We both admired it a moment, and then he encouraged me to run my hands over the craggy pocked surface of the thing—“Nothing to be afraid of, it’s simply the expression of a particularly vigorous colony of Cynipidae. But then you probably don’t know the first thing about Cynipids, do you? Unless, perhaps, Professor Eigenmann touched on them in the introductory course?” He was smiling now. Grinning, actually. This last was a joke, both on me — how could I have remembered? — and his colleague, who would have had to cover all of life on earth, from the paramecium to the horsetail to the giant sequoia and Homo sapiens, in the course of a semester and could hardly have devoted more than a single breath to the gall wasp, if that.
I grinned back at him, not quite knowing what was expected of me. “I know that they’re wasps,” I said. “And that they’re relatively small compared to the ones that would be flying around out there if it were summer now.”
“This is a parasitic insect, exquisitely adapted,” he said, looking down almost lovingly on the gall. “An all-but-sedentary species, flightless and living out its entire life cycle in a single gall on a single tree. Perhaps, once in a great while, the adults will emerge and crawl overland to another tree fifty or a hundred feet away, and that is the compass of their independence and the extent of their range, which makes them such an interesting study — you see, I have been able to trace the origins of a given species simply by following its geographic trail and noting variations in inherited characteristics.”
He began pacing again, stopping only to pluck off his glasses and gaze out the window a moment, before coming back to the desk to gently remove the exemplary gall and carefully replace it atop the bookcase. “But I’m afraid I have some bad news for you”—he was grinning; this was another joke in infancy—“they do tend to have a rather limited sex life. Unfortunately — for them, that is — males are very rare indeed in Cynipid society, most species reproducing through parthenogenesis. You do recall parthenogenesis from Professor Eigenmann’s course, don’t you?”
Another grin. His face dodged at mine and then away again. “Don’t think I bring up the subject of my Cynipids just to hear myself talk, and, yes, yes, I can see that questioning look in your eye, don’t try to hide it—What in God’s name is Kinsey up to now, you’re thinking, no? But there’s a method to my madness. What I’m trying to say is, your presence here is the hallmark of a new era: as of Monday, I will be reducing the hours of my three female assistants in your favor, Milk. I’ve gone as far as I can with the gall wasp, and now, with your help and the prospect of adequate funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Research Council, we are going to focus on one thing and one thing only, and I do think you know what that is …”
That year march came in like a lamb and went out like a lamb too, and I found myself doing double duty in Prok’s office and his garden alike. The mild weather seemed to invigorate him (as if a man of his almost superhuman energy needed invigoration), getting him out of doors as much as possible on weekends and particularly on Sundays. He’d had a strict Methodist upbringing that caused him all sorts of adolescent torment with regard to his natural urges, and once he’d discovered science and applied a phylogenetic approach to human behavior, he became rabidly a-religious and made a point of working his garden while the rest of Bloomington was at church. By the end of the month it was warm enough so that he was able to work bare-chested and in shorts, and he encouraged me to do the same. Eventually, as the days warmed into late spring and summer, we would both habitually work as near to naked as was decently possible — but I’m getting ahead of myself here.
I remember that month distinctly as a time when I felt at peace with myself in a way I hadn’t for a long while, if ever. There was the constant attention of Prok, his gentle prodding, his instruction, the feeling of mutuality as we sat in silence, bent over our desks, the sense of getting in on the ground floor of something revolutionary and exciting. There were nature hikes — he and Mac took me and the children to Lake Monroe, Bluespring Caverns, Clear Creek, for rambles in the patchwork of fields and forest out back of their house, Prok all the while lecturing on the geology of the soil, on the weeds and wildflowers that had begun to spring up in the clearings or the first of the migratory birds to reappear — and I remember too the enveloping peace of the dinner table and the hearth. It felt good to be with them, good just to be there. Mac simply took to preparing an extra portion any time I was working in the garden or we returned from one of our rambles, and the more I protested that I was putting them out, that I didn’t want to be a pest or nuisance, the more the two of them went out of their way to reassure me. It got to the point where I was spending more time at the Kinseys’ than at Mrs. Lorber’s, and Paul, who’d been the rock of my world for the past three years — my dearest and closest friend on campus — began to joke that the only time he saw me anymore was when I was asleep. He had Betsy, I had Prok and Mac. It was only inevitable that we should grow apart.
It was around this time that I did something of which I’m not particularly proud, but which should be reported here, just to set the record straight. Or rather keep it straight. After all, what is the point of this exercise — of this remembrance of things past — if I’m not going to be absolutely candid? I have nothing to hide. I’m a different person now than I was when I stepped into that marriage course, and I wouldn’t change anything that’s happened, not for the world.
At any rate, I was an apt pupil — I’ve always been good with puzzles and ciphers — and I learned Prok’s code in record time. Within two or three weeks I had it memorized. One afternoon — it was midweek and Prok had driven up to Indianapolis to address the faculty of a private school on the subject of the sexual outlets available to adolescents, and, not coincidentally, to collect as many histories as he could, of both staff and student body — I found myself alone in the office, transcribing coded histories from Prok’s notation sheets to a larger format for the files so that we could calculate the incidence of various behaviors for statistical analysis (in Prok’s system, a single encrypted sheet contained as much as twenty pages of information; eventually, of course, this information would have to be collated, at first by hand, and then, after we got our Hollerith tabulating machine, on punch cards). Initially, the work seemed exciting — the subject was sex, after all — but on this day, with these histories, which were of undergraduate men not much different from the one-hundred-percent group I’d managed to get him from my rooming house, it was pretty pedestrian. There had been some (limited) experimentation with other boys and farm animals, furtive masturbation, little coital experience but a good dose of petting, deep kissing and (again limited) forays into oral-genital contact. My hand ached from clutching the pen. My fingertips were stained with ink. I stifled a yawn.
I don’t know what came over me or how the idea even sprang into my head, but I found myself looking through Prok’s desk for the secondary code, the one that gave the key to the identities of all the individuals in his files — a code he was distinctly chary of sharing with me or anyone else, for security’s sake. If his subjects weren’t absolutely assured of anonymity, the vast majority of them would never have given up their histories in the first place. Security was the cornerstone of the project — then, as it is now. But when I actually had that code in my hand, I couldn’t help noticing certain correspondences with the interview code (imagine a kind of reinvented shorthand, conflating abbreviations, scientific symbols and the markers of the stenographer’s code into a new sort of encryption), and once I hit on those correspondences I couldn’t help my mind from leaping ahead. In brief, it took me less than an hour to break the secondary code, and when I had it, when I held the key to all the files in my hand, I couldn’t help using it. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t resist.