The Mockingbird Next Door

by Marja Mills

  They got cold, afraid of carbon monoxide if they kept the heater on too long.

  “Now, this was in the spring of the year, during turkey hunting season,” Alice explained. “And if you know anything about turkey hunting, people go into the woods before daylight and sit and wait for the turkeys to come off the roost.

  “At first light, Nelle Harper started out walking and ran into a turkey hunter. She told him her predicament. He went on down there and was able to back up the car and get it out, because the road had dried some during the night. Nelle Harper measured on the car odometer how far they were from the highway. They’d gone six miles.

  “The turkey hunter and his young son had gotten everything fine for ’em. Back in those days, we had evening services at our church. We don’t have ’em anymore in the evening, not a church service. But when I came back to Monroeville that Sunday afternoon, Nelle Harper was sitting on the front steps. She said to me, ‘I’m going to church tonight. I want to tell Fletcher—the minister—not to fuss at his congregation—this man and his little boy were Methodists—not to fuss at his Methodist members who turkey-hunted on Sunday morning. They might be friends indeed.’”

  All these years later, Alice had a big laugh about it again.

  Predicaments also inspire the best humor.

  Late one morning, Nelle and I were taking the long way back from McDonald’s to West Avenue. Instead of making the usual right onto Alabama, Nelle took the back way out of the McDonald’s lot. She made a left onto the Highway 21 Bypass. We sped along past the Subway sandwich shop and the Ace Hardware store, both to our left, and up the incline to the intersection with Pineville Road. The Bypass ended here. Turn right and you were on the rural stretch of highway to Julia Munnerlyn’s house in the country and, just beyond, to the tiny town of Peterman.

  Turn left on Pineville, as we did, and you were headed toward the Methodist church. Immediately to our right, we drove past a couple of abandoned structures, a weathered house and a dilapidated gas station, neither of which looked to have been occupied since the Depression, give or take. We passed Dale’s large redbrick Baptist church on our right. Nelle slowed and glanced over at me. We were coming up on First Methodist, its white steeple stately against a blue sky.

  “Do you mind if we stop off in the cemetery?”

  I did not mind.

  She knew her way around the cemetery and idled the car in front of a few headstones. They weren’t names I recognized. She didn’t volunteer information about the interred and I didn’t ask. Something reminded her of a story and a smile spread.

  “Has Alice told you about our Aunt Alice and Cousin Louie encountering a problem at the cemetery?” Nelle laughed.

  I’d heard about other Aunt Alice capers, to be sure, but none in a cemetery.

  “You see, Cousin Louie took Aunt Alice and a couple of other old ladies to pay a visit to the cemetery.” This was not in Monroeville but, she thought, Atmore. They paid their respects at a number of graves, and were having a perfectly pleasant outing, as cemetery visits go. Then Louie, who was driving, got the underside of the car caught on a mound of grass—more of a small, steep hill—she tried to drive over. The car was stuck there, like a turtle on a short pole.

  Louie tried to go forward. Nothing. She tried to put the sedan in reverse. Nothing. They were stuck. The ladies peered out the car windows. They would have to half-step, half-drop out of the car to get out. And then there still would be the problem of what to do next.

  Louie clambered down onto the grass from the driver’s seat. She took several steps back and surveyed the situation. She walked around the car, perched firmly atop the grass mound, and issued her report to the others, who remained in the vehicle.

  “What confronts us,” Louie declared, “is a problem of physics.”

  Nelle dissolved into laughter as she said this, so much so that I never did hear the solution.

  Years later, Alice found herself in a predicament of her own, one that involved Nelle only after the fact.

  Alice was about seventy years old then. She was heading back to Monroeville from yet another Methodist conference, this one in Dallas. She was getting ready to board a Greyhound bus when she realized her pocketbook was open and her wallet was missing. Someone had slipped in a hand and snatched it.

  “I’d already given the bus man my ticket, but there I was with no ID.” And not a penny for the journey home. She took a seat.

  A hand appeared over her seat back. A sympathetic stranger had realized Alice’s situation and offered a twenty-dollar bill. Alice was relieved and grateful. She tucked her benefactor’s address in her purse to reimburse her later. Meantime, she’d have food money along the way.

  Once she was home, Alice set about replacing her driver’s license and the other contents of the stolen wallet. She wasted no time sending the woman a check to reimburse her, as well as a gift to say thanks. It was a nightgown and robe, a pretty summer peignoir, from Vanity Fair. She mentioned the kindness of that stranger to Nelle.

  Unbeknownst to Alice, Nelle decided to express her own gratitude. She sent the woman a signed copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, with the inscription “Even though you have done it for my sister, you have done it for me.”

  Half the fun was picturing the woman’s surprise at the mailbox. The value of an autographed copy of the novel, in dollars and in personal terms, could be a burden. Then there were times like this.

  Chapter Nineteen

  In the four months I had been renting the house next door, daily life had fallen into routines and rhythms as predictable as the noontime bells ringing out from the Methodist church on Pineville Road.

  Sunday afternoons Alice left the front door open for me, and at the appointed time I slipped inside, locked the door behind me, and pulled the low rocking chair up to her recliner. I usually interviewed her for a few hours, tape recorder rolling. Before long, she would pause midsentence as I quickly flipped over the microcassettes, thirty minutes to a side. I’d press record, set down the little black recorder, and she’d resume her story exactly where she left off. I worried these sessions would become tiresome for her, but when I would say “I should let you get back to your afternoon,” her usual reply was “Not just yet, unless you need to go.” “Not just yet” often was another hour, an hour I welcomed.

  On weekdays, Nelle quite often would invite me for an afternoon cup of coffee at McDonald’s. We’d sit in the booth to the left of the main door or the first table over on the right-hand side. I’d ride along as she picked up Alice after work and then made the six-minute drive to the small lake down the hill from the Community House to feed the ducks and geese. As Nelle would slowly pull over and get the Cool Whip tub out of her trunk, the ducks would offer the kind of noisy welcome that only they can. They waddled excitedly over to the grass between the lake and the asphalt before Nelle had even stopped. They knew her car.

  Sometimes Nelle and I went to the Laundromat. She knew I didn’t have a washing machine either, and invited me to tag along.

  “I’m about due for a run to the Laundromat,” I would tell her when I didn’t have a shred of clean clothing left and couldn’t put it off any longer. I would offer to drive. Nelle had begun driving too close to the curb for comfort, once clipping a driveway mailbox with a loud crack she did not hear. But I knew better than to insist. Driving meant independence; it was a sensitive subject.

  Nelle preferred the Laundromat one town over in Excel. I assumed this was because she was less likely to be spotted there than in Monroeville but I didn’t ask. I just showed up with my white trash bags filled with laundry and tossed them in the trunk she would have open and waiting in her driveway.

  On one such trip, we chatted about the usual news and books and friends in common—as we made our way to Excel. Her mind was as sharp as ever but her vision was growing worse. Her peripheral vision was better than what she could see straight
ahead. She slid into a parking spot in front of J & E Cleaners, missing the car parked in the neighboring spot by a harrowing nine or ten inches on my side of Nelle’s Buick. I sucked in my breath, held in my stomach, and tried to squeeze between the two cars.

  She would be displeased if she realized she had alarmed me for a moment. We all had learned that her frustration with her vision, as well as her hearing, quickly could turn to frustration with us.

  While our laundry tumbled in the machines, we ducked next door into the Main Street Diner and poured cream into the ceramic mugs of steaming coffee.

  I told Nelle about my recent conversation with Alice about her return to Monroeville in 1945 after passing the bar exam in Birmingham. “I had two questions and we talked about it,” Alice told me of consulting her father about whether she should go home to practice. “One was: Would a small town accept a female attorney? The other was: Would I be able to establish myself or would I always be known as Mr. Lee’s daughter?”

  Father and daughter weren’t sure of the answer to either question. She wanted to try and he encouraged her.

  With some trepidation, Alice set up a desk in the office next to her father’s at his small law firm on the town square. She was the only woman in that profession for miles around, and as petite and polite a person as you could find.

  She had her father’s love of the law, his work ethic, and a ferocious attention to detail. Alice would never describe herself that way but others did.

  Nelle’s eyes began to dance as I recounted what they told me. “She did the work of six strapping men,” Nelle told me. Alice practiced law, Nelle said, “sweetly, quietly, and lethally.”

  Maybe, I thought, Nelle will allow me to take notes while we spoke about this. The sisters had agreed that a book on their lives and stories was a worthwhile project for some time now. But I never knew if Nelle would be in the right mood. I was apprehensive but I set down my coffee mug and pulled the slim reporter’s notebook out of my purse. I picked up a pen and tried to give her a casual “This is okay, right?” look.

  “Oh, here we go,” she said, making it clear this was not okay. Not today, anyway. I put the notebook away and set down my pen. Later, I would make notes of the conversation and recent happenings. Nelle and I would discuss which comments I wanted to use, and which experiences with her I wanted to relate. Often, her directive was to use my own judgment. To her credit, much of what she wanted off the record was to spare the feelings of a relative or a friend.

  Chapter Twenty

  Readers have long been fascinated by Nelle’s childhood friendship with Truman Capote. Rarely in literary history have two such minds met at such a tender age. Truman served as the model for Dill and Nelle was Truman’s partner in his greatest success. Those facts alone have cemented their literary pairing in the minds of readers.

  As a boy, Truman was left to spend time with his Monroeville aunts in the house right next door. Nelle’s childhood friendship with the odd, bright little playmate turned out to be a force for good and bad. At first, what unimaginable luck it was, what fun, that they had found each other as children. The imaginations of the two precocious young readers in rural Alabama fed each other years before either went on to literary fame in New York. Truman was two years older than Nelle. For children who loved stories—reading them but also making them up—such talented company was a rare find. Truman liked to hang around the Lee home, so much so, Alice told me, that her father had a routine question at the end of the day. “Has anyone put Truman out?”

  Truman and Nelle Harper wrote even then, sharing an old typewriter A. C. Lee brought home from the office. One would type part of a story, Alice recalled, and then turn the typewriter around for the other to add more.

  Nelle and Alice recalled Truman not as a neglected child, suffering a miserable childhood in the care of his old-maid Monroeville aunts, as he later told it, but as the focus of their attention, a boy treated to toys and ice cream his playmates couldn’t afford. He was, Alice told me on one of our Sunday afternoons, “an indulged child.” She drew out the word indulged, like taffy being stretched to the breaking point.

  Truman and Nelle went on to encourage each other as adult writers. Their time in Kansas was much more than a favor Nelle did for Truman. Nelle had told Capote biographer Gerald Clarke that she decided to accompany her old friend to Kansas because they shared a fascination with crime. It was, she said, “deep calling to deep.” I later learned the phrase came from a psalm. The Lees had been so steeped in the Word, those King James phrasings just came naturally to them. She and Truman recognized in each other the allure of solving a murder mystery and exploring the darkness behind it.

  Even so, the differences in their personalities and experience with fame caused a divide that only widened with time. Truman’s envy of Nelle’s Pulitzer Prize, something he never achieved, was the source of a poisonous resentment. She fled the spotlight; he courted it. Nelle grew disgusted with Truman’s erratic behavior and the lying and mean streaks she said ran through him.

  Nelle was offended by the speculation, never substantiated but persistent, that Capote might have had a hand in writing Mockingbird. “He absolutely was not involved,” Alice declared, her voice rising, as it would when she was incensed. “That’s the biggest lie ever told.” Indeed, Capote’s own letters to others regarding Nelle’s novel indicate he had no role. By the time Capote died in 1984, after a long, drug-laden downfall, the two friends were estranged and had been for years.

  In To Kill a Mockingbird, streaks run in families. According to Aunt Alexandra, “Everybody in Maycomb, it seemed, had a Streak: a Drinking Streak, a Gambling Streak, a Mean Streak, a Funny Streak.” In Truman’s family, according to Nelle, it was lying: “They fled from the truth as Dracula from the cross,” she said.

  Alice remembered Truman from the time he was very young.

  It was a Sunday and I was in the rocker, pulled up to the foot of Alice’s recliner, my hair damp with perspiration. No matter. We were in the groove.

  I asked her what Truman was like as a child.

  “He was a strange-lookin’ little thing. He was this blond little boy with this high-pitched voice and a vivid imagination. Other than that, he could have been any child running around. Wasn’t anything exceptional about him.”

  His imagination intrigued young Nelle. He liked how hers could take flight, too. “They used to stay up in the tree house in the big chinaberry tree right out our back door, exchanging ideas, all on a childish basis.”

  Truman was the only child of Lillie Mae Faulk. Lillie Mae was the oldest of five children who came to live next door when they were orphaned. She married young and had Truman when she was seventeen. She divorced and then married Joe Capote, whose name Truman took. Alice and Nelle’s mother, Frances Lee, played the piano at their wedding.

  “Mother was extremely fond of Lillie Mae. And Lillie Mae had more of a relationship with my mother than she had with her married cousins. I know they read books and exchanged them, you know, things like that. Mother was a paragon to Lillie Mae.”

  Nelle told me about the time a young Truman took off on an adventure. It was 1936. Truman was twelve and Nelle was ten. A girl named Martha was visiting the Rawls family across the street. She was from Milton, Florida, and four years older than Truman. Nelle said she noticed that the girl would sit out on the steps in her bathing costume. “I was jealous,” Nelle told me, “of all the time Truman was spending with Martha—the exotic older woman.”

  Nelle told me to ask Alice about the details of what came next. I did.

  “Truman and Martha got it in their heads that they would run away,” Alice told me. “So they hitchhiked to Evergreen and created a story about why they were traveling by themselves. The clerk at the hotel realized that something was not right and called back here to have someone retrieve them. It didn’t create that much attention around here. It was two little kids up to m
ischief. It was no big thing. The only big thing about it came later when both of ’em became well-known, but not for the same reason.

  “It turns out that years later she had been corresponding through one of those lonely hearts kind of things in a magazine, and that was how she met this husband who ended up being her partner in crime.”

  In an uncanny twist of Nelle’s and Truman’s history, Martha turned out to be a murderer. She was Martha Beck, who, with her husband, lured and robbed women who had placed personal ads in newspapers. Posing as brother and sister in the late forties, they befriended the unsuspecting victims before killing them. Known as the Lonely Hearts Killers, their crimes were sensationalized in the popular detective magazines of the day—the true-crime periodicals that both A. C. Lee and his son, Ed, devoured. Alice and Nelle also were great fans of detective stories.

  Articles about the Beck crime spree didn’t mention her childhood escapade with Truman, perhaps because Truman’s mother, Lillie Mae, pleaded with the neighbors in Monroeville not to mention it.

  “She was determined that no one would connect Truman with Martha. She went around saying, ‘Don’t say anything about it. Don’t say anything about it.’ And they didn’t.”

  Years later, Truman asked Nelle to accompany him to Kansas to research the 1959 farmhouse murders vividly recounted in In Cold Blood. She had turned in her manuscript for To Kill a Mockingbird, but it had not yet been published. He wanted to write a nonfiction narrative about the murders of the Clutter family that was so detailed and compelling it would read like a novel.

  Her old friend once had seemed unstoppable as he took the New York literary world by storm. But by the late 1950s, he was floundering. Nelle took heart that the Kansas book he envisioned could be a turning point.

  “I thought this could be a serious effort at a serious book and I wanted to encourage him,” Nelle said.