The Inner Circle (49 page)

I was neutral toward her. She was like Iris, only older, independent-minded, contentious, and she could never bring herself to address me directly, instead referring to me in the third person, as, for instance, “Is
he
hungry? Does
he
sit here?” But she took some of the pressure off me and kept Iris company and that was fine by me, because, as I've indicated, this was the busiest and most critical time the project had ever seen. Once she did leave, though, to go back home to Michigan City, the
onus fell on me, and the timing couldn't have been worse. I tried my best. Iris still hadn't recovered her usual level of energy, and I did what I could to help out, picking up groceries, doing a load of laundry, that sort of thing, but naturally things began to slip and I couldn't help feeling overburdened and resentful.

And yet I don't mean to sound negative, because a kind of miracle grew out of it all: I got to know my son. To this point he'd been bundled and diapered and whisked from one room to the other, from my mother-in-law's arms to Iris's, and if I got more than a peek at the reddened amorphous little face that was saying a lot, but as soon as her mother left—as we came up the walk on our way back from the bus station, in fact—Iris just handed him to me as if he were a sack of groceries she was tired of shifting from one hip to the other. “Go ahead, hold him, John,” she'd said, and there he was, the surprisingly dense bundle of him, thrust into my arms. I didn't know what to do. I was afraid of dropping him, of failing to properly support his neck, afraid of his weight and his movements and the way he had of effortlessly sucking in air and letting it out again in a maddened inconsolable shriek. He was a time bomb. He was made of lead. He had the lungs of Aeolus. “It's just a baby, John, that's all—he won't bite. He doesn't even have any teeth.” She looked at me, at the expression on my face, and burst out laughing.

I wasn't laughing. I was in awe. He was my son. I held him in my arms, felt the weight of him, the vitality, and something moved inside me. John Jr. The wedding of the chromosomes. This was what we'd worked for, the end result, and it was research no longer.

But the book. The project. That was the focus of the summer of 1947, and if our domestic lives intruded on it—Corcoran's, Rutledge's, Iris's and mine, even Mrs. Matthews's—Prok was there to remind us of our priorities. As he became more demanding, he became more anxious as well, and the press did nothing to assuage his fears, the reporters becoming more importunate and ingenious as the summer went on. I'd escaped Skittering, but there were dozens of others hot on the trail of the story, each of them looking to be the first to reveal our findings to the public. We were besieged with letters, wires, telephone calls, and not
just from the plebeian ranks, but from editors and editors-in-chief and even, in some cases, the distinguished owners of various media outlets themselves. Never underestimate the power of sex to incite the public. We were interested in science, but the press was interested in commerce and commerce alone. They wanted to sell copies because copies sold ads and ads sold product and product bought more ads, and none of us of the inner circle had any doubt that they would twist our work in any way they saw fit.

Ultimately, it was Prok who came up with the solution. He'd been feeling increasingly harassed, and one reporter in particular—very persistent, wouldn't take no for an answer—provided the catalyst. Every day, for a period of more than a month, we received a wire from this gentleman (or pest, as Prok called him), begging for an interview, Prok firmly refusing him time and again till one morning he showed up in the anteroom, hat in hand, trying to wheedle his way past Mrs. Matthews. We were working away at our desks when at some point we became aware of a duel of voices from the anteroom, the closer's sanguine inflections and Mrs. Matthews's deft parries, and I remember Prok, in exasperation, raising his head from his work. “Who
is
that, Mrs. Matthews?” he snapped.

We all saw him there through the open doorway, a slope-shouldered man of middle age in a humble brown suit, looking wounded and lost. “Ralph Becker,” he bleated. “Of the
Magazine of the Year?
I wired you.”

“Oh, yes,” Prok rumbled, “yes, you've wired us all right, and we've wired you back. Repeatedly.” Prok was up from his desk suddenly, curt and angry, striding through the doorway to confront the man in the brown suit while we looked on sheepishly. “But perhaps you have difficulty with the written word?”

The man stammered out an apology, all but melting into his shoes, but he never stopped wheedling. “As long as I'm here, I wonder if you might just—oh, just the smallest tour of the place. That's all I ask. And the tiniest glimmer of what you hope to accomplish. From all I hear you're fantastically dedicated, rigorous, really rigorous”—and here he looked beyond Prok to where we sat riveted at our desks—“and you've got a real crackerjack staff too. A minute? Just a minute of your time?”

Prok was impassive, hiding behind his interviewer's façade, and if you didn't know him you wouldn't have guessed at how close to snapping he was. His voice gave him away, throttled in the back of his throat, a kind of articulate croak: “I've explained all that a hundred times already, explained it till I'm exasperated beyond the point of civility, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to leave our offices—”

“But I wouldn't be in the way—I'd just want to get a feel for it, for your work.”

“—and not set foot on these premises again till you're expressly invited.” Prok waved his hand impatiently, as if dissipating a swarm of gnats. “Don't you see? Don't you get it? If you people don't stop pestering me there won't
be
a volume to review.”

The journalist must have detected the same despairing crack in Prok's voice I did, because he immediately tried to hammer a piton into it and hoist his way up: “‘
Invited,
' did you say? You mean you're going to open up, then? Good, good. But why wait? I'm here now. Think how useful I can be, spreading the word—that's what you want, isn't it? To spread the gospel? Right?”

The light from the hallway liquefied Prok's spectacles. He hesitated. He did want to spread the word, but not piecemeal, and not in a way that would cheapen and undermine everything we were hoping to accomplish. “All right,” he said finally, “I appreciate your interest, and this is what I've decided on—what
we've
decided on, my colleagues and I—as a matter of policy.” He took a moment to glance over his shoulder at us, and we did our best to support him, though we were as eager as the man in the brown suit to hear what he'd come up with. “We'll be issuing invitations to all the major newspapers and magazines to come here to the Institute, have a tour of the facilities, record your sex histories and receive full access to the page proofs—once those proofs are completed, that is. And I have to emphasize that: Completed. Finished. Ready to go. Now, do you understand?”

“I'll be the first?”

“You'll be one of them.”

There was a pause. The man shifted his weight from one scuffed
brown shoe to the other. His face was shrewd, narrow, the face of an extortionist, a second-story man. He'd come to rob us, just as surely as Skittering had. “You don't mean you're going to make me traipse all the way out here again—look, here I am. Can't you just make an exception, just in this one case?”

I almost got up—I was on the verge of it—because why should Prok, with so much on his shoulders, have to deal with this too? I could have ushered the man out the door, could have broken him in two if it came to that, but Prok was in charge here, always in charge, and Prok never wavered.

“Both you and I know that wouldn't be fair, now don't we?” he said. From where I was sitting I couldn't see Prok's expression, but I could have guessed at it, Prok looming over the little brown man, in absolute control—the steely look, the mask of indifference—and subtle, so subtle. “But I take your point. You
are
here, aren't you, and as long as you are we may as well get your sex history and save us all the trouble when you return.” Prok turned to me then, Mrs. Matthews gone back to her typing, Corcoran trying to suppress a grin, Rutledge fidgeting in his chair. “Milk, would you mind doing the honors?”

And so it was. Prok brought the reporters on in two waves, the magazine writers first—in August—and then the newspapermen in September, even as he was putting the finishing touches to the manuscript. We set up a conference table in the office across the hall, from which we'd evicted one of Prok's colleagues in the Zoology Department (above his protests, but with the blessing—and imprimatur—of President Wells), and Prok packed the reporters in as if they were so many shot-putters and pole-vaulters crowding onto the team bus. First he lectured them on our findings and the boon they represented for mankind, then gave them a tour of the facilities and an opportunity to talk individually with us, his shining and punctilious staff, finally making a plea to each of them to give up his history not simply in the service of the project but for the practical purpose of gaining insight into our methods. Better than fifty percent of the journalists took him up on it, and that kept us busy, all of us, frantically recording sex histories even as the rest of them
snooped around town, looking to unveil a little local color. As you might imagine, there was a real run on the bars.

Before they left, Prok gave them each a set of proofs, and then—this was pure genius—had them sign a thirteen-point contract vowing not to publish their stories or release any of our figures prior to the December issue of their respective publications and to submit all articles to us in advance so that we could vet them for errors. Of course, the effect was to stifle any criticism and at the same time harness the press to the service of our own ends—there was an outpouring of highly favorable articles, and all in that crucial period leading up to the book's release. We endured the sensationalized headlines as a matter of course, because there was really nothing to be done there, but by and large the articles themselves were more than we could have hoped for. Suddenly the whole nation—the whole world—was listening.

The rest is history.

All well and good. We'd achieved celebrity—or at least Prok had—but if before we'd been able to work in relative obscurity, now everything we did was magnified. And if Prok had been able to relax into his work in the past, into his gardening, his gall collecting, the meandering field trips to seek out taxonomic marvels and acquire histories, now he was driven and manipulated by his own success, pulled in a hundred directions at once. There were mobs of visitors all of a sudden, many of them quite prominent, travel and lecture requests, nonstop interviews, and letters—thousands of them—pouring in from all over the world, each more heartbreaking than the next. Prok was a guru now, and gurus had to sit at their desks from sunrise to sunset, tending to the needs of the faithful.

Dear Dr. Kinsy: My husbend wants to do unnatural things with me in bed like kissing me in my private parts but I think such things are unattracktive and sinful and I was hopping you could write to him or make a call and tell him to leave me alone. Yrs. Sinceerly, Mrs. Hildegard Dolenz

Dear Professor: Twelve years ago I met the woman of my dreams, Martha, and married her on the spot. She is a woman like no other and I am satisfied with her as a good mother to our six sons and a good cook and etc., but for the fact that she is no longer interested in marital relations and I don't know why. Is this natural in a woman of her age (38)? If so, can you tell me what the cure is or if I should look for relief in other quarters, because I have become friendly with a widow of 54 years of age who seems truly more interested in relations than my own wife. Very Truly Yours, Stephen Hawley, Long Beach Island, New Jersey

Dear Dr. Kinsey: Can you tell me why our servicemen, after liberating France and defeating Nazi Germany, have to spend all these months away from home living with the enemy? Because my husband of seventeen years never wrote me once until he came home on leave two weeks ago and told me that he was moving out of our house that we slaved for together because of some if you'll pardon the expression ex-Nazi floozy who's only idea is to pray on lonely servicemen in her foreign country. I love him. I want him back. But he says he loves her. Thank you and God bless. Mrs. Thomas Tuttle, Yuma, Arizona

Dear Doctor: I am a young teenaged girl and I like to play with myself and with two other girls in my class and I don't really think there's anything wrong with that, do you? Anonymous in Chicago.

Dear Dr. Kinsey: My father was my first lovver and he had a brother I never liked and he was my second I am a young Mulatto girl of mixed race because my father is White and my mother from Trinidad (Black) and my ex-husband Horace wants me to turn tricks in a furnished room and I still love him but my boyfriend Naaman says he will kill me first and I don't know what to “do” can you help me please with any advise?—May

Of course, with all the other pressures on him, Prok nonetheless took it upon himself to answer each letter personally, and sometimes in great detail, though after a while even he became inured to this outpouring of heartbreak and ignorance and either referred his correspondents to the relevant chapters of the male volume or advised them to seek counseling
from professionals in their own hometowns (
I regret to say that we are not clinicians, and that while we are interested to hear of your dilemma, we can do no more than to point you toward professional help
). Still, the sheer volume of the correspondence, coupled with the travel and interviews and the desire to move forward with the female text, all began to take their toll.

Prok's first collapse had come some three years earlier, in the spring of 1945, after a hectic round of lecturing at the Menninger Clinic and then at a conference for some of the leading lights of the military, during which he bent over backward trying to convince them that no sexual behavior was deviant (H-behavior, specifically, the old martial bugbear) and that even if it were it would pose no threat to military discipline. You can only imagine the sort of reception he must have met with, the hidebound officers and the tight-lipped military bureaucrats, and the energy he must have expended in the process. I was the one who picked him up at the station in Indianapolis, and I remember the look of him, his pallor that extended even to the dulled irises of his eyes, his slouch, the deadness of his voice. “It's just a cold,” he told me, but it was more than that. It was his heart, enlarged and arrhythmic, the legacy of his childhood bout with rheumatic fever, the thing that would kill him, though none of us could imagine it then—other people had coronary problems, other people died, but not Prok. Prok was a pillar. He was indefatigable. He was our leader, our mentor, and we couldn't do without him, couldn't even conceive of it.