It was a Sunday morning, and we’d got to work early in the garden, church bells tolling in the distance, people strolling by on their way to services, the air dense with heat and humidity, the promise of a late-afternoon shower brooding over the hills. The garden was open — each Sunday Prok posted a hand-lettered sign to that effect so that people could have a chance to tour the property and listen to him lecture on each variety of flower and plant, its classification, its near relatives, its preferences with regard to soil, light and watering. Prok liked nothing better than to show off what he’d accomplished horticulturally, and again, this derived as much from his competitive instincts (nobody’s lilies could ever hope to match his) as anything else. We were working on a massive clump of daylilies in one of the beds in the front yard, both of us down on all fours, when Prok glanced up and said, “Why, look, isn’t that Dean Hoenig? And who’s that with her? I’ll bet — yes, I’ll bet that would be her mother, come to visit all the way from Cleveland. Hadn’t somebody mentioned that her mother was visiting?”
Prok had risen to his knees, a tight smile on his lips. I looked up to see the Dean of Women, dressed for church, making her way along the walk past the house, talking animatedly with a stooped, open-faced old woman in a hat like an inverted wedding cake. I knew that the dean had just recently moved into a house two doors up from Prok’s, but beyond that I knew little or nothing of the faculty and really didn’t have an answer for him. “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t heard anything.”
The smile broadened. He was watching them in the way of predator and prey, and I saw that they didn’t have a chance, the old woman moving with such deliberation she was practically standing still. “It occurs to me,” Prok said, his voice rich with subversive joy, “that the garden is open, is it not?”
I didn’t give back the smile. I wanted nothing to do with the dean. I might have been under Prok’s protection, but still I couldn’t help shrinking inside every time I saw her, guilty, guilty as charged, and the irony was I’d never got more than that single kiss out of Laura Feeney despite all the squirming the situation had caused me.
Prok caught them at the gate. “Dean Hoenig, Sarah!” he called, darting out onto the walk in his jockstrap and single flopping shoe. The dean gave him a look of bewilderment, while her mother, who couldn’t have stood more than four feet ten in her heels, visibly started. But Prok would have none of it. He was the smoothest, courtliest, most perfect gentleman in the entire state of Indiana, and he’d happened to see the ladies passing—“On your way home from church, I take it?”—and felt he just had to awaken them to the delights of his garden and offer them the rare privilege of a personal guided tour. “And who might this charming lady be?” he inquired, turning to the old woman with a bow. “Your mother, I presume?”
The dean — compact, busty, tough as a drill sergeant — was at a loss. She was always in command, overseeing her charges and ruling the dorms with an iron hand, but the situation was clearly out of her control. “Yes, this is my mother, Leonora. Mother, Professor Kinsey of the Zoology Department.”
Prok took the old lady’s hand and gave it a squeeze. There was a sheen of sweat on his chest, the long muscles and veins of his arms stood out in work-hardened definition, his lower abdomen bristled with pale blond hairs that were beginning to turn gray. He loomed over the old woman like a naked troglodyte, all flesh and presence, and yet what she heard coming from his mouth was the language of culture and civility. “I understand you’re from Cleveland?”
The old lady’s eyes had retreated into her head. She could barely croak out an answer in the affirmative.
“A jewel of a city,” Prok said, idly scratching at the axillary hair under his left arm. “First-rate museum. Absolutely. Not to mention your symphony orchestra — I do envy you that, Mrs. Hoenig. But, please, don’t let’s stand out here in the street, come and let me show you my pride and joy — you do like lilies, don’t you?”
The dean’s mother nodded in a numb way, then shot a helpless look at her daughter. Dean Hoenig was wearing a tight smile, and it wasn’t a welcoming smile, not at all. “I’m afraid we must be going, Professor Kinsey, though I do thank you for thinking of us—”
Prok cut her off. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, taking the old lady by the arm and steering her toward the gate, “it’s no imposition at all, my pleasure, in fact, and how often does your mother get to see a botanical wonder like this and at a time when it’s looking its very best too, I might add? Isn’t that right, Mrs. Hoenig?”
The dean’s mother didn’t have an opportunity to express an opinion one way or the other because that was when she caught sight of me standing there in front of the hydrangeas, all but naked myself. (Prok had lectured me on what he saw as my excessive modesty, and I’d gradually come round to his way of thinking — though my gardening attire wasn’t as minimal as his, I was at the time wearing nothing but a kind of dun loincloth he’d fashioned for me and a pair of earth-stained tennis shoes, sans socks.) She jerked back as if an electric current had just passed through her, but Prok held firm and guided her up the path to me, the dean following grudgingly behind. “Mrs. Hoenig,” he was saying, “I’d like to introduce my assistant, John Milk. Milk, Mrs. Hoenig. And I think you know the dean …”
Even as I took the old lady’s hand in my own and gave it a gentle shake, I could feel the dean’s eyes probing me. She was out of her element here, already defeated — she was going to see the garden with her mother and listen to Prok’s nonstop monologue and in the process learn something about the natural condition of the human animal whether she liked it or not — but she couldn’t help making a thrust at me. “Yes, certainly,” she said. “From the marriage course. But I guess you’re waiting till after graduation to tie the knot, is that it, John?”
I was learning. From Prok. From the master himself. And I didn’t flinch, didn’t drop my eyes or let my face give me away. “Not really,” I said. “Not actually, that is.”
The old lady let out an exclamation over the bearded irises, a kind of long, attenuated coo, and Prok encouraged her, delighted, but before the dean could come back at me, he looked over his shoulder and said, “He’s met someone else, isn’t that right, Milk?”
What could I do but nod?
After the women left, laden with cut flowers, Prok and I finished up the chore that had been interrupted out front and then put in a good solid hour of pick and shovel work in the backyard (Prok was then constructing the lily pond, and there was plenty of hard labor involved in digging out rocks and hauling and spreading the dirt we removed). Just after noon, Mac came out with sandwiches and soft drinks and the three of us sat on the ground contemplating the contours of the hole and chatting. She was barefooted and dressed in the khaki shorts and blouse she wore as a camp counselor and troop leader for the Girl Scouts. I noticed that she’d parted her hair on the left, swept it across her brow and pinned it in place with a barrette over her right ear. I don’t know what it was, but on this particular afternoon she was as gay and lighthearted as I’d ever seen her. She drew up her legs and rocked back against them as she ate and laughed and broke in on Prok’s running monologue to make one point or another, and though she was in her early forties then, she seemed insouciant and girlish, not at all what you would expect from a housewife and mother.