by Marja Mills
I waited with Nelle for Dale to pick us up.
Alice and I chatted in the living room as Nelle got ready in her room.
“Can we bring you back anything?” I asked Alice.
She made a face. “No, thank you. I loathe Mexican food.” She drew out the word loathe, so long and with such feeling I had to chuckle.
“All right. No enchiladas for you. A shake, then, from McDonald’s, on our way home?”
“No, I have soup here. I don’t need a thing. Just enjoy and don’t worry about me. I have all this.” Alice nodded at the pile of papers, magazines, and books on the table next to her recliner. She looked forward to these interludes alone, I knew. Even in her nineties, nearly deaf, and having outlived many of her clients, quiet time like this was something she prized. Even in her downtime, she was disciplined. She usually answered a letter or two—she still corresponded regularly with a number of friends and relatives—and then rewarded herself with uninterrupted reading time.
Friends were less likely to drop by after dark so she could count on a long stretch of time without distractions. Her little sister would be out and occupied for several hours, and there was no mistaking the pleasure and a tinge of relief with which she settled into her chair and bade us good night.
Nelle, on the other hand, was looking forward to a social evening.
Laredo Grill had more customers than we expected. Except for one family at a small table, all were of East Indian origin. They were seated along several tables pushed together to create a very long one.
After we ordered our enchiladas, Nelle had one other request for the waitress. Could she tell us about the long table of people near us? Was this a family reunion? One big family?
She shrugged and asked if we needed anything else. “Would you try, please?” Nelle asked me. I’d studied in Paraguay and Spain. In Spanish, I repeated her question to the waitress. She brightened and explained, while I interpreted her answer for Nelle and Dale.
This was a regular gathering, the waitress said, of families from India who owned motels in Monroe County and the next one over, Conecuh. Some were related but not all. In their communities, including Monroeville, they were some of the only South Asians to be found. But at these meals, the camaraderie and shared experiences flowed.
Nelle was fascinated. She apologized for keeping the waitress but asked more questions. How long had most of these people lived here? How did they happen to choose this restaurant as their gathering place? The waitress wasn’t sure about that.
We tried to be discreet in observing the lively table, with multiple conversations going, food being passed, and water glasses refilled. They looked to be four generations, from children to a woman in her eighties. I’m not sure they paid much attention to our table of three, the two tall white-haired women and the short blond one. After sharing so many meals with Nelle, I usually could sense when someone had recognized her and was watching, however discreetly.
So while it’s possible someone recognized Nelle Harper and sent the little boy over to greet her, I doubt it. She was in a gregarious mood and that contagious laugh of hers would have floated over to the long table now and then. Maybe that’s what caught the little boy’s attention.
He was a striking child, four or five years old, with caramel-colored skin, black hair, and big brown eyes.
He walked over, by himself, and stood a few feet from Nelle, gazing at her intently. He didn’t smile. He didn’t look unhappy. He simply gazed, those big brown eyes looking at her with a calm, unapologetic curiosity.
It took Nelle a moment to notice he was there. She gave him a small nod, and continued to talking to us, but then, puzzled, returned his gaze. He just stood there.
They just looked at each other silently until Nelle laughed. She reached over to tousle his hair. He broke into a shy smile and dashed back to the long table. Nelle glanced at the woman, perhaps his mother, to whom he had returned. She gave the all-purpose, pleasant “lovely child you have” nod and returned to our conversation.
Usually, Nelle didn’t welcome interruptions from children at meals. She wasn’t nearly as likely as Alice to interact with a baby or young child while out to eat. But this encounter had charmed her.
Dale and I discussed it later. Ten years hence, that little boy would be reading To Kill a Mockingbird in his eighth- or ninth-grade English class. And he’d never know that he’d once had this encounter with the mysterious author.
It was impossible for me to watch Nelle’s fascination with the subculture of Indian families running motels in modern-day Mockingbird country and not feel a pang, once again, for all the other writing she might have done. She admired their industriousness, especially at a time when she felt too many people born and raised in the area felt the world owed them a living. I couldn’t help but envision a novel she could have written that included immigrants like those at the neighboring table, with Nelle’s eye for detail and character, her empathy for outsiders, applied to the subculture of South Asians living in southern Alabama.
That evening made me a little sad, in the way that my afternoon interviewing Margaret Garrett with Nelle did. It was a reminder of how much Nelle loved something she had stopped doing, at least for book purposes, examining the way of life, the nuanced interactions in a community in the way Jane Austen did in her novels, in the way Nelle did in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Chapter Twenty-six
The year was off to a rough start. Just a couple of weeks into 2005, Nelle had bad news from New York. A friend had died. She told me about it as we stood in her driveway. I was tired. She was tired. Even the January sky was tired, a washed-out shade of blue tinged with gray.
Nelle had pulled into her driveway as I was backing out of mine. I’d been in bed for a couple of days with a lupus flare. I had errands that couldn’t be postponed any longer.
Nelle got out of her car and gave a small wave. I stuck my arm out the car window and waved back. She began to take a few careful steps my way. I turned off the ignition and got out. The overhead light went on when the door was open; leaving it that way too long drained the battery. I left it open and ignored the insistent ding ding ding. I didn’t want Nelle to feel crowded by this unusual proximity of ours. The open door signaled this would be a quick hello.
Nelle saw me hurry across my front lawn and waited for me by her Buick, as I hoped she would. The little side yard between her driveway and my yard was uneven in spots. Near the base of a couple of tall pines, gnarled roots with no place else to grow twisted out of the earth.
“How are you?” she asked.
Tolerable, just barely, I thought.
“I’m fine,” I said. “How are you?”
Usually this was where she said “Tolerable.” Instead, Nelle was silent a moment. Something was wrong.
Oh, no, I thought. Alice.
She was active. But she also was ninety-four. We all knew a bad fall or a bout of pneumonia was all it would take. One evening, the phone rang later than usual. Even half asleep I thought, Oh, no. Alice. Please, not yet. It was nothing, a wrong number. Another time, a mutual friend told me, “We’ve had some bad news.” Oh, no. Alice. The bad news was someone else’s illness. And on this day, as usual, Alice was fine. Nelle told me her friend Nell Rankin had died.
“Oh, Nelle. I’m sorry.”
“Most of my friends are underground.”
This wasn’t the time for a quick hello. I knew Old Blue was ding ding ding–ing in my driveway but so be it. As we spoke, I rested the back of my hand against Nelle’s still-warm car. The index finger on my left hand was swollen and throbbing. The heat felt good. Nelle was beyond tired, too, but for a different reason. She felt the weariness of loss.
Opera singer Nell Rankin was a New York friend. She was another Alabama native, another Alabama Nelle. Or, rather, Nell. The singer was eighty-one, only two years older than Nelle Harper.
Nelle told me she had been on the phone nonstop. Or at least it felt like it. She was worried about Nell’s husband of more than fifty years, Hugh Davidson, a physician. He was inconsolable.
Sometimes the long distance from Manhattan to Monroeville was a comfort, its own form of privacy. At times like this, though, when she had to manage from afar, it was a frustration.
Nelle brightened when she began describing her friend.
“She sang all over the world.”
Her friend was larger than life, a woman who could captivate an audience with her warm, powerful voice. At one time, she had a jaguar. Not a Jaguar with wheels. An actual jaguar. With teeth.
The death wasn’t reported to the press immediately. Obituaries began to appear nearly a week after she died. I looked online to see what was running where.
The New York Times obituary noted, “In addition to her performances at the Met, Ms. Rankin continued to sing at major houses around the world, including La Scala, where she sang Cassandra, in Berlioz’s ‘Troyens,’ in 1960, and the Teatro San Carlo, in Naples, where she sang Adalgisa in Bellini’s ‘Norma,’ in 1963. She also sang with companies in Chicago, Fort Worth, Buenos Aires, Havana, Mexico City and Athens.”
Rankin famously brought her semidomesticated pet jaguar, King Tut, into a Metropolitan Opera contract meeting as a “negotiating tool.”
I printed out several of the obituaries, put them in a Food World plastic bag with a note, and hung the bag on the Lees’ doorknob. Next time I saw her, there was none of her usual teasing about what she called with slight disdain my “magic box.” Just a heartfelt thank-you. Would I keep my eye out for any others? I did, and passed them along.
Inevitably, advancing age was claiming more of the Lees’ friends and relatives. One of the hardest deaths to take had been Gregory Peck’s, in 2003.
Peck had come up early in my first conversation with Nelle, the one begun over the noisy air conditioner in my room at the Best Western. I told her the movie would be shown in Chicago as part of the To Kill a Mockingbird events for One Book, One Chicago. Gregory Peck is Atticus for most Mockingbird fans. That was just fine with Nelle.
“Isn’t he delicious?” she had said in our very first conversation. He was a dear friend who never lost that movie-star dreaminess for her.
From the start, Nelle’s friendship with Gregory Peck extended to his family: his wife, Veronique, who died in 2012, and their two children, documentary filmmaker Cecilia Peck and actor/producer Anthony Peck. I was amused when Nelle suggested fixing me up with Anthony Peck. She did a quick calculation and decided the age difference was too great. Seven years didn’t seem like a problem to me. I was looking to find a nice guy. When I Googled Anthony Peck, however, and saw his first wife was Cheryl Tiegs, I, too, thought better of the idea.
Before the film was made, Lee took Peck around Monroeville to help him prepare for the role. He had the chance to meet her father, who was amused at the hullabaloo created by Peck’s visit.
Peck connected with Nelle on a profound level before he even met her. He fell in love with her storytelling and the opportunity to play Atticus Finch. Peck was in his midforties when he played the small-town attorney. For the rest of his life he said it was his favorite role, the one he was born to play.
“When Alan Pakula and Bob Mulligan sent me the book and said, ‘I think this is something you’re going to like,’ well, I sat up all night reading the book. I could hardly wait until eight o’clock in the morning to call them and say, ‘If you want me, I’m your boy.’
“Of course I’ve never had a moment’s regret. On the contrary, it was a blessing and a gift from Harper Lee.”
Peck told this to an audience at A Conversation with Gregory Peck. In 1999, the actor, then in his early eighties, traveled to regional theaters around the country. He took questions and told stories, in that sonorous voice, about making To Kill a Mockingbird, as well as Roman Holiday with newcomer Audrey Hepburn and, later, MacArthur, about the World War II general. His daughter and her fellow filmmaker Barbara Kopple recorded those evenings.
In the documentary, Cecilia and writer Daniel Voll are expecting their first child. It’s the spring of 1998. Peck and his wife, the French-born Veronique Passani, are in Washington, D.C., for him to receive the National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton. Cecilia and Daniel visit their hotel room.
Peck tells his daughter about a phone conversation with Harper Lee.
“I talked to Harper yesterday for a long time.”
“Where is she? In Monroeville?”
“She’s in Monroeville looking after her sister. After a nice long talk—we talked about many things—I told her about you.” Peck pauses. “Furthermore I told her if it had been a girl, it might well have been named Harper. She was very touched by it.”
“What if I gave her name to a boy baby?”
Cecilia’s mother, Veronique, knows the answer to that. “I think she’d still be happy about it. It’s a great name for a boy.” And indeed, their boy is named Harper Daniel Peck Voll.
Peck and Nelle had kept up a long correspondence and Nelle stayed with the Pecks in their Holmby Hills home on occasion. When Cecilia Peck lived in New York, Harper Lee would go over and read to the young Harper.
When Peck died at eighty-seven in June 2003, the family tried to reach Nelle in New York by phone but she was out that day. She learned of his death, she told me, on the evening news.
Brock Peters delivered Peck’s eulogy. With more than a thousand people assembled at a cathedral in Los Angeles, Peters also sang a Duke Ellington song, “They Say.” He concluded, “To my friend Gregory Peck, to my friend Atticus Finch, vaya con Dios.”
Nelle did not attend the funeral but later visited Veronique Peck in Los Angeles.
Their grandson, Harper, was about six—Scout’s age in the novel—when Nelle came over one day with a request. She wanted to buy him a kite and have it shipped to California. She wondered what we could find online. She wanted an old-fashioned kite, “plain, no writing on it, nothing fancy. Just a classic kite.” She was frustrated that this was more difficult to find than ones with rainbows, gimmicks, or neon colors.
As I showed her what I was finding for kites online—nothing satisfactory that day—she glanced down at the hopeless tangle of power cords I had corralled into a basket on my floor. Cords for my laptop, my cell phone charger, my printer, and the copier all were twisted together and shoved in a basket to one side so I wouldn’t trip over them. She shook her head slowly. “Mercy,” was all she said.
—
That January 2005, Nelle also had an appearance coming up. At the end of the month, she was to attend an annual To Kill a Mockingbird luncheon in Tuscaloosa. No matter how relieved, and even pleased, Nelle might feel after an appearance, the days leading up to an event were fraught with anxiety.
Mystique raises expectations. Being anyone’s favorite author raises expectations, much less being so many people’s favorite author. Still, this was not new to Nelle. Shouldn’t it get easier with time? Apparently not. As the event drew closer, a swirl of apprehension, resentment, and irritation gained momentum.
Nelle told me she continued to do the event partly because of her friendship with the event’s organizers. She also liked that the focus was on students reading and writing about the novel.
Students at a predominantly black Tuscaloosa high school and at a predominantly white one write about the novel and what it means to them. Those judged to have the best essays are honored at the stately home of the president of
the University of Alabama.
Nelle was modest about it, but she knew her presence was a thrill for those students. She felt like less of a commodity there. A lot of the awards offered to her, she suspected, were mostly an attempt to get Harper Lee to show up and lend cachet to an event. This was different.
When Nelle studied in Tuscaloosa in the early 1940s, it took longer to travel the 138 miles to the college town on the banks of the Black Warrior River. Now you can make the drive in two hours and forty-five minutes. It seemed farther, though, the way people in Monroeville talked about it. Tuscaloosa has ninety thousand people and all those professors and students, dreamers and gadflies, that university towns attract. Monroeville it isn’t.
The event was less than a week away, and over coffee at McDonald’s, in the usual booth by the window, she fretted about it: the logistics, the need to dress up, the expectations that greeted her anytime she made an appearance.
Nelle knew those sitting at her table would be repeating whatever she said as their Harper Lee anecdote, that people would want to have their picture taken with her, that accounts of the event might make it into the newspaper.
It comes in handy to have a hairdresser in your posse. For Nelle, getting ready for a public appearance held all the appeal of having a tooth pulled. The one annual event she agreed to was this one. As the event drew closer, Ila offered to trim Nelle’s hair. She would trim Judy’s and mine as well while she was at it.
“Oh, would you, hon?” Nelle said, relieved. “Bless you.” She was uncomfortable with the fuss of primping for things like this.
Ila Jeter retired but kept her professional shears. For years, she ran a one-woman beauty shop. She shampooed and conditioned, cut and curled, teased and styled. She laughed with her customers and sympathized with their troubles. She was a natural.
For Nelle, there was reassurance in shopping for an outfit with Judy or having Ila trim her hair in the comfort and privacy of Ila’s home.
