The Inner Circle (6 page)

She was unfastening the snap at her collar, working at her hat, her hair, the scarf wrapped twice round her throat. Everything was suddenly in motion again, as if a film had just been rethreaded through the projector, her books sliding onto the tabletop beside mine, the coat open to reveal her dress and the way it conformed to her, and then the chair beside me pulling out and the girl—who
was
she?—perching at the edge of it. And then it came to me. “You're Iris,” I said.

She was giving me her full-lipped smile, the smile that borrows some of the juice from her eyes and runs off the same hidden power source. “Iris McAuliffe, Tommy's little sister. But you knew that.”

“I did, yes. Of course I did. My mother—I mean, she, and then I saw you around campus, of course—”

“I hear you're engaged.”

I didn't know what to say to this—I certainly wouldn't want it getting back to my mother in any way, shape or form—so I dipped my head and took a sip of coffee.

Iris's smile faded. “She's very pretty,” she murmured. “Laura Feeney.”

“Yes,” I said, my gaze fixed on the cup. “But I'm not really—we're not …” I looked up at her. Off on the periphery of my vision the woman at the cash register rang up a coffee and cruller as if she were
moving underwater, and I saw the balding head and narrow shoulders of my literature professor, his coat dusted with snow. “That is, it was a pretense, you know. For the marriage course.”

I watched her grapple with this ever so briefly before the smile came back. “You mean, you—faked it? Just to—? God,” she said, and she let her posture go, slouching back in the seat, all limbs and jangling, nervous hands, “I hear it was really
dirty
…”

I took exams, wrote papers (“Duality in John Donne's Love Poems”; “Malinowski's Melanesia”), took a bus home to Michigan City for Christmas break and gave my mother a set of bath oils and scented soaps carved in the shape of fishes and mermaids. Some of my old high school friends came round—Tommy McAuliffe, in particular, who was now assistant manager at the grocery—and what a surprise that he'd thought to bring his kid sister Iris along, and did I know that she was a sophomore at IU now? There she was, standing on the doorstep beside him, and though I barely knew her I began to appreciate that here was the kind of girl who understood what she wanted and always got it—always, no matter what. I told Tommy I'd just seen her on campus—on the day of the snowfall, wasn't it?—while she looked on with her big ever-widening sea-struck eyes as if she'd forgotten all about it. We ate pfefferneuse cookies in front of the fireplace and sneaked drinks of brandy every time my mother went back out to the kitchen to check on her pies. Just before New Year's I thought of asking Iris to the pictures or maybe to go skating—on a date, that is—but I never got around to it. Then I was back at school and the days closed down on the bleak dark kernel of mid-January.

One night I was at the library, reshelving books in the second-floor stacks, when I glanced up at the aisle directly across from me and there was Prok—Dr. Kinsey—down on one knee, scanning the titles on the bottom shelf. He was a tumult of motion, grasping the spine of one book or another and at the same time shoving it back in place, all the while scooting back and forth on the fulcrum of his knee. It was strange to see him there—or not strange so much as unexpected—and I froze up for a moment. I didn't know what to do—should I say hello, ignore him, grab an armload of books and duck round the corner? Even if I did
say hello, would he remember me? He had hundreds of students, and though he'd conducted private interviews—like mine—with all of them, or practically all of them, how could he be expected to recall any one individual? I watched him out of the corner of my eye. He seemed to be muttering to himself—was it a call number he was repeating?—and then he found what he was looking for, slipped it from the shelf and sprang to his feet, all in one motion. That was when he brought his eyes forward and saw me there.

It took a moment. I watched his neutral expression broaden into recognition, and then he came down the aisle and extended his hand. “Milk,” he said, “well, hello. Good to see you.”

“Hello, sir. I'm—I didn't think you'd remember me, what with all your, well, students—”

“Don't be foolish. Of course I remember you. John Milk, out of Michigan City, born October two, nineteen eighteen.” He gave me a smile, one of his patented ones, pulling his lip back from his upper teeth and letting the two vertical laugh lines tug at his jowls so that his whole face opened up in a kind of riotous glee. “Five foot ten, one hundred eighty pounds. But you haven't lost any weight, have you?”

“Hardly,” I said, my smile a weak imitation of his, and I was thinking of those other measurements, the ones I'd inscribed on a postcard and sent him in the mail. And beyond that, my secrets, and my shame, and all it implied. “My mother's cooking, you know. Over the holidays.”

“Yes,” he said, “yes, yes, of course. Nothing like a mother's cooking, eh?” He was still smiling, smiling even wider now, if that was possible. “Or a mother's love, for that matter.”

I had to agree. I nodded my head in affirmation, and then the moment detached itself and hung there, lit from above with the faint gilding of the electric lights. I became aware of the muted stirring of library patrons among the stacks, a book dropped somewhere, a whisper.

“You're working here, I presume?”

I told him I was, though they'd cut my hours recently and I could barely make ends meet. “Reshelving, mostly. Once we close the doors, I sweep up, empty the wastebaskets, make sure everything's in order.”

He was standing there watching me, rocking up off the balls of his
feet and back again. I couldn't help glancing at the title of the book:
Sexual Life in Ancient Greece,
by Hans Licht. “Late nights, eh? Isn't that a bit tough on your studies?”

I shrugged. “We all do the best we can.”

He was silent a moment, as if he were deciding something, his eyes all the while fixed on mine. “Do you know, Milk—John,” he said softly, almost musingly, “I have a garden out at my place. Mrs. Kinsey and I do. Clara, that is. In season, it's the pride of Bloomington, a regular botanical garden on two and a half fertile acres—I grow daylilies, irises, we're planning a lily pond. You should see it, you really should.”

I wasn't following him. I'd been keeping late hours and I was pretty well exhausted. For lack of a better option, I gave him my fawning student look.

“What I mean is, I've been thinking for some time of hiring somebody to help me with it—of course, it's nothing but husks and frozen earth at this juncture—but in the spring, well, that's when we'll really bring it to life. And until then—and beyond that, in addition, as well—we're going to need some help in the biology library. What do you say?”

A week later I was working in Biology Hall, with expanded hours and no late nights. The biology collection was considerably smaller than that of the main library and the patronage proportionately reduced in size, so that I found I had more time to myself at work, time I could apply fruitfully to my own studies (and to be honest, to daydreaming—I spent a disproportionate amount of time that semester staring out into the intermediate distance, as if all the answers I needed in life were written there in a very cramped and faint script). I didn't see much of Prok—he kept to himself for the most part, in his office on the second floor—and as the sex survey was then in its incipient stages, he didn't yet need anyone to help him with the interviewing or tabulating of results. He was, as you no doubt know, one of the world's leading authorities on Cynipids—gall wasps—and he was still at that time busy collecting galls from oak trees all over the country, employing his assistants (three undergraduate women) exclusively in helping to record his measurements of individual wasps and mount them in the Schmitt
boxes reserved for them. Taxonomy—that was his forte, both as an entomologist and a compiler of human sexual practices.

At any rate, the job was something of a plum for me, and for the first week or two I snapped out of the funk that seemed to have descended on me, exhilarated by the free nights and the extra change in my pocket. I went bowling with Paul and his girlfriend Betsy, and then insisted on treating them to cheeseburgers and I don't know how many pitchers of beer after Paul took me aside and told me they wanted me to be the first to know they were engaged to be married. The jukebox played “Oh, Johnny” over and over, Betsy kept saying, “You're next, John-Johnny-John, you're next,” and I barely flinched when Laura Feeney and Jim Willard sauntered in and took a booth in the back. We stayed up late that night, Paul and I, pouring out water glasses of bourbon smuggled upstairs right under Mrs. Lorber's nose, and though I overslept the next morning, I woke feeling glad for Paul and hopeful for myself.

Unfortunately, the mood didn't last. It struck me that my room-mate—a man of my own age and inclinations—was going to be married and that he already had a job lined up with his father's feed-distribution company, while I had to look at myself in the mirror every morning and admit I had no idea what was to become of me. I was at loose ends, as most seniors are, I suppose, worrying over my course work and facing June graduation without a single notion of what I was going to do in life—or even what I was going to do for gainful employment. All I knew was that I'd rather be sent to Devil's Island as underassistant to the assistant chef in the soup kitchen than go back to Michigan City and another summer with my mother. And as if that weren't enough, looming over it all was the prospect of war in Europe and talk of conscription.

So I was feeling blue, the weather going from bad to worse, Paul always off with Betsy somewhere till I'd begun to forget what he looked like, and the books on the library cart growing progressively heavier (I felt like a bibliographic Sisyphus, the task unending, each shelved volume replaced by another and yet another). And then two things happened. The first had to do with Iris, as you might have guessed. Though
she was an English major, like me, she showed up at the biology library one afternoon in desperate need of information on the life cycle of the
Plasmodium
parasite for a required introductory course in biology she was taking from Professor Kinsey himself. “We have to cite at least three scientific journals,” she told me, still breathless from her dash across campus in the face of a steady wind, “and I have to write it all up by tomorrow, for class.”

I'd been filling out catalogue cards for the new arrivals when she came up to the desk and took me by surprise. Before I could even think to smile, a hand went to my hair, smoothing it down where the rebellious curl was forever dangling. “I'd be—sure,” I said. “I'm not really—it's the librarian you want, Mr. Elster, but I could—I'll do my best, certainly.” And then I found my smile. “For you, of course.”

Her voice went soft. “I wouldn't want to be any trouble—I'm sure you have better things to do. But if you could just point me in the right direction—”

I got to my feet and shot a glance across the room to where Elster sat at his own desk, partly obscured by a varnished deal partition. He was a short, thin, embittered little man, not yet out of his twenties, and, as he was quick to remind me, it wasn't my job to take queries or assist the patrons—that was his function, and he guarded it jealously. For the moment, however, he seemed oblivious, absorbed in paperwork—or one of the crossword puzzles he was forever fussing over. When I responded, my voice was soft too—this
was
a library, after all, and there was no reason to draw attention to ourselves. “Current issues of the journals are alphabetized along the back wall, but what you'll want are the indexes, and they're—well, why don't I just get them for you?”

She was smiling up at me as if I'd already found the relevant citations, written them up for her and submitted the paper all on my own, and her eyes twitched and roved over my face in a way we would later identify as one of the subliminal signals of availability (readiness to engage in sexual activities, that is, in kissing, petting, genital manipulation and coitus), though at the time I could only think I must have something caught between my teeth or that my hair needed another dose of
Wildroot. “Have you heard from your mother?” she asked, abruptly changing the subject.

“Yes,” I said. “Or, no. I mean, why do you ask, has something—?”

“Oh, no, no,” she said, “no. I just wanted to know how she was doing, because I never did get to thank her for that lovely afternoon and her hospitality. And yours. We had a really memorable time, Tommy and I.”

“They were terrific cookies,” I said stupidly. “My grandmother's recipe, actually. They're a family tradition.”

For a moment I thought she wasn't going to respond and I stood there self-consciously at the desk, fumbling in my mind for the key to the next level of small talk—her mother, shouldn't I ask about her mother, though I barely knew her?—but then she said something so softly I didn't quite catch it.

“What?”

“They were, I said.” I must have looked puzzled, because she added, “The cookies. I was agreeing with you.”

I floundered over this for a minute—as I told you, I wasn't much with regard to small talk, not unless I had a couple of drinks in me, anyway—and then she let out a giggle and I joined her, my eyes flicking nervously to Elster's desk and back. “Well,” I said finally, “why don't you find a seat and I'll, well—the indexes …”

She settled herself at one of the big yellow-oak tables, laying out her purse, her book bag, her gloves, coat and hat as if they were on display at a rummage sale, and I brought her the journal indexes that might have been most promising, then retreated to my work at the main desk. The room was warm—overheated, actually—and smelled, as most libraries do, of dust and floor wax and the furtive bodily odors of the patrons. A shaft of winter sunlight colored the wall behind her. It was very still. I tried to focus on what I was doing, writing out the entries in my neatest block printing, but I kept looking up at her, amazed at the vitality she brought to that sterile atmosphere. She was wearing a long skirt, dark stockings, a tight wool sweater that showed off her contours and complemented her eyes, and I watched her head dip and rise over her work—first the journal, then her notebook, and back again—as if she
were some exotic wild creature dipping water from a stream in a pastoral tale.