall? Can I say that, and then let it rest?

“What about disciplinary action?” I said.

She let out a curt laugh. “Disciplinary action? Are you kidding?” She looked to Willard and back again. “I don’t care two snaps for all the disciplinary action in the world.”

And so I went alone to Biology Hall, following the faint lingering traces of her perfume, the collar of my overcoat turned up against the wind, a load of books tucked under one arm. The building, like most on campus, was made of local limestone. It rose up out of the black grasp of the trees like a degraded temple, the sky behind it all but rinsed of light, and I couldn’t help thinking how different it had looked in September when it was cushioned in foliage. As I came up the path, leaves grating underfoot, I felt a sudden sharp stab of apprehension. I didn’t know Prok yet — or I knew him only as a distant and formal presence on the podium — and I was afraid of what he might think of me. You see, it wasn’t only the subterfuge with Laura that cast a shadow over things, but my history itself. I was deeply ashamed of it, ashamed of who I was and what I’d done, and I’d never broached the subject of sex with anyone, not my closest friends, not the school counselor or even the uncle (Robert, my father’s youngest brother) who did his best to take my dead father’s place till the wandering bug got him and he disappeared too.

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?”

“Michigan City.”

“And your parents?”

“My mother teaches elementary school back at home. My father’s dead. He was killed in an accident on the lake — or, actually, no one really knows what went wrong. There was — they weren’t able to recover the body.”

Prok never took his eyes from mine, but he was making notations on a single sheet of paper that lay on the desk before him. Without my knowing it, the interview had already begun, but he paused now to express his sympathy. He asked how old I was at the time of my father’s death — I was nine, not quite out of school for the summer, and my father had gone mad for sailing, sanding and varnishing the boat all winter and into the spring, and now it had been launched and all I could think of was the long irradiated days ahead when we would coast unencumbered over the chop like the God who made the water and the son who came to walk on it — and then he said that he too had had to make do without a father’s guidance, at least once he went to college and broke free of a stifling paternal influence. His father had seen him as an engineer — could I imagine that? — but he himself had preferred biology. Biology was his passion. And he made a casual gesture to the cramped office behind him, and the great standing racks of insects pinned in trays. “Did you know,” he added, “that I’ve identified sixteen new species of gall wasp?” And he let out a chuckle. “If it was up to my father they’d be unknown today.” His eyes were shining. “Poor things.”

Our conversation — it was just that — had developed its own logic and rhythm. It was uncanny. The longer we spoke, and it was almost like speaking with your inner self or confiding in the family doctor behind closed doors, the more he seemed to know what I was thinking and feeling. And it wasn’t simply that he was a master at what he was doing, but that you felt he really and truly sympathized, that when your heart was breaking, so was his.

Which brings us to the real content of the interview: my sex history. We talked for perhaps fifteen minutes before the first question insinuated itself, as casually as if it were no more charged than a reflection on one’s parents or upbringing. We’d been talking about my playmates when I was a boy, and I was lost in nostalgic recollection, faces and places and names drifting like gauze through my brain, when Dr. Kinsey, in his softest, most dispassionate tones, asked, “How old were you when you first became aware of the anatomical differences between girls and boys?”

“I don’t know. Early on, I suppose. Five? Six?”

“Was there nudity in your home when you were a child? On the part of your parents or yourself?”

I took a moment, trying to recollect. “No,” I said, “no, I don’t think so.”

“Did your parents make you put your clothes on when you appeared naked?”

“Yes. But again, this would have been at a very early age, probably two or three. Or no, later. There was one incident — I must have been five, five at least, because it was before we’d moved to the house on Cherry Street — a hot day, bathing with my mother at the lake, and I came out of the water and removed my wet trunks. She was angry with me, and I remember I couldn’t understand why.”

“Were you reprimanded then?”

“Yes.”

“Physically?”

“I must have been. Not the first time, though.”

“What were the other occasions?”

Each question followed logically from the one previous, and they were very much rapid-fire: as soon as Prok got and recorded his response, he was on to the next, and yet you never felt as if you were being interrogated, but rather were part of an ongoing conversation focused on the most fascinating subject in the world: yourself. And the questions were always formulated so as to achieve the most precise — and unambiguous — answer. So it was not “Have you ever masturbated?” but rather “When did you first masturbate?” and “How old were you when you first saw the naked genitalia of your own sex? Of the opposite sex?” All the while, as the interviewee progressed in recollected age, so too did the questions delve ever more deeply into his sexual practices, going from the relatively innocuous data-based queries (“How old were you when you first began to sprout pubic hair?”) and calculations of your height, weight and handedness, to “When did you first experience coitus?”

My nose was dripping — I too had contracted the cold that held the campus in its thrall — and I was on my fourth cigarette and entirely unaware of where or even who I was by the time this last question came up. Dr. Kinsey studied my reaction, my face, his eyes locked on mine, his pencil poised over the sheet of paper. It’s all right, he seemed to say, whatever it is, it’s all right. You can confide in me. And further: You must confide in me.

I hesitated, and that hesitation told him everything. “Never,” I said. “Or, that is, not yet, I mean.”

Unbeknownst to me, there were a series of questions — twelve of them, to be exact — that gave an indication of one’s predilection toward same-sex behavior, or, as Prok liked to call it so as not to alarm or prejudice anyone, the H-history. It was at this point that he shifted in his chair and cleared his voice. “Backtracking now,” he said, “you were how old when you first saw the naked genitalia of a person of your own sex?”

I gave him the answer, which he quickly checked against my previous response.

“And when did you first see another individual’s erect penis?”

I gave him the answer.

And then the questions proceeded in what we would come to call our “steamroller” fashion, one hard on the heels of the next. “When did you first touch the genitals of a person of your own sex? When did you first bring to orgasm a person of your own sex? When was the first time you brought a person of your own sex to orgasm orally?”

I looked away and he broke off the interview a moment. There was a silence. I became aware of the bells tolling six on the clock tower across campus. “Milk,” he said, “John — let me remind you that there is nothing, nothing whatever, to be ashamed of. There is no sexual act between consenting parties that is in any way qualitatively different from any other, no matter what the prevailing ethos of a given society may be. If it will interest you to know, my own sex history was very much similar to yours when I was your age — and even later.”

But perhaps this would be a judicious time to bring up the 0–6 scale Prok devised to measure an individual’s sexual preferences — a scale that seeks to chart the entire range of human sexual proclivities, from the purely opposite-sex context (0) to the purely homosexual (6). You see, Prok believed — and I’ve come to believe too — that man in a state of nature is pansexual, and that only the strictures of society, especially societies under the dominion of the Judeo-Christian and Mohammedan codes, prevent people from expressing their needs and desires openly, and that thus, whole legions suffer from various sexual maladjustments. But I get ahead of myself.

That day, in that room, with a handkerchief pressed to my dripping nose and Prok’s presence guiding me, I began to know myself in a way I’d never thought possible. What I’d seen as a source of shame became usual — Prok himself had had similar experiences as a boy and had masturbated continually — and if I could say I rated perhaps a 1 or 2 on the 0–6 scale, then that was something, something momentous. And I hungered for experience, like anyone else, that was all. I’d been awkward with girls, terrified of them — I’d placed them on a pedestal and never saw them as sexual beings just like me, who had the same needs and desires as I, and that it had been perfectly natural to experiment with the only partners available to me, with boys, because as Prok says, we all need outlets. Or perhaps I didn’t realize all this on that late afternoon in Prok’s office, but I did think of Laura Feeney sitting there before me — in the very chair — and how Prok would have asked her at what age she began to masturbate and when she’d first seen the naked genitalia of the opposite sex, and when she’d first seen the phallus erect and first brought the opposite sex to orgasm, and I felt like Columbus spying land on the horizon.

The clock on the tower was tolling the quarter hour, for six forty-five, by the time we were finished and Dr. Kinsey leaned across the desk to hand me a penny postcard addressed to himself — Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, Professor of Zoology, Biology Hall, University of Indiana. “Just here, you see,” he was saying, “I will need four basic measurements, please.”

“Yes,” I said, taking the card in what seemed like a trance — and no, he hadn’t hypnotized me, not in the conventional sense, but he might as well have.

“Very well, then. We will need you, when you arrive at home, to measure first the circumference and then the length, from the base of the abdomen out, of the flaccid penis, and then, when you’re properly stimulated, the circumference and length while erect. And, oh, yes, if you would just note the angle of curvature as well …”

The wind perched in the trees that night, gathering force for a run down into Kentucky, and by nine o’clock it was flinging compact little pellets of sleet against the window of the attic room I shared with a fellow senior, Paul Sehorn, in Mrs. Elsa Lorber’s rooming house on Kirkwood Avenue. This was an old house, aching in its bones and not at all shy about voicing its complaints, especially at night. It had been built in the 1870s and was solid enough, I suppose, even after a generation of undergraduates had given it the sort of hard use that had brought down any number of other houses of its era. Unfortunately, it was insulated about as thoroughly as an orange crate and the balky antiquated coal furnace never seemed to elevate the temperature much above the zone of the distinctly uncomfortable. The winter previous, I’d woken one morning to find a crust of ice interposed between my lips and the water in the glass I’d left out on the night table, and for a month thereafter Paul referred to me as Nanook.

There was a desk in one corner, dominated by the secondhand Olympia typewriter my mother gave me when I went off to college and an old Philco radio I’d salvaged after my grandmother had given up on it. Against the facing wall, beside the door, was an armoire that stank regally of naphtha, and we shared its limited space, our shirts, trousers and suits (we each had one, mine in glen plaid, to match my tie, Paul’s a hand-me-down blue serge that showed a good three inches of cuff at the wrist) hanging side by side on a dozen scuffed wooden hangers. Other than that, it was shoes under the bed, overcoats downstairs on the hooks reserved for them in the vestibule, personal items laid out on our matching bureaus and books neatly aligned on a cheap pine bookcase I’d found at a rummage sale (four shelves, equally divided, eighteen inches per shelf for me, eighteen inches for Paul). The bathroom was across the hall.

Most nights, Paul and I tuned in the radio (we limited ourselves to two serials, and then it was swing out of Cincinnati, as soft and fuzzed with distance as a whisper), propped ourselves up in our beds and studied till our fingers went numb from the cold. Tonight, though, Paul was out on a date and I had the room to myself, though it was hardly peaceful, what with the unending stamp and furor of the other undergraduate men in the house and the long disquisitions on everything from the existence of God to the Nazi push for lebensraum that seemed always to take place outside the bathroom door. By ten, the sleet had changed to snow.

I lay there beneath the comforter on my bed, trying to read — as I remember, I had an exam the following day — but I didn’t get very far. The branches of the elm out back kept scraping at the house as if something were trying to crawl up the side of the building to escape the storm and the reception on the radio was so bad I had to get up and switch it off. I rubbed a circle in the frost and peered out the window. The world was dense and blurred, the streetlights pinched down to nothing, no sound but the wind and the intermittent rasp of the snow thrust up against the pane. I felt small and boxed-in. Felt restless. Bored.

I thought of Dr. Kinsey then — if truth be told, I hadn’t really thought of much else all evening, even at dinner — and crossed the room to my desk for what must have been the twentieth time to examine the postcard he’d given me. I let a hand drop to my trousers, a pressure there, and began massaging myself absently through a layer of gabardine. And how would I measure it? I didn’t have a ruler, but I could easily have gone down the hall and borrowed one from Bob Hickenlooper, the architectural whiz — if anyone would have one, he would — and yet I still wasn’t sold on the idea. It was vaguely obscene, ridiculous even. Measuring your own penis? But there was more to it than that, of course — and I’m sure you’ve anticipated me here — what if I didn’t measure up? What if I was, well, smaller, than other men? What then? Would I add an inch or two so as not to disappoint the distinguished scientist eagerly waiting to tabulate the results? Of course, I had little idea what the average length of the male penis was — but then wasn’t that the whole concept of the enterprise to begin with? What had Kinsey’s lecture on individual variation been but an attempt to make us all feel a bit more secure with regard to such things as breast size and penis length and the like?

Yes, I told myself, yes, certainly I’ll do the measurements and see to it that I’m as accurate and honest as possible. But, of course, in thinking about it, imagining the cold butt of some architectural student’s T square pressed to my penis, I found I had an erection. It was then (and please don’t mistake my meaning here) that I thought of Mrs. Lorber. She sat in the parlor downstairs each evening, listening to her own radio and knitting, and I knew she had a tape measure in her sewing basket, a soft and supple one, made of finger-burnished cloth, the very sort of thing you might imagine yourself using in a private scientific endeavor akin to the one I was contemplating.

All right. Fine. Before I could think I was thumping down the three flights of loose-jointed stairs, ignoring a shout from Tom Tomalin to come play a hand of pinochle and an off-color greeting from Ben Webber, all two hundred and forty-five pounds of him, who was laboring up to his room on the second floor. Out of breath, and with my excitement barely contained, I paused outside the open parlor door and tapped gently at the doorframe. Mrs. Lorber was seated in her favorite armchair, working at a ball of butterscotch-colored yarn, a cat sprawled in her lap. She didn’t glance up, though she knew I was there — she knew everything that went on in the house, every least stir and breath of her charges, and she’d positioned her chair so as to give her a strategic view of the entry hall and stairway in the event that anyone might be so foolish as to attempt to smuggle contraband into his room. (Mrs. Lorber was in her mid-sixties then, a big-shouldered ventricose old lady with a succession of chins and a focused, predatory look: alcoholic beverages, foods that required heating and, especially, women were strictly interdicted.)

“Uh, excuse me, Mrs. Lorber?” I murmured.

She fixed her gaze on me, and I expected her to smile or at least nod in recognition, but her face showed nothing.

“I just wondered, if I could, uh — if I could borrow your, uh, tape measure. For just a minute. I’ll bring it right back, I promise.”

She let out a sigh compounded of all the little inconveniences, crises and mounting disasters undergraduates had inflicted on her over the years, and then, without a word, leaned down to her right and began fishing through her sewing basket. “Here,” she said finally, coming up with the tape measure as I crossed the room to her, “but just make sure you return it.”

Leaning over her, I caught a smell of the liniment she rubbed on her legs each night and of the warm, yeasty air trapped beneath her skirts. The cat looked up at me blankly. “Yes,” I said, her cool, dry fingers coming into contact with mine as I took the tape measure from her, “I will. It’ll just be a minute and I’ll be right back with it, I promise.”

I was nearly out of the room when she stopped me. “But what on earth would you need to measure, John? What is it, curtains? Because I sincerely hope you two haven’t damaged—”

“It’s a, uh, project. For my literature class.”

“Literature? What, lines of poetry? The number of feet per line in ‘Don Juan’? Hmm?” She let out a laugh. “Now there was a poem — is that part of the syllabus still? Or, no, of course it must be. Lord Byron, eh? Now there was a poet.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “but you’ll have to, I mean, I have to—”

“Go, go,” she said, making a shooing motion with both hands. “No need to waste your time on an old woman when you’ve got measuring to do.”

I trudged back up the stairs, the tape measure burning like a hot coal in my pocket. I felt guilty, dirty, all the worse for the lie and the use to which I was going to put my landlady’s blameless instrument, and I kept thinking of her handling the thing and holding it up to a scarf she was knitting for a favorite niece or granddaughter. Maybe I should just return it to her, I thought, right now, before it’s been desecrated. I could slip out in the morning and purchase one of my own — a tape measure was a practical thing to have, after all, because you never knew when you’d be called upon to measure something, like bookshelves, for instance. My feet hit the stairs like hammers. The storm whispered at the windowpanes.

By the time I got back to the room, I found that my enthusiasm for Dr. Kinsey’s little statistical exercise had worn thin, but I loosened my belt and dropped my trousers dutifully, unscrolling Mrs. Lorber’s tape measure to record my now-flaccid dimensions. But the thing was, as soon as I laid the measure against my penis I began to grow hard again and couldn’t get an accurate measurement; before I knew it, I was stroking myself and trying to summon the look of Laura Feeney as she sat beside me in the semi-darkness of the lecture hall while the slide projector clicked and clicked again and we all held our breath. And then I was seeing a girl from the front row of my literature class, a girl with puffed lips and violet eyes and calves that caressed each other under the desk until I wanted to faint from the friction of it, and finally there was just a woman, featureless, anonymous, with her breasts thrust out and nipples hard and her cunt — that was what I wanted to call it, her cunt — just exactly like the one on the screen.

I was up early the next morning, the light through the window trembling on the sloped ceiling above the bed — it was a paler light than we’d been used to, bluer, like the aqueous glow at the bottom of a swimming pool, and I was filled with the anticipation that comes with the first good snow of the season. The storm had passed on, but outside the sky was a polished silver, a big, upended tureen of a sky, flurries trailing down like an afterthought. I didn’t wake Paul. He’d come in late — long after I’d gone to bed — and I didn’t want to disturb him, not so much out of any consideration for his beauty rest, but because I wasn’t in the mood for company. I wanted to tramp the streets, see the world transformed — just enjoy it, all to myself — before heading over to the Commons for breakfast and a final look at my notes for the exam.

There was a foot and a half of snow, maybe more — it was hard to say because the wind had piled it up in drifts against the fences and buildings. None of the walks had been cleared yet, people’s automobiles sat drifted over at the curb and the birds dipped in perplexity from the black field of the evergreens along the street to the sealed white envelope of the ground. Lights gleamed dully from the depths of the houses. I smelled bacon, woodsmoke, the clean, dense perfume of the new air swept down out of the north.

It wasn’t yet seven, and hardly anyone was stirring on campus. Those who were out moved silently across the quad, huddled figures excised from a dream and patched in here where they didn’t belong, and there were no more than ten students in the Commons where normally there would have been a hundred — even the staff was reduced to a single illdefined woman who served out the food mechanically and then moved to the cash register through crashing waves of silence to record the sale. I took a table by the window and sat there staring out over my books and into the trees along the creek, idly stirring sugar into a cup of coffee. It was one of those quiet, absorbing moments when the world slows to a standstill and all its inherent possibilities become manifest. Magic. The magic moment — isn’t that what they call it in the love songs?

She was speaking to me before I became aware of her—“Hello, John; hello, I said”—and when I did look up I didn’t recognize her at first. She was in a winter coat and hat, the black silk of her hair tugged down like an arras on either side of her face, her eyes lit from within as if there were twin filaments behind them and a battery secreted under her clothes. It was seven a.m. — or no, not even — and she was wearing mascara, the better to show off the color of those eyes, which managed to be both blue and green at the same time, like the sea off the port of Havana where the onshore waters meld with the pelagic and the white prow of your boat drifts placidly from one world to another and everything dissolves in a dream. “Don’t you recognize me?”

She was unfastening the snap at her collar, working at her hat, her hair, the scarf wrapped twice round her throat. Everything was suddenly in motion again, as if a film had just been rethreaded through the projector, her books sliding onto the tabletop beside mine, the coat open to reveal her dress and the way it conformed to her, and then the chair beside me pulling out and the girl — who was she? — perching at the edge of it. And then it came to me. “You’re Iris,” I said.

She was giving me her full-lipped smile, the smile that borrows some of the juice from her eyes and runs off the same hidden power source. “Iris McAuliffe, Tommy’s little sister. But you knew that.”

“I did, yes. Of course I did. My mother — I mean, she, and then I saw you around campus, of course—”

“I hear you’re engaged.”

I didn’t know what to say to this — I certainly wouldn’t want it getting back to my mother in any way, shape or form — so I dipped my head and took a sip of coffee.

Iris’s smile faded. “She’s very pretty,” she murmured. “Laura Feeney.”

“Yes,” I said, my gaze fixed on the cup. “But I’m not really — we’re not …” I looked up at her. Off on the periphery of my vision the woman at the cash register rang up a coffee and cruller as if she were moving underwater, and I saw the balding head and narrow shoulders of my literature professor, his coat dusted with snow. “That is, it was a pretense, you know. For the marriage course.”

I watched her grapple with this ever so briefly before the smile came back. “You mean, you — faked it? Just to—? God,” she said, and she let her posture go, slouching back in the seat, all limbs and jangling, nervous hands, “I hear it was really dirty …”

2

I took exams, wrote papers (“Duality in John Donne’s Love Poems”; “Malinowski’s Melanesia”), took a bus home to Michigan City for Christmas break and gave my mother a set of bath oils and scented soaps carved in the shape of fishes and mermaids. Some of my old high school friends came round — Tommy McAuliffe, in particular, who was now assistant manager at the grocery — and what a surprise that he’d thought to bring his kid sister Iris along, and did I know that she was a sophomore at IU now? There she was, standing on the doorstep beside him, and though I barely knew her I began to appreciate that here was the kind of girl who understood what she wanted and always got it — always, no matter what. I told Tommy I’d just seen her on campus — on the day of the snowfall, wasn’t it? — while she looked on with her big ever-widening sea-struck eyes as if she’d forgotten all about it. We ate pfefferneuse cookies in front of the fireplace and sneaked drinks of brandy every time my mother went back out to the kitchen to check on her pies. Just before New Year’s I thought of asking Iris to the pictures or maybe to go skating — on a date, that is — but I never got around to it. Then I was back at school and the days closed down on the bleak dark kernel of mid-January.

One night I was at the library, reshelving books in the second-floor stacks, when I glanced up at the aisle directly across from me and there was Prok — Dr. Kinsey — down on one knee, scanning the titles on the bottom shelf. He was a tumult of motion, grasping the spine of one book or another and at the same time shoving it back in place, all the while scooting back and forth on the fulcrum of his knee. It was strange to see him there — or not strange so much as unexpected — and I froze up for a moment. I didn’t know what to do — should I say hello, ignore him, grab an armload of books and duck round the corner? Even if I did say hello, would he remember me? He had hundreds of students, and though he’d conducted private interviews — like mine — with all of them, or practically all of them, how could he be expected to recall any one individual? I watched him out of the corner of my eye. He seemed to be muttering to himself — was it a call number he was repeating? — and then he found what he was looking for, slipped it from the shelf and sprang to his feet, all in one motion. That was when he brought his eyes forward and saw me there.

It took a moment. I watched his neutral expression broaden into recognition, and then he came down the aisle and extended his hand. “Milk,” he said, “well, hello. Good to see you.”

“Hello, sir. I’m — I didn’t think you’d remember me, what with all your, well, students—”

“Don’t be foolish. Of course I remember you. John Milk, out of Michigan City, born October two, nineteen eighteen.” He gave me a smile, one of his patented ones, pulling his lip back from his upper teeth and letting the two vertical laugh lines tug at his jowls so that his whole face opened up in a kind of riotous glee. “Five foot ten, one hundred eighty pounds. But you haven’t lost any weight, have you?”

“Hardly,” I said, my smile a weak imitation of his, and I was thinking of those other measurements, the ones I’d inscribed on a postcard and sent him in the mail. And beyond that, my secrets, and my shame, and all it implied. “My mother’s cooking, you know. Over the holidays.”

“Yes,” he said, “yes, yes, of course. Nothing like a mother’s cooking, eh?” He was still smiling, smiling even wider now, if that was possible. “Or a mother’s love, for that matter.”

I had to agree. I nodded my head in affirmation, and then the moment detached itself and hung there, lit from above with the faint gilding of the electric lights. I became aware of the muted stirring of library patrons among the stacks, a book dropped somewhere, a whisper.

“You’re working here, I presume?”

I told him I was, though they’d cut my hours recently and I could barely make ends meet. “Reshelving, mostly. Once we close the doors, I sweep up, empty the wastebaskets, make sure everything’s in order.”

He was standing there watching me, rocking up off the balls of his feet and back again. I couldn’t help glancing at the title of the book: Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, by Hans Licht. “Late nights, eh? Isn’t that a bit tough on your studies?”

I shrugged. “We all do the best we can.”

He was silent a moment, as if he were deciding something, his eyes all the while fixed on mine. “Do you know, Milk — John,” he said softly, almost musingly, “I have a garden out at my place. Mrs. Kinsey and I do. Clara, that is. In season, it’s the pride of Bloomington, a regular botanical garden on two and a half fertile acres — I grow daylilies, irises, we’re planning a lily pond. You should see it, you really should.”

I wasn’t following him. I’d been keeping late hours and I was pretty well exhausted. For lack of a better option, I gave him my fawning student look.

“What I mean is, I’ve been thinking for some time of hiring somebody to help me with it — of course, it’s nothing but husks and frozen earth at this juncture — but in the spring, well, that’s when we’ll really bring it to life. And until then — and beyond that, in addition, as well — we’re going to need some help in the biology library. What do you say?”

A week later I was working in Biology Hall, with expanded hours and no late nights. The biology collection was considerably smaller than that of the main library and the patronage proportionately reduced in size, so that I found I had more time to myself at work, time I could apply fruitfully to my own studies (and to be honest, to daydreaming — I spent a disproportionate amount of time that semester staring out into the intermediate distance, as if all the answers I needed in life were written there in a very cramped and faint script). I didn’t see much of Prok — he kept to himself for the most part, in his office on the second floor — and as the sex survey was then in its incipient stages, he didn’t yet need anyone to help him with the interviewing or tabulating of results. He was, as you no doubt know, one of the world’s leading authorities on Cynipids — gall wasps — and he was still at that time busy collecting galls from oak trees all over the country, employing his assistants (three undergraduate women) exclusively in helping to record his measurements of individual wasps and mount them in the Schmitt boxes reserved for them. Taxonomy — that was his forte, both as an entomologist and a compiler of human sexual practices.

At any rate, the job was something of a plum for me, and for the first week or two I snapped out of the funk that seemed to have descended on me, exhilarated by the free nights and the extra change in my pocket. I went bowling with Paul and his girlfriend Betsy, and then insisted on treating them to cheeseburgers and I don’t know how many pitchers of beer after Paul took me aside and told me they wanted me to be the first to know they were engaged to be married. The jukebox played “Oh, Johnny” over and over, Betsy kept saying, “You’re next, John-Johnny-John, you’re next,” and I barely flinched when Laura Feeney and Jim Willard sauntered in and took a booth in the back. We stayed up late that night, Paul and I, pouring out water glasses of bourbon smuggled upstairs right under Mrs. Lorber’s nose, and though I overslept the next morning, I woke feeling glad for Paul and hopeful for myself.

Unfortunately, the mood didn’t last. It struck me that my room-mate — a man of my own age and inclinations — was going to be married and that he already had a job lined up with his father’s feed-distribution company, while I had to look at myself in the mirror every morning and admit I had no idea what was to become of me. I was at loose ends, as most seniors are, I suppose, worrying over my course work and facing June graduation without a single notion of what I was going to do in life — or even what I was going to do for gainful employment. All I knew was that I’d rather be sent to Devil’s Island as underassistant to the assistant chef in the soup kitchen than go back to Michigan City and another summer with my mother. And as if that weren’t enough, looming over it all was the prospect of war in Europe and talk of conscription.

So I was feeling blue, the weather going from bad to worse, Paul always off with Betsy somewhere till I’d begun to forget what he looked like, and the books on the library cart growing progressively heavier (I felt like a bibliographic Sisyphus, the task unending, each shelved volume replaced by another and yet another). And then two things happened. The first had to do with Iris, as you might have guessed. Though she was an English major, like me, she showed up at the biology library one afternoon in desperate need of information on the life cycle of the Plasmodium parasite for a required introductory course in biology she was taking from Professor Kinsey himself. “We have to cite at least three scientific journals,” she told me, still breathless from her dash across campus in the face of a steady wind, “and I have to write it all up by tomorrow, for class.”

I’d been filling out catalogue cards for the new arrivals when she came up to the desk and took me by surprise. Before I could even think to smile, a hand went to my hair, smoothing it down where the rebellious curl was forever dangling. “I’d be — sure,” I said. “I’m not really — it’s the librarian you want, Mr. Elster, but I could — I’ll do my best, certainly.” And then I found my smile. “For you, of course.”

Her voice went soft. “I wouldn’t want to be any trouble — I’m sure you have better things to do. But if you could just point me in the right direction—”

I got to my feet and shot a glance across the room to where Elster sat at his own desk, partly obscured by a varnished deal partition. He was a short, thin, embittered little man, not yet out of his twenties, and, as he was quick to remind me, it wasn’t my job to take queries or assist the patrons — that was his function, and he guarded it jealously. For the moment, however, he seemed oblivious, absorbed in paperwork — or one of the crossword puzzles he was forever fussing over. When I responded, my voice was soft too — this was a library, after all, and there was no reason to draw attention to ourselves. “Current issues of the journals are alphabetized along the back wall, but what you’ll want are the indexes, and they’re — well, why don’t I just get them for you?”

She was smiling up at me as if I’d already found the relevant citations, written them up for her and submitted the paper all on my own, and her eyes twitched and roved over my face in a way we would later identify as one of the subliminal signals of availability (readiness to engage in sexual activities, that is, in kissing, petting, genital manipulation and coitus), though at the time I could only think I must have something caught between my teeth or that my hair needed another dose of Wildroot. “Have you heard from your mother?” she asked, abruptly changing the subject.

“Yes,” I said. “Or, no. I mean, why do you ask, has something—?”

“Oh, no, no,” she said, “no. I just wanted to know how she was doing, because I never did get to thank her for that lovely afternoon and her hospitality. And yours. We had a really memorable time, Tommy and I.”

“They were terrific cookies,” I said stupidly. “My grandmother’s recipe, actually. They’re a family tradition.”

For a moment I thought she wasn’t going to respond and I stood there self-consciously at the desk, fumbling in my mind for the key to the next level of small talk — her mother, shouldn’t I ask about her mother, though I barely knew her? — but then she said something so softly I didn’t quite catch it.

“What?”

“They were, I said.” I must have looked puzzled, because she added, “The cookies. I was agreeing with you.”

I floundered over this for a minute — as I told you, I wasn’t much with regard to small talk, not unless I had a couple of drinks in me, anyway — and then she let out a giggle and I joined her, my eyes flicking nervously to Elster’s desk and back. “Well,” I said finally, “why don’t you find a seat and I’ll, well — the indexes …”

She settled herself at one of the big yellow-oak tables, laying out her purse, her book bag, her gloves, coat and hat as if they were on display at a rummage sale, and I brought her the journal indexes that might have been most promising, then retreated to my work at the main desk. The room was warm — overheated, actually — and smelled, as most libraries do, of dust and floor wax and the furtive bodily odors of the patrons. A shaft of winter sunlight colored the wall behind her. It was very still. I tried to focus on what I was doing, writing out the entries in my neatest block printing, but I kept looking up at her, amazed at the vitality she brought to that sterile atmosphere. She was wearing a long skirt, dark stockings, a tight wool sweater that showed off her contours and complemented her eyes, and I watched her head dip and rise over her work — first the journal, then her notebook, and back again — as if she were some exotic wild creature dipping water from a stream in a pastoral tale.

But she wasn’t wild, not at all — she was as domestic as they come. And, as she later admitted, she’d brought herself to the library that day for the express purpose of reminding me that she was still alive and viable, that she had lips that could be kissed and hands that yearned to be held. In truth, she’d already written up her notes on the nasty little parasites that cause malaria — already had everything she needed — and was there at the desk with her hair shining and her head dipping and rising for my delectation alone. She had, as my mother knew long before I did, set her cap for me, and she was determined to allow me to discover that fact in my own groping way. Before she went home we had another little chat and I’d somehow managed to ask her out for Saturday evening to attend a student production of a popular Broadway play.

The other thing that happened involved Prok, and I suppose it was emblematic of all that was to unfold between us — that is, between Prok and me on the one hand, and me and Iris on the other. It was the same week Iris had come to the library — perhaps even the same day; I can’t really remember now. I was just leaving work when I heard someone call out my name and turned to see Prok coming down the steps at the front of the building. “Milk, hold up a minute, will you?” he called, and then he was at my side, peeling off one glove to take my hand in his. “So how is it, then? The new position suitable?”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m very much — it’s interesting.” My words hung in the air as if no one had spoken them. I felt for my cigarettes inside my jacket pocket, then realized I must have left them back at my desk.

“But let’s walk,” he said. “You going my way?”

“I live over on Kirkwood.”

“Ah. Well. Wrong direction, then. But indulge me — a young fellow like you ought to be able to stand a two-block detour I would expect, no?”

And then we were walking — in the direction of his house on First Street — the campus trees arrayed around us like statuary, lights riding high in the windows of the big pale buildings under a darkening sky. The air was tense with the cold, stretched thin over the skin of the evening, but it felt good to be out in it after the confinement of the library. There were patches of ice in the street. Trashcans stood at the curb. Prok was just slightly ahead of me, chopping along in his usual two-for-one stride (for Prok everything was competitive, even walking) and speaking over his shoulder so that his words came to me wrapped in an envelope of frozen carbon dioxide.

“I was just remarking to Clara what an interesting person you are and how much you impressed me, and she said, ‘Well, why not have him over for dinner, then?’ and I thought that would be just fine because I expect you don’t get all that much home cooking, do you? You know, as we were saying the other week, the mother’s touch?”

“No,” I said, “you’re absolutely right. It’s either the Commons or the diner, I’m afraid.” I was aglow with the compliment—I’d impressed him—and the words came easily.

“Plenty of grease and gristle to fuel those expanding brain cells.” He’d swung his big head round to smile at me.

“And of course we’re not allowed to cook for ourselves—”

“Rooming house, eh?”

I nodded. We were on one of the side streets now, across from the university. There was very little traffic.

“Well,” he said, pulling up short and swinging round on me, “so how about it? Shall we say Saturday, six p.m.?”

I must have hesitated, because he added, in a different tone altogether, almost as if he were preparing to build a case, “If you’re not doing anything, of course. You don’t have any plans, do you? For Saturday?”

I looked off down the deserted street, then came back to him. “No,” I said. “Not really.”

Prok’s house was an easy walk from campus, but in those days it was considered somewhat off the beaten path, as First Street and the neighborhood around it hadn’t yet been developed to the extent it now is. I had the impression of the odd sprawling house bracketed by tall black spikes of forest, and somewhere in the near distance there was the sound of a brook. Though there were no streetlights this far out, the glow of the stars and a three-quarters moon was enough to guide me past the occasional dark hump of an automobile drawn up alongside the curb, and each of the houses I passed seemed to have a lamp burning in every window. I was running a bit late because I’d spent the better part of an hour deciding on what to bring the hostess — an arrangement of dried flowers and pinecones that seemed to have been sprayed with white concrete in which were set some sort of piebald bird feathers, a bottle of bonded Kentucky bourbon, or a cheese that caught my eye in the grocery window. I’d settled on the cheese finally — the dried flowers were too risky, since I didn’t know a thing about botany and I’d be entering the domain of experts, and I passed over the bourbon because I didn’t know how Prok felt about the consumption of alcoholic beverages, though I suspected he was opposed to it both as a waste of time and inimical to one’s health.

When I did get there, at quarter past six and out of breath, I had to stop and recheck the address. I’d always been shy of social gatherings, afraid that I was in the wrong place or that I’d got the date confused or that the hosts wouldn’t recognize me or had forgotten they’d invited me to begin with. It was foolish, I know, but I’d even felt that way with my childhood friends in Michigan City, standing on a playmate’s doorstep with a catcher’s mitt or a basketball as I’d done a thousand times before and suddenly filled with the conviction that they’d turn me away, say something sharp and wounding, run me off like a stray dog. It didn’t help matters that I was out of my depth with this middle-aged professor and his wife (whoever she might turn out to be, I was terrified of her and what she might think of me, and in a state approaching panic over the thought of the other guests, who, for all I knew, might range from the town mayor to my literature professor and the president of the university). What would I say to them? What would I do?

So why then had I accepted the invitation in the first place? I can’t say, really. It was like that moment with Laura Feeney in the hall outside registration, a moment that seems to present itself as offering up a choice but is in actuality a confluence of circumstances that pins you to a course of action as decisively as Prok pins his Cynipids to the mounting board. Fate, I guess you would call it, though I wouldn’t want to give the impression that I’m making any sort of metaphysical or mystical connection here — I haven’t got a mystical bone in my body, not after spending the last sixteen years with Prok. I made my choice. I said yes, as I was to say yes to so many other invitations Prok would offer me, whether I wanted to or not. Again, looking back on it, I could see that Prok was a father figure to a young man whose own father was long dead and gone, and that he was powerful and persuasive — no one ever said no to Prok — but it went beyond that too. I was flattered by him. He’d chosen me — he was impressed by me — and I broke my first date with Iris to be there on that Saturday night in February.

But I had to recheck the address because the house was so — what better word for it? — unusual. From the street, in the grip of the night, it looked like a gingerbread house, something out of a fairy tale, the haunt of the necromancer or the sprite. The brick path wound circuitously through clumps of vegetation (Prok’s horticultural credo: “The orthogonal line is the recourse of the city planner, the curvilinear the gardener’s delight”), and though you could see that there was an order to it and that it did indeed lead to the front door, the effect was deceptively natural. As for the house, it glowed with windows and featured a stepped, shingled roof and walls constructed of odd-shaped bricks (seconds Prok had bought for a song) with great dabs of mortar leaking over them like icing on a sagging cake. This was the house of a scientist? I couldn’t believe it. I was certain I’d got the address wrong — misheard it, transposed the numbers — but by this time I was standing on the doorstep, and I was late, so there was nothing else to do but tuck the cheese under my arm (it was a Stilton and it must have weighed ten pounds), steel myself and lift the brass knocker.

A woman answered the door — or rather a female, as Prok would have it. She was tiny, childlike, with hair even blacker than Iris’s and cut short in a bob that left her ears exposed. She had a beautiful smile, natural and unaffected, and she was training it on me even as she pulled the door back with a slim white hand.

“I was — I’ve come — Does Professor Kinsey live here? By any chance?”

“I’m Clara,” she said, already accepting the cheese. “And you must be John. But here, come on in, Prok’s just finishing up some things and he’ll be with us in a moment.”

She led me inside, into the living room, which was as unconventional as the exterior of the house. The walls were painted black (or, as I was later to learn, stained with tea, which Prok felt would preserve them more effectively than paint) and the furniture, rustic and homemade, was of bent hickory, similarly painted black. There was a stand-up piano against one wall (also black), several bookcases full of records, and a gramophone. Lamps were placed about the room, softening the corners, and a fire burned in the open hearth. There was no sign of other guests.

“Mrs. Kinsey, I have to tell you I’m so sorry to have been, well, late — I’m not normally — but, I, uh, had some trouble finding the place, and I, uh—”

“Nonsense,” she said. “We don’t stand on ceremony here, John — we’ll eat when we’re hungry, so don’t you worry yourself. And please, call me Clara. Or better yet, Mac.” Her voice was breathy and hesitant, each syllable pulling back from the next with a gentle adhesion, as if words were like candy, like taffy, lingering reluctantly on her lips. She was forty-one years old, the mother of three, and no beauty, but she was fascinating, utterly, and from that moment forward she had me in her thrall.

We were standing in the middle of the room on what appeared to be a homemade rug. I must have been studying it unconsciously because Mac (her nickname, an abbreviation of her maiden name, McMillen, just as Prok was the short version of Professor K.) remarked, “Lovely, isn’t it? My husband’s handiwork.”

I said something inane in reply, along the lines that he was a very talented man.

Mac let out a little laugh. I wondered where the children were, where the other guests were, and at the same time secretly prayed there would be none. “But listen to me — I haven’t asked if you would like something to drink?”

I would. I wanted a bourbon, a good stiff one, to bring back the feeling in my fingers and toes and unfasten my tongue from the roof of my mouth. “Oh,” I said, “I don’t know. Anything. Water maybe?”

At that moment, as if on cue (but that’s a cliché: he was there all along, observing from the hallway, I’m sure of it), Prok appeared with an enameled tray in his hand, and on it a selection of liqueurs and three miniature long-stemmed glasses.

“Milk,” he cried, “glad you could make it, and welcome, welcome.” He set the tray down on a low black table in front of the hearth and motioned for me to take a seat. “I see you’ve already met Mac, and what’s this — a cheese? — ah, splendid. Perhaps Mac would do the honors, and some crackers, please, dear, crackers would be nice. And now,” turning back to me, “you’ll have a glass of spirits?”

I accepted one of the little glasses — about a thimbleful — while Prok expatiated on the properties of the various liqueurs on the tray, remarking how a colleague traveling in Italy had brought him back this one and how that one had come highly recommended by Professor Simmonds of the History Department, and I really didn’t have to say much in response. I sipped at the drink — it smelled powerfully of some herb I couldn’t quite place and had the consistency and cloying sweetness of molasses — all the while realizing that my initial surmise was correct: Professor Kinsey didn’t know the first thing about drinking. We were talking about the marriage course — my impressions of it — when Mac slipped back into the room with another tray, this one featuring my Stilton in the center of an array of saltine crackers.

“Just dissecting the marriage course,” he said, giving her a look I couldn’t fathom, and it occurred to me then that he must have taken her sex history as well — she must have been among the first — and the thought of that, of the husband quizzing the wife, gave me a strange rush of feeling. He was a master of the interview, as I knew from experience and would have reemphasized for me again and again as the years went by, and there was no dodging him — he could tell in an instant if the subject was hedging, almost as if he were hooked up to him like a human lie detector. She would have had to tell him everything, and he would know her secrets, as he knew mine. I saw, with a sudden thrill, the power of that knowledge. To give up your history was to give up your soul, and to possess it was the ultimate aggrandizement, like the cannibal growing ever greater with the subsumed spirit of each of his successive victims.

At dinner, the conversation was exclusively of sex. Prok went on about his project, how he could develop a taxonomy of human sexual behavior in the way he was able to classify wasps according to variations within the species. We were eating a stew of some sort — goulash, Prok called it — which he’d prepared himself. He served milk rather than beer or wine, pouring it out of a glass pitcher and making one of his rare stabs at wit (“Care for some milk, Milk? ”), and there were just the three of us at table. The children had apparently been fed earlier, so that, as Prok put it, “We can get to know one another without having to divide our attention,” and every time Prok drew a breath, which was rarely, Mac put in her two cents on the subject. And that surprised me, because she was every bit as informed as he — and every bit as capable of dropping terms like “cunnilingus” and “fellatio” into the dinner conversation.

For my part, I luxuriated in the attention. I’d never thought of myself as anything other than ordinary, even when I made A’s in my course work or managed to score a touchdown on a broken play in a high school football game, and here were two vibrant, intelligent, worldly people — two adults — soliciting my opinions and treating me as an equal. It was heady, and I felt I never wanted to leave that table or that sofa by the fireplace where we settled in after dinner with bowls of vanilla ice cream while Prok lectured in his high tireless voice and Mac knitted with perfect articulation. Nine o’clock came and went, and then ten. Mac disappeared at one point to be sure the children were in bed (two girls of fourteen and sixteen, and a boy of eleven), and there was an awkward moment during which I expressed my concern over the lateness of the hour, but Prok dismissed me with a wave. Far from being exhausted, he shifted into a higher gear.

He poked at the fire, then eased himself down on the floor with the cloth braids he was fashioning into a new rug (“Very economical, Milk — you should take it up. Any discards, old clothes, sheets and the like, plus strips of muslin dyed in whatever color you prefer, and you’d be surprised how durable such a rug can be. Why this one, the one beneath me here? I wove this as an assistant professor in our quaint little rental back in 1921, our first home, in fact, after we were married”) and in the quiet broken only by the snap and hiss of the fire, he opened up to me all his hopes and aspirations for the project. Ten thousand interviews, that was what he wanted — at a minimum — and the interviews had to be conducted face-to-face to assure accuracy, unlike the printed questionnaires or subjective analyses previous researchers had favored. Only then could we (he was already including the young neophyte before him) have the data to drive down the hidebound superstitions that had ruined so many lives. Take masturbation, for instance. Did I know that reputable people — doctors, ministers and the like — had actually promoted the egregious notion that masturbation leads to insanity?

He turned to me, his spectacles giving back twin images of the fire eating at a split oak log so that the reflection dissolved into his eyes. “Why, masturbation is the most natural and harmless outlet the species has acquired for release of sexual tension. It is purely positive, a veritable benefit to the species and to the society at large, and any minister worth his salt should be delivering sermons on that subject, believe me. Just think, Milk, just think of all the harm done by sexual repression and the guilt normal healthy adolescents are meant needlessly to feel—” I must have colored at this point, thinking of our last interview, because he changed tack suddenly and asked me point-blank if I wouldn’t help him by contributing to the project.

“Well, yes, I mean — certainly, I would be—” I fumbled, trying to recover myself. “But what could I do, in any material way, that is—?”

“Very simple,” he said, shifting his legs on the rug. “Just poll the men in your rooming house — you say there are fourteen of them in addition to yourself?”

“That’s right,” I said. “Yes. Fourteen.”

“Just poll them and convince them to come on into my office to give up their histories — you’ve got a potential one-hundred-percent group, there, John, do you realize that?”

I wasn’t the sort who fraternized easily — I think I’ve made that much clear here — and the prospect was daunting, but I found myself nodding my head in assent, because, as I say, you just didn’t say no to Prok.

And yet, even as I sat there conspiring with him like a favored son, somewhere in the back of my mind, obscured for the moment, was a dull but persistent sense of guilt over Iris. You see, it wasn’t simply my indecision over the cheese that had made me late that evening, but the fact that I’d left Iris — or the Iris situation, I should say — to the last minute. I don’t know why that was — I’m not a procrastinator, or not normally, else I wouldn’t have accomplished what I had at school or would come to achieve in later years with Prok — but every time I thought of phoning Iris my heart began to pound so violently I was afraid I was having a seizure, until finally I realized I had to see her in person, if only to explain myself and try to patch things as best I could. I did want to go out with her, very much so — I’d begun to think about her at odd moments, picturing her the way she was that day in the library or that afternoon at my mother’s, swinging her legs beneath the chair like a little girl, gesticulating to make a point, her eyes boiling up like cataracts over any issue at all, over parasites or poetry or the plight of the Lithuanians — but the longer I put off breaking our date the worse it was.

Finally it was Saturday, and I still hadn’t mounted the courage to see her. I woke to a burst of Paul’s blunt, ratcheting snores and a gray scrim of ice on the window, thinking Iris, thinking I had to go to her dorm right that minute and ask her to breakfast so I could look into her eyes over fried eggs and muffins and coffee and tell her I’d take her out the following Saturday, without fail, that I was looking forward to it, that there was nothing I’d rather do (and maybe, since I’d already bought the tickets for tonight she might want to go with a friend?), but that she had to understand, and I was sorry, more than sorry — distraught — and could she ever forgive me? But I didn’t go to her dorm. It was too early. Seven. It was only seven, or just past, and she wouldn’t be up for hours, or so I told myself. Instead, I took my books to breakfast alone at the Commons and read the first six stanzas of Milton’s “Il Penseroso” over and over till I couldn’t take it anymore (“Hence vain deluding Joys,/The brood of Folly without father bred,” et cetera), pushed myself up from the table and slammed out the door before I knew what I was doing.

The clock tower was ringing eight; the cold leached through the soles of my shoes. One of Laura Feeney’s discarded lettermen, vastly overfed and with feet like snowshoes, limped past me on his way to the gym, even as I cut through a patch of woods and made diagonally across a dead brown strip of lawn for Iris’s dorm. Inside, there was a smell of artificial fragrance, as if I’d somehow been transposed to the Coty counter at Marshall Field’s, and the resident assistant — a girl of twenty with bad skin and a limp blond pageboy — looked up at me as if I’d come to ravish every coed on the premises. “Hello,” I said, moving briskly across the room and trying to keep my head of steam up, because it was now or never, “I was wondering if, by any chance, well, if Iris McAuliffe is in. If she’s up yet, I mean.”

She gave me a stricken look, her features reduced to the essentials.

“I’m John,” I said. “John Milk. Would you tell her John Milk is here? Please?”

“She’s not in.”

“What do mean she’s not in? At eight o’clock in the morning? On a Saturday?”

But the RA wasn’t forthcoming. She simply repeated herself in a long, drawn-out sigh of exasperation, as if I’d spent every morning of my life in the reception hall of the girls’ dorm, pestering her: “She’s not in.”

I looked to the door at the far end of the lounge, the one that gave onto the inner sanctum beyond, and at that moment it swung open and two girls emerged, buttoning up their coats and adjusting their hats for the plunge through the outer doors and into the concrete clasp of the morning. They gave me a look of amusement — what man in his right mind would be calling for a girl at this hour? — and passed out of doors in a flurry of giggles. “All right, then,” I said, taking the coward’s way out, “can I leave her a note?”

But now I was with Prok, in front of the fire, agreeing to take my first unambiguous step on the road to a career in sex research, and who would have guessed? Who even knew there was such a thing? Ask a boy what he wants to be and he’ll answer cowboy, fireman, detective. Ask an undergraduate and he’ll say he intends to go into the law or medicine or that he wants to teach or study business or engineering. But no one chooses sex research.

I watched Prok work at his rag rug, pulling tight a six-inch strand of cloth, then interweaving it with another, the whole business spread now like a skirt over his sprawled legs. He was talking about his H-histories, how he’d been to the penal farm at Putnamville on his own and begun taking histories among the prisoners—“And they are very extensive histories, Milk, make no doubt about it”—and how one man in particular had offered to introduce him into the homosexual underworld of Chicago, and how significant that was, as H-histories were every bit as vital to assessing the larger picture as heterosexual histories, as I, no doubt, could appreciate. And then he paused a moment to offer a clarification, his eyes seeking mine and holding to them with that unwavering gaze he must have mastered by staring down his own image in the mirror for whole hours at a time. His voice softened, dropped. “That is, John, I believe you, of all people, should be especially attuned to the issue—”

I might have colored. I don’t know. But I do remember his embrace that night as he stood at the door thanking me for coming, thanking me for the cheese and my insights and offering all sorts of Prok-advice and admonishments about the cold, the icy streets, incompetent drivers and the like. “Goodnight, Milk,” he said, and took me in his arms and pressed me to him so that I could feel the ripple and contraction of his muscles and the warmth of him and breathe in the scent of his hair oil, his musk, the hot sweet invitation of his breath.

He let me go. The door pulled shut. I walked off into the darkness.

3

“So, paul, please, you’re going to have to reiterate it for me, because I must be missing something here. You’re opposed to science, is that it? To data collection? Honestly, I just don’t get it.”

We were in our room, waiting to go over to dinner, the day shutting down around the last pale fissures of a lusterless sun. It was cold. And not only outside: Mrs. Lorber must have had the furnace running on fumes. Paul — and I realize I haven’t yet described him, and you’ll forgive me, I hope, because I’m a novice at this — Paul was lying diagonally across his unmade bed, his head propped against the wall behind him, a comforter drawn up to his chin. He was almost a full year older than I and he wore a very thin, obsessively manicured mustache of the Ronald Colman variety, but his natural hair color was so pale and rinsed-out that you could barely detect it, even close up. His eyes were blue, but again, so weak a shade as to be almost transparent. He had two ears, a nose, a mouth, a chin — and a pair of thin colorless lips that always seemed to be clamping down on something, due, I think, to a congenital overbite. What else? His parents were English, from Yorkshire, he loved chess, Lucky Strikes and The Lone Ranger, and, of course, Betsy. With whom he’d gone all the way, though they were yet to be married — or rather, with whom he went all the way all the time. How did I know? He’d described it to me — coitus with Betsy — in the kind of detail that would have gratified Prok, if only I could get him to sit for an interview.

I would stay awake nights waiting for him to come home so we could lie smoking in the dark while he went on in his soft hoarse tones about how he’d maneuvered her against the wall in the hallway of the campus heating plant or pinned her beneath him on the backseat of a borrowed car, the heater going full, and how willing she was, how hot, how she only wore skirts now and no underwear, just to facilitate things, and how they longed to be married so they could do it in a bed, with sheets and blankets and no worries of the police or the night watchman or anybody else …

“But why should I?” he said. “Why should I waste an hour and a half — or what, two hours? — on some stranger I’ve never met and might not even like? What’s in it for me?”

“Science,” I said. “The advancement of knowledge. Did you ever stop to consider that if there were more men like Dr. Kinsey maybe you wouldn’t have to sneak in and out of the heating plant with your fiancée, because premarital sexual relations would be sanctioned, even encouraged?”

He was silent a moment. The window had gone gray and I got up to switch on the lamp before wrapping myself in a blanket and easing back down on my bed. Shadows infested the corners. I could see my breath hanging atomized in the air. “I don’t know,” he said, “it’s too personal.”

“Too personal?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “How can you say that to me, of all people, when you give me a running description of everything you and Betsy do seven nights of the week, whether I want to hear it or not—”

“Aah,” he said, and his hand rose and fell like a pulsing vein beneath the skin of the comforter, “you’re just a sad sack. You don’t even know where it goes, do you? You can’t imagine, for all your marriage course, how sweet it is, how hot and sweet, and I guess I’m going to have to help you find it the first time, huh, with what’s her name, Iris?”

“Screw you, Paul. I resent that. I do. Just because you got lucky with Betsy, found somebody, I mean, that doesn’t—”

“Okay,” he said, “all right. Keep your pants on. I’ll do it. Okay? You happy now?”

It took me a moment, the breath congealing under my nose, the blanket drawn tight at my throat. “Yes,” I said finally, and I tried to sound mollified, above it all, but he’d hurt me, he had — I was inexperienced and I knew it, but was that a crime? Did he have to rub it in? Didn’t he think I wanted love — love and sex — as much as anybody else?

He was thinking. He kicked absently at the fringe of the comforter to better wrap it round his stocking feet. Two fingers licked over the shadow of his mustache. “So where do I go? Are you signing people up, or what?”

I was up off the bed and at the desk now, the blanket trailing across the floor, notebook in hand. “I’ve got his schedule right here,” I said.

Before the month was out, I was promoted from library underling to special assistant to Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, Professor of Zoology, and when I chanced to pass Elster in the hallway or on the steps of the biology building, he looked right through me as if I didn’t exist. I suppose there must have been some resentment among a faction of the biology majors as well — I had no training whatever in the field, aside from the introductory course I’d taken from Professor Eigenmann in my second year, and here I’d been rewarded with what might be considered one of the department’s plum positions — but what Prok was looking for above all was someone to whom he could relate, someone who could share in his enthusiasm for the inchoate project that would ultimately produce the two seminal works in the history of sex research. That person could have been anyone, regardless of discipline. That it was I, that I was elected to be the first of Prok’s inner circle, is something for which I will be forever grateful. And proud. To this day, I thank Laura Feeney for it.

At any rate, Prok installed me at a desk in the back corner of the office, where I was wedged between towering gunmetal-gray bookcases and enjoyed a forward view of the windows, which were piled high with galls wrapped in mesh sacks to contain any insects that might hatch from them, and these galls might have been collected in the Sierra Madre Oriental or Prescott, Arizona, or even in the Appenines or the rugged hills outside Hokkaido (interested parties were sending Prok samples from all over the world). There was an indefinable smell to the office, not unpleasant, exactly, but curious, arising from and connected only to that constructed and confined space on the second floor of Biology Hall. The wasps had something to do with it, of course, but a gall — this is the woody excrescence found on oaks and rose bushes, the growth of which is promoted by the larvae of the wasps living within it — really has a bit of a pleasant smell, a smell of bark and tannin, I suppose. (Break one from a tree next time you’re out in the woods and hold it to your nose a moment and you’ll see what I mean.) And the wasps themselves had no discernible odor, so far as I could detect. There were the lingering traces of the cigarette smoke Prok’s subjects exhaled in dense blue clouds as they gave up their histories, and the smell of Prok himself — bristling and spanked clean; he was a great one for the cold plunge each morning and almost obsessive about soap. Finally, into the mix went the perfume of the three female assistants, who shared the desk with me and rotated shifts round my schedule, plus the usual odors of a working office: ink, pencil shavings, the machine oil of the typewriters and (in this case) the chemical used to discourage a minute species of beetle that routinely wreaks havoc on entomological collections round the world.

On my first day, Prok helped me settle in and gave me my initial lessons in deciphering his secret code and translating the results to his files. He was very precise, a model of efficiency, and if his longhand was somewhat artistic, full of flourishes and great slashing loops, his printing, like mine, was an almost mechanical marshaling of block letters so uniform it might be mistaken at a glance for typescript. Looking over my shoulder, rocking from foot to foot, his energy barely contained, he would cluck over my writing, seize my hand impatiently or snatch the paper out of my hands and ball it up as a reject. This went on for hours that first day, he pacing back and forth from his own desk to mine, until finally, when he felt I’d got the hang of it, he eased one haunch down on the corner of my desk and said, “You know, Milk, you’re really doing quite well. And I have to confess that I’m pleased.”

I looked up at him and murmured something in reply, trying to indicate my pleasure for the praise but at the same time not sound too obsequious — Prok may have been firmly in charge, always in charge, a born leader, but he never demanded obsequiousness, no matter what you might have heard from other sources.

A moment slipped by. Then he said, “You’ve noticed the galls, of course.”

He moved easily up off the corner of the desk, went to the bookcase and lifted down a massive, bulbous, many-faceted thing that looked like the preserved head of some extinct beast, then laid it on the wooden surface before me. “Biggest known gall extant,” he said. “Twelve chambers, fifteen point nine ounces. Collected it myself in the Appalachians.”

We both admired it a moment, and then he encouraged me to run my hands over the craggy pocked surface of the thing—“Nothing to be afraid of, it’s simply the expression of a particularly vigorous colony of Cynipidae. But then you probably don’t know the first thing about Cynipids, do you? Unless, perhaps, Professor Eigenmann touched on them in the introductory course?” He was smiling now. Grinning, actually. This last was a joke, both on me — how could I have remembered? — and his colleague, who would have had to cover all of life on earth, from the paramecium to the horsetail to the giant sequoia and Homo sapiens, in the course of a semester and could hardly have devoted more than a single breath to the gall wasp, if that.

I grinned back at him, not quite knowing what was expected of me. “I know that they’re wasps,” I said. “And that they’re relatively small compared to the ones that would be flying around out there if it were summer now.”

“This is a parasitic insect, exquisitely adapted,” he said, looking down almost lovingly on the gall. “An all-but-sedentary species, flightless and living out its entire life cycle in a single gall on a single tree. Perhaps, once in a great while, the adults will emerge and crawl overland to another tree fifty or a hundred feet away, and that is the compass of their independence and the extent of their range, which makes them such an interesting study — you see, I have been able to trace the origins of a given species simply by following its geographic trail and noting variations in inherited characteristics.”

He began pacing again, stopping only to pluck off his glasses and gaze out the window a moment, before coming back to the desk to gently remove the exemplary gall and carefully replace it atop the bookcase. “But I’m afraid I have some bad news for you”—he was grinning; this was another joke in infancy—“they do tend to have a rather limited sex life. Unfortunately — for them, that is — males are very rare indeed in Cynipid society, most species reproducing through parthenogenesis. You do recall parthenogenesis from Professor Eigenmann’s course, don’t you?”

Another grin. His face dodged at mine and then away again. “Don’t think I bring up the subject of my Cynipids just to hear myself talk, and, yes, yes, I can see that questioning look in your eye, don’t try to hide it—What in God’s name is Kinsey up to now, you’re thinking, no? But there’s a method to my madness. What I’m trying to say is, your presence here is the hallmark of a new era: as of Monday, I will be reducing the hours of my three female assistants in your favor, Milk. I’ve gone as far as I can with the gall wasp, and now, with your help and the prospect of adequate funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Research Council, we are going to focus on one thing and one thing only, and I do think you know what that is …”

That year march came in like a lamb and went out like a lamb too, and I found myself doing double duty in Prok’s office and his garden alike. The mild weather seemed to invigorate him (as if a man of his almost superhuman energy needed invigoration), getting him out of doors as much as possible on weekends and particularly on Sundays. He’d had a strict Methodist upbringing that caused him all sorts of adolescent torment with regard to his natural urges, and once he’d discovered science and applied a phylogenetic approach to human behavior, he became rabidly a-religious and made a point of working his garden while the rest of Bloomington was at church. By the end of the month it was warm enough so that he was able to work bare-chested and in shorts, and he encouraged me to do the same. Eventually, as the days warmed into late spring and summer, we would both habitually work as near to naked as was decently possible — but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

I remember that month distinctly as a time when I felt at peace with myself in a way I hadn’t for a long while, if ever. There was the constant attention of Prok, his gentle prodding, his instruction, the feeling of mutuality as we sat in silence, bent over our desks, the sense of getting in on the ground floor of something revolutionary and exciting. There were nature hikes — he and Mac took me and the children to Lake Monroe, Bluespring Caverns, Clear Creek, for rambles in the patchwork of fields and forest out back of their house, Prok all the while lecturing on the geology of the soil, on the weeds and wildflowers that had begun to spring up in the clearings or the first of the migratory birds to reappear — and I remember too the enveloping peace of the dinner table and the hearth. It felt good to be with them, good just to be there. Mac simply took to preparing an extra portion any time I was working in the garden or we returned from one of our rambles, and the more I protested that I was putting them out, that I didn’t want to be a pest or nuisance, the more the two of them went out of their way to reassure me. It got to the point where I was spending more time at the Kinseys’ than at Mrs. Lorber’s, and Paul, who’d been the rock of my world for the past three years — my dearest and closest friend on campus — began to joke that the only time he saw me anymore was when I was asleep. He had Betsy, I had Prok and Mac. It was only inevitable that we should grow apart.

It was around this time that I did something of which I’m not particularly proud, but which should be reported here, just to set the record straight. Or rather keep it straight. After all, what is the point of this exercise — of this remembrance of things past — if I’m not going to be absolutely candid? I have nothing to hide. I’m a different person now than I was when I stepped into that marriage course, and I wouldn’t change anything that’s happened, not for the world.

At any rate, I was an apt pupil — I’ve always been good with puzzles and ciphers — and I learned Prok’s code in record time. Within two or three weeks I had it memorized. One afternoon — it was midweek and Prok had driven up to Indianapolis to address the faculty of a private school on the subject of the sexual outlets available to adolescents, and, not coincidentally, to collect as many histories as he could, of both staff and student body — I found myself alone in the office, transcribing coded histories from Prok’s notation sheets to a larger format for the files so that we could calculate the incidence of various behaviors for statistical analysis (in Prok’s system, a single encrypted sheet contained as much as twenty pages of information; eventually, of course, this information would have to be collated, at first by hand, and then, after we got our Hollerith tabulating machine, on punch cards). Initially, the work seemed exciting — the subject was sex, after all — but on this day, with these histories, which were of undergraduate men not much different from the one-hundred-percent group I’d managed to get him from my rooming house, it was pretty pedestrian. There had been some (limited) experimentation with other boys and farm animals, furtive masturbation, little coital experience but a good dose of petting, deep kissing and (again limited) forays into oral-genital contact. My hand ached from clutching the pen. My fingertips were stained with ink. I stifled a yawn.

I don’t know what came over me or how the idea even sprang into my head, but I found myself looking through Prok’s desk for the secondary code, the one that gave the key to the identities of all the individuals in his files — a code he was distinctly chary of sharing with me or anyone else, for security’s sake. If his subjects weren’t absolutely assured of anonymity, the vast majority of them would never have given up their histories in the first place. Security was the cornerstone of the project — then, as it is now. But when I actually had that code in my hand, I couldn’t help noticing certain correspondences with the interview code (imagine a kind of reinvented shorthand, conflating abbreviations, scientific symbols and the markers of the stenographer’s code into a new sort of encryption), and once I hit on those correspondences I couldn’t help my mind from leaping ahead. In brief, it took me less than an hour to break the secondary code, and when I had it, when I held the key to all the files in my hand, I couldn’t help using it. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t resist.

In later years, when Prok was the single most recognized person in this country outside of the president himself, when he appeared on the cover of Time magazine and the press couldn’t get enough of him, the most frequent question put to him concerned his own sex life, and he would invariably answer that he had contributed his history to the project as so many thousands of others had and that it would remain anonymous just as theirs would. That, of course, was true, and only we of the inner circle came to know the details of that sex life firsthand — we were sworn to secrecy, because the fabric of all of our lives would have unraveled if any of it got out — but on that sleepy afternoon with an over-active sun poking through the blinds and big droning flies sailing obliviously over the racks of preserved wasps, Dr. Kinsey’s was the first file I went to, and after his, it was Mac’s.

I stood there at the filing cabinet, my breath coming in shallow gulps, the manila folder spread open before me. Every other second I stole a glance over my shoulder, ready to slip the file back in place at the first hint of a sound from the outer office. I was keyed up, yes, but riveted too. Here was Prok’s history, right here in my hand, his deepest nature revealed in the most elemental way: he had my history, and now I had his, and it was unlike anything I’d anticipated.

As a boy Prok had been even more awkward and shy than I, not at all interested in organized athletics or social activities of any kind, and to compensate for a system weakened by early bouts with rickets, typhoid and rheumatic fever, he took to nature, hiking and exploring obsessively till he’d built himself into the fit and vigorous man I knew (though he never lost his pronounced stoop, a result of double curvature of the spine). He was an Eagle Scout. He masturbated compulsively. His father was a religious moralist. Until he was well into his twenties — older than I — he never had a mature and satisfying sexual experience, and that came only after his marriage to Clara.

And here was where his history got interesting. Though the honeymoon involved a long and arduous early-summer hiking trip through the White Mountains during which he and his bride were forced together in the close proximity of their tent each night, the marriage wasn’t consummated till some months on. The delay, as I was later to learn, was a result both of their inexperience and a slight physiological impediment with regard to Clara’s hymen, which was unusually thick (added to the fact that Prok’s penis was a good deal larger than normal). I pictured their mutual embarrassment, their prudery, their lack of knowledge or insight, envisioned them kissing and stroking and wrestling in their sleeping bags and tents, on the cots in the summer camp where they served as counselors in July and August of that year, and then back at home in their first rental in Bloomington, nothing gained but frustration. After three months of marriage, sex still remained a mystery for them — it wasn’t until a surgical procedure relieved Mac’s discomfiture that they were finally able to achieve coitus. Prok was twenty-eight at the time.

Knowing this — uncovering it in the way an Egyptologist might have decrypted the hieroglyphs telling of the life and habits of some ancient pharaoh — gave me a strange rush of sensation. On the one hand, I couldn’t help thinking of my mentor as somewhat diminished — here he was preaching sexual liberation, at least privately — and he’d been as much a prisoner of antiquated mores, of shyness, ignorance and his own inability to act, as I was. And yet, on the other, his history gave me hope and a kind of eerie confidence that my own sexual confusion would eventually resolve itself.

There was more. His H-history, which began with adolescent alliances, as mine had, became increasingly complex. The zoology professor, the distinguished scientist with a star beside his name in American Men of Science, the middle-aged father of three and happily married entomologist with the no-nonsense manner, was moving higher up the 0–6 scale, having initiated relations with several of his graduate students in the course of their long field trips and ultimately experiencing an intense and very close relationship with a male student not much older than I. And how do you suppose that made me feel? And Mac, what of her?

My blood was racing and I suppose if anyone had looked in on me in the office that day they would have seen the color in my face. I riffled through the pages, all greedy eyes and trembling fingers, then slipped Prok’s folder back into the cabinet and took up Mac’s. Her history was more extensive than I would have guessed, and as the symbols gave themselves up to me I couldn’t help picturing her naked, her hands, her lips, the way she walked, the cloying catch in her voice. I was aroused, I admit it, and I was already up from the desk and searching through the files for Laura Feeney’s history, for Paul’s and the Kinseys’ children’s, when I caught myself. What was I doing? This was voyeuristic, it was wrong, a violation of the trust Prok had invested in me, and here I was throwing it all over just to satisfy the tawdriest kind of curiosity. Suddenly — it was dark now, the lamps softly glowing, the galls shadowy and surreal — I felt ashamed, as deeply ashamed as I’d ever felt in my life. I could barely breathe until I’d put the files back and replaced the code under lock and key in the drawer, all the while listening for footsteps in the hall. I switched off the lights. Locked up. And when I slunk off into the corridor, I turned up my collar and averted my face like a criminal.

The next day Prok was back, a volcano of energy, whistling a Hugo Wolf song under his breath, bustling about the office in a running pantomime of quick, jerky movements, up from his desk and back again, a glance into one of the Schmitt boxes, then the files, a cursory check of a two-years’-dormant gall that had suddenly begun to hatch out and then a shout from the microscope—“A new genus, here, Milk, I believe, a new genus altogether!” When I’d first come in he gave me half a moment to settle myself and then, with a grin, he laid a compact folder on my desk. “Eighteen histories,” he said, showing his teeth. “And thirty-six more promised. I was up till two in the morning just to record them.”

“Wonderful news,” I said, sharing the grin with him.

“Any difficulties while I was away?”

I fought to keep my face straight. Don’t shift your eyes, I told myself, don’t. “No,” I said, shifting my eyes, “no, everything was fine.”

He was looking at me curiously. I opened the folder in the hope of distracting him, but it didn’t work. Actually, I don’t think there was ever a person born on this earth more attuned to the nuances of human behavior than Prok, no one more sensitive to facial expression and what we’ve come to call body language — he was a bloodhound of the emotions, and he never missed a thing. “Everything?” he prodded.

I wanted to confess in that moment, but I didn’t. I murmured something in the affirmative, and, further to distract him, said, “Do you want me to transcribe these right away?”

He seemed absent, and didn’t answer immediately. He was always young-looking for his age — in those days people routinely took him for five to ten years younger than he actually was — but I saw the lines in his face then, the first faint tracings of the finished composition he would take to his grave with him. But he must be exhausted, I thought, pushing himself to collect his histories, driving all that way in his rattling old Nash, up late, up early, nobody to help him. “You know,” he said after a moment, and it was almost as if he were reading my mind, “I’ve been thinking how convenient it would be — how essential — for me to train another interviewer, someone I could trust to collect the data along with me, a person who might not necessarily have any scientific training but who could immerse himself in the technique I’ve developed and apply it rigorously. A quick study, John. Somebody like you.” A pause. “What do you say?”

I was so taken by surprise — and so consumed with guilt over my invasion of the files — that I fumbled this one badly. “I — well, of course,” I began. “Well, certainly, you know, I would — and I do have to graduate yet …”

“English,” he said, and the noun came off his tongue like something distasteful, something chewed over and spat out again. “I never quite understood the application of that — as a field, that is.”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. He was watching me still, watching me with a preternatural intentness. “I thought I might like to maybe teach. Someday, I mean.”

He sighed. For all his qualities, patience wasn’t one of them. Nor did he take disappointment well. “Just think about it, John, that’s all I ask. No need to decide right this minute — let’s talk over dinner, and we are expecting you tonight, six sharp, that is, unless you have other plans?”

“Sex research? Are you nuts?”

Paul was stretched across his bed as if he’d been washed up there by a tide just recently receded. He was chewing gum and idly bouncing a tennis ball up off the racquet propped on his chest. Half a dozen books were scattered across the floor, face-down, another kind of flotsam. I didn’t feel like explaining it to him — he wouldn’t have understood anyway.

“At least it’s a job,” I said, pulling the sweater up over my head as carefully as I could so as not to disarrange my hair. I was changing for the Kinseys (they didn’t stand on ceremony, as Mac had said — behind closed doors they were even what might have been considered bohemian — but I felt that a dinner invitation, no matter how frequent or informal, required a jacket and tie, and I still feel that way).

Paul let the ball dribble off the racquet and fall to the floor, where it took three or four reduced hops and disappeared under my desk. “But the sort of questions he asks — it’s embarrassing. You’re not going to—?” he caught himself, then saw it in my face. “You are, aren’t you?”

I was knotting my tie in the mirror, studying my eyes, the way the hair clung slick to the sides of my head. “You didn’t seem to have any objections at the time, if I recall — you said, in fact, that you found the experience unique. Wasn’t that the word you used, ‘unique’?”

“Look, John, I might be all wet about this, but don’t you think it takes kind of an unusual sort of person to be poking into people’s dirty underwear all the time?”

I gave him a look that projected from the mirror all the way across the room, and there he was, diminished on the bed, diminished and growing smaller by the moment. I didn’t say anything.

“I wouldn’t want to call the professor an odd duck or a pervert or anything, but don’t you realize everyone’s going to think of you that way? And what about your mother? You think she’s going to approve — as a career choice, I mean?”

“I’ve told you a thousand times,” I said, slipping into my jacket now, “it’s science, research, just like anything else. Like Lister discovering antiseptic or what’s his name with the mold on the bread. Why shouldn’t we know as much as we possibly can about everything the human animal does?” I was at the door now, on my way out, but I paused to give him his chance to reply.

“The human animal? You sound just like him, John, you realize that? That’s what he says. But what about human beings, made in the image of God? What about us? What about the soul?”

I was irritated suddenly. “There is no God. And no soul either. You know what’s wrong with you?”

He never moved from the bed, never even lifted his head. “No, but I guess you’re going to tell me.”

“You just have a narrow mind, that’s all,” I informed him, and I let the door punctuate the truth of it on my way out.

Mrs. Lorber nodded to me from her post in the rocking chair and I gave her a strained smile in return, and then I was out in the street, the pussy willows at the corner in bloom, the tight pale buds firing on the trees, a warm breeze coming up out of the south freighted with the promise of the season to come. My eyes followed a trim dark girl as I crossed Atwater in front of the campus, her legs bare and thrilling as she receded down the avenue of trees, and I thought of Iris. I hadn’t seen her in over a month, since I’d stood her up, that is, and I felt bad about it — and, of course, the longer I put off facing her the worse it was.

A car rolled slowly up the street, so slowly I thought the driver meant to pull up to the curb and park. He was an old man, his face drawn and anxious, and he gripped the wheel as if he were afraid someone was about to snatch it away from him. I watched him a moment, long enough to see a pair of bicyclists overtake him, and he never looked right or left or gave any sign he noticed them or anything else, and I found myself daydreaming about getting a car of my own someday and just taking off up over the hills and out of town until the road spooled out beneath me and I could be anywhere. Students drifted by in both directions. A pair of boxer dogs sat on their haunches and regarded me steadily from behind a picket fence.

As I turned onto First, I encountered a couple just ahead of me, the girl leaning into the man till they were a single entity, strolling along on four synchronized limbs, and I crossed to the far side of the street to avoid having to overtake them; seeing them there, seeing the way they made each other complete, made me think of Iris again. What I’d done was inexcusable, and I told myself I was going to call her the very next day — just steel myself and do it — and if she told me to get lost, drop dead, dry up and blow away, well, at least the situation would be resolved. And there was no denying I deserved it.

So I walked. And if I noticed the various operations of nature in its season of renewal — if I smelled the scent of the forsythias or watched the birds ascend to the trees with bits of straw or twig clamped transversely in their beaks — I don’t know if I really remarked them, at least not consciously. It was spring, that was all, and I was on First Street, going to the Kinseys’. For dinner.

Prok himself met me at the door. He was dressed in his gardening shorts and nothing else, his legs lean and muscled, his bare toes gripping the long polished boards of the sweet-gum floor. His hair, as always, looked as if it had been freshly barbered. “Ah, Milk,” he said, ushering me in, “I’ve just been spreading a little humus on the irises — and the lilies too. Couldn’t resist it, the weather’s so agreeable.”

He put on a short-sleeved shirt for dinner, but no shoes and no socks. Mac too was dressed more informally than she’d been on any of the previous occasions I’d come to dinner, in her own pair of shorts and a pale blue cotton blouse that showed off her throat and the delicate line of her clavicle. She seemed to have cut her hair as well, and it was as short now — nearly, that is — as a man’s. I felt a bit foolish in my coat and tie, but both Prok and Mac reassured me: they were just rushing the season a bit, that was all.

After dinner the children dispersed, and Prok, Mac and I sat in the front room awhile, chatting. Prok was at his rug, Mac at her knitting. Prok had been talking excitedly about the premature return of some sort of bird — I forget which — and how it portended an early summer, when he broke off abruptly and turned to me. “Milk,” he said, “John. Have you thought about what I said this afternoon?”

Mac’s needles flashed. She was studying me out of her soft brown eyes, a maternal smile fixed at the corners of her lips.

I told him — told them—that I had. “It would be, well,” I said, “an honor. And I want to say how much, that is — that you can be so generous to a young man, a student, who, uh—”

“Good,” Prok said, in his honeyed tones, “very good. We’ll see about increasing your hours, then, and as soon as the semester is out, you’ll come on with me full-time. Salary to continue as current. And of course we’ll be working together in the garden as well.”

The evening went on in that vein — a congratulatory vein, in a relaxed and amiable atmosphere — until Mac excused herself and Prok and I were left alone. I had no qualms about the work he was offering — it was important, exciting, noble even — and I was deeply grateful to have been offered steady employment at a time when the global situation was anything but settled, yet I did have one reservation. Or rather scruple, I suppose I should say. I didn’t feel right about what I’d done in the office behind his back. Here he was, going out of his way to make something of me, to invest in me and my future in the most concrete way, and I had let him down, cheated him, betrayed his trust in me. He was talking about the school in Indianapolis — the Porter School, it was called — describing some of the details of the more intriguing histories, especially of two of the male faculty, who were hiding their extensive H-histories from the administration and the community too, when I interrupted him.

“Professor Kinsey,” I said. “Prok. Listen, I, well, I must tell you something.”

He stopped what he was doing — his long nimble fingers arrested on the fringe of the making rug — to focus his gaze on me. “Yes,” he said. “What is it, Milk?”

There seemed to be a ringing in my ears, some sort of tocsin repeating itself there, and I must have raised my voice to be heard over it. “I have a confession to make.”

For once, Prok had nothing to say. He receded into his interview mode, all ears.

“Well, I — when you were away I broke the code. The secondary code, that is. I–I’m afraid I went through your desk.”

His first response was disbelief. “Impossible,” he said.

I held his gaze unflinchingly, the bells ringing in my ears, his eyes fading in and out of focus till they were like twin blue planets floating in the ether. “I looked up only two histories, that’s all, and I know it’s unforgivable but I just couldn’t help myself …”

One word only: “Whose?”

Something flew at the window then, beating toward the light of the lamp, a bat, I suppose, or a bird disoriented in the shadows of the fallen night. There was a dull thump of wings against the glass, and then it was gone. “Yours,” I said, the voice strangled in my throat. “And Mac’s.”

He let me dangle a moment, then said, “You broke the code?”

“Yes,” I murmured.

“I never imagined anyone could break my code, even if they did somehow get access to it. You realize I’ll now have to devise a new one?”

“Yes.”

“And that it will have to be infinitely more complex?”

I said nothing, thinking of the work it would entail, the waste of his irretrievable time, my own idle curiosity and how I’d set back the project before I’d even had a chance to contribute to it. I was angry with myself. And ashamed.

Prok got up, crossed to the mantel and spent a moment rearranging the framed photos there. I studied him from the rear, the long tapering range of him, the narrowed shoulders, the bristle of hair. He went next to the window, peered out into the darkness, then came back across the room and settled on the sofa before reaching up to flick off the lamp. Shadows stole out to enclose the room, the only light emanating from a lamp in the hallway. “So,” he said finally, “you know my history, then? But here”—patting the place beside him on the sofa—“come here and sit.”

I obeyed. I got up from the chair and eased in beside him on the sofa.

He put his arm round my shoulder then and drew me to him so that our faces were no more than six inches apart. “You shouldn’t have pried, John,” he whispered. “Shouldn’t have. But I tell you one thing, it was good of you to confess.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Demonstrates character. You realize that, don’t you?” He gave my shoulder a fraternal squeeze. “You’re a fine young man, John, and I appreciate your candor, I do.”

And then something strange happened, the last thing I would have expected under the circumstances — he kissed me. Leaned in, closed his eyes and kissed me. Some period of time passed during which neither of us spoke, then he took me by the hand and led me up the stairs to the spare room in the attic, and I remember a Ping-Pong table there, children’s things, a fishing rod, an old sewing machine — and a bed. I didn’t go home that night, not until very late.

4

Iris was taking a Shakespeare course that semester in the same building where I was sitting in on Professor Ellis’s Modern British Poetry. I didn’t realize it at the time because I hadn’t yet got around to contacting her, though I’d meant to, so it was something of a surprise to run into her in the corridor one afternoon. As I remember it, the day was dismal, hanging like lint in the windows, the linoleum slick with wet, the whole world giving off a reek of mold and ferment. Rain had fallen steadily for the past week and there was more in the forecast. I was thinking nothing, umbrella, notebook and poetry text tucked under one arm, dripping hat in the other, making my desultory way through the mob of students in the corridor. Perhaps I was dreaming. Perhaps that was it.

She was on me before I could prepare myself, right there in front of me, two sets of shoulders parting, a girl in a yellow mackintosh grinning and ducking out of the way, somebody calling out something. Iris. There she was. We both pulled up short. “Hi,” she said, and her smile was an education in itself.

“Yes,” I said, “hi.”

Her eyes seemed to drain all the available light out of the corridor, and there was nothing I could do but stare into them, fascinated. She seemed to have done something to her hair too, or maybe it was just wet. What was she wearing? A sweater six sizes too big for her, woolen skirt, ankle socks, saddle shoes. “You have Ellis this period?”

“Modern British,” I said. “Poetry, that is. But listen, I never — did you get my note?”

She gave me a quizzical look.

“You know, that day — when we were supposed to go to the play? I left the tickets, and you know, a note, with the girl at the desk. The RA. I just wondered if you, well, if you got them.”

Two streams of students were making their way round us as we stood there like posts in the dank hallway. There was a buzz of talk, I saw Professor Ellis at the far end of the corridor, a hundred pairs of shoes squealed on the wet linoleum. “Please, John,” she said, her mouth drawn down to nothing, a slash, a telltale crack in the porcelain shell of her shining, martyred face, “not here. This isn’t the place.”

I just stared at her, mortified. An overwhelming sense of guilt and loss, of a doomed and inextricable culpability, began to drum at the taut skin of me, and, yes, the back of my neck went cold and the hair prickled on my scalp. “At least hear me out,” I said.

“You want to talk? All right. Fine. I’d be interested to hear what you have to say, I really would.” Her face was bled of color now, and she held herself absolutely rigid. “Four o’clock,” she said, her voice struggling for the right tone, “at Webster’s. You can’t miss me. I’ll be the girl at the back table, sitting all by herself.”

I had to ask Prok to shift my hours that day, and I can’t say that he was overjoyed about it — anything that interfered with work was antithetical to his project, and so, by extension, to him — but I managed to get to Webster’s Drugstore before she did, and when she came through the door in her rain hat and made a show of shaking out her umbrella and throwing back her hair to mask whatever she was feeling, I was there. I told her I was glad she could come and then I told her how much I liked her and how sorry I was for what had happened, and my explanation probably ran to several paragraphs, but suffice it to say that I did adduce Prok and the importance of cultivating him for the sake of my job and future prospects.

She listened dispassionately, let me go deeper and deeper until at some arbitrary point her face lit with a smile and she said, “I took a friend. To the play, I mean. And it was one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done since I got here freshman year.”

“Oh,” I said, “well, I, in that case—”

“Don’t you want to ask his name?”

We were drinking tea and fighting the impulse to dunk our powdered donuts into the little ceramic cups set out on the saucers in front of us. I didn’t drink tea. I didn’t particularly like tea. But I was drinking tea because that was what she had ordered with a look at the waitress — and then at me — that made tea seem exotic, the ultimate choice of those in the know. I’d just raised the cup to my lips, and now I put it down again. I tried to be casual. “His name?” I said. “Why, do I know him?”

She shook her head, her hair catching the light through the window. “I don’t think so. He’s a senior, though. In architecture. Bob Hickenlooper?”

What can I say? Hickenlooper’s face rose up before me, a conventionally handsome face, the face of one of the most popular men on campus, one who had a reputation for chasing anything that tottered by on a pair of heels — or in flats, for that matter — and he was a brain too, with a great and staggering future ahead of him. Jealousy seized me. My hair — the loop of it that never seemed to want to stay where it belonged — fell across my forehead and I had an impulse to reach up and tear it out of my scalp with a single furious jerk. “He’s — he lives in my rooming house,” I said, making my voice as cold and small as I could.

She was enjoying herself now — that much was evident from the glint in her eyes and the way she shifted in her seat to get a better look at me. I watched her lower her head and purse her lips for a long slow sip of tea. “But enough of me,” she said, “what about you? I hear you’ve been promoted.”

“Yes, I—”

“Sex research, right?”

I nodded, a hundred thoughts warring in my brain, not the least of which was how she would have known: Through Hickenlooper? Paul? Her mother? But how could her mother know if mine didn’t? I wanted to change the subject, wanted to ask her out to the pictures for Saturday night, right then and there — and I did, but not before she said, “How did ever you get that?”

The weather warmed. Prok and I spent more and more time in the garden, hauling rocks for edges and borders, spading up the earth, pushing wheelbarrows of shredded bark and chicken manure back and forth, trimming, cutting, pruning. We divided and transplanted endless clumps of lilies of all varieties, and irises — irises were his passion, and he’d collected over two hundred and fifty varieties of them and was forever trading and selling bulbs by post all across the country. We also planted trees — fruit trees, ornamentals, saplings we dug out of hollows in the hills — and all sorts of native plants, poke, goldenrod, snakeroot, wild aster, Queen Anne’s lace, which had a surprising cumulative effect, setting off the splendor of the flowerbeds and giving the whole property a sylvan air, as if it were the product of nature rather than man. While we worked, Prok talked of one thing only — sex — and particularly of the H-histories he was collecting not only in Chicago and Indianapolis now, but in New York as well. He was moved almost to tears by the accounts of sex offenders he’d interviewed in prison, people incarcerated for common acts that happened to run afoul of the antiquated laws of record and who were prosecuted almost arbitrarily, like the South Bend man jailed for having received oral sex from his wife (or rather ex-wife, and on her report), or the many homosexual couples ferreted out and exposed by vindictive spouses, parents, small-town police. Coitus out of wedlock was universally banned, masturbation illegal, sodomy a felony in most states. “You know,” he told me, and he told me more than once, making his case, already preparing the next lecture in his head, “it’s utterly absurd. It’s got to the point where if all the sex laws on the books were rigorously prosecuted, some eighty-five percent of the adult populace would be behind bars.”

I told him that I agreed with him. That I couldn’t agree more. That my life would have been a thousand times better if it weren’t for all the prohibitions placed on me from the time I knew what the equipment between my legs was for.

He smiled, put an arm round me. “I know, I know,” he said, “I’m preaching to the converted.”

I began to see more of Iris during this period — I took her to the pictures and we went for walks or met for study dates at the library — though with finals coming up, graduation looming and the time I was required to devote to the project, not to mention the garden, our relationship progressed by fits and starts. By this time both Prok and I were stripped down to the barest essentials while working out of doors, and both of us developed such deep tans you might have mistaken us for a pair of Italian laborers. Prok wasn’t a nudist, not officially (he was far too self-sufficient to join any group or movement), but he was often naked or as close to naked as he could reasonably be given the circumstances, because to his mind nudity was an expression of the most natural and relaxed state of the human animal — the very same agencies of social control that had proscribed certain sex acts dictated that people should wear clothing, whereas any number of societies outside the ken of the Judeo-Christian tradition did perfectly well without it, or with very little of it. “The Trobriand Islanders, for instance, Milk, think of the Trobriand Islanders. Or the Samoans.” To emphasize his point with the neighbors and any uninformed pedestrians who might happen by, Prok ultimately reduced his gardening costume to a kind of flesh-colored jockstrap and a single shoe, which he wore on the right foot, for digging. I followed suit, of course, because this was what was expected of me, and I always did what was expected. (It was a question of loyalty, that was all, of an ethic central to my training, my upbringing — my very nature, I guess — though Iris in later years could be savage on the subject.)

What happened next — it was just before graduation in June — surprised even me, and I was the initiator of it. All this talk of sex, of how natural and uncomplicated it was and would and should be if only society would loosen its strictures, got me thinking about my own situation and the outlets (Prok’s term) available to me. I was young, healthy, and the exercise and the sun and the feel and smell of the soil had me practically bursting with lust. I was hot, never hotter, frustrated, angry. I wanted Iris, wanted Laura Feeney, wanted anyone, but I didn’t know where to begin. On the other hand, Prok and I continued to have encounters (but how he would have hated the euphemism — sex, we had sex), though, as I say, my H-history was limited and if I were a 1 or at best a 2 on the 0–6 scale, that would describe the extent of my inclination in that direction, and so I began in my hesitant way to broach the subject of heterosexual relations with him. But let me draw back a moment, because I remember the day clearly and need to set the scene here.

It was a Sunday morning, and we’d got to work early in the garden, church bells tolling in the distance, people strolling by on their way to services, the air dense with heat and humidity, the promise of a late-afternoon shower brooding over the hills. The garden was open — each Sunday Prok posted a hand-lettered sign to that effect so that people could have a chance to tour the property and listen to him lecture on each variety of flower and plant, its classification, its near relatives, its preferences with regard to soil, light and watering. Prok liked nothing better than to show off what he’d accomplished horticulturally, and again, this derived as much from his competitive instincts (nobody’s lilies could ever hope to match his) as anything else. We were working on a massive clump of daylilies in one of the beds in the front yard, both of us down on all fours, when Prok glanced up and said, “Why, look, isn’t that Dean Hoenig? And who’s that with her? I’ll bet — yes, I’ll bet that would be her mother, come to visit all the way from Cleveland. Hadn’t somebody mentioned that her mother was visiting?”

Prok had risen to his knees, a tight smile on his lips. I looked up to see the Dean of Women, dressed for church, making her way along the walk past the house, talking animatedly with a stooped, open-faced old woman in a hat like an inverted wedding cake. I knew that the dean had just recently moved into a house two doors up from Prok’s, but beyond that I knew little or nothing of the faculty and really didn’t have an answer for him. “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t heard anything.”

The smile broadened. He was watching them in the way of predator and prey, and I saw that they didn’t have a chance, the old woman moving with such deliberation she was practically standing still. “It occurs to me,” Prok said, his voice rich with subversive joy, “that the garden is open, is it not?”

I didn’t give back the smile. I wanted nothing to do with the dean. I might have been under Prok’s protection, but still I couldn’t help shrinking inside every time I saw her, guilty, guilty as charged, and the irony was I’d never got more than that single kiss out of Laura Feeney despite all the squirming the situation had caused me.

Prok caught them at the gate. “Dean Hoenig, Sarah!” he called, darting out onto the walk in his jockstrap and single flopping shoe. The dean gave him a look of bewilderment, while her mother, who couldn’t have stood more than four feet ten in her heels, visibly started. But Prok would have none of it. He was the smoothest, courtliest, most perfect gentleman in the entire state of Indiana, and he’d happened to see the ladies passing—“On your way home from church, I take it?”—and felt he just had to awaken them to the delights of his garden and offer them the rare privilege of a personal guided tour. “And who might this charming lady be?” he inquired, turning to the old woman with a bow. “Your mother, I presume?”

The dean — compact, busty, tough as a drill sergeant — was at a loss. She was always in command, overseeing her charges and ruling the dorms with an iron hand, but the situation was clearly out of her control. “Yes, this is my mother, Leonora. Mother, Professor Kinsey of the Zoology Department.”

Prok took the old lady’s hand and gave it a squeeze. There was a sheen of sweat on his chest, the long muscles and veins of his arms stood out in work-hardened definition, his lower abdomen bristled with pale blond hairs that were beginning to turn gray. He loomed over the old woman like a naked troglodyte, all flesh and presence, and yet what she heard coming from his mouth was the language of culture and civility. “I understand you’re from Cleveland?”

The old lady’s eyes had retreated into her head. She could barely croak out an answer in the affirmative.

“A jewel of a city,” Prok said, idly scratching at the axillary hair under his left arm. “First-rate museum. Absolutely. Not to mention your symphony orchestra — I do envy you that, Mrs. Hoenig. But, please, don’t let’s stand out here in the street, come and let me show you my pride and joy — you do like lilies, don’t you?”

The dean’s mother nodded in a numb way, then shot a helpless look at her daughter. Dean Hoenig was wearing a tight smile, and it wasn’t a welcoming smile, not at all. “I’m afraid we must be going, Professor Kinsey, though I do thank you for thinking of us—”

Prok cut her off. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, taking the old lady by the arm and steering her toward the gate, “it’s no imposition at all, my pleasure, in fact, and how often does your mother get to see a botanical wonder like this and at a time when it’s looking its very best too, I might add? Isn’t that right, Mrs. Hoenig?”

The dean’s mother didn’t have an opportunity to express an opinion one way or the other because that was when she caught sight of me standing there in front of the hydrangeas, all but naked myself. (Prok had lectured me on what he saw as my excessive modesty, and I’d gradually come round to his way of thinking — though my gardening attire wasn’t as minimal as his, I was at the time wearing nothing but a kind of dun loincloth he’d fashioned for me and a pair of earth-stained tennis shoes, sans socks.) She jerked back as if an electric current had just passed through her, but Prok held firm and guided her up the path to me, the dean following grudgingly behind. “Mrs. Hoenig,” he was saying, “I’d like to introduce my assistant, John Milk. Milk, Mrs. Hoenig. And I think you know the dean …”

Even as I took the old lady’s hand in my own and gave it a gentle shake, I could feel the dean’s eyes probing me. She was out of her element here, already defeated — she was going to see the garden with her mother and listen to Prok’s nonstop monologue and in the process learn something about the natural condition of the human animal whether she liked it or not — but she couldn’t help making a thrust at me. “Yes, certainly,” she said. “From the marriage course. But I guess you’re waiting till after graduation to tie the knot, is that it, John?”

I was learning. From Prok. From the master himself. And I didn’t flinch, didn’t drop my eyes or let my face give me away. “Not really,” I said. “Not actually, that is.”

The old lady let out an exclamation over the bearded irises, a kind of long, attenuated coo, and Prok encouraged her, delighted, but before the dean could come back at me, he looked over his shoulder and said, “He’s met someone else, isn’t that right, Milk?”

What could I do but nod?

After the women left, laden with cut flowers, Prok and I finished up the chore that had been interrupted out front and then put in a good solid hour of pick and shovel work in the backyard (Prok was then constructing the lily pond, and there was plenty of hard labor involved in digging out rocks and hauling and spreading the dirt we removed). Just after noon, Mac came out with sandwiches and soft drinks and the three of us sat on the ground contemplating the contours of the hole and chatting. She was barefooted and dressed in the khaki shorts and blouse she wore as a camp counselor and troop leader for the Girl Scouts. I noticed that she’d parted her hair on the left, swept it across her brow and pinned it in place with a barrette over her right ear. I don’t know what it was, but on this particular afternoon she was as gay and lighthearted as I’d ever seen her. She drew up her legs and rocked back against them as she ate and laughed and broke in on Prok’s running monologue to make one point or another, and though she was in her early forties then, she seemed insouciant and girlish, not at all what you would expect from a housewife and mother.

What did we talk about over lunch that afternoon? I don’t know. The pond, most likely, its depth and dimensions, the plantings Prok was planning for it, pickerelweed, irises of course, with their feet right in the water, and what did we think of Sarracenia purpurea for the transitional zone? I found myself stealing glimpses of Mac, of her legs, her ankles, the place where her tanned thighs vanished into the crotch of her shorts. That was what prompted it, I suppose, what made me dare something I would have been incapable of even a few weeks earlier, but as I say, my education was rapidly advancing. Here it is: when Mac gathered up the plates and Prok and I had watched her saunter across the lawn and disappear into the rear of the house, I turned to him. “Prok, I hope you won’t, well, take this in the wrong way,” I began, “but I’ve been thinking — with regard to my education and my needs too — about what we were talking of yesterday, my need for a female outlet, that is?”

He was in the act of pushing himself up, already anxious to get back to work. “Yes,” he said, “yes, what of it?”

“Well, you see, I was wondering how you would feel about, well, about Mac—?”

He looked puzzled. “Mac?”

“Yes,” I said, and I looked him right in the eye, apt pupil that I was, “Mac.”

It took him a moment. “You mean, you want to — with Mac?”

You can say what you will about him — and everybody has an opinion, it seems — but Prok was no hypocrite. He preached sexual liberation for men and women both and he lived what he preached. A wan smile came to his lips and his eyes sparked with amusement, as if the joke were on him, then he laid down the shovel and told me he’d put the proposition to his wife that night, and that if she consented, I had his blessing.

As it turned out, Mac was as surprised as her husband, surprised but flattered too, and when I came to work in the garden the following weekend I found that she was alone in the house. I was out back, knee-deep in the crater Prok and I had excavated, wondering where he was — had he slept late? (an impossibility in itself; even when his heart was failing him in his late fifties he never slept more than four or five hours a night) — when I became aware of the susurrus of bare feet in the grass and looked up to see Mac standing there before me, a soft shy smile pressed to her lips. “Hello, John,” she said, her eyes shining, that cloying catch in her voice, “I just came out to tell you that Prok has taken the children to Lake Monroe for the day. To do a bit of hiking and collect galls. He said—”

It felt as if the chambers of my heart had been wedged shut. I was having trouble breathing. The sun was a palpable thing, a weight on my shoulders I could barely sustain. I thought I might lose consciousness, and maybe I did, for just an instant, swaying there on my feet while the earth spun out of control beneath me.

“He said you really didn’t have to work today. Not if you didn’t want to.”

Again, I want to be frank here — if Prok taught me anything, he taught me that. Euphemism is the resort of the inauthentic, the timid, the sex shy. I don’t deal in euphemism and I believe in telling it like it is. Or as it is. To put it simply: I became intoxicated with Mac. She was my first, the woman who relieved me of my virginity, or to put it in the crudest possible terms, just to get it out, to express it in the way our lower-level subjects would in countless interviews — in the vernacular that so often gets to the truth so much more powerfully than the loftiest circumlocution — she was my first lay. There, I’ve said it. And if Iris should ever listen to this once events have played themselves out — or transcribe it for a book, and that’s what it should be: a book — I have nothing to hide. She knows my sex history. She’s known it from the beginning, just as I’ve known hers.

But on that June day in the garden with the flowers in riot and the air so soft and sustaining it was like a scented bath, with the faerie house looming behind us and the dense drugged stillness of the morning insulating us from the world, Mac reached out her hand to me and I took it. She didn’t say a word. Just tugged gently till she conveyed what she wanted and I came up out of the dirt and let her lead me to a place at the back of the yard where the trees closed us in. There was a blanket there, spread out on the grass, and the sight of it made me surge with excitement: she’d planned out everything in advance, thought of me, wanted me, and here was the proof of it.

“Here,” she said, “sit,” and I obeyed her, my breath coming shallow and quick as she stood above me and unbuttoned her blouse, stepped out of her shorts, and with a slow graceful dip of her body, knelt down beside me and let her hands flow over my chest and abdomen, all the while exerting the gentlest soothing pressure on the strung-tight cords of my shoulders and upper arms, until finally I was resting on my elbows, then my back, and I could feel her fingers at the sash of the loincloth. The moment seemed to last forever, then the cloth slipped free and I felt her take hold of me in the one place that mattered. I knew what I was doing. I’d seen the slides, transcribed the histories. And I’d taken Professor Keating’s classics course and I knew Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus and I knew that Prok was the old king and I was the son and Mac the mother. My eyes were open. I was no victim. And this was sex — not love, but sex — and I came to it as if I’d been doing it all my life.

5

I graduated the following Saturday.

My mother — and more on her in a moment — drove all the way down from Michigan City with Tommy McAuliffe and my Aunt Marjorie in Tommy’s Dodge (we’d never had a car; it was a luxury, according to my mother, that we just couldn’t afford, hence I’d never learned to drive, not till Prok took it upon himself to teach me later that summer). This was in June of 1940, and events in Europe — the evacuation at Dunkirk and the imminent fall of France — overshadowed what must have been one of the glummest graduation celebrations in IU history. Everybody was unsettled, and not just the seniors going out into the world. Conscription was a virtual certainty now. All the undergraduate men would be affected.

But I was graduating — magna cum laude, no less — and my mother was going to make an occasion of it, Hitler or no Hitler. She’d booked rooms for herself and my aunt a full year in advance so as to outmaneuver the other parents, the ones who might not be quite so astute or forward-looking, and Tommy was going to sleep on a cot in the room I shared with Paul Sehorn, everything arranged on the up-and-up with Mrs. Lorber beforehand. Now, as to my mother. I feel I should give her her due here, though one could argue that her role is hardly central to Prok’s story, and yet I find it difficult to talk about her (she’s alive and well, as of this testimonial, still teaching elementary school in Michigan City and not yet sixty). Hers was — is — a character formed by circumstance, and by circumstance, I mean, specifically, having to raise a son on her own during the Depression, widowed at thirty and with her parents nearly a thousand miles away and unable (and unwilling) to help. She was frugal, precise, as efficient and predictable as a machine, and nothing anyone had ever done or could ever do was quite up to her standard. But that sounds harsh and I don’t mean to be harsh — she gave me clothing, food, opportunity, and if her emotional self went into retreat after my father disappeared, then certainly I’m not in any position to blame her. Nor is anyone else for that matter. She absorbed her sorrow, drank it up like a sponge, and then hardened with it till she calcified. But that’s not right either. She’s my mother and I love her unconditionally, in the way any son loves his mother. That goes without saying. Perhaps a physical description, perhaps I’d better stick to that.

My mother was taller than average — five foot seven — and she played intramural basketball when she was in high school, loved swimming and hiking and gossip. She was of Dutch descent — her maiden name was van der Post — and she had a natural wave to her hair, which was an amalgam of red and brown that in summer went to gold on the ends. She had a dramatic figure (I’m aware of this, in retrospect, not so much from observation — you just don’t think of your mother in that way — but because she was proud of it, forever dispensing the information that so-and-so had complimented her legs or made some reference to the way her sweaters fit her like a model’s and how she ought to have a screen test in Hollywood), but if she had any sexual outlets after my father’s death, she was careful to conceal them from me, and I wouldn’t mention the subject here at all but for what transpired between her and Prok. And for the sake of inclusivity, of course.

In any case, I was watching at the window that Friday afternoon when Tommy’s Dodge pulled up to the curb in a flash of reflected sunlight and my mother and Aunt Marjorie got out, looked round them as if they’d been delivered to the Amazon instead of Bloomington, Indiana, and adjusted their hats a moment before mounting the front steps of the rooming house. I could have met them at the door, but I held back a moment, and I don’t really know why. This was a time of celebration, of joy — for once I had the prospect of being spoiled a bit; there would be a nice dinner certainly, oysters, celery sticks with blue-cheese filling, steak served up medium rare on unchipped plates against a field of linen so white it could have been manufactured that very morning — but I just stood there at the window and never made a move to go downstairs till I heard her voice in the hallway. I don’t know what she was saying — greeting Mrs. Lorber no doubt, making some sort of animadversion on the state of the roads or Tommy’s driving, or the weather: Wasn’t it hot? — but the tone of it took hold of me and I went downstairs to her cold embrace, the dutiful son, John, her boy John.

The three women stood there in the vestibule, turned slightly toward the staircase, as if posing for a group portrait, which I suppose you might call Awaiting His Footsteps in a Time of Quiet Jubilation or Who Will Save the Day? “Mother,” I said, taking the steps one at a time, slowly, with dignity, no bounding or undergraduate hijinks here, “welcome. And Aunt Marjorie — thanks so much. And Mrs. Lorber — have you met Mrs. Lorber?”

My mother embraced me in her stiff, formal way, but her eyes told me she was proud of me and pleased too. She was about to say something to that effect — or at least I assumed she was — when Tommy came rocketing up the steps from the street and burst through the door to wrap me up in a bear hug. “Hello, professor!” he shouted, spinning me around like some oversized package he was about to raffle off. “You know it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing!” Everyone smiled as if he’d lost his mind. Which he had. A moment later, when we were alone up in the room, he showed me the agency of his temporary derangement: a flask of whiskey convenient to the inside pocket of a sports coat. He handed it to me and I automatically took a long burning swallow, and when I tried to pass it back to him, he wouldn’t take it. “Look at the initials on it,” he said, sinking into Paul’s bed as if his legs would no longer hold him.

Reproduced there, in filigree, were the initials JAM, for John Anthony Milk. “These are my initials,” I said stupidly.

Tommy regarded me out of eyes that ran down the depths of two long tunnels. He’d listened to my mother and aunt for hours on end and who could blame him for being on the far side of sober? “You bet,” he said.

There were five of us at dinner that night — my mother, my aunt, Tommy, Iris and myself. The restaurant was on the ground floor of a downtown hotel (not the one where my aunt and mother were staying, which was much more modest), and it had the reputation of being Bloomington’s best, at least in that sleepy, provincial era before the war. There were potted palms to shield the tables from one another, the maitre d’ was decked out in his best approximation of a tuxedo and had managed to paste his hair so tightly to his scalp it was like a black bathing cap with a part drawn down the side of it, and the menu ran from onion soup au gratin to grilled veal chops, whitefish and, of course, beef in all its incarnations. We all started out with shrimp cocktails, the shrimp perched prettily up off individual goblets of ice, and Tommy and I ordered beers while the ladies had a round of gin fizzes. I was feeling elated. Not only was I the center of attention — this was a fete for me, and because I was an adult now, a college graduate who’d achieved something in his own right, it had none of the constraint of the regimented birthday parties my mother used to arrange right up until the time I left high school for the university — but there was the flask to consider too. Its contents had gone a long way toward fueling my enthusiasm. Was I tipsy? I don’t know. But I saw things with a kind of blinding clarity, as if the world had suddenly been illuminated, as if I’d been living in two dimensions all my life, in a black-and-white picture, and now there were three and everything came in Technicolor. Iris, for instance.

She sat across the table from me, her shoulders bared in a strapless organdy gown — blue, a soft cool pastel blue, with a tiny matching hat pinned atop the sweeping shadow of her hair — and I saw that she’d plucked her eyebrows and redrawn them in two perfect black arches that led the way to her eyes. To this point we hadn’t said much to each other, she absorbed with my mother and aunt, Tommy and I reliving old times with a series of sniggers and arm cuffs and all the rest of the adolescent apparatus that still imprisoned us in boyhood though we would have been mortified if anyone had taken us for anything less than men. My mother said, “We have to intervene. There’s no choice to it now. God forbid my son should have to go — I don’t have to tell you he’s the only thing I have left in this world — but we can’t afford to divorce ourselves from the rest of humanity, we just can’t, not anymore.”

“That’s what they want you to believe,” Iris said, setting down her fork. She’d ordered the fish, and the white flakes of it gleamed on the tines against an amber puddle of sauce on her plate. “Why should we get drawn in? Forgive me — I know Holland’s been occupied — but it’s happened before, hasn’t it? War after war?”

Tommy was in the middle of a reminiscence about a prank he’d pulled off after a football game against our biggest rival, and he was mistaken in thinking that I’d been part of it, but he was so wrapped up in the memory that I didn’t want to disabuse him. But now he looked at his sister as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. “Oh, come on, sis, are you kidding me? France’ll be gone in a week, two at the most, and then Hitler can pound England till there’s nothing left but rubble, and you really think he’ll be satisfied with that? You think he’ll send a box of chocolates to Roosevelt and kiss and make up?”

“Exactly,” my mother said, and her chin was set. “It might take him years to get here — a decade even, who knows? But the world is smaller than you might think, Iris, and nobody is safe as long as that madman is in it. Did you see him in the newsreel last week? The goose-step. Aren’t you sick to death of the goose-step?”

“You don’t understand. It’s not our war,” Iris said. “It has nothing to do with us. Why should our boys die for some crumbling empire, for, for — John,” she said, turning to me, “what do you think?”

What I thought was that the celebration had gone sour. What I thought was that Iris looked like the prettiest thing I’d ever seen in my life, her eyes lit with indignation, her mouth puckered, the whitefish at her command. I tried on a grin. “I don’t know,” I murmured, “but personally? I don’t want to die.”

I was trying for levity, trying to take us all someplace else and expunge the strutting dictator from my celebratory dinner, but no one laughed. They just looked at me — even Aunt Marjorie, the mildest person I’ve ever known — as if I’d admitted to fraud or child rape or murder. War. We were in the grip of war, and there was no shaking it off.

It was Iris who came to my rescue. She’d taken a moment to slip the fork between her lips and masticate her fish and a sliver of green bean. “That’s my point,” she said, still chewing. “I don’t want to die either. Nobody does.”

My mother waved a hand in dismissal. “You’re too young yet. You don’t understand. There’s a larger picture here, and a larger issue—”

“Hey,” Tommy said, as if he were awakening from a nap, “anybody want another beer — or cocktail?”

We walked my mother and Aunt Marjorie back to their hotel, then went out for a nightcap, just the three of us, and finally took Iris back to the dorm just before curfew. A dozen couples were sitting around the lounge gazing into each other’s eyes. One of the girls had a conspicuous grass stain on her skirt — a stripe of vivid green against a beige that was almost white — and a guy I vaguely recognized was on the sofa with his girl, leaning in so close he looked as if he’d been glued to her. Her feet were on the floor, though — that was the rule — and so were his. The RA — the same blonde with the limp hair — had her head buried in a book.

Tommy had slowed down considerably as the evening wore on, and now, as we crossed the lounge to a semi-private spot against the far wall, behind the RA’s desk, he wasn’t so much walking as lurching. Iris’s arm was linked in mine. We stood there bunched against the wall a moment, while Tommy struggled to light a cigarette — he dropped the cigarette twice to the carpet, then dropped the matches. “Listen,” he said, straightening up and squinting round the room as if he’d never seen men and women necking before, “I’ve got to — it’s hot in here, isn’t it? Listen, I’ve got to go find a lavatory somewhere, all right?”

We watched him pull one foot and then the other up off the carpet, moving as if the solid floor had suddenly been converted to a trampoline, and then he was out the door, a smell of the scented night air trailing behind him. “Good old Tommy,” I said, for lack of anything better to say. “He must be a swell brother. You’re really lucky, you know that?”

Iris was drawn into herself, leaning back against the wall, her shoulders narrowed as if she were cold. She was watching me closely. Her arms — lovely arms, beautiful arms, the shapeliest, most perfectly formed arms I’d ever seen — were folded across her breasts, but she dropped them now to her sides, as if she were opening herself up to me. We had kissed here before, in this very spot, just out of sight of the RA, but the kisses had been constrained and proper, or as proper as they could be given the fact that we were pressed up against the wall in a place where the lamplight was dimmest and our tongues had just begun to discover a new function altogether. She didn’t believe in petting or premarital sex of any kind, raised a Catholic and haunted by it, diminished by what had been imposed on her and helpless to escape it. “You don’t mind, do you?” she’d whispered one night, her breath hot on my face, the taste of her on my lips. “No,” I’d said, “no, I don’t mind.”

But now — tonight, on my big night, the night before the graduation ceremony and all the uncertainty it implied — she took hold of me and pressed her body to mine so that I could feel her breasts go soft against my chest. Her voice was so low it was barely audible. “Kiss me,” she whispered.

The ceremony went off as planned, the speeches sufficiently inspiring, the weather cooperating, President Wells exercising his handshake and handing over the diplomas one after another as a gentle breeze came down out of Illinois to animate our robes and tug ever so gently at the girls’ hairdos. Afterward, there was a private reception at Prok’s — he’d insisted, he wouldn’t take no for an answer, it was the least he could do for a young man who’d done so much for him — and we got to glory among the flowers and sample Mac’s punch and Prok’s liqueurs. My mother didn’t really hit it off with Mac, which wasn’t unusual for her — she’d always worn her reserve like a suit of armor and had never really warmed to people, not till she’d mixed with them four or five times, and even then there was no guarantee — but there was something deeper and more complex involved here, and I’d probably cite Freud at this juncture but for the fact that Prok so rigorously educated me against him.

Prok, though, was a different story — she seemed to take to him right away. Of course, he went out of his way to make my mother feel comfortable, zeroing right in on her and giving her an extended tour of the garden, all the while soliciting her opinion on the dahlias or the heliotropes — or the azaleas that just seemed to thrive in the most acidic conditions he could provide, and had she tried coffee grounds? Coffee grounds were one of the most convenient and effective ways of changing the pH factor of the soil, at least as far as Prok had been able to discover. Of course you had to be mindful of chlorosis, but that could be cured by the addition of iron chelate to the soil, well worked in, needless to say …

I watched them draw slowly away from the main body of the party, my mother balancing a tiny liqueur glass in one gloved hand, the sun glancing off the crown of her hat and making a glowing transparency of the single long trailing feather, Prok nodding and gesticulating as he guided her down the path. He was dressed formally, in what we (that is, Corcoran, Rutledge and I) came to regard as his uniform: dark suit, white shirt, crisply knotted bow tie in a two-color geometric pattern. I could see that he was a bit on edge because of having to give up a day’s work, first for the academic convocation at the graduation ceremony and now for this little gathering, but to the uneducated eye he seemed as relaxed and charming as an antebellum plantation owner showing off his holdings. The children were playing an extended game of croquet, while Iris, Tommy and I sat under a tree with my Aunt Marjorie and Mac, who’d kicked off her shoes and was forever dashing back and forth from the house with a tray of canapés or the persimmon tarts she’d baked herself that morning in my honor.

We were talking of everything but the war, because the war was happening someplace else, far across the sea, and this was our day — Tommy’s, Iris’s and mine — and there was no reason to let the darkness intrude. My aunt, never a loquacious woman, not unless she was gossiping with her sister-in-law, sat in a wicker chair with her ankles crossed and smiled a faraway smile, thinking perhaps of her husband, who’d been killed at Ipres in the first war. Mac, when she was with us, held forth charmingly on any number of subjects, including the Girl Scouts, knitting — Aunt Marjorie perked up a bit here — and, of course, sex research. It was all very relaxed.

At one point, just as the children ended their game with a shout of triumph from one of the girls, Iris pushed herself up off the lawn, patting down her dress as if she’d been lying there in the grass since it first sprouted. “Why don’t we play?” she said. “You, me and Tommy. Come on.”

If I hesitated (and I might have, lulled by her presence — and Mac’s — as well as the golden fluid issuing from the flask on command), she wouldn’t hear of it.

“Come on,” she repeated. “Are you afraid I’m going to beat you or something?” She was wearing a summer dress that left her arms bare, and she stretched, then brought her heels together and made a muscle with her right arm. “Because you ought to be. I’ll have you know I was croquet champion of the entire neighborhood.”

“When you were nine maybe,” Tommy said, but he was already getting up from the grass himself.

We played a languid game out on the lawn, the sun holding steady overhead, Iris chasing down our balls and hammering them into the flowerbeds whenever she had the chance. There were gales of laughter. The flask circulated. I don’t think I’d ever been happier, but for one thing — the look Prok gave us when he emerged with my mother from the rear of the property. His face was stripped naked for just a moment, his mouth screwed up in a kind of pout of disdain, and I wondered what sin we were committing, what transgression, until it came to me: Prok hated games of any sort. Games were nonproductive. Games were, by definition, a waste of time — a pastime, that is, which was the same thing. Only work had any validity for him, and he never understood when we (again, Corcoran, Rutledge and I) spent even a moment’s time engaged in any activity that didn’t directly serve the project. We might have spent twelve hours in a single day taking sex histories and then come back to the hotel to relax with the radio and a game of cards, and Prok would insist that we should be reading and studying the literature so as to better perform our function and advance the research.

There was one time — and I’m jumping ahead here eight or ten years — when Prok, Corcoran and I had been on a research trip to take histories in Florida. We’d driven down from Indiana so Prok could address a group of college administrators who were holding a series of seminars in Miami, and we’d put in five intense days of recording histories from the moment we’d finished breakfast right on through to ten and eleven at night. On the final day, the day before we were to drive back to Indiana and the perennial ice of winter, we finished up by eight in the evening, and on a lark Corcoran and I pulled in at a miniature golf course. Corcoran — he was the ultimate extrovert, sunny, glad-handing, an obsessive serial sexual adventurer — was at the wheel because Prok was busy beside him with a flashlight and the sheaf of interviews we’d just concluded. “Say,” he cried out suddenly, “John — do you see that, up ahead there on the left?”

I was in back. I leaned forward over the seat and saw what he was talking about — a glittering playland of lights leaching out into the Florida night, and a sign superimposed above them: TEETER’S MINIATURE GOLF.

“Time for a little rest and relaxation?” he asked, already swinging the wheel wide as Prok glanced up distractedly from the papers in his lap.

There was an anti-authoritarian streak in Corcoran, a boyish playfulness Prok tolerated in a way he wouldn’t have in anybody else, and I wakened to it in that moment. Why not? I thought. Why not get out from under the whip, if only for an hour? “Sure, yes,” I said, “that would be — that would hit the spot. And I’ve never, and we are going back tomorrow …”

And before Prok could protest, it was a fait accompli, the car pulled up snug to the admission booth in the gravel lot, Corcoran and I paying for our tickets and selecting our clubs while the palms rustled in a breeze that was as warm as the breath of the furnace back at home. We must have played for two hours or more, feeling lighthearted and a bit silly, feeling like boys who despite the frivolity of the situation had always been in competition with one another and fought to win no matter how inconsequential the victory might have been. (As I recall, for the record, I wound up beating him that night, if only just narrowly.) But Prok. Prok tried to be good-natured about it, yet he was beside himself. He couldn’t understand it. Couldn’t imagine why grown men would behave like adolescents, why they would dissipate precious time that could be devoted to the project, to work, to the accretion of knowledge and the advancement of culture, and all in the name of a vapid amusement. He paced. He hectored us from behind the fence. “Corcoran,” he called, and his voice was a sorry bleat of remonstrance. “Corcoran. Milk. You’re holding up the project!”

But on the day of my graduation, I didn’t yet know of Prok’s uncompromising view of what he considered frivolous pursuits — or at least not to the extent I one day would — and the look he gave us over an innocent game of croquet gave me pause. I tried to parse that look. Tried to decipher what it portended — was the celebration over? Had my mother said something to him — or he to her — that would have changed the complexion of the day? Did my mother know about Prok and me — or Mac and me — and had she said something?

As it turned out, it was none of the above, just Prok being Prok. And we finished our game and went back to the shady spot on the lawn and Prok retired to the house a moment and came back with a gift for my mother — an especially convoluted but bred-out gall he’d shellacked as an objet d’art — and when she thanked him I saw the hint of a mutuality there and I didn’t know how I felt about it. There was something complicit between them, and I realized in that moment that it had nothing to do with me: Prok, I guessed, had been talking up the project and had convinced her, as he convinced practically everyone he ran across, to give up her history. My mother’s history. She would sit with him for two hours the next day, or maybe even that evening, and answer the three hundred and fifty questions about her masturbatory habits and how often she brought herself to orgasm and what men she’d slept with since my father died.

Everything gets a bit hazy here, and I don’t know if what happened next was a direct result of this or not — again, that would take a psychiatrist to iron out, and Prok hated psychiatrists — but I do know that I excused myself from the group gathered on the lawn, left Iris there, and my mother too, and went up the winding path for the house, where I knew Mac was preparing something, a light snack, she’d said, for all us. I went in without knocking, an honored guest by this point, almost a member of the family. The children were nowhere to be seen. Everything was still. The furniture seemed to recede into the depths of the room, shadowy and skeletal, the records canted on the shelves as if awaiting the hand to bring them to life. Distantly, from all the way across the yard, I heard the buzz of voices.

I found Mac in the kitchen, at the counter, her back to me. She was barefooted still, but she’d put an apron on over her dress and I could see where it was tied just above the swell of her hips. Do I have to tell you how much I needed her in that moment, how much a disciple of the master I’d become? I came up behind her — and she knew I was there, she was waiting for me — and pressed myself to her so she could feel the hardness of me against the softness of her buttocks, and I reached both hands round to embrace her breasts. The sweetest thing: she turned her head to kiss me, to give me the excitation of her tongue and underscore the reciprocity of the moment. And then — and then we were down on the kitchen floor, pawing at each other’s clothes. No children appeared. No one intruded. And I had coitus with her there in a quick wild spate of thrusting and licking and biting that must have taken no more than three minutes beginning to end, and then I zippered up and went back out across the lawn to Iris and my mother.

6

Ever since the fall of 1938, when Prok inaugurated the marriage course, there had been whispers on campus and in the community too, and the whispers grew to a rumble of distaste and then outrage as the summer of 1940 gave way to autumn and a coalition of forces gathered against him. If I’d wondered at the number of faculty — and especially older faculty — attending the session of the course Laura and I had taken together, now I began to understand: these were spies, hostile witnesses, the drones of convention and antiquated morality who wanted to keep the world in darkness as far as sex was concerned. They weren’t there to be educated — they were there to bring Prok down.

Foremost among them was Dr. Thurman B. Rice of the Indiana State Health Board and the IU medical faculty. Rice had himself taught a precursor to Prok’s course in the early thirties—“a hygiene course,” he called it — and it had been one of the running jokes of the campus, an exercise in innuendo, misinformation and Victorian nice-nellyism. Apparently, he’d sat through the lecture in which Prok showed his infamous slides, and protested, in writing, to President Wells, the Board of Trustees and Prok himself that the pictures were so graphic as to have stimulated even him — a man thirty years married, who had given the subject “real objective study”—and that, as a result, he feared for the student body. What if some innocent coed were to be so stimulated and wind up engaging in sexual intercourse, becoming pregnant and having to be sent home as damaged goods? What then?

He was joined by the rest of his colleagues on the medical faculty, who as one felt that Professor Kinsey was appropriating to himself what was essentially a medical function: how could he presume to interview and advise students of both sexes on physiological matters — behind closed doors, nonetheless — when he had no medical training himself? Add to this the unanimous outcry of the town’s pastors, a cascade of letters from distraught Hoosier mothers who had heard rumors that this professor was instructing their daughters in the various methods of birth control and asking them to measure their own clitorises, and the undying enmity of Dean Hoenig, who would never forgive Prok that display in the garden and what she deemed his overzealous pursuit of the histories of some of the more reticent undergraduate women under her aegis, and you can well imagine that a public lynching was in the cards.

I was crossing campus on a dead-calm, slow-roasting morning at the beginning of September, on my way to work, thinking of nothing more significant than what I was going to do about dinner, when all of this — the rumors, the rancor, the anti-Prok sentiment boiling up out of the cauldron of the community — came home to me in an immediate way. Laura Feeney, a senior now and even prettier and fuller of figure than I’d remembered, was coming toward me along the path by the brook, a text clutched to her breasts (between which dangled a chain decorated with a class ring presumably belonging to Jim Willard). When she glanced up and recognized me, a change came over her face and she stopped in midstride and just stood there motionless until I closed the distance between us. “Laura,” I said, awkward suddenly — awkward again—“hello.”

It took her a moment. “John,” she murmured, something tentative in the tone of her voice, as if she were trying the name out to see if it fit. “Oh, hello. So nice to see you.” A pause. “And how was your summer?”

We could have been having the same conversation we’d had a year ago, except that this time I hadn’t gone home to the crucifixion of boredom that was Michigan City and the attic room in my mother’s house, because I was out in the world now, working a full-time job, and I’d stayed on at Mrs. Lorber’s, though Paul Sehorn was gone and I would soon have a new roommate — that is, if anyone answered Mrs. Lorber’s ad. I watched her face through the formalized exchange of ritualistic chitchat — she was a master at it, or rather, a mistress — and then I got bold and commented on the chain round her neck. “I see you’re wearing Jim Willard’s class ring.”

“What? Oh, this?” (An excuse to brush her own breasts and lift the ring to eye level.) She let out a laugh that was meant to be self-deprecating, but managed only to be flirtatious. My interest piqued. “You’re not going to believe this, but I’ve traded in one Willard for another.” Again, the laugh. “You know Willard Polk?”

I hesitated.

“Co-captain of the football team? He’s my steady. We’re planning to get engaged come Christmas.” She idly rotated the toe of one shoe and I couldn’t help stealing a glance at her ankles and legs. “Jim and I? We just didn’t seem to see eye to eye anymore, that’s all. But now”—and here she gave me the full power of her smile—“now I’m in love. Really. Truly. This is it. For life.” Another pause. Her face contracted round her mouth. Her eyes narrowed. “But what about you? If I hear right, you’re actually working with Dr. Kinsey now?”

I nodded, tried for a smile.

“Our old professor,” she said. “Dr. Sex.” She was still playing with the ring, but now she let it drop between her breasts again. “I hear that you’re conducting sex interviews yourself now, isn’t that true?”

I was an entirely different person from what I was a year ago, sexually experienced, out in the world, conversant with every sexual practice in the book, but still I couldn’t stop the blood rushing to my cheeks. “Only men,” I said. “Undergraduate men. Because, you see, well, they’re the least elaborate, if you know what I mean?”

“Oh?” The flirtation had come back into her voice. “But what about the girls? Aren’t they even less—elaborate? All those vestal virgins in the dorms? Will you be interviewing them too, or will this be the kind of survey that just tells us what beasts men are — as if we didn’t already know, right, John?”

So I was blushing. I’d had intercourse with Mac, I’d missed Iris all summer with an ache so deep and inconsolable it was as if some essential part had been cut out of my body, and as I stood there willing the blood to drain from my cheeks, I wanted — why not say it? — to fuck Laura Feeney, no matter how many Willards she had. I saw her naked. Saw her without the dress and the little hat and the shoes, saw her breasts bared and her nipples erect with excitement. Laura Feeney, Laura Feeney: no other girl but you. That’s what I told her with my eyes and she saw it, saw the change in me, and actually took one step back — that is, shifted her weight and ever so minutely extended the distance between us. “No,” I said, and I was leering, I suppose, I admit it, “no, I’ll be doing women too. Prok promised me. But not here. Not on campus.”

A lift of the eyebrows. “Prok?”

“Professor Kinsey. That’s what we, what I—”

“I hear they’re going to fire him.”

That was the moment when all the birdsong and the trickle of the brook and the backfiring of an automobile in the faculty parking lot were suddenly cued out as if at the upstroke of a conductor’s baton. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t have been more surprised — or shocked, shocked is a better word — if she’d told me the Nazis were marching on Muncie. “They can’t do that,” I said finally, “he’s a starred scientist. He’s got tenure.”

“The marriage course is finished. You know what they’re calling it? They’re calling it a smut session. ‘That smut session,’ that’s what they say.” She was watching my face for a reaction. “President Wells himself is going to fire him — for, I don’t know, moral turpitude. That’s what I hear, anyway.”

The following morning, before the sun was up, Prok and I climbed into the Nash (I don’t recall the model or even the year of the thing, though he’d bought it used in 1928 and as far as I could see it seemed to be held together principally with C-clamps and rust), and headed off for West Lafayette, where he’d been invited to lecture to a combined group of sociology classes at Purdue University. Along the way, we were planning on stopping in Crawfordsville to pick up the remaining interviews we hadn’t managed to squeeze in when Prok had lectured at DePauw the previous week. And, of course, we were looking forward to taking the histories of the cohort that would attend the evening’s lecture, having budgeted the next three days to those. Lunch would be on four wheels, tepid water out of a jug I’d set on the floorboards behind the seat and a few handfuls of the trail mix (raisins, nuts, sunflower seeds and the odd nugget of chocolate) Prok consumed for lunch every day of his life, whether he was ensconced in the Astor Hotel on Times Square, wandering the withered foothills of the Sierra Madre in search of galls or sitting behind his desk in Biology Hall.

There was no radio in the car, but it didn’t really matter, as Prok provided all the entertainment himself, talking without pause from the minute I slid into the seat beside him in the uncertain light of dawn to the moment we disembarked in Crawfordsville, and then continuing without missing a beat till we arrived, in late afternoon, in West Lafayette. He talked about sex. About the project. About the need to collect more lower-level histories, more black histories, more histories from cabbies and colliers and steam-shovel operators — for balance, that is, because undergraduate interviews, as invaluable as they might be, only supplied a portion of the picture. If we passed a cow standing by the roadside, he went on about milk production and the leanness of the drought years. He talked of the topography, of riverine and lacustrine ecology, of mushroom hunting — had I ever tasted fresh-picked morels, lightly breaded and fried? I didn’t feel at a loss, not a bit. I let him talk. It was all part of my education.

We were coming up on the White River just outside Spencer when the sun rose behind us and spilled across the water, laminating everything in copper. A great blue heron stood out in relief against the mist rising off the surface, the cornfields caught fire, pear and apple trees emerged from the gloom, heavy with luminescent fruit. The surface of the road was wet with dew and as the sun touched it vapor rose there too until it fell away from the rush of the tires and fanned out over the rails of the bridge like a storm in the making. That was the moment that I chose to disburden myself of the unsettling information Laura Feeney had pressed on me and which I’d been turning over in my head now for the better part of the last twenty-four hours. “Prok,” I said, interrupting him in the middle of a story I’d heard twice before about a subject at the state work farm pulling out his penis in the middle of the interview and laying it on the table for measurement, “is it true that, well, I’ve heard rumors that pressure is being put on you again — more than you’ve revealed to me, that is — regarding the marriage course. They’re not going to, well, fire you, are they?”

A low spear of sun transfixed the interior of the car and illuminated Prok’s face from the lips down, as if he were wearing a beard of light. He gave me a dour look, head slightly canted, eyes showing white. “And where, exactly, did you get that notion?”

“I — well, Laura Feeney. Laura Feeney told me yesterday morning. You know, the girl I took the marriage course with?”

“With whom.”

“Yes, right — the girl with whom.”

The planks of the bridge rattled under the wheels and I saw the heron stiffen and protract its wings. Prok’s eyes were fixed on the road. He was silent a moment, then murmured, “I suppose Miss Feeney had an audience with President Wells himself? Or was it the Board of Trustees?”

“You’re making light of it, Prok, and that’s not right. I’m just, well, I’m concerned, that’s all, and there are rumors, you can’t deny that—”

He let out a sigh. Gave me a glance of commiseration, then turned back to the road. “I feel like Galileo,” he said, “if you want to know the truth. Hounded and oppressed and denied the basic right of scientific investigation, simply because some cleric or some dried-up old maid like Dean Hoenig or a has-been like Thurmond Rice feels threatened by the facts. They can’t face reality, and that’s the long and short of it.”

My heart sank. So it was true. I stared out the window on the fierce geometry of the cornfields, the engine moaning beneath my feet, the world slipping by.

“They’re going to offer me an ultimatum: drop the marriage course or give up the research, one or the other.”

“But you can’t — that would be like an admission that sex is dirty, that they were right all along—”

Another sigh. The hooded look. His hands were claws on the wheel. “You see, the problem is with doing the course and the interviews combined, not to mention the advisement on sexual matters that has been so much a natural concomitant of the information we dispense—”

He shifted down as the car hurtled through a pothole, rising up off its springs and slamming down again with a shudder, and then he laid a hand on my knee. “It’s the research they’re after. They just can’t abide the idea of our getting impressionable young things behind closed doors, because you never know what might happen.” He gave my knee a squeeze. “Isn’t that right, John?”

We were on a tight schedule, but we were fortunate that day because the DePauw subjects all appeared on time, delivered up their information and went back about their business so that we could go about ours. Trail mix and aqua pura in the car, Prok dodging farm wagons, overladen trucks and the odd cow, a long running trailer of intensely green fields alternating with flagrant forests and shadowy bottoms, and we were there, arrived safe and sound in West Lafayette three quarters of an hour before the lecture was scheduled to begin.

I don’t remember much of the hotel, though I should, because that trip was a real watershed for me, but all the hundreds of towns and hotels and motor courts we’ve visited over the years seem to have produced a generic impression. It was a brick building from the last century, most likely, in need of sandblasting and paint, and it was, as likely or not, located on the main street near the courthouse. There would have been shade trees, a dog curled up on the sidewalk out front, cars parked on the diagonal. The building itself would be three stories, with a separate entrance for the restaurant and bar. We doubled up on the room, to save money — Prok was a prodigy of thrift — just as we would triple and quadruple up in later years, when we added Corcoran and finally Rutledge to the team.

As for the lecture. Did Prok need anything? No, he was fine. He stood bare-chested in the bathroom, shaving before the mirror, then he changed his shirt, knotted his bow tie, slipped into his jacket and went off at a brisk gait for the university, his host, Professor McBride of the Sociology Department, struggling to keep pace. I brought up the rear. When we arrived, the auditorium was already full (the word was spreading, even in those early days, and if the combined sociology classes could boast sixty students among them, there must have been three hundred of the idle and curious there as well, hoping for a bit of titillation). As usual, Prok spoke ex tempore, without notes, and, as usual, he cast a spell over the audience from the first words out of his mouth to the last. (The subject might have been premarital sex, the psychology of sexual repression, the function of adolescent outlets, the history of sex research or the frequency of masturbation in the comparison of males and females of a given age group — it didn’t really matter to Prok; all speeches were one speech. And I should say here too that he had a particular gift for delivery that never resorted to tricks or theatrical gestures, his voice clear and distinct and largely unmodulated, every inch the man of science expatiating on a subject of deep interest to all humanity. He was no Marc Antony or even a Brutus, but he got the job done as no one else could have.)

And again, as usual, a whole mob of potential subjects came forward to volunteer their histories at the conclusion of the lecture and Prok and I sat side by side at a long table set up behind the lectern and scheduled them. Dinner? I don’t remember if we did eat that night — it might have been sandwiches sent up to the room — but we both started right in on taking histories as soon as the lecture hall had cleared and we’d had a chance to get back to the hotel. Prok conducted his interviews in our room and I was accommodated with a private conference room located just behind the restaurant. It must have been past midnight by the time I was finished (three undergraduate men, sociology students out to earn extra credit with Professor McBride in coming forward as volunteers, the expected responses, nothing I hadn’t heard before), and I remember sinking into an armchair in the lobby, a watered-down drink at my side, watching the hands crawl round the clock as Prok conducted his final interview of the night.

Afterward, we compared notes as we got ready for bed, and that was when we discovered a discrepancy in the schedule for the following morning: we had inadvertently scheduled two females for the same hour, rather than one female and one male. Which meant we were either going to have to cancel or I would be forced to record my first female history, a step Prok to this point hadn’t deemed me qualified to take. He looked up from the schedule, shook his head slowly, then rose from the sofa and padded into the bathroom to see to his dental prophylaxis (he was a great one for maintaining his teeth in good condition, a hygienic habit that allowed him to take the full set to his grave with him). “I don’t know, Milk,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of running water, “but I do hate to cancel. It’s inefficient, for one thing. And it could cost us data, for another. No. There’s nothing to do but go through with it.”

A moment later he was back in the room, hovering over me, fully clothed, which in itself was odd because the moment we were done for the day he usually stripped to the skin and encouraged me to do the same. (Yes, we were alone together a great deal on these trips, and we continued to have sexual relations, though my education — and my predilections — were taking me in the opposite direction. I revered Prok — I revere him still — but gradually I was growing away from him in this one regard and toward Mac, toward Iris, toward the coeds in their loose sweaters and tight skirts who drifted across the campus like antelope on the plain. No matter: I enjoyed being with Prok — I felt privileged to be with him — and I looked forward to these trips because they took me away from the tedium of my desk and the constriction of small-town life and enabled me to see and absorb something of the larger world, of Indiana certainly, but eventually of Chicago and New York, San Francisco and Havana too.) “We’re going to have to accelerate your training,” he said, and there was no trace of levity to his tone.

I was exhausted. The travel, the skimped meals, the force of concentration required to record five histories in a single day — all of it combined to sap me as surely as if I’d spent the day at hard labor, chained to a convict and breaking up rock with a mallet. “We are?” I echoed.

“The interview for women requires, I would think, a little more finesse than the men’s, especially the ones you’ve been conducting with undergraduates near to your own age, where you appear as a sort of fraternity colleague or perhaps an older brother. No, I am aware of how you feel in these matters, with regard to women, that is, and Mac and I have discussed it thoroughly”—he let that hang a moment—“and I wonder if you’re capable of being absolutely disinterested and professional.”

I made some noises to the effect that I was.

He was watching me carefully. Still standing over me, still in shirt and bow tie. “You’ll forgive me, Milk, but your emotions too often show in your face, and we can’t have that the first time a woman—this woman tomorrow morning — tells you of something you may tend to find stimulating.”

I fought to keep my face rigid — and pale. “I think, well, if you’ll give me the chance, I’m sure I can, that is—”

He wound up drilling me for two hours that night. First I was the woman, then he was, then vice versa and vice versa again. The questions came in spate, his eyes on me like whips, like cold pans of water first thing in the morning, intractable and unforgiving. He was exacting, demanding, hypercritical, and if I missed a beat he fed me hot coffee till my nerves were so jangled I don’t think I slept at all that night. But Prok did. I lay there awake in the darkness, thinking of a thousand things, but mainly of Iris, whom I hadn’t seen all summer though we’d written each other nearly every day. She was due back on campus the day after tomorrow, and I was thinking of her as the shadows softened and the first furtive wakening sounds of the street drifted in through the window and Prok puffed and blew and slept the sleep of the righteous.

In the morning, over breakfast in the room, Prok quizzed me again. I lifted a forkful of egg and toast to my mouth, put it down again, answered a question and took a quick sip of coffee. I nearly rebelled — didn’t he have any confidence in me after all this time? — but I let him have his way, despite the fact that there was no essential difference in the way the male and female interviews were conducted, except that the sequence and type of the questions were specific to one sex or the other, as for example with the female you asked about the onset of menarche and the age at which breast development first appeared and so on. It wasn’t my competency Prok was questioning, it was my age and experience, or lack of it. He kept saying, “Milk, Milk, I wish you were twenty years older. And married. Married with children. How many children do you want, John — shall we make it three?”

I was downstairs in the conference room ten minutes before the scheduled appointment, which was at nine. Before a subject arrived, we would routinely record the basic data — the date, the number of the interview (for our files), the sex of the subject and the source of the history (that is, through what agency the subject had come to us, and in this case, of course, it was as a direct result of Prok’s solicitation after the sociology lecture). I didn’t know what to expect. We’d scheduled some twenty-eight interviews for the next three days and many more than that for our return trip the following week, and I had no way of connecting the names on the schedule sheet with any individual, though I’d sat there and registered them the night before. The woman I was to interview — and I’m going to assign her a fictitious name here, for confidentiality’s sake — was a young faculty wife of twenty-five, as yet childless. Mrs. Foshay. Let’s call her Mrs. Foshay.

There was a knock at the door. I was seated in an armchair by a dormant fireplace, the schedule sheet and Mrs. Foshay’s folder spread out on a coffee table before me. The other chair — mahogany, red plush, standard Edwardian hotel fare — was positioned directly across from mine. “Come in,” I said, rising to greet her even as the door swung open.

In the doorway, peering into the room as if she’d somehow fetched up in the wrong place, was a very pretty young woman dressed in the height of fashion — dressed as if she’d just stepped out of a nightclub on Forty-second Street after an evening of dinner, dancing and champagne. She gave me a hesitant smile. “Oh, hello,” she said, “I wasn’t sure if I was in the right place—”

I’d crossed the room to her and now I took her hand and gave it a curt, professional shake. “It’s really, well, really kind of you to come — and important, important too — because every history, no matter how extensive, or, or, unextensive — nonextensive, I mean — contributes to the whole in a way that, that—”

Her smile opened up suddenly, a dazzling full-lipped smile that made whole flocks of birds take off and careen round my stomach. “Oh, it’s my pleasure,” she murmured as I motioned to the chair and watched her settle into it, “anything for science, hey?”

I offered her a cigarette — she chose a Lucky — lit it for her and wished it were nine in the evening rather than nine in the morning so we could both have a drink. A drink would have gone a long way toward calming my case of nerves.

“Good,” I said, poised over the interview sheet, pencil in hand. “So, Mrs. Foshay, perhaps you’d like to tell me something of yourself—”

“Alice, call me Alice.”

“Yes, Alice. You’ve lived here long, here in West Lafayette, I mean?”

The small talk, designed, as I’ve said, to put the subject at ease, consumed perhaps five minutes and then my brain froze up. I couldn’t help noticing how Mrs. Foshay’s breasts filled out the material of her blouse — filled it to the point of strain — and how silken her legs looked in a pair of sheer stockings. A moment of silence passed like a freight train. “All right, then,” I said, “so. And you lived in Trenton, you say, until what age?”

I did manage to get into the rhythm of things as we moved along through the factual data (number of brothers, sisters, twin status, sorority membership, frequency of attending motion pictures, et cetera) keeping it in a simple question-response mode, and even the early sequential questions about onset of puberty came off well, but I’m afraid I broke down a bit when we got to the more sensitive areas. “When did you first begin to masturbate?” I asked, lighting a cigarette myself.

“I must have been eleven,” she said, drawing at her Lucky. “Or maybe it was twelve.” She threw her head back and exhaled, no more concerned than if she were at the hairdresser’s or conferring with a girlfriend on the telephone. “We were living in Newark still, and I remember the curtains — my mother had made them for me when I was a child, very colorful, decorated with little figures out of nursery rhymes, Mother Goose, that sort of thing. My sister Jean — she’s a year older than I — she showed me the technique.”

I set down the cigarette, made a notation in the proper square. “Yes? And what was that technique?”

She tried to look away, but I held onto her with my eyes. I didn’t blink. Didn’t move.

“Well, you might find this odd or maybe hard to believe …”

“No,” I said, and my voice was so pinched I could barely get it out, “no, not at all — there is no activity we haven’t recorded, and certainly, as Prok—Dr. Kinsey, that is — outlined in the lecture last night, we make no judgments …”

She seemed encouraged. She patted her hair, which was piled up and pinned at the crown in a roll, with the bangs brushed into an exaggerated pompadour, reminiscent of the way Dolly Dawn used to wear her hair, and most people I think will remember her from George Hall’s band (“It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie” should ring a bell, or, at the very least, “Yellow Basket”). “Well,” she said, “I’m double-jointed. So’s Jean. And my brother Charlie.”

“Yes?” I said, pencil poised.

“We — Jean and I — would get up on the bed, side by side, and do a kind of back flip, you know, the sort of things acrobats do at the circus? Only we would hold it there and then, well, because of being double-jointed, we would lick ourselves.”

The term that came into my head was “auto-cunnilingus.” Prok hadn’t yet devised a box or code for that one, so I made a spontaneous notation. I was probably blushing. Certainly I was hard.

We forged on.

Was this her first marriage? Yes. Had she experienced deep kissing prior to the time she was married? Yes. Had she experienced petting? Yes. Had she fondled the male genitalia, experienced mouth-to-genital contact, engaged in coitus? Yes, yes and yes. How many partners had she had, excluding her husband? Somewhere, she guessed, around twenty. “Twenty?” I repeated, trying to keep my voice neutral. She couldn’t say, really, it might have been a few less or even as many as twenty-five, and her eyes went dreamy a moment as she tried to recollect. And what about orgasm: When was the first time she was aware of having experienced an orgasm? Had she been able to bring herself to orgasm through masturbation, petting, intercourse? When had she most recently experienced an orgasm?

And here was where I found myself in deep water again, because I asked this conventionally pretty and very likely pampered professor’s wife, this elegant blond jewel of a woman dressed in impeccable taste, the next question in the sequence, that is: “How many orgasms do you experience on average?”

She was on her fifth cigarette, and if she’d been relaxed from the outset, now she was as warm and enthusiastic as any individual I’d yet interviewed. She looked at me. Gave a little smile. I had been continuously — and unprofessionally — hard for the better part of two hours now. “Oh, I would guess maybe ten or twelve.”

My face must have shown my surprise, because few even of our highest-rating individuals would have approached that numerical category. “Per week?” I asked. And then, stupidly, “Or is that a monthly approximation?”

Now it was her turn to blush, just the faintest reddening of the flesh under both cheekbones and around the flanges of her nostrils. “Oh, no,” she said. “No. I’m afraid that would be daily.”

If Iris was at all miffed that I wasn’t there to greet her and Tommy and help drag her steamer trunk up three flights of stairs at the women’s dorm, she didn’t show it. Prok and I returned to Bloomington early on the morning of the fourth day, as planned — he still had his teaching schedule to work around in those days — and I went straight to the office to transcribe the coded sheets and add incrementally to our burgeoning data on human sexual behavior, and I should say that this was always exciting, in the way, I suppose, of a hunter returning from a successful expedition with his bag limit of the usual birds and perhaps a few of the exotic as well. (Further to the above interview, incidentally: please don’t think that all the interviewees had such a rich and extensive sex life as that young faculty wife. Much more typical, of the females especially, was a record of sexual repression, guilt and limited experience, both in number of partners and activities. I should add too, just to close out the anecdote, that the moment the door shut behind her — Mrs. Foshay — I couldn’t help relieving the pressure in my groin, though if Prok had heard of it he would have skinned me alive — professionalism, professionalism was the key word, at least on the surface. At least in the beginning. I came to orgasm in record time, the stale room still redolent with her perfume and the heat of her presence, and I barely had time to mop up with my handkerchief and tuck myself away before the next knock came at the door and the acne-stippled face of a nineteen-year-old sociology student, who wouldn’t have recognized the female genitalia if they’d been displayed for him on a gynecologist’s examining table, appeared in the doorway. He gave me a steady look, then said — or rather, croaked—“Am I in the right place?”)

But Iris. Immediately after work I rushed across campus to the dorm. Earlier, when it looked as if Prok and I wouldn’t be finished till seven or so, I’d left a telephone message with the RA to the effect that I would come straight from work and take her to dinner (Iris, that is, not the RA), so she should hold off eating. And, though it was the RA I was talking with and so couldn’t really express much of what I was feeling, I added that I was looking forward to seeing her. After such a long time, that is. Very much. Very much so.

I got there at quarter past seven, but Iris kept me waiting. I don’t know what she was doing — making me suffer just a bit on general principles, taking extra care with her dress and makeup so as to reinforce the impression she would make on me, falling back on the prerogative of women, as the pursued, to do whatever they damned well pleased — but I found myself jumping up from the sofa every other minute and pacing round the lounge, much to the dismay of the RA, who was at least putting on a show of reading from the book spread out on the desk before her. I was keyed up, and I couldn’t really say why. Perhaps it was the anticipation — nearly three months apart, the exchange of letters and snapshots, the protestations of love on both sides — which was only to be expected. I couldn’t say that I’d been lonely over the summer, not exactly, not with Mac and Prok and the long hours I’d put in both traveling and at my desk, but I guess I did use the letters as an opportunity of opening up to her my hopes and aspirations (and fears; I was in line to receive my draft notice, as was practically every other man on campus), and that made the moment of our reunion all the more significant. And fraught. I’d quoted love poems to her as well—“Now while the dark about our loves is strewn,/Light of my dark, blood of my heart, O come!”—and now I would have to make good on all of that. And so would she. But did she care for me still? Had she found someone else? Was I worthy of her?

It was nearly eight, and at least thirty women had come down the stairs and passed through the portals of the inner sanctum to meet and embrace their dates and go off to the pictures or the skating rink or the backseat of the car, when Iris finally appeared. I’d been pacing, and I was at the far end of the lounge, my back to the room, when I heard the faint wheeze of the door pulling back against the pneumatic device that kept it closed. I jerked round and there she was. Can I state the obvious? She was very beautiful, and beyond beautiful: she was special, one in a million, because I’d been writing to her and thinking of her all summer, because she was Iris McAuliffe and she was mine if I wanted her. I knew that then, knew it in the minute I saw her. This was love. This was it.

But how did she look? She’d curled her hair so that it hung in a succession of intricate lapping waves at her shoulders and framed the locket at her throat, the locket I’d given her, and whose picture was in that locket? Her dress — blue, sleeveless, cut to the knee — was new, purchased for the occasion, and her eyes, always her focal point, seemed to leap across the room at me (an illusion, I later realized, that was enhanced by the skillful application of mascara, eye shadow and rouge). She seemed smaller, darker, prettier than I’d remembered. I just stood there, helpless, and watched her as she crossed the carpet to me and let me hold her and kiss her.

“You’re back,” she said.

“Yes. And so are you. Did I miss Tommy?”

She nodded. “He had work, so he was only here for the day. He was disappointed, but he knew you were — where were you again?”

“Purdue. And DePauw.”

“He knew you were working.” The RA had fixed her eyes on us as if she had the power to look right through the layers of our clothing and our skin to reduce and examine our bones and even the marrow within. “He sends his regards.”

I felt bad for a moment, a sudden little stab of regret penetrating and then withdrawing like the blade of a knife, and I knew I should have been there for her — for her and Tommy too — but I dismissed it. There was nothing I could have done. Prok’s schedule had been set months in advance and I was powerless to alter it. “I wish I’d been here,” I said, glancing over my shoulder at the RA (not the limp blonde, but a new girl, heavyset, with a dead-white face and hair piled up like detritus on her head). The RA dropped her eyes. I turned back to Iris — Iris, whose hand I seemed to be holding — and said, “But you must be famished. How about a nice steak?”

Now that I was settled — or as settled as a man who was awaiting his draft notice in uncertain times could ever expect to be — there was no real impediment to my seeing Iris as often as I wanted. I no longer had to attend classes, take exams or write papers, and my hours with Prok were relatively stable, if far in excess of the standard forty-hour workweek. Our only problem was the travel — I was out on the road with Prok for three to four days every other week, and that pace was soon to accelerate — but Iris and I were able to adjust, because we wanted to. If before we were dating casually, feeling each other out, no hurry, no pressure or commitment, now things were different, radically different. We went everywhere together — we met for meals, attended concerts, went dancing, hiking, skating, sat in the lounge in the evenings, side by side, so close we were breathing as one, Iris working at her studies and I poring over Magnus Hirschfeld and Robert Latou Dickinson to keep up with the literature in the field. It got to the point where I felt hollow if she wasn’t there, as if I had no inner being or essence without her. When she was in class or I was at work or sitting in some second-class hotel staring into the eyes of an overfed undergraduate who was obsessed with Rita Hayworth or masturbated too much, I thought of Iris, only Iris.

The fall passed into winter and winter stretched across the holidays and into the New Year (we went home together, on the bus, to our respective families in Michigan City, and everything seemed new-made and cheerful, despite the fact that Tommy had been drafted into the United States Army and the Nazis, the Fascists and the Imperial Japanese were moving relentlessly forward on all fronts). We came back to the sunless gloom of January, the campus burdened with snow and afflicted with the kind of winds that made hats and scarves superfluous. I’d registered for the draft too, as required by law, along with all the other twenty-one to thirty-five-year-old men, but my number hadn’t come up and so we picked up where we’d left off, spending every minute outside of work or school in each other’s company. All was well. We were happy. I wrote Paul Sehorn long, chatty letters and found myself whistling as I strode across the barrens to the women’s dorm each evening after work (where I couldn’t resist joking with the RA, who had become as familiar and innocuous as a doting grandmother, though she couldn’t have been more than twenty).

There was one essential problem, though, and I’m sure you’ve anticipated me here. Sex. Sex was the problem. Even if Iris was willing, and to this point I wasn’t at all certain that she was, given her background and her virginity, there was absolutely no place we could go to put it to a trial. The year before, when I’d propositioned Laura Feeney in a headlong rush of sexual derangement, it was only bravado talking: I couldn’t have brought her home unless Mrs. Lorber had coincidentally died of a stroke in the very moment of my asking. And even if I could somehow have sneaked Iris through a second-story window in the middle of the night, there was my new roommate to consider (a senior from a remote hamlet by the name of Ezra Vorhees, whose sensibilities and personal hygienic habits were, shall we say, rustic, to put it mildly). It was frustrating. Iris and I would neck for hours in the lounge or the library till I was in pain — actual physical pain, from what undergraduates termed “blue balls” and Prok defined as an excess buildup of seminal fluids in the testicles and vas deferens — and then I would have to go back to my room and relieve myself under the blankets while my roommate pretended to be asleep. Whenever I could, I went to Mac, but I didn’t feel good about it, not anymore.

Prok was the one who came up with the solution. As I say, he’d taught me to drive that summer, and now, as I explained my situation to him, he demonstrated just how generous he was — and how much he was willing to go out of his way for me. I remember broaching the subject to him on one of our collecting trips (this time to Gary and a particular Negro neighborhood there, and more on that later), and his turning to me with a smile and saying, “Yes, it’s about time, Milk. You do need another outlet, as we all do. Why not this? Take the Nash. Take it any time you like.”

“But I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you — or Mac.”

“No inconvenience at all — we never use the car at night anyway. In fact, what I’ll do is simply leave the key under that loose brick we never got around to repairing last summer — you know, out back in the low wall round the persimmon tree? You know the one I mean?”

And so, for the first time in my life I had an automobile to do with as I liked, though of course I would have to be especially cautious since it represented the project’s single biggest nonhuman asset, and where would we have been without it? At any rate, when we got back from the trip I went straight to Iris — I caught her in the quad as she was going between classes — and informed her I’d be picking her up in style that night.

“In style?” she said. She gave me a knowing smile. The wind lifted the brim of her hat and then set it fluttering like a bird’s wing.

“That’s right,” I said. “Your own limousine, at your service, mademoiselle.”

“Kinsey’s car,” she said. “The bug buggy. The wasp wagon.”

“I’m taking you out of town. To a roadhouse. To celebrate.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Kinsey’s car?”

“It’s better than nothing.” I felt as if I’d been transposed to one of Shakespeare’s comedies, trading quips with Rosalind or Beatrice in the forest of Arden or a sunny piazza in Messina. Only this was Indiana and it was winter and Iris was letting me dangle. Just for fun.

“Do you know any roadhouses? Have you ever been to one?”

“Sure,” I lied. “Sure, dozens of times.”

“And then what?” she asked, fixing me with a teasing look.

“We eat, drink and make merry.”

“And then?”

“And then,” I said, leaning into her, the wind tearing at my collar, a flurry of students hurrying by with pale numb faces, “then afterwards we can drive off into some quiet, dark lane and, well, and have some real privacy.”

Despite everything, despite all the thought I’d put into getting Iris alone in a private setting, not to mention the fantasies I’d indulged, I was all nerves that night. The roadhouse was anything but romantic, a smoky, ill-lit den ranged round with leering, drunken faces that offered up the kind of cuisine that gave Hoosier cooking a bad name. I had a bowl of what purported to be beef stew with at least half an inch of melted tallow floating atop it and a packet of stale saltines to help soak it up. Iris pushed something called a Salisbury steak around her plate until finally she gave up and mashed the peas that accompanied it into a kind of paste and ate that on the crumbling saltines. We each had two beers.

I was watching her over the second one, trying to gauge her mood. I’d made a number of passing references to what I hoped the evening would bring, and she’d seemed amenable, or at least resigned. “Hurry up and finish that beer,” I said.

She gave me a smoldering look — or maybe that was just my imagination; more likely its intention was satiric. She did love to clown. “Oh, and why? Have you got something planned for the rest of the evening? There’s a meeting of the Backgammon Club on campus, you know. And there’s a group sing at the Presbyterian church. Do you feel like a good sing, John — wouldn’t that be swell?”

My hand found her knee beneath the table. “You know what I want,” I said.

“No,” she said, all innocence. “Whatever could that be?”

The night was cold — arctic, in fact — and the Nash’s heater didn’t really amount to much. I’d heard of a couple who’d kept the car running inside the garage (it was the girl’s father’s car, three in the morning, her parents asleep upstairs in the house) and wound up asphyxiating themselves, only to be discovered half-undressed and rigid as ice sculptures the next morning, and I was aware of the dangers. Still, we were outside and the wind — the implacable, unrelenting, stern and disapproving wind — would at least fan the exhaust away from the cab, and, more important, the backseat. For a long while we sat there in front, necking and watching the stars, and then something seemed to give in her, a sense of release, as if all the old strictures and prohibitions had suddenly fallen away. She let me pull open her jacket, and then her blouse, and after a moment I tugged her brassiere down so that her breasts fell free and I began to stimulate them orally. She responded and that encouraged me. I was petting her now, petting her furiously, kissing her deeply, massaging her bare breasts and working the nipples between my fingertips, absolutely aflame, when I murmured, “Shall we — the backseat, I mean?”

She didn’t say anything, so I took that for a yes, and after an awkward moment we were over the seat and into the back, my body stretched full atop hers, the engine eructating beneath us, the heater fighting down the onslaught of the cold. I was thinking of Mac, thinking of our first time in the garden and how receptive she was, how natural and pleasurable and easy it had been, when suddenly Iris clamped her legs together on the fulcrum of my right hand.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

Her face was faint and ghostly in the light of the stars that seeped in through the trees. I smelled the heat of her, her breath commingled with mine, the perfume she’d dabbed behind her ears that was all but dissipated now. “You don’t think I’m going to go all the way, do you?”

I was stretched out atop her. My trousers were down at my knees. She’d had her hand on my penis and her tongue in my mouth. Suddenly I became eloquent. “Yes, of course,” I said. “You know it’s the most natural thing in the world, and it’s only convention — superstition, priests, ministers, bogeymen — that keeps people from expressing themselves to the full. Sexually, I mean. Come on, Iris. Come on, it’s nothing. You’ll like it, you will.”

She was silent. She hadn’t moved. Her face was inches from mine, floating there in the dark of the car like a husked shell on a midnight sea.

“You know what we’re discovering?” I whispered.

“No,” she whispered back. “What?”

“Well, that premarital sex is actually beneficial, that people who have it — premarital sex, that is — are much better, well, adjusted than those who don’t. And it carries over into their married sex life as well. They’re happier, Iris. Happier. And that’s the long and short of it, I swear.”

She was silent again. I could feel myself shrinking, the blood ticking along the length of the shaft and ever so slowly draining away. The wind buffeted the car and we both tensed a moment, and then it passed, and the silence deepened. “Premarital,” she murmured after a moment. “Pre,” she said, holding it a beat, and then releasing it, “marital. Isn’t that what you said, John?”

“Yes,” I said, eager now, not quite taking her point. “Premarital. Sex before, well, marriage.”

Another silence, but I could feel the change coming over her, communicated along the length of her body, through the nerve endings of her skin, directly to mine. She was grinning, I knew it, though it was too dark to read her face. “So,” she said, “I take it you’re proposing to me, then?”

In the end, President Wells did deliver the ultimatum Prok had been expecting, but Prok surprised him and the Board of Trustees too. They had assumed he’d choose the marriage course over the research, the teaching to which he’d devoted himself and at which he’d excelled for the past twenty years rather than what they must have seen as a new and perhaps passing enthusiasm, but they didn’t know him very well. It hurt him, it outraged him, it made him more determined than ever to overturn the cant and hypocrisy of the guardians of the status quo, of the Rices, the Hoenigs and all the rest, but he gave up the marriage course — eventually gave up teaching across the board — in order to pursue the new and great goal of his life. Soon, very soon, the Institute for Sex Research would be born and the inner circle would expand by three.

7

“So it’s iris — the lucky girl, that is?”

Prok was at his desk, bent over his papers in a cone of light. The windows looked as if they’d been soldered over, the corridor was in shadow and the dull weight of a steady drizzle seemed to have put the entire campus into hibernation. It was our lunch hour and we were eating at our desks, as we did most days, Prok dining on his trail mix while I made the best of a disintegrating tuna sandwich from the Commons, and I’d just told him the good news, though I’d been bursting with it since I got in that morning. (If you’re wondering why I’d hesitated, it was because Prok had been even more than usually absorbed in his work all morning and I couldn’t seem to find an opportunity — he hated to be interrupted — and, if truth be told, I was uncertain how he would take the news. Yes, he’d wanted me to marry, but that was in the abstract, on another temporal plane altogether, and this was in the here and now. I knew his first thought would be for the project and how my altered status would affect it.)

“Well,” he said, looking distracted as he shuffled through his papers in search of something he’d momentarily misplaced — but that was a ruse, a ruse so he could buy time to sort out his thoughts—“she’s an attractive girl, there’s no doubt of that. And intelligent. Intelligent too.” Another moment trundled by, the wheels turning in his brain with a creak and groan I could hear all the way across the room, and then it was done. “But what am I thinking?” he shouted, and suddenly he was on his feet and striding to my desk, his hand outstretched and his face lit with the wide-angle grin he used to such effect when it suited him. “Congratulations, John. Really. This is the best news I’ve heard all week.”

I took his hand and gave him what must have been a shy but self-satisfied smile. “I’m glad, I’m really — because I didn’t know, well, how you’d feel—” I was saying, but he cut me off, already racing on ahead of me.

“When did you say the date was?”

“Well, that is, I didn’t. But we were thinking we’d like to, well, as soon as possible. March. Iris thought March would be—”

He was shaking his head. “That’ll never do. Not March. The garden, as you of all people should know, is barely worthy of the name in March. No, it will have to be May, no question about it.”

“The garden?”

He was looking directly at me — staring into my eyes — but I don’t think he was seeing me at all. He was seeing sunshine and flowers, Iris in a trailing satin gown, the justice of the peace in his ceremonial robes, the deep cerulean arc of the sky overhead. “Yes, of course. I’m offering it to you — my gift, John. And think of it, in May the irises will be at their best — irises for Iris. What could be better?”

I told him it was all right with me — I thanked him lavishly, in fact — but that Iris had already called her mother and that certain undeniable forces had been set in motion, so that I wasn’t sure if we could postpone it at this juncture. He didn’t seem to hear me. “We’ll have Mac do something special,” he said. “A persimmon wedding cake, how about that? And I’ll make up the nuptial supper, cold meats and that sort of thing, and a goulash — and champagne, of course we’ll have to have champagne …” He trailed off and seemed to become aware of me again, as if I’d ducked out of the room and left a standing effigy behind and had just now returned to inhabit its shell. “But Iris,” he said, “your intended — the sexual adjustment was satisfactory, I take it?”

I stood there in the gloom of the office, the desk between us, a numb smile adhering to my lips. I nodded.

He was grinning even more intensely now, shifting from foot to foot, squaring his shoulders and rubbing his hands as if to warm them. “Yes,” he said, “yes. Nothing like the automobile for a modern-day aphrodisiac, eh? You see what I’ve been telling you all along, how fulfilled young couples across America would be, all those frustrated undergraduates out there, the lovesick high school faction, couples too poor to marry”—his arm swept the campus and the rooftops of the town beyond—“if only they could have the privacy and freedom from prejudice to express their sexual needs when and how they choose. Of course, John,” and his eyes took hold of mine, “I hope you’re not confusing the coital experience with the sort of commitment needed to build and sustain a marriage … Or Iris. She does know that sex is — or can, and in many cases should be — independent of marriage? That she doesn’t have to marry the first—” And here he stopped himself, leaving the rest unspoken.

I was about to reassure him, to tell him that we loved each other and had been dating, as he well knew, for some time now, and that our sexual adjustment was just fine, thank you, more than adequate — terrific, even — and that we knew perfectly well what we were doing, but again he cut me off.

“But this is great news! To have you married, Milk — don’t you see what this will do for the project? You won’t be — and you’ll forgive me — so wet behind the ears, or appear to be, at any rate. A married man conducting interviews has got to inspire more confidence, especially in older subjects, and females, of course, than a bachelor. Don’t you think?”

And here I could answer him with confidence even as the image of Mrs. Foshay fought to crowd everything else out of my brain. “That goes without saying, Prok, and I have been listening, believe me, on all those occasions when you kept wishing I was older and more, well, experienced—”

“Good, good,” he said, “good,” and he’d turned to go back to his desk when he swung round on me with an afterthought. “Iris,” he said. “Do we have her history?”

Over the course of the next two months, Prok was in increasing demand as a lecturer, and we began, of necessity, to step up our travel schedule. Word had gotten around. It seemed that every civic group, private school and university in a five-hundred-mile radius wanted him to appear, and at this stage, Prok never turned down an invitation. Nor did he charge a fee, even going so far as to pay traveling expenses out of his own pocket, though his first fledgling grants from the National Research Council and the Rockefeller Foundation helped cover him here — as they did with my salary as his first full-time employee. The routine was the same as always — Prok would find himself in a hall somewhere, the crowd already gathered, and he would lecture with his usual frankness on previously taboo subjects and then ask for volunteers — friends of the research, he’d begun to call them — to step forward and have their histories taken. When we weren’t in his office, working out our tabulations, curves and correlation charts, we were off on the road, collecting data, because, as Prok said, over and over, you could never have enough data.

And how did I feel about all this? I was excited, of course, and I was infused with Prok’s enthusiasm — I believed in the project with every ounce of my being, and I still do — but the timing was a bit awkward, as you can imagine. Iris and I had just become engaged. We treasured each other’s company. We’d begun to enjoy each other sexually (though both of us were still fighting our inhibitions and it wasn’t at all the same as it was with Mac). I wanted to be with her, to stroll arm in arm round Bloomington and poke through the secondhand shops, looking for dishware, rugs and the like, pricing furniture for the household we hoped to set up come June — and we needed to find an apartment we could afford within our limited means, and that was going to take some time and footwork too. But instead I was sitting up in second-rate hotels till one and two in the morning, utterly exhausted, trying to squeeze as many histories as possible into each working day. I was drinking and smoking too much. My ears rang, my head ached, my eyes felt molten, and nothing, not even the details of the most arcane sexual practices, could arouse me from my torpor — not coprophilia, incest or sex with barnyard animals. I just nodded, held the subject’s eyes, and made my notations on the position sheet.

We must have collected some two hundred histories during this period, really driving ourselves, but thus far the research was skewed by the fact that the majority of our histories were predominantly upper-level — that is, from college students and professionals. We’d begun to branch out, as I’ve mentioned, and we did make trips to collect histories among the denizens of the homosexual underground in Indianapolis and Chicago, as well as at least one prison and the state work farm where Prok had made so many of his most valuable contacts — and one contact invariably gave rise to another, and another, ad infinitum, so that now we were determined to pursue as many of these lower-level histories as we could. What we lacked above all were black histories, and so we decided to mount a second expedition to Gary, Indiana, and the aforementioned Negro neighborhood there.

We left Bloomington on a drizzly Saturday morning in mid-April (we were still working around Prok’s teaching schedule then — though the marriage course was dead, he was nonetheless committed to his biology classes, one of which met at eight o’clock on Saturday mornings, a cruel hour for any undergraduate to have to bend over a dissecting pan or distinguish between mono- and dicotyledons). We drove straight through, going as fast as the roads, the Nash and the state police would abide, arriving just after dark. We had an indifferent meal at a poorly lit diner, and sat there over coffee and pie as the drizzle solidified into a gray intermittent rain that wasn’t going to make our work — outdoor work, on the streets — any easier. Prok looked grim. He kept checking his watch, as if that could somehow stop the rain and accelerate the coming of the hour at which we were to meet our contact. He had good reason to be anxious. Our first expedition to Gary, in the deep-freeze of February, had been a failure. We’d spent endless hours circling one block after another, peering hopefully through the windshield any time a figure appeared on the deserted streets, but Prok’s contact failed to show up, and we didn’t get a single history. Neither of us mentioned it now. We just finished our coffee, shrugged into our rain gear and climbed back into the car, heading six blocks south, into the Negro neighborhood.

Prok parked on a side street around the corner from a bar called Shorty’s Paradise, in a neighborhood of modest storefronts (HAIR-DRESSER, SANDWICHES MADE TO ORDER, BUTCHER SHOP) with walkup apartments above them and the smokestacks of the factories looming up in the near distance like the battlements of a degraded castle. The street was littered with sodden newspaper, bottles, discarded food wrappers. Rain streaked the windshield and painted a sheen of reflected light on the pavement. There was no sign of life. We got out of the car and the doors slammed behind us like a cannonade.

My first surprise came when we turned the corner — the street outside Shorty’s Paradise was thronged with people despite the rain, a whole mob spilling from the open door of the saloon and fanning out in both directions under the tattered awning. But these were black people, exclusively black, and I have to confess that I’d never to this point had much contact with Negroes, aside from the occasional pleasantry—“Nice day, isn’t it?”—I exchanged with the odd maid or cook who came into the market where I’d worked summers. There was music drifting out the open door, a gaggle of voices, the smell of tobacco, marijuana, alcohol. I didn’t know what to do. I hesitated.

But Prok. Prok was the second surprise. Though he detested bars, cigarettes and, especially, what he termed the “jungle beat” of popular music, he strode right past the crowd and though the front door as if he’d been going there every Saturday night of his life. He was dressed, as always, in his dark suit, white shirt and bow tie, over which he’d casually slung a yellow rain slicker that seemed always to hitch up in back as if it had been sewn together from two mismatching bolts of oilcloth. I was dressed in a dark suit and tie as well, though my overcoat — a thing my grandmother had picked out for me — was gray with black flecks and hung to my ankles. I could feel the hair prickling under the band of my hat, ready to spring loose the minute I stepped inside. I ducked my head and followed Prok through the door.

A long, trailing mahogany-topped bar dominated the place, and it was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with chattering people, all of whom glanced up as we stepped through the door, then turned away as if they hadn’t seen us at all. The jukebox was playing “Minnie the Moocher” at a dynamic volume and everyone in the place seemed to be shouting to be heard above it. Prok went straight to the bar, elbowed his way in and immediately started up a conversation with a towering man in an electric-blue double-breasted suit. And this was the third thing, the oddest of all: Prok began to speak in dialect. I was stunned. As you may know, Prok was a real stickler for standard English, and he wasn’t at all shy about correcting grammatical mistakes — he could be brutally sarcastic about it too — but here he was, switching to the vernacular like a ventriloquist. The conversation went something like this:

“Evenin’, friend,” Prok said, fastening on the man with the blue talons of his eyes. “I’m lookin’ for Rufus Morganfeld. You know him?”

The man in the electric-blue suit took his time, regarding Prok from eyes drawn down to slits. He had a cigarette in one hand, a not-quite-empty glass in the other. “You the law?”

“Uh-uh.”

“What then? Sellin’ Bibles?”

“Who I am is Doctor Alfred C. Kinsey, Professor of Zoology at Indiana University, and Rufus — brother Rufus — say he gone meet me here.”

“That’s somethin’,” the man said softly. “Doctor, huh? What, you come to cure my hemorrhoids?”

Prok’s face never changed. No one laughed. “You wouldn’t be needin’ a cocktail there by any chance, would you?” he asked.

There was a long interval, Prok remaining absolutely motionless, his eyes never wavering, and then the man in the blue suit let a smile creep out of the furrows at the corners of his mouth. “Crown Royal and soda,” he said.

The drink was ordered, the drink came, the drink was handed over. By this time Prok was deep in conversation with the man in the blue suit and a group of four or five others who were nearest him at the bar, and Rufus Morganfeld himself — our contact, who had been down at the other end of the bar to this point, waiting to see how things sorted out — came up and introduced himself. Prok greeted him warmly, and I thought he was going to offer Rufus a drink as well, but instead he shook hands all around, took Rufus in one arm and me in the other and shepherded us out into the street. Immediately Prok went back to being Prok, as there was no need to coddle Rufus, whom he’d met at the work farm, whose history he’d recorded and who was being paid fifty cents for every history he helped us collect among the prostitutes who worked the neighborhood. (I should say that Prok was intensely interested in prostitutes, at least in the beginning, because their experience was so much wider than most — this was before we actually got to observe them at work — but ultimately, they weren’t as useful as you might imagine in regard to the physiology of various sex acts because of their propensity to counterfeit response.)

At any rate, with Rufus as our Virgil, we were able to track down the prostitutes (it was a slow night for them in any case, because of the rain, and they tended to bunch up in a few locales), and begin to record their histories. At first they tended to be skeptical—“Oh, yeah, honey, for one greenback dollar you just gone talk”—but Prok on the scent of histories was not to be denied and they quickly came round to the view that this was strictly on the up-and-up, pure science, and that we valued them not only as a resource but as human beings too, and this was another facet of Prok’s genius — or his compassion, rather. He genuinely cared. And he had no prejudices whatever — either racial or sexual. It didn’t matter to him if you were colored, Italian or Japanese, if you engaged in anal sex or liked to masturbate on your mother’s wedding photo — you were a human animal, and you were a source of data.

The problem we encountered, however, was that since there were no adequate hotels nearby, we were at a loss for a private venue in which to conduct the interviews. We did have the car, but only one of us could interview in the Nash and the necessity was to conduct our interviews simultaneously. We were standing there on the street corner, the rain coming down harder now, in a forlorn little group — two prostitutes no older than I, Prok, Rufus and myself — when Rufus came up with the solution. “I got a room,” he said, “two blocks over. Nothin’ fancy, but it’s got a electric light, a bed and a armchair, if that’ll do—”

In the end Prok decided to take the Nash himself and leave me to the relative comfort of Rufus’s room, reasoning that I was still the amateur and didn’t need any additional impediments — such as cold, rain and inadequate lighting — put in my way. It was a noble gesture, or a practical one, I suppose, but either way, it was destined to backfire on him. I took my girl — and I call her a girl because she was just eighteen, with a pair of slanted cinnamon eyes and skin the color of the chocolate milk they mix up at Bornemann’s Dairy back at home — up to Rufus’s sitting room at the end of a hallway on the third floor of a detached brick apartment building that was once a single-family home. She seemed dubious at first, and maybe a bit nervous, and, of course, I was a bundle of nerves myself, not only because I’d taken so few female histories to this point but because of her race and the surroundings, the close, vaguely yellowish walls, the neatly made single bed that might have been a pallet in the penitentiary, the harsh light of the naked bulb dangling from the ceiling on its switch cord. Fifteen minutes into the interview, when she saw what it was, she relaxed, and I do think I did a very professional job with her that night (though, to be honest, I did find myself uncomfortably aroused, as with Mrs. Foshay).

Her history was what you might expect from a girl in her position — relations at puberty with both her father and an older brother, marriage at fourteen, the move north from Mississippi, abandonment, the pimp, the succession of johns and venereal diseases — and I remember being movedby her simple, unnuanced recitation of the facts, the sad facts, as I hadn’t been moved before. Unprofessionally, I wanted to get up from my chair and hug her and tell her that it was all right, that things would get better, though I knew they wouldn’t. Unprofessionally, I wanted to strip the clothes from her and have her there on the bed and watch her squirm beneath me. I didn’t act on either impulse. I just closed down my mind and recorded her history, one of the thousands that would be fed into the pot.

The second woman — she was older, thirty or thirty-five, and she had a white annealed scar tracing the line of her jawbone on the right side of her face — came to the door the minute the first girl had left. This second woman had a belligerent look about her — a striated pinching of the lips, the weather report of her brow, the prove-it-to-me stance of her legs as she stood there arms akimbo at the door — and before she stepped into the room she demanded the dollar we were paying out to each of our subjects that night. I dug around in my pockets and came up empty — Prok had the billfold of crisp green singles he’d withdrawn from the bank the previous afternoon and he’d neglected, in the confusion of sorting things out vis-à-vis appropriate interviewing venues, to give me more than the one I’d handed to the first girl. “I, well, I’m sorry,” I said, “I guess I’ll have to, well—”

“Yeah, sure, you’re sorry,” she said, her brow contorted, “and so am I.” She let out a curse. “And after I’ve went and dragged my sweet ass all the way over here in the rain too—”

“No,” I said, “no, you don’t understand.”

“You just some schemer,” she said, “like all the rest. Somethin’ for nothin’, ain’t that about right?”

It took all my powers of persuasion, which, believe me, weren’t much more than marginally developed at that point, to convince her to have a seat on the bed while I made a mad dash down the stairs, out into the street and back along the two blocks to where Prok sat in the Nash, interviewing his own colored prostitute. He wouldn’t be thrilled over the interruption. It was a rule, hard and fast, that all interviews must be conducted straight through in a controlled and private location, without any distractions whatever that might compromise the rapport established with the subject, no telephones ringing, no third parties hovering in the background, no emergencies of any sort. I knew this. And I knew what Prok’s impatience — and his wrath — could be like. Still, I had no choice. I ran hard all the way, afraid that my subject would get fed up and leave, and I rounded the corner by Shorty’s in full stride, the dark hump of the Nash rising up out of the black nullity of the pavement like something deposited there by the retreating glaciers. There was a light on inside — Prok’s flashlight — and the silhouettes of a pair of heads caught behind the windshield. Out of breath, I skidded to a halt on the wet sidewalk, took half a second to compose myself, and rapped gently at the driver’s-side window.

That was the precise moment when the police cruiser rounded the corner behind me and the lights began to flash.

I had never in my life been in trouble with the law and had no reason to expect anything but courtesy and neighborly assistance from the two peace officers who emerged from the cruiser, thinking absurdly that they’d come to help us contact as many prostitutes as possible so as to make it easier for us to line up our interviews. Events proved otherwise. Events, in fact, moved so swiftly from that moment on that I didn’t really have a chance to make sense of them until much later. The two patrolmen, both short and stocky, with the barrel chests and bandy-legged gait of rugby players, converged on me where I stood arrested at the window of the Nash. The first of them — he looked to be Prok’s age, with a pug nose and inflamed features — strode directly up to me, and without saying a thing took hold of both my arms, jerked them round behind me and clapped two conjoined discs of metal over my wrists. In a word, handcuffs.

“But, but what are you doing?” I demanded. Or rather, stuttered. The rain was in my face, soaking the sleeves and shoulders of my jacket and infiltrating the pomaded weave of my hair, which sprang loose now in a sad barbaric tangle (in my urgency, I’d left both hat and overcoat in the room). “No, no, no, this is all wrong. You see, you, well, you don’t understand what—”

The second policeman — he was fair-haired, with pale eyebrows and a little mustache that vanished like Paul Sehorn’s when the lights of the patrol car illuminated his face — had taken up my position at Prok’s window. His rapping, with the business end of a nightstick, was more insistent than mine had been. The window rolled down and I saw Prok’s astonished face framed there a moment, and then the policeman had his hand on the door and was jerking it open. “Okay,” he said, “out of the car.”

All the way to the station house, as we sat wedged in on either side of the prostitute (Verleen Loy, five foot five, one hundred twenty-seven pounds, D.O.B. 3/17/24), Prok remonstrated with the patrolmen in his precise, wrathful tones. Did they know who he was? Did they know that the NRC, the Rockefeller Foundation and Indiana University supported his research? Were they aware that they were holding up vital progress toward understanding one of the most significant behavioral patterns of the human animal?

They weren’t aware of it, no. In fact, one of them — the red-faced policeman who had handcuffed me and subsequently shoved me up against the brick wall at my back for no earthly reason — swung round in his seat at this point and addressed the prostitute in a tone I could only think was both crude and offensive. “Hey, Verleen,” he said, grinning wide, “are we holding up progress here?”

The passing aura of a streetlight caught her face then. She had battered-looking eyes, teeth that seemed to have been sharpened to points. Her voice was reduced, hardly audible over the swish of the tires on the wet pavement. “You ain’t holdin’ up nothin’,” she said.

At the station house, things seemed to take a turn for the better. The night captain, though he was deeply skeptical, was impressed by Prok’s manner and his dress (and I think he took pity on me too, with my disarranged hair and hangdog look). After determining that Prok was who he claimed to be, the night captain allowed him to put a call through to H.T. Briscoe, Dean of the Faculties at IU. I stood there looking on, the handcuffs digging at my wrists, as Prok recited the number from memory and the night captain conveyed it to the operator.

It was past two in the morning. Verleen had been taken off and locked up in a cell somewhere, and I could hear the occasional shout or whimper emanating from the men’s cell block in the rear. I was frightened, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I wasn’t yet twenty-three, I’d seen little or nothing of the world, and here I was, on the wrong side of the law and facing some sort of convoluted morals charge that would blemish my record forever, and I was already frantic over what I would tell my mother — what I would tell Iris, for that matter. Solicitation. Wasn’t that what they charged you with? What about Sodomy? Fornication? Corrupting the morals of a minor? I saw myself at the work farm, in prison stripes, shuffling out to rake the yard.

But then I heard Prok’s cool, collected tones as he explained the situation to Dean Briscoe, rudely awakened from his bed in a cozy room in a comfortable house back in the very Eden of Bloomington, and then I watched the night captain’s face as Prok handed him the phone and Dean Briscoe delivered his authoritative testimonial on the other end of the line, and it was only then that I knew the crisis had passed. Unfortunately, I never did recover my overcoat and hat, and we managed only six interviews on that trip, but on the positive side, it taught us a lesson — from then on, Prok never went anywhere without a letter from Dean Briscoe explaining his project and its validation by the highest authorities of Indiana University, said letter to be produced “in the event that the nature of his research takes him into localities where the purpose of what he is doing might not be clearly understood.”

Back safe in Bloomington, I gave Iris a truncated version of our little contretemps, tried to make a joke of it, in fact, though my psychic wounds were still open and festering, but Iris didn’t find the story amusing, not at all. We were taking dinner together at the Commons (the roast pork with brown gravy, fitfully mashed potatoes and wax beans cooked to the consistency of cud), and she’d innocently asked how the trip had gone. I told her, glossing over some of the seamier details, and winding up with an extended lament over the loss of my hat and overcoat (for which Prok would make allowance in my next paycheck, incidentally).

“Prostitutes, huh?” she said.

I nodded. The overhead lighting made a gargoyle’s mask of my face (I know because I was staring into my own reflection in a long dirty strip of mirror on the wall behind Iris). Outside, it was raining, a local manifestation of the same pandemic storm that had dogged us in Gary.

Iris’s face was very pale and her mouth drawn tight. She laid her knife and fork carefully across her plate, though she’d barely touched her food. When she spoke, her voice was thick with emotion. “Do you often go with prostitutes?”

“Well, no,” I said. “Of course not. That goes without saying.”

“Do you ever — do you sleep with them?”

I didn’t like the implied accusation, didn’t like the criticism — or belittling — of my professionalism and my work. And I was especially annoyed after what I’d been through the previous night. She couldn’t begin to imagine. “No,” I snapped. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Did you ever?”

“Iris. Please. What do you think I am?”

“Did you?”

“No. And if you want to know the truth I never laid eyes on a prostitute in my life till last night and I wouldn’t treat them, prostitutes, that is, any different from anybody else. As far as interviews are concerned. You know perfectly well that for the project to succeed we need everybody’s history, from as wide a range of people as we can manage to contact, ministers’ wives, Daughters of the American Revolution, Girl Scout leaders”—and here the image of Mac, naked, flitted quickly through my brain like one of the flecks and blotches on the screen when the projector first flicks on—“and, yes, prostitutes too.”

She looked away, caught in profile, her hair a small conflagration of shadow and light. “Did you ever sleep with anybody?” She spoke to the wall, her voice a whisper. “Besides me?”

“No,” I said, and I don’t know why I lied when the whole ethos behind the project was to bring human sexuality out of the dungeon to which the priests had confined it and to celebrate it, glory in it, experience it to the full, without prohibition or inhibition. But still, given the moment and the situation, which was fraught to say the least, I lied.

“But why not?” she said, lifting her head to give me a sidelong glance, the glance of the executioner and the hanging judge. “Isn’t that — sleeping with people, I mean — exactly what Dr. Kinsey—Prok—says is the right thing to do? Isn’t it part of the program? Sexual experimentation, I mean?”

“Well,” I said, and a gobbet of meat, soft as a sponge, seemed to have climbed back up my throat, “not exactly. He is happily married himself, you know, and he, he wants us to be too—”

Her face was flushed. The crucified pork congealed in its gravy on the table before her. I felt a draft come up, somebody opening a door somewhere, and I craned my neck to pinpoint the source of it. “Do you feel a draft?” I said.

“You’re lying to me,” she said. “I know you’ve slept with people.”

“Who?” I demanded.

She was working loose the ring I’d given her, twisting it back and forth to get the band over the bone of the finger joint. It was a diamond solitaire, and I’d borrowed twenty-five dollars from Prok, as an advance on my salary, to put a down payment on it. I had never in my life purchased anything so lavish — had never even dreamed of it. I watched her jerk it off her finger now and set it on the table between us. She was feeling around her for her jacket, all her emotions concentrated in her eyes and the unforgiving slash of the drawn-down wound of her mouth. “Mac,” she said. “Mac, that’s who.”

8

Talk of women’s intuition, of the subliminal signals the sex is somehow able to pick up on, in the way of the dog that knows its master is coming home when the car is still six blocks away or the cat that lifts its ears at the faintest rustle of tiny naked feet in the farthest corner of the attic. For a solid week I walked around with that ring in my pocket, and I made no attempt to contact Iris or convince her that she was wrong, other than what I told her that night at the Commons — that she was out of her mind, that Mac was a surrogate mother to me, and far too old, and married, and that I wasn’t attracted to her in any case. Iris listened, wordlessly, as if to see how far I would go before I stumbled, and then she was on her feet and stalking across the cafeteria to the door at the far end of the room. Which she slammed behind her.

This was our first tiff, the first round in a long series of preliminary bouts and featured attractions, and I was miserable over it — miserable, but not about to give in. What had I done, after all? Interviewed a couple of prostitutes? That was my job, couldn’t she see that? And if such an insignificant thing could set her off, I dreaded to think what the future would bring, when certainly we would be obliged to interview a hundred more prostitutes, not to mention whole busloads of sex offenders of all stripes. I wanted to call my mother and tell her the engagement was off, but, as I say, I’d always had difficulty confiding in her because she never seemed to see things my way — she would take Iris’s side, I was sure of it, and lay me open like a whitefish she was filleting for the pan. In the end, I went to Mac.

I chose a time when I knew Prok would be in class and the children at school. I made my way down the familiar street, the sun in my face, leaves unfurling on the trees, the world gone green with the April rains. The garden was coming along nicely, just as Prok had said it would, though we were devoting less time to it this spring because of the accelerating schedule of our travels, and I might have lingered over the flowerbeds for a moment or two before I screwed up the courage to ring the bell. All I could think of was Iris and what I could do to extricate myself from the sheath of lies I’d constructed around me — a marriage counselor, I needed a marriage counselor even before I was married — and I was more than a little tentative with regard to Mac too. She’d given us her blessing, just as Prok had, and she couldn’t have been more excited if one of her own children were getting married. I wondered how I could turn around now and tell her that it was all off — off because of what we’d done between us, in the garden, on the bentwood sofa in the living room and on the marital bed in the room upstairs. So I stood there, vaguely aware of the life seething around me, the insects descending on the flowers and the sparrows squalling from their nests in the eaves, took a deep breath and put my finger to the bell.

Mac came to the door in her khaki shorts and the matching blouse with the GSA insignia over the breast pocket, but she was wearing a cardigan too. (The house was cold this time of year because Prok, always frugal, shut down the furnace on the first of April, no matter what the weather — a habit I’ve taken up myself, by the way. Why waste fuel when the body makes its own heat?) She’d been in the kitchen, fixing a pot of vegetable soup and bologna sandwiches for the children’s lunch, and she was expecting the postman, one of the neighbors, a traveling salesman — anybody but me. I saw it in her eyes, a moment of recognition, and then calculation — how much time did she have before the children came tramping up the path? Enough to pull me in and wrestle off my clothes? Enough for a quick rush to climax with her shorts at her knees and the blouse shoved up to her throat?

“Hello,” I said, and my face must have been heavy because the kittenish look went right out of her eyes. “Have you — may I come in for a minute?”

She said my name as if she were sleepwalking, then pulled back the door to admit me. “What’s wrong?” she said. “What is it?”

I stood there, shaking my head. I don’t think I’d ever felt so hopeless as I did in that moment.

Mac knew just what to do. She led me to the kitchen, sat me down at the table with a cup of tea and set about feeding me what she could spare of the children’s lunch. I watched her glide round the kitchen, from stove to counter to icebox and back, a whole ballet of domestic tranquillity, and I began to let it all out of me. I remember there was a sound of hammering from the yard two houses over where they were putting up a garage and it seemed to underscore the urgency of the situation — and the hopelessness. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said, and the hammer thumped dully, then beat a frantic tattoo.

To this point, Mac hadn’t offered much, other than the odd phrase—“And then what?” or “Do you take mustard, John?”—and I had the sudden intimation that she was jealous somehow, jealous of Iris and what she meant to me. Mac was masterful at inhabiting her role — dutiful wife of the scientist, selfless helpmeet, hostess, cook and mother — but I wondered how she really felt about things. About me, that is, and our relationship and how this would affect it — how it already had.

“Should I–I mean, do you think I should be the one to, to—?” I wanted her to tell me to go to Iris and make it up, to say that honesty was the best policy, to let the truth come out and we’d all be the better for it, but, as usual, I fumbled round the issue.

Mac pulled out the chair across from me and sat at the table, her own cup of tea in hand. She leaned forward to blow the steam off the cup, then sat up and stirred the dark liquid with a spoon. “You do love her, John,” she said. “You’re sure of it?”

I did, I was sure I did, and it wouldn’t be the first time I’d confessed it to Mac, but now, sitting in the gently percolating, sun-grazed kitchen where we’d copulated on the linoleum tiles in front of the stove — the two of us, Mac and I — it felt awkward to admit it.

“Yes,” I said, and the hammer came down twice. “I’m sure.”

She took a long while over it, blowing at her tea with pursed lips, then lifting the cup to her mouth and watching me over the edge of the ceramic rim. Her hands were beautiful, her eyes, the imbricate waves of her hair. I was in love with her too — with Mac — and I’d been fooling myself to think it was purely biological. And what had Prok said to his critics, to the Thurman B. Rices and all the rest who accused him of taking the spiritual essence out of sex, of regarding it in a purely mechanistic way? They’ve had three thousand years to go on about love, now give science a chance. I’d agreed with him, taken it as a credo and worn the credo as a badge. It was us against them, the forces of inquiry and science against the treacle you heard on the radio or saw on the screen. But now I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. I set down my sandwich, too upset — too confused — to eat.

Mac was smiling suddenly, even as the first footsteps hit the porch out front and the squeal of the hinges and the slamming of the door came to us in quick succession. “You know what?” she said, and the hammer pounded with a slow, deliberate rhythm that was like the drumbeat of a funerary march. “I think I’ll go have a talk with her.”

Again, though, I can’t help thinking I’m straying off the path here, because this is about Prok — or it should be. Prok was the great man, not I. I was just fortunate to have been there with him from the beginning and to have been allowed to contribute in my small way to the greater good of the project and the culture at large. Prok was defined by his work, above all, and his detractors — those who find sex research a source of prurient jokes and adolescent sniggers, as if it weren’t worthy of investigation, as if it were some pseudoscience like studies of spacemen or ectoplasm or some such thing — might like to know just how consumed by it he was. I’ll give one example from around this period — I can’t really recall whether it was before or after Mac and Iris had their little tête-à-tête — but it speaks volumes of Prok’s single-mindedness and dedication. And it’s of interest for another reason too — it was the one occasion when our roles were reversed, when I was the teacher and he the pupil.

But I’m already making too much of it. Anybody, any man on the street, could have given Prok what he required — I just happened to be available, that was all. In any case, we were in the office one evening — it must have been around six or so — and I don’t think we’d exchanged a word in hours, when I heard Prok get up from his desk. I had my head down, busy with one of the preliminary graphs on sources of orgasm for single males at the college level, and so I didn’t look up, but I did register the sound of the file drawer opening and closing again, of the turning of the key in the lock, signals that Prok was getting set to shut down the office for the day. A moment later, he was standing over me.

“You know, John,” he said, “since Mac and the girls are away on this Girl Scout Jamboree, or whatever it is they call it, and my son seems to be absorbed in a school project he’s doing over at his friend’s house — the Casdens, decent people — I wonder if we shouldn’t spend the evening together—”

I thought I knew what he meant, and I no doubt did have plans — brooding over Iris would have topped the list — but I nodded in compliance. “Yes,” I said, “sure.”

He was opening up that dazzling smile, pleased, delighted — and, oddly, he reached across the desk and shook my hand as if I’d just given him the keys to the kingdom. “A bite of dinner, maybe, and perhaps we can combine that with what I had in mind, a little practice in one of the areas where I find myself sadly deficient — with an eye to improving my technique, that is.”

“Technique?”

“Interviewing, I mean.”

I gave him an astonished look and said something along the lines that he was the consummate interviewer and that I couldn’t imagine how he could expect to improve on what was already as close to flawless as anyone could hope.

“Kind of you to say,” he murmured, giving my hand a final squeeze and releasing it. “But we’re all capable of improvement, and, you know, I think, that I’m not as comfortable as I should be around revelers.”

“Revelers?”

“Where do we spend most of our time — in the field, that is?”

I didn’t have a clue as to what he was talking about.

“In taverns, Milk. In barrooms, roadhouses, beer halls, at parties and gatherings where smoking and drinking are de rigueur, and you know how I — how awkward I am, or perhaps untrained is a better word, with those particular sybaritic skills.”

I still wasn’t following him. “Yes? And?”

He laughed then, a short chopped-off laugh that began in his throat and terminated in his nose. “Well, isn’t it obvious? You’re the expert here, Milk. I’m the novice.”

“You mean you want me, to, to—?”

“That’s right. I want you to give me lessons.”

We went back to the house on First Street that night with a brown paper bag of ham sandwiches, three packs of cigarettes, two cigars, a quart of beer and a fifth each of bourbon, scotch, gin, rum and vodka, as well as the standard mixers. It may have been raining. The house was cold. Prok built up a fire in the hearth and we spread our acquisitions out on the coffee table, set ourselves up with the proper glasses, ice and ashtrays, and started in.

First came the cigarettes. “You don’t have to inhale, Prok,” I said, knowing how much he loathed the habit. “Just let the thing dangle from your lips, like this”—I demonstrated—“bend forward to light it, squelch the match with a flick of the wrist, take the smoke in your mouth, like so, hold it a moment, exhale. No, no, no — just leave the cigarette there, right there at the corner of your mouth, and let the smoke rise. That’s right. Squint your eyes a bit. But you see? Now your hands are free, and you can pick up your drink or, if you’re interviewing, go right on with your recording. Yes, yes, now you can remove it — two fingers, index and middle — and tap the ash. That’s it. Right. Very good.”

Of course, he hated it. Hated the smell, the taste, the idea, hated the smoke in his eyes and the artificial feel of the dampening paper at his lip. And on the second or third puff he inadvertently inhaled and went into a coughing fit that drained all the color from his face and swelled his eyes till I thought they would burst. The cigars were even worse. At one point he went to the mirror to examine how he looked with the sodden stub of a White Owl clenched in the corner of his mouth, and then wordlessly came back across the room and flung the thing in the fireplace. “I just don’t understand it,” he said. “I just don’t. How can people derive enjoyment from burning weeds under their noses — from burning weeds anywhere? From inhaling burning weeds? And what about men with facial hair, with beards — what do they do? It’s a wonder every barroom in America hasn’t burned to the ground by now.” He was stalking back and forth across the floor. “It’s maddening is what it is. Maddening.”

We did better with alcohol. I started him off with bourbon, my drink of choice, and I tried to have him dilute it with water or soda, but he insisted on taking it straight, reasoning that if he had to choose a favorite, something he could order casually at some gin mill to help put potential subjects at ease, he ought to know what it tasted like in its unadulterated form. I watched him sniff the sepia liquid, tip back the drink, swish it around in his mouth, and then, after a moment’s deliberation, spit it back into the glass. “No,” he said, giving me a grimace, “bourbon, I’m afraid, is not—viable.”

And so on, through the other candidates (the beer, he said, had the smell of swamp gas and the taste of an old sponge that had been buried in the yard and then squeezed over a glass), until we got to the rum. He poured it, sniffed it, swirled it in his mouth and swallowed. The grimace never left his face and my impression was that the experiment had been a failure. But he leaned forward and poured a second drink, a very short one, and drank that off too. He gritted his teeth. Smacked his lips a time or two. His eyes were red behind the shining discs of his glasses. “Rum,” he said finally. “That’s the ticket. How does the song go? — ‘Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest, Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.’”

In fact, we didn’t have Iris’s history. I knew, though, almost exactly how it would tabulate — she’d been sex shy, inhibited by her upbringing and her religion; she’d masturbated guiltily while thinking of a boy in her class or some screen actor; she’d dated frequently, but not seriously, and had never, until now, allowed anything more than deep kissing and perhaps some awkward adolescent manipulation of her breasts; she’d had one sexual partner and had lost her virginity at the age of nineteen in the backseat of a Nash. And more: she loved that partner and intended to marry him. Or at least she had until a week ago.

Though he tried not to show it, Prok was irritated that we hadn’t collected her history — how would it look vis-à-vis the project if the prospective wife of his sole colleague had decided against volunteering? Bad, to say the least. Unreasonable. Hypocritical. Even worse, it would tend to undermine everything we were trying to project with regard to openness about sex on the one hand and absolute confidentiality on the other. What was Iris thinking? Was she going to wind up being a detriment to the project? And if she was, would it cost me my job?

The pressure was subtle. There was that initial inquiry of Prok’s on the afternoon he congratulated me on my engagement, and then, in the days and weeks that followed, the odd passing reference to Iris’s sexual adjustment or to the history he’d recorded of some coed in his biology course, who just happened to remind him of Iris—“Same build, you know, same bright sparking eyes. A peach of a girl, a real peach.” But once he’d found out — from Mac, I presume — that the engagement was off, he withdrew a bit, no doubt brooding over his options. He wanted me married, no question about it, and he wanted Iris’s history as a matter of course, but since I hadn’t yet chosen to confide in him, he couldn’t very well give me unsolicited advice or exert the direct pressure with which he was so much more comfortable. All that week — the week I walked around with the weight of the ring like an anvil in my pocket — he said nothing, though I could see he was bursting with the impulse to interfere, to lecture, advise, hector and, ultimately, set things right.

As it turned out, it was Mac who held the key. The day after I spoke with her she asked Iris over to the house for tea, and I don’t know how much she revealed (or I didn’t then) or just how she put it, but Iris seemed mollified. Mac called me at the rooming house — shouts, the tramping of feet up and down the stairs, Phone’s for you, Milk! — to tell me in her soft adhesive tones that I should go to Iris as soon as I could. It was past seven in the evening. I’d had an early supper alone at a diner (where I’d looked up from my hamburger to see Elster, my old antagonist from the biology library, giving me a look of contempt and naked, unalloyed jealousy), and I’d been stretched out on my bed ever since with a pint of bourbon, listening to the sad, worn, gut-clenching voice of Billie Holiday drifting over her sorrow. Was I drunk? I suppose so. I gave my effusive thanks to Mac, fought down my hair in the mirror, and then flung myself out the door.

The campus. The dorm. A sound of frogs trilling along the creek. The RA and her welcoming smile. “Hi, John,” she said, and she gave me a wink. “Glad to see you’re back.” The big pale moon of her face rose and set again. “I’ve already rung her,” she said.

As it happened, two other girls came through the door before Iris and I caught a glimpse of her on the stairs before the door wheezed shut, and in the interval between its closing and springing open again, I had a chance to compose myself. I smoothed down my hair, cupped a palm to my mouth and evaluated my breath (which smelled, essentially, no different from the neck of the bottle I’d left back in the room). What I needed was a stick of gum, but I’d given up the habit because Prok forbade it in the office and disapproved strenuously of it everywhere else. I fingered the ring in my pocket and stood rigid, awaiting my fate.

She was wearing her best outfit, one I’d repeatedly praised, and it was evident that she’d spent a great deal of time on her hair and makeup. And what was she doing? Making me aware of what I’d been missing, of what she had to offer, of what she was worth, and as I watched her cross the room to me I tried to read her face. How much had Mac told her? And the lie. Was the lie still intact? I was drunk. I wanted to spread my arms wide and hold her, but her smile stopped me — it was a pinched smile, brave and artificial, and her chin was trembling as if she might begin to cry. “Iris,” I said, “listen, I’m sorry, I don’t know what I’ve done or what I can do to, to make it up, but—”

The RA was glorying. A study date indented the sofa nearest us, but there was no studying going on in that moment — or at least not of books and notes.

“Not here,” Iris said, and she took me by the hand and led me out the door.

The night was soft, a warm breath of air hovering over the dark unspooling stretches of lawn, streetlights masked in fog. The frogs trilled. Other couples, derealized in the drift of the night, loomed up on us and vanished. We wandered round the campus, hand in hand, not saying much, till at some point we found ourselves out front of Biology Hall, and we wound up sitting on the steps there till curfew. For the first hour we just held each other and kissed, murmuring the usual sorts of things — clichés; love thrives on them — until we got progressively more worked up and I asked her in a husky voice if I shouldn’t run for Prok’s car.

We were fully clothed, exposed to the eyes of anyone who happened by, but I suppose my hand might have been on her thigh, under her skirt. And her hand — her hand had been pressed against the crotch of my flannel trousers, and the pressure it exerted, the slow sweet calculated friction, told me everything I needed to know. “No,” she said, and she didn’t withdraw her hand, “not tonight. It’s too late.”

“Tomorrow, then?”

She kissed me harder, kept rubbing. “Tomorrow,” she murmured.

It took me a moment, floating there on the breath of the night as if I’d gone out of my body altogether, and I wasn’t thinking about Mac or versions of the truth or anything else. I was fumbling in my pocket for the ring. “In that case,” I said, releasing her lips and lifting her hand from my lap for the instant it took to slip the ring back in place and not a second more, “I guess the engagement’s back on, then?”

The wedding was modest, as it had to be, considering my salary, the financial status of Iris’s parents — her father delivered milk for Bornemann’s Dairy in Michigan City and environs — and the instability of the times. Which is not to say that it wasn’t a joyful, inspiriting ceremony and a celebration I’ll remember all my life, the emotional core of the scene worth all the palatial weddings in the world. The bride wore white tulle, the lace veil setting off her hair and the uncontainable flash of her eyes, and the bridegroom found himself in a rented tuxedo, the first he’d ever pulled over his shoulders and forced down the slope of his chest. Tommy was best man, Iris’s roommate the maid of honor (a trembling tall horse of a girl, with pinpricks for eyes and a mouth that swallowed up her lower face, and it’s odd that I can’t remember her name now, though it hardly matters: she was there, dressed in a strapless gown, doing her part). At first, Iris’s parents had pushed for a church wedding, presided over by a priest, but Iris had begun to drift (or rather, swim, head-down, against the current) away from the Roman Catholic faith since she’d come to college, and I, a lapsed Methodist, had no real desire to join any church of any denomination, and certainly not one so compromised by mystery, superstition and repression. And, of course, to Prok, who was hosting the affair, all religions and religious persons were anathema.

But a word about Iris, because I see I haven’t given her her due here — and she is central to all this, to Prok’s story, that is, because on that day at the end of May in 1941 she was to become the fourth member of the inner circle, taking her place alongside Prok, Mac and me, and everything that’s happened since concerns her as much as it does anyone else. She was — well, she had an independent streak. She thought for herself. Formed her own opinions. And while I didn’t necessarily recognize it at the time, so caught up was I in the project and what we’d set out to accomplish, I would say that her independence grew over the years until it was almost antithetical — a rebellion, very nearly a rebellion — against what we believed in. But that’s off subject. Iris. Let me put her down here in a few words. Beautiful, certainly. Stubborn. Witty (I’ve never encountered anybody so quick except maybe Corcoran). Smart as a whip. Organized. She played clarinet throughout high school and college, and until her senior year, when we were already married, she put on a starched uniform every Saturday morning and marched across the shimmering greensward with the band. She was a conscientious student, though her grades weren’t nearly as high as mine (not that it matters, of course), and she had a stunning artistic sense, able to make a household, our eventual household, that is, look nothing short of elegant on just the barest of means. What else? Her smile. I wanted to sail away on that smile, and I did, for a long while. And her sexual response, of course — I can’t leave that out, not in an account of this nature. What I’d told Prok was true, more or less. She’d opened up to me — she loved me — and as we became more acclimated to one another, as we spent more and more time in the backseat of Prok’s car and then, as the weather warmed, on a blanket in a hidden corner of the park, she let her passionate side emerge. We began to experiment, and she was increasingly enthusiastic, on several occasions even climbing atop me in the female-superior position without any prompting on my part. And while she wouldn’t dream of using crude language in any situation, she used it then, used it when her eyes began to roll back in her head and her hands jerked at my shoulders as if she wanted to pull me right down inside her rib cage and beyond, into the ground beneath, and deeper, deeper yet: “Oh, fuck,” she’d say. “Fuck, cunt, fuck.”

Prok had arranged for the justice of the peace to perform a simple civil ceremony under the persimmon tree at the rear of the house, and he’d gone to considerable trouble to move the piano out of doors as well so that we could have the bridal march to put the official seal on the ceremony. (I haven’t mentioned that Prok had dreamed of becoming a concert pianist when he was a boy and gave it up only when he’d discovered his true vocation in science. He was good, as accomplished as anyone you might find on the stage in the concert hall down the street, and he serenaded us not only with the wedding march that afternoon, but with a host of selections from Peer Gynt, which went eerily well with the fairy-tale setting.) Prok at the piano, Iris in my arms, Tommy at my side: it was as close to heaven as I’d yet come. And my mother, of course. She was there with Aunt Marjorie, a small distant smile on her face, and I think she drank too much that day (rum drinks — Prok had gone mad for them, not so much because he enjoyed drinking all that much himself, but because he was swept away with the idea of collecting recipes, and so we had Zombies that afternoon, and something called Charleston Cup in a crystal bowl set in a bed of ice). She didn’t cry, though Mac did, briefly. For my mother, never one to sentimentalize (she’d described herself to me as a fatalist on more than one occasion), the ceremony must have brought her back to her own wedding day so many years ago and the wreckage that had been left in place of the dreams of a young bride. Still, she did approve of Iris because she felt that Iris had grit and grit was the only thing my mother understood in terms of getting by — you needed grit and toughness, especially if you were a woman, in order to survive in a world of war and depredation and boating accidents.

Somebody — Tommy, the maid of honor, Paul Sehorn — tied a potpourri of old pans and graters to the bumper of the Nash, and Prok, erect as a chauffeur up front with my mother and Mac erect beside him, grimaced at the noise all the way to the station while Iris and I clung to each other on the soft wide leather seat we knew so well.

9

Our honeymoon took its cue from the one Prok and Mac had pioneered twenty years earlier — that is, we went on an extended camping trip, not to the White Mountains of New Hampshire as the Kinseys had done, but to the Adirondacks, a region that had always fascinated me as a boy growing up among the scrub hills and dunes on the shores of Lake Michigan. Iris wasn’t much of a camper, nor was I, if truth be told. But it seemed like an adventure, and it had the added virtue of being cheap (which was one of the motivating factors for Prok back in his day, though of course he was a naturalist who’d been camping all his life and could happily have subsisted on tubers, berries and mast if he had to, something, needless to say, I was neither able nor willing to do). To give her credit, Iris was game, though she’d lobbied for a more conventional honeymoon in Niagara Falls, and we did pay a visit there and spend a single night in a hotel room that cost as much as the rest of the trip combined. Looking back on it, I do have fond memories of that journey — Iris in a swimsuit and horripilated flesh perched over a lake barely clear of ice, the smell of the pine woods and the intoxicating smoke of our cookfires, the touch of her hand, our vagrant lovemaking in a sleeping bag designed for one in the core of a blackness absolute and a silence deeper than all of history — but overall it did have its limitations. I won’t really bother to go into detail — it’s not relevant here — but I will say that the insects were merciless, the tent barely adequate to its function, the weather horrible and the ground as hard as a rail rolled off the line in a Gary steel mill.

None of that seemed to matter (or it mattered, but we fell all over ourselves trying to assure each other it didn’t), because we were together, just the two of us, for the first time in our lives. We made an erotic playground of the big white bed in the hotel room in Niagara Falls and engaged in activities — fellatio, cunnilingus, rear entry — I’d been too timid, and too hurried, to try with Mac. Ironically, though we didn’t know it at the time, the two weeks of our honeymoon would be our last opportunity to experience that sort of freedom for almost a full year. That is, when we got back to Bloomington, Iris returned to her dorm — where she would stay on for summer session in the hope of accelerating her matriculation — and I to Mrs. Lorber’s. Though we spent every available minute tramping through apartments, spare rooms, converted basements and various outbuildings posing as rental units, we found nothing we could both tolerate and afford, and so, though we were married now and though I was an adult with a full-time job, we went back to the blanket in the park and the backseat of Prok’s antiquated Nash (not that Prok was unsympathetic, but you have to understand that the lion’s share of the money for the project was at that time coming out of his own pocket — that is, from his earnings at IU and the royalties on his biology textbook — and it was all but impossible for me to expect him to raise my salary even by a few dollars a week).

In any case, Iris and I made do, as countless other separated couples had throughout the Depression, and we saved our money and painted vivid dreams of our first household as the summer imperceptibly coalesced with the fall and the news from abroad went from bad to worse. It was a strange, unsettling period, that interlude between our marriage and the war. On the one hand we were hopeful, and yet on the other, everything we did, even the simplest things, gave rise to doubt — why bother to put that extra dollar away, look after the condition of your teeth and your diet or dare to dream about your wife and an apartment and the future when the ax was poised to fall? A lot of men I knew despaired. Others just burned up all they had of energy and resources, day and night, carpe diem.

My own crisis came at the end of October, on a day when Prok and I had been in a jubilant mood over the correlations we were discovering between educational levels and number of sexual partners in adolescence (it was predictive, and that was the wonder of it, those who would not go on to college having a much wider and more complete range of sexual activity than those who would), and I remember feeling elated as I came through the door at Mrs. Lorber’s. I was looking forward to dinner with Iris, a picture show and then some mutually productive time spent in the backseat of the Nash, and when I saw the official-looking envelope sitting there atop the pile of circulars on the little table in the vestibule, it didn’t at first register on me. UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT, SELECTIVE SERVICE AGENCY, it read, OFFICIAL BUSINESS. I’m sure you’re familiar with the form of the thing, with the language that sounds so clinical it might have been describing the latest method of relaxing the bowels or the proper way to install a new condenser in your Zenith, and yet manages to rivet your attention all the same:

Greetings:

Having submitted yourself to a local board composed of your neighbors for the purpose of determining your availability for training and service in the land or naval forces of the United States, you are hereby notified that you have been selected …

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go — already the campus was beginning to teem with young men in uniform, already the girls were looking right through anybody in civvies and practically wrapping themselves in red, white and blue, and add to this the fervor that was building in all of us and my honest and true desire to go out and defend my country, to defend freedom and liberty and rescue all those besieged Britons from the terror of the Luftwaffe and the Albanians from the Italians and all the rest — but still, to come through the door on an otherwise tranquil afternoon and find the envelope there on top of the pile where Mrs. Lorber had no doubt left it after examining it from all angles and in every light available, was a shock. I was newly married, just getting started in a career, I had money in my pocket (not a lot, but money nonetheless) and an automobile at my disposal, and now I was going to have to start all over, with nothing. And in a strange place, among strangers. It wasn’t that I was afraid. I was too young and blandly healthy to dream even in my worst imaginings that I could be maimed, injured or even killed; that sort of thing didn’t happen to the individual — to me — but to some faceless member of the generality in the newsreel footage before the main feature came on. The problem was the uncertainty of it — of putting oneself in the hands of such an arbitrary and manifold organization as the United States Army and having to trust for the best.

I must have stood there in the vestibule for a good five minutes before the tramp of feet on the outside steps, closely followed by the violent wrenching open and then slamming of the front door, brought me out of it. Ezra Voorhees had just come in from class. Ezra was a student of business, or business as it applied to agriculture, that is, and his ambition was to improve production on his father’s poultry farm, with an eye to running it on his own someday. He was nineteen and more or less harmless, but he was loud and excitable, he’d chosen not to give up his sex history to the project (though I’d all but gone down on my knees and begged him) and he wasn’t overfussy about washing his clothes — or his person, for that matter. “John!” he cried, giving me a look of surprise, as if I were the last person he’d expected to see there in the vestibule of the house in which we shared a room. And then, snatching the letter from my hand: “What’s this? Oh, Jesus, Jesus. It’s your induction notice.”

I held my hand out stiffly, too numb to be irritated. He handed the letter back.

“You going to enlist?”

“Well, I–I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it.” I had a sudden vision of myself in uniform, erect and proud, my hair a perfect glaze cut crisply over the ears, the stiff-brimmed hat tucked under one arm, saluting. My mother would be proud. Iris would hate it. And Prok — Prok would be apoplectic.

“Enlistment’s the route to take, believe me. I’ve been talking with Dick Martone and some of the other guys — Dave Frears, for one — and we were thinking about the Marine Corps, about enlisting, I mean. To get a jump on everybody.” Ezra was tall — two or three inches taller than I — and thick-bodied, but with a disproportionately small and oddly shaped head, the crown of which he began to scratch now in a leisurely, thoughtful way. “Enlist,” he said, “and you’re right in the thick of things, overseas, in France or Belgium — or Italy, Italy, where the real fighting’s going to be.”

I went to Iris first. We met in the Commons for dinner (beef roasted white, with a puddle of butterscotch-colored gravy, disheartened potatoes and peas that had been harvested and canned before the New Deal went into effect), and I waited till we were seated, till we’d buttered our bread and peppered our meat, before pushing the envelope across the table to her. I watched as she bent her head and absorbed the contents of the letter even before she’d finished ironing it out on the placemat in front of her. Her chin was trembling, and when she raised her head again her eyes had taken on a harrowing look. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “You can’t — isn’t Tommy enough for them?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re not going to go, are you?”

I shrugged. “What choice do I have?”

“But you’re married.”

Another shrug. “Lots of people are married — and how many of them got married in the last six months just to evade the draft? They don’t care about that in Washington. And the way it’s looking — well, Wilkie didn’t win the election, did he?”

She took hold of both my hands then, across the table, interlocked her fingers with mine and squeezed as if she wanted to crush them in her own. “I won’t let you go,” she said. “I won’t. It’s not our war. It has nothing to do with us.”

But of course she was wrong, as the whole country — even the most diehard America Firster — would know in less than two months when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. That night, though, with a cold wind scuttling leaves across campus and her hands locked in mine as students all around us sat gumming their overcooked beef and burying their heads in their textbooks or the funny papers or just laughing aloud in an excess of high spirits, it seemed as if the force of her words was enough: I won’t let you go. I won’t.

The next morning, I took the letter to Prok. He was in the office before me, as usual, head down, engaged with his work. I didn’t want to interrupt him, but he looked up and greeted me with a smile as I came in, and I calculated that this was as good a chance as any to give him the bad news. “Good morning, Prok,” I said, and already his eyes were dropping back to the page, but I forged on, if a bit awkwardly. “Prok,” I repeated, and his gaze lifted again, even as the smile vanished, “there’s something — well, I just wanted you to know, that, that, well, here,” and I handed him the notice.

He gave it a cursory glance, then rose to his feet, folded it carefully and handed it back. “I’ve been afraid of this for some time,” he said. For just a moment he looked defeated, the shadow of resignation flitting over his face, his jowls gone heavy, but then he squared his shoulders and let out a sharp burst of air, as if a teakettle had come on to boil. “Damn it,” he said, and this was as close to cursing as I’ve ever heard him come, before or since, “we’re going to fight this thing, even if we have to take it to the Secretary of War himself.” And then he paused a moment and gave me a questioning look. “Who is the Secretary of War anyway?”

I told him I didn’t know.

“That’s all right. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the research, and I wonder if any of these people”—and he let his hand rise and fall in a characteristic sweep, as if all the politicians, the forces of the Army and Navy, as well as Hitler and his Wehrmacht were no more than errant students who’d missed a key question on a biology exam—“if any of them have even the slightest idea of what it takes to train an interviewer? No,” he snapped, answering his own question, “I doubt if they do. But you know, John, don’t you?”

I nodded. We’d sat together through hundreds of hours of training, Prok quizzing me unceasingly, jumping up impatiently to snatch the position sheet out of my hand and make his own corrections, looking over my shoulder for hours at a time, putting me through mock interviews — I must have taken his history fifty times — and sitting perched behind me like a wooden Indian as I conducted my first live interviews. As I’ve said, he was a perfectionist, and he knew no other way to do anything but the Kinsey way, and whether that can be considered a flaw or not, I can’t really say. His method worked, no question about it, and worked in an arena where so many before him — Krafft-Ebing, Hamilton, Moll, Freud, Havelock Ellis — had fallen short. But he had a point: the training was not to be undertaken lightly. And certainly you had to have a certain type of personality — the personality of a recruit, I suppose, or maybe even a disciple — to undergo it in the first place.

He’d come out from behind the desk now and he was striding back and forth across the confined space of the office, hands pinned behind his back. “No,” he said finally, drawing himself up before me so that our faces were no more than inches apart, “no, I simply will not allow it.”

And so, Prok began a vigorous campaign to keep me at his side throughout the war, though it may be interesting to note that he never really consulted me on the matter, but operated on the assumption that I was one hundred percent in accord with him, that sex research — the project and the advancement of human knowledge — was more vital to the welfare of the country than prosecuting a war on the European Front or in the Pacific. He never pressured me. Never knew, in fact, that I spent long hours propped on the edge of the bed in my room with Ezra and Dick Martone and some of the others, debating the merits of joining up, of doing my part, of sacrificing everything for the cause of freedom. In the end, I acquiesced. That is, I did nothing, and let events take their course.

In the meanwhile, even as Prok was filing an appeal and soliciting letters on my behalf from President Wells, Robert M. Yerkes of the National Research Council and other purveyors of influence and power, he was at the same time very seriously contemplating the hire of another researcher to increase our strength. That researcher, as most people will know, was Purvis Corcoran. Corcoran, as I’ve said, was a smoothly handsome and outgoing young psychologist and sexual wunderkind, who had taken his degree some ten years earlier at IU, completed his Master’s in Chicago and was working incrementally toward his Ph.D. He was married — his wife’s name was Violet — and the father of two small children, both girls. Prok first met him after lecturing to a group of social workers (“the most prudish and the most restricted in their understanding of sex you could find”) in South Bend, while I was away on my honeymoon. Corcoran volunteered to give his history — which was extensive to say the least, both in heterosexual and H-experience — and Prok was impressed by him. So impressed, in fact, that he invited him to Bloomington, to visit the Institute (as we were now officially calling our cramped quarters) and interview for a position with us.

When I mentioned it to Iris — that Prok, in anticipation of new grants both from the NRC and the Rockefeller Foundation, was bringing Corcoran to town for a job interview — she was suspicious of the whole thing. “Can’t you see he’s trying to replace you,” she said. “He’s letting you go, leaving us high and dry, and I’ll be here all alone and you’ll be God knows where — in some desert in Africa fighting Rommel or whoever he is, some goose-stepping Prussian with a gun and bayonet.”

We were in the Nash, parked in our favorite spot overlooking the black serene waters of a quarry and its ghostly monuments of rock, having a post-coital smoke. “You’re wrong,” I told her. “It has nothing to do with the draft or the war or anything else — we need more hands, that’s all.”

She was silent a moment. “You know,” she said, “he’s been making overtures—”

“Who?”

“Your boss.”

“Prok?”

It was very dark in the car, but I could just make out the nod of her head. We were naked and the smell of her sex was all over me. I put an arm round her, drew her to me and began fondling her breasts, but she pushed away. “Yes, Prok,” she hissed. “He’s — when I was waiting for you the other day? He told me he was going to do everything he could to get you off, letters to the draft board back home, even a personal appeal if it comes to that — you know, because the research is vital to the national security and all the rest, and I said I was grateful. But it was more than that. I guess I just about got down and kissed his feet, because you know how strongly I feel about this — you are not going to war, not while I’m alive, John Milk — and he gave me a look, and I know you think he’s God Himself come down from on high with all the angels singing in rapture, but it was the coldest look anybody’s ever given me in my life. And you know what he said then, as if it were some kind of bargain we were entering into? He said, ‘We don’t have your history yet, Iris, do we?’”

“Yes,” I said, “and so what?”

“So what? Aren’t you listening to me?”

“Look, Iris,” I said, and all the wind went out of me, “I’ve told you myself, a thousand times, you have to give up your history because of how bad it’ll look if you don’t — how bad it already looks.”

“He’s a blackmailer.”

“A blackmailer? Have you gone completely nuts?”

“Don’t give me that, don’t pretend you’re blind.” I reached out a hand to her again, but she shifted away until her shoulders were pressed up against the window and the light of her cigarette revealed her face there, in shadow. “I give him my secrets, I tell him what I’ve never told anybody, not even you, and he’ll get you off.” A beat, time enough for the bitterness to saturate her voice. “And if I don’t — well, goodbye, Johnny, huh?”

A week later, Corcoran arrived. He’d come alone, without his wife, arriving early one Saturday when I was off someplace with Iris — at Prok’s behest. Prok was interested in my impression of Corcoran, of course, but on that first day he wanted him to himself, and I didn’t know what, if anything, happened between them, but Prok, I’m sure, was his usual courtly self and wound up giving Corcoran the VIP tour of the facilities, ending up with an intimate, Mac-prepared dinner at the faerie cottage on First Street. The following evening, on Sunday, Iris and I were invited to Prok’s for one of his weekly “musicales” as he called them, in order to socialize with a select group of his friends and colleagues, listen to a recorded program Prok had selected for the occasion, and, expressly, to meet Corcoran.

We were a few minutes late, nothing to worry over, though Prok had asked me to come early so as to have some time with Corcoran before the others arrived. Iris was the one at fault here. She seemed to take forever with her dress and makeup — maddeningly so — and I must have had the RA ring for her five times before she finally came down the stairs and through the door at which I’d been staring so hard and for so long I actually began to believe I could force it open by will alone. I was impatient, maybe even a bit angry, though I have to admit it was worth the wait: Iris was stunning that night, all in black, with a single strand of heirloom pearls her mother had given her and an especially vivid shade of lipstick that lent her all the color she needed. I don’t know what it was — the pearls, maybe — but she looked transformed, as if she’d suddenly gained five years and the sophistication of a socialite, and forgive me if I couldn’t help thinking of Mrs. Foshay and her savoir faire.

Most of the guests had already arrived by the time we got there. I suppose there must have been fifteen or twenty people present, professors and their wives, Prok’s next-door neighbor, two awed-looking undergraduates who seemed afraid even to glance at the crackers, nuts and chocolates Prok had set out around the room in cut-glass dishes. Mac greeted us at the door. “John,” she puffed in her airless voice, drawing me to her for a kiss on the cheek, “and, Iris, so nice of you to come,” and she took both of Iris’s hands in her own and embraced her as if they’d been separated for years.

They held on to each other just a moment longer than I thought appropriate, and I was beginning to feel uncomfortable, as if I’d been deserted there in the entrance hall, the eyes of the guests beyond already roving toward us. “But, Mac,” Iris said, fixating on her face as if they were exchanging telepathic secrets, “you know I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” She was smiling, beaming, as happy as I’d seen her since the draft notice arrived, all her irritation over Prok dissolved in that instant. She was genuine, I’ll give her that. “You’re simply the best, you are, and I — we, John and I — we’re always thrilled to come visit. You know that. I just wish we could return the favor …”

“Don’t you worry,” Mac said, taking our coats and leading us into the living room, “something’ll turn up. Prok and I went through the same sort of thing after our honeymoon, and the place we did find — well, you kids probably wouldn’t look twice at it today.”

Iris cooed something in response — I still hadn’t got round to broaching the subject of Mac with her, and I know it was ridiculous and maybe even cowardly, but I think too that anyone in a similar situation will understand the temptation to let sleeping dogs lie — and then we were among the company and Mac had excused herself to dart off to the kitchen. I didn’t know everyone there, though I’d attended several of Prok’s musicales in the past — the cast of invitees was forever shifting — and so I wasn’t able to pick out Corcoran right away. We were distracted by Professor Bouchon of the Chemistry Department, and his wife, who appeared to suffer from logorrhea, and then we were separated, and I found myself wedged into a corner and nodding at what seemed appropriate junctures as Mrs. Professor Bouchon told me in exhaustive detail of the defects of the German character and the privations she’d suffered as a girl in Nantes during the first war. Iris was across the room, clutching a long-stemmed glass of greenish liquid (one of Prok’s herbal liqueurs) and talking guardedly with Professor Bouchon and a gaunt, hunched man in a flannel suit who was too old to have been Corcoran. It was only then that I realized that Prok wasn’t among us.

But a word here on the musicales: Prok, always the inveterate collector, had amassed a personal library of over a thousand records, and for the past decade or more he’d been hosting these weekly gatherings in order to share the musical wealth. There was a high tone to these evenings, and the shape of the program was uniform and even fairly rigid — Prok was in charge, and Prok would do as Prok would. The guests gathered, as we were doing now, for a brief period of socializing, Prok delivered a lecture on the pieces and composers he’d selected, and then there was the listening. Seated in a semicircle facing the gramophone, the audience watched in silence as Prok wiped the record free of dust, sharpened the cactus needle and gently laid it on the revolving disc; this was succeeded by a moment of tense anticipation, during which the guests sat rigid and expressionless through the initial poppings and crackles until the music began with a characteristic roar and they settled into their listening postures. The records were always played at full volume, because that was the only way, Prok believed, to pick up on the nuances of the pianissimo movements and the full complexity of the interweaving of the various instruments, and for the duration of the symphony or quartet or whatever it was he’d chosen for the evening, absolute silence was required on the part of the audience. I remember one evening on which the wife of a first-time guest seemed especially restive and kept shifting in her seat, though Prok threw her one admonitory glance after another — her chair was squeaking and she couldn’t help herself. Afterward, during the break for refreshments, Prok ignored her. She was never asked back, as far as I knew.

But this evening was different, in deference to Corcoran. The preconcert gathering was more elaborate and animated than usual, as if this were a dinner party rather than a musical evening, and I was just about to excuse myself and go looking for Prok, when the door from the kitchen swung open and he strode into the room with the crystal bowl from our wedding party held out before him in both arms. Right behind him, holding the door, was Corcoran.

The first thing I noticed about Corcoran was the look on his face — not smug, exactly, but utterly relaxed and self-assured — and then the physiognomy itself. It’s been discovered (not by us, but by other researchers in the field) that the most appealing face in either sex is the one that most closely approaches perfect symmetry, and Corcoran’s certainly fit the bill. He was handsome, no two ways about it. Eyes the color of a calfskin wallet, sandy hair, the perfect expanse of brow, everything about him sleek and neat to a degree that was just pleasing, simply that. You saw him and you liked him, and when he smiled, and then when he spoke, you liked him even more. That was Corcoran: handsome, charming, gregarious. He was just slightly taller than average, five eight or nine, I guess, and he didn’t look particularly athletic — too slack, somehow, too insouciant, as if there were an invisible bellpull hanging in front of him and he had only to give it a tug to summon a whole team of servants at a trot.

In the bowl, trembling at the cut-glass rim, was a deep ochre liquid in which floated the carapaces of three or four bright emerald limes, and I recognized this immediately as Prok’s special version of Planter’s Punch (two parts dark rum to one part triple sec, orange and pineapple juice in equal proportions, squeeze of lime, dash of grenadine, to be shaken and poured over ice and garnished with an orange slice and maraschino cherry). Prok looked bemused as he set the bowl down on the coffee table, obviously still turning over in his mind some little witticism of Corcoran’s, and then his face was neutral again as he focused on the task of preparing the individual glasses of punch and handing them out to his guests. Corcoran, meanwhile, had turned to Dean Briscoe and his wife, and was already talking animatedly with them, gesturing, smiling, as slick and frictionless as a tail-walking trout, and then, even as Mrs. Professor Bouchon reminded me for the third time of how she’d subsisted entirely on turnips for a period of nine weeks in the autumn of 1917, I saw him register Iris’s presence. She was in the far corner, still engaged in conversation with Professor Bouchon and the stooped, skeletal man who was too old to be Corcoran, and I watched Corcoran’s head swivel on its axis and then fix on her.

“A toast!” Prok proclaimed, though he was holding up a nearly empty glass himself and had never before offered any alcoholic beverages of any kind — even his liqueurs — prior to a musicale. The room fell silent. “To Purvis Corcoran,” he said, raising his glass high, “a fine and a talented young man — one who is certainly not sex shy, not in the least, and who I understand just might be willing to join us in our endeavors here … that is, if we can ever manage to lure him away from the cultural and physical charms of South Bend.”

There was an unfocused laugh or two in appreciation of Prok’s attempt at humor, and then we drained our glasses, Prok setting his down untouched and immediately looking about him as if he’d misplaced something. I patted at my lips with a napkin, smiled absently at Mrs. Professor Bouchon. She was a bore, of course, but I was nothing if not polite and attentive — that was my nature, and that was my job. But now Prok was motioning me to him even as Corcoran disengaged himself from the Briscoes and began a peculiar shuffle in the direction of my wife (it was almost a dance, and the verb “to sidle” doesn’t begin to do it justice — he was skating, that was what he was doing, skating across the polished floor as if it were the municipal rink).

“Milk,” Prok was saying, “Milk,” as I mumbled something excusatory to the professor’s wife and strode across the room. “And, Corcoran,” he called, causing my future colleague to whirl round on his heels as if he were a human gyroscope Prok had just set spinning, “I’d like to introduce you to John Milk.”

The chatter had started up again, fueled now by the bite of Prok’s rum. I felt it myself — the rum — as a sudden stimulant, as if there were a flap at the back of my head and I’d poured it directly into my brain. At the same moment I caught a glimpse out the window of the denuded persimmon tree, framed over Corcoran’s big smooth head like the standing remnant of some ancient conflagration. Corcoran was smiling. He held out his hand, the happiest man alive, the best-adjusted and most relaxed, an emperor in his own bedroom, and I took it in my own.

“It’s a real pleasure,” Corcoran said, pumping my hand. “Dr. Kinsey’s been singing your praises for two days now. I feel I know you already.”

And there was Prok’s face, creased, jowly, the keen-edged eyes and accipiter’s crest, hanging there between us. Prok was nodding, nodding and approving.

“Yes,” I said, registering the touch of the man’s skin on my own, “me too. I mean, yes, it’s a, well, pleasure.”

“He’s turning into a first-class interviewer,” Prok interjected, turning to Corcoran. “And that is no mean feat, as I expect you’ll come to learn as soon as we can put things on a firm footing.”

I bowed my head at the compliment to show how little I deserved it. Both men were studying me now, as if I were some rare object in a museum. “You’re too kind, Prok, really you are.” I focused on Corcoran. “It’s all in the teaching. And Prok, he’s, well—”

“I’m sure he is,” Corcoran said, giving Prok his soberest look.

“A firm footing,” Prok repeated, all business now. “And I certainly hope you won’t keep us in suspense, Corcoran, because the project requires data, and we do have several other candidates lined up at this juncture, quite capable men, like yourself.” If there had been an air of festivity to this point, Prok had erased it. I could see that he was impatient with the whole process, eager to get on with the musicale — to get it over with, though he treasured these evenings as a way of giving himself over to the emotional side he so rigidly suppressed in his workaday life — and beyond that to get Corcoran hired, trained and out in the field. He looked at us shaking hands and sizing each other up, and he saw nothing more than data, data accumulating at the rate of fifty percent more rapidly.

Mac went round with a tray to collect our glasses, and we took our seats. Prok insisted on ushering Iris and me into the front row beside Mac, and I had a brief moment of panic over the seating arrangements before opting to interpose myself between the two women, who immediately leaned across me and exchanged a birdlike flurry of conversation, not a word of which I caught. Corcoran, as guest of honor, was seated in the front row along with us, taking his place beside Iris. The room quieted. Professor Bouchon’s wife returned from the lavatory and ducked into her seat at the end of the second row, while another woman (middle-aged and doughy, someone I didn’t recognize, or at least didn’t remember) pulled out her knitting and began counting stitches with a mute movement of her lips. There was the fragment of a moment during which Prok turned away to check the gramophone and I was able to lean across my wife and make a hurried introduction—“Iris,” I whispered, “this is Purvis Corcoran; Corcoran, my wife, Iris”—and then Prok started his lecture.

“This evening we have a real treat for you — two versions of Gustav Mahler’s exquisite and powerful Symphony Number Four in G Major, the one conducted by the immortal Leopold Stokowski of the Philadelphia Orchestra (though some of you will no doubt remember him from his early days with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra), and the other by his protégé and successor, Eugene Ormandy, the new kid on the block, as it were.” Prok went on, in full lecture mode, to give a brief biography of Mahler, a discography of known recordings, both in the United States and Europe, and then a summary of the contrasting styles of Stokowski and Ormandy. “Now,” he said, his fleshy face and oversized head hanging there before us like a great ripening fruit, legs slightly spread for balance, right hand gesturing, “I intend to play alternate movements, beginning with the Stokowski for the first and third and Ormandy for the second and then the fourth and final movement, but I will then conclude by playing that final movement as well in the Stokowski version. Now, of course, that movement contains the stirring soprano solo, ‘Wir geniessen die himmlischen Freuden’ as sung by”—and here he named two singers I’d never heard of—“but I don’t want you to be distracted by the distinctions in vocal coloration, but rather attune yourselves to the tempo work of the respective conductors, all right?”

There was a vague murmur of assent, which seemed to satisfy him. Prok clasped his hands in front of him briefly, in what might have been prayer, or, more likely, conciliation, then turned away from us to start the record. We heard the needle hit the vinyl surface with a jolt, a blast of static, three distinct pops, and suddenly Mahler was there with us, at full volume.

We lingered for half an hour or so once the concert was concluded (again, the evening was unusual in that Prok generally scheduled an intermission and finished up his program with a few light pieces, but not tonight), and stood around in little groups, sipping coffee and remarking on the music and the clear differences between the two conductors, at least when those differences were made apparent in a demonstration such as this. I had entertained fond hopes of spiriting Iris off somewhere in the Nash, but it was late and there was work in the morning for me and classes for her, so I just stood there stupidly with a coffee cup in one hand and a ladyfinger in the other while Professor and Mrs. Bouchon boxed me into a corner and made appreciative noises about the music we’d just heard. Since I knew nothing about classical music, other than what I’d just picked up from Prok’s remarks, I essentially just stood there listening while Professor Bouchon reminisced about having seen Stokowski in action once — it was in either Philadelphia or New York, he couldn’t be sure which — and his wife pointed out that thanks to the Germans her family’s piano had been destroyed, and all her joy in music along with it.

Across the room, Iris and Corcoran were getting acquainted. Corcoran had somehow managed to talk Prok into bringing out his tray of liqueurs again, now that the time was appropriate, and I watched as he leaned over to pour something the color of urine into her coffee. She hadn’t enjoyed the concert. That much I was sure of. She always claimed that Prok’s clinical dissection of the pieces took all the spirit out of them, and as the years went on she would come to view these musical evenings more and more as a duty than a pleasure. But on this night, as she stood there with Corcoran in the shadow of the far corner, framed by the slick black architecture of Prok’s furniture and the dark stain of the walls, she seemed to be having a high time of it.

How did I know? I could tell from the way she held herself — and from her face. I knew that face better than I knew my own, and I could see by the way she widened her eyes and pursed her lips as he spoke (and what was he telling her, what was so fascinating?) that she was fully engaged. And, too, there was a way she had of ducking her head to one side as she laughed, tugging unconsciously at her right earring and shifting her weight from foot to foot as if the floor had caught fire beneath her. Body language. I’d become a student of it, of necessity. Was I jealous? Not in the least, not yet, anyway. Why should I have been? I loved her and she loved me, there was no doubt about that — and there never has been, not to this day — and all the rest, as Prok had taught me, was nothing more than a function of the body, physiology at its root, stimulus and response. I listened politely to Professor and Mrs. Bouchon, nodding and smiling when it seemed appropriate, and then I excused myself and crossed the room to collect my wife, thank our hosts and head out into the night.

The walk home was — well, I suppose you’d call it stimulating. Not in a sexual sense (as I said, we didn’t have the luxury of being sexually stimulated that night), but in an emotional one. For the first minute or so we fussed with the buttons of our coats, pulled our collars up against the breeze and leaned into each other as we hurried down the street, not a word exchanged between us. There was a premonitory scent of winter on the air, of the cold rock-strewn Canadian wastes and the stiffened fur of all the hundreds of thousands of beasts creeping across the tundra up there, and the sky was open overhead, the stars splashed from horizon to horizon like the white blood of the night. I felt like going out somewhere for a nightcap, but I knew Iris would refuse — absurdly, though she was a married woman, she was still under jurisdiction of the dorm, the RA and curfew — so I found myself instead saying the first thing that came into my head. “So what about Corcoran,” I said. “What did you think of him?”

Her head was down, her shoulders slumped, one hand at the collar of her coat. She was moving along at a brisk pace — we both were. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “He seems all right.”

“All right? Is that all?”

My hands were cold — I hadn’t thought of gloves; it was too early in the season — and I’d looped my arm through hers and forced my right hand into the pocket of my coat. The left I stuffed down into my trousers pocket and kept it there, though I found it awkward to walk off-balance like that. Leaves scuttered before us. There was the sound of a car backfiring up the street behind us, where the other guests were leaving Prok’s party. “I don’t know,” she said again. “Persuasive, I guess.”

“Persuasive? What do you mean?”

“He’s a good talker. Smooth. He’ll make a sterling interviewer, I’m sure.”

“Do I detect a note of sarcasm?”

She turned her face to me, a cold pale oval of reflected light, then looked down at her feet again. “No, not at all,” she said. “I’m just being practical. He’s a perfect fit. He’ll take your place without so much as a ripple—”

“He’s not going to take my place.”

“Did you see the way Kinsey looked at him?”

I was shivering, I suppose, my coat too light, the wind knifing at my trousers. A chill went through me. I saw Corcoran’s face then, saw Prok hovering over him throughout the evening, as proud as if he’d given birth to him himself, and I knew in that moment what there was between them — the same thing Prok and I had together. I couldn’t help myself. I was angry suddenly. Jealous. “So what?” I said. “What’s it to me? I keep telling you, we need more hands.”

Iris said nothing. The leaves crunched underfoot. After a moment, she said: “But he is persuasive.”

“Really,” I said, and I wasn’t thinking, not at all. “What did he persuade you of? I’d like to know. I really would.”

We were at the end of the block now, turning right, toward campus. The wind came naked round the corner. A pair of automobiles, one following so closely on the other they might have been tethered, slammed over a branch the wind had thrust in the street and the sound was like a burst of sudden explosions. “To give my history,” Iris said, but I thought I hadn’t heard her right, and so I said, “What?”

“To give my history. To Kinsey.”

I was dumbfounded. I’d been nagging her for months, and here this new man — this persuader, this Corcoran—had won her over in what, ten minutes’ time? “Good,” I said, numb all over. “That’s good. But how — I mean, why listen to him if your own, well, your own husband can’t convince you, and after all this time?”

The taillights of the two cars receded up ahead of us. They both turned right on Atwater, in front of the campus, and were gone. “He just seemed to make sense,” she said, “that was all. For the good of the project, like you’ve been saying. His wife’s already arranged to give her history on your next trip to South Bend — maybe you’ll get to take it, John, and wouldn’t that be just swell, keep it in the family, huh?”

“And so, what’s your point? I see nothing wrong with—”

“Kinsey said he’d get him a deferment.”

We walked on in silence. Of course Prok would get him a deferment — he was going to get me a deferment too, for the sake of the project, and it had absolutely nothing to do with whether our wives gave their histories or not. I should have been gratified, Corcoran’s first day on the scene and he’d convinced Iris to join in for the sake of team spirit, and that was wonderful, terrific news, hallelujah to the heavens, but I wasn’t gratified, I was rankled. “That has nothing to do with it,” I said.

The campus loomed up before us, the odd office lit in a random grid against the backdrop of the night, the frost-killed lawn underfoot, more leaves and the advancing crunch of our footsteps. “What about Mac?” she said then.

“Mac?” I echoed. I wasn’t following her. “What do you mean, Mac? Was Mac in on it? Did she persuade you too — or help persuade you? Is that what you mean?”

“No. Mac as a wife. As part of the inner circle. Now it’ll be three husbands and three wives—if I give my history to Prok, that is, and if he goes to the draft board.”

“He will,” I said, simply to say something, to keep it going. “He has, I mean. He’s trying his best.”

“But what about Mac?” she repeated. We were crossing the quad to the women’s dorm, figures gathered there by the vault of the door, couples in the shadows, the rooms overhead radiating light as if all the life of the campus were concentrated there. And it was. At least at this hour.

“What about her?”

Iris suddenly jerked her arm away from my mine and quickened her pace. “You slept with her,” she said. “She told me all about it.” The light from the high bank of windows was on her face now, on her hair, silvering the shoulders of her coat and the dark crenellations of her hat. “She told me,” she said, and there was a catch in her voice, an amalgam of rage and despair strangling the words in her throat, “and you lied to me.” She swung round suddenly and planted herself right there in front of the building. “You,” she said. “You, John Milk. My husband.”

I didn’t know what to say. It would have required a speech, would have required hours, days, would have required a whole heterogeneous philosophy delivered and debated point by excruciating point, and we had ten diminishing minutes till curfew. “I didn’t want to, to surprise you,” I said, and that was the best I could come up with. “Or, or hurt you, if, I mean, if—”

“Liar.” She spat it at me. Heads turned. The lovers in the shadows came out of their clinches for one hard instant. “You’re a liar,” she said, then swung round, went up the steps and into the arena of light even as I stood there and watched her jerk open the door and slam it behind her.

A week later, Iris made an appointment with Prok and gave up her history. As I remember it, there was an unusual amount of rain that fall, and then an early snow. Everything was locked in, the weeks seemed to conflate, and then Corcoran sent word that he was accepting Prok’s offer and the Japanese climbed into their planes in the hour before dawn and descended on Pearl Harbor. And nothing was ever the same again.

10

Given what I’ve already revealed about myself, I suppose it will come as no surprise if I tell you that the first chance I got (when Prok was away on his own, lecturing to a civic group in Elkhart, and, incidentally, taking Violet Corcoran’s sex history in neighboring South Bend), I went straight to the files to look up two histories of special interest — Corcoran’s and my wife’s. Can I tell you too that I didn’t feel the slightest guilt or compunction? Not this time. Not anymore. Prok was away, and it was only his intervention that would have stopped me, and nothing short of it. I broke Prok’s new ironclad code within the hour, pulled the files and spread them out side by side on the desk before me.

It was just before the holidays, the whole country whipped into a froth of martial hysteria and Prok already fretting over the rumored rationing of gasoline, tires and the rest, insisting we’d have to take the train more now, the train and the bus. Everyone was distracted, shocked, outraged, so caught up in the events of December seventh that even Christmas itself seemed inconsequential — who could think of Santa Claus when Tojo and Hitler were loose in the world? As I remember, we were having a cold snap, the sky the color of shell casings, snow flurries predicted for later in the day, and I was in the office early, with a number of tasks ahead of me. There was the endless tabulation of data, the drawing up of tables and graphs, and correspondence too, though of course the volume was nothing like what we — Prok mostly — had to contend with after publication of our findings in ’48. By that time, Prok was receiving thousands of letters a year from absolute strangers seeking advice or adjustments of their sexual problems, offering up their services as friends of the research, sending on explicit photos and sex diaries, erotic art, dildos, chains, whips and the like. I remember one letter in particular, from an attorney representing a client who had been charged with “knowing a pig carnally by the anus,” and requesting Prok’s expert testimony as to the overall frequency of such acts with animals (six percent of the general population; seventeen percent of the single rural population). Prok declined. Politely.

At any rate, there I was, bent over the desk, a Christmas carol infesting some part of my brain (Iris and I had attended a choral concert the night before), one of Prok’s colleagues clearing his throat or blowing his nose down the hall somewhere while secretaries in heels clacked on by as if so many miniature locomotives were running over the rails of a miniature train set. I turned to Iris’s history first, and there were no surprises there, just as I’d assumed. She hadn’t even known what the term “masturbation” meant until she was seventeen and already in college, and then she was too consumed with her own inhibitions to try it more than two or three times, and never to the point of orgasm; she’d experienced both manual and oral stimulation of her breasts on the part of men — boys — other than me, but no petting and no coitus until the time of her engagement and marriage. She’d had limited experience with her own sex, and that at a very young age, no animal contacts, few fantasies. She’d never employed foreign objects, never (till now) taken the male genitalia into her mouth.

There was nothing there I hadn’t seen a hundred times already, and I wondered why she’d been so reluctant to give up her history — truly, it was as pedestrian as could be — and then I wondered if that wasn’t it, that she was ashamed of having so little to offer us, as if all we cared about were the extreme cases, the sexual athletes, the promiscuous and jaded, the individuals who dropped off the end of the bell curve. Could that have been it? Or was it something deeper, some resistance to the tenor of the study itself? To Prok? To me? For a minute I felt my heart would break — it hadn’t been easy for her, and she’d done it for me, for me alone, and if it weren’t for that she’d never have offered herself up to the project. It just wasn’t in her nature. I might have taken a moment then to stare out the window into the sealed gray crypt of the sky, might have spoken her name aloud: Iris. Just that: Iris.

She was so nervous the day she came in, so tightly wound, so shy and soft and beautiful. “Dr. Kinsey,” she said in a voice that was barely audible, “hello. And hello, John.” I’d known she was coming, and I’d been in a state myself — all day, in fact. Every time I heard a footfall in the corridor, and never mind that it was hours still until her appointment, I couldn’t help shifting in my seat and stealing a glance at the door. I thought I was ready for her, ready to put this thing behind us as if it were the last in a series of marital rites, like an inoculation or the VD test required for the license, and yet still, though I’d been watching the clock and there was an ache in the pit of my stomach as if I hadn’t eaten in a week, when it came to it I was almost surprised to see her there. I’d been working on a calculation that was a bit over my head (standard deviation from the mean in a sample of men reporting nocturnal emissions) and she’d come in noiselessly, as soft-footed as a cat. I looked up and there she was, stoop-shouldered, waiflike, sunk into her coat like a child, her gloved hands, the hat, the quickest, fleeting, agitated smile on her lips. Prok and I rose simultaneously to greet her.

“Iris, come in, come in,” Prok was saying, all the mellifluous inflection of his smoothest interviewer’s tones pouring out of him like syrup, “here, let me help you off with your coat — bitter out there, isn’t it?”

Iris said that it was. She gave me a smile as she shrugged out of her coat and Prok bustled round her, hot on the scent of yet another history. Did she look tentative, even a bit dazed? I suppose so. But I didn’t really have much time to think about it one way or the other because Prok immediately turned to me and said, “I expect you’ll want to go home a bit early this afternoon, Milk? Or better yet, perhaps you’d like to take your work down to the library—?”

And then there was Corcoran’s history.

But Corcoran’s history — and it was, as I’ve said, extensive, the most active single file we’d yet come across — isn’t perhaps as important at this juncture as sketching in the denouement of that scene with Iris on the steps of the dorm, because that has more than a little bearing on all of this, and all that was to come. She called me a liar. Slammed the door. Left me in the cold. As I stood there in the unrelenting wind, undergraduates and their dates slipping round me like phantoms, I was faced with two incontrovertible facts: Mac had told her everything, and she’d known about it all this time, through our reconciliation, our wedding and honeymoon and the dawdling intimate Sunday afternoons of summer and on into the fall, and she’d never said a word. She’d just watched me, like a spy, awaiting her opening. Well, now she had it. The door slammed behind her, the dorm swallowed her up and I staggered across campus like an invalid till I found a pay phone and rang her number.

The RA answered. “Bridget?” I said. “It’s John Milk. Can you get Iris for me?”

“Yes, sure,” she said, but her voice was distant and cold, and I wondered how much she knew. The phone hit the table with a hard slap, as of flesh on flesh, and then I was listening to the buzz of static. After a moment, the usual sounds came through: the scuffing of feet in the background, a giggle, a man’s voice. “Good night,” somebody said, another man, and then a girl’s voice: “One more kiss.”

When Iris finally came on the line — it might have been two minutes later or ten, I couldn’t say — she sounded as if she were speaking to a stranger, an unsolicited caller, somebody selling something. “What do you want?” she demanded.

“I just, well, I just wanted to, well, talk — that is, if, if—”

“What did you think you were doing?” she said then, and she sounded better now, sounded like herself — furious, but in some way resigned. “Did you think I was stupid or something? Or blind? Was that it?”

“No, it wasn’t that. It was just that, well, I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong, but I didn’t want to upset you in any way, that was all. It’s the project. It’s the human animal. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, nothing at all.”

She was silent. I listened to the blitzkrieg of static over the line and she might have been a thousand miles away instead of just across the quad.

“Listen, Iris,” I said, “you’re going to have to try to overcome these antiquated notions about, well, relations between consenting adults — this is the modern age and we’re scientists, or we mean to be, and all this superstition and fear and blame and finger-pointing is holding us back, as a society, I mean. Can’t you see that?”

Her voice came back at me as if she hadn’t heard what I was saying at all, a small voice, quavering around the edges: “And Prok?”

“What about him?” I said.

“You and Prok?”

I was in a phone booth, bathed in yellow light. It was cold. The wind rattled the door, seeped through the cracks where the hinges folded inward. I was shivering, I’m sure, but this was my wife, this was Iris, and I had to get everything out in the open, had to be straightforward and honest from here on out or we were doomed, I could see that now. “Yes,” I said.

What came next was a surprise. She didn’t throw it back at me, didn’t shout “How could you?” or demand to know the occasions and the number of times or ask me if I loved him or he me or where she and Mac fit into all of this, and she didn’t use any of those hateful epithets people are so quick to make use of, invert, tribad, fag. She just said, “I see.”

What did I feel? Shame? A little. Relief? Yes, certainly, but it was as tenuous as the connection that fed our voices through the superstructure of the night. “I love you,” I said. “You, and nobody else. The rest is all—”

“A bodily function?”

“Iris, listen. I love you. I want to see you face-to-face, because this isn’t — we shouldn’t, not over the phone—”

“Mac,” she said, and I couldn’t be sure — the connection was bad — but there was a knife edge of sorrow to her voice, a slicing away from the moment that made me feel she was about to break down in tears. “Mac and I talked. She’s like a mother, but you know that, don’t you? She, she told me the same thing you did. It doesn’t mean anything, not a thing, it’s just — just what? Animals rubbing their parts together.”

“Iris,” I said. “I love you.”

There was a long silence. When she finally spoke, her voice was reduced to nothing. “What about me and Prok then?” she whispered. “Is that what you want?”

I might have been carved of cellulose, absolutely wooden, the effigy of John Milk propped up inside a phone booth on the far side of the quad on the IU campus on a blustery autumn night. Hammer nails into me, temper me, whittle away with every tool at your disposal: I was insensate. “No,” I said. “No, I don’t want — that’s not … You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

“But I’m giving up my history, aren’t I? Why not give up the rest of me too?” A pause. The wind rattled the booth. “It doesn’t mean anything, does it?”

I was made of wood. I couldn’t speak.

“John? John, are you still there?”

“I’m here.”

“Your — what should I call him? Your colleague — Corcoran,” and now a new tone came into her voice, a tone I didn’t like at all. “He certainly seemed interested. Did you see him tonight? Did you? He was on me like a bird dog.”

And so I went for Corcoran’s history. After things had settled down, that is — after Iris and I had talked it out a hundred times, after we’d reaffirmed the vows we’d taken before the justice of the peace and loved each other in the backseat of the Nash and scraped our money together to put down a deposit on our first apartment because this was intolerable, this separation, this yearning, these misunderstandings, and it was all right, it was going to be all right as far as I could tell on that hollowed-out December morning when Prok was away and I went to the files and saw what Corcoran was. What can I say? I sat there under the lamp and ran my finger down the interview sheet, noting acts, ages, frequencies, reconstructing an ever-expanding scenario of experimentation and sexual derring-do. Corcoran, in fact, was very nearly my diametrical opposite so far as experience was concerned. He’d matured early and taken advantage of it, precisely the type of individual we would later label as “high raters,” who consistently, throughout their lives, experienced more sex with more partners than the average, and far more than the “low raters” on the other end of the scale.

Corcoran was raised in Lake Forest, the son of a professor who later (when Corcoran was fourteen) moved the family to South Bend in order to accept a position at Notre Dame University. His father was Catholic, but only minimally involved in the church, and his mother was Unitarian, and something of a free spirit. There was nudity in the household, both parents having been involved at one time with the Nudist Movement, a fact his father took pains to conceal from his superiors at the university, just as Prok had to keep his own private affairs sub rosa in the IU community. Corcoran could remember having experienced erections in childhood, and his mother assured him that he’d had them in infancy even — she used to joke about it, in fact, saying he was like a little tin soldier, poking right up at her every time she went to change his diaper — and while this is unusual, our research into childhood sexuality has shown that it is not at all anomalous, especially among high-rating individuals. When he was eleven, he had his first orgasm, after which he participated enthusiastically in what in the vernacular would be called “circle jerks” with other neighborhood boys, first in Lake Forest and then in South Bend, where it seems he was the initiator of a whole range of sexual activities involving both boys and girls.

First coitus came at the age of fourteen, at a summer cottage on one of the lakes in the upper Michigan peninsula. There were, apparently, a number of like-minded individuals taking summer cabins in the region — nudists, that is — and he and his two sisters went without clothing throughout the summer, “tanned,” as he later put it, “in every crevice.” It was his aunt — his mother’s sister — who first initiated him, and from there he went on to the sixteen-year-old daughter of one of the other campers, with whom he pursued every means of gratification he could think of. He found, as he liked to say, that he had a talent for sex, that he enjoyed it more than any other activity he’d ever discovered, and before long he’d lost all interest in the boyish pastimes of baseball, trout fishing, picture shows and adventure novels, devoting himself almost wholly to satisfying his urges in as many ways and with as many partners as he could. He met his wife, Violet, in college, and she was, from the beginning, a sexual enthusiast as well (at this juncture I could only configure her in my imagination, and I have to confess that I found myself becoming stimulated at the thought of transcribing her interview for our records). They had two children, both girls, of seven and nine years of age respectively. On occasion, they entertained other couples, Corcoran himself indiscriminate as to whether he had sex with the men or the women or both (he rated himself no higher than a 3 on Prok’s 0–6 scale and thought of himself as fully bi-sexual). Finally, and this was to endear him to Prok and provide an ever-accumulating source of data for our files, he kept a little black book of his conquests, which ran, at this point, into the hundreds.

Of course, much of what I’ve related here is what I’ve gleaned from my personal knowledge of the man — we’ve been colleagues for fourteen years now and certainly we’ve kept no secrets from each other — and yet the basic information was there in the files when on that December morning a week before the uncertain Christmas of 1941 I violated Prok’s proscription for the second (but not the last) time. I can remember sitting there among the dried-out galls, my heart racing as I scanned the file of my prospective colleague, “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” banging around in my head, the fading tramp of students’ feet trailing down the corridor. How could I ever hope to match him? — that was what I was thinking. I was sure suddenly that I’d been fooling myself all along, that Iris had been right — Corcoran was here to displace me, here to take my desk and my salary and my interviews, to unseat me in the hierarchy of the project I’d been the first to sign on for. A kind of panic took hold of me and I had to get up and pace round the room to calm myself. I made a mental list of my own virtues — loyalty, affability, a knowledge of the research second only to Prok’s, my seniority on the job — and yet, no matter how I turned it over in my mind, I had to admit that Corcoran was my superior in every way, at least on paper: eight years older, the father of two, holder of an advanced degree and so high a rater he’d wind up at the top of any number of our graphs and charts. Guilty now — self-accused and suddenly ashamed — I slipped the file back in the cabinet and turned the key in the lock.

We took possession of the apartment on New Year’s Day. It was far from ideal — ten footsore blocks from campus in what must have been the shabbiest neighborhood in Bloomington and damp as a tomb because it was situated at the bottom of a hill on land reclaimed from a marsh, three rooms with a bath and a perdurable smell of the old lady who’d died there (Mrs. Lorber’s elder sister, if that tells you anything of its provenance) — but it was ours, and Iris, with her genius for interior design, soon transformed the place. She strung a bead curtain to separate the kitchen from the sitting room, stripped the faded Victorian wallpaper and replaced it with an almost austere modern design in beige with an overlay of gray-and-white interlocking rectangles, then, after deliberating all of one afternoon and into the evening when I got home from work, directed me in hanging the four framed woodcuts depicting scenes from Wuthering Heights she’d found in the back corner of a secondhand shop. Our sofa and armchair came courtesy of the want ads in the back of the paper, and Prok was kind enough to lend us the Nash to serve as moving van and Ezra helped me maneuver the things through the narrow front door. There was the bed — a double, made of painted iron and dug out of an antiques shop at a basement-bargain price — and the mattress, marked “just like new,” to fit it, a bookcase to lend stateliness to the barren wall across from the sofa, my radio, an assortment of blue glass vases featuring various arrangements of dried flowers and an aspidistra Mac gave us, along with a set of pots and saucepans, as a wedding present. And Prok had been more than generous too, with a Christmas bonus that came at just the right time and the promise of a five-dollar raise to fifty dollars a week beginning the first of the year.

We had sandwiches out of a brown paper sack that first night, sitting cross-legged on the mattress we laid out on the floor because we were too exhausted to set up the bed, and we passed a quart of beer back and forth till it was gone, and then we opened another. I had the radio on — Benny Goodman playing “Don’t Be That Way,” or maybe it was something softer, sweeter — and I lay back against the soon-to-be-stripped wall with Iris in my arms and just held her. The smell of her hair, newly washed in our very own bathroom sink, was the smell of a new beginning, the beginning of life on our own, adult life, together and inseparable. I can’t describe the peace I felt that night. We must have lain there on our new mattress, admiring our new walls, our new front door and the new bead curtains till past midnight, the beer setting us gently adrift, the music swaying softly beneath it, borne up on its own currents. Mrs. Lorber and the various RAs were no longer a part of our universe. Ezra could bathe or not as he pleased and it was nothing to me. The backseat of the Nash was a thing of the past. We had our own place now — our own home — and we could do anything we wanted, anytime, day or night, and never have to worry about the headlights of another car pulling up behind us or the fumes from the exhaust or the night that lay round us like hostile territory.

When I came in from work the next day, Iris had her hair up in a kerchief and she was wearing an apron. The apartment smelled powerfully of something other than Mrs. Lorber’s deceased sister and the ineradicable ribbons of black mold that traced the lines of the fixtures she’d left behind. “What is that, Iris?” I asked, swishing through the bead curtains. “It smells, well, good — or different.”

The kitchen table, layered with coats of ancient kelly-green paint and unstable on its legs, was a scene of devastation. Every plate we owned — used plates, chipped variously round the edges, a legacy of my mother and the trove of our basement in Michigan City — was either crusted with or dripping something. There was a scattering of flour, eggshells, sugar, mounds of potato and apple peelings, what looked to be ketchup and Worcestershire, and spices — marjoram figured prominently in the display, as I recall.

She gave me her smile, two arms conjoined round my neck, and a kiss. “Meat loaf,” she said, “with scalloped potatoes, string beans and apple pan dowdy. The meat loaf and potatoes come courtesy of my mother, and yes, I was standing right beside her in the kitchen all those years in high school, learning how to be a good little housekeeper, thank you very much.” She was grinning, pleased with herself, and so what if the place was a mess — we’d just moved in and she was cooking for me. “As for the apple pan dowdy, I found a recipe in a magazine at the library, and I didn’t have a pencil so I tore it out.” And there it was, a square of glossy paper, Scotch-taped to the cabinet over the stove.

I must have given her a look (she knew full well that as a former librarian I would disapprove of her defacing library materials of any kind, even ephemera like magazines), because she added, “Don’t pout, John. The IU library isn’t going to miss one little recipe — or do you think all the coeds are lined up at the checkout desk right now, sobbing over the apple pan dowdy that might have been?”

Inside the pocket of my overcoat, which I hadn’t yet removed, was a bottle of bourbon. I thought this might be an auspicious time to draw it out and set it amid the clutter on the table. “A little celebration,” I said, lifting two glasses down from the shelf and pouring us each a drink. “To you,” I said, and we clinked glasses even as she corrected me: “To us!”

Can I say that that meal was the best I’ve ever had? Because it isn’t just the quality of the ingredients or the expertise of the preparation or the elegance of the surroundings that make for a great meal, but the mood of the diner — in this case a mood elevated by the situation, by the bourbon, by love—that can make every bite seem as sensual as a kiss. Apple pan dowdy. Meat loaf. I ate like a man who’d been shipwrecked for a month, ate till I could eat no more, then killed the bottle of bourbon — it was a fifth and it got both of us pretty giddy, I’m afraid — and fell on my wife like that same shipwrecked sailor, or maybe his admiral.

That was in the beginning, and that was what our life was like through every day and every night. It’s called happiness, and we had it in spades, as they say. The war loomed over us, of course, as it loomed over everyone in those days and months after Pearl Harbor, but Prok was good to his word and did finally manage to get me an occupational deferment, using the full arsenal of his rhetoric and all the weight of his position to bring the draft board around to the view that our research was crucial to the war effort. For her part, Iris was determined to finish out her final semester and get her degree in elementary education, but she did take a part-time job at the five-and-dime, and the money she earned there, along with the raise Prok gave me, helped lend us as much a sense of security as anyone could expect under the circumstances. Which is not to say that we didn’t have to budget pretty strictly, and I cut back on smoking, we did our drinking at home and rationed ourselves to one picture a week.

Was it all idyllic? No, of course not. There was still the unresolved business of our relationship with Prok and Mac — they invited us for dinner and musicales on a regular basis, and, of course, I traveled with Prok much more than Iris would have liked, a sore point that seemed to get sorer and sorer as the years went on — and beyond that there was Iris’s growing disenchantment with the project itself. “We’re at war,” she would say. “The whole world hangs in the balance, and you’re out there somewhere in the hinterlands measuring orgasms — I mean, doesn’t that strike you as trivial?”

“But you never wanted me to go, don’t you remember?” I countered. “You were the one. You were adamant — you could have been Lindbergh’s speechwriter, for Christ’s sake. ‘I will not let you go,’ you said. ‘It’s not our war.’ Remember?”

She had a way of curling her underlip, as if she’d just been poisoned, had just set down the vial and was about to turn on her perpetrator — me — with all the moribund strength left in her. “Don’t give me that crap, John. I might have been against it, but that was before the Japs came into it. Now it’s almost as if, as if — I don’t want to say it, John. But orgasms. I mean, what could be more ridiculous?”

I remember a night from that period, sometime in the winter or early spring, when we had our first dinner party, and Ezra and Dick Martone, who were quitting school to enlist, came to the apartment with two girls and three tall bulging sacks of beer — and gin, which was Dick’s drink of choice. Gin, in a silver bottle, with a seltzer squirter full of tonic. The girls were plain, with dead-looking hair and acne scars — they were sisters, I think, maybe even twins — and their chief attraction, aside from the lushness of their figures, was their unabashed carnality. They talked dirty, drank like sponges and had “given out” to half the men on campus. What they especially liked, being patriotic girls, was uniforms.

At any rate, we had a going-away party and Iris made a leg of lamb with pan-roasted potatoes, carrots and creamed corn, hot-from-the-oven biscuits, and a homemade peach cobbler for dessert. I spent the afternoon — it was a Saturday — running a carpet sweeper over the rug, peeling vegetables and dashing out to the store for mint jelly, cloves of garlic, a pound of margarine and whatever else she discovered she needed at the last minute. I told her it was no big deal, that it was only Dick and Ezra and their dates, a couple of girls we’d never see again and who were there for one purpose only, but Iris had worked herself into a state. “It’s our first dinner party, John,” she said, busy at the sink, her back to me. “The first time we’ve ever entertained people in our own home.”

The water was running, steam rising, the heady fragrance of the roasting lamb infusing every corner of our three rooms and bath with a richness and prodigality that made me feel like a robber baron, like a sultan lounging on his multicolored carpets while the exotic smells of dinner wafted up from the royal kitchens below. I put my hands on her hips, kissed the back of her ear. “I know you,” I said, leaning into her, pressing my groin into the swell of her buttocks, “you just want to show off.”

She stiffened, her shoulders gone rigid, the dishes in the sink flying from the suds to the rinse pan and off to the dish rack as if an automaton were at work. “You could help,” she said, without turning around. “You could dry. Because we’re going to need these dishes for the table and our guests are going to be here in less than an hour.”

“Sure,” I said, “sure,” and I picked up the dish towel and moved in beside her. “But really, you don’t have to make such a production of it, not for Dick and Ezra—”

She turned to me in half-profile, showing me the underlip and a quick darting leap of her eyes. “And so what if I want to show the place off — and my husband too. I’m proud of it. Aren’t you?”

I told her that I was and I tried to embrace her with a wet platter in my hand, and I suppose I was a bit awkward — not drunk yet, not by any means, but I will admit to having had a nip or two in anticipation of the party — and somehow the platter wound up on the floor. In pieces. We both stood stock-still a moment, staring down at the wreckage. This was the only platter we had, the platter on which the lamb was to have been served, and the crisis of the moment proved too much for Iris. She gave me a savage look, plunged through the bead curtains and stalked down the hallway to the bedroom, where she slammed the door behind her with an excess of force. I wanted to go to her and apologize — or no, I was angry suddenly and I wanted to kick the door, rattle the knob and shout at her, because it wasn’t the end of the world, it was only an accident, and why take it out on me? Why don’t you just tear the goddamned thing off its hinges, huh? That was what I wanted to say, what I wanted to scream. But I didn’t. I got as far as the door, but the door was locked. “Iris,” I said. “Iris, come on.” I listened for a moment — was she crying? — then went back to the kitchen, poured another drink and got down on my knees to pick up the pieces.

For all that, the party went off as well as could be expected. Or better, even. Dick and Ezra and the two girls — let’s call them Mary Jane and Mary Ellen — were pretty well lit when they arrived and I don’t think they would have noticed or cared if we’d served the lamb on a skewer. As it was, I carved the meat at the stove and arranged the slices on an ordinary dinner plate, after Iris had made sure that everyone had a chance to admire it in the pan, that is, and by the time the pie and coffee were served we were laughing over the lost platter and the inept husband who couldn’t be trusted in the kitchen. Mary Ellen, seated on my right, gave me a playful cuff on the shoulder and called me “butterfingers.” “You butterfingers, you,” she said, and both sisters let out a scream of laughter.

I brought out the bourbon to spike our coffee and Ezra poured his cup full to the brim and bolted the whole business while it was still too hot for anyone else even to sip, and then asked for more. A vacant look came into his eyes after that, but he sat there happily, one redolent arm thrust over Mary Jane’s shoulder while his free hand maneuvered his fork round a second piece of cobbler. He and Dick, who’d stayed on through the fall for graduate school and a teaching assistantship in the Engineering Department, were leaving in the morning for basic training. This was their last night of freedom, their last fling, and I wanted — Iris and I wanted — to make it memorable for them. There was beer left still, and when we moved away from the table and into the sitting room, Dick poured a fresh round of gin and tonics for himself and the girls.

At some point, and I didn’t really recall too much of it the following morning, let alone what I can summon up at this juncture, the conversation turned away from the war and how Dick and Ezra were sure to turn the tide, whip Hitler with one hand tied behind their backs and come steaming home triumphant by fall, to me and my situation. Dick was sunk into the couch, his arm fastened round Mary Ellen and his hand resting lightly on her left breast. The radio was on, the volume turned down low out of respect for the neighbors, something moody and blue seeping in out of the airwaves. “Kinsey really did get you that deferment, huh?” he said.

“Kinsey?” Mary Ellen said. “You mean Professor Kinsey? Dr. Sex?”

Mary Jane, who’d been locked in an embrace with Ezra in the easy chair, lifted her head a moment to let out a giggle.

“That’s right,” I said. “Yes. Dr. Kinsey. I work for him.”

“Doing research,” Iris put in. “He’s terrific with statistics, he does all the figures—”

Ezra let out a snort. “I’ll bet he does — but what do you do with all those figures, huh, John?” And he and Dick shared a lascivious laugh.

Mary Ellen was slow to form the next thought, but I watched her compose her features and struggle with the notion till she got it out. “You mean … you, you’re a sex researcher?”

I was seated on one of the hard-backed kitchen chairs I’d dragged into the sitting room to make space for everyone. As I’ve said, I had no qualms whatever about the work — I was Prok’s right-hand man, his disciple in everything — but I didn’t like having to defend it, not in mixed company, not in my own living room. I looked into Mary Ellen’s eyes — she had nice eyes, her best feature, along with her consequential figure — and just nodded.

She made a cooing noise, turned to Dick and kissed him full on the mouth. When she came up for air she treated us to a coy smile and said that sex was the most fascinating subject she could think of. “I love sex,” she said, cooing still. “I love men, I’m sorry, but that’s just who I am.” A pause. “Do you get to watch? I mean, when people are …when they’re”—she looked to Iris to see how far she could go—“you know, doing it?”

I was long past the stage of coloring, but I felt the heat in that room and my wife’s eyes on me, and Dick’s and Ezra’s too. “No,” I said, raising a hand to smooth back my hair, “no, we just—”

“They just ask questions,” Iris answered for me. She gave me a look I couldn’t fathom. “Isn’t that right, John?”

Mary Jane had come back to consciousness, sprawled in Ezra’s lap and with her lipstick smeared in broad ovals at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were dull with drink and the lateness of the hour. The faint wail of a saxophone rose from the radio like the cry of a strangled soul, then faded out again. “Questions?” she said. “What kind of questions?”

“How much do you masturbate?” Iris said, and she was still looking at me. “How many men you’ve been with, how many orgasms you have, how often you fellate your boyfriends. That sort of thing.”

There was a silence. Dick lifted his head as if he hadn’t heard a thing we’d said for the past five minutes. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I guess you’ve got a wife and all that, so I can’t blame you for taking the deferment, I really can’t.”

Another silence. The comment just sat there crouching over the evening, and no one wanted to touch it, least of all me. The announcer came on then to inform us that the station was signing off for the night, and we all stared at the radio till the fuzz of static replaced the broadcast and I began to think it was time to turn in. Finally Mary Jane roused herself again long enough to ask, “What’s fellate?”

Iris and I had agreed beforehand that we would retire early and let the two couples have the benefit of the couch and easy chair and the equable temperature produced by the furnace rather than having to make do in a frigid hallway somewhere or the backseat of a borrowed car, and so we went to bed not long after that and left our guests in the front room. I was fairly well gone at that point, and so was Iris, and I don’t think I even got around to brushing my teeth before I fell into the bed as if I were plummeting from a high dive. Instantly, I was asleep.

I woke sometime in the night with a dry throat, a condition that often afflicts me when I’ve been drinking. I was having a dream about walking into the drugstore and ordering a chocolate phosphate that magically turned into a Coca-Cola on ice with beads of condensation standing out on the glass that was like a cold compress in my hand, and then I was up and out of bed and heading toward the bathroom in my bare feet. But it wasn’t just my feet that were bare. I’ve always slept in the nude, at least ever since puberty when my mother stopped looking in on me at night, and in the disorientation of waking I’d forgotten entirely that there were guests in the house. The truth of it was, I was still drunk. Even so, something alerted me to the situation — a scent, the sound of a furtive movement, the faint trembling light of the candle Iris had left burning in the main room.

It took me a moment, fumbling my way down the hall step by faltering step, to realize that I was not alone. There was someone else there, a deepening shadow that seemed to concentrate the darkness against the wall just in front of me. I reached out a hand and felt flesh, a woman’s flesh, two complicit breasts to linger over, the heat of her skin, of her tongue, and a whisper: “I was looking for the bathroom …”

What would the proper host have done? Escorted her to the lavatory, I suppose. Provided her with fresh towels, a bar of soap, eau de cologne. I didn’t do any of that. I didn’t even have time to think, really — one minute I was asleep, and the next I was making tactile contact with the smooth hot inflammatory skin of a strange naked woman in my own hallway even while the sounds of distant snoring and the ticking, somewhere, of a clock, came to me. Her nipples were hard, her vagina was wet. Instantly, we were inseparable, and I don’t blame myself, not in the least, because it was the natural impulse of the moment, uncomplicated, salubrious, research on the fly, as it were.

I never did discover whether the friend of the research that night was Mary Ellen or Mary Jane, not that it mattered.

11

Automobiles were on my mind that winter, even as rationing went into effect and the auto assembly lines switched over to war production. In December, just before the Japanese struck, Prok had turned his considerable investigative energies to seeking out a second car, reasoning that it was unfair to deprive Mac and the children of transportation for such long stretches when we were out on the road lecturing and collecting histories. After having examined a dozen or more vehicles for sale around town, he finally settled on a late-model Buick that featured almost-new tires and an unblemished finish in a shade of blue so deep it was almost black. The car had belonged to one of his colleagues at IU, an elderly music professor who had passed on the year before and left the car garaged with his widow, who’d never learned to drive it. Prok sat down with the widow over tea one afternoon and collected not only the car (at a rock-bottom price), but her sex history as well. I was there, at the house on First Street, with Iris and Mac and the children, all of us waiting on pins and needles to see if Prok could pull it off, and I remember the celebratory flash of the sun catching the windshield as he swung into the driveway and the look of naked triumph on his face. Ostensibly, by the way, this was to be Mac’s car, while we continued to rely on the wheezing, unsteady Nash for our peregrinations, but in fact, from the day Prok motored into the driveway with it, the Buick was ours.

Of course, since Iris and I were to set up our household a few weeks later, our need for a car wasn’t quite as urgent as it once was, but still I think I wanted an automobile of my own at that time as much as I’d ever wanted anything. On Sunday afternoons Iris and I would bundle up and walk across town — and sometimes even out into the nether areas where the houses gave way to farms and open land — just to have a look at this or the other ancient collapsing Tin Lizzie we couldn’t have afforded in any case. But we looked, because you never knew. Every time I saw an ad—“1929 Model A, good tires, needs work, best offer; 1934 Chevy, clean”—I built something in my mind, and every time, without fail, I was disappointed. I wasn’t a mechanic. Didn’t, in fact, know the first thing about spark plugs or flywheels or transmission oil. I had hope, though. I was looking for something reliable, something cheap and efficient, with a sound engine and rust-free chassis, and I didn’t care about make, model or year. Because, as I’ve said, the road out of town always beckoned to me and I sometimes felt — as both student and married man — that I was stranded in Bloomington, surrounded and given up for dead. There were buses, the train and my trips with Prok, sure, but if I had four wheels under me I could be my own master and go where I liked, when I liked.

It must have been toward the end of February, and I can’t really recall whether it was before or after our little farewell party for Dick and Ezra, when Corcoran came to Bloomington to stay. There had been a break in the weather — clear skies and daytime temperatures that climbed up into the forties — and I remember I was just leaving Biology Hall to run an errand for Prok when a horn tooted and a car pulled up to the curb in front of me. It was a yellow Cadillac La Salle convertible with crisp whitewall tires and chrome hubcaps, and the top was down. At the wheel, in a tweed jacket and with a pipe clenched in the corner of his mouth, was Corcoran. He thrust both arms up over his head and waved them in transect as if he were lost at sea. “John,” he called, “hey, John! I’ve arrived!”

I don’t know what I said to him in response, something about the car, I suppose. It was the sort of thing you came across in magazines, hands down the sportiest vehicle Bloomington had yet to see.

“You like it?” he crowed, sliding out the door and pumping my hand. “Just got it a week ago. And you should have seen the thing cruise on the way down here, my hand on the horn the whole way because all you cows and you farmers in your hay wagons, just look out, here I come.”

I made admiring noises, traffic passing by on the pavement, students pausing to gawk, the barren trees jammed into the ground up and down the street like so many gibbets. There was a suitcase on the passenger’s seat and a new tan fedora atop it. I was wondering how Corcoran could have afforded such a car on a social worker’s salary (his wife’s people had money, as I was later to learn), and wondering too how much Prok had offered him to come work with us — more than I was getting, that was for sure — when he looked from me to the suitcase and back again and said, “You think this’ll be okay here? The suitcase, I mean. Just for a minute?”

“Well,” I said, “I guess, well, sure—”

“You wouldn’t want to keep an eye on it, just for a minute, would you? See, I wanted to dash up and let Prok know I’m here — the apartment I can find afterward, that’s no problem … and by the way, I wanted to thank you, and Prok, I guess, for finding me the place.”

This was the first I’d heard of it, and my face must have showed my confusion, because he added, “Or whoever was responsible. It was kind. It really was. See, I’ll need the next couple of months, while I’m batching it, to find something suitable for Violet and the kids, and this is really — well, I know how hard it is to find something in the middle of the semester…”

As it turned out, I must have stood there at the curb for half an hour while flocks of students, townspeople and the odd professor ambled by, watching over the car and maybe even pretending it was mine. I did inspect the thing pretty thoroughly, even looked into the engine compartment and the trunk (tennis racket, a set of golf clubs, a pair of two-tone shoes and another suitcase), and toward the end of my little wait I sat at the wheel, just to get the feel of it. I was beginning to feel a bit uneasy — Prok would be wondering where I was — when I saw Corcoran and Prok emerge from Biology Hall and start up the walk toward me. Prok was moving along at his usual stiff pace, and Corcoran was keeping right up with him, stride for stride. They were both smiling, gesturing, deep in running conversation. Guiltily (though I don’t know why I should have felt guilty — I had been asked the favor of minding the car and suitcase, after all), I slid out from behind the wheel and eased the door shut. When they got to the car — to me, that is — both men looked up as if surprised to see me there, and Prok went immediately to the passenger’s side, lifted out the suitcase and handed it to me. He climbed in and shut the door without a word, then looked up at me and said, “See if you can fit that in down behind the seat, Milk, will you?” And then to Corcoran: “Very impressive, Corcoran, I must say. But a bit flashy, isn’t it?”

I could see that Prok was getting a very high reading on his frugality monitor, not to mention his concern over any of his employees drawing undue attention to himself. The look on his face told me everything: A yellow convertible, he was thinking. And what next? No doubt too he was calculating how Corcoran’s layout for expenditure could have been more propitiously budgeted to the project, though that wouldn’t have been fair, but still —

Corcoran was oblivious, as he so often was — this was one of his talents, as I was soon to learn. He coasted through life on greased wings, and he took what he wanted and gave what he liked in return. If the situation was oppressive or difficult in any way — and as the project took off and the public descended on us there were any number of occasions that caused me to squirm, to say the least — he simply ignored it. I don’t think it was because he was insensitive, quite the contrary, but just that he didn’t care. He was blithe. He was insouciant. He was Corcoran — and the world had better look out. All he said to Prok now was: “V-8 engine, Prok, runs like a dream. And does it have power.”

I managed to fit the suitcase in the space behind Prok’s seat, and then Prok gave my hand a pat and said, “Go on back up to the office, Milk — I’m just going to take a few minutes here to settle Corcoran in at his apartment, just to get it over with. We’ll be back inside of an hour, and then”—with a glance for Corcoran—“then we’ll get some real work done.”

Corcoran put the car in gear, revved the engine and took off with a squeal, Prok already beginning to gesticulate, no doubt giving him the first in an unending series of driving instructions. I stood there and watched the car recede down the block, then I turned round and went back up to the office in Biology Hall, the errand — whatever it was — all but forgotten.

There was a dinner party that Saturday evening, then a musicale the following Sunday for a select group of Prok’s colleagues, including the Briscoes and President Wells (Prok was showing off his newest acquisition, this handsome, shining, confident young man with the yellow convertible, and that was only to be expected), and then the three of us were off on our first collective trip in the streamlined shell of the Buick. Prok drove, Corcoran in the passenger’s seat beside him, while I sat in back and gazed out on the countryside. As usual, Prok never stopped chattering from the moment he and Corcoran swung by the apartment to pick me up till we arrived at our destination, Corcoran, as new man, doing his best to punctuate some of Prok’s fluent observations with thoughts of his own, and I just leaning back with half-closed eyes and letting it all drift over me. Was I disillusioned over having my place so immediately and completely usurped? Yes, of course I was, at least at first. But I quickly began to see the advantage in it — I now had someone to divide Prok’s attention, absorb some of his excess energy as well as his criticism, his rigidity and, not least, his sexual needs. And so, as I sat back against the seat in the relative luxury of the Buick, half-listening to the conversation up front and replying with a nod or grunt when I was directly drawn into it, I began to feel that things were definitely looking up and that some of the pressure I’d been under was bound to lift.

Because I had been tense. In the weeks before Corcoran’s arrival Prok and I had been working on our grant proposals as well as pushing ourselves to travel and collect as many histories as we could before rationing went into effect, and Prok had become increasingly demanding under the sway of his own pressures. Perhaps it was the uncertainty of the times (he never said a word about the war, never followed developments or mentioned world events except as they related to the research, and yet it was clear that he was increasingly concerned over the potential damage to the project), and perhaps too it was that he felt me drawing away from him emotionally since I’d moved in with Iris. He wanted sexual relations and I acquiesced, but there was no joy in it, and he must have felt that. I remember one night in a motor court outside Carbondale when he came to me naked and erect after a long day’s driving and interviewing and all I wanted was to turn over and go to sleep, and I told him as much. “What’s the matter,” he said, easing down on the bed beside me, “you’re not getting sex shy on me, are you?”

“No,” I told him, “no, I’m just tired,” but I did what he wanted, and all the time I was thinking of Iris, back at home, waiting for me.

On this particular trip — the first of a hundred or more the three of us would make together over the years — we were on our way to Indianapolis, where we were planning to interview prostitutes and, if possible, their johns, Corcoran looking on in the role of apprentice till he could acquire the necessary skills to join in. Prok was in high spirits, more talkative even than usual, and though he drove erratically, also as usual, and tried to maintain an even speed so as to conserve on fuel, we made good time and got to our hotel early enough to have a collegial dinner before going out on the streets. I’d wanted a highball before the meal, and so had Corcoran, but Prok wouldn’t hear of it — we’d be in and out of bars till all hours, and as that would almost certainly involve the consumption of a certain unavoidable quantity of alcohol there was no reason to start now; the last thing he wanted was an inebriated interviewer. Didn’t we agree? Yes, of course we did, albeit reluctantly, and after the waiter took our menus, Corcoran and I exchanged a glance over our glasses of virgin soda water and I thought I’d found an ally. We were under Prok’s thumb — always, and willingly — but we could rebel too, in our own quiet, complicit way, and that made me feel ever so slightly wicked, as if I’d found an elder brother to kick under the table when our father’s back was turned.

So we sipped soda water while Prok had a Coca-Cola (“I don’t really like the taste of the stuff,” he claimed, though his sweet tooth was legendary, “but it’s good for the caffeine, keeps me alert, you know”) and outlined our plan of attack for the evening. “Actually,” he said, pausing to look round him at the nearly deserted hotel dining room, “I have no doubt but that we’ll pick up some excellent data tonight, the sort of high-rating, lower-level histories we’re always seeking for balance — and you remember Gary, Milk, and how rich an arena that was — but I’ve been thinking that it’s not enough.”

The hotel was in the low- to mid-price range, and its restaurant was nothing to write home about (again, Prok’s thinking was, Why waste project funds on some fleeting luxury?), and he set his knife and fork down carefully beside the salad plate, on which three slices of pickled beet remained in a gory pool beside a brownish fragment of lettuce.

“What do you mean?” Corcoran asked. “No one’s ever accumulated data as accurate and complete as what you’ve showed me, you and John, I mean.”

Prok shot another glance round the room to make sure no one was listening, then leaned in over his plate. “What I’m thinking is this: while it’s all well and good to record direct accounts of sexual activity — while it’s essential, the backbone of everything we’re trying to accomplish — nevertheless we could be doing more, much more.”

Corcoran’s eyes jumped to mine and I gave him the faintest shrug of my shoulders. I couldn’t imagine what Prok was getting after.

“I’ve arranged something a little different for tonight,” Prok said, picking up his fork as if he’d never before seen a utensil, then setting it down again as if he couldn’t guess at its function. “Let me put it this way,” he went on, “while we have been able, as a species, to domesticate animals and breed them into their many varieties — to observe and manipulate, as it were, their sexual activity — we’ve never had the opportunity to do the same with human beings. To observe, that is.”

“Yes, of course,” Corcoran said, jumping on the notion, “because while we all participate, we’re never exactly watching, are we? Or even wearing our scientist’s hat — isn’t that right, John?”

“Well,” I said, “yes, sure,” and I gave him a grin. “In the heat of the moment, you’re not thinking in scientific terms; no one is—”

“Right. And where’s your objectivity?” Corcoran’s face was lit with pleasure. He was on the trail of something. The moment was his. “When you’re with a woman, in the throes of passion, everything else, every other consideration, goes right out the window, and at a certain point you don’t even care what she looks like, just as long as—”

“Exactly.” Prok gave us a satisfied look, the blue claws of his eyes pulling us to him even as he paused at the approach of the waiter and the three of us sat in silence as the steaming plates appeared before us. The waiter hovered expectantly — Could he bring us anything else? — and Prok waved him off. When the man had retreated to the far side of the room, Prok took a moment to poke at his entrée — corned beef and cabbage, sans potatoes, one of his alimentary prohibitions. “Tonight we’re going to do what no one in the field has even so much as dared before, at least as far as I know — that is, we’re going to observe the act itself, in commission. It’s all been arranged.”

We waited in a kind of palpitating silence, till he added: “With one of the young women, that is. We’ll be secreted in the room — in the closet, actually — when she entertains her tricks.”

“You mean”—I couldn’t help myself—“we’ll be peeping then, as if we were, well … you mean, like Peeping Toms?”

“Voyeurs,” Corcoran pronounced with a faint smile.

Prok gave each of us a look. “Yes,” he said. “That’s it exactly.”

Jean Sibelius — one of Prok’s particular favorites — had been the focus of the previous week’s musicale, and I remember having gone to Prok’s without much enthusiasm only to find myself pleasantly surprised. As I’ve said, swing was more to my taste than classical, but the music Prok chose that night was melodic and warm — almost dreamlike — and before I knew it I’d lost all consciousness of my surroundings and let it sweep over me like some natural force. I suppose something similar happened to jitterbuggers out on the dance floor — to Iris and me when we danced before a bandstand — but all that was driven by the intoxication of the moment and the coronary thump of the bass drum. This was different. Once the record began I found myself slipping into a reverie, utterly calm and at ease, my thoughts bumping along from one repository to another without logic or connection. For the first time I began to understand what Prok saw in his music and why he was so devoted to it.

Iris and I had been on time, for a change, and I’d taken a seat in the front row, as Prok expected me to, with Iris on my right and Corcoran seated beside her, the preliminaries this time reduced to a few minutes of strained chitchat with President Wells over a plate of stale crackers and rumless fruit punch, and I remember speculating about Wells even as he eased into the seat beside me. He was a short, energetic, rotund little man, and a great supporter of Prok against the storm of criticism, invective and innuendo that continually came our way, and yet he was unmarried in his forties, and that seemed odd — very odd — given the time and place. I made a note to myself to pull his history the first chance I got.

The room was cold that night, Prok having turned down the thermostat in the expectation that the aggregate body heat of his guests would be sufficient to warm the place up — that and the coloration of the music. There was a small fire going in the hearth, but it was dying because Prok didn’t like to fuss with tending a fire when a record was on the turntable, and who could blame him? So we were cold, and I suppose I must have felt a bit sorry for the first-time guests who hadn’t dressed for what might as well have been an outdoor concert, as Iris, Corcoran and I had. For all that, Prok was his usual warm and outgoing self, entertaining us with a brief lecture on the composer’s career and the piece we were about to hear. He talked of Sibelius’s love of his native Finland and the charm of his sylvan settings and how the majority of his symphonic poems were based on Finland’s great epic, the Kalevala.

Then the room hushed as he retreated to the gramophone, sharpened the needle and let it fall. We heard “The Swan of Tuonela” that night and selections from “Pohjola’s Daughter,” and, as I say, I simply closed my eyes and let the music carry me away. There was an intermission, during which Mac served refreshments — non-alcoholic — and the guests got up and mingled, and then there were a few songs (“Was It a Dream?” and “The Maid Came from Her Lovers’ Tryst,” both of which I remember distinctly because as soon as I was able I went out and purchased a recording of them, which I treasure to this day), and then the party broke up. The reason I mention all of this, is because of what happened during the intermission — or what might have happened, because I can’t say for sure that that was the beginning of it, though I have my suspicions.

In any case, I was doing my best with a fistful of stale crackers and a cup of tepid punch while Prok pinned me in the corner along with President Wells, expatiating on the music we’d just heard (and on the research, of course), when I looked across the room and saw that Iris was alone with Corcoran, just as she had been on the last occasion — back in the fall — when we’d all three gathered for a musical evening. I wouldn’t have paid it any attention really if it weren’t for what she’d said that night over the wire while I sank miserably into the glass crevice of the phone booth: He was on me like a bird dog. Prok was informing President Wells and me (though I’d heard it before) that he liked to study the faces of the audience during musical performances for signs of sensual transport — one professor emeritus in his seventies had actually become physically aroused one night over Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde—but I was watching Iris, watching her face, watching Corcoran and how he seemed to anticipate her every movement, as if they were dancing to an imaginary orchestra. “Prok,” I said, cutting him off, “President Wells, I, just, well, if you’ll excuse me, please, and I’ll be right back—”

Prok gave me a wondering look, but he didn’t miss a beat. As I wandered off, making sure to head in the direction of the lavatory, I heard him say, “Of course, I would never name that gentleman, for fear of embarrassing him, but really, there’s absolutely nothing to be embarrassed about—”

I came up on Corcoran and my wife from behind, having made a detour past the lavatory in the event that Prok and Wells were watching, and I seemed to have startled them. Whatever they’d been talking about so intently just a moment before fell off a conversational cliff and the two of them looked up at me in confusion. I wanted to say something blithe like, “Am I interrupting anything here?” but when I saw the looks on their faces the words died in my throat. “Hello,” was the best I could manage.

Corcoran treated me to a smile. “Oh, hi, John. We were just discussing the way Prok seems to have taken charge of our president.” He gave a sidelong glance to where the two of them stood in the corner still, Prok lecturing, Wells stifling a yawn.

Iris said, “He never misses an opportunity, does he?”

I was angry suddenly, or testy, I suppose — testy would be a better word. “He has every right,” I said, staring her in the face, and I wasn’t smiling, wasn’t keeping it blithe and light. “Because you’d be amazed how much each department has to fight for funding. And we’ve got the prospect of expanding our grant base, which in turn should help convince Wells — or the university, I mean — to give us more for salary, materials, travel expenses and the like.”

Iris was wearing a little smile of amusement. “So?” she said.

“So don’t go accusing Prok, of, of—pandering—or whatever you want to call it, because if it weren’t for him we’d be—”

“Up shit’s creek without a paddle,” Corcoran said, expanding his smile. He had a glass of mauve-colored punch in his hand and he was rotating it against his palm as if he were about to snatch up three or four others and start juggling them to break the ice and get the party rolling, irrespective of Prok and Wells and the high tone of the evening. But then he laid a hand on my arm. “It’s okay, John,” he said, and Iris warmed up her smile too, “we’re on your side. We’re all in this together, aren’t we?”

I suppose that was when I first began to have my suspicions — Corcoran, the sexual Olympian on the loose, and Iris, the love of my life, stinging still over what I’d done in bed with Mac and with Prok — but I was paralyzed. I wanted to believe that there was nothing between them beyond the usual goodwill that existed between one colleague and the spouse of another, and I was afraid of any sort of confrontation with Iris, because I knew she’d throw it back at me, every phrase, every excuse and rationale, every occasion on which I’d ever spoken of our animal nature and sex as a function divorced from emotion of any kind, no different from hunger or thirst. Of course, I dropped hints. Put out probes, as it were. I came home from work, complimented the aroma of whatever was cooking, poured a drink, sat with her and reviewed my day, and of course my day included Corcoran — I dropped his name whenever I could, scanning her face for a reaction. There was nothing there. But what did she think of him? I pressed. Oh, he was nice enough, she said. Better than she’d thought. She really did think he was going to work out, and she was sorry if at first she’d seemed negative about him. “Yes,” I said, “I told you, didn’t I?” And then a smile, as if it were all a joke, “And what about his bird dog propensities?”

She was busy suddenly — a pot was boiling over on the stove, there was an onion to be peeled. It was a joke, sure it was, and she just laughed. “He’s like that with all women,” she said. “And men too. But you would know better than I, John.”

If I were a turtle — one of Darwin’s Galápagos tortoises Prok was always talking about — I could have pulled all my exposed parts back into my shell, and I suppose, in a metaphorical way, that was what I did do. We went to Indianapolis, the three of us, colleagues on a mission, and Corcoran and I sat across the table from each other exchanging our own private signals while Prok informed us that we were going to do something illegal, if not immoral, despite the testimonial letters from Dean Briscoe, President Henry B. Wells and Robert M. Yerkes: for this night, anyway, we were going to be Peeping Toms.

The idea of it, I have to admit, made my blood race. I think we all have the capacity for voyeurism, we all burn to see how other people live through their private moments so that we can hold them up against our own and thrill with a feeling of superiority, or perhaps, on the other end of the spectrum, feel the sharp awakening slap of inadequacy. So that’s how it’s done, we think. I could do it that way. Or could I? Yes, sure I could, and I could do it better too. I’d like to be doing it right now — but look at her, look how she clings to him, how she rises to meet him, how —

Beyond that, of course, we were scientists, and we convinced ourselves that we had a duty to the research that rated above all other considerations. We needed to do fieldwork, like any other investigators, needed to engage in direct observation of sexual experience in all its varieties, else how could we presume to call ourselves experts? How could our data have the kind of validity we sought if it were paper data only? If you think of it, everything we were attempting to accomplish, every close observation, every measurement, should have been rendered redundant by a hundred studies that had come before us. But there weren’t a hundred studies, there weren’t fifty — there wasn’t even one. We’d built our civilization, gone to war, delved into the smallest things, the microbe and the atom, and still the hypocrites and the lily-whites were there to shout us down: sex is dirty, they said. Sex is shameful, private, obscene, unfit for examination. Well. We got up from the table, paid the check and walked out into the night to prove them wrong.

This time it wasn’t raining, wasn’t even all that cold, considering the season. Prok wasn’t wearing an overcoat, though the streets were damp from a series of rainstorms the previous week and he’d pulled a pair of rubbers on over his shoes. Corcoran was wearing his tan fedora and a pale camel trench coat, as if he’d just stepped off the set of a picture about foreign agents and the assignations of war. For my part, I was dressed as usual, coat and tie, no hat, and my feet — in a pair of fresh-polished cordovans — would just have to get wet if I wasn’t absolutely vigilant about the puddles in the street. “All right,” Prok said, gathering us to him on a street corner, “I think it’s this way, down this street and one block over to the left — and the contact, incidentally, is a young woman, a redhead by the name of Ginger.”

We found Ginger without any trouble, dressed in a cheap imitation fur and sipping a soft drink through a straw on a bench in the back of the local pool hall. There was a man slouched beside her, a sharp dresser with a flashy tie and elephantine pants that concealed the boniness of his legs, till he leaned back to light a cigarette and crossed his ankles, that is. He regarded the three of us with suspicion — he was the pimp, and his name was Gerald — till Prok won him over with a brief speech in the vernacular and a contribution of three dollars to the support of his staff and a dollar more for each history he brought us, including his own. Ginger was a big girl, five eight or five nine, twenty-two years old, with a solid, thick-fleshed physique that would sink her in fat by the time she was thirty and the milky coloring of a natural redhead. She didn’t make a move. Just sucked at the straw within the red bow of her mouth and watched her pimp fold Prok’s bills and tuck them away in the voluminous pockets of his trousers. “Okay,” Gerald said then, “okay,” and he smiled to reveal a set of hopeless teeth, variously colored. He looked to Ginger and the smile vanished. “So what you waitin’ for? Go peddle your goods — and take these gennemen with you.”

Then we were outside, dodging puddles, Prok at Ginger’s side as if he were escorting her to a cotillion that would miraculously appear round the next corner in a pure white outflowing of light, Corcoran and I bringing up the rear. It was an awkward scenario, none of us — even Prok — inclined to say much, Ginger leading us on with a hypnotic shake and roll of her hips, faces appearing out of the dark to dodge away again, slatted eyes assessing us as potential johns or mugging victims. Ginger had a ground-floor room, convenient to the street, in a house from the Victorian era that was in serious need of repair and paint too, and she separated herself from Prok and strolled right in through the unlocked door without turning around to invite us in or even to see if we were still there.

The room itself was a shambles, but that’s about all I remember of it. Except that it had a high ceiling and a big, walk-in closet that had once been an anteroom of some sort and was now separated from the bedsit by a finger-greased quilt stretched across the doorway on a wire. Ginger’s dresses — a dozen or more, smelling of her underarms and the cologne she used to mask the smell of her tricks, one from the other — hung on wire hangers in the forefront of the closet, while her shoes and undergarments were scattered underfoot. “Here it is,” she said in a high, fluting voice that could have belonged to a woman half her size, to a child, and she held out her hand, palm up, to receive the dollar Prok had promised.

“Swell,” Prok said, reverting to the vernacular. “Just grand.” He’d swept back the quilt to inspect the arrangements and the grin he gave her was almost ghoulish — the light was bad, yellowed and corrupt, issuing from a lamp at the bedside over which Ginger had laid a saffron scarf for effect, and it made his whole face seem to sag under the weight of his satisfaction. I glanced at Corcoran. He looked like a ghoul too. I wondered what my own face looked like. “This is just the ticket,” Prok said, laying the dollar bill across Ginger’s palm while we looked on as if we’d never seen money exchanged before, “but I wonder if you could do me a favor, Ginger? Just a tiny little one?”

She’d turned her back to secrete the money somewhere on her person, and now she swung back round suspiciously. “Depends what it is.”

“Would you mind if I”—Prok crossed the room and lifted the scarf from the lamp—“just removed this for the evening? Unless you’re really stuck on it—”

A slow smile crept over her face. “Yeah,” she said, “yeah, sure. You’re the doctor.”

When she’d gone off in search of her first trick (and I don’t know if I’ve explained this previously, but “trick” was the term prostitutes used then to describe their johns, and, of course, it’s still in current usage, though in those days only our lower-level subjects would have been conversant with it), we did what we could to make the closet comfortable, shifting some of Ginger’s underthings from the floor and moving the room’s only chair into the closet with us. We agreed to take shifts in the chair, so as to relieve the tedium of standing — this was going to be a long night, and we couldn’t afford to give ourselves away by any stretching or cracking of joints, let alone the fatal cough or sneeze. We talked in whispers now, all three of us keyed up with anticipation. What was it like? Like the juvenile thrill of hide-and-seek, I suppose, only with the delicious adult taint of the verboten layered over it. Living sex. We were about to witness living sex.

It didn’t take long. There was the sound of footsteps on the porch, a low murmur of voices, then the click of the doorknob, and the three of us froze in place. The way Prok had arranged the quilt — and we’d all examined it from the outside to make sure we were completely hidden — gave us two points of access. Corcoran was at one end of the closet, peeping through the slit there, and Prok and I at the other. Prok was in the chair, perched at the very edge of it, as motionless as a fakir on a bed of nails, and I was hovering over him, so close we were practically conjoined. Movement, voices. I felt him tense. I didn’t dare breathe. From where we were stationed, we had a view of the now brightly lit bed, but we couldn’t see the door or what was happening there as Ginger and her john apparently embraced, clothes rustling, the allision of their shoes on the floorboards, and then the sudden startling basso of the man’s voice. “Shit, is this it?” he said, and the voice thrilled me, resonating from the cerebral cortex that registered it all the way down to the soles of my feet. “Well, shit,” he said again, movement now, and there they were — there he was — not five feet from us. I’d like to report that the man was some sort of bruiser, a tattooed sailor stranded ashore, a specimen, but that wasn’t the case. He was slight of build, average height, average in every way, with skin that seemed granulated under the harsh accounting of the light. Ginger was there, looming, the meat of her rump, her breasts. “You going to blow me,” he said, “or what?”

“Anything you want, honey,” she said, bending to run her hand up the crotch of his pants. “You’re the doctor.”

She wasn’t wearing underpants — stockings, yes, supported by black garters at the swollen midpoint of her thighs — and she was reluctant to fully undress, though that was what we wanted, as Prok had made clear beforehand. (From her point of view, removing her dress and brassiere was both a bother and a waste of time, an impediment to moving her johns in an efficient conga line in and out of the room, but from ours it was essential, if we were to observe the way the female corpus responds to sexual stimulation.) The man — the trick, the john — let her undo his fly while she was still fully dressed, and he massaged her scalp, squeezed her head as if it were a bowling ball he was about to pluck up and fling down the alley, as she fellated him. Her lips shone with the viscous fluid released by the Cowper’s glands by way of lubrication, and she took the whole thing into her mouth — and this was amazing — his entire phallus, right down to the root, as if she were a sword-swallower performing at the carnival. We were later to discover, incidentally, that among the many physiological modifications occurring during sexual activity, suspension of the gag reflex occurs in a high percentage of both women and men, thus demonstrating the adaptive role of the oral component in sexual response. But all that aside, can I tell you how amazed I was? How — unprofessionally — titillated?

He pulled away from her before he reached orgasm, and only then did he begin to tug down his trousers. “On the bed, sister,” he told her, “because if you think you’re getting off that easy, you’re nuts. I paid for a fuck, didn’t I?”

Ginger stretched out on the bed in compliance, hiking her skirts to display her nakedness, but then she seemed to remember her mission — we were in the closet, her auxiliary johns, and we’d paid for our fuck too — and she sat up again, took his penis in her hand and caressed it a moment, then pulled the dress up over her head and reached behind her to release the snaps of the brassiere and let her breasts fall free. Immediately he was on her, stimulating her nipples both with his fingers and tongue even as she guided him into her, but then, suddenly, he stopped in mid-thrust. “The light,” he said. “What gives with the fucking light? Don’t you know nothing about romance, sweetheart?”

She did. Or at least apparently she did. Because until the moment he pulled out of her and snatched for the light, she’d been moaning and singing out to him as if there were no man better in the world and no moment richer than this. “Leave it on, honey,” she said. A theatrical pause, one finger stuck in the corner of her mouth. “I want to see every inch of you.”

12

The first thing I did when we got back to Bloomington three days later was go straight to Iris. It was past two in the morning, I was dirty, exhausted, hungry — famished, actually, since we hadn’t stopped to eat — and I could still feel the throb of the Buick’s engine like a permanent dislocation in the back of my skull. I’d personally recorded eight histories, including Gerald’s and Ginger’s, and I’d watched from the closet with Prok and Corcoran as Ginger entertained sixteen different men over the course of the three nights we spent in her company. Surprisingly, there really wasn’t all that much variety, and while I admit to being in a state of permanent sexual excitation throughout the entire time we were there, the novelty did tend to wear off after a while. The men were hirsute, glabrous, tall, short, fat, thin, they wore long johns, boxer shorts, sports coats and flannel shirts, galoshes, boots, tennis shoes. They had moles, birthmarks, tattoos, they were circumcised and uncircumcised, their penises angled to the left or the right or straight up, and they folded their clothes neatly atop the bureau or threw them on the floor in a twisted heap. As for the sex, it was entirely conventional, beginning with a brief period of fellatio in about half the cases and a certain degree of fumbling, licking and squeezing in the others, followed by penetration, the pumping of the naked white buttocks that were variously flaccid or tight with the strain of the gluteal muscles, Ginger’s increasingly theatrical simulation of orgasmic ecstasy, and then the decline and fall and the absolute lack of interest in the female’s nudity, her exposed genitalia or even her face and eyes as the clothes were silently gathered up and hurriedly pulled back on and the door swung open and shut again.

But I went to Iris. Went directly up the walk from the backseat of Prok’s car and into the apartment, which was utterly still and dark now but for the light leaching in from the streetlamp and the moon that hung over the town with all its symbolic heft. I went straight into the bedroom. She was asleep. Bundled in the blankets against the cold, her hair splayed out on the pillow, one eye winking open as I switched on the light beside the bed and the clock glowing and no sound anywhere in the bottomless cavern of the night. I was stripping off my clothes, jacket, shirt, trousers, and the light was on. I wanted her to see me, wanted her to admire me and the souvenir I’d held on to for her through three grueling days in a whore’s closet in Indianapolis. “John?” she murmured. “John? What time is it?”

There was the smell of her, a smell I can’t describe, her own personal fragrance that was like no other, a compound of body heat, the emollients she used on her face and hands, the traces of her shampoo and her perfume and the natural oils of her scalp. “Shhhh,” I said, and I waited for her to acknowledge me, to see what I’d brought her, and yes, I know that our published research has shown that the majority of females are unaffected by a display of the erect phallus and that a portion are even offended by it, but it didn’t matter a whit that night. I was stimulated to the point of bursting and I wanted her to see that, to know it and feel it. “Shhhh,” I repeated, and I threw back the covers, all that warmth, the sight of her naked feet and ankles, her face turned to me now and her arms spreading wide in invitation. I slipped between the covers and lifted her nightgown and we never did shut the light off, not till morning.

One night in a thousand nights, in five thousand nights, a man and his wife — a sex researcher and his wife — gratifying each other’s needs. It was the most ordinary thing in the world — or no, it was celebratory, celebratory still because we had the license of our own apartment and no John Jr. to worry over or anything else. We had intercourse six or seven times a week. We experimented with extended foreplay, with teasing, strip poker, with all the coital positions we could imagine. And all the while the project went forward, gained momentum, and Corcoran and I became ever more deeply involved — as friends, as colleagues — even as we jockeyed for position with Prok.

Corcoran offered me a ride home after work one evening, and we wound up stopping off at a tavern for a drink. I thought of calling Iris, to tell her I’d be late, but there was no need really — the hours were never regular when you worked for Prok, and there was no telling when I’d be home on a given evening, but it was rarely earlier than seven. The tavern was the same student hangout I frequented senior year, the place where I’d sat breathless and palpitating with Laura Feeney and her friends in the wake of Prok’s arresting slide show. I remember smiling at the memory. It had seemed like a hundred years ago — and it was, in terms of what I’d learned and experienced since. Corcoran laid a bill on the bar and asked me what was so amusing.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s this place, I guess. I used to come here as a student.”

At that moment, both of us, as if we were being manipulated by a force beyond our control, turned to watch a coed in a pair of slacks saunter by on the arm of a boy who couldn’t have been more than eighteen. “What a waste,” Corcoran said.

I was grinning. “Oh, yeah,” I said, “yeah. A real waste.”

He was staring off into the distance now, idly tapping a knuckle on the bartop. “I could relate to her,” he said. “Couldn’t you?”

I said that I could, and then the bartender appeared and we both ordered martinis, up, with a twist, though I didn’t really care all that much for gin — Corcoran ordered first, that was all, and he made it sound good, so I said, “Second that.”

What did we talk about that night through three martinis and a kind of delirium that made my head feel as if it were a pan full of sloshing water? Sex, certainly. The project. Prok. The immediate future, as in our next trip, scheduled for two days later. At some point, there was a pause, and he leaned forward to light a cigarette. “How do you feel about that, the trips, I mean?” he said, shaking out the match. “Is it — I don’t know — difficult at all? With Iris?”

I looked out over the room a moment, caught the gaze of the coed we’d tracked earlier, and immediately dropped my eyes. “Well, yes, sure.” The third martini had lost its chill. The roof of my mouth felt as numb as if I’d been given an anesthetic at the dentist’s — gin, I didn’t like gin, and I didn’t know why I was drinking it. “But it’s part of the job. She understands that. We both do.” I lifted the thin-stemmed glass to my lips, conscious all at once of its fragility. “But what about you? You don’t, well — what about your wife?”

Corcoran turned a bland face to me. There were golden highlights in his hair. He gave an elaborate shrug that began in his upper arms, migrated to his shoulders and finally to his neck and the rotating ball of his head. “It’s hard, but Violet’s got to keep the kids in school till June — we couldn’t very well uproot them. And when I do manage to see her — you remember I drove up there weekend before last? — when we do get together, believe me, the sex is terrific, red-hot, like you wouldn’t believe.”

I didn’t know what to say. To this point I’d laid eyes on Violet Corcoran just once, when she’d come to town on the bus one weekend to get her bearings and help motivate her husband to find a suitable place for the long term. She was attractive, certainly — of Italian descent, with skin the color of olive oil, very dark eyes and a mouth that turned up in a natural pout, even at rest — but she was nothing compared to Iris. Maybe I was prejudiced — of course I was — but to my mind Iris was a true natural beauty and Violet Corcoran wasn’t in that category at all. I tried to picture her with her clothes off, picture her in bed with Corcoran, but the image flickered and vanished before I could get hold of it. Finally I said something like, “I guess there are some advantages, then, hmm?” And tried for a complicitous smile.

There was traffic in and out of the bar, the high whinny of a laugh, the squeak and shuffle of men’s shoes. The jukebox was playing something I didn’t recognize. Corcoran squinted against the smoke rising from his cigarette, and I couldn’t help thinking he should be the one to give Prok his lessons in savoir faire. “Yeah,” he said finally, “but there are other advantages too, if you know what I mean.”

“No,” I said, “what?”

He drew at the cigarette, exhaled, set it down carefully in the corner of the ashtray and picked up a hard-boiled egg, which he began delicately tapping against the surface of the bar. I watched him for a moment as he peeled back the shell and the membrane beneath it, salted the slick white surface and took the entire thing into his mouth. “You know, batching it,” he said, chewing around his words. “Opportunities arise. Not that they wouldn’t if I were back home in South Bend — and you know I never let convention stand in my way — but it’s just that it’s, well, easier if you’re off on your own. Less complicated, you know?”

I thought about that a moment, thought about him and Iris at the musicale, thick as thieves. I had nothing to add.

“But you,” he said, turning to me, his face as bland and ineluctably handsome as any movie star’s, “don’t you … get out a bit yourself?”

As I’ve said, I was past the stage of reddening — that sort of emotional report card was strictly for adolescents — but I did feel my heart pound out of synchronization for just a moment even as the lie flew to my lips. “No,” I said, thinking of that dark groping encounter in the hallway of my own apartment, “no, not really.”

Then there came a night when I did get home early — just past six — and Iris wasn’t there. I’d been in the biology library all afternoon, sequestered in a back corner working on a series of tables (Accumulative Incidence: Pre-Adolescent Orgasm From Any Source, By Educational Level; Active Incidence and Percentage of Outlet: Petting to Orgasm, By Decade of Birth) in support of our grant proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation, my head down, minding my own business, while Elster stalked back and forth and glared at me from his desk as if the scratch of my pencil or the setting down of my ruler and T square were exploding the bibliographical calm of the place. I tried my best to ignore him, but whenever he came into my range of vision with an armload of papers or a cart of books, I couldn’t help wondering why he hadn’t been called up to fight our enemies in Europe, Africa or the Pacific. But then I studied him for a moment when he was busy at his desk — the slack posture, fleshless limbs, the glowing bald spot on the crown of his head that was like the stamp of early senescence — and came up with the answer to my own question: he was IV-F, IV-F without a doubt.

And what was I doing in the library in the first place? Simple. Prok had evicted me for the afternoon so that he and Corcoran could conduct simultaneous interviews of a cohort of southern Indiana psychologists who were attending a conference on campus. I’d interviewed two of them already that morning and early afternoon, and now Prok was putting Corcoran to the test, checking Corcoran’s position sheet against his own the minute the subject had left. And so I got home early, and Iris wasn’t there.

I saw that she’d made a casserole — tuna and macaroni, with layers of American cheese spread atop it — and left the morning’s dishes to dry in the rack, and that was fine, nothing out of the ordinary there, but where could she be? Had she forgotten something at the store, some essential ingredient — coffee, margarine, a cake mix for dessert? Perhaps she’d just stepped out for a minute to go round the corner to the grocer’s. Or maybe it was some sort of emergency. Maybe she’d cut herself or fallen — or it might have been one of the neighbors. I thought of the old lady upstairs who’d been the special friend of Mrs. Lorber’s sister. Mrs. Valentine. She was so frail — so winnowed and reduced — that she could have gone at any moment and no one would have been surprised. But it wasn’t anything to concern myself over. If something had happened, there was nothing I could do about it. I would hear in due time, so why worry? The casserole was in the oven, the bourbon on the shelf. I poured myself a drink and went to the radio to see what was on.

I was on my third drink and the top layer of the casserole had developed a color and texture I’d never before seen in a baked dish, not that I’m much of a cook, when I began to feel concerned (about Iris, that is; for all I cared the casserole could find its way into the trashcan and we’d make do with sandwiches and three fingers of bourbon). I’d listened to Vic and Sade, then a program of war news and Kate Smith singing “God Bless America,” and now I began to pace round the room and peek out through the curtains every time I thought I heard someone coming. Could she have gone to the office to surprise me? Was I supposed to have met her somewhere? Did we have concert tickets for the student-faculty orchestra? Were we dining out? But no, there was the casserole, irrefutable evidence to the contrary. I decided to go back to campus, to the office, just to check if she was there, to see if I’d somehow managed to get my signals crossed, and so I shrugged into my coat and hat and started out the door.

The light had faded from the sky and the streets were pretty well deserted. I had the bourbon to fuel me, and, as I say, I kept myself in tiptop shape, so I was able to make the ten blocks to campus in what must have been record time, though I wasn’t running or even jogging, but moving along expeditiously for all that. I climbed the familiar steps of Biology Hall, went in through the unlocked door and mounted the stairs. I found the office dark, the building silent. Perhaps I rattled the knob of the office door a time or two — I could have used my key, but what was the sense? — and then turned and went back down the stairs. I thought about another drink, about stopping somewhere, but I didn’t.

All the way back, I kept thinking how odd this was, how unlike Iris. She was taking classes still, of course — this was her last semester — and that involved research papers, library work and such, but she’d always taken care of that sort of thing during the day so we could be together at night. I set a brisk pace on the way back, because I was concerned now, frustrated in the way I got on the rare occasions when I misplaced something and wound up endlessly retracing my steps, running round in circles till I either found it or gave up on it altogether. My pen, for instance. I had a sleek silver Parker pen Iris had given me for my birthday, and one afternoon after lunch I couldn’t seem to find it. Up and down from my desk I went, back and forth to the filing cabinets, the bookshelves, the anteroom, till Prok lifted his head from his work and asked in an irritated voice what exactly I thought I was doing. I told him, and he gave me a long wondering frown before going back to his papers, but I was up and down all afternoon until finally, on my sixth or seventh trip, I found the pen in the men’s washroom, on the metal tray above the sink, where I’d scrawled a note to myself after washing up. It was a bit neurotic, I suppose, but when I felt that things were out of my control, that something was wrong, that I’d fouled up somehow, I had difficulty breathing and I’m sure my blood pressure shot up. Jittery. I felt jittery, as if I’d consumed one too many cups of coffee. That was how I felt now, coming up the final block in the dark, when I should have been home with my wife and a casserole.

A car door slammed up ahead, I saw the red flash of the taillights like cigarette burns in the dark garment of the night, and the car — it was light-colored — passed under the streetlight and disappeared at the far end of the block. Was there a figure there, a shade against the shade, moving up the walk of one of the houses on our side of the street? It was dark. I couldn’t be sure. Two minutes later, I came through the door and Iris was there, bent over the oven.

“Jesus, Iris,” I said, “where’ve you been? I was, well, I was here and I turned off the casserole—”

She looked flushed, as if she’d been running laps or springing up off the trampoline at the gymnasium, an exercise she loved, incidentally, and I’d watched her at it, the tight focus of her concentration, her arms flapping as if she were about to take wing and her hair rising straight up off her head in defiance of gravity. The casserole was in her two hands, the red pot holders climbing up over the handles. She set it down on the counter and gave me a smile that faded as soon as it bloomed. “That was the right thing to do,” she said. “Because it would have burned.”

I was in the kitchen now, the bead curtains rattling behind me like a swarm of angry insects. “But where were you? I was worried. I, well, I went all the way back to the office, just to see if, you, well, if you were there.”

“I’m sorry, John. I didn’t expect you so early.” She was opening a can of peas, her back to me so I couldn’t read her face, brisk movements, the pot, the flame, and then to the table to set out the plates and cutlery. “Do you want milk with this tonight — or will water do? Or juice?”

“What was it?” I said. “Studying? Didn’t you just have an exam last week?”

She was in motion, brushing by me, the beads rattling, to the table and back. She wasn’t looking at me, her eyes fixed on anything but me — the table, the icebox, the floor. “Studying,” she said, “that’s right. I was studying.”

“Where? At the library? Because I was in the bio library all afternoon, and you should’ve — but you needed the main, right? For what, for Huntley’s class?”

The casserole had gone to the trivet in the center of the table and she’d poured me a glass of milk, staunch and white, the glass standing beside the plate in a still-life representation of the ordinary. She looked harried. Looked unhappy.

“What is it?” I asked. “What’s the matter?”

She held herself right there, the peas in a slotted spoon, the hot pan balanced at the edge of the table. “Oh, John, I’m not good at this. I’m just not.”

This was the fever, this was it, the moment that had my heart pounding. I didn’t say a word.

Two scoops of peas, one on each plate. “You might as well know — I was with Purvis. I–I went to the office, looking for you, to surprise you, and he was just locking up …”

“That was his car? Just now, when I came up the street?”

She nodded.

“Well,” I said. “And so? Did he give you a lift home, did you go out with him for a drink or what?”

“No,” she said, her eyes dodging mine. “Or, yes, he gave me a lift home.”

I shrugged. He’d given her a lift. Case closed.

She was still holding the pot of peas, still hovering over the table. “But I’m not going to lie to you, John, neither one of us is. I’m not that sort of person, and I think you know that.” There was a pause then, and I suppose somewhere in the world ships were passing in the night, freighters foundering, the ice narrowing in the narrow passages. “We — we had a relationship.”

I just stared at her.

“In the office. On the desk.”

“In the office,” I repeated.

“Purvis and I.” Her eyes went cold a moment. “It’s nothing to worry over,” she said, and the pot found its way to the table even as she wiped her trembling hands on the apron at her hips. “You know, John,” she said. “The human animal.”

It was around this time that we began to conduct our first interviews with children, which, as most people will know, served not only to break a long-standing taboo but to lay the foundation for the many studies into childhood sexuality that were to follow. In fact, in trying to reconstruct events, I’m almost certain that our initial foray into the field must have come just after that unnerving scene with Iris — the very next morning — because I remember distinctly how unsettled I was, turning the situation over and over again in my mind as if it were a sharp-edged object I could worry until it was as smooth as fired clay. It was odd. As I sat beside Prok in the front seat of the Buick on our way to the Fillmore School in Indianapolis, listening to him chatter on about infantile sexuality and the preadolescent awakening of desire, I couldn’t help feel that my emotions were on a collision course with my objectivity. I kept telling myself that I was a researcher and that sentiment had no place in the scientific ledger, no quantifiable value at all. It was a negative, a disqualifier, a weakness that had to be conquered. Prok had indoctrinated me well, and I was getting there, almost over the hump, but I kept slipping back. I couldn’t help myself.

“Are you all right?” Prok asked, giving me one of his hooded, searching looks.

I must have been twisting in my seat, jittering a knee, lifting my chin to the flicker of roadside light as if I were on my way to martyrdom, but at least I didn’t have to face Corcoran, not yet anyway — Prok had given him three days off to see to his affairs and attend his daughters’ Easter pageant back in South Bend.

“Milk?” Prok said. “Milk, did you hear me? I said are you all right?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m fine.”

The motor hummed beneath the floorboards. Scenery flitted by. Prok cocked his head and shot me another glance. “Getting enough sleep? Because really, Milk, you look like one of the living dead—”

“No, I — well, not last night, I guess.”

He went off on a mini-lecture about the vital importance to health of the three telling factors — diet, exercise and sleep — and was in the middle of one of his long, artfully congested sentences when he suddenly caught himself. “But, John,” he said. “Are you — do you have something caught in your eye?”

I told him that I was allergic, that was all. “Hay fever,” I said.

He was silent a moment. Then he turned his face to me, his eyes shifting focus briefly and then darting ahead to the road. “A bit early in the season, isn’t it?”

In the end, I hadn’t confronted Iris — how could I? How could I have said anything without looking like a hypocrite? We’d eaten our dinner in silence, listening to the radio. She had a text—Modern British Poetry, my old marked-up copy — spread out on the table beside her plate, and she never lifted her eyes from it, though I didn’t see her turn the page, not once. When we were finished, I tried to get up and clear off the dishes, but she wouldn’t let me. “No, no,” she said, taking the dirty plate from my hand — I’d eaten nothing, the macaroni like sodden cardboard, though I’d chewed as if my jaw would break—“let me do it. You must be tired.”

Her face was bloodless, her hair hanging limp, and I didn’t want to think of what had happened to the curl she spent so much effort on every night and worked so hard to bring to perfection each morning. I was tired. So tired I could barely lift my arms from the table. “Sure,” I said. “Okay.”

I made it as far as the couch and just lay there with one hand laid flat across my forehead while the radio spat and crackled and the water ran in the sink. For a long while I listened to her move about the kitchen, the cabinets opening and closing, the hiss of the water, the clink of glass and crockery, and then I lit a cigarette and studied the ceiling. There was band music from somewhere, a variety show, the Chiquita banana jingle — I must have heard that ten times over. Finally, she came to me. I felt her there, standing over the couch, but I never turned my head. “John,” she said, “John, please,” and I could hear the emotion saturating her voice, the plea for absolution that made me stiffen and harden all the more — mineralizing, I was mineralizing like a stick of wood buried over the eons in the deepest layer of sediment. I said nothing. She made a speech then, tearful, punctuated by sobs — she didn’t mean to, it wasn’t anything, the madness of the moment and somehow she couldn’t resist him, Purvis, because he was so persuasive—but I never moved. After a while she went into the bedroom and shut the door.

Can I tell you now that I felt as if a stake had been driven through my heart? I knew why she’d done what she had — it didn’t take a psychiatrist to figure that out. She’d had one man in her life, just one, and I’d had Mac and Prok and she could only guess whom else. The whole project, the whole regime, demanded that she acquire experience — we looked up to the high raters, didn’t we, no matter how unbiased we tried to appear? I knew where the guilt lay. I knew who was at fault. But if I believed in what I preached, if I believed in my work — and I did, and still do, fervently — then I had no right to say J’accuse.

I went to bed late that night, so late there was the sound of birds stirring in the bushes outside the windows and a slow gray seep of light infiltrating the curtains. She was awake still. I saw her there in the bed and all the sadness of the world came to lodge in my throat, acidic and unforgiving, until I steeled myself and swallowed it down. What I wanted more than anything in that moment was to have her, to throw back the blankets, strip off her nightgown and bury myself in her.

She might have said my name, I don’t know, I don’t remember. But I remember this: we came together without preliminaries, without words, and I drove at her in an ecstasy of release and she responded in kind, fighting me, thrashing at me, furious with the sting of her guilt and the pleasure too, and all the while I was thinking she hadn’t run the tub, hadn’t washed Corcoran out of her, and he was right there with us, grinning like an actor.

Yes, and it felt odd too to be returning to Indianapolis, this time to sit with children from the local elementary school instead of some jaded prostitute and her string of faceless johns, and in the pure efflorescent light of day instead of in the shadows of the night. Prok had arranged the session with the principal and one of the kindergarten teachers, both of whom were friends of the research, and we’d modified the standard procedure to accommodate the children’s level of apprehension. Also, we were careful to get the parents’ consent beforehand — and the parents’ histories, as well — and we conducted the interviews in tandem and with at least one parent present so that there could be no hint of impropriety.

We arrived early, the children still in their classes, the stiff, hacked grass of the athletic field greening round the edges and the sun hanging bright over the playground and its idle swings and seesaws and the rigid superstructure of the monkey bars. The school’s principal — a Mr. McGuiniss, whose comfortingly unremarkable history we’d taken on our last trip during the diurnal hours when Ginger was unavailable — met us at the door and led us into his office. There was a flag, a stuffed owl, the crude, curiously mobile abstract paintings of very small children decorating the walls, and a window that gave onto the playground. “Dr. Kinsey,” McGuiniss said — he was small, bald, his fingertips stained with nicotine—“and Mr. Milk, welcome, and thank you for coming. We have, as you know, several students who’ve volunteered, and their mothers are here as well. Everyone is very excited.”

We began with two sisters, aged seven and five. The principal made his office available to us — he’d already furnished it with a few playthings and picture books to put the children at ease — and the girls’ mother ushered them into the room. She was a tall brunette, not unattractive, with prominent cheekbones and a mass of healthy-looking hair swept up atop her head and held in place with a pair of mother-of-pearl barrettes. I knew her age — twenty-nine — because I’d taken her history myself on our previous visit. (She was monogamous, married eight years, eager to experiment with coital positions and oral-genital contacts, but as yet very much a novice and fighting her husband’s resistance — he was a devout Catholic and typically repressed, and he was the only one of this particular cohort who’d declined to be interviewed himself.)

Prok and I rose to greet her, even as McGuiniss bowed out of the room with a sheaf of papers under one arm. “Mrs. Perrault,” Prok cried, taking her hand and flashing his smile, “so nice of you to come. You know my associate, Mr. Milk, of course. And now”—turning to the girls and giving a formal bow that was calculated to charm them—“who are these beautiful young ladies?”

The girls — Suzy was the younger, Katie the elder — both had their mother’s coloring and her outsized liquid eyes. They gave us prim little smiles, pleased to be the centers of attention, and yet they seemed a bit flustered too, uncertain as to what was expected of them. “I’m Katie,” the seven-year-old said. “And this is my sister.”

“Suzy,” the sister put in, swaying back and forth over the pivot of one foot. “My name’s Suzy.”

“Ah,” Prok said, and he was still bent at the waist, his face at a level with theirs, “so you’re not princesses, then? I thought you were princesses for sure.”

A giggle. More swaying. “No,” the little one said, and they both burst out in laughter.

“And what do you think of having the principal’s office all to ourselves? Pretty special, isn’t it? Well, this is a special afternoon for some very special little girls. I’m Uncle Kinsey, and this”—indicating me, and I smiled as genuinely as I could to show everyone concerned how harmless I was—“is Uncle Milk.”

Both girls gave me a brief examination, their smiles flickering uncertainly and then coming back to life again as Prok went on in his most facetious and whimsical tones: “And what of Mr. Owl — you see Mr. Owl up there? He’s going to play a part too, because the game I’ve thought up for us is a camping game — do your mommy and daddy ever take you girls camping?”

Oh, yes, yes, they did. And where had they gone camping? A look to their mother and back again. “In the woods,” Katie said.

“Good, very good.” Prok had got down on the floor now, and he eased himself into a cross-legged posture, as if he were an Indian chief presiding over a sheaf of tobacco leaves. “All right, girls,” he said, “sit right here with me, that’s right, cross your legs just like this, because we’re going to pretend that we are out in the deep woods sitting round a campfire roasting marshmallows — do you like marshmallows? Yes, good. Very good. Of course you do.” And, magically, from his coat pocket, appeared two white puffs of the very substance.

I should say here that despite what you may have heard to the contrary — and I am aware of some of the more malicious and odious rumors spread by enemies of the project, people who choose to see dirt in everything — that Prok was as delicate, respectful and proper with our juvenile subjects as anyone I could imagine. And we all learned from him and attempted to adopt his methods, though none of us could ever manage to establish the instant rapport with children that Prok was capable of. This was one of his great gifts as an interviewer, and as a personality too. Just as he could sidle up to a urinal at Penn Station and immediately cultivate the trust of a homosexual hustler in search of action or wander the Negro neighborhoods of Gary and Chicago with the authentic argot dropping from his lips, so too could he relate in the most open and innocent way to children. And children’s histories were vital to the research, because while we routinely asked our subjects about their initial sexual awakening, nearly all of them were at least somewhat hazy on the details, and we felt we could correct for the inadequacy of memory in our adult subjects by collecting data directly from children, whose experiences were still vivid and ongoing. That seemed to make sense. And yet, inevitably, there was criticism — we were sullying the children’s minds, leading them astray, that sort of thing. But I can assure you that nothing could have been further from the truth.

On this particular day, as Prok led these two beautiful wide-eyed girls through an imaginary forest and sat with them round a fanciful camp-fire, ever so subtly and gracefully posing his questions, first to Suzy as her sister played in the corner, and then to Katie, I have to admit it was an education for me. The questions were entirely innocent, yet telling: Do you play more often with girls or boys? Do you like boys? But boys are different from girls, aren’t they? Yes? And how is that? How do you know? I sat there in the principal’s chair, clinging to a grin and exchanging the occasional glance with the mother while recording her daughters’ responses, and I felt myself expanding into the possibilities. Children. I’d never really thought much about them one way or another. In fact, they’d always made me nervous and uncertain — I didn’t know how to act around them, didn’t have a clue — and now here was Prok, one of the most eminent men of his generation, a starred scientist, showing me the way. “Just talk to them,” he said. “Just talk and listen.”

All this sex, and what was it for? For this. For children. It came to me as a revelation that afternoon, my brain struggling with the insupportable image of Iris spread out naked on my desk and Corcoran rising above her even as the piping immature voices gave rise to opinions and qualified expectations. They trooped through the office, one child after another, shy, brassy, eager, reticent, and I found myself groping toward the beginnings of perspective. Those organs we’d so diligently focused on with Ginger and her clients, the acts, the consummation, the reproductive tract—it came to this, to children. And John Jr. wouldn’t be born for another five years yet.

We got back to Bloomington late on the third night, after having overstayed ourselves in order to record a number of serendipitous interviews that came our way at the last minute — the school janitor and his brother, who ran the filling station, and a local minister, his wife and their seventeen-year-old daughter. I came in the door and there was Iris, in her kimono, waiting up for me over her poetry text. “But you didn’t have to wait up,” I said, and she came to me, her eyes full, and held me, rocking gently with me there in the middle of the living room. “Don’t you have class tomorrow?”

“Hush,” she said, “hush,” and then we went to bed, and I was made of wood. We had intercourse though, almost as soon as I could get my clothes off, and she might have broken down during the process — might have cried, might have buried her face in my chest and sobbed for all I know — but I was made of wood and I can’t really say for certain. She was gone before I woke in the morning, and then I was at the office in Biology Hall, surrounded by galls and running a slow, lingering hand over the surface of my desk as if I’d never seen anything like it before.

13

There was the sound of footsteps clattering in the stairwell, the faint reverberant echo of voices, growing louder now, coming closer, and my first thought was of Prok, returning from his early class with students in tow. By this time I’d recovered myself and I was settled in at my desk, organizing the material we’d collected at the Fillmore School and sinking numbly into the familiar grip of routine. I’d sharpened all the pencils, squared away the papers on the desk. A mug of black coffee stood at my elbow, giving off steam. Outside, beyond the windows, a mild drizzle softened the lines of Maxwell Hall, across the way.

But that was Prok’s voice, no doubt about it, a sort of lucid mumble rising above the ambient sounds, and there was another voice attached to it, hearty and unflappable, a voice I couldn’t help but recognize, and a moment later, there they were, Prok and Corcoran, ducking through the door. “Milk, good morning,” Prok sang out, “sleep well?”

“Morning, John,” Corcoran put in. He stood there hovering over Prok’s desk, no more than ten feet from me, arms akimbo, exuding nonchalance — nothing wrong here, not a thing in the world. “I tell you, it’s good to be back — the drive was killing, absolutely killing. And how was your trip?”

For the moment, I was at a loss for words. I suppose I’d thought of nothing really over the course of the past four days but Corcoran and what I would say to him, what he would say to me, how I’d face up to him and what it would mean for all of us — for the present and the future too. “We, well,” I faltered. “I’m sure Prok—” I gestured vaguely, and then let my hand drop, too full of anguish to go on.

Prok was already seated at his desk. His head was down, and he was shuffling through his papers. “Splendid,” he said. “Couldn’t have been better. We got some fourteen juvenile histories, very interesting, very significant, and it just confirms in me the resolve to get more. Isn’t that right, Milk?”

“Yes,” I said. “It was, uh, a real experience.”

Corcoran was watching me closely. “Oh?” he said. “How so?”

Prok’s head rose as he glanced up to monitor my answer.

“I don’t know,” I said, reaching for the coffee cup to cover myself. “It was — I guess you’d have to call it an awakening. Of sorts.”

Corcoran was smiling, always smiling. He was so at ease I could have killed him, could have leapt up from the desk and strangled him right there in the middle of the linoleum floor and never thought twice about it. I think he was about to press it further, ask for some clarification — because this was interesting, it was. He might have been about to say, What do you mean? Or turn it into a joke: But how long were you asleep, then?

Prok got there first. “Good,” he said. “Well put. I felt it myself, and this is a new avenue — one we have to tread a whole lot more in future, but cautiously of course.” There was a silence as we all three contemplated just what that caution entailed, and then Prok, in his briskest voice, said, “I’m going to need you to take some dictation, Milk — follow-up letters, and not just to the parents, but to the children as well.” He glanced up sharply, as if I were about to demur. “Because, you understand, we have to be absolutely aboveboard here, and the parents will see the letters — follow-up, that is, and I can’t stress how vital this is. And should be. My feeling is that if a volunteer goes out of his way to be a friend of the research, no matter how young or old, we are in that person’s debt and should acknowledge it at the very first opportunity.”

I should point out that these were still the early days of the Institute for Sex Research and we didn’t yet have a full-time secretary or even adequate office space, though with the arrival of Corcoran, Prok had convinced the administration to incorporate the classroom next door into what was now a little suite of offices. A door had been carved out of a wall of the original office, giving onto this new space, and Corcoran’s desk was located in there, as well as the overflow from our files and the ever-increasing library of material in the field that Prok had begun to amass (including the erotica collection so much has been made of recently). But truly, from humble beginnings …

In any case, I mention it only because of what came next — just to locate you in situ — so you can appreciate where all three of us were in relation to one another. The pleasantries were over, and Prok was the last to tolerate any procrastination — work was what he wanted and work was what we were there for — and yet still Corcoran hadn’t moved. “John,” he said, dropping his voice, “listen, I wonder if you and I could have a few words, later, after work, I mean. We must talk.”

Prok lifted an eyebrow, shot us both a look. “That would be splendid, Corcoran,” he said, “but I assure you I’ll be more than happy to fill you in on the details of what we’ve learned, and what we hope to learn. Fascinating, really.”

Corcoran’s smile was fading. “No, it was another matter, Prok.”

“Oh?”

For all my will power, I felt the color rising to my face. I stared into the coffee mug.

“A private matter,” Corcoran said.

Prok’s eyebrow lifted a degree higher. “Oh?”

“It’s nothing, really. Just — well, just something between colleagues, isn’t that right, John?”

What could I say? I’d been shot through the shoulder blades, brought down at a gallop on the high plains, hooves kicking futilely in the air. I felt the shaft of the arrow emerging under my breastbone, the hot sharp little tip of the skewer. “Yeah,” I said. “Or, yes, I mean. Yes, that’s right.”

I don’t suppose it will come as a surprise if I told you I had trouble concentrating on my work that day. As much as I tried to fight them down, I was prey to my emotions — stupidly, I know. Falsely. Anachronistically. I kept telling myself I was a sexologist, that I had a career and a future and a new outlook altogether, that I was liberated from all those petty, Judeo-Christian constraints that had done such damage over the centuries, but it was no good. I was hurt. I was jealous. I presented my ordinary face to Prok and, through the doorway and across the expanse of the inner room, to Corcoran, but I was seething inside, burning, violent and deranged with the gall of my own inadequacy and failure — my own sins—and I kept seeing the stooped demeaning figure of the cuckold in the commedia dell’arte no matter how hard I tried to dismiss it. I stared at Corcoran when he wasn’t looking. I studied the way he scratched at his chin or tapped the pencil idly on the surface of the blotting pad as if he were knocking out the drumbeat to some private rhapsody. Kill him! a voice screamed in my head. Get up now and kill him!

Then we were locking up, the three of us gathered there at the front door of the office while Prok turned the key and we chatted, in a valedictory way, about the business of sex. Prok had his umbrella with him, and his galoshes, but no overcoat — it was too mild and he was the sort who could endure anything, in any case — and he made some comment about the two of us, Corcoran and I, needing to better attune ourselves to the weather as neither of us had any protection at all, save for sports coat and tie, and then he bade us good night and headed off down the hall. “Well,” Corcoran breathed, hesitating, “shall we — do you want to take the car?”

I just nodded and we walked to his car in silence. As soon as we’d slammed the doors, Corcoran turned over the engine and the radio came to life, blaring out a popular dance tune, and it was that, as much as anything, that made my anger rush to the surface — I had to hold tight to the doorframe to keep from doing something I might have regretted for the rest of my professional career.

Corcoran had put the car in gear and we were moving slowly down the street, but I was so wrought up I barely registered the movement. After a moment, he said, “What about the tavern? How’s a drink sound? It’s on me.”

There was a clarinet solo in that tune — the band was famous for its clarinetist — and we both listened as the instrument went slipping and eliding through its paces. “I never realized how much I hate the clarinet,” I said, “not till now, anyway.”

Corcoran reached out a cuff-linked wrist to flick off the radio. He seemed to decide something then, swinging the wheel hard to the right to nose the car in at the curb. “Listen,” he said, “John, I hope you’re not going to take this the wrong way, because it can get awkward for all of us, and there’s no reason—”

Was I glaring at him? I don’t know. All of a sudden, and this was the foremost thing in my mind, grown there full-blown like an instantaneous cancer, I was overcome with a fear of embarrassing myself, of showing my hand — of being petty, hidebound, of being the cuckold. “No,” I said, turning away from him, and I didn’t know what proposition or argument I was dismissing.

“It doesn’t mean anything. Not a thing. Not between us.” He was turned to me, studying me in profile, and I could feel him there, feel the heat of his breath against the carved wooden mask of my face. “Look, before I did anything I consulted Prok—”

At first I thought I hadn’t heard him right — Prok? What did Prok have to do with this? — and then the single curt syllable began to reverberate in my head like a pinball ringing up the score. Maybe my ears reddened. Still I didn’t turn to him, but just sat there staring out the window, fighting for control.

“Well, of course I did. You don’t think I would just — hey, I might have an overactive libido, I admit to it, but I wouldn’t do a thing without Prok’s go-ahead, not anymore, not now, not with the situation out there in the world like it is. That’d be nuts, that’d be suicide.”

Prok. He’d consulted Prok — Prok, but not me. As if — but I couldn’t finish the thought, because Prok had known all along, Prok had approved, given him the green light and his blessing too, all for one and one for all. And I’d sat there stolidly through the morning while Prok loomed over me dictating letters, my fingers hammering away at the keys of the typewriter as if I were some obsequious little clerk in a Dickens novel. Letter after letter, and never a word about Iris or me. First there were the letters to the parents, then to the principal, the superintendent, the minister and the gas station attendant, and finally, the children.

Dear Suzy: Uncle Milk and I wanted you to have a very special letter all your own that the mailman will bring to the box just for you. We will write a special letter to your sister, Katie, too, and the mailman will bring it just for her so that she can have one as well. What we want to say, most of all, is how much we enjoyed meeting such a sweet and intelligent girl as yourself and how proud you should be for helping us with our science. Yours Truly, Uncle Kinsey

“And I think you know how he feels when it comes to the inner circle — we have no secrets, we’re bonded, each of us, together. John, listen, he encouraged me — for your good and mine. And Iris’s, don’t forget Iris.”

I hadn’t forgotten her, not for an instant.

Corcoran’s face hung there in the car as if dissociated from his body, the last light of the day laminating his features at the far blurring edge of my peripheral vision, and still I was staring straight ahead. I wouldn’t look at him. I couldn’t. There was a picket fence two doors up, fresh white paint peerless against the unfolding copper-green leaves of the climbing roses that were just then starting to take hold of it. “And there’s Violet, don’t forget Violet. She’s a very passionate woman, John, believe me. And she’ll be here sooner than you know.”

In my hurt — in my hurt and my refusal to acknowledge it to Corcoran, Prok or Iris or anyone else — I went to Mac. I telephoned beforehand to let her know I was coming — it was Saturday morning, Iris behind the cash register at the five-and-dime, Prok lecturing his biology students on gametes and zygotes or the sex life of the fruit fly or I don’t know what, nest robbers, parasitic wasps, the cowbird and the cuckoo — and she was waiting for me at the door in a light sweater and her walking shorts. “I thought you might want to go for a walk,” she said, her eyes searching mine.

I gave her nothing back, just nodded, and we went off empty-handed down the street and through the familiar fields and into the woods beyond. It was coming on to high spring in southern Indiana, the wet black furrows spread open under the sun, wildflowers in the clearings, a smell of mud and ferment under the trees, birds everywhere. And gnats. We swatted them as we moved along, ducking away from one swarm only to walk headlong into another. It was warm where the sun hit us, cool, even a little chilly, in the shade. Mac went out of her way to make small talk — if Prok knew, then she knew — and I give her credit for that, trying to defuse the situation in the way Corcoran had, nothing amiss here, life as usual, the study of sex and the free and unencumbered practice of it inextricably linked, and where were the grounds for complaint? We found a spot in one of the clearings where the sun invested a spike of weather-worn rock with its heat, and made ourselves comfortable.

For a long while I just sat there, my back against the rock, and let Mac do the talking. She wasn’t saying much, nothing of substance, that is, and I knew what she was doing (“Isn’t that a bluebird over there, on that branch just above the stump, right there, see? They’re getting rare, aren’t they, ever since the starlings invaded, anyway, but don’t you love the smell of the outdoors, especially this time of year? I do. I can’t get enough of it. When I was a girl, oh, no older than eight or nine — have I ever told you this?”) but I didn’t care, it was conversation as anodyne, and I let it wash over me. Gratefully. I don’t know how long this went on — ten minutes, twenty — but eventually she fell silent. I leaned back, closed my eyes and let the sun probe my face. I wanted her, and we’d come here to engage in sex, but I was in no hurry — or maybe I was fooling myself, maybe I didn’t want her at all.

Her voice seemed to come to me out of nowhere, out of some place in my head, and my eyelids, blue-veined, pulsing with the sleepy drift of floating bodies, snapped open. “John,” she was saying, “John, listen, I know how you feel. I do. But you can’t let it get to you, because that way of thinking — jealousy, recrimination, whatever you want to call it — is wrong. And it’s destructive, John. It is.”

She closed her hand over mine. The light was stark, flaming all around her as if she were on the apron of a stage, her pupils shrunk to pinpoints, a splay of lines radiating out from the corners of her eyes as if the skin there had been fractured or worked with a sharp tool — she was old, getting old, and the visible signs of it, the apprehension of it, made something shift inside me. “I’ll tell you,” she said, dropping her voice, “it wasn’t easy for me in the beginning. You’re not the first, you know. There was Ralph Voris — has Prok ever mentioned him?”

“Yes.”

“And there were graduate students too, casual affairs — things with women.”

I said nothing, but I may have flushed, thinking of the day I’d broken the code and pulled his file. And hers.

“He’s highly sexed, Prok, and to be away so often, for so long — you don’t know. It was before your time, ten years ago and more. He went to Mexico for three months, collecting galls with three healthy young men — and he was a healthy young man himself. Was I hurt? Did I complain? Did I resent being all but abandoned? Do I resent it now?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Do you?”

She removed her hand, lifted both arms to pat her hair in place, and then she smoothed down her blouse and shifted position in the dry leaves at the base of the rock. “No,” she said, “I don’t think so. Not anymore. You see,” and she moved in closer to me, so that I could feel the warmth of her hip sliding in against mine, “I love him, love him more than anybody else in the world, and that’s all that matters.”

The moment hung there between us, and Prok was proportional to it, each of us trying to fit him in and work around him at the same time. Then I leaned forward and kissed her and she brought both her hands to my chest and slipped them inside my shirt and ran them down the long muscles at my sides. We breathed in unison, and then she released me. “And I believe in him,” she said, “believe in his work and everything he does — and so do you. I know you do.”

That evening, when I went to pick up Iris at work, she wasn’t there. I was right on time — six o’clock on the dot — and I’d got good at that, adopting the model of Prok’s punctuality along with so many other things. The girl behind the counter said that Iris had left early, half an hour before, to make some urgent appointment—“Maybe with the doctor,” the girl offered after studying the look on my face. “Yeah, I think she said the doctor,” she added, and what did it matter if no doctor in the whole state of Indiana was keeping hours at six o’clock on a Saturday evening?

I went home then, to see if I’d somehow missed her, and I sat there brooding till seven. When the bell in the church tower two blocks over struck the hour I pushed myself up and walked the ten blocks to the office, and this time I used my key in the door. I hit the light switch and the shadows fled into the corners. It was very still. I stood there a moment in the doorway, and then I couldn’t help but go to my desk and examine it — I bent down and sniffed it, actually sniffed the surface of my own desk as if I could somehow detect the residue of vaginal lubricants there, as if I were a bloodhound, as if I were some petty and heartbroken cuckolded fool stooping so low as to drop off the chart of humiliation, even — and I examined Corcoran’s desk too, shuffling through his things, probing into his drawers, looking for something, anything, that would give me a clue as to who he really was and what he might want. And how did I feel then, standing there in the lamp-lit office rifling my colleague’s desk while the sky closed down over the campus and couples were strolling out hand-in-hand to the dance, the pictures, dinner? Devastated. Devastated, certainly, but it was worse than that: I felt as if I’d somehow failed Iris, as if I were the one at fault. More than anything, and I hate even to remember it, I felt inadequate.

Our research would show that some twenty-six percent of women and fifty percent of men would engage in extramarital intercourse — I myself drew up the accumulative incidence curve on page 417 of the female volume — and we would conclude, in Prok’s words, that “Extramarital coitus had attracted some of the participants because of the variety of experience it afforded them with new and sometimes superior sexual partners.” Exactly. And yet the female volume was still a decade in the future — we’d only begun to accumulate the data at this point — and so my attitude was purely intuitive. I’d been with Mac. I could still smell her on my fingertips. But that didn’t matter a whit, not now — all that mattered now was Iris, Iris and Corcoran.

I went back home — eight o’clock and no sign of her — and I poured a drink and brooded some more. When eight-thirty came and she still hadn’t appeared or even called, I copied out a poem, or a fragment of a poem, from her anthology, and left it on her pillow in the bedroom, then took the long walk to Corcoran’s to see if his car was parked out front, if his windows were lit, if there was movement there, a silhouette on the shade, anything. The night had grown cold and I watched it stream from my mouth as I walked, my shoulders tense, all my emotions — rage, despair, scorn, vengefulness — wadded up like a bolus in the pit of my stomach. There was no yellow convertible drawn up to the curb outside Corcoran’s apartment, and there was no sign of life inside. I stood there for two hours and more, then I turned away and went home, defeated.

Need I say that Iris wasn’t there? The poem was where I’d left it, though, untouched, and it might have remained there all night and into the next day, for all I knew. I had no idea when she came home that night or if she came home at all because I bundled up some things in a suitcase — a change of clothes, toiletry articles, bedding — and dragged myself back to the office to sleep on the floor while the abandoned building, one of the oldest on campus, ticked and settled round me in a state of decline that couldn’t help recalling my own. I wasn’t yet twenty-four and already my life was over. I should have enlisted, I told myself. Should have gone to fight and kill and be killed, because anything was better than this.

The poem, incidentally, was from Hardy, bile-bitter and as grim as it gets. I suppose now it looks a bit sophomoric — the sentiments expressed, the whole gesture — but then it seemed to strike right to the heart of what I was feeling. It’s called “Neutral Tones,” and the speaker is looking back on the bleak day by a frozen pond when the smile on his lover’s lips went dead. I left her with the last four lines:

Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,

And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me

Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,

And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

I slept in the office for two nights, never venturing within ten blocks of the apartment, because if she could make me suffer I could make her suffer too. Let her stew, that was what I thought, let her stew until she’s as sick at stomach as I am. But where was Corcoran? I waited for him that first morning with a dry throat and a pounding in my temples that was calibrated to a recurrent hormonal rush, and then eight o’clock slipped by, and eight-ten, and I put it to Prok as casually as I could, Where is he? Prok barely glanced up. It had slipped his mind, but he’d neglected to tell me that he’d given our colleague two days off to see to a personal matter, and that was where it ended — Prok barely lifted his head from his work all the rest of the day. There was no chatter, no humor, and the only relief from routine came when we interviewed two young women for the position of full-time secretary, and subsequently, one-on-one, took their histories.

At the end of the second day, having heard nothing from Iris, I went back to the apartment, but warily, looking for signs, coming up the walk and approaching the front steps with the slow deliberation of a sapper, as if the place had been mined and booby-trapped by the retreating forces. The first thing I noticed was the milk — there they were, two bottles, nestled side by side in the insulated box on the porch, undisturbed. There was no sound of the radio, no lights left burning. Everything sank in me. I turned my key in the lock and came in to a smell of nothing, of a tomb, of a place that was empty and had been empty and might never be inhabited again. It was as if the people who’d lived here had disappeared, that nice young couple, as if they’d been kidnapped and held for ransom and no one could tell if the sum would ever be raised.

Her clothes were there still, hanging in the wardrobe, her brushes and toilet things, her shampoo — it was all there. It probably took me fifteen minutes, a good quarter hour of poking through things in a kind of mind-numbing despair, until I noticed that the poem was gone, replaced by a few lines in her own hand, and I still don’t know where she got them from:

I never again shall tell you what I think.

I shall be sweet and crafty, soft and sly.…

And some day when you knock and push the door,

Some sane day, not too bright and not too stormy,

I shall be gone, and you may whistle for me.

I couldn’t breathe. I had to pour a drink and ease myself down in the armchair, so weak suddenly my legs wouldn’t support me. Gone? I shall be gone? And what was that supposed to mean? I couldn’t fathom it — was she saying she would leave me, that she didn’t want me anymore, that Corcoran had taken my place and negated everything between us in the course of what, a week? Sane? No, it was insane. I loved her, she loved me. How could anything ever change that?

If I thought that was the low point, exchanging bitter poems, warfare by proxy, the drink and the chair and the empty apartment, I was wrong. Because even as I sat there in the armchair, the glass in one hand and the sheet of paper she’d inscribed in the other (and I’d sniffed that too, holding it to my nose and breathing deep in the hope of catching the remotest fleeting scent of her), there was the sound of her heels on the steps and her key turning in the lock, and in the next instant I had to look her in the face and listen to her tell me that she was in love.

There she was, flush with it, her hair disheveled and her clothes looking as if they’d been slept in (and they had, or no, they hadn’t, and I didn’t want to think about that either). She came straight into the room, threw down her purse and her coat, and told me she was sorry, but that was how it was, she was in love.

I don’t get angry. I suppress my anger, drink it down like Angostura bitters, digest it, let it run through the bowels, shit it out — my mother taught me that. Do what I say. Mind your manners. Live for me. “We haven’t even been married a year yet,” I said.

She was frantic, she couldn’t sit down, pacing back and forth while I clung to the chair as if the ship had gone down and this was all that was left to me. “I don’t care,” she said. “I’m sorry, and I don’t want to hurt you — I’ll always love you, and you’re my first love, you know that — but this is something bigger than that, and I just can’t help it. I can’t.”

“He’s married,” I said, and my voice was flat and toneless. The faucet was dripping in the sink, one thunderous drop after another hitting the greased porcelain of the unwashed plates and cups and saucers. “He doesn’t love you. It’s just sex — he told me that. Just sex, Iris. He’s a sex researcher.”

All the intensity of her face drew down to the frozen eyelet of her mouth and for a second I thought she was going to spit at me. “Is that what you call it — research?” She was trembling, lit up with the ecstasy of the moment, her eyes gone clear and hard. “Well, I don’t care, I love him and it doesn’t matter what happens. I can do research too. You’ll see. You just wait and see.”

The next morning, early, while Prok was still upstairs brushing his teeth and Mac presiding over the kitchen with her whisk and bowl and a mug of coffee, I went to the house on First Street and rapped on the door till one of the children let me in. I don’t recall which one it was — it might have been Bruce, the youngest, who would have been thirteen or fourteen at the time — but the door swung open, the adolescent face registered my presence and then vanished and I was left standing there in the anteroom, unannounced, the door open wide to the street behind me. Two years earlier I would have been mortified to be put in this position, but now, as the sounds of the house percolated round me — three children preparing for school and the slap of Prok’s razor strop echoing down from above — I felt nothing but relief, blanketed by normalcy, by the regular thump of footsteps overhead and the murmurous dialogue of the girls drifting down the hall. I stood there a moment, then shut the door softly behind me. There was a smell of coffee, butter, hot grease, and I let it lead me to the kitchen, even while I tried to calm the pounding in my chest. Mac was at the stove, beating eggs for the pan, her back to me. She was wearing a housedress and an apron, her feet were bare and her hair was uncombed, and when I spoke her name she started visibly.

She turned to me, puzzled. “John?” she said, as if she couldn’t quite place me. “What are you doing here at this hour — are you and Prok off somewhere? I thought it was next week you were going back to Indianapolis?”

“No,” I said, fumbling for the words I wanted, “I just, well — I came to see Prok, is Prok in? It’s, well, it can’t wait—”

She gave me a stricken look. There was danger here, and heartbreak too, and I was out of bounds — she could see that at a glance. “Have you eaten?” she said suddenly. “Because I can just add a couple eggs — and toast, do you want toast?”

“Is he upstairs?”

She might have nodded, or maybe she said, “Go ahead,” but the permission was implicit — I belonged here, I was part of this, part of this household, this family — and in the next moment I was bounding up the stairs even as the two girls, Joan and Anne, were coming down, dressed for school. I suppose they might have given me a quizzical look and perhaps even a giggle or two (they were eighteen and sixteen respectively), but it was nothing out of the ordinary — I was there, on the staircase, and I’d been there before, John Milk, the handsome young man with the recalcitrant hair, Daddy’s friend, Daddy’s assistant, his colleague and traveling companion. I found Prok in the bathroom, standing before the mirror, shaving. The door was open, he was in his underclothes, and he’d just scraped the last of the shaving cream from his chin when he became aware of me standing there in the doorway. “Prok,” I said, “I hope you won’t — well, I didn’t know where else to turn.”

I couldn’t eat — I was too wrought up for that — but the two of them, Mac and Prok both, insisted on sitting me down at the table with a plate of toast and scrambled eggs. Throughout breakfast, Prok kept fastening on me with that intent gaze of his, as if he were trying to reduce me to my constituent parts for a physiologic study of variations in the human organism under stress, but he talked exclusively of the project. “The children were really something, weren’t they, Milk? And, Mac, you should have seen them, fully cognizant of sexual roles even at four and five years old, and by seven or eight a number of them had already seen the genitalia of the opposite sex, and there was that one girl, Milk, you remember her? The one in pigtails? She’d seen both her parents naked—saw them on a regular basis.” When we were done — I barely touched my food — he got up in his usual brisk way, squared his bow tie in the hall mirror and informed me that we’d better hurry if we were going to be at work on time.

The minute we were out of the house he asked me what the matter was.

“It’s Iris,” I told him, struggling to keep pace with him as we swung through the gate and out onto the street. I was having trouble getting it out, the words colliding in my head, and the emotions too, choking at me in some deep glandular way. Prok shot me an impatient look. “She says she’s in love with Corcoran, and that”—and here I felt myself breaking down—“that she wants to move in with him, to live with him. To, to—”

His head was down, his shoulders hunched, and he was already elongating into his no-nonsense stride, no time to waste, no time to stand still in the street and shoot the breeze when there was work to be done. What he said was, “We can’t have that.”

No, I thought, no, of course we can’t.

“But you approved,” I said, “or that’s what Corcoran told me, that you said, well, that you gave your blessing. To the whole thing, I mean.”

The look he gave me — sidelong, over his jolting shoulder — wasn’t in the least sympathetic. It was fierce, irascible, the sort of look that came over his face when he was challenged, when the Thurman B. Rices and Dean Hoenigs of the world rose up to castigate him on whatever grounds, whether statistical or moral. “We’re adults, Milk,” he snapped. “Consenting adults. No one needs my permission to do anything.”

I was right there now, right at his shoulder, drawn up even with him, and I came as close to losing control then as I ever have — there were accusations on my lips, I know it, and I wanted to throw his words right back at him, but the best I could manage was just another reflection of my own inadequacy, a kind of bleat of agony that might have come from the lips of a child. “It’s eating me up inside,” I said, and for all my conditioning I seemed to be out of breath, my legs pumping automatically, air in, air out. “I love her. I want her back.”

We walked on in silence a moment, and I can’t tell you whether the sun was shining and the squirrels clambering up the trees or the wind blowing a gale, because I was at the breaking point and nothing of the world of appearances held any interest for me, all of it just a backdrop now to the scene I was playing out, the heartsick lover, the cuckold, the fool in motley. “You say she wants to move in with him?” he said. He gave me the snatching look.

I nodded. We were hurrying along so fast I was on the verge of breaking into a jog. “She’s been with him the past three nights and she, she came home only to get her things last night and she told me she was”—I felt ridiculous saying it, but I couldn’t stop myself—“doing research.”

Suddenly we were stopped dead in our tracks, right there in the middle of the sidewalk, a pair of student lovers splitting up to edge around us on either side, the trees wheeling overhead and everything aside from Prok’s face, his glasses, his eyes, rushing past in a blur of motion. “Research?” he said. “But that’s absurd. It’s wrong. And you know, John, you of all people, because I’ve emphasized it over and over again, how much our work depends on the public perception of it?”

“Of course. That’s what I’m saying.”

His jaw was set. The wind, if there was a wind, might have ruffled the stiff crest of his hair. “We can’t afford to give them any ammunition.”

“No, of course not.” I wanted to look away. There was fluid in my eyes — tears, that is — and I didn’t want to expose myself.

“You and Mac, for example. Mutually beneficial, just as I’ve said all along, pleasure given, pleasure taken. That’s the way it should be. We need to break down our inhibitions and express ourselves to the fullest, I do believe that with all my heart. But it has to be kept strictly confidential, and every one of us — not just the husbands but the wives too — must understand that we’re part of something larger here, much larger. And under scrutiny, under the microscope, John. You know that, don’t you?” He caught himself. We were still rooted there, and he made as if to move off, but caught himself again. “Has anyone seen her with him, seen her go to his apartment?”

“I don’t know,” I said miserably. I was studying the pattern of the sidewalk. I couldn’t look him in the eye. “But I don’t see how, well, in a small town like this — or not for long, anyway.”

Prok didn’t curse. He never used expletives or indulged dirty jokes, though of course in later years he was deluged with them, but now, standing there in the street, he came as close to it as I can recall. He spat something out, some Latin term, and then we were walking again and he was muttering about Corcoran, about how he blamed himself for not making the situation “absolutely clear, so clear any idiot could see through to the truth and necessity of it.” We crossed Atwater, then Third, moved up the walk and into the aegis of the big looming limestone buildings of the campus. “I’m sorry, John,” he said, pinning me with his gaze as if I were the one threatening to bring the research down, “but we just can’t have it.”

Two weeks later, though her daughters’ school was still in session and they would have to miss the last six weeks of the term, Violet Corcoran left South Bend and moved into her husband’s cramped apartment on College Avenue in downtown Bloomington. She took charge of things right away, opening up an account at the grocery, arranging for a tutor and putting Lloyd Wheeler, the best real-estate agent in town, on the trail of a suitable property, with a yard for the girls, a garage for the Cadillac and shade trees to mitigate the summer heat. Prok had had a talk with Corcoran — he came right up the stairs of Biology Hall the morning I’d voiced my complaint, slammed into the back office and chewed him out, in no uncertain terms — and Corcoran had a talk with Iris five minutes later, on the telephone to his apartment. All the while I sat at my desk, drinking coffee as if my veins flowed with nothing else.

If I think about it now, I have to chalk the whole thing up to Iris’s immaturity — she was just twenty when we married and, as I say, hadn’t had any previous experience with men, and perhaps that was unfair to her, or certainly it was, especially in the context of the project we were all engaged in and the relations I’d had outside of the marriage. She had no way of gauging what she was doing, of putting a cap on her emotions and keeping things in perspective — she was infatuated, that was all, like so many of the teenage girls we interviewed over their first crushes and so on. Above all, she was stubborn. Once she set her sights on something, it was hard to turn her, and when she came through the office door an hour later, her face drained of color and her eyes red-veined and swollen, I can’t say I was surprised, though I shrank inside. Prok happened to be standing over me, comparing a chart with one of mine, and Corcoran, the self-satisfied smile for once kneaded out of his features, sat hunched at his desk in the back room. “You can’t do this,” she said.

I was on my feet before I knew what I was doing, before I realized she wasn’t talking to me at all. Corcoran swung round in his chair, his eyes shrunk back in his head. He was wearing his two-tone shoes, I remember, and he began to grind one foot into the floor as if he were putting out a cigarette. Prok laid a hand on my shoulder, and I felt a wave of shame wash over me.

Iris never moved. “You don’t own me — or John or Purvis either.”

“Take your wife out of here, Milk, will you,” Prok said. “Take her home.”

“No,” she said, her voice rising, “no — not until you tell me who elected you God.”

“Corcoran,” Prok called over his shoulder, “will you come in here please,” and we all watched as Corcoran pushed himself up from the desk and crossed the room on stiffened legs. He edged in beside us, looking unsure of himself, and still Iris hadn’t moved from the doorway.

“All right, Corcoran,” Prok said then, and I hadn’t gone to my wife, hadn’t touched her, the three of us ranged there against her like a scrum awaiting the drop of the ball. “Just tell me please if you’ve explained the situation to Mrs. Milk?”

Corcoran bowed his head. “Yes,” he said.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you—”

Corcoran looked first to Iris, then to me. “Yes,” he repeated.

“Good,” Prok said, “very good. And, Iris, if you would”—and he was already moving forward, already taking her by the arm and guiding her toward the door of the inner room—“I’d just like to have a few words with you in private, if I may.”

Then the door closed and I went back to work.