The Inner Circle (24 page)

“I'm sure he is,” Corcoran said, giving Prok his soberest look.

“A firm footing,” Prok repeated, all business now. “And I certainly hope you won't keep us in suspense, Corcoran, because the project requires data, and we do have several other candidates lined up at this juncture, quite capable men, like yourself.” If there had been an air of festivity to this point, Prok had erased it. I could see that he was impatient with the whole process, eager to get on with the musicale—to get it over with, though he treasured these evenings as a way of giving himself
over to the emotional side he so rigidly suppressed in his workaday life—and beyond that to get Corcoran hired, trained and out in the field. He looked at us shaking hands and sizing each other up, and he saw nothing more than data, data accumulating at the rate of fifty percent more rapidly.

Mac went round with a tray to collect our glasses, and we took our seats. Prok insisted on ushering Iris and me into the front row beside Mac, and I had a brief moment of panic over the seating arrangements before opting to interpose myself between the two women, who immediately leaned across me and exchanged a birdlike flurry of conversation, not a word of which I caught. Corcoran, as guest of honor, was seated in the front row along with us, taking his place beside Iris. The room quieted. Professor Bouchon's wife returned from the lavatory and ducked into her seat at the end of the second row, while another woman (middle-aged and doughy, someone I didn't recognize, or at least didn't remember) pulled out her knitting and began counting stitches with a mute movement of her lips. There was the fragment of a moment during which Prok turned away to check the gramophone and I was able to lean across my wife and make a hurried introduction—“Iris,” I whispered, “this is Purvis Corcoran; Corcoran, my wife, Iris”—and then Prok started his lecture.

“This evening we have a real treat for you—two versions of Gustav Mahler's exquisite and powerful Symphony Number Four in G Major, the one conducted by the immortal Leopold Stokowski of the Philadelphia Orchestra (though some of you will no doubt remember him from his early days with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra), and the other by his protégé and successor, Eugene Ormandy, the new kid on the block, as it were.” Prok went on, in full lecture mode, to give a brief biography of Mahler, a discography of known recordings, both in the United States and Europe, and then a summary of the contrasting styles of Stokowski and Ormandy. “Now,” he said, his fleshy face and oversized head hanging there before us like a great ripening fruit, legs slightly spread for balance, right hand gesturing, “I intend to play alternate movements, beginning with the Stokowski for the first and third and Ormandy for
the second and then the fourth and final movement, but I will then conclude by playing that final movement as well in the Stokowski version. Now, of course, that movement contains the stirring soprano solo, ‘Wir geniessen die himmlischen Freuden' as sung by”—and here he named two singers I'd never heard of—“but I don't want you to be distracted by the distinctions in vocal coloration, but rather attune yourselves to the tempo work of the respective conductors, all right?”

There was a vague murmur of assent, which seemed to satisfy him. Prok clasped his hands in front of him briefly, in what might have been prayer, or, more likely, conciliation, then turned away from us to start the record. We heard the needle hit the vinyl surface with a jolt, a blast of static, three distinct pops, and suddenly Mahler was there with us, at full volume.

We lingered for half an hour or so once the concert was concluded (again, the evening was unusual in that Prok generally scheduled an intermission and finished up his program with a few light pieces, but not tonight), and stood around in little groups, sipping coffee and remarking on the music and the clear differences between the two conductors, at least when those differences were made apparent in a demonstration such as this. I had entertained fond hopes of spiriting Iris off somewhere in the Nash, but it was late and there was work in the morning for me and classes for her, so I just stood there stupidly with a coffee cup in one hand and a ladyfinger in the other while Professor and Mrs. Bouchon boxed me into a corner and made appreciative noises about the music we'd just heard. Since I knew nothing about classical music, other than what I'd just picked up from Prok's remarks, I essentially just stood there listening while Professor Bouchon reminisced about having seen Stokowski in action once—it was in either Philadelphia or New York, he couldn't be sure which—and his wife pointed out that thanks to the Germans her family's piano had been destroyed, and all her joy in music along with it.

Across the room, Iris and Corcoran were getting acquainted. Corcoran had somehow managed to talk Prok into bringing out his tray of liqueurs again, now that the time was appropriate, and I watched as he
leaned over to pour something the color of urine into her coffee. She hadn't enjoyed the concert. That much I was sure of. She always claimed that Prok's clinical dissection of the pieces took all the spirit out of them, and as the years went on she would come to view these musical evenings more and more as a duty than a pleasure. But on this night, as she stood there with Corcoran in the shadow of the far corner, framed by the slick black architecture of Prok's furniture and the dark stain of the walls, she seemed to be having a high time of it.

How did I know? I could tell from the way she held herself—and from her face. I knew that face better than I knew my own, and I could see by the way she widened her eyes and pursed her lips as he spoke (and what was he telling her, what was so fascinating?) that she was fully engaged. And, too, there was a way she had of ducking her head to one side as she laughed, tugging unconsciously at her right earring and shifting her weight from foot to foot as if the floor had caught fire beneath her. Body language. I'd become a student of it, of necessity. Was I jealous? Not in the least, not yet, anyway. Why should I have been? I loved her and she loved me, there was no doubt about that—and there never has been, not to this day—and all the rest, as Prok had taught me, was nothing more than a function of the body, physiology at its root, stimulus and response. I listened politely to Professor and Mrs. Bouchon, nodding and smiling when it seemed appropriate, and then I excused myself and crossed the room to collect my wife, thank our hosts and head out into the night.

The walk home was—well, I suppose you'd call it stimulating. Not in a sexual sense (as I said, we didn't have the luxury of being sexually stimulated that night), but in an emotional one. For the first minute or so we fussed with the buttons of our coats, pulled our collars up against the breeze and leaned into each other as we hurried down the street, not a word exchanged between us. There was a premonitory scent of winter on the air, of the cold rock-strewn Canadian wastes and the stiffened fur of all the hundreds of thousands of beasts creeping across the tundra up there, and the sky was open overhead, the stars splashed from horizon
to horizon like the white blood of the night. I felt like going out somewhere for a nightcap, but I knew Iris would refuse—absurdly, though she was a married woman, she was still under jurisdiction of the dorm, the RA and curfew—so I found myself instead saying the first thing that came into my head. “So what about Corcoran,” I said. “What did you think of him?”

Her head was down, her shoulders slumped, one hand at the collar of her coat. She was moving along at a brisk pace—we both were. “Oh, I don't know,” she said. “He seems all right.”

“All right? Is that all?”

My hands were cold—I hadn't thought of gloves; it was too early in the season—and I'd looped my arm through hers and forced my right hand into the pocket of my coat. The left I stuffed down into my trousers pocket and kept it there, though I found it awkward to walk off-balance like that. Leaves scuttered before us. There was the sound of a car backfiring up the street behind us, where the other guests were leaving Prok's party. “I don't know,” she said again. “Persuasive, I guess.”

“Persuasive? What do you mean?”

“He's a good talker. Smooth. He'll make a sterling interviewer, I'm sure.”

“Do I detect a note of sarcasm?”

She turned her face to me, a cold pale oval of reflected light, then looked down at her feet again. “No, not at all,” she said. “I'm just being practical. He's a perfect fit. He'll take your place without so much as a ripple—”

“He's not going to take my place.”

“Did you see the way Kinsey looked at him?”

I was shivering, I suppose, my coat too light, the wind knifing at my trousers. A chill went through me. I saw Corcoran's face then, saw Prok hovering over him throughout the evening, as proud as if he'd given birth to him himself, and I knew in that moment what there was between them—the same thing Prok and I had together. I couldn't help myself. I was angry suddenly. Jealous. “So what?” I said. “What's it to me? I keep telling you, we need more hands.”

Iris said nothing. The leaves crunched underfoot. After a moment, she said: “But he
is
persuasive.”

“Really,” I said, and I wasn't thinking, not at all. “What did he persuade you of? I'd like to know. I really would.”

We were at the end of the block now, turning right, toward campus. The wind came naked round the corner. A pair of automobiles, one following so closely on the other they might have been tethered, slammed over a branch the wind had thrust in the street and the sound was like a burst of sudden explosions. “To give my history,” Iris said, but I thought I hadn't heard her right, and so I said, “What?”

“To give my history. To Kinsey.”

I was dumbfounded. I'd been nagging her for months, and here this new man—this persuader, this
Corcoran
—had won her over in what, ten minutes' time? “Good,” I said, numb all over. “That's good. But how—I mean, why listen to him if your own, well, your own husband can't convince you, and after all this time?”

The taillights of the two cars receded up ahead of us. They both turned right on Atwater, in front of the campus, and were gone. “He just seemed to make sense,” she said, “that was all. For the good of the project, like you've been saying. His wife's already arranged to give her history on your next trip to South Bend—maybe you'll get to take it, John, and wouldn't that be just swell, keep it in the family, huh?”

“And so, what's your point? I see nothing wrong with—”

“Kinsey said he'd get him a deferment.”

We walked on in silence. Of course Prok would get him a deferment—he was going to get me a deferment too, for the sake of the project, and it had absolutely nothing to do with whether our wives gave their histories or not. I should have been gratified, Corcoran's first day on the scene and he'd convinced Iris to join in for the sake of team spirit, and that was wonderful, terrific news, hallelujah to the heavens, but I wasn't gratified, I was rankled. “That has nothing to do with it,” I said.

The campus loomed up before us, the odd office lit in a random grid against the backdrop of the night, the frost-killed lawn underfoot, more
leaves and the advancing crunch of our footsteps. “What about Mac?” she said then.

“Mac?” I echoed. I wasn't following her. “What do you mean,
Mac
? Was Mac in on it? Did she persuade you too—or help persuade you? Is that what you mean?”

“No. Mac as a wife. As part of the inner circle. Now it'll be three husbands and three wives—
if
I give my history to Prok, that is, and
if
he goes to the draft board.”

“He will,” I said, simply to say something, to keep it going. “He has, I mean. He's trying his best.”

“But what about Mac?” she repeated. We were crossing the quad to the women's dorm, figures gathered there by the vault of the door, couples in the shadows, the rooms overhead radiating light as if all the life of the campus were concentrated there. And it was. At least at this hour.

“What about her?”

Iris suddenly jerked her arm away from my mine and quickened her pace. “You slept with her,” she said. “She told me all about it.” The light from the high bank of windows was on her face now, on her hair, silvering the shoulders of her coat and the dark crenellations of her hat. “She told me,” she said, and there was a catch in her voice, an amalgam of rage and despair strangling the words in her throat, “and you lied to me.” She swung round suddenly and planted herself right there in front of the building. “You,” she said. “You, John Milk. My husband.”

I didn't know what to say. It would have required a speech, would have required hours, days, would have required a whole heterogeneous philosophy delivered and debated point by excruciating point, and we had ten diminishing minutes till curfew. “I didn't want to, to
surprise
you,” I said, and that was the best I could come up with. “Or, or hurt you, if, I mean, if—”

“Liar.” She spat it at me. Heads turned. The lovers in the shadows came out of their clinches for one hard instant. “You're a liar,” she said, then swung round, went up the steps and into the arena of light even as I stood there and watched her jerk open the door and slam it behind her.

A week later, Iris made an appointment with Prok and gave up her history. As I remember it, there was an unusual amount of rain that fall, and then an early snow. Everything was locked in, the weeks seemed to conflate, and then Corcoran sent word that he was accepting Prok's offer and the Japanese climbed into their planes in the hour before dawn and descended on Pearl Harbor. And nothing was ever the same again.

Given what I've already revealed about myself, I suppose it will come as no surprise if I tell you that the first chance I got (when Prok was away on his own, lecturing to a civic group in Elkhart, and, incidentally, taking Violet Corcoran's sex history in neighboring South Bend), I went straight to the files to look up two histories of special interest—Corcoran's and my wife's. Can I tell you too that I didn't feel the slightest guilt or compunction? Not this time. Not anymore. Prok was away, and it was only his intervention that would have stopped me, and nothing short of it. I broke Prok's new ironclad code within the hour, pulled the files and spread them out side by side on the desk before me.