Authors: Harper Lee
They walked arm-in-arm down the track to collect her suitcase. “How’s Atticus?” she said.
“His hands and shoulders are giving him fits today.”
“He can’t drive when they’re like that, can he?”
Henry closed the fingers of his right hand halfway and said, “He can’t close them any more than this. Miss Alexandra has to tie his shoes and button his shirts when they’re like that. He can’t even hold a razor.”
Jean Louise shook her head. She was too old to rail against the inequity of it, but too young to accept her father’s crippling disease without putting up some kind of fight. “Isn’t there anything they can do?”
“You know there isn’t,” Henry said. “He takes seventy grains of aspirin a day and that’s all.”
Henry picked up her heavy suitcase, and they walked back toward the car. She wondered how she would behave when her time came to hurt day in and day out. Hardly like Atticus: if you asked him how he was feeling he would tell you, but he never complained; his disposition remained the same, so in order to find out how he was feeling, you had to ask him.
The only way Henry found out about it was by accident. One day when they were in the records vault at the courthouse running a land title, Atticus hauled out a heavy mortgage book, turned stark white, and dropped it. “What’s the matter?” Henry had said. “Rheumatoid arthritis. Can you pick it up for me?” said Atticus. Henry asked him how long he’d had it; Atticus said six months. Did Jean Louise know it? No. Then he’d better tell her. “If you tell her she’ll be down here trying to nurse me. The only remedy for this is not to let it beat you.” The subject was closed.
“Want to drive?” said Henry.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. Although she was a respectable driver, she hated to operate anything mechanical more complicated than a safety pin: folding lawn chairs were a source of profound irritation to her; she had never learned to ride a bicycle or use a typewriter; she fished with a pole. Her favorite game was golf because its essential principles consisted of a stick, a small ball, and a state of mind.
With green envy, she watched Henry’s effortless mastery of the automobile. Cars are his servants, she thought. “Power steering? Automatic transmission?” she said.
“You bet,” he said.
“Well, what if everything shuts off and you don’t have any gears to shift. You’d be in trouble then, wouldn’t you?”
“But everything won’t shut off.”
“How do you know?”
“That’s what faith is. Come here.”
Faith in General Motors. She put her head on his shoulder.
“Hank,” she said presently. “What really happened?”
This was an old joke between them. A pink scar started under his right eye, hit the corner of his nose, and ran diagonally across his upper lip. Behind his lip were six false front teeth not even Jean Louise could induce him to take out and show her. He came home from the war with them. A German, more to express his displeasure at the end of the war than anything else, had bashed him in the face with a rifle butt. Jean Louise had chosen to think this a likely story: what with guns that shot over the horizon, B-17s, V-bombs, and the like, Henry had probably not been within spitting distance of the Germans.
“Okay, honey,” he said. “We were down in a cellar in Berlin. Everybody had too much to drink and a fight started—you like to hear the believable, don’t you? Now will you marry me?”
“Not yet.”
“Why?”
“I want to be like Dr. Schweitzer and play until I’m thirty.”
“He played all right,” said Henry grimly.
Jean Louise moved under his arm. “You know what I mean,” she said.
“Yes.”
There was no finer young man, said the people of Maycomb, than Henry Clinton. Jean Louise agreed. Henry was from the southern end of the county. His father had left his mother soon after Henry was born, and she worked night and day in her little crossroads store to send Henry through the Maycomb public schools. Henry, from the time he was twelve, boarded across the street from the Finch house, and this in itself put him on a higher plane: he was his own master, free from the authority of cooks, yardmen, and parents. He was also four years her senior, which made a difference then. He teased her; she adored him. When he was fourteen his mother died, leaving him next to nothing. Atticus Finch looked after what little money there was from the sale of the store—her funeral expenses took most of it—he secretly supplemented it with money of his own, and got Henry a job clerking in the Jitney Jungle after school. Henry graduated and went into the Army, and after the war he went to the University and studied law.
Just about that time, Jean Louise’s brother dropped dead in his tracks one day, and after the nightmare of that was over, Atticus, who had always thought of leaving his practice to his son, looked around for another young man. It was natural for him to engage Henry, and in due course Henry became Atticus’s legman, his eyes, and his hands. Henry had always respected Atticus Finch; soon it melded to affection and Henry regarded him as a father.
He did not regard Jean Louise as a sister. In the years when he was away at the war and the University, she had turned from an overalled, fractious, gun-slinging creature into a reasonable facsimile of a human being. He began dating her on her annual two-week visits home, and although she still moved like a thirteen-year-old boy and abjured most feminine adornment, he found something so intensely feminine about her that he fell in love. She was easy to look at and easy to be with most of the time, but she was in no sense of the word an easy person. She was afflicted with a restlessness of spirit he could not guess at, but he knew she was the one for him. He would protect her; he would marry her.
“Tired of New York?” he said.
“No.”
“Give me a free hand for these two weeks and I’ll make you tired of it.”
“Is that an improper suggestion?”
“Yes.”
“Go to hell, then.”
Henry stopped the car. He turned off the ignition switch, slewed around, and looked at her. She knew when he became serious about something: his crew cut bristled like an angry brush, his face colored, its scar reddened.
“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?”
“I’m not worrying, Zandra.” Atticus glanced at his sister, amused. She was an impossible woman, but a sight better than having Jean Louise permanently home and miserable. When his daughter was miserable she prowled, and Atticus liked his women to be relaxed, not constantly emptying ashtrays.
He heard a car turn into the driveway, he heard two of its doors slam, then the front door slam. He carefully nudged the music stand away from him with his feet, made one futile attempt to rise from the deep armchair without using his hands, succeeded the second time, and had just balanced himself when Jean Louise was upon him. He suffered her embrace and returned it as best he could.
“Atticus—” she said.
“Put her suitcase in the bedroom, please, Hank,” said Atticus over her shoulder. “Thanks for meeting her.”
Jean Louise pecked at her aunt and missed, took a package of cigarettes from her bag, and hurled it at the sofa. “How’s the rheumatism, Aunty?”
“Some better, sweet.”
“Atticus?”
“Some better, sweet. Did you have a good trip down?”
“Yes sir.” She collapsed on the sofa. Hank returned from his chores, said, “Move over,” and sat down beside her.
Jean Louise yawned and stretched. “What’s the news?” she asked. “All I get these days is reading between the lines in the
Maycomb Tribune
. You all never write me anything.”
Alexandra said, “You saw of the death of Cousin Edgar’s boy. That was a mighty sad thing.”
Jean Louise saw Henry and her father exchange glances. Atticus said, “He came in late one afternoon hot from football practice and raided the Kappa Alpha icebox. He also ate a dozen bananas and washed ’em down with a pint of whiskey. An hour later he was dead. It wasn’t sad at all.”
Jean Louise said, “Whew.”
Alexandra said, “
Att
icus! You know he was Edgar’s baby boy.”
Henry said, “It
was
awful, Miss Alexandra.”
“Cousin Edgar still courtin’ you, Aunty?” asked Jean Louise. “Looks like after eleven years he’d ask you to marry him.”
Atticus raised his eyebrows in warning. He watched his daughter’s daemon rise and dominate her: her eyebrows, like his, were lifted, the heavy-lidded eyes beneath them grew round, and one corner of her mouth was raised dangerously. When she looked thus, only God and Robert Browning knew what she was likely to say.
Her aunt protested. “Really, Jean Louise, Edgar is your father’s and my first cousin.”
“At this stage of the game, it shouldn’t make much difference, Aunty.”
Atticus asked quickly, “How did you leave the big city?”
“Right now I want to know about this big city. You two never write me any dirt. Aunty, I’m depending on you to give me a year’s news in fifteen minutes.” She patted Henry on the arm, more to keep him from starting a business conversation with Atticus than anything else. Henry interpreted it as a warm gesture and returned it.