The Inner Circle

Epilogue

Bloomington, Indiana

August 27, 1956

I’d like to be able to report that everything continued on an even keel, that Iris and I were able to make the necessary adjustments and live in harmony ever after — or until the present, at any rate — and that the project came to fruition and Prok received the recognition he deserved as one of the great original geniuses of the twentieth century, but in life, as distinct from fiction, things don’t always tie up so neatly. Iris never attended a musicale again, and she never again mounted the stairs to the attic at the house on First Street. She was present for the social occasions, the picnics, the occasional staff dinners at Prok’s, the holiday celebrations, but she saw them as an obligation, nothing more, and gradually she began to withhold her friendship from Mac and Violet Corcoran and Hilda Rutledge and take up with a new circle of people she’d known from her days at school, even talking about going back to teaching once John Jr. matriculates from the lower grades. In the interval, I’ve continued with the business of the Institute, with the interviews and the travels and the filming, sometimes as an observer, sometimes a participant. Iris and I don’t discuss it. I try to leave my work at the office, as they say. And Elster — Prok had him transferred back to the biology library the day we returned from Michigan City and he’s been persona non grata in Wylie Hall ever since. Good riddance, is what I say.

As for Prok, his life was too short. Dead at sixty-two, buried this morning. He wanted to record one hundred thousand histories — that was his grand ambition, the definitive sample — but at last count we had something less than twenty percent of that figure. And he projected another several volumes in the series to take advantage of all that raw data, a volume on sex offenders to follow the female, but everything is in flux now. His last words to me, as they bundled him off to the hospital, were: “Don’t do anything till I get back.” I don’t know. I’m too distraught right now to see things clearly, but if there was a catalyst in all this — in his exhaustion and the wear and tear on his heart that ultimately killed him — it was the female volume. Less than three years after its publication, he was dead.

Publishers are forever using the cliché “eagerly anticipated” to describe ordinary and humdrum volumes of which no one is even remotely aware, but I can say, without doubt, that Sexual Behavior in the Human Female was the most feverishly awaited and explosive title of the century. Everything that worked so spectacularly for the male volume — the marshalling of the press, the close-guarding of the proofs, the secrecy and vigilance — was redoubled for the female. During the months leading up to publication, Prok brought the press in for a series of lectures, meetings with the inner circle, long exhaustive face-to-face talks until late in the night, and, of course, a first look at the proofs and the signing of his standard contract limiting their articles to five thousand words and a proscription against publishing before August 20—1953, that is — which one wag had already dubbed “K-Day.” Excitement was so high, in fact, that we had to reschedule the publication date from the fourteenth of September to the ninth, because the retail outlets began putting the book on the shelves the minute they received their shipments, no matter the prohibitions and pleas from the Saunders Company. Predictably, sales were spectacular, outstripping those of the male volume by something like two to one in the first weeks.

But then, as I’m sure you’re aware, the adverse reaction set in. It’s not as if we didn’t expect it — Prok had warned us from the outset that the public would react very differently to revelations about female sexuality than to those regarding the male of the species, but that it was absolutely necessary that we publish our findings in any case, because, as he liked to say, people just had to learn to face reality. If the male volume was shocking, especially in regard to the statistics relating to pre- and extramarital relations and the prevalence of H-behavior, at least the general public had always viewed men’s sexual mores with some degree of skepticism, but to put women in the same category was something else altogether.

Whether Prok liked it or not, women had been placed on a pedestal — they were our wives, daughters, mothers — and people came to see the book less as a scientific survey than as an attack on American womanhood. They objected to hearing women called “human animals,” a phrase that recurs some forty-eight times in the text, and to Prok’s bias toward premarital sex as well (our statistics, as I informed Iris in the backseat of the Nash so long ago, showed that women who engaged in premarital sex were more likely to make a satisfactory adjustment to marriage than those who did not). In fact, they hated all our statistics and what they implied — that women were sexual beings too, 62 percent of whom had masturbated, while 90 percent had engaged in petting, 50 percent had had premarital intercourse and 3.6 percent reported sexual contacts with lower animals. Mothers and daughters having sex with animals (and never mind that only one of our subjects had experienced full coitus with her pet, a German shepherd, as I recall, and that our single highest rater had achieved no more than perhaps six hundred orgasms through oral-genital contact with her cat) — the notion alone was enough to inflame the public to almost universal condemnation of us, our methods, our objectives, personalities and characters. There were even stirrings among the legislators on Capitol Hill to the effect that Sexual Behavior in the Human Female played into the hands of the Communist menace that sought to destroy the moral fiber of the country.

Prok was called variously “an advocate for free love,” “a peddler of obscene literature and smut,” and a “deranged Nebuchadnezzar” whose agenda was to drag women down to the level of “the beasts of the jungle.” Old adversaries like Margaret Mead and Lawrence Kubie arose to denounce him, as well as new ones like the Reverend Billy Graham, Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Menninger, the latter of whom had praised the male volume and now wounded Prok deeply and insupportably with his apostasy. The criticism? At first it was strictly on moral grounds, taking Prok to task for suggesting that all sexual outlets were equally unobjectionable and that frequency and numbers somehow legitimized certain behaviors, asserting instead that in fact such behaviors should make people feel guilty because guilt was essential to the establishment and preservation of basic morality, but then the scientific community weighed in to undermine our statistical analysis, and that was truly devastating.

Of course, Prok was shrewd enough to escape the initial furor — all of us, Mac, Corcoran, Rutledge, Aspinall and myself, piled onto the train on publication day and made a three-week excursion to the Pacific Coast, where we locked ourselves up with the inmates in San Quentin, as out of reach as anyone could ever hope to be. But then it was back to Bloomington, where the phone never stopped ringing, and Prok began his counterattack. If anything, he pushed himself even harder now, seeking justification, fighting for the very existence of the Institute, but the Rockefeller Foundation, feeling the heat, dropped our funding and even President Wells’s defense of academic freedom began to ring hollow in the face of assaults from outraged alumni, the Board of Trustees and the Indiana Provincial Council of Catholic Women. Prok slipped. He faltered. The more he drove himself, the greater the strain on his recalcitrant heart. He began to suffer a series of small strokes. His physicians recommended bed rest, but there was no keeping Prok in bed. Even his vacation, a trip to Europe with Mac designed to slow the pace and distract him from his work, proved exhausting, as he couldn’t help but stay out till all hours interviewing prostitutes and male hustlers in the streets of London, Copenhagen and Rome. Finally, inevitably, he gave out.

But I don’t want to remember him like that, I don’t want to remember the drawn and confused-looking shell of a man who began to convene daily meetings because he no longer had the focus and mental capacity for work, the imposter Prok who we all felt would throw off the mask at any moment and roar out, “Milk, Corcoran, Rutledge, you’re obfuscating the facts and delaying the project!” The dead Prok. The Prok in the casket that felt as if it were filled with rock, with lead, with hot lava, because no mere mortal could weigh anywhere near that much—

I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t even know if I’ll have a job come tomorrow. And I can’t drink another Zombie cocktail because they no longer have an effect on me, and this one before me is the last I’ll ever have, in honor of Prok, out of respect to him. Bourbon, I’ll drink bourbon, but not rum. Never again. Just the smell of it brings him back, Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest. But here I am, locked in my study, the recording tape moving through the sprockets and across the heads, a fleeting tan strip of magnetized tape imprinted with the thinnest layer of everything I’ve ever felt in my life. It’s hot. Blistering. Not a breath of air. Iris is in the living room, in her black dress, drinking iced tea and leafing through a magazine, and John Jr., released from the onus of mourning, is out in the yard — or the neighbor’s yard — playing ball or running through the sprinkler with his playmates. If I concentrate, I can hear their shouts and cries carrying out over the lawn.

But Prok. This is how I remember him, how I want to remember him:

I see Corcoran and me pulling up to the curb outside Wylie Hall, a winter’s day, five or six years ago. We are in Corcoran’s Cadillac and both of us are exhausted after the long drive out from New York City on roads slick with ice and fraught with potholes and a hundred other hazards. We’ve driven straight through, relieving each other at the wheel, and my stomach is queasy from too many cups of coffee and the blue-plate special at some anonymous diner in a town I’ve already forgotten. What we’re carrying is precious cargo — a group of outsized clay models left to the Institute by the late Robert Latou Dickinson, along with his library, the histories he’d taken, his sex diaries and erotica collection. The models are of human genitalia, depicted in the act of coitus, in a scale of roughly five to one, so that the phallus is nearly a yard long and the clay vagina meant to receive it proportional in every way. In all, we’ve transported seven of these models, and given their various angles and excrescences, it was no mean feat to maneuver them into the trunk and backseat of the car on the frigid streets of New York while a not-inconsiderable crowd of kibitzers looked on, and now, exhausted, we are faced with the task of removing them safely from the car and hustling them down the steps of the building, through the corridor and into the library without attracting undue attention.

We’ve had Prok’s advice, by both letter and telephone — his very exacting advice as to routes, padding to protect the models, the ideal speed we should maintain, how much rest we should need and where we should stop for meals, et cetera — and we can both hear his voice in our heads as we throw open the door and begin fumbling with the first of the models, the one with the fragile outsized phallus. It is windy. A cold rain has begun to fall. One misstep and the model is forever destroyed. I want only to be done with this, to be home with Iris and my son, sitting by the fire with a glass of bourbon and something warm and wholesome in my stomach, and my attention has wandered. I’m bushed. I tug in one direction, Corcoran in the other.

Then I hear Prok behind me. “I’m sorry, Milk,” he says, “but I can see that you don’t know the first thing about unloading an automobile. Here,” he says, “let me,” and I feel him take the load from me as if it had never been there at all.