Go Set a Watchman - Lee Harper - Страница 29

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 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.

“Ahm, ah—Hester, of course I don’t know much about it, but I thought that Montgomery crowd spent most of their meeting time in church praying,” said Jean Louise.

“Oh my child, don’t you know that was just to get sympathy up in the East? That’s the oldest trick known to mankind. You know Kaiser Bill prayed to God every night of his life.”

An absurd verse vibrated in Jean Louise’s memory. Where had she read it?

By right Divine, my dear Augusta,

We’ve had another awful buster;