The Mockingbird Next Door

by Marja Mills

  Chapter Nine

  Even before my move, I was becoming part of the Lees’ social circle and, as such, was included in their regular get-togethers. In early 2004, I was staying with Haniel and Judy Croft. Haniel was the retired president of what was then the Monroe County Bank. They invited Nelle and Alice and me to watch the Super Bowl on the big-screen television in their living room. We’d settle in to see the New England Patriots play the Carolina Panthers in Houston and then have dinner. “Marvelous,” Nelle said of that invitation.

  I looked forward to it as much as they did that week, even though the only Super Bowl games I remotely enjoyed watching over the years were in Black River Falls. Those I enjoyed not for the football but for the sound of my grandfather’s deep voice mixing easily with my father’s and brother’s above the television commentary and the din of the crowd.

  For years, Nelle and Alice had their own tradition for watching football games. They loved watching the Crimson Tide in particular. They had no television in the house, Alice told me, until Julia was hired in 1997 and insisted. Nelle had suggested the same more than once, but it took Julia to get a small set across the threshold. She was not about to miss her game shows. After that, during football season, Alice would join Nelle in the back bedroom to watch the games. Before the dawn of the television age in the Lee home, the two sisters would make the seven-block drive to the Monroe County Bank building, below Alice’s law office, and watch the weekend’s best games in a conference room.

  Sometimes Nelle watched University of Alabama games at the home of her high school English teacher, Gladys Burkett. This was in an old house on North Mount Pleasant Avenue, a few blocks off the town square. It was there that Nelle got to know Dale Welch. They met over football but bonded over books. “I think she appreciated that I was a teacher and a librarian. We had a lot to talk about,” Dale told me. A friendship quickly blossomed and soon they were meeting for coffee or lunch at Radley’s.

  Like many in their circle of friends, the Lees were a mixed family when it came to football in Alabama. Their brother had attended Auburn. That gave it special status. But Nelle had attended the University of Alabama, and she and Alice gravitated to the Crimson Tide. If you ever want to drive down an empty thoroughfare in Monroeville, do so when Alabama is playing Auburn.

  Their other great sports passion was golf. In fact, both Alice and Nelle had once played the game regularly at the Vanity Fair golf course. Nelle told a journalist in the early 1960s that the course provided her a quiet place to think. They particularly looked forward to the Masters every April. As Alice told me, “We usually root for the underdog.” Later that same spring, the Lees got a thrill cheering for Phil Mickelson at Augusta, where he won his first major at long last.

  As was often the case in Monroeville, I was reminded on that Super Bowl Sunday that I was a foreigner. The temperature in snowy Black River Falls, my father’s hometown, barely reached into the twenties. On Alabama Avenue in Monroeville, the Monroe County Bank time and temperature sign showed it was fifty degrees. We settled into the Crofts’ comfortable living room to watch the game. Haniel Croft took a wing-backed chair. His wife, Judy, and I were on a coral-colored sofa, Nelle across from me. Alice preferred a chair to sinking into a sofa. As soothing as the sounds of the three generations of menfolk in my family had been to me, my own voice sounded distinctly midwestern, almost clunky, in a room of softer Southern accents.

  In lighter moments, my otherness—my Yankeeness—was a subject for good-natured joshing. Didn’t I know what butter beans were? Or that “mashing a button,” an expression I first heard from Judy, simply meant pressing a button? Not pushing it hard, again and again, as I had guessed. Or that the Civil War, as Alice never called it, might better be referred to as the War Between the States? We had a running debate. Which was more extreme: the oppressive heat of Monroeville in August or the bitter chill of Chicago in January? I thought Monroeville took the title in that one. The others were skeptical.

  As I spent time with this circle of friends in Monroeville, I was aware of a mutual wariness of the sensibilities on the other side of the Mason-Dixon Line, at least as we had experienced them. I was a blue state woman in a red state town and reminded almost daily of the cultural differences. In my piece for the Tribune, Tom had called Nelle socially liberal but politically conservative. She later chided him for the comment. Her politics were not that black and white.

  It still surprised me how many public events here began with a Christian prayer. I was accustomed to prayers being private or an ecumenical blessing at most. My father’s family is Methodist and my mother’s is Catholic but I was raised in a Unitarian Universalist congregation. I was pretty sure my Methodist credentials, from the church my extended family belonged to in Black River Falls, were held in higher esteem than my upbringing in a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Madison.

  This was a day just to kick back and enjoy the warmth and ease of that group. Lamps cast a glow on the wood paneling in the room. The large oak bookcase and cabinetry that housed the big-screen television was the painstaking work of Nelle and Judy’s friend Ila Jeter’s husband, James. On one side, he used tiny screws to affix a small metal plate engraved with the date, his name, and the names of the friends for whom he spent long hours making it. He did the same for the Lees with the wide, chest-high bookcase that dominated their entryway. In a place of honor, on a corner display shelf of the Crofts’ cabinetry, was their copy of To Kill a Mockingbird with Nelle’s inscription.

  For many years after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, Nelle willingly signed thousands of copies of the book. Alice once told me she had even given herself tendonitis in her wrist from the long hours she spent fulfilling autograph requests. It was one of the many ways she tried to be a good steward of the tremendous affection her novel had engendered. The book exerted an unusually strong personal pull on readers and Nelle didn’t want to disappoint her public. The volume of requests, letters, and books sent to the Lees’ small post office box in Monroeville was overwhelming and showed no sign of stopping even four decades after the book’s initial publication. Alice toted them all home in plastic grocery bags.

  “Did you ever think about hiring an assistant to help with all this?” I asked Alice.

  “No,” she said. “It wouldn’t work too well, because there is no uniform way of handling it. Each thing, almost, is different.”

  Their generosity was not always met in kind. In the 1990s, a local shop owner took advantage of Nelle’s efforts to help out Monroeville brick-and-mortar establishments by signing books to be sold there. The shop owner sold some of them, marked up, on eBay, Nelle discovered. She was outraged. Some book buyers did the same. After that, she mostly stopped signing books. Behind the scenes, she still autographed books in special cases, but she had a public policy of no longer signing books.

  Before the game got under way, I grabbed another Diet Coke from the kitchen and took my place near the Crofts’ son Kenny. He loved to be a part of any gathering and he loved football. So today, as his father said, he was in high cotton. Kenny, with the unusually flexible joints characteristic of Down syndrome, sat cross-legged with his knees all the way to the Oriental rug on the floor. He was a yogi in Auburn’s orange and blue.

  Kenny looked up at Nelle as she began to read aloud from Doris Jay’s “Rocky Hill News” column in that week’s Monroe Journal. This was, hands down, Nelle’s favorite part of the paper. The column detailed the comings and goings of an extended family who lived in the area known as Rocky Hill, southwest of Monroeville.

  “‘Jan. 1: Dale and Brenda Jay had dinner with his parents Thursday.’” Nelle read this first sentence matter-of-factly. “‘Jan. 5: Calvin and Doris Jay made a trip Monday to Atmore on business.’” Here she began to falter. “‘Jan. 7: Philip Jay had dinner Wednesday with his parents.’” The chuckle was building. Nelle took off her glasses, leaned her head back, and let loose with a
deep laugh. She had the rest of us laughing, too. This wasn’t mocking laughter. It was the kind of affectionate amusement I’d come to recognize, an appreciation of what was both absurd and deeply human about this kind of thing.

  Nelle collected herself and continued. “‘Dale and Brenda Jay visited Wednesday afternoon. Doris, Lisa, M. C. Cauly, and children visited with their grandmother, Effie Lee Dunn, recently.’” Nelle was gone again. When her laughter subsided into controllable chuckles, she delivered the news of January 10. “‘Dale and Brenda Jay attended a singing in Mobile Saturday night. Joe Shiver has an appointment with his doctor in Mobile. He accompanied Slick Linam to the doctor earlier in the week in Pensacola.’”

  One more visit to parents plus three more medical appointments and Nelle had taken us through the rest of the “Rocky Hill News.” Her laughter was contagious. Kenny joined in. I did. And Haniel, with his low chuckle.

  “Oh, bless their hearts,” Nelle said. She was still chuckling when she set down the Journal and rose to duck into the other room for a minute. She gave Kenny’s crew cut a playful rub on the way out.

  Then the ads for erectile dysfunction began. This was the first Super Bowl in which Viagra and its like were staples of the commercial breaks. The ads are so common now that the surprise and unspoken embarrassment we shared at the time seem almost quaint. I gave silent thanks that Alice’s poor hearing meant she wasn’t much interested in straining to catch the commercials. It was jarring when prescription drugs were first advertised heavily on television. But now this? Nelle walked back into the living room a couple of minutes into the commercials. She stopped and peered at the screen. “Is that an ad for . . . ,” Nelle began to ask, puzzled. She paused. Got it. Judy glanced down at Kenny and then at me. I shrugged my shoulders.

  It was a relief when the television screen flashed back to the football field. We stopped talking, mostly, to listen. The crowd was loud. Commentators pressed one hand to their earpieces as they speculated the game could turn on the Panthers’ running game.

  At halftime, the Panthers were leading, 14–10. Janet Jackson took center stage with Justin Timberlake. They rocked out to her “All for You” and the infectious “Rhythm Nation.” Singing the final line of his own hit, “Rock Your Body,” Timberlake yanked at Jackson’s bustier. What happened next apparently was not planned. “I’m going to have you naked by the end of this song,” he sang, and, rip, there was Jackson’s right breast. The television cameras quickly cut away.

  I didn’t see this. I had been in the kitchen helping Judy and returned to the living room, which was suddenly abuzz. “Was that?” someone asked. “I think so,” came the answer.

  If Alice was taking it all in, she gave no indication. Nelle appeared to experience these Super Bowl developments with a mixture of surprise, consternation, and barely suppressed amusement, in that order. Not that we spoke of it again. She told an off-color joke in private now and then but also lamented the erosion of a particular kind of public propriety. “She grows frustrated,” Tom told me in one of our first interviews, “with a country and a culture grown coarse and obscene.”

  Alice spent the commercial breaks and halftime show in conversation or absorbed in the coffee table book I had given her as a belated Christmas gift. She ran her arthritic fingers across the photos in Thomas Pakenham’s Remarkable Trees of the World, and studied the text. On the cover, an older man in hiking boots, gazing upward, stood dwarfed at the foot of an enormous redwood. I bent over Alice a bit and raised my voice so she could hear better. “In honor of your most remarkable tree,” I told her.

  “Alice’s tree” is what her friends called a giant, sheltering live oak people guessed might be a couple of hundred years old. The tree didn’t belong to anyone she knew. It wasn’t even on a main road. It shaded a good portion of a large yard in the town of Uriah, a forty-five-minute drive southeast of Monroeville. It was just something striking she had come across years ago and liked to check on, to appreciate out on drives. The oak prompted Nelle, on an earlier Sunday drive, to observe about the two sisters, “One thing about us, we can appreciate beauty without needing to possess it.” The moment she said it, I knew that comment would stay with me.

  The game turned out to be memorable for more than the brief nudity and the novelty of the men’s pharmaceutical ads. The score was close. The Patriots narrowly beat the Panthers, 32–29. Soon it would be time to take our places at the more informal of the Crofts’ two dining tables, this one on a large rug between the kitchen and the living room.

  Following some postgame analysis, Alice again was absorbed by her new book of photographs. Nelle leaned over Alice’s chair and put her left arm on the backrest to brace herself. This way her face was closer to Alice’s.

  “Alice,” Nelle asked her tenderly, amused, “are you ready to surrender your trees?” Alice smiled. She was not. Not just yet. It was almost time to eat, though, and Nelle was getting hungry. A few minutes later, her voice tinged with exasperation, she tried again.

  “Alice, will you surrender your trees?”

  She did.

  As we lingered at the table after dessert, Nelle warmly thanked Haniel and Judy. “I suppose we should be on our way,” she said. She pushed back a bit from the rectangular table. I could see the mirth in her eyes when she explained.

  “One of us at this table has to be at work in the morning.”

  There was silence at the table for a moment and then a ripple of appreciative laughter. All eyes had come to rest on Alice. The ninety-two-year-old was the one who had to be at work in the morning.

  That night, with the three Crofts sound asleep, I lay awake in the guest room. It was close to midnight, dark and silent. The best days always lingered in my memory as sounds, even a day like this that just ended.

  The sounds were still in my ears. Before the game, Nelle’s slightly husky voice reading aloud the “Rocky Hills News,” unable to finish before that infectious laugh took over, with Judy joining in. “Oh, Nelle.”

  During a commercial, Haniel leaning over Alice to comment on a play, his deep voice mixing with her soft rasp, for the time not banker and attorney who had worked together but old friends talking football on a relaxed Sunday afternoon. Kenny’s muted rat-tat-tat of his drumsticks against the living room rug.

  Nelle’s circle of close friends was a down-to-earth group, eclectic in that it included a retired hairdresser, a pharmacy clerk, a one-time librarian, and a former bookkeeper who also was the wife of a retired bank president. None cared too much about status. Nelle got a kick out of it when one of the town’s socially prominent women referred, a bit dismissively, to Nelle’s unpretentious running buddies as “that crowd.”

  Nothing about the day spent with that crowd—not the ease of it, not the familiarity of it, certainly—would have been imaginable two and a half years earlier when Terrence and I rented a car in Atlanta and bent over a map to find Monroeville. I had been surprised—pleased, sometimes thrilled, but always surprised—as strangers I didn’t expect to meet opened the doors to their homes, and as people I spent time with, to discuss the Lees and the area, became new friends. In several cases, those new friends, with time and talk and shared experiences, began to be good friends.

  Chapter Ten

  Iwas back in Chicago to build stamina to return to my newspaper job. But my friendship with Alice and Nelle offered a glimpse at life before the onslaught of modern communications. Not until a year later, in 2005, at the urging of Gregory Peck’s wife, Veronique, would Nelle finally give in and get a cell phone for the long Amtrak journey she was undertaking from New York to Los Angeles. She was going there for Peck’s library fund-raiser. Otherwise, at home in Monroeville, the Lees stuck with the telephone in their hallway nook.

  But we shared a favorite mode of transportation: trains. Railroad tracks connected the places that mattered in their world in the South. They connected Evergreen, thirty miles from Monroevi
lle, to Selma, and Selma to Birmingham, Birmingham to Atlanta. The rails also connected one generation to the next in their family as well as mine.

  Before passing the bar in 1915, A.C. kept books for Barnett & Bugg and did work for the Manistee & Repton Railroad, a client. A train gave the young Alice and her friend Evelyn Barnett the thrill of their lives when A.C. took them along on a trip to St. Louis. Years later, when Nelle set her sights on being a writer in New York, like her friend Truman, A.C. dropped her off at the Evergreen train station for the long journey east. Alice made it through the twentieth century without boarding an airplane. Her doctor told her flying would be a bad idea due to an ear condition. Nelle did fly, for a time. She worked as a reservations clerk for the British Overseas Airways Corporation for several years, after all, to pay her rent in New York. That’s the problem, however, with working for an airline. She learned too much about what could go wrong and cause an airplane to crash. After BOAC, she abandoned the skies. Amtrak took her back and forth between New York and Alabama, between one way of life and the other. She made that overnight train trip through her thirties, her forties, her fifties, her sixties, and her seventies, when I met her.

  I was looking to return to my job, to keep up with the rigors of newspaper reporting. Well into a period of convalescence, though I was still in bed a lot and no closer to that goal. As my rheumatologist predicted, I’d have to stay on disability leave for the foreseeable future. I decided to explore with the Lees the idea of spending more time in Monroeville, and perhaps renting a place there.

  If nothing else, I thought I could begin gathering information for a book about Mockingbird country, captured as the fictional Maycomb County in the novel. I didn’t know at that point if Nelle would want to be much involved, but Alice was a remarkable story in her own right. As she entered her tenth decade and our rapport grew, she was ready to talk candidly. Friends of the Lees predicted that Alice would be steadfast in her view of my undertaking and Nelle would run hot and cool on her enthusiasm for it.