by Lee, Harper
“You’ve said that once today.”
Jean Louise put her hands on her hips. “How would you like to go swimming with your clothes on? I haven’t said that once today. Right now I’d just as soon push you in as look at you.”
“You know, I think you’d do it.”
“I’d just as soon,” she nodded.
Henry grabbed her shoulder. “If I go you go with me.”
“I’ll make one concession,” she said. “You have until five to empty your pockets.”
“This is insane, Jean Louise,” he said, pulling out money, keys, billfold, cigarettes. He stepped out of his loafers.
They eyed one another like game roosters. Henry got the jump on her, but when she was falling she snatched at his shirt and took him with her. They swam swiftly in silence to the middle of the river, turned, and swam slowly to the landing. “Give me a hand up,” she said.
Dripping, their clothes clinging to them, they made their way up the steps. “We’ll be almost dry when we get to the car,” he said.
“There was a current out there tonight,” she said.
“Too much dissipation.”
“Careful I don’t push you off this bluff. I mean that.” She giggled. “Remember how Mrs. Merriweather used to do poor old Mr. Merriweather? When we’re married I’m gonna do you the same way.”
It was hard on Mr. Merriweather if he happened to quarrel with his wife while on a public highway. Mr. Merriweather could not drive, and if their dissension reached the acrimonious, Mrs. Merriweather would stop the car and hitchhike to town. Once they disagreed in a narrow lane, and Mr. Merriweather was abandoned for seven hours. Finally he hitched a ride on a passing wagon.
“When I’m in the legislature we can’t take midnight plunges,” said Henry.
“Then don’t run.”
The car hummed on. Gradually, the cool air receded and it was stifling again. Jean Louise saw the reflection of headlights behind them in the windshield, and a car passed. Soon another came by, and another. Maycomb was near.
With her head on his shoulder, Jean Louise was content. It might work after all, she thought. But I am not domestic. I don’t even know how to run a cook. What do ladies say to each other when they go visiting? I’d have to wear a hat. I’d drop the babies and kill ’em.
Something that looked like a giant black bee whooshed by them and careened around the curve ahead. She sat up, startled. “What was that?”
“Carload of Negroes.”
“Mercy, what do they think they’re doing?”
“That’s the way they assert themselves these days,” Henry said. “They’ve got enough money to buy used cars, and they get out on the highway like ninety-to-nothing. They’re a public menace.”
“Driver’s licenses?”
“Not many. No insurance, either.”
“Golly, what if something happens?”
“It’s just too sad.”
At the door, Henry kissed her gently and let her go. “Tomorrow night?” he said.
She nodded. “Goodnight, sweet.”
Shoes in hand, she tiptoed into the front bedroom and turned on the light. She undressed, put on her pajama tops, and sneaked quietly into the livingroom. She turned on a lamp and went to the bookshelves. Oh murder, she thought. She ran her finger along the volumes of military history, lingered at The Second Punic War, and stopped at The Reason Why. Might as well bone up for Uncle Jack, she thought. She returned to her bedroom, snapped off the ceiling light, groped for the lamp, and switched it on. She climbed into the bed she was born in, read three pages, and fell asleep with the light on.
6
“Jean Louise, Jean Louise, wake up!”
Alexandra’s voice penetrated her unconsciousness, and she struggled to meet the morning. She opened her eyes and saw Alexandra standing over her. “Wh—” she said.
“Jean Louise, what do you mean—what do you and Henry Clinton mean—by going swimming last night naked?”
Jean Louise sat up in bed. “Hnh?”
“I said, what do you and Henry Clinton mean by going swimming in the river last night naked? It’s all over Maycomb this morning.”
Jean Louise put her head on her knees and tried to wake up. “Who told you that, Aunty?”
“Mary Webster called at the crack of dawn. Said you two were seen stark in the middle of the river last night at one o’clock!”
“Anybody with eyes that good was up to no good.” Jean Louise shrugged her shoulders. “Well, Aunty, I suppose I’ve got to marry Hank now, haven’t I?”
“I—I don’t know what to think of you, Jean Louise. Your father will die, simply die, when he finds out. You’d better tell him before he finds out on the street corner.”
Atticus was standing in the door with his hands in his pockets. “Good morning,” he said. “What’ll kill me?”
Alexandra said, “I’m not going to tell him, Jean Louise. It’s up to you.”
Jean Louise silently signaled her father; her message was received and understood. Atticus looked grave. “What’s the matter?” he said.
“Mary Webster was on the blower. Her advance agents saw Hank and me swimming in the middle of the river last night with no clothes on.”
“H’rm,” said Atticus. He touched his glasses. “I hope you weren’t doing the backstroke.”
“Atticus!” said Alexandra.
“Sorry, Zandra,” said Atticus. “Is that true, Jean Louise?”
“Partly. Have I disgraced us beyond repair?”
“We might survive it.”
Alexandra sat down on the bed. “Then it is true,” she said. “Jean Louise, I don’t know what you were doing at the Landing last night in the first place—”
“—but you do know. Mary Webster told you everything, Aunty. Didn’t she tell you what happened afterwards? Throw me my negligee, please sir.”
Atticus threw her pajama bottoms at her. She put them on beneath the sheet, kicked the sheet back, and stretched her legs.
“Jean Louise—” said Alexandra, and stopped. Atticus was holding up a rough-dried cotton dress. He put it on the bed and went to the chair. He picked up a rough-dried half slip, held it up, and dropped it on top of the dress.
“Quit tormenting your aunt, Jean Louise. These your swimming togs?”
“Yes sir. Reckon we ought to take ’em through town on a pole?”
Alexandra, puzzled, fingered Jean Louise’s garments and said, “But what possessed you to go in with your clothes on?”
When her brother and niece laughed, she said, “It’s not funny at all. Even if you did go in with your clothes on, Maycomb won’t give you credit for it. You might as well have gone in naked. I cannot imagine what put it in your heads to do such a thing.”
“I can’t either,” said Jean Louise. “Besides, if it’s any comfort to you, Aunty, it wasn’t that much fun. We just started teasing each other and I dared Hank and he couldn’t back out, and then I couldn’t back out, and the next thing you know we were in the water.”
Alexandra was not impressed: “At your ages, Jean Louise, such conduct is most unbecoming.”
Jean Louise sighed and got out of bed. “Well, I’m sorry,” she said. “Is there any coffee?”
“There’s a potful waiting for you.”
Jean Louise joined her father in the kitchen. She went to the stove, poured herself a cup of coffee, and sat down at the table. “How can you drink ice-cold milk for breakfast?”
Atticus gulped. “Tastes better than coffee.”
“Calpurnia used to say, when Jem and I’d beg her for coffee, that it’d turn us black like her. Are you worn with me?”
Atticus snorted. “Of course not. But I can think of several more interesting things to do in the middle of the night than pull a trick like that. You’d better get ready f
or Sunday School.”
Alexandra’s Sunday corset was even more formidable than her everyday ones. She stood in the door of Jean Louise’s room enarmored, hatted, gloved, perfumed, and ready.
Sunday was Alexandra’s day: in the moments before and after Sunday School she and fifteen other Methodist ladies sat together in the church auditorium and conducted a symposium Jean Louise called “The News of the Week in Review.” Jean Louise regretted that she had deprived her aunt of her Sabbath pleasure; today Alexandra would be on the defensive, but Jean Louise was confident that Alexandra could wage a defensive war with little less tactical genius than her forward thrusts, that she would emerge and listen to the sermon with her niece’s reputation intact.
“Jean Louise, are you ready?”
“Almost,” she answered. She swiped at her mouth with a lipstick, patted down her cowlick, eased her shoulders, and turned. “How do I look?” she said.
“I’ve never seen you completely dressed in your life. Where is your hat?”
“Aunty, you know good and well if I walked in church today with a hat on they’d think somebody was dead.”
The one time she wore a hat was to Jem’s funeral. She didn’t know why she did it, but before the funeral she made Mr. Ginsberg open his store for her and she picked one out and clapped it on her head, fully aware that Jem would have laughed had he been able to see her, but somehow it made her feel better.
Her Uncle Jack was standing on the church steps when they arrived.
Dr. John Hale Finch was no taller than his niece, who was five seven. His father had given him a high-bridged nose, a stern nether lip, and high cheekbones. He looked like his sister Alexandra, but their physical resemblance ended at the neck: Dr. Finch was spare, almost spidery; his sister was of firmer proportions. He was the reason Atticus did not marry until he was forty—when the time came for John Hale Finch to choose a profession, he chose medicine. He chose to study it at a time when cotton was one cent a pound and the Finches had everything but money. Atticus, not yet secure in his profession, spent and borrowed every nickel he could find to put on his brother’s education; in due time it was returned with interest.
Dr. Finch became a bone man, practiced in Nashville, played the stock market with shrewdness, and by the time he was forty-five he had accumulated enough money to retire and devote all his time to his first and abiding love, Victorian literature, a pursuit that in itself earned him the reputation of being Maycomb County’s most learned licensed eccentric.
Dr. Finch had drunk so long and so deep of his heady brew that his being was shot through with curious mannerisms and odd exclamations. He punctuated his speech with little “hah”s and “hum”s and archaic expressions, on top of which his penchant for modern slang teetered precariously. His wit was hatpin sharp; he was absentminded; he was a bachelor but gave the impression of harboring amusing memories; he possessed a yellow cat nineteen years old; he was incomprehensible to most of Maycomb County because his conversation was colored with subtle allusions to Victorian obscurities.
He gave strangers the idea that he was a borderline case, but those who were tuned to his wavelength knew Dr. Finch to be of a mind so sound, especially when it came to market manipulation, that his friends often risked lengthy lectures on the poetry of Mackworth Praed to seek his advice. From long and close association (in her solitary teens Dr. Finch had tried to make a scholar of her) Jean Louise had developed enough understanding of his subjects to follow him most of the time, and she reveled in his conversation. When he did not have her in silent hysterics, she was bewitched by his bear-trap memory and vast restless mind.
“Good morning, daughter of Nereus!” said her uncle, as he kissed her on the cheek. One of Dr. Finch’s concessions to the twentieth century was a telephone. He held his niece at arm’s length and regarded her with amused interest.
“Home for nineteen hours and you’ve already indulged your predilection for ablutionary excesses, hah! A classic example of Watsonian Behaviorism—think I’ll write you up and send you to the AMA Journal.”
“Hush, you old quack,” whispered Jean Louise between clenched teeth. “I’m coming to see you this afternoon.”
“You and Hank mollockin’ around in the river—hah!—ought to be ashamed of yourselves—disgrace to the family—have fun?”
Sunday School was beginning, and Dr. Finch bowed her in the door: “Your guilty lover’s waitin’ within,” he said.
Jean Louise gave her uncle a look which withered him not at all and marched into the church with as much dignity as she could muster. She smiled and greeted the Maycomb Methodists, and in her old classroom she settled herself by the window and slept with her eyes open through the lesson, as was her custom.
7
There’s nothing like a blood-curdling hymn to make you feel at home, thought Jean Louise. Any sense of isolation she may have had withered and died in the presence of some two hundred sinners earnestly requesting to be plunged beneath a red, redeeming flood. While offering to the Lord the results of Mr. Cowper’s hallucination, or declaring it was Love that lifted her, Jean Louise shared the warmness that prevails among diverse individuals who find themselves in the same boat for one hour each week.
She was sitting beside her aunt in the middle pew on the right side of the auditorium; her father and Dr. Finch sat side by side on the left, third row from the front. Why they did it was a mystery to her, but they had sat there together ever since Dr. Finch returned to Maycomb. Nobody would take them for brothers, she thought. It’s hard to believe he’s ten years older than Uncle Jack.
Atticus Finch looked like his mother; Alexandra and John Hale Finch looked like their father. Atticus was a head taller than his brother, his face was broad and open with a straight nose and wide thin mouth, but something about the three marked them as kin. Uncle Jack and Atticus are getting white in the same places and their eyes are alike, thought Jean Louise: that’s what it is. She was correct. All the Finches had straight incisive eyebrows and heavy-lidded eyes; when they looked slant-wise, up, or straight ahead, a disinterested observer would catch a glimpse of what Maycomb called Family Resemblance.
Her meditations were interrupted by Henry Clinton. He had passed one collection plate down the pew behind her, and while waiting for its mate to return via the row she was sitting on, he winked openly and solemnly at her. Alexandra saw him and looked blue murder. Henry and his fellow usher walked up the center aisle and stood reverently in front of the altar.
Immediately after collection, Maycomb Methodists sang what they called the Doxology in lieu of the minister praying over the collection plate to spare him the rigors involved in inventing yet another prayer, since by that time he had uttered three healthy invocations. From the time of Jean Louise’s earliest ecclesiastical recollection, Maycomb had sung the Doxology in one way and in one way only:
Praise—God—from—whom—all—blessings—flow,
a rendition as much a tradition of Southern Methodism as Pounding the Preacher. That Sunday, Jean Louise and the congregation were in all innocence clearing their throats to drag it accordingly when out of a cloudless sky Mrs. Clyde Haskins crashed down on the organ
PraiseGodfromwhomall Bles—sings—Flo—w
PraiseHimallcreatures He—re Bee—low
PraiseHimaboveye Heav’n—ly Ho—st
PraiseFatherSonand Ho—ly Gho—st!
In the confusion that followed, if the Archbishop of Canterbury had materialized in full regalia Jean Louise would not have been in the least surprised: the congregation had failed to notice any change in Mrs. Haskins’s lifelong interpretation, and they intoned the Doxology to its bitter end as they had been reared to do, while Mrs. Haskins romped madly ahead like something out of Salisbury Cathedral.
Jean Louise’s first thought was that Herbert Jemson had lost his mind. Herbert Jemson had been music dir
ector of the Maycomb Methodist Church for as long as she could remember. He was a big, good man with a soft baritone, who ruled with easy tact a choir of repressed soloists, and who had an unerring memory for the favorite hymns of District Superintendents. In the sundry church wars that were a living part of Maycomb Methodism, Herbert could be counted on as the one person to keep his head, talk sense, and reconcile the more primitive elements of the congregation with the Young Turk faction. He had devoted thirty years’ spare time to his church, and his church had recently rewarded him with a trip to a Methodist music camp in South Carolina.
Jean Louise’s second impulse was to blame it on the minister. He was a young man, a Mr. Stone by name, with what Dr. Finch called the greatest talent for dullness he had ever seen in a man on the near side of fifty. There was nothing whatever wrong with Mr. Stone, except that he possessed all the necessary qualifications for a certified public accountant: he did not like people, he was quick with numbers, he had no sense of humor, and he was butt-headed.
Because Maycomb’s church had for years not been large enough for a good minister but too big for a mediocre one, Maycomb was delighted when, at the last Church Conference, the authorities decided to send its Methodists an energetic young one. But after less than a year the young minister had impressed his congregation to a degree that moved Dr. Finch to observe absently and audibly one Sunday: “We asked for bread and they gave us a Stone.”
Mr. Stone had long been suspected of liberal tendencies; he was too friendly, some thought, with his Yankee brethren; he had recently emerged partially damaged from a controversy over the Apostles’ Creed; and worst of all, he was thought to be ambitious. Jean Louise was building up an airtight case against him when she remembered Mr. Stone was tone deaf.
Unruffled by Herbert Jemson’s breach of allegiance, because he had not heard it, Mr. Stone rose and walked to the pulpit with Bible in hand. He opened it and said, “My text for today is taken from the twenty-first chapter of Isaiah, verse six:
For thus hath the Lord said unto me,