Go Set a Watchman (16 page)

She looked into the old woman’s face and she knew it was hopeless. Calpurnia was watching her, and in Calpurnia’s eyes was no hint of compassion.

Jean Louise rose to go. “Tell me one thing, Cal,” she said, “just one thing before I go—please, I’ve got to know. Did you hate us?”

The old woman sat silent, bearing the burden of her years. Jean Louise waited.

Finally, Calpurnia shook her head.

“
ZEEBO,
”
SAID JEAN
Louise. “If there’s anything I can do, for goodness’ sake call on me.”

“Yessum,” the big man said. “But it don’t look like there’s anything. Frank, he sho’ killed him, and there’s nothing nobody can do. Mr. Finch, he can’t do nothing about sump’n like that. Is there anything I can do for you while you’re home, ma’am?”

They were standing on the porch in the path cleared for them. Jean Louise sighed. “Yes, Zeebo, right now. You can come help me turn my car around. I’d be in the corn patch before long.”

“Yessum, Miss Jean Louise.”

She watched Zeebo manipulate the car in the narrow confine of the road. I hope I can get back home, she thought. “Thank you, Zeebo,” she said wearily. “Remember now.” The Negro touched his hatbrim and walked back to his mother’s house.

Jean Louise sat in the car, staring at the steering wheel. Why is it that everything I have ever loved on this earth has gone away from me in two days’ time? Would Jem turn his back on me? She loved us, I swear she loved us. She sat there in front of me and she didn’t see me, she saw white folks. She raised me, and she doesn’t care.

It was not always like this, I swear it wasn’t. People used to trust each other for some reason, I’ve forgotten why. They didn’t watch each other like hawks then. I wouldn’t get looks like that going up those steps ten years ago. She never wore her company manners with one of us … when Jem died, her precious Jem, it nearly killed her….

Jean Louise remembered going to Calpurnia’s house late one afternoon two years ago. She was sitting in her room, as she was today, her glasses down on her nose. She had been crying. “Always so easy to fix for,” Calpurnia said. “Never a day’s trouble in his life, my boy. He brought me a present home from the war, he brought me an electric coat.” When she smiled Calpurnia’s face broke into its million wrinkles. She went to the bed, and from under it pulled out a wide box. She opened the box and held up an enormous expanse of black leather. It was a German flying officer’s coat. “See?” she said. “It turns on.” Jean Louise examined the coat and found tiny wires running through it. There was a pocket containing batteries. “Mr. Jem said it’d keep my bones warm in the wintertime. He said for me not to be scared of it, but to be careful when it was lightning.” Calpurnia in her electric coat was the envy of her friends and neighbors. “Cal,” Jean Louise had said. “Please come back. I can’t go back to New York easy in my mind if you aren’t there.” That seemed to help: Calpurnia straightened up and nodded. “Yes ma’am,” she said. “I’m coming back. Don’t you worry.”

Jean Louise pressed the drive button and the car moved slowly down the road.
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Catch a nigger by his toe. When he hollers let him go
… God help me.

PART V

13

ALEXANDRA WAS AT
the kitchen table absorbed in culinary rites. Jean Louise tiptoed past her to no avail.

“Come look here.”

Alexandra stepped back from the table and revealed several cut-glass platters stacked three-deep with delicate sandwiches.

“Is that Atticus’s dinner?”

“No, he’s going to try to eat downtown today. You know how he hates barging in on a bunch of women.”

Holy Moses King of the Jews. The Coffee.

“Sweet, why don’t you get the livingroom ready. They’ll be here in an hour.”

“Who’ve you invited?”

Alexandra called out a guest list so preposterous that Jean Louise sighed heavily. Half the women were younger than she, half were older; they had shared no experience that she could recall, except one female with whom she had quarreled steadily all through grammar school. “Where’s everybody in my class?” she said.

“About, I suppose.”

Ah yes. About, in Old Sarum and points deeper in the woods. She wondered what had become of them.

“Did you go visiting this morning?” asked Alexandra.

“Went to see Cal.”

Alexandra’s knife clattered on the table. “Jean Louise!”

“
Now
what the hell’s the matter?” This is the last round I will ever have with her, so help me God. I have never been able to do anything right in my life as far as she’s concerned.

“Calm down, Miss.” Alexandra’s voice was cold. “Jean Louise, nobody in Maycomb goes to see Negroes any more, not after what they’ve been doing to us. Besides being shiftless now they look at you sometimes with open insolence, and as far as depending on them goes, why that’s out.

“That NAACP’s come down here and filled ’em with poison till it runs out of their ears. It’s simply because we’ve got a strong sheriff that we haven’t had bad trouble in this county so far. You do not
realize
what is going on. We’ve been good to ’em, we’ve bailed ’em out of jail and out of debt since the beginning of time, we’ve made work for ’em when there was no work, we’ve encouraged ’em to better themselves, they’ve gotten civilized, but my dear—that veneer of civilization’s so thin that a bunch of uppity Yankee Negroes can shatter a hundred years’ progress in five….

“No ma’am, after the thanks they’ve given us for looking after ’em, nobody in Maycomb feels much inclined to help ’em when they get in trouble now. All they do is bite the hands that feed ’em. No sir, not any more—they can shift for themselves, now.”

She had slept twelve hours, and her shoulders ached from weariness.

“Mary Webster’s Sarah’s carried a card for years—so’s everybody’s cook in this town. When Calpurnia left I simply couldn’t be bothered with another one, not for just Atticus and me. Keeping a nigger happy these days is like catering to a king—”

My Sainted Aunt is talking like Mr. Grady O’Hanlon, who left his job to devote his full time to the preservation of segregation.

“—you have to fetch and tote for them until you wonder who’s waiting on who. It’s just not worth the trouble these days—where are you going?”

“To get the livingroom ready.”

She sank into a deep armchair and considered how all occasions had made her poor indeed. My aunt is a hostile stranger, my Calpurnia won’t have anything to do with me, Hank is insane, and Atticus—something’s wrong with me, it’s something about me. It has to be because all these people cannot have changed.

Why doesn’t their flesh creep? How can they devoutly believe everything they hear in church and then say the things they do and listen to the things they hear without throwing up? I thought I was a Christian but I’m not. I’m something else and I don’t know what. Everything I have ever taken for right and wrong these people have taught me—these same, these very people. So it’s me, it’s not them. Something has happened to me.

They are all trying to tell me in some weird, echoing way that it’s all on account of the Negroes … but it’s no more the Negroes than I can fly and God knows, I might fly out the window any time, now.

“Haven’t you done the livingroom?” Alexandra was standing in front of her.

Jean Louise got up and did the livingroom.

THE MAGPIES ARRIVED
at 10:30, on schedule. Jean Louise stood on the front steps and greeted them one by one as they entered. They wore gloves and hats, and smelled to high heaven of attars, perfumes, eaus, and bath powder. Their makeup would have put an Egyptian draftsman to shame, and their clothes—particularly their shoes—had definitely been purchased in Montgomery or Mobile: Jean Louise spotted A. Nachman, Gayfer’s, Levy’s, Hammel’s, on all sides of the livingroom.

What do they talk about these days? Jean Louise had lost her ear, but she presently recovered it. The Newlyweds chattered smugly of their Bobs and Michaels, of how they had been married to Bob and Michael for four months and Bob and Michael had gained twenty pounds apiece. Jean Louise crushed the temptation to enlighten her young guests upon the probable clinical reasons for their loved ones’ rapid growth, and she turned her attention to the Diaper Set, which distressed her beyond measure:

When Jerry was two months old he looked up at me and said … toilet training should really begin when … he was christened he grabbed Mr. Stone by the hair and Mr. Stone … wets the bed now. I broke her of that the same time I broke her from sucking her finger, with … the cu-utest, absolutely the
cutest
sweatshirt you’ve ever seen: it’s got a little red elephant and “Crimson Tide” written right across the front … and it cost us five dollars to get it yanked out.

The Light Brigade sat to the left of her: in their early and middle thirties, they devoted most of their free time to the Amanuensis Club, bridge, and getting one-up on each other in the matter of electrical appliances:

John says … Calvin says it’s the … kidneys, but Allen took me off fried things … when I got caught in that zipper I like to have never … wonder what on earth makes her think she can get away with it … poor thing, if I were in her place I’d take … shock treatments, that’s what she had. They say she … kicks back the rug every Saturday night when Lawrence Welk comes on … and laugh, I thought I’d die! There he was, in … my old wedding dress, and you know, I can still wear it.

Jean Louise looked at the three Perennial Hopefuls on her right. They were jolly Maycomb girls of excellent character who had never made the grade. They were patronized by their married contemporaries, they were vaguely felt sorry for, and were produced to date any stray extra man who happened to be visiting their friends. Jean Louise looked at one of them with acid amusement: when Jean Louise was ten, she made her only attempt to join a crowd, and she asked Sarah Finley one day, “Can I come to see you this afternoon?” “No,” said Sarah, “Mamma says you’re too rough.”

Now we are both lonely, for entirely different reasons, but it feels the same, doesn’t it?

The Perennial Hopefuls talked quietly among themselves:

longest day I ever had … in the back of the bank building … a new house out on the road by … the Training Union, add it all up and you spend four hours every Sunday in church … times I’ve told Mr. Fred I like my tomatoes … boiling hot. I told ’em if they didn’t get air-conditioning in that office I’d … throw up the whole game. Now who’d want to pull a trick like that?

Jean Louise threw herself into the breach: “Still at the bank, Sarah?”

“Goodness yes. Be there till I drop.”

Um. “Ah, what ever happened to Jane—what was her last name? You know, your high school friend?” Sarah and Jane What-Was-Her-Last-Name were once inseparable.

“Oh her. She got married to a right peculiar boy during the war and now she rolls her
ah
’s so, you’d never recognize her.”

“Oh? Where’s she living now?”

“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 ex
act
ly 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
Ro
ses? No, honey, I said Warren pro
po
ses … 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—”