Go away, the old buildings said. There is no place for you here. You are not wanted. We have secrets.
In obedience to them, in the silent heat she walked down Maycomb’s main thoroughfare, a highway leading to Montgomery. She walked on, past houses with wide front yards in which moved green-thumbed ladies and slow large men. She thought she heard Mrs. Wheeler yelling to Miss Maudie Atkinson across the street, and if Miss Maudie saw her she would say come in and have some cake, I’ve just made a big one for the Doctor and a little one for you. She counted the cracks in the sidewalk, steeled herself for Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose’s onslaught—Don’t you say hey to me, Jean Louise Finch, you say good afternoon!—hurried by the old steep-roofed house, past Miss Rachel’s, and found herself home.
HOME-MADE ICE CREAM.
She blinked hard. I’m losing my mind, she thought.
She tried to walk on but it was too late. The square, squat, modern ice cream shop where her old home had been was open, and a man was peering out the window at her. She dug in the pockets of her slacks and came up with a quarter.
“Could I have a cone of vanilla, please?”
“Don’t come in cones no more. I can give you a—”
“That’s all right. Give me whatever it comes in,” she said to the man.
“Jean Louise Finch, ain’tcha?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Used to live right here, didn’tcha?”
“Yes.”
“Matter of fact, born here, weren’tcha?”
“Yes.”
“Been livin’ in New York, haven’tcha?”
“Yes.”
“Maycomb’s changed, ain’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t remember who I am, do you?”
“No.”
“Well I ain’t gonna tell you. You can just sit there and eat your ice cream and try to figure out who I am, and if you can I’ll give you another helpin’ free of charge.”
“Thank you sir,” she said. “Do you mind if I go around in the back—”
“Sure. There’s tables and chairs out in the back. Folks set out there at night and eat their ice cream.”
The back yard was strewn over with white gravel. How small it looks with no house, no carhouse, no chinaberry trees, she thought. She sat down at a table and put the container of ice cream on it. I’ve got to think.
It happened so quickly that her stomach was still heaving. She breathed deeply to quieten it, but it would not stay still. She felt herself turning green with nausea, and she put her head down; try as she might she could not think, she only knew, and what she knew was this:
The one human being she had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted had failed her; the only man she had ever known to whom she could point and say with expert knowledge, “He is a gentleman, in his heart he is a gentleman,” had betrayed her, publicly, grossly, and shamelessly.
9
INTEGRITY, HUMOR, AND patience were the three words for Atticus Finch. There was also a phrase for him: pick at random any citizen from Maycomb County and its environs, ask him what he thought of Atticus Finch, and the answer would most likely be, “I never had a better friend.”
Atticus Finch’s secret of living was so simple it was deeply complex: where most men had codes and tried to live up to them, Atticus lived his to the letter with no fuss, no fanfare, and no soul-searching. His private character was his public character. His code was simple New Testament ethic, its rewards were the respect and devotion of all who knew him. Even his enemies loved him, because Atticus never acknowledged that they were his enemies. He was never a rich man, but he was the richest man his children ever knew.
His children were in a position to know as children seldom are: when Atticus was in the legislature he met, loved, and married a Montgomery girl some fifteen years his junior; he brought her home to Maycomb and they lived in a new-bought house on the town’s main street. When Atticus was forty-two their son was born, and they named him Jeremy Atticus, for his father and his father’s father. Four years later their daughter was born, and they named her Jean Louise for her mother and her mother’s mother. Two years after that Atticus came home from work one evening and found his wife on the floor of the front porch dead, cut off from view by the wisteria vine that made the corner of the porch a cool private retreat. She had not been dead long; the chair from which she had fallen was still rocking. Jean Graham Finch had brought to the family the heart that killed her son twenty-two years later on the sidewalk in front of his father’s office.
At forty-eight, Atticus was left with two small children and a Negro cook named Calpurnia. It is doubtful that he ever sought for meanings; he merely reared his children as best he could, and in terms of the affection his children felt for him, his best was indeed good: he was never too tired to play Keep-Away; he was never too busy to invent marvelous stories; he was never too absorbed in his own problems to listen earnestly to a tale of woe; every night he read aloud to them until his voice cracked.
Atticus killed several birds with one stone when he read to his children, and would probably have caused a child psychologist considerable dismay: he read to Jem and Jean Louise whatever he happened to be reading, and the children grew up possessed of an obscure erudition. They cut their back teeth on military history, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, True Detective Mysteries, The Code of Alabama, the Bible, and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.