The Mockingbird Next Door

by Marja Mills

  She apologized for the delay in answering my knock. She had been on the phone. Then, with no other preamble, she paused and said, “Do you know the dirtiest word in the English language?” She stood just inside the house.

  I thought quickly. I wanted to see if I had the knowledge, by this point, to guess correctly what she would say.

  Bigotry, I thought. No, maybe poverty. But there was a moral indignation to the way she posed the question, so maybe . . .

  She answered before I did. This was rhetorical, anyway.

  “Entitlement.” She spit the word out.

  Instead of asking, especially when she was irritated or angry, I’d learned to wait for her to volunteer details if she wanted to do so. She didn’t, at least not on that day, but it was a topic she would refer to again and again.

  One afternoon, Nelle glanced at the Mobile Register on my coffee table. The paper had another story about the trials of Richard Scrushy, former CEO of HealthSouth, the large health-care company, and a codefendant with former Alabama governor Don Siegelman. Known for extravagant personal spending, Scrushy and the governor were eventually convicted in 2006 of federal funds bribery, conspiracy, and fraud.

  “Greed is the coldest of the deadly sins, don’t you think? At least lust, gluttony are . . .” She paused. “Human.”

  I had to think what the other cardinal sins were. Unitarians aren’t big on those. Our Sunday school classes never touched on them.

  I knew, at least, that there were seven deadly sins. So what were the four others besides greed, lust, and gluttony? Sloth was one. Envy another.

  I had to Google the other two later. Pride and wrath.

  Greed, especially, did gall Nelle. In part, that was because on occasion people took advantage of her goodwill to make money.

  “She’ll give you the shirt off her back,” Hilda Butts told me for the newspaper story, “but don’t try to take it without her permission.”

  Love of money and the things it can buy didn’t motivate Nelle. She just wasn’t interested in luxury, though she did value the opportunity to give bountiful sums to charity and to educate people behind the scenes.

  The fortune she earned from the book did afford her the opportunity to live her life, from her midthirties on, without having to worry about money, or holding down a traditional job. And that was something she cared about, deeply: the ability to live her life on her own terms. She answered to nobody. She had no husband or children. No boss. With her withdrawal from public life, she rarely committed to public appearances or other obligations of that sort. She did look to Alice for guidance and support, and was keenly aware of Alice’s high standards of personal conduct. But Nelle’s life, and her choices, were her own.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Those first weeks I got by with a rental car and then one borrowed from the Crofts. But I needed my own wheels. I never cared about cars. I was nearly thirty when I got my first one, and only got it then because there was no public transportation to my job. Living in downtown Chicago, as I did when I decided to spend more time in Monroeville, I could again get by without one.

  But there was no getting around the need for a car in Monroeville. I wanted a car that Alice and Nelle, Dale and Tom, and the rest of my gray-haired posse could get in and out of without need of a crane or orthopedic surgeon. That narrowed the field. Nothing that rode too low or too high.

  I test-drove a few cars at the dealership while Tom rode shotgun. I tried a bigger car with a bench seat. I was used to smaller Japanese cars. This felt like driving a parade float down the street. I glanced over at Tom.

  “I feel like I don’t know where my sides are.”

  “You’d get used to it.”

  I made an awkward, wide turn at the intersection and he qualified his prediction.

  “Or maybe not.”

  We tried a 2001 Dodge Stratus with sixty thousand miles on it. It was smaller, more familiar. It was in my price range.

  “Okay, Tom. What do you think? How is it for getting in and out?”

  “It ain’t a Cadillac. But it ain’t bad, either. I think this’d do fine.”

  I paid seven thousand dollars for it. Tom and I puzzled over what color it was. Silver is what the title said. And it did look silver, sort of, from some angles. In other light it was closer to metallic blue. After a few months, when the car had more miles and some Monroe County red clay dust on it and the air conditioner would blow only full blast or not at all, Tom started calling it “Old Blue.”

  I faxed the Lees about my progress. “Dear Alice and Nelle, Hallelujah! I now have a car and fridge, phone and fax. Feels luxurious . . .”

  With Christmas getting closer, we were exchanging more faxes about logistics. By that Wednesday, December 22, the rain was cold and steady. It wasn’t good weather for travel but Nelle and Alice were headed out with a nephew to Jacksonville, Florida, where Louise was now. I read the latest from Nelle. It referred to the little wooden Christmas ornament, a violin, I had found for them at the gift shop of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

  “Thanks for the info and the Strad—it’s lovely.” She outlined their plans and ended with a cheery “Merry C. & love, Nelle.”

  —

  The three Lee sisters remained close throughout their lives, but Louise, in marrying and having a family, had chosen a more traditional path for a woman of her era. Alice and Nelle, in choosing to pursue male-dominated professions, made their own way. Their mother did not want them to have the same limitations she had. It galled both Lees that Frances did not get the credit she deserved in that respect.

  Growing up, Frances had wanted to be a nurse. It didn’t happen. Her parents agreed with the prevailing wisdom that this was not a job for young ladies. It wasn’t proper, not with bed pans to empty and patients to bathe, and all the rest.

  “She felt that disappointment throughout her life,” Alice told me. “And she made sure all four of us felt free to do whatever we wanted.”

  Frances Lee wasn’t the only one thwarted in her career ambitions. Just as nursing wasn’t considered ladylike, being a secretary was off-limits for Ida Gaillard, a Lee family friend who had taught at the local high school. Both Alice and Nelle remained close with her.

  “You should talk to Ida, no question,” Nelle had told me. “Don’t wait too long on that one. She’s ninetysomething, you know.”

  Nelle and Alice were both matter-of-fact about the issue of age, Alice advising me to interview one retired doctor “while he still has his marbles,” and Nelle, a Pentecostal preacher “while she’s still aboveground.” The same words accompanied the stories Alice told me about people she grew up with. “He’s dead now.” Or, “She’s gone now.”

  Ida Gaillard not only was aboveground and in possession of her marbles, she was enthusiastic about an afternoon of storytelling. Nelle called ahead to tell her about me, and to let her know it was all right to share memories of Nelle and the Lee family.

  At ninety-eight, Ida still lived, with help, in the home in which she was raised. The white house with a large front porch was near Perdue Hill, twenty minutes outside Monroeville.

  “I always wanted to do secretarial work. But my father said no. I finished high school when I was sixteen and he didn’t want me to go into an office so young. In those days they didn’t think young girls ought to do things like that.”

  Maybe after she got her degree, he said, she could consider it. But it wasn’t to be. She went a more traditional route, earning a college degree and then teaching from 1928 until she retired. The closest she got to working in a business office was teaching typing to her students.

  She remembered the four Lee children as students, especially the three girls. Ida first met Alice when Ida was teaching and Alice was in senior high. “She was one of these quiet studious people.”

  Louise was more outgoing. “I’ll never forget Louise. Louise w
as a pretty child, and we’d have football games and they’d have Coca-Cola—it came in bottles then. She was serving the Cokes at a football game and reached down to get a Coke out of the tub of ice water and the thing blew up and cut her face on her cheek. She always had a scar from it. It was the first that I’d ever seen Coke blow up.

  “Ed Lee was all about football,” she recalled.

  And Nelle, well, Nelle stood out in her own way. “Nelle was always the tomboy. She was always—getting into something. If somebody picked on her she’d jump on ’em and fight ’em. So a bunch of the boys decided one day they were going to get the best of Nelle. So one was going to start it, and then the others were going to jump in and help him. But she jumped on that first one, and then the others came in and she jumped on them.” Ida laughed. “And they didn’t jump on her anymore! She was quite different from Alice. Growin’ up, she was a tomboy.”

  As she spoke, all I could think of was Scout. Scout, who got into school yard dustups with boys from her class. Scout, who wanted to do what her brother did and not be confined by dresses and ladylike manners.

  Chapter Fifteen

  As I began to spend more time with the Lee sisters, I was mesmerized by the stories they told and by the way they told them, in beautiful, fluid language rich with the flavors of the South. They spoke with a playfulness, too, a sprightly humor that turned even mundane events into wry tales. Our days fell into a rhythm, punctuated by the daily drive to Whitey Lee Lake to feed the ducks and geese.

  I often found myself standing at the edge of the small lake, just a few minutes from Alice’s law office, watching Nelle summon ducks with her distinctive call:

  “Woo-hoo-HOO! Woo-hoo-HOO!”

  While calling the ducks, Nelle shook a Cool Whip Free container filled with seed corn. The ducks responded to the rattle. Alice stayed in the car, peering out her open window. The small, grassy slope down to the water’s edge couldn’t be navigated with her walker. Nelle stood on the small bank. She would focus on one duck, then another. She was studying, as she always did, how they interacted.

  Nelle was counting the ducks, too. The difference in her approach to life as compared with her sister’s was in evidence even here, counting ducks. Alice did so silently and methodically, and then repeated the process. Nelle, standing a few feet from me and a tad closer to the lake, counted rapid-fire. I could hear, without a breath between the numbers, “Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen.” It was tricky counting moving ducks. She started again, and then once more.

  She turned to me, exasperated. “You have young eyes. How many do you get? I only count sixteen.”

  “Let me see.” I performed my own count at a pace between the two sisters’. A couple of the smaller ducks strayed closer to the water’s edge after I counted them, and then hustled back to the larger group.

  “I counted seventeen but I think I counted one twice.”

  “What?” she said, straining to hear. It was irritating not catching things the first time.

  She moved closer and I raised my voice to repeat what I had said.

  She nodded. I began the count again.

  “You’re right. I only get sixteen.”

  “Eaten by a fox, maybe.”

  I wasn’t sure if Nelle was kidding. Were there foxes around here? These residential areas were wooded. Maybe so. I didn’t ask. I’d revised my usual thinking about posing such questions on the spot. Better to find out another way. I had the feeling one or two ignorant questions would get me a demotion.

  Something startled the geese into a cacophony of honking. Whatever prompted the ruckus, it was quickly dismissed as neither threat nor possible source of food. They returned to pecking at the ground.

  Nelle gave an audible sigh and walked over to Alice. “Well, are you about ready to go, Bear?”

  “Yes, I believe so.” She said “I b’lieve so,” minus one syllable in believe, like my grandfather. “How many did you count?”

  “Only sixteen. Marja the same.”

  “I fear one has gone missing.”

  I slid into the backseat as Nelle walked around to the back of the car and put the Cool Whip container in the trunk. She got behind the wheel with a loud “oomph.”

  “Home,” she said, and we were off. I looked back at the ducks. From a distance, they all looked alike.

  No detail in these interactions was too small to escape their attention or pique their interest. Once, when one of the ducks had an injured wing, Nelle watched to see how “the little fella would get his food.” She noticed him the first time because he was trailing behind the feathered flock in the rush for the corn kernels.

  The next time we spotted him, he brought up the rear but hung with the other ducks and geese closely enough to stake out his share of corn and peck away. The others didn’t give him leeway, nor did they take advantage. It was simply competition as usual.

  Another day, Alice gazed out the open window from her usual vantage point, the passenger seat. She chuckled softly. “Look at them follow momma duck.”

  After the rush for corn, the mother duck made her way back down to the lake, ducklings waddling after her in ragtag fashion. The little ones knew to keep up with her. She didn’t look back. In the water, they fell effortlessly into orderly formation behind their mother. To human eyes, anyway, they were the picture of a contented family, a page out of Make Way for Ducklings, Robert McCloskey’s 1941 classic set in Boston.

  The sisters noticed the aggressive ducks and the more passive ones. Nelle commented on the way one new goose briskly circled the lake, small head held high above a slim, regal neck. He was showing who was top goose, she speculated, and Alice agreed. Or maybe he was just checking out the new territory. The interpretations were the Lees’.

  They did the same around town, keenly observing the interactions—in government, at church, and in personal circles—among the leaders and the followers, the newcomers and the established, the injured parties, socially speaking, and the top dogs. That eye for the way hierarchies and influence form and slowly shift in a community infuses To Kill a Mockingbird.

  In the community of Monroeville, information about Nelle was currency. It could be spent, traded, or saved for the right moment. Demand exceeded supply, especially because her good friends kept their interactions with her largely private. People were curious about where she went, whom she saw, what she said.

  “I’ve just learned not to even mention it to anyone, usually, if I have coffee with Nelle,” Dale Welch told me. “People talk if you do that, and she doesn’t want that.”

  Perhaps that’s why her friends were interested in long conversations about Nelle and Alice. Early on, Nelle and Alice told them it was okay to speak freely with me, and so it was a chance for them to compare impressions with someone else, to share favorite stories that they didn’t with others.

  “I’d like you to meet some people,” Nelle had told me on that visit when I delivered the published story.

  I didn’t know where she was taking me, or exactly why, but I didn’t ask. I just followed her to her Buick. She drove me to three homes and introduced me to close friends Judy Croft and Ila Jeter, and took me to Dale Welch’s house to get to know her better.

  It was lost on none of us that this was an unusual decision on her part. That day marked the beginning of a new phase in my getting to know the Lees’ world in Monroeville. These were good friends she was introducing, telling them I was looking to do more research in Monroeville. Alice had begun sharing more stories of her life, of Nelle’s, of their family, and of the area. Nelle, too. They both encouraged me to talk to their friends there, especially the older folks who remembered Monroe County in the 1930s. These weren’t stories that could be told quickly. Our conversations usually were two or three hours long. Now in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, those friends might otherwise take some of their firsthand knowledge of the Lees and old M
onroeville to the grave.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Julia Munnerlyn, the mystery woman in the kitchen making fried green tomatoes that first day I met Alice, welcomed me into her life. She would take me to her church and her home. She proudly showed me the flowers she tended at both places, as well as at the Lees’.

  Julia grew up in the area, the youngest daughter of six Stallworth children. “Four boys, two girls,” she told me. “I’m the baby girl and I had a brother under me.”

  Their father farmed and logged at a sawmill camp. “But our livelihood was farming. Oh, we made everything. We grew everything. We didn’t have to go to the store to buy too much, just sugar or something like that. We’d raise hogs and butcher the hogs and make up our own cracklins’”—she chuckled at the memory—“and make our own lard.”

  “It sounds like a lot of work,” I told her over coffee at my kitchen table one August afternoon when Julia walked across my parched yard from the Lees’ house and rapped on the kitchen door. I had asked her over, and we settled in at the kitchen table, tape recorder rolling.

  “No, it was fun. Because, you know, it was your main source [of fun] that you invented. Today’s children, they don’t do anything but put their hands on things they’re not supposed to. We didn’t have a problem back then. Everybody worked together and everybody—well, if this family over there sees these other children doing something wrong, you got a whipping from them. . . . The children obeyed. I don’t know how the news got home so fast—we didn’t have no telephone—but when you got home it would go like this:

  “‘Uh-huh. What’d you do at Sadie’s house?’ ‘Oh, we didn’t do noth . . .’

  “‘Uh-huh. Come on, young lady or man, you’re gonna get it.’ And you would [get it] again.”