The drive up to Michigan City was uneventful, no different from a thousand other drives Prok and I had taken together, he at the wheel and I in the seat beside him, staring through the windshield and calling out directions because he tended to get involved in what he was saying and cruise right on by the crucial left-hand turn or miss the junction we were looking for and have to swing a U-turn a hundred yards up — at the risk of both our lives. Prok was getting older, less attentive to detail, and his driving had suffered. Of course, he would never consider asking me to get behind the wheel, not unless he’d been knocked unconscious. What else? It was spring again, another spring. The sun was unimpeded and the shoots of green things were springing up everywhere. We kept the windows down to feed on the glory of it.
We didn’t talk about Iris, but she was there with us the whole way, one more hurdle for Prok, the beginning and end of everything for me. I’d called, again and again, but she wasn’t coming to the phone and her mother’s voice could have crushed the hulls of icebreakers. I didn’t know what she expected from me. Didn’t know if this was the end or not, if we would divorce and my son would be taken from me — and my job. Because Prok wouldn’t have a divorced man on his staff — or even a remarried one. That was the rule, simple and final.
What we did talk about was Elster. “I don’t mean to say things behind anybody’s back,” I said, “but I think, well, I think it’s a mistake to hire the man. In any capacity. But especially not as our librarian, where he has access to our — well, you know what I mean.”
Prok didn’t know, and he interrogated me nearly the whole way there, his eyes gone cold and hard. He made me go over the details six times—“Fred Skittering? The reporter? And Elster put him on to you? How long ago was this?”—and he was still questioning me, still brooding over this treachery in his midst, when he pulled up to Iris’s girlhood home. It was a modest house on a street of modest houses, two stories, with rust streaks under the gutters and a battered Pontiac in the driveway. “This is it, then?” he asked, waiting for a car to pass before he backed in at the curb.
“Yes,” I said, my stomach sinking, “the white house, right here, number fourteen.”
He shut off the car and turned to face me. “What was the name of Iris’s mother again?”
“Deirdre. They’re Irish.”
“Irish. Yes. Right. And the father?”
I glanced at my watch. “Frank,” I said. “But he’ll be at work still.”
And then we were at the door, Prok running a hand through his hair while I rang the bell and the dog — a sheltie named Bug, which Iris’s father delighted in calling Bugger every chance he got — began barking at the rear of the house. There was the sound of footsteps, the scrabbling of the dog’s nails on the bare floor, more barking, and I tried to compose myself even as Iris’s mother pulled back the door and gave me a look of iron while the dog whined and leapt at my legs. “Um, well, hello,” I said, and I tried out her name, “Deirdre. Oh, yes, and this is Dr. Kinsey, my, well, my boss—”
Everything changed in that instant. Iris’s mother let her face bloom with a Kilkenny smile and the door swung wide. “Oh, yes, of course,” she said, “I would have recognized you anywhere, and please, please come in.”
I stepped through the door and froze: Iris. Where was Iris? And my son? I thought I heard the piping of a child’s voice from upstairs, from Iris’s old room, and I had to force myself to put one foot in front of the other. The dog whined and flapped about the floor and I stooped mechanically to stroke it.
I hadn’t been to the house in six months or more — we visited when we could, both Iris’s parents and my mother, but my work didn’t allow much time off, of course, as I think I’ve made clear here. At any rate, the place didn’t seem to have changed much, the same coats on the coat tree, the same umbrellas in the umbrella stand, even a pair of galoshes that looked vaguely familiar set aside in the corner. I noticed all these things with a kind of heightened perception — the dog looked shabbier, Iris’s mother older, the carpet was worn in the living room — because I was snarled up inside, twisted like wire. All I could think of was Iris. Would she talk to me? Would she see me even?
“Here, please, have a seat,” my mother-in-law was saying, “but you must be exhausted — did you drive all the way up today?”
“Yes,” Prok said, easing himself down on the sofa, “but John and I are used to it, isn’t that right, John?”
I stood there hovering over him, incapable of decision — I didn’t even know if I could sit, if the muscles would respond or the factory of my brain issue the command. “Yes,” I murmured.
Iris’s mother was transformed, as inflated as I’d ever seen her — there was a celebrity in the house, the great man himself, parked on the sofa in her living room at 14 Albion Drive. “Tea,” she said, extending her smile even to me, “would you like some tea? And sweet buns, I have sweet buns—”
Prok, at his most courtly, in the voice that had mesmerized how many thousands I couldn’t even begin to guess, said that that would be very nice indeed, a real treat, and my mother-in-law practically fell at his feet. I wondered, even in my distracted state, how long it would take before she volunteered to give up her history.
I was on the verge of breaking in, of demanding to know where my wife and son were and why she hadn’t gone to get them, first thing, when suddenly the sound of the clarinet came drifting down from above, something hesitant, broken, infinitely sad, as if all the sorrows of humankind had been distilled to the single failing breath of that melody. “That’s Wagner,” Prok said. “The ‘Liebestod,’ isn’t it? From Tristan and Isolde?”
“Honestly, I don’t know,” Iris’s mother said, throwing up her hands. “With Iris, it could be anything—”
And then I was gone, through the door and up the steps two at a time, and I didn’t care about Prok or the project or anything on this earth but her, Iris, my wife, the woman I loved and needed and wanted. I flung open the door and there was my son, sprawled out asleep in the middle of the bed as if he’d dropped down from the sky, and Iris at the window with her clarinet. She was wearing a pair of child’s slippers, fluffy and oversized, and a blouse that fed off the color of her eyes. She played two notes more, sostenuto e diminuendo, and then, very slowly, with infinite care, she laid the instrument aside and held out her arms. And can I tell you this? — I never let go of her, never once, never again.
Epilogue
Bloomington, Indiana
August 27, 1956
I’d like to be able to report that everything continued on an even keel, that Iris and I were able to make the necessary adjustments and live in harmony ever after — or until the present, at any rate — and that the project came to fruition and Prok received the recognition he deserved as one of the great original geniuses of the twentieth century, but in life, as distinct from fiction, things don’t always tie up so neatly. Iris never attended a musicale again, and she never again mounted the stairs to the attic at the house on First Street. She was present for the social occasions, the picnics, the occasional staff dinners at Prok’s, the holiday celebrations, but she saw them as an obligation, nothing more, and gradually she began to withhold her friendship from Mac and Violet Corcoran and Hilda Rutledge and take up with a new circle of people she’d known from her days at school, even talking about going back to teaching once John Jr. matriculates from the lower grades. In the interval, I’ve continued with the business of the Institute, with the interviews and the travels and the filming, sometimes as an observer, sometimes a participant. Iris and I don’t discuss it. I try to leave my work at the office, as they say. And Elster — Prok had him transferred back to the biology library the day we returned from Michigan City and he’s been persona non grata in Wylie Hall ever since. Good riddance, is what I say.