At this, there was a low sustained whistle from the row behind me, what was known to us then as a “wolf whistle.” The crowd jumped on it as if it were a rallying cry, the whole interconnected organism stirring again with that sound as of the wind in the trees, but Prok came right back with a barb that stopped them dead. “And then there are some,” he went on, unfazed, “whose output is as low as that of the man who just whistled.”
Nervous laughter, and then silence. He had them. And he never let go of them for the next sixty minutes, every last one of those nine thousand souls intent and focused on Prok, that erect figure on the podium, the celebrity of sex, the reformer, the pioneer, the preacher and spellbinder. I watched him from the front row, Mac on one side, Corcoran on the other, and though I’d heard the speech so often I could have recited it verbatim, right on down to the statistics and the pregnant pauses, the intensity of it in that setting on that afternoon gave me a chill. This was the apex, the moment of glory, Prok at his height. The students held their breath, the professors’ wives leaned forward. There wasn’t a sound, not a cough or murmur. No one stirred, no one left early. He concluded with his usual plea for tolerance, then took a step back and ducked his head in acknowledgment of the audience — it wasn’t a bow, exactly, but it had that effect.
And oh, they roared. They roared.
9
When we got back I found that Elster had been named official librarian of the Institute and that Iris had taken up the clarinet again, the hollow doleful sound of it greeting me even as I came up the drive and assessed the state of disrepair in the house and yard. The car (I’d left it for her, Corcoran having given me a lift home) was listing over a flat tire on the driver’s side front, and there was a raw new crease in the rear bumper. Because it was very still and clear and cold, the sound of the clarinet carried to me from deep inside the house, and it took me a moment to realize what it was — at first I’d thought some wounded animal was moaning out its final agony behind the toolshed. But no, it was Iris. Playing her instrument, the instrument in the little black velvet-lined case she’d kept untouched in the lower right-hand drawer of the dresser all these years.
Imagine that, I thought, and that was the extent of my thinking. The car was undrivable, half a dozen other failures leapt to my attention as I came up the front steps, and it didn’t really affect me one way or the other. I was beyond caring. The place could fall down for all it mattered to me, the car could go up in flames — I was tired, deeply tired, and there was no way in the world I could continue to travel with Prok and fit neatly into the role of house-husband like one of those cool unflappable fathers grinning out at us from the television these days.
As I stepped through the door, John Jr. leapt up from the welter of his toys and bolted across the room to throw his arms round my knees, and I set down my suitcase to lift him high and greet him with a kiss. Iris had her back to me. She was seated on the sofa before the fire (she had a fire going, at least, but I saw that she’d used the wrong wood, the stuff I’d reserved for kindling only and had begged her at least a hundred times to use sparingly), her legs splayed in front of her, the instrument at her lips. The sound it produced was pitched low and mournful, a groaning, creaking reverberation that put me in mind of the freighters plying the fog on Lake Michigan. I felt depressed suddenly, seeing her there with her distended cheeks and splayed legs, her hair in disarray, her eyes shut tight in concentration, Iris, my Iris, and she might have been anybody, a girl in the marching band, a prodigy of practice and desire working toward something I couldn’t begin to imagine. For just a moment, before I set down my son (gently, gently, the miniature grasping limbs, the uprush of the carpet) and called her name, I felt I was losing her. Or, no: that I’d already lost her.
“Iris,” I said, “Iris, it’s me,” and she started, her eyes flashing wide, the instrument pulling away from her lips with a long filament of saliva still attached. It took her a moment, and then she smiled, and I said, “Playing the clarinet again, huh?”
“Come here,” she said, and I sat beside her and we kissed, John Jr. scrambling up into my lap and the cat appearing from nowhere to adhere to the arm of the chair. It was a sudden joyful moment, the return of the hero, and I felt my depression begin to lift. We let the moment stretch out a bit, and we said the usual things to each other, and I filled her in on the highlights of the trip, the scare at San Quentin and Prok’s mastery at Berkeley, and we had a drink together and I gave John Jr. the box of Crackerjack I’d brought back for him and dug out the lacquered nautilus shell I’d got at a seashore gift shop for Iris, and then, after a silence, I came back to the subject of the clarinet.
“So what prompted you to start playing again?”
Iris gazed up at me over the rim of her glass. She’d made herself a gin and tonic, though it was cold still and would be for some time yet. The instrument lay tucked in against her shoulder, the reed and mouthpiece wet and glistening, the keys shining, the long black tube cutting like a shadow across her arm.
“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging, “something to do, I guess. You know, to pass the time.”
There was the hint of an accusation here, the old argument, and the anger came up in me. “You left the car out there with a flat. You didn’t drive on it, did you? Tell me you didn’t drive on it.”
She ignored me. The glass went to her lips and came away again. “And Hilda. She encouraged me — she plays herself, you know, and we’re planning on getting up a duet for the picnic this spring, on Memorial Day, maybe, just Hilda and me. I didn’t think I’d get my embouchure back, but I have.” The fire gave a sigh, then subsided, because it was built of twigs instead of the painstakingly split oak that was stacked up in the woodshed perhaps fifty feet from where we sat. “I wanted to surprise you.”
“I didn’t know Hilda played.” I tried to picture Rutledge’s wife, angular and airily blond, with her stingy lips and small high breasts, perched at the edge of a chair with the sheet music spread before her, taking the instrument into her mouth.
“All through college. Like me.” She smoothed her thumb over the pale glistening surface of the reed. “We’ve got to do something, what with our men gone all the time.”
“Oscar was here.”
“Yes,” she said, “that’s right. But you weren’t.”
At this point, John Jr., who’d gone back to his toys, looked up and announced that he was hungry. “Mommy, I’m hungry,” he piped, as if he’d just discovered some essential truth about the nature of existence and himself in particular.
“Maybe we should just go out,” I said.
Iris gave me a look. “Can we afford it?”
“Something cheap. Hamburgers. A pizza.”
“Pizza!” John Jr. cried, taking up the refrain. “Pizza!”
“Hush,” she said, and he’d flung himself at her legs now, burying his head in her lap. “There’s no reason why I can’t whip something up, because we really don’t have to make a celebration of it, do we? I mean, you go away and you come back. Isn’t that the way it always is?”
I had nothing to say to this, and we sat there a moment in silence, even as John Jr. tugged at her blouse and keened, “Please, Mom, please?”
“I’d have to change,” she said. “And put on some makeup. And I do want to get right back—”
I tipped my glass to her. “For what — more practice?”