Go Set a Watchman (To Kill a Mockingbird #2)(7)

She turned to her father. “The Merriweathers? How long have they been married?”

Atticus looked at the ceiling, remembering. He was a precise man. “Forty-two years,” he said. “I was at their wedding.”

Alexandra said, “We first got wind of something wrong when they’d come to church and sit on opposite sides of the auditorium …”

Henry said, “They glared at each other for Sundays on end …”

Atticus said, “And the next thing you know they were in the office asking me to get ’em a divorce.”

“Did you?” Jean Louise looked at her father.

“I did.”

“On what grounds?”

“Adultery.”

Jean Louise shook her head in wonder. Lord, she thought, there must be something in the water— Alexandra’s voice cut through her ruminations: “Jean Louise, did you come down on the train Like That?”

Caught offside, it took a moment for her to ascertain what her aunt meant by Like That.

“Oh—yessum,” she said, “but wait a minute, Aunty. I left New York stockinged, gloved, and shod. I put on these right after we passed Atlanta.”

Her aunt sniffed. “I do wish this time you’d try to dress better while you’re home. Folks in town get the wrong impression of you. They think you are—ah—slumming.”

Jean Louise had a sinking feeling. The Hundred Years’ War had progressed to approximately its twenty-sixth year with no indications of anything more than periods of uneasy truce.

“Aunty,” she said. “I’ve come home for two weeks of just sitting, pure and simple. I doubt if I’ll ever move from the house the whole time. I beat my brains out all year round—”

She stood up and went to the fireplace, glared at the mantelpiece, and turned around. “If the folks in Maycomb don’t get one impression, they’ll get another. They’re certainly not used to seeing me dressed up.” Her voice became patient: “Look, if I suddenly sprang on ’em fully clothed they’d say I’d gone New York. Now you come along and say they think I don’t care what they think when I go around in slacks. Good Lord, Aunty, Maycomb knows I didn’t wear anything but overalls till I started having the Curse—”

Atticus forgot his hands. He bent over to tie perfectly tied shoelaces and came up with a flushed but straight face. “That’ll do, Scout,” he said. “Apologize to your aunt. Don’t start a row the minute you get home.”

Jean Louise smiled at her father. When registering disapprobation, he always reverted back to her childhood nickname. She sighed. “I’m sorry, Aunty. I’m sorry, Hank. I am oppressed, Atticus.”

“Then go back to New York and be uninhibited.”

Alexandra stood up and smoothed the various whalebone ridges running up and down her person. “Did you have any dinner on the train?”

“Yessum,” she lied.

“Then how about coffee?”

“Please.”

“Hank?”

“Yessum, please.”

Alexandra left the room without consulting her brother. Jean Louise said, “Still haven’t learned to drink it?”

“No,” said her father.

“Whiskey either?”

“No.”

“Cigarettes and women?”

“No.”

“You have any fun these days?”

“I manage.”

Jean Louise made a golf grip with her hands. “How is it?” she asked.

“None of your business.”

“Can you still use a putter?”

“Yes.”

“You used to do pretty well for a blind man.”

Atticus said, “There’s nothing wrong with my—”

“Nothing except you just can’t see.”

“Would you care to prove that statement?”

“Yes sir. Tomorrow at three okay?”

“Yes—no. I’ve got a meeting on. How about Monday? Hank, do we have anything on for Monday afternoon?”

Hank stirred. “Nothing but that mortgage coming up at one. Shouldn’t take more than an hour.”

Atticus said to his daughter, “I’m your man, then. From the looks of you, Miss Priss, it’ll be the blind leading the blind.”

At the fireplace, Jean Louise had picked up a blackened old wooden-shaft putter which had done years of double-duty as a poker. She emptied a great antique spittoon of its contents—golf balls—turned it on its side, kicked the golf balls into the middle of the livingroom, and was putting them back into the spittoon when her aunt reappeared carrying a tray of coffee, cups and saucers, and cake.