by T. C. Boyle
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.
9
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.
None of that seemed to matter (or it mattered, but we fell all over ourselves trying to assure each other it didn’t), because we were together, just the two of us, for the first time in our lives. We made an erotic playground of the big white bed in the hotel room in Niagara Falls and engaged in activities—fellatio, cunnilingus, rear entry—I’d been too timid, and too hurried, to try with Mac. Ironically, though we didn’t know it at the time, the two weeks of our honeymoon would be our last opportunity to experience that sort of freedom for almost a full year. That is, when we got back to Bloomington, Iris returned to her dorm—where she would stay on for summer session in the hope of accelerating her matriculation—and I to Mrs. Lorber’s. Though we spent every available minute tramping through apartments, spare rooms, converted basements and various outbuildings posing as rental units, we found nothing we could both tolerate and afford, and so, though we were married now and though I was an adult with a full-time job, we went back to the blanket in the park and the backseat of Prok’s antiquated Nash (not that Prok was unsympathetic, but you have to understand that the lion’s share of the money for the project was at that time coming out of his own pocket—that is, from his earnings at IU and the royalties on his biology textbook—and it was all but impossible for me to expect him to raise my salary even by a few dollars a week).
In any case, Iris and I made do, as countless other separated couples had throughout the Depression, and we saved our money and painted vivid dreams of our first household as the summer imperceptibly coalesced with the fall and the news from abroad went from bad to worse. It was a strange, unsettling period, that interlude between our marriage and the war. On the one hand we were hopeful, and yet on the other, everything we did, even the simplest things, gave rise to doubt—why bother to put that extra dollar away, look after the condition of your teeth and your diet or dare to dream about your wife and an apartment and the future when the ax was poised to fall? A lot of men I knew despaired. Others just burned up all they had of energy and resources, day and night, carpe diem.
My own crisis came at the end of October, on a day when Prok and I had been in a jubilant mood over the correlations we were discovering between educational levels and number of sexual partners in adolescence (it was predictive, and that was the wonder of it, those who would not go on to college having a much wider and more complete range of sexual activity than those who would), and I remember feeling elated as I came through the door at Mrs. Lorber’s. I was looking forward to dinner with Iris, a picture show and then some mutually productive time spent in the backseat of the Nash, and when I saw the official-looking envelope sitting there atop the pile of circulars on the little table in the vestibule, it didn’t at first register on me. UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT, SELECTIVE SERVICE AGENCY, it read, OFFICIAL BUSINESS. I’m sure you’re familiar with the form of the thing, with the language that sounds so clinical it might have been describing the latest method of relaxing the bowels or the proper way to install a new condenser in your Zenith, and yet manages to rivet your attention all the same:
Greetings:
Having submitted yourself to a local board composed of your neighbors for the purpose of determining your availability for training and service in the land or naval forces of the United States, you are hereby notified that you have been selected …
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go—already the campus was beginning to teem with young men in uniform, already the girls were looking right through anybody in civvies and practically wrapping themselves in red, white and blue, and add to this the fervor that was building in all of us and my honest and true desire to go out and defend my country, to defend freedom and liberty and rescue all those besieged Britons from the terror of the Luftwaffe and the Albanians from the Italians and all the rest—but still, to come through the door on an otherwise tranquil afternoon and find the envelope there on top of the pile where Mrs. Lorber had no doubt left it after examining it from all angles and in every light available, was a shock. I was newly married, just getting started in a career, I had money in my pocket (not a lot, but money nonetheless) and an automobile at my disposal, and now I was going to have to start all over, with nothing. And in a strange place, among strangers. It wasn’t that I was afraid. I was too young and blandly healthy to dream even in my worst imaginings that I could be maimed, injured or even killed; that sort of thing didn’t happen to the individual—to me—but to some faceless member of the generality in the newsreel footage before the main feature came on. The problem was the uncertainty of it—of putting oneself in the hands of such an arbitrary and manifold organization as the United States Army and having to trust for the best.
I must have stood there in the vestibule for a good five minutes before the tramp of feet on the outside steps, closely followed by the violent wrenching open and then slamming of the front door, brought me out of it. Ezra Voorhees had just come in from class. Ezra was a student of business, or business as it applied to agriculture, that is, and his ambition was to improve production on his father’s poultry farm, with an eye to running it on his own someday. He was nineteen and more or less harmless, but he was loud and excitable, he’d chosen not to give up his sex history to the project (though I’d all but gone down on my knees and begged him) and he wasn’t overfussy about washing his clothes—or his person, for that matter. “John!” he cried, giving me a look of surprise, as if I were the last person he’d expected to see there in the vestibule of the house in which we shared a room. And then, snatching the letter from my hand: “What’s this? Oh, Jesus, Jesus. It’s your induction notice.”
I held my hand out stiffly, too numb to be irritated. He handed the letter back.
“You going to enlist?”
“Well, I—I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it.” I had a sudden vision of myself in uniform, erect and proud, my hair a perfect glaze cut crisply over the ears, the stiff-brimmed hat tucked under one arm, saluting. My mother would be proud. Iris would hate it. And Prok—Prok would be apoplectic.
“Enlistment’s the route to take, believe me. I’ve been talking with Dick Martone and some of the other guys—Dave Frears, for one—and
we were thinking about the Marine Corps, about enlisting, I mean. To get a jump on everybody.” Ezra was tall—two or three inches taller than I—and thick-bodied, but with a disproportionately small and oddly shaped head, the crown of which he began to scratch now in a leisurely, thoughtful way. “Enlist,” he said, “and you’re right in the thick of things, overseas, in France or Belgium—or Italy, Italy, where the real fighting’s going to be.”
I went to Iris first. We met in the Commons for dinner (beef roasted white, with a puddle of butterscotch-colored gravy, disheartened potatoes and peas that had been harvested and canned before the New Deal went into effect), and I waited till we were seated, till we’d buttered our bread and peppered our meat, before pushing the envelope across the table to her. I watched as she bent her head and absorbed the contents of the letter even before she’d finished ironing it out on the placemat in front of her. Her chin was trembling, and when she raised her head again her eyes had taken on a harrowing look. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “You can’t—isn’t Tommy enough for them?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re not going to go, are you?”
I shrugged. “What choice do I have?”
“But you’re married.”
Another shrug. “Lots of people are married—and how many of them got married in the last six months just to evade the draft? They don’t care about that in Washington. And the way it’s looking—well, Wilkie didn’t win the election, did he?”
She took hold of both my hands then, across the table, interlocked her fingers with mine and squeezed as if she wanted to crush them in her own. “I won’t let you go,” she said. “I won’t. It’s not our war. It has nothing to do with us.”
But of course she was wrong, as the whole country—even the most diehard America Firster—would know in less than two months when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. That night, though, with a cold wind scuttling leaves across campus and her hands locked in mine as students all around us sat gumming their overcooked beef and burying their heads in their textbooks or the funny papers or just laughing aloud in an excess of high spirits, it seemed as if the force of her words was enough: I won’t let you go. I won’t.
The next morning, I took the letter to Prok. He was in the office before me, as usual, head down, engaged with his work. I didn’t want to interrupt him, but he looked up and greeted me with a smile as I came in, and I calculated that this was as good a chance as any to give him the bad news. “Good morning, Prok,” I said, and already his eyes were dropping back to the page, but I forged on, if a bit awkwardly. “Prok,” I repeated, and his gaze lifted again, even as the smile vanished, “there’s something—well, I just wanted you to know, that, that, well, here,” and I handed him the notice.
He gave it a cursory glance, then rose to his feet, folded it carefully and handed it back. “I’ve been afraid of this for some time,” he said. For just a moment he looked defeated, the shadow of resignation flitting over his face, his jowls gone heavy, but then he squared his shoulders and let out a sharp burst of air, as if a teakettle had come on to boil. “Damn it,” he said, and this was as close to cursing as I’ve ever heard him come, before or since, “we’re going to fight this thing, even if we have to take it to the Secretary of War himself.” And then he paused a moment and gave me a questioning look. “Who is the Secretary of War anyway?”
I told him I didn’t know.
“That’s all right. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the research, and I wonder if any of these people”—and he let his hand rise and fall in a characteristic sweep, as if all the politicians, the forces of the Army and Navy, as well as Hitler and his Wehrmacht were no more than errant students who’d missed a key question on a biology exam—“if any of them have even the slightest idea of what it takes to train an interviewer? No,” he snapped, answering his own question, “I doubt if they do. But you know, John, don’t you?”
I nodded. We’d sat together through hundreds of hours of training, Prok quizzing me unceasingly, jumping up impatiently to snatch the position sheet out of my hand and make his own corrections, looking over my shoulder for hours at a time, putting me through mock interviews—I must have taken his history fifty times—and sitting perched behind me like a wooden Indian as I conducted my first live interviews. As I’ve said, he was a perfectionist, and he knew no other way to do anything but the Kinsey way, and whether that can be considered a flaw or not, I can’t really say. His method worked, no question about it, and worked in an arena where so many before him—Krafft-Ebing, Hamilton, Moll, Freud, Havelock Ellis—had fallen short. But he had a point: the training was not to be undertaken lightly. And certainly you had to have a certain type of personality—the personality of a recruit, I suppose, or maybe even a disciple—to undergo it in the first place.
He’d come out from behind the desk now and he was striding back and forth across the confined space of the office, hands pinned behind his back. “No,” he said finally, drawing himself up before me so that our faces were no more than inches apart, “no, I simply will not allow it.”
And so, Prok began a vigorous campaign to keep me at his side throughout the war, though it may be interesting to note that he never really consulted me on the matter, but operated on the assumption that I was one hundred percent in accord with him, that sex research—the project and the advancement of human knowledge—was more vital to the welfare of the country than prosecuting a war on the European Front or in the Pacific. He never pressured me. Never knew, in fact, that I spent long hours propped on the edge of the bed in my room with Ezra and Dick Martone and some of the others, debating the merits of joining up, of doing my part, of sacrificing everything for the cause of freedom. In the end, I acquiesced. That is, I did nothing, and let events take their course.
In the meanwhile, even as Prok was filing an appeal and soliciting letters on my behalf from President Wells, Robert M. Yerkes of the National Research Council and other purveyors of influence and power, he was at the same time very seriously contemplating the hire of another researcher to increase our strength. That researcher, as most people will know, was Purvis Corcoran. Corcoran, as I’ve said, was a smoothly handsome and outgoing young psychologist and sexual wunderkind, who had taken his degree some ten years earlier at IU, completed his Master’s in Chicago and was working incrementally toward his Ph.D. He was married—his wife’s name was Violet—and the father of two small children, both girls. Prok first met him after lecturing to a group of social workers (“the most prudish and the most restricted in their understanding of sex you could find”) in South Bend, while I was away on my honeymoon. Corcoran volunteered to give his history—which was extensive to say the least, both in heterosexual and H-experience—and Prok was impressed by him. So impressed, in fact, that he invited him to Bloomington, to visit the Institute (as we were now officially calling our cramped quarters) and interview for a position with us.
When I mentioned it to Iris—that Prok, in anticipation of new grants both from the NRC and the Rockefeller Foundation, was bringing Corcoran to town for a job interview—she was suspicious of the whole thing. “Can’t you see he’s trying to replace you,” she said. “He’s letting you go, leaving us high and dry, and I’ll be here all alone and you’ll be God knows where—in some desert in Africa fighting Rommel or whoever he is, some goose-stepping Prussian with a gun and bayonet.”
We were in the Nash, parked in our favorite spot overlooking the black serene waters of a quarry and its ghostly monuments of rock, having a post-coital smoke. “You’re wrong,” I told her. “It has nothing to do with the draft or the war or anything else—we need more hands, that’s all.”
She was silent a moment. “You know,” she said, “he’s been making overtures—”
“Who?”
“Your boss.”
“Prok?”
It was very dark in the car, but I could just make out the nod of her head. We were naked and the smell of her sex was all over me
. I put an arm round her, drew her to me and began fondling her breasts, but she pushed away. “Yes, Prok,” she hissed. “He’s—when I was waiting for you the other day? He told me he was going to do everything he could to get you off, letters to the draft board back home, even a personal appeal if it comes to that—you know, because the research is vital to the national security and all the rest, and I said I was grateful. But it was more than that. I guess I just about got down and kissed his feet, because you know how strongly I feel about this—you are not going to war, not while I’m alive, John Milk—and he gave me a look, and I know you think he’s God Himself come down from on high with all the angels singing in rapture, but it was the coldest look anybody’s ever given me in my life. And you know what he said then, as if it were some kind of bargain we were entering into? He said, ‘We don’t have your history yet, Iris, do we?’”
