Her uncle bounced back into the livingroom, sipping from a tall glass filled with ice, water, and whiskey. “Look what I got out of Zandra. I’ve played hell with her fruitcakes.”
Jean Louise attempted to pin him down: “Uncle Jack,” she said. “I have a definite idea that you know what happened this afternoon.”
“I do. I know every word you said to Atticus, and I almost heard you from my house when you lit into Henry.”
The old bastard, he followed me to town.
“You eavesdropped? Of all the—”
“Of course not. Do you think you can discuss it now?”
Discuss it? “Yes, I think so. That is, if you’ll talk straight to me. I don’t think I can take Bishop Colenso now.”
Dr. Finch arranged himself neatly on the sofa and leaned in toward her. He said, “I will talk straight to you, my darling. Do you know why? Because I can, now.”
“Because you can?”
“Yes. Look back, Jean Louise. Look back to yesterday, to the Coffee this morning, to this afternoon—”
“What do you know about this morning?”
“Have you never heard of the telephone? Zandra was glad to answer a few judicious questions. You telegraph your pitches all over the place, Jean Louise. This afternoon I tried to give you some help in a roundabout way to make it easier for you, to give you some insight, to soften it a little—”
“To soften what, Uncle Jack?”
“To soften your coming into this world.”
When Dr. Finch pulled at his drink, Jean Louise saw his sharp brown eyes flash above the glass. That’s what you tend to forget about him, she thought. He’s so busy fidgeting you don’t notice how closely he’s watching you. He’s crazy, all right, like every fox that was ever born. And he knows so much more than foxes. Gracious, I’m drunk.
“… look back, now,” her uncle was saying. “It’s still there, isn’t it?”
She looked. It was there, all right. Every word of it. But something was different. She sat in silence, remembering.
“Uncle Jack,” she finally said. “Everything’s still there. It happened. It was. But you know, it’s bearable somehow. It’s—it’s bearable.”
She was speaking the truth. She had not made the journey through time that makes all things bearable. Today was today, and she looked at her uncle in wonder.
“Thank God,” said Dr. Finch quietly. “Do you know why it’s bearable now, my darling?”
“No sir. I’m content with things as they are. I don’t want to question, I just want to stay this way.”
She was conscious of her uncle’s eyes upon her, and she moved her head to one side. She was far from trusting him: if he starts on Mackworth Praed and tells me I’m just like him I’ll be at Maycomb Junction before sundown.
“You’d eventually figure this out for yourself,” she heard him say. “But let me speed it up for you. You’ve had a busy day. It’s bearable, Jean Louise, because you are your own person now.”
Not Mackworth Praed’s, mine. She looked up at her uncle.
Dr. Finch stretched out his legs. “It’s rather complicated,” he said, “and I don’t want you to fall into the tiresome error of being conceited about your complexes—you’d bore us for the rest of our lives with that, so we’ll keep away from it. Every man’s island, Jean Louise, every man’s watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscious.”
This was news, coming from him. But let him talk, he would find his way to the nineteenth century somehow.
“… now you, Miss, born with your own conscience, somewhere along the line fastened it like a barnacle onto your father’s. As you grew up, when you were grown, totally unknown to yourself, you confused your father with God. You never saw him as a man with a man’s heart, and a man’s failings—I’ll grant you it may have been hard to see, he makes so few mistakes, but he makes ’em like all of us. You were an emotional cripple, leaning on him, getting the answers from him, assuming that your answers would always be his answers.”
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.”