Go Set a Watchman (To Kill a Mockingbird #2)(8)

“Between you and your father and your brother,” Alexandra said, “that rug is a disgrace. Hank, when I came to keep house for him the first thing I did was have it dyed as dark as I could. You remember how it used to look? Why, there was a black path from here to the fireplace nothing could take out….”

Hank said, “I remember it, ma’am. I’m afraid I was a contributor to it.”

Jean Louise drove the putter home beside the fire tongs, gathered up the golf balls, and threw them at the spittoon. She sat on the sofa and watched Hank retrieve the strays. I never tire of watching him move, she thought.

He returned, drank a cup of scalding black coffee at an alarming rate of speed, and said, “Mr. Finch, I’d better be going.”

“Wait a bit and I’ll come with you,” said Atticus.

“Feel like it, sir?”

“Certainly. Jean Louise,” he said suddenly, “how much of what’s going on down here gets into the newspapers?”

“You mean politics? Well, every time the Governor’s indiscreet it hits the tabloids, but beyond that, nothing.”

“I mean about the Supreme Court’s bid for immortality.”

“Oh, that. Well, to hear the Post tell it, we lynch ’em for breakfast; the Journal doesn’t care; and the Times is so wrapped up in its duty to posterity it bores you to death. I haven’t paid any attention to it except for the bus strikes and that Mississippi business. Atticus, the state’s not getting a conviction in that case was our worst blunder since Pickett’s Charge.”

“Yes, it was. I suppose the papers made hay with it?”

“They went insane.”

“And the NAACP?”

“I don’t know anything about that bunch except that some misguided clerk sent me some NAACP Christmas seals last year, so I stuck ’em on all the cards I sent home. Did Cousin Edgar get his?”

“He did, and he made a few suggestions as to what I should do with you.” Her father was smiling broadly.

“Like what?”

“That I should go to New York, grab you by the hair of the head, and take a switch to you. Edgar’s always disapproved of you, says you’re much too independent….”

“Never did have a sense of humor, pompous old catfish. That’s just what he is: whiskers here and here and a catfish mouth. I reckon he thinks my living alone in New York is ipso facto living in sin.”

“It amounts to that,” said Atticus. He hauled himself out of the armchair and motioned for Henry to get going.

Henry turned to Jean Louise. “Seven-thirty, honey?”

She nodded, then looked at her aunt out of the corner of her eye. “All right if I wear my slacks?”

“No ma’am.”

“Good for you, Hank,” said Alexandra.





3


THERE WAS NO doubt about it: Alexandra Finch Hancock was imposing from any angle; her behind was no less uncompromising than her front. Jean Louise had often wondered, but never asked, where she got her corsets. They drew up her bosom to giddy heights, pinched in her waist, flared out her rear, and managed to suggest that Alexandra’s had once been an hourglass figure.

Of all her relatives, her father’s sister came closest to setting Jean Louise’s teeth permanently on edge. Alexandra had never been actively unkind to her—she had never been unkind to any living creature, except to the rabbits that ate her azaleas, which she poisoned—but she had made Jean Louise’s life hell on wheels in her day, in her own time, and in her own way. Now that Jean Louise was grown, they had never been able to sustain fifteen minutes’ conversation with one another without advancing irreconcilable points of view, invigorating in friendships, but in close blood relations producing only uneasy cordiality. There were so many things about her aunt Jean Louise secretly delighted in when half a continent separated them, which on contact were abrasive, and were canceled out when Jean Louise undertook to examine her aunt’s motives. Alexandra was one of those people who had gone through life at no cost to themselves; had she been obliged to pay any emotional bills during her earthly life, Jean Louise could imagine her stopping at the check-in desk in heaven and demanding a refund.

Alexandra had been married for thirty-three years; if it had made any impression on her one way or another, she never showed it. She had spawned one son, Francis, who in Jean Louise’s opinion looked and behaved like a horse, and who long ago left Maycomb for the glories of selling insurance in Birmingham. It was just as well.