“Come on,” she repeated. “Are you afraid I’m going to beat you or something?” She was wearing a summer dress that left her arms bare, and she stretched, then brought her heels together and made a muscle with her right arm. “Because you ought to be. I’ll have you know I was croquet champion of the entire neighborhood.”
“When you were nine maybe,” Tommy said, but he was already getting up from the grass himself.
We played a languid game out on the lawn, the sun holding steady overhead, Iris chasing down our balls and hammering them into the flowerbeds whenever she had the chance. There were gales of laughter. The flask circulated. I don’t think I’d ever been happier, but for one thing — the look Prok gave us when he emerged with my mother from the rear of the property. His face was stripped naked for just a moment, his mouth screwed up in a kind of pout of disdain, and I wondered what sin we were committing, what transgression, until it came to me: Prok hated games of any sort. Games were nonproductive. Games were, by definition, a waste of time — a pastime, that is, which was the same thing. Only work had any validity for him, and he never understood when we (again, Corcoran, Rutledge and I) spent even a moment’s time engaged in any activity that didn’t directly serve the project. We might have spent twelve hours in a single day taking sex histories and then come back to the hotel to relax with the radio and a game of cards, and Prok would insist that we should be reading and studying the literature so as to better perform our function and advance the research.
There was one time — and I’m jumping ahead here eight or ten years — when Prok, Corcoran and I had been on a research trip to take histories in Florida. We’d driven down from Indiana so Prok could address a group of college administrators who were holding a series of seminars in Miami, and we’d put in five intense days of recording histories from the moment we’d finished breakfast right on through to ten and eleven at night. On the final day, the day before we were to drive back to Indiana and the perennial ice of winter, we finished up by eight in the evening, and on a lark Corcoran and I pulled in at a miniature golf course. Corcoran — he was the ultimate extrovert, sunny, glad-handing, an obsessive serial sexual adventurer — was at the wheel because Prok was busy beside him with a flashlight and the sheaf of interviews we’d just concluded. “Say,” he cried out suddenly, “John — do you see that, up ahead there on the left?”
I was in back. I leaned forward over the seat and saw what he was talking about — a glittering playland of lights leaching out into the Florida night, and a sign superimposed above them: TEETER’S MINIATURE GOLF.
“Time for a little rest and relaxation?” he asked, already swinging the wheel wide as Prok glanced up distractedly from the papers in his lap.
There was an anti-authoritarian streak in Corcoran, a boyish playfulness Prok tolerated in a way he wouldn’t have in anybody else, and I wakened to it in that moment. Why not? I thought. Why not get out from under the whip, if only for an hour? “Sure, yes,” I said, “that would be — that would hit the spot. And I’ve never, and we are going back tomorrow …”
And before Prok could protest, it was a fait accompli, the car pulled up snug to the admission booth in the gravel lot, Corcoran and I paying for our tickets and selecting our clubs while the palms rustled in a breeze that was as warm as the breath of the furnace back at home. We must have played for two hours or more, feeling lighthearted and a bit silly, feeling like boys who despite the frivolity of the situation had always been in competition with one another and fought to win no matter how inconsequential the victory might have been. (As I recall, for the record, I wound up beating him that night, if only just narrowly.) But Prok. Prok tried to be good-natured about it, yet he was beside himself. He couldn’t understand it. Couldn’t imagine why grown men would behave like adolescents, why they would dissipate precious time that could be devoted to the project, to work, to the accretion of knowledge and the advancement of culture, and all in the name of a vapid amusement. He paced. He hectored us from behind the fence. “Corcoran,” he called, and his voice was a sorry bleat of remonstrance. “Corcoran. Milk. You’re holding up the project!”
But on the day of my graduation, I didn’t yet know of Prok’s uncompromising view of what he considered frivolous pursuits — or at least not to the extent I one day would — and the look he gave us over an innocent game of croquet gave me pause. I tried to parse that look. Tried to decipher what it portended — was the celebration over? Had my mother said something to him — or he to her — that would have changed the complexion of the day? Did my mother know about Prok and me — or Mac and me — and had she said something?
As it turned out, it was none of the above, just Prok being Prok. And we finished our game and went back to the shady spot on the lawn and Prok retired to the house a moment and came back with a gift for my mother — an especially convoluted but bred-out gall he’d shellacked as an objet d’art — and when she thanked him I saw the hint of a mutuality there and I didn’t know how I felt about it. There was something complicit between them, and I realized in that moment that it had nothing to do with me: Prok, I guessed, had been talking up the project and had convinced her, as he convinced practically everyone he ran across, to give up her history. My mother’s history. She would sit with him for two hours the next day, or maybe even that evening, and answer the three hundred and fifty questions about her masturbatory habits and how often she brought herself to orgasm and what men she’d slept with since my father died.
Everything gets a bit hazy here, and I don’t know if what happened next was a direct result of this or not — again, that would take a psychiatrist to iron out, and Prok hated psychiatrists — but I do know that I excused myself from the group gathered on the lawn, left Iris there, and my mother too, and went up the winding path for the house, where I knew Mac was preparing something, a light snack, she’d said, for all us. I went in without knocking, an honored guest by this point, almost a member of the family. The children were nowhere to be seen. Everything was still. The furniture seemed to recede into the depths of the room, shadowy and skeletal, the records canted on the shelves as if awaiting the hand to bring them to life. Distantly, from all the way across the yard, I heard the buzz of voices.
I found Mac in the kitchen, at the counter, her back to me. She was barefooted still, but she’d put an apron on over her dress and I could see where it was tied just above the swell of her hips. Do I have to tell you how much I needed her in that moment, how much a disciple of the master I’d become? I came up behind her — and she knew I was there, she was waiting for me — and pressed myself to her so she could feel the hardness of me against the softness of her buttocks, and I reached both hands round to embrace her breasts. The sweetest thing: she turned her head to kiss me, to give me the excitation of her tongue and underscore the reciprocity of the moment. And then — and then we were down on the kitchen floor, pawing at each other’s clothes. No children appeared. No one intruded. And I had coitus with her there in a quick wild spate of thrusting and licking and biting that must have taken no more than three minutes beginning to end, and then I zippered up and went back out across the lawn to Iris and my mother.
6
Ever since the fall of 1938, when Prok inaugurated the marriage course, there had been whispers on campus and in the community too, and the whispers grew to a rumble of distaste and then outrage as the summer of 1940 gave way to autumn and a coalition of forces gathered against him. If I’d wondered at the number of faculty — and especially older faculty — attending the session of the course Laura and I had taken together, now I began to understand: these were spies, hostile witnesses, the drones of convention and antiquated morality who wanted to keep the world in darkness as far as sex was concerned. They weren’t there to be educated — they were there to bring Prok down.