Go Set a Watchman (To Kill a Mockingbird #2)(26)

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 for 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.