“Honey, do you want me to put it like a gentleman? Miss Jean Louise, I have now reached an economic status that can provide for the support of two. I, like Israel of Old, have labored seven years in the vineyards of the University and the pastures of your daddy’s office for you—”
“I’ll tell Atticus to make it seven more.”
“Hateful.”
“Besides,” she said, “it was Jacob anyway. No, they were the same. They always changed their names every third verse. How’s Aunty?”
“You know good and well she’s been fine for thirty years. Don’t change the subject.”
Jean Louise’s eyebrows flickered. “Henry,” she said primly, “I’ll have an affair with you but I won’t marry you.”
It was exactly right.
“Don’t be such a damn child, Jean Louise!” Henry sputtered, and forgetting the latest dispensations from General Motors, grabbed for a gearshift and stomped at a clutch. These denied him, he wrenched the ignition key violently, pressed some buttons, and the big car glided slowly and smoothly down the highway.
“Slow pickup, isn’t it?” she said. “No good for city driving.”
Henry glared at her. “What do you mean by that?”
In another minute this would become a quarrel. He was serious. She’d better make him furious, thus silent, so she could think about it.
“Where’d you get that appalling tie?” she said.
Now.
She was almost in love with him. No, that’s impossible, she thought: either you are or you aren’t. Love’s the only thing in this world that is unequivocal. There are different kinds of love, certainly, but it’s a you-do or you-don’t proposition with them all.
She was a person who, when confronted with an easy way out, always took the hard way. The easy way out of this would be to marry Hank and let him labor for her. After a few years, when the children were waist-high, the man would come along whom she should have married in the first place. There would be searchings of hearts, fevers and frets, long looks at each other on the post office steps, and misery for everybody. The hollering and the high-mindedness over, all that would be left would be another shabby little affair à la the Birmingham country club set, and a self-constructed private Gehenna with the latest Westinghouse appliances. Hank didn’t deserve that.
No. For the present she would pursue the stony path of spinsterhood. She set about restoring peace with honor:
“Honey, I’m sorry, truly sorry,” she said, and she was.
“That’s okay,” said Henry, and slapped her knee. “It’s just that I could kill you sometimes.”
“I know I’m hateful.”
Henry looked at her. “You’re an odd one, sweet. You can’t dissemble.”
She looked at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Well, as a general rule, most women, before they’ve got ’em, present to their men smiling, agreeing faces. They hide their thoughts. You now, when you’re feeling hateful, honey, you are hateful.”
“Isn’t it fairer for a man to be able to see what he’s letting himself in for?”
“Yes, but don’t you see you’ll never catch a man that way?”
She bit her tongue on the obvious, and said, “How do I go about being an enchantress?”
Henry warmed to his subject. At thirty, he was an adviser. Maybe because he was a lawyer. “First,” he said dispassionately, “hold your tongue. Don’t argue with a man, especially when you know you can beat him. Smile a lot. Make him feel big. Tell him how wonderful he is, and wait on him.”
She smiled brilliantly and said, “Hank, I agree with everything you’ve said. You are the most perspicacious individual I’ve met in years, you are six feet five, and may I light your cigarette? How’s that?”
“Awful.”
They were friends again.
2
ATTICUS FINCH SHOT his left cuff, then cautiously pushed it back. One-forty. On some days he wore two watches: he wore two this day, an ancient watch and chain his children had cut their teeth on, and a wristwatch. The former was habit, the latter was used to tell time when he could not move his fingers enough to dig in his watchpocket. He had been a big man before age and arthritis reduced him to medium size. He was seventy-two last month, but Jean Louise always thought of him as hovering somewhere in his middle fifties—she could not remember him being any younger, and he seemed to grow no older.
In front of the chair in which he was sitting was a steel music stand, and on the stand was The Strange Case of Alger Hiss. Atticus leaned forward a little, the better to disapprove of what he was reading. A stranger would not have seen annoyance on Atticus’s face, for he seldom expressed it; a friend, however, would expect a dry “H-rm” to come soon: Atticus’s eyebrows were elevated, his mouth was a pleasant thin line.
“H-rm,” he said.
“What, dear?” said his sister.
“I don’t understand how a man like this can have the brass to give us his views on the Hiss case. It’s like Fenimore Cooper writin’ the Waverley Novels.”
“Why, dear?”
“He has a childlike faith in the integrity of civil servants and he seems to think Congress corresponds to their aristocracy. No understanding of American politics a-tall.”
His sister peered at the book’s dust jacket. “I’m not familiar with the author,” she said, thus condemning the book forever. “Well, don’t worry, dear. Shouldn’t they be here now?”