The Inner Circle (12 page)

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.

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.