And again, as usual, a whole mob of potential subjects came forward to volunteer their histories at the conclusion of the lecture and Prok and I sat side by side at a long table set up behind the lectern and scheduled them. Dinner? I don’t remember if we did eat that night — it might have been sandwiches sent up to the room — but we both started right in on taking histories as soon as the lecture hall had cleared and we’d had a chance to get back to the hotel. Prok conducted his interviews in our room and I was accommodated with a private conference room located just behind the restaurant. It must have been past midnight by the time I was finished (three undergraduate men, sociology students out to earn extra credit with Professor McBride in coming forward as volunteers, the expected responses, nothing I hadn’t heard before), and I remember sinking into an armchair in the lobby, a watered-down drink at my side, watching the hands crawl round the clock as Prok conducted his final interview of the night.
Afterward, we compared notes as we got ready for bed, and that was when we discovered a discrepancy in the schedule for the following morning: we had inadvertently scheduled two females for the same hour, rather than one female and one male. Which meant we were either going to have to cancel or I would be forced to record my first female history, a step Prok to this point hadn’t deemed me qualified to take. He looked up from the schedule, shook his head slowly, then rose from the sofa and padded into the bathroom to see to his dental prophylaxis (he was a great one for maintaining his teeth in good condition, a hygienic habit that allowed him to take the full set to his grave with him). “I don’t know, Milk,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of running water, “but I do hate to cancel. It’s inefficient, for one thing. And it could cost us data, for another. No. There’s nothing to do but go through with it.”
A moment later he was back in the room, hovering over me, fully clothed, which in itself was odd because the moment we were done for the day he usually stripped to the skin and encouraged me to do the same. (Yes, we were alone together a great deal on these trips, and we continued to have sexual relations, though my education — and my predilections — were taking me in the opposite direction. I revered Prok — I revere him still — but gradually I was growing away from him in this one regard and toward Mac, toward Iris, toward the coeds in their loose sweaters and tight skirts who drifted across the campus like antelope on the plain. No matter: I enjoyed being with Prok — I felt privileged to be with him — and I looked forward to these trips because they took me away from the tedium of my desk and the constriction of small-town life and enabled me to see and absorb something of the larger world, of Indiana certainly, but eventually of Chicago and New York, San Francisco and Havana too.) “We’re going to have to accelerate your training,” he said, and there was no trace of levity to his tone.
I was exhausted. The travel, the skimped meals, the force of concentration required to record five histories in a single day — all of it combined to sap me as surely as if I’d spent the day at hard labor, chained to a convict and breaking up rock with a mallet. “We are?” I echoed.
“The interview for women requires, I would think, a little more finesse than the men’s, especially the ones you’ve been conducting with undergraduates near to your own age, where you appear as a sort of fraternity colleague or perhaps an older brother. No, I am aware of how you feel in these matters, with regard to women, that is, and Mac and I have discussed it thoroughly”—he let that hang a moment—“and I wonder if you’re capable of being absolutely disinterested and professional.”
I made some noises to the effect that I was.
He was watching me carefully. Still standing over me, still in shirt and bow tie. “You’ll forgive me, Milk, but your emotions too often show in your face, and we can’t have that the first time a woman—this woman tomorrow morning — tells you of something you may tend to find stimulating.”
I fought to keep my face rigid — and pale. “I think, well, if you’ll give me the chance, I’m sure I can, that is—”
He wound up drilling me for two hours that night. First I was the woman, then he was, then vice versa and vice versa again. The questions came in spate, his eyes on me like whips, like cold pans of water first thing in the morning, intractable and unforgiving. He was exacting, demanding, hypercritical, and if I missed a beat he fed me hot coffee till my nerves were so jangled I don’t think I slept at all that night. But Prok did. I lay there awake in the darkness, thinking of a thousand things, but mainly of Iris, whom I hadn’t seen all summer though we’d written each other nearly every day. She was due back on campus the day after tomorrow, and I was thinking of her as the shadows softened and the first furtive wakening sounds of the street drifted in through the window and Prok puffed and blew and slept the sleep of the righteous.
In the morning, over breakfast in the room, Prok quizzed me again. I lifted a forkful of egg and toast to my mouth, put it down again, answered a question and took a quick sip of coffee. I nearly rebelled — didn’t he have any confidence in me after all this time? — but I let him have his way, despite the fact that there was no essential difference in the way the male and female interviews were conducted, except that the sequence and type of the questions were specific to one sex or the other, as for example with the female you asked about the onset of menarche and the age at which breast development first appeared and so on. It wasn’t my competency Prok was questioning, it was my age and experience, or lack of it. He kept saying, “Milk, Milk, I wish you were twenty years older. And married. Married with children. How many children do you want, John — shall we make it three?”
I was downstairs in the conference room ten minutes before the scheduled appointment, which was at nine. Before a subject arrived, we would routinely record the basic data — the date, the number of the interview (for our files), the sex of the subject and the source of the history (that is, through what agency the subject had come to us, and in this case, of course, it was as a direct result of Prok’s solicitation after the sociology lecture). I didn’t know what to expect. We’d scheduled some twenty-eight interviews for the next three days and many more than that for our return trip the following week, and I had no way of connecting the names on the schedule sheet with any individual, though I’d sat there and registered them the night before. The woman I was to interview — and I’m going to assign her a fictitious name here, for confidentiality’s sake — was a young faculty wife of twenty-five, as yet childless. Mrs. Foshay. Let’s call her Mrs. Foshay.
There was a knock at the door. I was seated in an armchair by a dormant fireplace, the schedule sheet and Mrs. Foshay’s folder spread out on a coffee table before me. The other chair — mahogany, red plush, standard Edwardian hotel fare — was positioned directly across from mine. “Come in,” I said, rising to greet her even as the door swung open.
In the doorway, peering into the room as if she’d somehow fetched up in the wrong place, was a very pretty young woman dressed in the height of fashion — dressed as if she’d just stepped out of a nightclub on Forty-second Street after an evening of dinner, dancing and champagne. She gave me a hesitant smile. “Oh, hello,” she said, “I wasn’t sure if I was in the right place—”
I’d crossed the room to her and now I took her hand and gave it a curt, professional shake. “It’s really, well, really kind of you to come — and important, important too — because every history, no matter how extensive, or, or, unextensive — nonextensive, I mean — contributes to the whole in a way that, that—”