In later years, when Prok was the single most recognized person in this country outside of the president himself, when he appeared on the cover of Time magazine and the press couldn’t get enough of him, the most frequent question put to him concerned his own sex life, and he would invariably answer that he had contributed his history to the project as so many thousands of others had and that it would remain anonymous just as theirs would. That, of course, was true, and only we of the inner circle came to know the details of that sex life firsthand — we were sworn to secrecy, because the fabric of all of our lives would have unraveled if any of it got out — but on that sleepy afternoon with an over-active sun poking through the blinds and big droning flies sailing obliviously over the racks of preserved wasps, Dr. Kinsey’s was the first file I went to, and after his, it was Mac’s.
I stood there at the filing cabinet, my breath coming in shallow gulps, the manila folder spread open before me. Every other second I stole a glance over my shoulder, ready to slip the file back in place at the first hint of a sound from the outer office. I was keyed up, yes, but riveted too. Here was Prok’s history, right here in my hand, his deepest nature revealed in the most elemental way: he had my history, and now I had his, and it was unlike anything I’d anticipated.
As a boy Prok had been even more awkward and shy than I, not at all interested in organized athletics or social activities of any kind, and to compensate for a system weakened by early bouts with rickets, typhoid and rheumatic fever, he took to nature, hiking and exploring obsessively till he’d built himself into the fit and vigorous man I knew (though he never lost his pronounced stoop, a result of double curvature of the spine). He was an Eagle Scout. He masturbated compulsively. His father was a religious moralist. Until he was well into his twenties — older than I — he never had a mature and satisfying sexual experience, and that came only after his marriage to Clara.
And here was where his history got interesting. Though the honeymoon involved a long and arduous early-summer hiking trip through the White Mountains during which he and his bride were forced together in the close proximity of their tent each night, the marriage wasn’t consummated till some months on. The delay, as I was later to learn, was a result both of their inexperience and a slight physiological impediment with regard to Clara’s hymen, which was unusually thick (added to the fact that Prok’s penis was a good deal larger than normal). I pictured their mutual embarrassment, their prudery, their lack of knowledge or insight, envisioned them kissing and stroking and wrestling in their sleeping bags and tents, on the cots in the summer camp where they served as counselors in July and August of that year, and then back at home in their first rental in Bloomington, nothing gained but frustration. After three months of marriage, sex still remained a mystery for them — it wasn’t until a surgical procedure relieved Mac’s discomfiture that they were finally able to achieve coitus. Prok was twenty-eight at the time.
Knowing this — uncovering it in the way an Egyptologist might have decrypted the hieroglyphs telling of the life and habits of some ancient pharaoh — gave me a strange rush of sensation. On the one hand, I couldn’t help thinking of my mentor as somewhat diminished — here he was preaching sexual liberation, at least privately — and he’d been as much a prisoner of antiquated mores, of shyness, ignorance and his own inability to act, as I was. And yet, on the other, his history gave me hope and a kind of eerie confidence that my own sexual confusion would eventually resolve itself.
There was more. His H-history, which began with adolescent alliances, as mine had, became increasingly complex. The zoology professor, the distinguished scientist with a star beside his name in American Men of Science, the middle-aged father of three and happily married entomologist with the no-nonsense manner, was moving higher up the 0–6 scale, having initiated relations with several of his graduate students in the course of their long field trips and ultimately experiencing an intense and very close relationship with a male student not much older than I. And how do you suppose that made me feel? And Mac, what of her?
My blood was racing and I suppose if anyone had looked in on me in the office that day they would have seen the color in my face. I riffled through the pages, all greedy eyes and trembling fingers, then slipped Prok’s folder back into the cabinet and took up Mac’s. Her history was more extensive than I would have guessed, and as the symbols gave themselves up to me I couldn’t help picturing her naked, her hands, her lips, the way she walked, the cloying catch in her voice. I was aroused, I admit it, and I was already up from the desk and searching through the files for Laura Feeney’s history, for Paul’s and the Kinseys’ children’s, when I caught myself. What was I doing? This was voyeuristic, it was wrong, a violation of the trust Prok had invested in me, and here I was throwing it all over just to satisfy the tawdriest kind of curiosity. Suddenly — it was dark now, the lamps softly glowing, the galls shadowy and surreal — I felt ashamed, as deeply ashamed as I’d ever felt in my life. I could barely breathe until I’d put the files back and replaced the code under lock and key in the drawer, all the while listening for footsteps in the hall. I switched off the lights. Locked up. And when I slunk off into the corridor, I turned up my collar and averted my face like a criminal.
The next day Prok was back, a volcano of energy, whistling a Hugo Wolf song under his breath, bustling about the office in a running pantomime of quick, jerky movements, up from his desk and back again, a glance into one of the Schmitt boxes, then the files, a cursory check of a two-years’-dormant gall that had suddenly begun to hatch out and then a shout from the microscope—“A new genus, here, Milk, I believe, a new genus altogether!” When I’d first come in he gave me half a moment to settle myself and then, with a grin, he laid a compact folder on my desk. “Eighteen histories,” he said, showing his teeth. “And thirty-six more promised. I was up till two in the morning just to record them.”
“Wonderful news,” I said, sharing the grin with him.
“Any difficulties while I was away?”
I fought to keep my face straight. Don’t shift your eyes, I told myself, don’t. “No,” I said, shifting my eyes, “no, everything was fine.”
He was looking at me curiously. I opened the folder in the hope of distracting him, but it didn’t work. Actually, I don’t think there was ever a person born on this earth more attuned to the nuances of human behavior than Prok, no one more sensitive to facial expression and what we’ve come to call body language — he was a bloodhound of the emotions, and he never missed a thing. “Everything?” he prodded.
I wanted to confess in that moment, but I didn’t. I murmured something in the affirmative, and, further to distract him, said, “Do you want me to transcribe these right away?”
He seemed absent, and didn’t answer immediately. He was always young-looking for his age — in those days people routinely took him for five to ten years younger than he actually was — but I saw the lines in his face then, the first faint tracings of the finished composition he would take to his grave with him. But he must be exhausted, I thought, pushing himself to collect his histories, driving all that way in his rattling old Nash, up late, up early, nobody to help him. “You know,” he said after a moment, and it was almost as if he were reading my mind, “I’ve been thinking how convenient it would be — how essential — for me to train another interviewer, someone I could trust to collect the data along with me, a person who might not necessarily have any scientific training but who could immerse himself in the technique I’ve developed and apply it rigorously. A quick study, John. Somebody like you.” A pause. “What do you say?”