She listened to the figure on the sofa.
“When you happened along and saw him doing something that seemed to you to be the very antithesis of his conscience—your conscience—you literally could not stand it. It made you physically ill. Life became hell on earth for you. You had to kill yourself, or he had to kill you to get you functioning as a separate entity.”
Kill myself. Kill him. I had to kill him to live … “You talk like you’ve known this a long time. You—”
“I have. So’s your father. We wondered, sometimes, when your conscience and his would part company, and over what.” Dr. Finch smiled. “Well, we know now. I’m just thankful I was around when the ructions started. Atticus couldn’t talk to you the way I’m talking—”
“Why not, sir?”
“You wouldn’t have listened to him. You couldn’t have listened. Our gods are remote from us, Jean Louise. They must never descend to human level.”
“Is that why he didn’t—didn’t lam into me? Is that why he didn’t even try to defend himself?”
“He was letting you break your icons one by one. He was letting you reduce him to the status of a human being.”
I love you. As you please. Where she would have had a spirited argument only, an exchange of ideas, a clash of hard and different points of view with a friend, with him she had tried to destroy. She had tried to tear him to pieces, to wreck him, to obliterate him. Childe Roland to the dark tower came.
“Do you understand me, Jean Louise?”
“Yes, Uncle Jack, I understand you.”
Dr. Finch crossed his legs and jammed his hands into his pockets. “When you stopped running, Jean Louise, and turned around, that turn took fantastic courage.”
“Sir?”
“Oh, not the kind of courage that makes a soldier go across no-man’s-land. That’s the kind that he summons up because he has to. This kind is—well, it is part of one’s will to live, part of one’s instinct for self-preservation. Sometimes, we have to kill a little so we can live, when we don’t—when women don’t, they cry themselves to sleep and have their mothers wash out their hose every day.”
“What do you mean, when I stopped running?”
Dr. Finch chuckled. “You know,” he said. “You’re very much like your father. I tried to point that out to you today; I regret to say I used tactics the late George Washington Hill would envy—you’re very much like him, except you’re a bigot and he’s not.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Dr. Finch bit his under lip and let it go. “Um hum. A bigot. Not a big one, just an ordinary turnip-sized bigot.”
Jean Louise rose and went to the bookshelves. She pulled down a dictionary and leafed through it. “‘Bigot,’” she read. “‘Noun. One obstinately or intolerably devoted to his own church, party, belief, or opinion.’ Explain yourself, sir.”
“I was just tryin’ to answer your running question. Let me elaborate a little on that definition. What does a bigot do when he meets someone who challenges his opinions? He doesn’t give. He stays rigid. Doesn’t even try to listen, just lashes out. Now you, you were turned inside out by the granddaddy of all father things, so you ran. And how you ran.
“You’ve no doubt heard some pretty offensive talk since you’ve been home, but instead of getting on your charger and blindly striking it down, you turned and ran. You said, in effect, ‘I don’t like the way these people do, so I have no time for them.’ You’d better take time for ’em, honey, otherwise you’ll never grow. You’ll be the same at sixty as you are now—then you’ll be a case and not my niece. You have a tendency not to give anybody elbow room in your mind for their ideas, no matter how silly you think they are.”
Dr. Finch clasped his hands and rested them on the back of his head. “Good grief, baby, people don’t agree with the Klan, but they certainly don’t try to prevent them from puttin’ on sheets and making fools of themselves in public.”
“Why did you let Mr. O’Hanlon get up there?” “Because he wanted to.” Oh God, what have I done?
“But they beat people, Uncle Jack—”
“Now, that’s another thing, and it’s just one more thing you’ve failed to take into consideration about your father. You’ve been extravagant with your talk of despots, Hitlers, and ring-tailed sons of bitches—by the way, where did you get that? Reminds me of a cold winter’s night, possum hunting—”
Jean Louise winced. “He told you all that?”
“Oh yes, but don’t start worrying about what you called him. He’s got a lawyer’s hide. He’s been called worse in his day.”
“Not by his daughter, though.”
“Well, as I was saying—”