Go Set a Watchman (To Kill a Mockingbird #2)(50)

THE MAGPIES ARRIVED at 10:30, on schedule. Jean Louise stood on the front steps and greeted them one by one as they entered. They wore gloves and hats, and smelled to high heaven of attars, perfumes, eaus, and bath powder. Their makeup would have put an Egyptian draftsman to shame, and their clothes—particularly their shoes—had definitely been purchased in Montgomery or Mobile: Jean Louise spotted A. Nachman, Gayfer’s, Levy’s, Hammel’s, on all sides of the livingroom.

What do they talk about these days? Jean Louise had lost her ear, but she presently recovered it. The Newlyweds chattered smugly of their Bobs and Michaels, of how they had been married to Bob and Michael for four months and Bob and Michael had gained twenty pounds apiece. Jean Louise crushed the temptation to enlighten her young guests upon the probable clinical reasons for their loved ones’ rapid growth, and she turned her attention to the Diaper Set, which distressed her beyond measure:

When Jerry was two months old he looked up at me and said … toilet training should really begin when … he was christened he grabbed Mr. Stone by the hair and Mr. Stone … wets the bed now. I broke her of that the same time I broke her from sucking her finger, with … the cu-utest, absolutely the cutest sweatshirt you’ve ever seen: it’s got a little red elephant and “Crimson Tide” written right across the front … and it cost us five dollars to get it yanked out.

The Light Brigade sat to the left of her: in their early and middle thirties, they devoted most of their free time to the Amanuensis Club, bridge, and getting one-up on each other in the matter of electrical appliances:

John says … Calvin says it’s the … kidneys, but Allen took me off fried things … when I got caught in that zipper I like to have never … wonder what on earth makes her think she can get away with it … poor thing, if I were in her place I’d take … shock treatments, that’s what she had. They say she … kicks back the rug every Saturday night when Lawrence Welk comes on … and laugh, I thought I’d die! There he was, in … my old wedding dress, and you know, I can still wear it.

Jean Louise looked at the three Perennial Hopefuls on her right. They were jolly Maycomb girls of excellent character who had never made the grade. They were patronized by their married contemporaries, they were vaguely felt sorry for, and were produced to date any stray extra man who happened to be visiting their friends. Jean Louise looked at one of them with acid amusement: when Jean Louise was ten, she made her only attempt to join a crowd, and she asked Sarah Finley one day, “Can I come to see you this afternoon?” “No,” said Sarah, “Mamma says you’re too rough.”

Now we are both lonely, for entirely different reasons, but it feels the same, doesn’t it?

The Perennial Hopefuls talked quietly among themselves:

longest day I ever had … in the back of the bank building … a new house out on the road by … the Training Union, add it all up and you spend four hours every Sunday in church … times I’ve told Mr. Fred I like my tomatoes … boiling hot. I told ’em if they didn’t get air-conditioning in that office I’d … throw up the whole game. Now who’d want to pull a trick like that?

Jean Louise threw herself into the breach: “Still at the bank, Sarah?”

“Goodness yes. Be there till I drop.”

Um. “Ah, what ever happened to Jane—what was her last name? You know, your high school friend?” Sarah and Jane What-Was-Her-Last-Name were once inseparable.

“Oh her. She got married to a right peculiar boy during the war and now she rolls her ah’s so, you’d never recognize her.”

“Oh? Where’s she living now?”

“Mobile. She went to Washington during the war and got this hideous accent. Everybody thought she was puttin’ on so bad, but nobody had the nerve to tell her so she still does it. Remember how she used to walk with her head way up, like this? She still does.”

“She does?”

“Uh hum.”

Aunty has her uses, damn her, thought Jean Louise when she caught Alexandra’s signal. She went to the kitchen and brought out a tray of cocktail napkins. As she passed them down the line, Jean Louise felt as if she were running down the keys of a gigantic harpsichord:

I never in all my life … saw that marvelous picture … with old Mr. Healy … lying on the mantelpiece in front of my eyes the whole time … is it? Just about eleven, I think … she’ll wind up gettin’ a divorce. After all, the way he … rubbed my back every hour the whole ninth month … would have killed you. If you could have seen him … piddling every five minutes during the night. I put a stop … to everybody in our class except that horrid girl from Old Sarum. She won’t know the difference … between the lines, but you know exactly what he meant.