“How?”
She grinned. “Don’t you know how to catch a woman, honey?” She rubbed an imaginary crew cut, frowned, and said, “Women like for their men to be masterful and at the same time remote, if you can pull that trick. Make them feel helpless, especially when you know they can pick up a load of light’ud knots with no trouble. Never doubt yourself in front of them, and by no means tell them you don’t understand them.”
“Touché, baby,” said Henry. “But I’d quibble with your last suggestion. I thought women liked to be thought strange and mysterious.”
“No, they just like to look strange and mysterious. When you get past all the boa feathers, every woman born in this world wants a strong man who knows her like a book, who’s not only her lover but he who keepeth Israel. Stupid, isn’t it?”
“She wants a father instead of a husband, then.”
“That’s what it amounts to,” she said. “The books are right on that score.”
Henry said, “You’re being very wise this evening. Where’d you pick up all this?”
“Living in sin in New York,” she said. She lighted a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “I learned it from watching sleek, Madison Avenuey young marrieds—you know that language, baby? It’s lots of fun, but you need an ear for it—they go through a kind of tribal fandango, but the application’s universal. It begins by the wives being bored to death because their men are so tired from making money they don’t pay any attention to ’em. But when their wives start hollering, instead of trying to understand why, the men just go find a sympathetic shoulder to cry on. Then when they get tired of talking about themselves they go back to their wives. Everything’s rosy for a while, but the men get tired and their wives start yellin’ again and around it goes. Men in this age have turned the Other Woman into a psychiatrist’s couch, and at far less expense, too.”
Henry stared at her. “I’ve never heard you so cynical,” he said. “What’s the matter with you?”
Jean Louise blinked. “I’m sorry, honey.” She crushed out her cigarette. “It’s just that I’m so afraid of making a mess of being married to the wrong man—the wrong kind for me, I mean. I’m no different from any other woman, and the wrong man would turn me into a screamin’ shrew in record time.”
“What makes you so sure you’ll marry the wrong man? Didn’t you know I’m a wife-beater from way back?”
A black hand held out the check on a tray. The hand was familiar to her and she looked up. “Hi, Albert,” she said. “They’ve put you in a white coat.”
“Yes ma’am, Miss Scout,” said Albert. “How’s New York?”
“Just fine,” she said, and wondered who else in Maycomb still remembered Scout Finch, juvenile desperado, hellraiser extraordinary. Nobody but Uncle Jack, perhaps, who sometimes embarrassed her unmercifully in front of company with a tinkling recitative of her childhood felonies. She would see him at church tomorrow, and tomorrow afternoon she would have a long visit with him. Uncle Jack was one of the abiding pleasures of Maycomb.
“Why is it,” said Henry deliberately, “that you never drink more than half your second cup of coffee after supper?”
She looked down at her cup, surprised. Any reference to her personal eccentricities, even from Henry, made her shy. Astute of Hank to notice that. Why had he waited fifteen years to tell her?
5
WHEN SHE WAS getting in the car she bumped her head hard against its top. “Damnation! Why don’t they make these things high enough to get into?” She rubbed her forehead until her eyes focused.
“Okay, honey?”
“Yeah. I’m all right.”
Henry shut the door softly, went around, and got in beside her. “Too much city living,” he said. “You’re never in a car up there, are you?”
“No. How long before they’ll cut ’em down to one foot high? We’ll be riding prone next year.”
“Shot out of a cannon,” said Henry. “Shot from Maycomb to Mobile in three minutes.”
“I’d be content with an old square Buick. Remember them? You sat at least five feet off the ground.”
Henry said, “Remember when Jem fell out of the car?”
She laughed. “That was my hold over him for weeks—anybody who couldn’t get to Barker’s Eddy without falling out of the car was a big wet hen.”
In the dim past, Atticus had owned an old canvas-top touring car, and once when he was taking Jem, Henry, and Jean Louise swimming, the car rolled over a particularly bad hump in the road and deposited Jem without. Atticus drove serenely on until they reached Barker’s Eddy, because Jean Louise had no intention of advising her father that Jem was no longer present, and she prevented Henry from doing so by catching his finger and bending it back. When they arrived at the creek bank, Atticus turned around with a hearty “Everybody out!” and the smile froze on his face: “Where’s Jem?” Jean Louise said he ought to be coming along any minute now. When Jem appeared puffing, sweaty, and filthy from his enforced sprint, he ran straight past them and dived into the creek with his clothes on. Seconds later a murderous face appeared from beneath the surface, saying, “Come on in here, Scout! I dare you, Hank!” They took his dare, and once Jean Louise thought Jem would choke the life out of her, but he let her go eventually: Atticus was there.
“They’ve put a planing mill on the eddy,” said Henry. “Can’t swim in it now.”
Henry drove up to the E-Lite Eat Shop and honked the horn. “Give us two set-ups please, Bill,” he said to the youth who appeared at his summons.
In Maycomb, one drank or did not drink. When one drank, one went behind the garage, turned up a pint, and drank it down; when one did not drink, one asked for set-ups at the E-Lite Eat Shop under cover of darkness: a man having a couple of drinks before or after dinner in his home or with his neighbor was unheard of. That was Social Drinking. Those who Drank Socially were not quite out of the top drawer, and because no one in Maycomb considered himself out of any drawer but the top, there was no Social Drinking.
“Make mine light, honey,” she said. “Just color the water.”
“Haven’t you learned to hold it yet?” Henry said. He reached under the seat and came up with a brown bottle of Seagram’s Seven.