“I’m not, I’m not gone all the time — and I’m not going to be.”
“—leaving me alone way out here for how long? Weeks at a time?”
“Ten days.”
“Okay, ten days. But I’m stuck here. What if the baby needs something? What if I run out of flour — which I did — or, I don’t know, what if I just feel bored? Don’t you know I get bored out here — don’t you realize that?”
“You’re the one who wanted the place.”
“You wanted it too.”
I stared into the black pit of the hearth. Cold ash there, the butt ends of charred sticks poking through like bones at the crematorium. Across the room, John Jr. was talking to his toy trucks. “Bad boy,” he was saying, over and over, “bad!” The ice cream was in the freezer, the pistachios still in the bag on the counter. I looked up at my wife. “When do you want your first lesson?”
If I was reluctant at first — forced into something I had neither the time nor the patience for — it took only one lesson for me to realize my mistake. I can’t speak for Iris, but for me the next few weeks were some of the best times we’d ever had, John Jr. in my lap, Iris at my side, focused and intent, her hands locked on the wheel even as she negotiated the perdurable mysteries of clutch and accelerator. We memorized the back roads, watched the hills roll at us, one after another, like waves on a concrete sea, and we went where the mood took us, stopping for a milkshake or a hot dog or just to wander up a streambed and share a sandwich on a fallen log. Then it was back in the car, the clutch, the accelerator, jerk forward and stall, grind the ignition, the clutch, the accelerator, jerk forward and stall again. I don’t know what it was, something to do with her fragility, I suppose, with her very narrow and specific need and my ability to direct it—“Turn left,” I would say, “stop here; third gear; put it in reverse”—but I cherished that time. I never lost my temper, never raised my voice, not even when she swerved off the road to avoid a hell-bent squirrel and put three long gouges in the right front fender.
Indulge me a moment, because this is important — not to Prok, maybe, but to me. It was the day after Thanksgiving, the sun stripped of color, Iris gaining in confidence, the wheels firm on the road and my attention drifting into another realm altogether, when suddenly the squirrel made his dash across the pavement and my free hand got to the wheel an instant too late. There was the shock of the impact, a screech of stone on metal, and then the car stalled. Startled, John Jr. began to pipe and then the piping grew in fullness and volume till he was bawling at the top of his lungs though there wasn’t a mark on him — on any of us. She hadn’t been going more than twenty miles an hour.
Iris’s voice rode a thin tube of air up out of her constricted throat, even as John Jr. began to hit his stride. “Oh, God, I’ve ruined it. I wrecked the car, I wrecked it, wrecked it!”
“It’s all right,” I told her, though I knew it wasn’t.
“I don’t want to do this, I don’t, I can’t.”
I remember feeling expansive, feeling calm despite myself. I got out of the car, John Jr. still clutched tightly to me, calmly assessed the damage — heartbroken, my first car, my pride and joy — and then leaned in the window to reassure her. “It’s nothing,” I said. “Just a scratch. Nothing a little rubbing compound won’t cure, and maybe a tap or two with the hammer. Really, Iris, it’s okay.”
She sat there rigid, eyes shut, forehead pressed to the wheel. Her shoulders began to quake. Her fingers trembled. She couldn’t seem to breathe. I saw her humbled in that moment, defeated and brought low, and felt everything a man is supposed to feel for a woman. I wanted to protect her, save her, comfort her, and I eased back into the car and took her in my arms, John Jr. reaching out for her at the same time till the three of us just sat there and held the embrace as if there were nothing more to life.
Unfortunately, it couldn’t hold. Three days later — on the Monday — Prok, Aspinall, Corcoran, Rutledge and I took the train for Oregon, where we would shoot nearly four thousand feet of film exhibiting H-behavior among bulls at an agricultural station there. “You see,” Prok would exclaim excitedly as one animal mounted another, “it’s just what I’ve said all along — all our behaviors have their antecedents in nature.”
8
It was a little over a year later, in February of 1950, that we moved into our new quarters in Wylie Hall, another of the venerable old buildings on campus. This time we were given an entire floor to ourselves, albeit the basement, though in all fairness I should say that the basement was partially above ground, so that at least we could stare up into the opaque wire-reinforced glass of the windows and speculate as to whether it was morning, afternoon or evening. Prok oversaw all the details in his usual obsessive way, of course, insisting on the highest standards of fireproofing in order to protect our records and the rapidly accumulating stock of the library, as well as air-conditioning so that we could seal the place off during the hellish Hoosier summers, and sheets of soundproofing to ensure absolute privacy in our interviewing. Each of us had an office to himself now, there was a file room, a darkroom, and for the first time space enough to consolidate the library in one place (with additional room for visiting scholars to consult our holdings without disturbing the workings of the Institute). None of this was particularly grand — we were in a basement, after all, with long, close corridors and exposed pipes running overhead — but Prok would have revolted against anything that smacked in the least of luxury. Still, the university deemed the project enough of a success to sink seventy thousand dollars into the remodeling of the space, and finally, at long last, we had a place of our own, where we could pursue our research as we saw fit, without worry or interference of any kind.
What do I remember most of that time? Boxes. Cardboard boxes stuffed full of books, files and correspondence. For two solid weeks, during the worst an Indiana winter could offer, I traipsed up and down the stairs at Biology Hall, staggered across campus with my arms straining at the sockets, and deposited said boxes in the commodious basement of Wylie. Anyone else would have hired movers, or at the very least, students, but not Prok. He insisted that our records were far too sensitive to entrust to anyone but the senior members of the staff, and somehow the gall wasp collection, the filing cabinets and even our desks, chairs and coat racks fell under that designation too. Corcoran, Rutledge and I packed, moved, unpacked and reordered everything we possessed, and then we stood back and marveled at all the empty space yet to fill.
Ted Aspinall had joined us the previous year, but he was excluded from any of the heavy lifting by virtue of his speciality — he was an artist first, a technician second, and his province was the film laboratory. He moved permanently to Bloomington around this time, arriving with a suitcase of clothes and two trunks of photographic equipment, and immediately set up shop in our new offices (or “laboratories,” as Prok preferred to call them). He’d never been outside of New York City before in his life, and he did seem a bit lost at times, wandering the streets of Bloomington in his dark glasses and trench coat as if he’d gone to sleep on the subway and got off at the wrong stop, but Prok had made him an attractive offer (he came in at a higher salary than I was making, but there was nothing new there, low man on the totem pole as I was and always will be) and his commercial photography — the eternal weddings, bar mitzvahs, graduation ceremonies, the unvarying frozen portraits of grandparents, uncles, cousins, even dogs — had begun to grate on him. He came to Bloomington to stay, and the whole tenor of the project changed to accommodate him. We were no longer an earnest if underfunded seat-of-the-pants operation working out of a warren of cramped dismal offices in the biology building, but a shining enterprise with international recognition, a ready influx of cash and our own full-time staff photographer.