“That’s odd, isn’t it?”
“It’s one of the oddities of this world.” Dr. Finch got up from the sofa and extinguished his cigarette in an ashtray on the table beside her. “Now, young lady, take me home. It’s nearly five. It’s almost time for you to fetch your father.”
Jean Louise surfaced. “Get Atticus? I’ll never be able to look him in the eye again!”
“Listen, girl. You’ve got to shake off a twenty-year-old habit and shake it off fast. You will begin now. Do you think Atticus is going to hurl a thunderbolt at you?”
“After what I said to him? After the—”
Dr. Finch jabbed the floor with his walking stick. “Jean Louise, have you ever met your father?”
No. She had not. She was terrified.
“I think you’ll have a surprise coming,” said her uncle.
“Uncle Jack, I can’t.”
“Don’t you tell me you can’t, girl! Say that again and I’ll take this stick to you, I mean that!”
They walked to the car.
“Jean Louise, have you ever thought about coming home?”
“Home?”
“If you will refrain from echoing either the last clause or the last word of everything I say to you, I will be much obliged. Home. Yes, home.”
Jean Louise grinned. He was becoming Uncle Jack again. “No sir,” she said.
“Well, at the risk of overloading you, could you possibly give an undertaking to think about it? You may not know it, but there’s room for you down here.”
“You mean Atticus needs me?”
“Not altogether. I was thinking of Maycomb.”
“That’d be great, with me on one side and everybody else on the other. If life’s an endless flow of the kind of talk I heard this morning, I don’t think I’d exactly fit in.”
“That’s the one thing about here, the South, you’ve missed. You’d be amazed if you knew how many people are on your side, if side’s the right word. You’re no special case. The woods are full of people like you, but we need some more of you.”
She started the car and backed it down the driveway. She said, “What on earth could I do? I can’t fight them. There’s no fight in me any more….”
“I don’t mean by fighting; I mean by going to work every morning, coming home at night, seeing your friends.”
“Uncle Jack, I can’t live in a place that I don’t agree with and that doesn’t agree with me.”
Dr. Finch said, “Hmph. Melbourne said—”
“If you tell me what Melbourne said I’ll stop this car and put you out, right here! I know how you hate to walk—after your stroll to church and back and pushin’ that cat around the yard, you’ve had it. I’ll put you right out, and don’t you think I won’t!”
Dr. Finch sighed. “You’re mighty belligerent toward a feeble old man, but if you wish to continue in darkness that is your privilege….”
“Feeble, hell! You’re about as feeble as a crocodile!” Jean Louise touched her mouth.
“Very well, if you won’t let me tell you what Melbourne said I’ll put it in my own words: the time your friends need you is when they’re wrong, Jean Louise. They don’t need you when they’re right—”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it takes a certain kind of maturity to live in the South these days. You don’t have it yet, but you have a shadow of the beginnings of it. You haven’t the humbleness of mind—”
“I thought fear of the Lord was the beginning of wisdom.”
“It’s the same thing. Humility.”
They had come to his house. She stopped the car.
“Uncle Jack,” she said. “What am I going to do about Hank?”
“What you will eventually,” he said.
“Let him down easy?”
“Um hum.”
“Why?”
“He’s not your kind.”
Love whom you will, marry your own kind. “Look, I’m not going to argue with you over the relative merits of trash—”
“That has nothing to do with it. I’m tired of you. I want my supper.”
Dr. Finch put his hand out and pinched her chin. “Good afternoon, Miss,” he said.
“Why did you take so much trouble with me today? I know how you hate to move out of that house.”
“Because you’re my child. You and Jem were the children I never had. You two gave me something long ago, and I’m trying to pay my debts. You two helped me a—”
“How, sir?”
Dr. Finch’s eyebrows went up. “Didn’t you know? Hasn’t Atticus gotten around to telling you that? Why, I’m amazed at Zandra not … good heavens, I thought all of Maycomb knew that.”
“Knew what?”
“I was in love with your mother.”
“My mother?”
“Oh yes. When Atticus married her, and I’d come home from Nashville for Christmas and things like that, why I fell head over heels in love with her. I still am—didn’t you know that?”
Jean Louise put her head on the steering wheel. “Uncle Jack, I’m so ashamed of myself I don’t know what to do. Me yelling around like—oh, I could kill myself!”
“I shouldn’t do that. There’s been enough focal suicide for one day.”
“All that time, you—”
“Why sure, honey.”
“Did Atticus know it?”
“Certainly.”
“Uncle Jack, I feel one inch high.”
“Well, I didn’t mean to do that. You’re not by yourself, Jean Louise. You’re no special case. Now go get your father.”
“You can say all this, just like that?”
“Um hum. Just like that. As I said, you and Jem were very special to me—you were my dream-children, but as Kipling said, that’s another story … call on me tomorrow, and you’ll find me a grave man.”
He was the only person she ever knew who could paraphrase three authors into one sentence and have them all make sense.
“Thanks, Uncle Jack.”
“Thank you, Scout.”
Dr. Finch got out of the car and shut the door. He poked his head inside the window, elevated his eyebrows, and said in a decorous voice:
“I was once an exceedingly odd young lady—
Suffering much from spleen and vapors.”