But Prok. This is how I remember him, how I want to remember him:
I see Corcoran and me pulling up to the curb outside Wylie Hall, a winter’s day, five or six years ago. We are in Corcoran’s Cadillac and both of us are exhausted after the long drive out from New York City on roads slick with ice and fraught with potholes and a hundred other hazards. We’ve driven straight through, relieving each other at the wheel, and my stomach is queasy from too many cups of coffee and the blue-plate special at some anonymous diner in a town I’ve already forgotten. What we’re carrying is precious cargo — a group of outsized clay models left to the Institute by the late Robert Latou Dickinson, along with his library, the histories he’d taken, his sex diaries and erotica collection. The models are of human genitalia, depicted in the act of coitus, in a scale of roughly five to one, so that the phallus is nearly a yard long and the clay vagina meant to receive it proportional in every way. In all, we’ve transported seven of these models, and given their various angles and excrescences, it was no mean feat to maneuver them into the trunk and backseat of the car on the frigid streets of New York while a not-inconsiderable crowd of kibitzers looked on, and now, exhausted, we are faced with the task of removing them safely from the car and hustling them down the steps of the building, through the corridor and into the library without attracting undue attention.
We’ve had Prok’s advice, by both letter and telephone — his very exacting advice as to routes, padding to protect the models, the ideal speed we should maintain, how much rest we should need and where we should stop for meals, et cetera — and we can both hear his voice in our heads as we throw open the door and begin fumbling with the first of the models, the one with the fragile outsized phallus. It is windy. A cold rain has begun to fall. One misstep and the model is forever destroyed. I want only to be done with this, to be home with Iris and my son, sitting by the fire with a glass of bourbon and something warm and wholesome in my stomach, and my attention has wandered. I’m bushed. I tug in one direction, Corcoran in the other.
Then I hear Prok behind me. “I’m sorry, Milk,” he says, “but I can see that you don’t know the first thing about unloading an automobile. Here,” he says, “let me,” and I feel him take the load from me as if it had never been there at all.
Author’s Note
This is a work of fiction, and all characters and situations have been invented, with the exception of the historical figures of Alfred C. Kinsey and his wife, Clara Bracken (McMillen) Kinsey. I am indebted to Dr. Kinsey’s biographers — Cornelia Christenson, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, James H. Jones and Wardell B. Pomeroy — for much of the factual material delineating the details of their lives. In addition, I would like to thank Jenny Bass and Shawn C. Wilson of the Kinsey Institute for their help and generosity.
A Note on the Author
T.C. Boyle’s novels include World’s End, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Riven Rock, A Friend of the Earth, Drop City (which was a finalist for the National Book Awards), The Women and When the Killing’s Done. His short story collections include After the Plague, Tooth and Claw and Wild Child, and his stories appear regularly in most major magazines, including the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Granta and the Paris Review. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages.