The Inner Circle (26 page)

Of course, much of what I've related here is what I've gleaned from my personal knowledge of the man—we've been colleagues for fourteen years now and certainly we've kept no secrets from each other—and yet the basic information was there in the files when on that December morning a week before the uncertain Christmas of 1941 I violated Prok's proscription for the second (but not the last) time. I can remember sitting there among the dried-out galls, my heart racing as I scanned the file of my prospective colleague, “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” banging around in my head, the fading tramp of students' feet trailing down the corridor. How could I ever hope to match him?—that was what I was thinking. I was sure suddenly that I'd been fooling myself all along, that Iris had been right—Corcoran was here to displace me, here to take my desk and my salary and my interviews, to unseat me in the hierarchy of the project I'd been the first to sign on for. A kind of panic took hold of me and I had to get up and pace round the room to calm myself. I made a mental list of my own virtues—loyalty, affability, a knowledge of the research second only to Prok's, my seniority on the job—and yet, no matter how I turned it over in my mind, I had to admit that Corcoran was my superior in every way, at least on paper: eight years older, the father of two, holder of an advanced degree and so high a rater he'd wind up at the top of any number of our graphs and charts. Guilty now—self-accused and suddenly ashamed—I slipped the file back in the cabinet and turned the key in the lock.

We took possession of the apartment on New Year's Day. It was far from ideal—ten footsore blocks from campus in what must have been the shabbiest neighborhood in Bloomington and damp as a tomb because it was situated at the bottom of a hill on land reclaimed from a marsh, three rooms with a bath and a perdurable smell of the old lady who'd died there (Mrs. Lorber's elder sister, if that tells you anything of its provenance)—but it was ours, and Iris, with her genius for interior design, soon transformed the place. She strung a bead curtain to separate the kitchen from the sitting room, stripped the faded Victorian wallpaper and replaced it with an almost austere modern design in beige with an overlay of gray-and-white interlocking rectangles, then, after deliberating all of one afternoon and into the evening when I got home from work, directed me in hanging the four framed woodcuts depicting scenes from
Wuthering Heights
she'd found in the back corner of a secondhand shop. Our sofa and armchair came courtesy of the want ads in the back of the paper, and Prok was kind enough to lend us the Nash to serve as moving van and Ezra helped me maneuver the things through the narrow front door. There was the bed—a double, made of painted iron and dug out of an antiques shop at a basement-bargain price—and the mattress, marked “just like new,” to fit it, a bookcase to lend stateliness to the barren wall across from the sofa, my radio, an assortment of blue glass vases featuring various arrangements of dried flowers and an aspidistra Mac gave us, along with a set of pots and saucepans, as a wedding present. And Prok had been more than generous too, with a Christmas bonus that came at just the right time and the promise of a five-dollar raise to fifty dollars a week beginning the first of the year.

We had sandwiches out of a brown paper sack that first night, sitting cross-legged on the mattress we laid out on the floor because we were too exhausted to set up the bed, and we passed a quart of beer back and forth till it was gone, and then we opened another. I had the radio on—Benny Goodman playing “Don't Be That Way,” or maybe it was something softer, sweeter—and I lay back against the soon-to-be-stripped
wall with Iris in my arms and just held her. The smell of her hair, newly washed in our very own bathroom sink, was the smell of a new beginning, the beginning of life on our own, adult life, together and inseparable. I can't describe the peace I felt that night. We must have lain there on our new mattress, admiring our new walls, our new front door and the new bead curtains till past midnight, the beer setting us gently adrift, the music swaying softly beneath it, borne up on its own currents. Mrs. Lorber and the various RAs were no longer a part of our universe. Ezra could bathe or not as he pleased and it was nothing to me. The backseat of the Nash was a thing of the past. We had our own place now—our own home—and we could do anything we wanted, anytime, day or night, and never have to worry about the headlights of another car pulling up behind us or the fumes from the exhaust or the night that lay round us like hostile territory.

When I came in from work the next day, Iris had her hair up in a kerchief and she was wearing an apron. The apartment smelled powerfully of something other than Mrs. Lorber's deceased sister and the ineradicable ribbons of black mold that traced the lines of the fixtures she'd left behind. “What is that, Iris?” I asked, swishing through the bead curtains. “It smells, well, good—or different.”

The kitchen table, layered with coats of ancient kelly-green paint and unstable on its legs, was a scene of devastation. Every plate we owned—used plates, chipped variously round the edges, a legacy of my mother and the trove of our basement in Michigan City—was either crusted with or dripping something. There was a scattering of flour, eggshells, sugar, mounds of potato and apple peelings, what looked to be ketchup and Worcestershire, and spices—marjoram figured prominently in the display, as I recall.

She gave me her smile, two arms conjoined round my neck, and a kiss. “Meat loaf,” she said, “with scalloped potatoes, string beans and apple pan dowdy. The meat loaf and potatoes come courtesy of my mother, and yes, I was standing right beside her in the kitchen all those years in high school, learning how to be a good little housekeeper, thank you very much.” She was grinning, pleased with herself, and so what if
the place was a mess—we'd just moved in and she was cooking for me. “As for the apple pan dowdy, I found a recipe in a magazine at the library, and I didn't have a pencil so I tore it out.” And there it was, a square of glossy paper, Scotch-taped to the cabinet over the stove.

I must have given her a look (she knew full well that as a former librarian I would disapprove of her defacing library materials of any kind, even ephemera like magazines), because she added, “Don't pout, John. The IU library isn't going to miss one little recipe—or do you think all the coeds are lined up at the checkout desk right now, sobbing over the apple pan dowdy that might have been?”

Inside the pocket of my overcoat, which I hadn't yet removed, was a bottle of bourbon. I thought this might be an auspicious time to draw it out and set it amid the clutter on the table. “A little celebration,” I said, lifting two glasses down from the shelf and pouring us each a drink. “To you,” I said, and we clinked glasses even as she corrected me: “To us!”

Can I say that that meal was the best I've ever had? Because it isn't just the quality of the ingredients or the expertise of the preparation or the elegance of the surroundings that make for a great meal, but the mood of the diner—in this case a mood elevated by the situation, by the bourbon, by
love
—that can make every bite seem as sensual as a kiss. Apple pan dowdy. Meat loaf. I ate like a man who'd been shipwrecked for a month, ate till I could eat no more, then killed the bottle of bourbon—it was a fifth and it got both of us pretty giddy, I'm afraid—and fell on my wife like that same shipwrecked sailor, or maybe his admiral.

That was in the beginning, and that was what our life was like through every day and every night. It's called happiness, and we had it in spades, as they say. The war loomed over us, of course, as it loomed over everyone in those days and months after Pearl Harbor, but Prok was good to his word and did finally manage to get me an occupational deferment, using the full arsenal of his rhetoric and all the weight of his position to bring the draft board around to the view that our research was crucial to the war effort. For her part, Iris was determined to finish out her final semester and get her degree in elementary education, but she did take a part-time job at the five-and-dime, and the money she
earned there, along with the raise Prok gave me, helped lend us as much a sense of security as anyone could expect under the circumstances. Which is not to say that we didn't have to budget pretty strictly, and I cut back on smoking, we did our drinking at home and rationed ourselves to one picture a week.

Was it all idyllic? No, of course not. There was still the unresolved business of our relationship with Prok and Mac—they invited us for dinner and musicales on a regular basis, and, of course, I traveled with Prok much more than Iris would have liked, a sore point that seemed to get sorer and sorer as the years went on—and beyond that there was Iris's growing disenchantment with the project itself. “We're at war,” she would say. “The whole world hangs in the balance, and you're out there somewhere in the hinterlands measuring orgasms—I mean, doesn't that strike you as trivial?”

“But you never wanted me to go, don't you remember?” I countered. “You were the one. You were adamant—you could have been Lindbergh's speechwriter, for Christ's sake. ‘I will not let you go,' you said. ‘It's not our war.' Remember?”

She had a way of curling her underlip, as if she'd just been poisoned, had just set down the vial and was about to turn on her perpetrator—me—with all the moribund strength left in her. “Don't give me that crap, John. I might have been against it, but that was before the Japs came into it. Now it's almost as if, as if—I don't want to say it, John. But
orgasms.
I mean, what could be more ridiculous?”

I remember a night from that period, sometime in the winter or early spring, when we had our first dinner party, and Ezra and Dick Martone, who were quitting school to enlist, came to the apartment with two girls and three tall bulging sacks of beer—and gin, which was Dick's drink of choice. Gin, in a silver bottle, with a seltzer squirter full of tonic. The girls were plain, with dead-looking hair and acne scars—they were sisters, I think, maybe even twins—and their chief attraction, aside from the lushness of their figures, was their unabashed carnality. They talked dirty, drank like sponges and had “given out” to half the men on campus. What they especially liked, being patriotic girls, was uniforms.

At any rate, we had a going-away party and Iris made a leg of lamb with pan-roasted potatoes, carrots and creamed corn, hot-from-the-oven biscuits, and a homemade peach cobbler for dessert. I spent the afternoon—it was a Saturday—running a carpet sweeper over the rug, peeling vegetables and dashing out to the store for mint jelly, cloves of garlic, a pound of margarine and whatever else she discovered she needed at the last minute. I told her it was no big deal, that it was only Dick and Ezra and their dates, a couple of girls we'd never see again and who were there for one purpose only, but Iris had worked herself into a state. “It's our first dinner party, John,” she said, busy at the sink, her back to me. “The first time we've ever entertained people in our own home.”

The water was running, steam rising, the heady fragrance of the roasting lamb infusing every corner of our three rooms and bath with a richness and prodigality that made me feel like a robber baron, like a sultan lounging on his multicolored carpets while the exotic smells of dinner wafted up from the royal kitchens below. I put my hands on her hips, kissed the back of her ear. “I know you,” I said, leaning into her, pressing my groin into the swell of her buttocks, “you just want to show off.”

She stiffened, her shoulders gone rigid, the dishes in the sink flying from the suds to the rinse pan and off to the dish rack as if an automaton were at work. “You could help,” she said, without turning around. “You could dry. Because we're going to need these dishes for the table and our guests are going to be here in less than an hour.”

“Sure,” I said, “sure,” and I picked up the dish towel and moved in beside her. “But really, you don't have to make such a production of it, not for Dick and Ezra—”

She turned to me in half-profile, showing me the underlip and a quick darting leap of her eyes. “And so what if I want to show the place off—and my husband too. I'm proud of it. Aren't you?”

I told her that I was and I tried to embrace her with a wet platter in my hand, and I suppose I was a bit awkward—not drunk yet, not by any means, but I will admit to having had a nip or two in anticipation of the party—and somehow the platter wound up on the floor. In pieces. We
both stood stock-still a moment, staring down at the wreckage. This was the only platter we had, the platter on which the lamb was to have been served, and the crisis of the moment proved too much for Iris. She gave me a savage look, plunged through the bead curtains and stalked down the hallway to the bedroom, where she slammed the door behind her with an excess of force. I wanted to go to her and apologize—or no, I was angry suddenly and I wanted to kick the door, rattle the knob and shout at her, because it wasn't the end of the world, it was only an accident, and why take it out on me?
Why don't you just tear the goddamned thing off its hinges, huh?
That was what I wanted to say, what I wanted to scream. But I didn't. I got as far as the door, but the door was locked. “Iris,” I said. “Iris, come on.” I listened for a moment—was she crying?—then went back to the kitchen, poured another drink and got down on my knees to pick up the pieces.

For all that, the party went off as well as could be expected. Or better, even. Dick and Ezra and the two girls—let's call them Mary Jane and Mary Ellen—were pretty well lit when they arrived and I don't think they would have noticed or cared if we'd served the lamb on a skewer. As it was, I carved the meat at the stove and arranged the slices on an ordinary dinner plate, after Iris had made sure that everyone had a chance to admire it in the pan, that is, and by the time the pie and coffee were served we were laughing over the lost platter and the inept husband who couldn't be trusted in the kitchen. Mary Ellen, seated on my right, gave me a playful cuff on the shoulder and called me “butterfingers.” “You butterfingers, you,” she said, and both sisters let out a scream of laughter.