There was no radio in the car, but it didn’t really matter, as Prok provided all the entertainment himself, talking without pause from the minute I slid into the seat beside him in the uncertain light of dawn to the moment we disembarked in Crawfordsville, and then continuing without missing a beat till we arrived, in late afternoon, in West Lafayette. He talked about sex. About the project. About the need to collect more lower-level histories, more black histories, more histories from cabbies and colliers and steam-shovel operators — for balance, that is, because undergraduate interviews, as invaluable as they might be, only supplied a portion of the picture. If we passed a cow standing by the roadside, he went on about milk production and the leanness of the drought years. He talked of the topography, of riverine and lacustrine ecology, of mushroom hunting — had I ever tasted fresh-picked morels, lightly breaded and fried? I didn’t feel at a loss, not a bit. I let him talk. It was all part of my education.
We were coming up on the White River just outside Spencer when the sun rose behind us and spilled across the water, laminating everything in copper. A great blue heron stood out in relief against the mist rising off the surface, the cornfields caught fire, pear and apple trees emerged from the gloom, heavy with luminescent fruit. The surface of the road was wet with dew and as the sun touched it vapor rose there too until it fell away from the rush of the tires and fanned out over the rails of the bridge like a storm in the making. That was the moment that I chose to disburden myself of the unsettling information Laura Feeney had pressed on me and which I’d been turning over in my head now for the better part of the last twenty-four hours. “Prok,” I said, interrupting him in the middle of a story I’d heard twice before about a subject at the state work farm pulling out his penis in the middle of the interview and laying it on the table for measurement, “is it true that, well, I’ve heard rumors that pressure is being put on you again — more than you’ve revealed to me, that is — regarding the marriage course. They’re not going to, well, fire you, are they?”
A low spear of sun transfixed the interior of the car and illuminated Prok’s face from the lips down, as if he were wearing a beard of light. He gave me a dour look, head slightly canted, eyes showing white. “And where, exactly, did you get that notion?”
“I — well, Laura Feeney. Laura Feeney told me yesterday morning. You know, the girl I took the marriage course with?”
“With whom.”
“Yes, right — the girl with whom.”
The planks of the bridge rattled under the wheels and I saw the heron stiffen and protract its wings. Prok’s eyes were fixed on the road. He was silent a moment, then murmured, “I suppose Miss Feeney had an audience with President Wells himself? Or was it the Board of Trustees?”
“You’re making light of it, Prok, and that’s not right. I’m just, well, I’m concerned, that’s all, and there are rumors, you can’t deny that—”
He let out a sigh. Gave me a glance of commiseration, then turned back to the road. “I feel like Galileo,” he said, “if you want to know the truth. Hounded and oppressed and denied the basic right of scientific investigation, simply because some cleric or some dried-up old maid like Dean Hoenig or a has-been like Thurmond Rice feels threatened by the facts. They can’t face reality, and that’s the long and short of it.”
My heart sank. So it was true. I stared out the window on the fierce geometry of the cornfields, the engine moaning beneath my feet, the world slipping by.
“They’re going to offer me an ultimatum: drop the marriage course or give up the research, one or the other.”
“But you can’t — that would be like an admission that sex is dirty, that they were right all along—”
Another sigh. The hooded look. His hands were claws on the wheel. “You see, the problem is with doing the course and the interviews combined, not to mention the advisement on sexual matters that has been so much a natural concomitant of the information we dispense—”
He shifted down as the car hurtled through a pothole, rising up off its springs and slamming down again with a shudder, and then he laid a hand on my knee. “It’s the research they’re after. They just can’t abide the idea of our getting impressionable young things behind closed doors, because you never know what might happen.” He gave my knee a squeeze. “Isn’t that right, John?”
We were on a tight schedule, but we were fortunate that day because the DePauw subjects all appeared on time, delivered up their information and went back about their business so that we could go about ours. Trail mix and aqua pura in the car, Prok dodging farm wagons, overladen trucks and the odd cow, a long running trailer of intensely green fields alternating with flagrant forests and shadowy bottoms, and we were there, arrived safe and sound in West Lafayette three quarters of an hour before the lecture was scheduled to begin.
I don’t remember much of the hotel, though I should, because that trip was a real watershed for me, but all the hundreds of towns and hotels and motor courts we’ve visited over the years seem to have produced a generic impression. It was a brick building from the last century, most likely, in need of sandblasting and paint, and it was, as likely or not, located on the main street near the courthouse. There would have been shade trees, a dog curled up on the sidewalk out front, cars parked on the diagonal. The building itself would be three stories, with a separate entrance for the restaurant and bar. We doubled up on the room, to save money — Prok was a prodigy of thrift — just as we would triple and quadruple up in later years, when we added Corcoran and finally Rutledge to the team.
As for the lecture. Did Prok need anything? No, he was fine. He stood bare-chested in the bathroom, shaving before the mirror, then he changed his shirt, knotted his bow tie, slipped into his jacket and went off at a brisk gait for the university, his host, Professor McBride of the Sociology Department, struggling to keep pace. I brought up the rear. When we arrived, the auditorium was already full (the word was spreading, even in those early days, and if the combined sociology classes could boast sixty students among them, there must have been three hundred of the idle and curious there as well, hoping for a bit of titillation). As usual, Prok spoke ex tempore, without notes, and, as usual, he cast a spell over the audience from the first words out of his mouth to the last. (The subject might have been premarital sex, the psychology of sexual repression, the function of adolescent outlets, the history of sex research or the frequency of masturbation in the comparison of males and females of a given age group — it didn’t really matter to Prok; all speeches were one speech. And I should say here too that he had a particular gift for delivery that never resorted to tricks or theatrical gestures, his voice clear and distinct and largely unmodulated, every inch the man of science expatiating on a subject of deep interest to all humanity. He was no Marc Antony or even a Brutus, but he got the job done as no one else could have.)