The Mockingbird Next Door

by Marja Mills

  I was stunned Alice hadn’t committed their family stories to paper. She knew the family background she shared with Nelle was of lasting interest. Mockingbird’s importance in American culture ensured that.

  She wrote exceptionally well. Nelle, in fact, once said to me, “Alice is the real writer in the family.” Alice cherished history. She knew history. She could recount these stories as no one else. She had an eye for details and the memory to do them justice.

  “It just wasn’t for me,” she told me when I asked her about that. She didn’t explain why. For years, friends and family had been gently suggesting she put the recollections on paper. She was the authority on Lee family stories and most of the community’s history as well. Precision mattered to her, and accuracy. When she wasn’t sure of something, there was no fudging of facts or embellishing of tales. She found the answer or made it clear she didn’t know.

  On days when I was up to it, I pulled out my tape recorder and began the slow, deliberate, and often enthralling project of recording oral histories of Alice Lee and her friends and neighbors in Monroeville. As I did, I could almost feel an invisible hand pushing me. I knew I had to hurry. Alice would one day be gone, and her stories would go with her.

  “You know that African proverb ‘When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground’? When Alice dies,” Tom said, “it will be like a library burning.”

  A motel wouldn’t suffice for a long-term stay. Yet my search for short-term rentals led to a series of sketchy apartments and depressing dead ends. I hoped to find a mother-in-law-type apartment above someone’s garage or a tiny guesthouse behind a family home. Those existed here and there. Friends asked around for me and I followed a couple of leads, but the places either were occupied or not something available to be rented. If nothing else, I was learning my way around Monroeville’s residential streets and getting a sense of what were considered desirable neighborhoods and not, and why.

  I talked to Tom about any older people around town who might be willing to rent a room and grant kitchen privileges to me. It wouldn’t be ideal but it could be workable. The problem was the couple of people who might consider that also were looking for some live-in assistance from such a person and I didn’t want to commit to any particular schedule.

  One lucky day, Dale Welch told me about a house that might be available two doors down from the sisters. She knew the owners. They were fixing it up to sell but might consider renting it to me.

  Naturally, my first thought was, No way. The Lees, I assumed, would be less than thrilled at the prospect of having a Chicago journalist as a neighbor, even one with whom they’d formed a friendship.

  I was wrong. Nelle and Alice were pleased with the idea.

  They weren’t so pleased, however, with the $650 a month rent the owners proposed. “Highway robbery,” Nelle said, indignant. Dale wondered aloud what I already was thinking: What about the other house, next to the Lees, that also was for sale? I didn’t want to even ask the owner unless the Lees approved. They encouraged me to check it out and offered themselves as references to their former neighbor, a young man named Wes Abrams. Would he consider renting it? Turns out he would, and for $450 a month.

  The day I met him, Wes wore a camouflage shirt and jeans. His big dog, Buck, happily followed him from room to room in their old house. A year earlier, Wes was transferred to Jackson, Alabama, an hour’s drive from Monroeville. After finding a place there, he put his house up for sale. In a sluggish market, the one-story, three-bedroom home in one of Monroeville’s less glamorous neighborhoods was a tough sale. Priced at eighty thousand dollars, the house sat across the street from the junior high school and featured a screened breezeway off the eat-in kitchen and built-in bookshelves next to a fireplace. In the high-rise where I live in Chicago, not a fancy one by downtown standards, eighty thousand dollars will get you two parking spaces in the underground garage.

  Wes and I agreed I would rent month to month while the house remained up for sale.

  The house had been empty for several months before I moved in. Well, empty of human occupants, anyway. But I was not alone. I came to realize that my residency was preceded by that of scuttling spiders, alarmingly big cockroaches, and aggressive mildew brought on by storm damage. The formerly living things were no better company. Wes loved to hunt, and these were his trophies. A large deer head sporting an impressive set of antlers was mounted high on the wall of the small room where I put the folding table that served as my desk. What looked to be a stuffed bobcat watched me from a shelf in another room; another crouching creature via taxidermist—I had no idea what—perched nearby. In the kitchen, even the green and white dishes had a duck theme.

  I didn’t have much to unpack. I stacked my books, including my paperback copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, its margins now filled with my scribbled annotations, on the shelves, hung up my clothes, and made up the bed with the butter-yellow sheets that Dale Welch had lent me. The bed was rather high off the ground, with a white metal frame. When I sat on the edge of the bed, my feet didn’t quite reach the floor. As I settled in, it seemed to me that the unblinking eyes of the animals, as cold as marbles, followed me ominously around the house.

  I briefly considered draping towels over their heads, the better to escape those eyes. That would be even creepier, I decided. So I just tried to ignore them.

  That first night, sleep felt like a long way off. Perversely, I found I missed the familiar cacophony of Chicago’s streets.

  So there I lay, in the white-frame bed in the house next door to Nelle and Alice Lee. I snuck glimpses at Nelle’s window, a tidy square hung with blinds that didn’t quite manage to keep the light from escaping. We were close enough to rig ourselves a child’s primitive telephone. Who needs a cell phone when you’ve got two tin cans and a hunk of string? It was just the kind of thing Scout and Jem would have done.

  I was having an awful time trying to fall asleep. The silence intensified all around me. Occasionally it stopped, replaced by the compact chaos of a cricket’s lament, but then the silence returned, wider and deeper and more enveloping than ever.

  And then it hit me: I was journey proud.

  Nelle taught me that phrase early on in our friendship. Part of my role at the Tribune had been to write a column I initiated on language. Both Lees enjoyed teaching me new phrases, like “pounding the preacher,” an old Southern expression for paying the preacher with a pound of chicken or vegetables or the like when money was in short supply.

  For them, language was play. A person who tosses and turns on the night before a trip, she explained to me, is journey proud. And I was on a journey. A journey that was entertaining, but that also made me bristle with anxiety. What if Nelle suddenly decided, as she had been known to do, that I was no longer trustworthy, that I was not someone she wanted to spend time with after all? What if Wes sold the house, forcing me to move elsewhere?

  What if my own health declined while I was down there, many hundreds of miles from my doctors at Northwestern Memorial Hospital? Well, then I’d move back to Chicago and that would be that.

  I love the phrase journey proud. I love it for its simple colloquial beauty. I love it the way I loved so much of what I was learning here, day by day, taught by a couple of Southern women who opened up their lives—and now their neighborhood—to this Yankee newcomer.

  The first day waking in the new house, November 22, I found a yellow Post-it note from Nelle on my kitchen table. I didn’t hear her knock or slip in to leave the note. Her message instructed me to meet her next door at six that evening for a dinner she’d host at the country club. I faxed back my thanks and walked over at the appointed time.

  I raised my hand to knock and stopped. It occurred to me my cardigan might smell like the mildew that was my unwelcome roommate for the time being. The baskets of scented Walmart pine cones I placed strategically around the house only meant that the place now smelled of
mildew with an odd note of cinnamon. Me, too? I lifted my forearm to my face and sniffed. Not great but passable. I knocked.

  No answer. I hesitated to press the doorbell. That would make the floor lamp next to Alice’s recliner blink on and off. She would have to do that small rocking motion to get to her feet and make her way with her walker or cane to the door. I knocked again, loudly, so there would be a better chance that Nelle would hear me. She did. “Hoo-hoo-hoo,” Nelle said by way of greeting, much as she did with the ducks at the lake. She told me to say hello to Alice and she’d be back in a minute. Alice was staying home this evening after a long day of work.

  “How is it coming?” Alice said. Her voice was especially raspy this evening, almost a croak. “There is so much to do in your position.”

  I pulled up the rocker, close enough that my knees brushed against the footrest of her recliner. “I’m getting there,” I said. The water, electricity, and gas were in my name now. A woman from an industrial cleaning service had sprayed disinfectant on the walls and ceiling, a formula that was supposed to kill the mildew and keep it from coming back. “Oh, heavens,” Alice said.

  “It was fun to unpack my books and get settled in. Wes has those built-in shelves in the living room.” Alice knew the house. She knew the family who lived there before Wes, and the family who lived there before that. People still called it the Snowden house, after the original owners. The Snowdens moved to the neighborhood, then on the woodsy outskirts of town, about the same time Alice and her father did.

  That was fifty-two years ago, when Alice was forty-one and A. C. Lee was seventy-two and newly widowed. I realized then that I was the same age Alice had been upon moving to West Avenue. I tried to picture Alice back then. Her hair was still dark, her hands not yet lined with age. She had cat’s-eye glasses, I had seen a photo. Ed’s death, at age thirty, was still a fresh grief, alongside the loss of Frances. Louise was thirty-six, living in Eufaula with her husband and two children. Nelle, at twenty-six, had been living in New York for three years at that point.

  When I thought about them as young women, I wondered about their romantic lives. Dating, either as young women or in later years, never came up in conversation with either sister. It didn’t seem to be a topic up for discussion. Finally, I asked Nelle if Alice had dated at some point. I asked Alice the same of Nelle. A little, was the answer both gave. And that was that.

  The specter of A. C. Lee loomed large for both Nelle and Alice. Both sisters often mentioned him in conversation and absolutely lit up whenever an acquaintance or friend shared a memory of their father. Their mother’s legacy was more complicated and both sisters curated it carefully. Neither of them mentioned her often, and when they did, both were careful to refer to her as a gentle soul.

  In part, the sisters were wary of doing anything to sully the image of their mother, which had taken a beating at the hands of biographers and Truman Capote himself. Capote told his biographer Gerald Clarke that Frances twice tried to drown a young Nelle, a story the sisters vehemently denied.

  In her recollections of her mother, Alice focused on her musicianship and her love of reading. She also spoke of how A.C. cared for and protected his wife. Frances’s delicate nature was not always a good fit for the role that was available to a Southern woman at the time. In many ways, her youngest child shared her sensitivity. But because of the extraordinary success of Nelle’s novel, she was allowed a latitude that was never afforded to her mother. Nelle, of course, had a fierceness and an independence that her mother seemed to lack, too. Alice, like her father before her, did not share her sister’s need to roam outside their hometown. From an early age, she followed in A.C.’s footsteps.

  Alice adjusted the precarious pile on the side table next to her. Through some feat of creative engineering, she was able to pile her books and papers into haphazard stacks that threatened to topple over but didn’t. On top of a couple of hardcover British histories she had piled yellow legal pads, manila file folders, handwritten correspondence, a Smithsonian catalog, a sheaf of papers, and another couple of books. She didn’t seem to lose track of those things, though. She simply remembered where she put them.

  Alice nudged back into place a book that threatened to slip off the pile. I took the opportunity to wipe away the sweat already forming on my upper lip and then swipe my hand on my pants, my usual furtive gesture so that Alice wouldn’t see how warm I was.

  “Problem is,” I told Alice, “I’m already accumulating more and more books.” Alice’s eyes crinkled at the corners. “At this rate, I’ll have to check out the space in the oven soon.” She chuckled. “As long as you don’t cook any more than we do,” she said.

  Nelle reappeared from the hallway in the back. I stood up and dragged the rocking chair back to its spot by the piano. “All righty, you have a good time at the club and you call us if you need anything,” Alice said.

  Nelle leaned over Alice and spoke loudly. “Don’t get into any trouble now while we’re away, Bear,” she said. The name seemed incongruous for someone so petite. I asked Nelle early on where the nickname came from. “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” she said. I didn’t press it. It wasn’t until the two of us made a day trip to Montgomery that Nelle gave me a clue to the origin of her name for her big sister.

  The family had rented a home in Montgomery one summer when A. C. Lee was serving in the legislature. Nelle was just a little girl, but an early memory was going to the zoo with Alice and seeing the bears.

  Our ride was here, idling in the driveway. Jack and Julie—if I have their names right—greeted us. Jack was a lumber or paper company executive originally from Detroit, and his wife, Julie, a secretary, was from the area.

  “I have another Yankee for you,” Nelle told Jack.

  He dropped the three of us off in front of the white brick country club and went to park. Dale was already seated at a round table in the back room. A dinner buffet was set up there. Sunday brunch buffets were in the front room.

  As we settled into our chairs, Nelle said firmly, “You are my guests.” She wanted no fighting about who would pay for the meal. Jack joined us at the table. We stopped talking long enough to survey the menu. Dale, Julie, and I made our way to the salad bar. “That’s what I should be eating,” Nelle said, but she stuck to the fried catfish that soon arrived.

  Nelle told Julie and Jack about the newspaper story I had written. “She’s a contradiction,” Nelle said. “She’s a class-act journalist.”

  “Thank you for the compliment,” I said. “To me if not my profession.” She laughed and the others joined in.

  “Miss Nelle,” Jack said, mock scolding. The “Miss Nelle” or “Miss Alice” that sounded natural coming from local people seemed stilted somehow the few times I heard it used by a northerner. Which was worse, I wondered, to risk sounding contrived or to bypass a local courtesy? Nelle and Alice had told me to call them just that, and so I stuck to it. I had to hope that if this ever sounded impolite to other ears, I’d be given a Yankee special dispensation.

  Jack had wondered the same about all the “yes, ma’am’s” and “no, sir’s” that laced conversation around Monroe County. It is a different culture in some ways, he said. Those “yes, sir’s” and “no, ma’am’s” that sounded respectful here could sound almost mocking where we were from.

  The dining room wasn’t full this evening. Another group of four took a table near ours. Nelle protectively scooted her black handbag closer to the leg of her chair, then laughed at herself.

  “I think I’m in New York,” she said.

  I glanced down at her handbag, pleasantly worn with long, sturdy straps. She wore it diagonally across her chest sometimes. I thought of the purse story someone had told my mother. “My mother heard about a woman in Black River Falls . . .” I faced Nelle when speaking so she could hear better. I glanced at Jack and Julie and added, “That’s the little Wisconsin town wher
e I have family.

  “The woman—this was an older woman—was terribly afraid that someone would break into her house to steal her purse. She couldn’t sleep out of fear that an intruder could break in and hurt her in the process of trying to steal the purse. He could have it; what she feared was violence. Finally, she came up with a solution. Every evening, she would walk out on her front porch and deposit her purse outside the front door. If a thief wanted her pocketbook, he could get it without breaking in. She slept better after that.”

  “Oh, that’s marvelous,” Nelle said. “I love that.” She let loose with that slightly husky, contagious laugh of hers.

  Later, as we stood to leave, I glanced around at the other tables. My impression was that those who recognized Nelle were paying her the courtesy of pretending not to. Others simply didn’t know who she was.

  I appreciated Nelle introducing me to Jack, someone closer to my age, and a midwesterner. “I fear you don’t have young people here to be with,” she told me. I never did get together again with Jack and Julie, as it happened.

  Beyond a shared passion for stories, for learning, it turned out that I had an awful lot in common with this gray-haired crew, with Alice and Nelle, Dale and Julia, Tom and Hilda, and others. Their joints hurt, too. They didn’t have the energy they once had, either. We all were more familiar with doctors’ waiting rooms than we wanted to be. These were my people.

  And they had time for me, time for someone who, like them, was not raising a family or, with the exception of Alice, going into an office every day. They were in a different stage of life from my peers in Chicago.

  I was researching a project about aging once at the Tribune and interviewed Mary Pipher, the psychologist who wrote the bestselling Reviving Ophelia about pressures on teenage girls. Pipher had just written a book about aging and the generation gap that often divides baby boomers and their parents, many of them in their eighties and nineties, who grew up in another time with another sensibility. It is as if the older people, often isolated by age and challenged by health problems, inhabited some other territory in their day-to-day life. She called the book Another Country.