“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.
Back up the scale with the sandwiches:
Mr. Talbert looked at me and said … he’d never learn to sit on the pot … of beans every Thursday night. That’s the one Yankee thing he picked up in the … War of the Roses? No, honey, I said Warren proposes … to the garbage collector. That was all I could do after she got through … the rye. I just couldn’t help it, it made me feel like a big … A-men! I’ll be so glad when that’s over … the way he’s treated her … piles and piles of diapers, and he said why was I so tired? After all, he’d been … in the files the whole time, that’s where it was.
Alexandra walked behind her, muffling the keys with coffee until they subsided to a gentle hum. Jean Louise decided that the Light Brigade might suit her best, and she drew up a hassock and joined them. She cut Hester Sinclair from the covey: “How’s Bill?”
“Fine. Gets harder to live with every day. Wasn’t that bad about old Mr. Healy this morning?”
“Certainly was.”
Hester said, “Didn’t that boy have something to do with you all?”
“Yes. He’s our Calpurnia’s grandson.”
“Golly, I never know who they are these days, all the young ones. Reckon they’ll try him for murder?”
“Manslaughter, I should think.”
“Oh.” Hester was disappointed. “Yes, I reckon that’s right. He didn’t mean to do it.”
“No, he didn’t mean to do it.”
Hester laughed. “And I thought we’d have some excitement.”
Jean Louise’s scalp jumped. I guess I’m losing my sense of humor, maybe that’s what it is. I’m gettin’ like Cousin Edgar.
Hester was saying, “—hasn’t been a good trial around here in ten years. Good nigger trial, I mean. Nothing but cuttin’ and drinkin’.”
“Do you like to go to court?”
“Sure. Wildest divorce case last spring you ever saw. Some yaps from Old Sarum. It’s a good thing Judge Taylor’s dead—you know how he hated that sort of thing, always askin’ the ladies to leave the courtroom. This new one doesn’t care. Well—”
“Excuse me, Hester. You need some more coffee.”
Alexandra was carrying the heavy silver coffee pitcher. Jean Louise watched her pour. She doesn’t spill a drop. If Hank and I—Hank.
She glanced down the long, low-ceilinged livingroom at the double row of women, women she had merely known all her life, and she could not talk to them five minutes without drying up stone dead. I can’t think of anything to say to them. They talk incessantly about the things they do, and I don’t know how to do the things they do. If we married—if I married anybody from this town—these would be my friends, and I couldn’t think of a thing to say to them. I would be Jean Louise the Silent. I couldn’t possibly bring off one of these affairs by myself, and there’s Aunty having the time of her life. I’d be churched to death, bridge-partied to death, called upon to give book reviews at the Amanuensis Club, expected to become a part of the community. It takes a lot of what I don’t have to be a member of this wedding.
“—a mighty sad thing,” Alexandra said, “but that’s just the way they are and they can’t help it. Calpurnia was the best of the lot. That Zeebo of hers, that scamp’s still in the trees, but you know, Calpurnia made him marry every one of his women. Five, I think, but Calpurnia made him marry every one of ’em. That’s Christianity to them.”
Hester said, “You never can tell what goes on in their heads. My Sophie now, one day I asked her, ‘Sophie,’ I said, ‘what day does Christmas come on this year?’ Sophie scratched that wool of hers and said, ‘Miss Hester, I thinks it comes on the twenty-fifth this year.’ Laugh, I thought I’d die. I wanted to know the day of the week, not the day of the year. Thi-ick!”
Humor, humor, humor, I have lost my sense of humor. I’m gettin’ like the New York Post.
“—but you know they’re still doing it. Stoppin’ ’em just made ’em go underground. Bill says he wouldn’t be surprised if there was another Nat Turner Uprisin’, we’re sittin’ on a keg of dynamite and we just might as well be ready,” Hester said.