We could talk shop in the most public of places because of the code. I would say, “My last history liked Y better than CM although Go in Cx made him very ez.” That type of rendering made everyone more comfortable. That was during McCarthy and the Customs Case. Our books could not be sent through the mail. The Institute and the University were very sensitive. We had recently lost the Rockefeller money. No one was laughing at anything.
Clara and I, during the first hot summers in Bloomington, would walk its streets and alleys, mildly interested in the bees collecting around the backdoor rubbish bins of restaurants. Pleased when we distinguished characteristics readily. Family, order, class. The tiny mass of Latin, yellow and brown, lighted on the red bricks. Their abdomens pulsed and touched. The wasps scribbled on the surface of a pool of water. Genus, species, variety. We went to Dunn Mcadow and turned the oak leaves over in our hands, recognizing the wasp by the disruption of the cells, the black gall on the dull side of the leaf. Rummaging through campus to where the Jordan River disappeared underground, we read the leaves until it was too dark to see the beauty marks, left, and grabbed a bench on Kirkwood. From there we watched the couples collect under the yellow lights of the Von Lee as they waited to buy their tickets. We saw them touch each other. We did not care who was watching us watching. Paying no attention to the miller in the light or the cricket in the dark, we rounded the corner to the Book Nook, empty and quiet between terms. The soda jerk behind the counter told us again where the speaks were that summer as he screwed his towel into the glasses while I sat down at the piano where Hoagy Carmichael had composed “Stardust” and played Chopin and Beethoven, without distinction. We closed the place, circled back to ours, and. without turning on the lights, stumbled by the sheets of insects under glass, the cotton and the chlorides, the spreading boards and pins, and, with nothing left to identify, fell in bed with the house as hot as it had been all day.
My secret was never to show surprise. I told my interviewers to assume that everyone had done everything. Anything that could be imagined is humanly possible. We had only to ascertain when and how many times.
Clara would sometimes bring my lunch down to Jordan Hall when the Institute was just setting up house. “Honey,” I said to her, “this building will one day house more pornography than the Vatican.” We laughed. She always understood when I was joshing. We sat on the steps where Dellenbeck liked to take our picture and watched the young men across the way strip down to the waist and knock off for lunch. The WPA was building Sycamore and the Auditorium, and the CCC was adding a wall around the campus. Everything was done in the local limestone, which would turn from pink to gray in winter. That summer those boys with their farmer’s tans molted into men. Thomas Hart Benton used some of them in the murals he did for the Auditorium. I took his history when he was on the campus. That afternoon we shared a lunch Clara brought, back in the woods where the river traced through the exposed bedrock. He wore overalls and talked about Missouri. Clara sat with her legs curled under her skirt. He stretched out his hand and touched her cheek saying, simply, “Bounty.”
Pomeroy thought I derived some pleasure from keeping secrets. That was the psychologist in him talking. I never would reveal anything, of course, nor hold anything over anyone’s head. It wasn’t power that interested me.
I remember when Pomeroy broke my code, found and read my history, and Clara’s and the children’s. Of course, I was upset. But it pleased me even more that he was so willing to learn.
Her waist was gone. She was white in the moonlight. I remember, because the curtains were gone. Laundry. The baby was showing and had already moved. It was past the time we had agreed upon to do anything more. Her waist was gone, and she was a different creature. But it was summer, I remember, because I would stay up after she went to sleep and listen for insects. She had longings for cream puffs. I could keep nothing from spoiling. She could no longer move. There was no surprise. The introduction of love is its own undoing.
I told my researchers that there were only three ways a subject could not be reporting accurately. He could exaggerate, conceal, or remember imprecisely. Our methods took care of all three. The number and speed at which we ask our questions took care of most problems. No one could prepare a life, especially a sexual one, on the spur of the moment. The rest was in the follow-up, to see if the same story could be told twice.
I no longer ask myself certain questions. Donald died the year of my first Biology. It was Mill, I believe, who began his autobiography with a reference to his father’s book on India. Author and Father. At the Institute, we interviewed each other every year or so. I have gone through my sexual history over twenty times. I’ve never found the slightest inconsistency; my stories match from year to year. The repetition makes everything clearer in my mind. In others, this justifies our methodology. The story is to remain the same. I am not so sure in my own case. I have been over everything again and again, but no single night presents itself to me as the one during which Donald was conceived. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male took ten years to write, and I can still recite the seed of that story. I even remember what the woman wore, the pearl at her throat. Perfection out of irritation. She was one of the students in the marriage course. In conference, she asked me how much passion she should expect from her fiancé. And I didn’t know. Not then. Donald was three when he died. My first son. Some passion spent long ago.
I told my interviewers that some subjects would make advances. I prepared them for this as best I could. I knew it would happen. I had instructed them to remain impassive, always impassive. Nothing cools ardor more than impassivity. We did not want to lose the oral history, though. We did not want to lose anything.
There were about fifty different measurements taken on each specimen of gall wasp. And this was only morphology, not phylogeny, host relationships, geographic distribution, life cycles and history, or gall polymorphism. I no longer had the time for the rest of it, and couldn’t find a graduate student so inclined. I was caught up in the other work. By this time I had finished two books on the Cynips. That was enough of a contribution.
I remember watching Clara once as she measured the third segment of antennae. She would still work on the plates with water colors and go over the Leach drawings after the children were in bed. She would use the colored pencils to write me notes. I told her the new study interested me more. No more pictures to draw. “Imagine,” she said, “the illuminated manuscript of this. A different box of colors.” I gave the rest of the specimens to Harvard and went to the field again, collecting.