Go Set a Watchman (To Kill a Mockingbird #2)(56)

But she was not there to be entertained with the vacillations of a minor Victorian esthete. She watched her uncle maneuver salad greens, olive oil, vinegar, and several ingredients unknown to her with the same precision and assurances he employed on a difficult osteotomy. He divided the salad into two plates and said, “Eat, child.”

Dr. Finch chewed ferociously on his lunch and eyed his niece, who was arranging lettuce, hunks of avocado, green pepper, and onions in a neat row on her plate. “All right, what’s the matter? Are you pregnant?”

“Gracious no, Uncle Jack.”

“That’s about the only thing I can think of that worries young women these days. Do you want to tell me?” His voice softened. “Come on, old Scout.”

Jean Louise’s eyes blurred with tears. “What’s been happening, Uncle Jack? What is the matter with Atticus? I think Hank and Aunty have lost their minds and I know I’m losing mine.”

“I haven’t noticed anything the matter with them. Should I?”

“You should have seen them sitting in that meeting yesterday—”

Jean Louise looked up at her uncle, who was balancing himself dangerously on the back legs of his chair. He put his hands on the table to steady himself, his incisive features melted, his eyebrows shot up, he laughed loudly. The front legs of his chair came down with a bang, and he subsided into chuckles.

Jean Louise raged. She got up from the table, tipped over her chair, restored it, and walked to the door. “I didn’t come here to be made fun of, Uncle Jack,” she said.

“Oh sit down and shut up,” said her uncle. He looked at her with genuine interest, as if she were something under a microscope, as though she were some medical marvel that had inadvertently materialized in his kitchen.

“As I sit here and breathe, I never thought the good God would let me live to see someone walk into the middle of a revolution, pull a lugubrious face, and say, ‘What’s the matter?’” He laughed again, shaking his head.

“Matter, child? I’ll tell you what’s the matter if you collect yourself and refrain from carrying on like—arum!—I wonder if your eyes and ears ever make anything save spasmodic contact with your brain.” His face tightened. “You won’t be pleased with some of it,” he said.

“I don’t care what it is, Uncle Jack, if you’ll only tell me what’s turned my father into a nigger-hater.”

“Hold your tongue.” Dr. Finch’s voice was stern. “Don’t you ever call your father that. I detest the sound of it as much as its matter.”

“What am I to call him, then?”

Her uncle sighed at length. He went to the stove and turned on the front burner under the coffeepot. “Let us consider this calmly,” he said. When he turned around Jean Louise saw amusement banish the indignation in his eyes, then meld into an expression she could not read. She heard him mutter, “Oh dear. Oh dear me, yes. The novel must tell a story.”

“What do you mean by that?” she said. She knew he was quoting at her but she didn’t know what, she didn’t know why, and she didn’t care. Her uncle could annoy the hell out of her when he chose, apparently he was choosing to do so now, and she resented it.

“Nothing.” He sat down, took off his glasses, and returned them to his vest pocket. He spoke deliberately. “Baby,” he said, “all over the South your father and men like your father are fighting a sort of rearguard, delaying action to preserve a certain kind of philosophy that’s almost gone down the drain—”

“If it’s what I heard yesterday I say good riddance.”

Dr. Finch looked up. “You’re making a bad mistake if you think your daddy’s dedicated to keeping the Negroes in their places.”

Jean Louise raised her hands and her voice: “What the hell am I to think? It made me sick, Uncle Jack. Plain-out sick—”

Her uncle scratched his ear. “You no doubt, somewhere along the line, have had certain historical facts and nuances placed in front of you—”

“Uncle Jack, don’t hand me that kind of talk now—fightin’ the War has nothing to do with it.”

“On the contrary, it has a great deal to do with it if you want to understand. The first thing you must realize is something—God help us, it was something—that three-fourths of a nation have failed to this day to understand. What kind of people were we, Jean Louise? What kind of people are we? Who are we still closest to in this world?”