The Mockingbird Next Door

by Marja Mills

  And so it was that a few days before Nelle’s appearance, she and Judy and I gathered at Ila’s handsome one-story house at the end of the cul-de-sac in Mexia. Ila shepherded all three of us into the roomy master bathroom. It was easily five times the size of the main bathroom at the Lee house.

  Ila motioned for Nelle to sit in the chair she had dragged in for this purpose. She draped a thin smock, the kind with a snap in the back, over Nelle’s casual, button-down shirt. I perched on the steps to the Jacuzzi, and Judy sat on the window seat. Ila wet Nelle’s hair. She went to work with an efficient snip, snip, snip.

  “Are you going to make me look presentable?” Nelle asked Ila. She added wryly: “To the extent that’s possible.”

  “More than presentable,” Ila said.

  “You know me,” Nelle said. “It’s short hair, leave it white, and be done with it.”

  “This is quite a bathroom,” Judy said. It was gracious, spacious. In fact, Ila told us, with her husband James’s cancer progressing, he had mused that perhaps they should just roll a hospital bed in here near the end and make it his room. “He said, ‘Everything would be right here.’”

  “Oh, bless his heart,” Nelle said. It was vintage James Jeter. He was a practical man, and he didn’t want to make things any harder than necessary for Ila. She lightly brushed a little wet, white hair off Nelle’s smock. Ila stepped back to regard her work and returned to trimming Nelle’s bangs.

  “How long did you work as a hairdresser?” I asked Ila.

  “Thirty years.”

  “So you knew all about what was happening in people’s lives,” I said.

  “Girl, you don’t know. I knew more than I wanted to know.” She had a longtime customer who Ila knew was having an affair with the husband of another regular. She made sure not to book their appointments back-to-back. A last-minute change one day meant that happened, nonetheless.

  So Ila worked quickly, she told us. She tried to nudge the freshly coiffed wife out the door without being obvious. She got nowhere. The woman was in a talkative mood and in no hurry. She departed, finally, right before the other woman arrived.

  Ila pantomimed her relief. Nelle’s laughter bubbled over. “Mercy.”

  Nelle had a question. Had Ila ever read “Petrified Man,” the Eudora Welty short story that takes place in a beauty shop?

  “I don’t think so,” Ila said.

  “Oh, you should.”

  “I can make a copy for you,” I told Ila.

  “Oh, would you?” Nelle said.

  “Great,” Ila said.

  Ila refused to let Nelle or Judy or me pay her. As we left her house, I told Ila I’d drop off the copy of “Petrified Man.”

  “I know you’ll enjoy it,” Nelle told her.

  Welty published the story in 1939. It became a staple of high school English classes. That’s when I read it, sitting in the overheated, old library of West High in Madison. All these years later, I remembered something about a human specimen preserved in a jar but not much else.

  Not long after, I found “Petrified Man” in my copy of The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. At my bedside printer, I lifted the lid to make the copy. Before setting the book facedown on the glass, I glanced again at the first couple of lines of the story.

  “‘Reach in my purse and git me a cigarette without no powder in it if you kin, Mrs. Fletcher, honey,’ said Leota to her ten o’clock shampoo-and-set customer. ‘I don’t like no perfumed cigarettes.’”

  I read on. Mrs. Fletcher marvels at the peanuts in Leota’s purse. Leota tells her they came from Mrs. Pike. Who is that? Mrs. Fletcher wants to know.

  I put the lid to the printer back down. I couldn’t be expected to stop there, not without knowing who Mrs. Pike was or what was up with Mrs. Fletcher and Leota. The feeling I’d had reading the story twenty-five years earlier was returning to me. It was a feeling about the confining lives of the characters, more like hearing a familiar song in a distant room than recalling anything specific. I still couldn’t remember the details of what happened in that Mississippi beauty shop.

  I thought, I’ll just read another a page or two. I climbed up on the bed and sat cross-legged with the book. Mrs. Fletcher is pregnant, married to a man she expects to reform. She has a multitude of reasons for resenting Mrs. Pike, whom she knows only through Leota’s gossip. There was a “petrified man,” too, a person who could stand stock-still so long he appeared to be made of stone. He turns out to be a wanted criminal, a rapist on the run. Inside the lavender walls of the beauty shop, the gossip flows. The women reveal themselves and their predicaments, more than they know.

  I had errands to run, starting with getting a photocopy of the story to Ila. But there were a dozen other stories in the Welty collection.

  One more and then it’s back to work.

  Maybe two.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  In February I told Nelle that I was planning to drive to Princeton Junction, New Jersey, later that month to visit my college roommate and her family. I asked Nelle if she wanted to come along, since she was returning to New York about that same time, and flying, of course, was not an option. She could catch an easy commuter train from there. She said yes.

  I began my preparations, turning to practical aspects, fighting the urge to get a window sign that said PLEASE BE CAREFUL. NATIONAL TREASURE ON BOARD.

  I did, however, join AAA, stock the car with water bottles, and, much to Alice’s amusement, buy collapsible orange traffic cones for my trunk.

  On Thursday morning, February 24, we piled our things in the car and I backed out of her driveway, dipping a back tire off the edge of the narrow cement strip, causing a noticeable bounce. “So much for getting off to a good start,” Nelle told me with a wry smile.

  That night I faxed Alice from Newnan, Georgia, telling her that Nelle, even with drops in her eyes, helped to get me on 85, and it was an easy drive. Nelle dashed off a note on the fax to confirm our arrival and signed off as “Dody.” The nickname goes back to childhood when a young Nelle, as the family story goes, mispronounced a word as dody and the name stuck.

  After a day of driving and several cups of coffee each, we stopped at another Hampton Inn, in Fredericksburg, Virginia. I managed to get lost trying to find the Bonefish Grill, a seafood restaurant chain. By the time I pulled into the parking lot, we were both tired and stiff from a day in the car. “My treat,” Nelle said. She wanted us to enjoy a quiet dinner at a nice place.

  It wasn’t the subdued place we had pictured. Young men and women, still in suits after work, crowded the bar and waiting area. Waiters rushed by and people chatted loudly on cell phones. Nelle took all this in and sank onto a bench for diners waiting to be seated. “Mercy,” she said.

  After we sat down for dinner, our conversation turned to the grim topic people were grappling with in Monroeville. The brutal murder of a beloved local doctor and his wife the previous year had shocked everyone. Now trial preparations were under way for the couple’s thirty-one-year-old adoptive son, Timothy Jason Jones, who had a history of drug addiction and anger. The prosecutor had decided this would be a death penalty case, and sentiment in town seemed to be largely in favor of that. What gave some pause was Jones’s long history of addiction. The crime appeared to be related to a dispute over money he wanted for drugs.

  Was someone in the grips of addiction, even someone who repeatedly had spurned his parents’ efforts to help him get his life back on track, fully responsible for his actions?

  I had asked Alice about the case during one of our Sunday afternoons with recliner, rocking chair, and recorder. How did she feel about the death penalty?

  “No one abhors what he did more than I,” Alice said. “Dr. Jones and his wife were my friends. But my faith tells me that everyone has a spark of the divine in them. I wouldn’t want to serve on a jury that sent him to his death.”


  As I recounted this to Nelle, she leaned forward.

  “That’s what Alice said? That’s fascinating.”

  “You haven’t discussed the case with her?”

  “Well, not in those terms. What do you think about it?”

  “I understand both sides of it, I think. I do. But I don’t support the death penalty. There are too many problems. Who gets executed and why. And the whole idea of executing people . . .”

  Nelle nodded.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I understand both sides of it, too,” she said. She demurred on what she thought should happen in the Jones case, or in general.

  If she still were writing, I wondered to myself, would a case like this be the inspiration for something she might write in a novel? The trial in To Kill a Mockingbird is still taught in some law schools. People are fascinated by her thoughts about social issues like that, about criminal justice. And In Cold Blood was about the road to the hanging of the two killers.

  There was no point in wondering, though. She wasn’t going to be doing that. It was another book I pictured on the shelf of those she could have written. The imaginary row of books that made me wistful when I thought about it. Wistful for what Nelle might have accomplished and taken pride in doing with her talent, with her insight. Wistful for all of us who would have loved to read them. But that decision was hers to make and she’d made it, however gradually over the years, for her host of reasons, starting with the difficulty of living up to the impossible expectations raised by To Kill a Mockingbird.

  In my conversations with Alice and Tom, that impediment loomed large, as they saw it. Tom knew the whole question was a tiresome topic for Nelle. He let her bring it up rather than doing so himself. And she did, every now and then. As he recalled it, this was one late-night conversation over a bottle of Scotch.

  “Do you ever wonder why I never wrote anything else?” Nelle asked him. She dropped it into their conversation apropos of nothing, but with a certain intensity.

  Tom paused and looked at her with a hint of a smile.

  “Well, along with about a million other people, yes.”

  He knew, Tom told her, that it would have been daunting to compete with the success of To Kill a Mockingbird. He began to expand on that, but she cut him off.

  “Bullshit,” she said. “Two reasons. First, I wouldn’t go through all the pressure and publicity I went through with Mockingbird for any amount of money.”

  Tom nodded.

  “Second, I have said what I wanted to say and I will not say it again.”

  Tom nodded again but thought to himself, he later told me, that he, personally, didn’t put a lot of stock in that second reason. Only she knew, of course. It was for her to say.

  But in his experience, she did have more to say. Plenty more to say. Issues of family and faith, race and religion, character and community, still animated her conversations. Someone sustained by ideas, who still was a writer to her core whether or not she had published anything in decades, had to have more to say. Didn’t she?

  Later on that trip, as we got closer to New Jersey, I offered again to drive Nelle into Manhattan. I knew it would be hairy but I wondered if I shouldn’t deliver her to her door. “Don’t even think about it. It’s too difficult doing that. I want to take the train in. It’s better for you and me.”

  Nelle and I arrived early at the Princeton Junction station, a quaint stone structure with wooden pews for waiting passengers. She had shipped all but what she needed for the car trip so her bag was easy to manage. The station wasn’t crowded; most of the wooden benches were unoccupied and we found a quiet spot to sit. I sat with her bag while she went to the window and got a ticket to Penn Station.

  “Thanks a bunch, hon,” Nelle said. “You have a good time with your friends. And drive safely.”

  The train came to a stop and Nelle boarded with small clusters of others waiting on the platform. The doors closed and the train pulled out of the station. And she was gone.

  I’d been close to my New Jersey friends since we’d studied together at Georgetown University. After visiting them, I decided to make the twelve-hour drive to Chicago rather than return to Monroeville. It was easier than dealing with a flight to Chicago later on, and I was overdue to make the usual round of medical appointments and to spend time with friends and family, especially my young nephews, Tommy and Andrew. At home, I received a letter from New York. Nelle thanked me for the trip and the good company.

  Across the top she dashed off a line about the dark felt-tip pen I had given her, one that was supposed to be easier for people with vision problems to see. “I love this pen!”

  While Nelle was in New York, Alice faxed me her phone number there so I would have it. I wrote Nelle’s phone number in my little pink address book but not under Lee. Earlier, I had recorded her address under a made-up name. I was afraid if it were ever lost or stolen I would feel compelled to leap from the Sears Tower rather than owning up to the security breach.

  I had thought about what name I could come up with that would fall right before Lee. Leder. I’d heard the name. I put the information under “Natalie Leder.” Someone with the initials N.L. would remind me but mean nothing to any purse snatcher who, theoretically, would turn out to have a literary bent, would know Nelle Lee was Harper Lee, and would auction off the address or phone number.

  While Nelle still was in New York, I returned to Monroeville with my mother. Nelle would take the train to Los Angeles for a May 19 library foundation fund-raiser planned by Veronique Peck and then another train to New Orleans for a stretch in Monroeville. She got back two weeks after my mother left. “Your mother was a big hit around here,” she told me when she returned. It was true.

  Having a sweet-spirited, smart momma made my stock rise a bit, I think, among my friends here. She and I were close, always, and she knew more about my experiences in Alabama than anyone else.

  It was a treat to show my mother around the town she had heard so much about, to take a long country drive with Alice, see the play, and go to dinner at the Crofts’ and the Butts’. With tender pride, Julia showed my mother the giant red amaryllis she had cultivated in the Lees’ small flower bed. Finally, Julia had a true gardener next door, if only for a short time, someone who could talk annuals and perennials with her. My own gardening amounted to admiring the yellow lantana that grew wild by my driveway. Not that I knew it was called lantana until my mother saw it and told me.

  In the Lees’ front yard, Julia was telling us more about the amaryllis when a mockingbird alighted on a tree branch and offered us its song. Mockingbirds are a fairly common sight around Monroeville but to have one join us in Harper Lee’s yard was a bit of magic.

  My mother and I just looked at each other. We paused and listened. Julia volunteered her take on mockingbirds.

  “They just sing their song and don’t care what anybody say about it. It’s their song and they gonna sing it.”

  Mockingbirds sing loudly and don’t take kindly to other birds infringing on their territory. There’s something strong but also vulnerable about mockingbirds; those qualities applied to the one in the tree as well as the ones living in the house.

  That night, Julia finally went to see the annual play. Later, with the tape recorder rolling at my kitchen table, I asked her what she thought of it.

  “It was different from what I thought it would be like. Because I had never read the book either. I have the book, but I had never read it or seen the play. Miss Alice told me. ‘Julia?’

  “And I said, [she speaks in a high voice] ‘Yes ma’am?’

  “‘You ever seen that play?’

  “‘No ma’am.’

  “She said, ‘Well, Julia, when it plays again you’d better go see it.’

  “So I did.”

  She chuckled.

  What had sh
e expected?

  “I really expected that this lawyer that defend the accused, that he’d have more action than what he really did, you know. He didn’t, he didn’t pound his fist saying, “I don’t believe he did it.” Julia pounded her fist on the table to illustrate. “It was just a regular calm thing, you know. I thought—I was expecting more action on his part than there really was.”

  I told her there’s more action in the movie, though Atticus is still pretty calm in the courtroom. She didn’t like courtrooms, she told me, because they reminded her of Judgment Day in the Bible.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Weighty histories and long biographies were not the only books captivating the Lees.

  That year, 2005, Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays, two Mississippi women, had just published Being Dead Is No Excuse. The slim book is, as the subtitle explains, The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral.

  The authors had tongue-in-cheek fun with the various traditions, when it comes to funerals and receptions and all that is right and proper and reflects one’s social standing, among the various denominations in their town. The book made the rounds among the people I knew: Nelle and Alice, Judy and Dale, Tom and Hilda.

  As a Methodist minister’s wife well versed in funerals, the normally soft-spoken Hilda erupted with laughter reading the book aloud one evening. I had joined her and Tom at their kitchen table for a dinner of beef vegetable soup, salad, and her fragrant homemade sourdough rolls, famous among their friends as devilishly impossible to resist. She made batches of them in round baking tins, used layers of plastic wrap and aluminum foil to preserve them in the freezer, and always gave me a package for the road. The only problem was the difficulty in driving while liberating the thawed rolls from those tight layers of plastic wrap.

  Nelle told me her favorite passage was the one with the Episcopalian woman trying to remember the origin of her bruised knees.