The Inner Circle (21 page)

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.

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.