Go Set a Watchman - Lee Harper - Страница 39

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Hell is eternal apartness. What had she done that she must spend the rest of her years reaching out with yearning for them, making secret trips to long ago, making no journey to the present? I am their blood and bones, I have dug in this ground, this is my home. But I am not their blood, the ground doesn’t care who digs it, I am a stranger at a cocktail party.

16

“HANK, WHERE’S ATTICUS?”

Henry looked up from his desk. “Hi, sweetie. He’s at the post office. It’s about coffee-time for me. Comin’ along?”

The same thing that compelled her to leave Mr. Cunningham’s and go to the office caused her to follow Henry to the sidewalk: she wished to look furtively at them again and again, to assure herself that they had not undergone some alarming physical metamorphosis as well, yet she did not wish to speak to them, to touch them, lest she cause them to commit further outrage in her presence.

As she and Henry walked side by side to the drugstore, she wondered if Maycomb was planning a fall or winter wedding for them. I’m peculiar, she thought. I cannot get into bed with a man unless I’m in some state of accord with him. Right now I can’t even speak to him. Cannot speak to my oldest friend.

They sat facing each other in a booth, and Jean Louise studied the napkin container, the sugar bowl, the salt and pepper shakers.

“You’re quiet,” said Henry. “How was the Coffee?”

“Atrocious.”

“Hester there?”

“Yes. She’s about yours and Jem’s age, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, same class. Bill told me this morning she was pilin’ on the warpaint for it.”

“Hank, Bill Sinclair must be a gloomy party.”

“Why?”

“All that guff he’s put in Hester’s head—”

“What guff?”

“Oh, the Catholics and the Communists and Lord knows what else. It seems to have run all together in her mind.”

Henry laughed and said, “Honey, the sun rises and sets with that Bill of hers. Everything he says is Gospel. She loves her man.”

“Is that what loving your man is?”

“Has a lot to do with it.”

Jean Louise said, “You mean losing your own identity, don’t you?”

“In a way, yes,” said Henry.

“Then I doubt if I shall ever marry. I never met a man—”

“You’re gonna marry me, remember?”

“Hank, I may as well tell you now and get it over with: I’m not going to marry you. Period and that’s that.”

She had not intended to say it but she could not stop herself.

“I’ve heard that before.”

“Well, I’m telling you now that if you ever want to marry”—was it she who was talking?—“you’d best start looking around. I’ve never been in love with you, but you’ve always known I’ve loved you. I thought we could make a marriage with me loving you on that basis, but—”

“But what?”

“I don’t even love you like that any more. I’ve hurt you but there it is.” Yes, it was she talking, with her customary aplomb, breaking his heart in the drugstore. Well, he’d broken hers.

Henry’s face became blank, reddened, and its scar leaped into prominence. “Jean Louise, you can’t mean what you’re saying.”

“I mean every word of it.”

Hurts, doesn’t it? You’re damn right it hurts. You know how it feels, now.

Henry reached across the table and took her hand. She pulled away. “Don’t you touch me,” she said.

“My darling, what is the matter?”

Matter? I’ll tell you what’s the matter. You won’t be pleased with some of it.

“All right, Hank. It’s simply this: I was at that meeting yesterday. I saw you and Atticus in your glory down there at that table with that—that scum, that dreadful man, and I tell you my stomach turned. Merely the man I was going to marry, merely my own father, merely made me so sick I threw up and haven’t stopped yet! How in the name of God could you? How could you?”

“We have to do a lot of things we don’t want to do, Jean Louise.”

She blazed. “What kind of answer is that? I thought Uncle Jack had finally gone off his rocker but I’m not so sure now!”

“Honey,” said Henry. He moved the sugar bowl to the center of the table and pushed it back again. “Look at it this way. All the Maycomb Citizens’ Council is in this world is—is a protest to the Court, it’s a sort of warning to the Negroes for them not to be in such a hurry, it’s a—”

“—tailor-made audience for any trash who wants to get up and holler nigger. How can you be a party to such a thing, how can you?”

Henry pushed the sugar bowl toward her and brought it back. She took it away from him and banged it down in the corner.

“Jean Louise, as I said before, we have to do—”

“—a lot of things we don’t—”

“—will you let me finish?—we don’t want to do. No, please let me talk. I’m trying to think of something that might show you what I mean … you know the Klan—?”

“Yes I know the Klan.”

“Now hush a minute. A long time ago the Klan was respectable, like the Masons. Almost every man of any prominence was a member, back when Mr. Finch was young. Did you know Mr. Finch joined?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised at anything Mr. Finch ever joined in his life. It figures—”

“Jean Louise, shut up! Mr. Finch has no more use for the Klan than anybody, and didn’t then. You know why he joined? To find out exactly what men in town were behind the masks. What men, what people. He went to one meeting, and that was enough. The Wizard happened to be the Methodist preacher—”

“That’s the kind of company Atticus likes.”

“Shut up, Jean Louise. I’m trying to make you see his motive: all the Klan was then was a political force, there wasn’t any cross-burning, but your daddy did and still does get mighty uncomfortable around folks who cover up their faces. He had to know who he’d be fighting if the time ever came to—he had to find out who they were….”

“So my esteemed father is one of the Invisible Empire.”

“Jean Louise, that was forty years ago—”

“He’s probably the Grand Dragon by now.”

Henry said evenly, “I’m only trying to make you see beyond men’s acts to their motives. A man can appear to be a part of something not-so-good on its face, but don’t take it upon yourself to judge him unless you know his motives as well. A man can be boiling inside, but he knows a mild answer works better than showing his rage. A man can condemn his enemies, but it’s wiser to know them. I said sometimes we have to do—”

Jean Louise said, “Are you saying go along with the crowd and then when the time comes—”

Henry checked her: “Look, honey. Have you ever considered that men, especially men, must conform to certain demands of the community they live in simply so they can be of service to it?

“Maycomb County’s home to me, honey. It’s the best place I know to live in. I’ve built up a good record here from the time I was a kid. Maycomb knows me, and I know Maycomb. Maycomb trusts me, and I trust Maycomb. My bread and butter comes from this town, and Maycomb’s given me a good living.

“But Maycomb asks certain things in return. It asks you to lead a reasonably clean life, it asks that you join the Kiwanis Club, to go to church on Sunday, it asks you to conform to its ways—”

Henry examined the salt shaker, moving his thumb up and down its grooved sides. “Remember this, honey,” he said. “I’ve had to work like a dog for everything I ever had. I worked in that store across the square—I was so tired most of the time it was all I could do to keep up with my lessons. In the summer I worked at home in Mamma’s store, and when I wasn’t working there I was hammering in the house. Jean Louise, I’ve had to scratch since I was a kid for the things you and Jem took for granted. I’ve never had some of the things you take for granted and I never will. All I have to fall back on is myself—”

“That’s all any of us have, Hank.”

“No it isn’t. Not here.”

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