The Inner Circle (41 page)

I'd like to report that John Jr. was conceived that night, but it wasn't to be. Months went by, then the year, the war ended, Prok, Corcoran and I were traveling at an accelerated pace and collecting histories more assiduously than ever, and despite our best efforts—Iris's and mine—her menses came as regularly as before. We consulted the literature, employed the recommended coital positions and dutifully coupled during the most fertile period of the monthly cycle, but all for naught. Iris took hot baths, cold baths, rubbed herself with oleomargarine, consumed nothing but eggs for an entire month. Nothing seemed to work. I talked it over with Prok, who sent me to a specialist he knew in Indianapolis. I had a thoroughgoing physical, and the doctor even invited me into the back room to study my semen under the microscope in order to reassure me that there was nothing amiss. Prok and I began to suspect Iris, and she was examined too—by a gynecologist Prok recommended, the very man who'd helped Mac with her adhesion problem twenty years earlier—and he pronounced her both normal and fit. So what was the problem? What were we doing wrong? Neither of us had a clue, but Prok did, and he was typically blunt about it.

After reviewing the results—we were in the office and he'd been pacing back and forth in front of his desk with a puzzled frown, murmuring to himself—he motioned me to him. It might have been raining that day, I don't remember, but rain would have been appropriate—as a symbol of hope and fertility. I needed something positive, because I'd been down on myself, feeling inadequate, impotent, a failure even at this. We stood together at the window a moment, gazing out on the
campus. “You just have to account for the aleatory factor here, that's all,” he said finally.

“I'm sorry?”

“Each of the millions of your spermatozoa fighting for purchase in the uterus and Fallopian tubes, an ovum descended or not, as the case may be, natural selection at work, that is, in the microcosm of one woman's womb—”

I gave him a puzzled look.

“Chance, John, chance. Keep trying, that's all I can say.”

In the meanwhile, our larger quest—for new blood at the Institute—had begun to turn up a number of qualified candidates now that the war was over, and we started interviewing in earnest. Each man was invited to campus, with his wife and family—the wives, in particular, had to be scrutinized, not only to determine if they were in any measure sex shy, but if they were discreet and reliable as well—and Prok gave them a tour of the facilities, arranged a picnic or musicale in their honor, took their histories and had Corcoran and me vet them for any irregularities. (Typically, Prok would have us take the candidate out on the town afterward, sans wife, in order to loosen him up and catch him off guard, and if that required a certain outpouring of liquor and a given number of Havana cigars drawn on the Institute coffers, it was nothing more than a practical business expenditure by Prok's accounting.) Obviously, nearly all the candidates had one flaw or another, and Prok, perfectionist that he was, rejected them wholesale despite his almost desperate need for another man.

I remember one candidate by the name of Birdbright. He was forty-five, happily married, father of a well-adjusted and grown daughter, just decommissioned from the Navy and in the process of submitting his doctoral thesis at Harvard in the field of Physical Anthropology. He came to campus and Prok quizzed him late into the night. Corcoran and I took him on the rounds of the taverns, and though he seemed a bit stiff—his military bearing, I suppose, or perhaps it was just academic rigor—we could find nothing to disqualify him. He was a scotch man, smoked Camels, hated sports. He wasn't particularly easy to draw out in
conversation, but he wasn't sex shy either and seemed to have few biases against any number of sexual behaviors that were, technically speaking, against the law. The day after his visit the three of us sat down to compare notes. “I find nothing objectionable in the man,” Prok said, the candidate's file spread open on the desk before him, and Corcoran and I had to agree. There was a pause. “Yet I don't sense any real enthusiasm either.” Prok gently closed the folder and let his eyes roll back in his head. “But
Birdbright
—is anybody going to want to disclose sensitive information to a man with a name like that?” He let out a short, chiming laugh. “
Birdbright,
really!”

There was another man disqualified along similar lines. Again, he was unobjectionable, if not particularly exciting, and he did have an acceptable wife and the proper academic background, but he was burdened with a long, hyphenated name—Theodore Lavushkin-Esterhazy—that set Prok to fretting. Prok put it to him directly: Would he consider shortening his name to the less imposing Theodore Esterhazy, or even, for the purposes of interviewing lower-level subjects, simply Ted Ester-hazy? The candidate replied that his was a venerable family name of several centuries' standing and that under no condition would he consider editing it. That was the term he used, “editing.” Prok tented his hands on the desk before him, gave the candidate a long tunneled look, and thanked him for his time.

Yes. And there was one other man rejected because of his wife, who had a drinking problem, as we learned through inquiries among the staff at his previous place of employ and discovered firsthand at a Bryan Park picnic held in his honor. The wife was loud, sexually showy, with muscular calves and protuberant breasts, and she hung on one man after another, quaffing Planter's Punch as if it were carrot juice. She didn't create a scene, not exactly, but it was enough to warn us off. Prok had no use for drunks because drunks were unreliable and couldn't be trusted to keep their mouths shut (and he was to lecture me about my own alcohol consumption on more than one occasion, but that's not relevant here, or at least not at this juncture). This is not to say, incidentally, that he was ruthless, as the rumormongers might have you believe, nor that
he chose the members of his team based on his ability to control and dominate them, but only that he was preternaturally sensitive to the needs of the project. There were secrets to keep. There was work to be done. Who could blame him for being particular?

Rutledge, of course, as the whole world knows, was the man we finally settled on. We all liked him from the start. Despite his Ivy League credentials and a sheaf of laudatory letters from some of the biggest names in the field, Robert M. Yerkes among them, he seemed down to earth, equally at ease with President Wells and Prok's colleagues in the Zoology Department as he was with the waiter who brought us our chops at Murchison's or the barman who mixed us highballs at the tavern, and from the start he treated Corcoran and me as his colleagues and equals. His wife, Hilda, was a tall asthenic blonde who talked out of the corner of her mouth as if everything she said was a wisecrack—and more often than not it was. She was relaxed and informal, a breath of fresh air after the wives of the majority of the other candidates, who might as well have been auditioning for a part in one of those robot pictures that seem to be infesting the theaters these days. Another plus, to my mind, at least: she took to Iris right off. Prok arranged for us all to have drinks with the Rutledges one afternoon—the Corcorans, the Milks and the Kinseys—and before Prok had even handed me my first Zombie cocktail, she and Iris had their heads together. And the children, never forget the children, because as Prok says they're perhaps the best reflection of the parents, in this case two solemn boys of eight and nine, who seemed well-adjusted and polite enough.

After the preliminary round of interviews, Rutledge was the sole candidate we invited back for a follow-up, and if he passed muster this time, it was understood that Prok was prepared to offer him the job. I met him at the bus station and together we walked up to the Institute. It was autumn—the autumn of '46 now, and I remember distinctly for reasons that will soon become apparent—and the day was unseasonably warm, a taste of Indian summer before the cold weather set in and the leaves turned and the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun for yet another long season of contrition. Rutledge was wearing a
tweed jacket over a long-sleeved shirt, he'd pushed his hat back to get a little air on his brow and loosened his tie so that it canted away from his open collar like a lolling tongue. He had a briefcase in one hand and a traveling bag in the other, his raincoat thrown carelessly over his shoulder. I asked if I could give him a hand with anything, and he broke into a smile. “Sure, John,” he said, “that would be kind of you,” and passed me the traveling bag.

We walked on in silence a moment. The sidewalks had been dampened by a fleeting rain, and every yard we passed seemed well tended and tranquil, with picket fences, overspilling flowerbeds and glistening lawns. Butterflies drifted over the blooms, birds soliloquized in the trees. “You know, I really do like this town,” he said. “It has character. And charm too. It's not quite Princeton, maybe, but it's got plenty to offer as far as I can see. What do you think? You like it here?”

“Well, yes,” I said, “sure. It's quiet, of course, but we make our own society.”

“With Dr. Kinsey?”

We were stopped at a corner, waiting for a bus to move off across the intersection. I was conscious of Rutledge's eyes on me. He was sounding me out, and that was all right with me—it wasn't as if he were asking me to reveal anything he didn't already know. It just meant that he was confident Prok would offer him the job—and further, that he was leaning toward taking it. “Prok's a big part of it,” I admitted.

“You're very close, aren't you?”

“Yes,” I said, “we are.”

He let that rest a moment and then the bus moved on and we crossed the street. His gait was easy, the briefcase swinging, tie stirring in the breeze our progress generated, and we fell into step, in rhythm, and I felt a kind of communion with him then, as if we were two athletes moving across the field of play. “You were his student, weren't you?”

I told him that I was, or had been, and then I laughed. “But I guess you'd have to say I still am, because with Prok the learning process goes on every minute of every day.”

“He certainly has energy, Prok,” Rutledge said.

“Yes, he does. I've never met anyone like him.”

“But I like that. I like the whole project, what you and he and Purvis are doing here. It's very exciting. Groundbreaking, really.”

We were striding right along, a block from the university now. It felt good to be out of the office and under the sun, if only for half an hour, and I was glad Prok had appointed me to be the one to go to the station. I didn't get out enough. None of us did. I made a mental note to see if Iris might not like to go for a picnic over the weekend before the weather turned.

“I'd like to be part of it, I would,” Rutledge went on, as if I'd been contradicting him. “And I love this town, did I mention that? Seems like a terrific place to raise kids.”

I had nothing to say to this, but he was just talking to hear himself in any case. There was a proposition on the table—should he or shouldn't he?—and he was trying very hard to convince himself that he should. “By the way,” he said, just as we were coming up on the campus, “do you and Iris have any kids?”

“No,” I said, “but we'd like to. We're, well, we're trying, that is.”

He gave me a grin. “Trying, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said, and I grinned back.

“When you come down to it”—two fingers went to his mustache—“it's all just another facet of the research, isn't it?”

Prok spent most of the day cloistered with him, then we had dinner at a restaurant—just the four of us, spouses not invited—and Prok must have peppered Rutledge with a thousand questions, and this after both he and his wife had given up their histories. There was drinking, though Prok abstained, and Rutledge, either out of temperance or calculation—he knew he was still on trial here—stopped after two highballs and tucked into his dinner with real appetite, Prok's third degree notwithstanding. I had enough to drink so that I could feel myself drifting out of my body for whole seconds at a time, but nothing excessive, nothing that would draw attention to myself, and Corcoran, who could hold his liquor as well as anyone I'd ever met, imbibed pretty steadily
throughout the meal, almost as if he were conditioning himself for some test of endurance. Which, as it turned out, he was.

No one had clued me in, but I could guess from Prok's expression that there was to be some further test or demonstration yet to come, and when Corcoran excused himself before dessert with a wink for the company and the promise that he'd see us in just a bit, my suspicions were confirmed. “Well,” Prok said, as we spooned up ice cream and sponge cake and the waitress lurked in the background, “it's been quite an evening. Quite a day, in fact, and I hope you've enjoyed it, Oscar”—and here he used Rutledge's given name for the first time, a clue that something was afoot, because he made a point of addressing his team by surname only—“as much as I have. And, I'm sure, Milk has. Haven't you, Milk?”

I answered in the affirmative, as did Rutledge. “It's been grand,” he said, “and I have to say I'm impressed, Dr. Kinsey, with everything you've showed me here—”

Prok had set down his spoon and was staring across the table at Rutledge over the bridge of his intertwined fingers. His face showed nothing—Prok the impassive, Prok the interviewer, the open and accessible and nonjudgmental—but his eyes flashed with excitement. “Call me Prok,” he said.

Rutledge ducked his head, put a hand to the back of his neck and came up smiling. “Yes, sure,” he said. “It'll be a pleasure. Prok.”

“Good, good, good,” Prok murmured, and he called for the check then and spent the next several minutes looking it over and carefully counting out the exact change plus a three-percent tip, while Rutledge and I exchanged small talk in a collegial way. “All right,” Prok said finally, pushing the neat pile of bills and coins away from him, “and now let's just retire to my place for some more talk and some good strong coffee, if you think you can stand it at this hour”—he paused, grinning now—“because I've got something arranged for your benefit, Rutledge, and yours too, Milk, a demonstration, actually, that should prove more than interesting. Shall we?”