Foremost among them was Dr. Thurman B. Rice of the Indiana State Health Board and the IU medical faculty. Rice had himself taught a precursor to Prok’s course in the early thirties—“a hygiene course,” he called it — and it had been one of the running jokes of the campus, an exercise in innuendo, misinformation and Victorian nice-nellyism. Apparently, he’d sat through the lecture in which Prok showed his infamous slides, and protested, in writing, to President Wells, the Board of Trustees and Prok himself that the pictures were so graphic as to have stimulated even him — a man thirty years married, who had given the subject “real objective study”—and that, as a result, he feared for the student body. What if some innocent coed were to be so stimulated and wind up engaging in sexual intercourse, becoming pregnant and having to be sent home as damaged goods? What then?
He was joined by the rest of his colleagues on the medical faculty, who as one felt that Professor Kinsey was appropriating to himself what was essentially a medical function: how could he presume to interview and advise students of both sexes on physiological matters — behind closed doors, nonetheless — when he had no medical training himself? Add to this the unanimous outcry of the town’s pastors, a cascade of letters from distraught Hoosier mothers who had heard rumors that this professor was instructing their daughters in the various methods of birth control and asking them to measure their own clitorises, and the undying enmity of Dean Hoenig, who would never forgive Prok that display in the garden and what she deemed his overzealous pursuit of the histories of some of the more reticent undergraduate women under her aegis, and you can well imagine that a public lynching was in the cards.
I was crossing campus on a dead-calm, slow-roasting morning at the beginning of September, on my way to work, thinking of nothing more significant than what I was going to do about dinner, when all of this — the rumors, the rancor, the anti-Prok sentiment boiling up out of the cauldron of the community — came home to me in an immediate way. Laura Feeney, a senior now and even prettier and fuller of figure than I’d remembered, was coming toward me along the path by the brook, a text clutched to her breasts (between which dangled a chain decorated with a class ring presumably belonging to Jim Willard). When she glanced up and recognized me, a change came over her face and she stopped in midstride and just stood there motionless until I closed the distance between us. “Laura,” I said, awkward suddenly — awkward again—“hello.”
It took her a moment. “John,” she murmured, something tentative in the tone of her voice, as if she were trying the name out to see if it fit. “Oh, hello. So nice to see you.” A pause. “And how was your summer?”
We could have been having the same conversation we’d had a year ago, except that this time I hadn’t gone home to the crucifixion of boredom that was Michigan City and the attic room in my mother’s house, because I was out in the world now, working a full-time job, and I’d stayed on at Mrs. Lorber’s, though Paul Sehorn was gone and I would soon have a new roommate — that is, if anyone answered Mrs. Lorber’s ad. I watched her face through the formalized exchange of ritualistic chitchat — she was a master at it, or rather, a mistress — and then I got bold and commented on the chain round her neck. “I see you’re wearing Jim Willard’s class ring.”
“What? Oh, this?” (An excuse to brush her own breasts and lift the ring to eye level.) She let out a laugh that was meant to be self-deprecating, but managed only to be flirtatious. My interest piqued. “You’re not going to believe this, but I’ve traded in one Willard for another.” Again, the laugh. “You know Willard Polk?”
I hesitated.
“Co-captain of the football team? He’s my steady. We’re planning to get engaged come Christmas.” She idly rotated the toe of one shoe and I couldn’t help stealing a glance at her ankles and legs. “Jim and I? We just didn’t seem to see eye to eye anymore, that’s all. But now”—and here she gave me the full power of her smile—“now I’m in love. Really. Truly. This is it. For life.” Another pause. Her face contracted round her mouth. Her eyes narrowed. “But what about you? If I hear right, you’re actually working with Dr. Kinsey now?”
I nodded, tried for a smile.
“Our old professor,” she said. “Dr. Sex.” She was still playing with the ring, but now she let it drop between her breasts again. “I hear that you’re conducting sex interviews yourself now, isn’t that true?”
I was an entirely different person from what I was a year ago, sexually experienced, out in the world, conversant with every sexual practice in the book, but still I couldn’t stop the blood rushing to my cheeks. “Only men,” I said. “Undergraduate men. Because, you see, well, they’re the least elaborate, if you know what I mean?”
“Oh?” The flirtation had come back into her voice. “But what about the girls? Aren’t they even less—elaborate? All those vestal virgins in the dorms? Will you be interviewing them too, or will this be the kind of survey that just tells us what beasts men are — as if we didn’t already know, right, John?”
So I was blushing. I’d had intercourse with Mac, I’d missed Iris all summer with an ache so deep and inconsolable it was as if some essential part had been cut out of my body, and as I stood there willing the blood to drain from my cheeks, I wanted — why not say it? — to fuck Laura Feeney, no matter how many Willards she had. I saw her naked. Saw her without the dress and the little hat and the shoes, saw her breasts bared and her nipples erect with excitement. Laura Feeney, Laura Feeney: no other girl but you. That’s what I told her with my eyes and she saw it, saw the change in me, and actually took one step back — that is, shifted her weight and ever so minutely extended the distance between us. “No,” I said, and I was leering, I suppose, I admit it, “no, I’ll be doing women too. Prok promised me. But not here. Not on campus.”
A lift of the eyebrows. “Prok?”
“Professor Kinsey. That’s what we, what I—”
“I hear they’re going to fire him.”
That was the moment when all the birdsong and the trickle of the brook and the backfiring of an automobile in the faculty parking lot were suddenly cued out as if at the upstroke of a conductor’s baton. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t have been more surprised — or shocked, shocked is a better word — if she’d told me the Nazis were marching on Muncie. “They can’t do that,” I said finally, “he’s a starred scientist. He’s got tenure.”
“The marriage course is finished. You know what they’re calling it? They’re calling it a smut session. ‘That smut session,’ that’s what they say.” She was watching my face for a reaction. “President Wells himself is going to fire him — for, I don’t know, moral turpitude. That’s what I hear, anyway.”
The following morning, before the sun was up, Prok and I climbed into the Nash (I don’t recall the model or even the year of the thing, though he’d bought it used in 1928 and as far as I could see it seemed to be held together principally with C-clamps and rust), and headed off for West Lafayette, where he’d been invited to lecture to a combined group of sociology classes at Purdue University. Along the way, we were planning on stopping in Crawfordsville to pick up the remaining interviews we hadn’t managed to squeeze in when Prok had lectured at DePauw the previous week. And, of course, we were looking forward to taking the histories of the cohort that would attend the evening’s lecture, having budgeted the next three days to those. Lunch would be on four wheels, tepid water out of a jug I’d set on the floorboards behind the seat and a few handfuls of the trail mix (raisins, nuts, sunflower seeds and the odd nugget of chocolate) Prok consumed for lunch every day of his life, whether he was ensconced in the Astor Hotel on Times Square, wandering the withered foothills of the Sierra Madre in search of galls or sitting behind his desk in Biology Hall.