The Mockingbird Next Door

by Marja Mills

  “I just don’t know,” the woman said as she dyed Easter eggs in her kitchen, “Did I hurt my knees yesterday afternoon doing the Stations of the Cross? Or did I do it falling down drunk last night?”

  In fairness, the authors, and Nelle, too, had fun at the expense of the whole array of Protestant denominations.

  —

  Not long after Nelle and I chuckled about the book over coffee, we attended a society luncheon in Monroeville.

  Nelle called one afternoon and got right to the point.

  “We’ve been invited to a to-do at Patsy’s house.” Patsy McCall was a shirttail relative of Nelle’s who lived in a large, elegant house atop a small hill on the other side of town. Patsy married Lloyd McCall, whose sister Sara Anne married Ed Lee. Patsy was Nelle’s sister-in-law’s sister-in-law. No wonder people default to the all-purpose “They’re kin to them.”

  We?

  “I think they invited me so that you’d come.” No, she wasn’t kidding.

  The occasion was an elaborate luncheon series for two dozen or so women, held September through May. Hostess duties rotated among the homes of several of the women. Nelle wanted me to see this aspect of life in Monroeville.

  This was not the kind of gathering Nelle frequented.

  “Well,” I asked Nelle, “would you like to go?”

  “I’ll go if you go.”

  And so, on the second Friday in November, I walked next door. Nelle was still getting ready. I kept watch, just inside the front door, for our ride. Marianne Lee, the effervescent wife of her nephew Ed Lee, would be by to pick us up.

  Nelle emerged from the bedroom hallway, smoothing her hair and sort of fluttering into the room. I’d never seen her quite like this. She seemed festively discombobulated, if such a thing is possible. This would be a fairly dressy gathering, she told me, and she was as dressed up as I’d seen her, save when she made one of her rare public appearances to accept an award.

  She had on black pants and a pink silk shirt, and her bangs were combed straight down. On her collar was a glittery cat pin. On her feet, black loafers with a gold buckle.

  She smoothed her hair again as she surveyed my outfit. I had on black slacks, low heels, and a cotton turquoise blazer. And longer earrings than usual.

  “Are you dressed to the nines?” she said.

  “I tried to find some nines to dress in.” I smiled.

  “Oh, well. I’m dressed to the sevens.”

  Nelle reached out and cupped her hand below the curl in my hair.

  “You curled your hair.”

  “Trying to look respectable.”

  Nelle sighed. “Oh, Lord. At least my shoes will be pretty.” She glanced down at her loafers, ones I hadn’t seen before.

  As Marianne’s SUV pulled into the driveway we said good-bye to Alice, who was working at the kitchen table. It was a beautiful fall day, no jacket needed.

  Our footsteps were quiet amid the clatter of women in high heels climbing the redbrick stairs to Patsy’s home. It was white, two stories, with columns out front. White rocking chairs graced the wide porch. I began to see what Nelle meant. This was an occasion, not just a get-together. It was like stepping into a photo spread in Southern Living.

  “Welcome, welcome,” Patsy greeted us as we streamed in with several others. A round table in a sizable foyer had a huge arrangement of lilies and pink roses, the size you might see in the lobby of a nice hotel. One of the three hostesses for this lunch, Mary Whetstone, circulated a silver platter with little roll-ups of salmon and cream. I’d met Mary. She was married to Dr. Jack Whetstone, now mostly retired, and went to Judy’s Wednesday night bell practice at the Methodist church.

  About two dozen guests, mostly older women but some in their thirties and forties, were chatting animatedly. I’d already met half of them, or more, and Patsy began introducing me to the others.

  Before the meal, people stood around the table and Patsy led the grace. Then we seated ourselves at one of the tables set up throughout the house. Nelle and I chose a table for seven in the kitchen, where we sat before sparkling place settings on linen place mats: gold-rimmed white plates, weighty silverware, and crystal stemware for white wine.

  Over a meal of baked chicken, vegetable casserole, rice almandine, corn salsa, and rolls, the conversation centered on the usual talk of who was doing what around town. Nelle especially enjoyed Patsy’s dessert of rosettes topped with ice cream, caramel sauce, and pecans. “There go all my good intentions,” she said. She noticed that some of it had dripped onto her shirt. “Never fails,” Nelle said, dipping her linen napkin into her goblet to blot the stain. “Just like my grandfather.”

  A heavyset black woman wearing a bright raspberry velour top stood at the sink washing dishes as the conversations continued. After the meal, coffee was served in delicate cups and saucers. Nelle and I helped ourselves to cream and sugar from an elegant silver tray. McDonald’s this wasn’t.

  Nelle once complained to me that “all anyone wants to talk about here is grandchildren and gardens.” The conversation at the table, along those lines, was going on around her. She sat quietly, looking a bit ill at ease.

  I asked if anyone had read Being Dead Is No Excuse. A few, like Nelle, had started it. She brightened recalling her favorite story. I’d heard Nelle share this with a few other people in recent weeks but that’s the thing about a favorite story. It’s amusing each time. And so here we were again.

  “The best line in there is the Episcopalian woman with bruised knees, who said she wasn’t sure if they came from doing the Stations of the Cross the day before or if she had been falling down drunk at night.”

  She laughed, and the others joined in.

  I asked a woman in a coral suit if there was a book club in town.

  “No. There are a few art clubs, a garden club, lots of bridge clubs.”

  Back home in the driveway I asked Nelle about the lack of a book club. I wasn’t looking to join, necessarily, but I was curious about who was reading what around town. Perhaps there was one and I hadn’t heard of it.

  Nelle had a different explanation. “The literary capital of Alabama doesn’t read.” The term “Literary Capital of Alabama” had been coined in the effort to make Monroeville, home of Harper Lee, a tourist attraction.

  We talked about which guests she knew; I wondered how many were from “old Monroeville.” She paused. “Me and that was it.”

  I was struck once again at the contrast between the grand, formal house we’d just left and the modest place that houses a famous author and her attorney sister.

  Later, I told Judy Croft about the lunch. “I’m so glad Nelle went,” she said. “She hides her light under a bushel basket a lot of the time.”

  That night Judy, Dale Welch, Nelle, and I had dinner at the Main Street Diner in Excel. The talk turned to books. “These two children are too young to remember Miss Minerva,” Nelle said to Dale, glancing at Judy and me, “but she was marvelous. Reynolds Price found an old one for me for ten bucks.”

  The Miss Minerva series followed the antics of young William Green Hill and his childhood friends in Tennessee. Miss Minerva is the genteel unmarried aunt who welcomes the orphaned, mischievous six-year-old Billy into her home. The books were first published in the early twentieth century.

  She told us about a new book coming out, written by a friend of hers.

  “It’s delicious. If you remember the good old-fashioned novel, this is it.”

  In fact, she contributed a cover blurb that described it as a transcendent and enduring American novel, adding “I loved it.”

  Nelle was in her element now, holding court and holding forth in a way she never would in that afternoon’s more formal setting. The book was The Lightning Keeper, she said, written by a friend of hers in New York, Star Lawrence, who was editor in chief of W. W. Norton at the time.
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  “The Lightning Keeper,” Dale repeated slowly, wondering what the title meant.

  “It’s about General Electric and relatives that were involved in—well, the type of people who went dove hunting in Paraguay.” Nelle zeroed in on one of Lawrence’s telling details. Old money with a sense of adventure went dove hunting in Paraguay.

  A woman leaving the diner stopped at our table to greet Dale. Nelle asked loudly who that was. Dale replied that she was a good artist, and murmured, as precaution, “and the husband is still behind us.” Nelle didn’t hear the last part, I could tell, so I slipped her a piece of paper from my reporter’s notebook that read, “The husband is still behind us.”

  I offended her. “I’m not going to say anything about someone I don’t know,” she said, irritated. She fidgeted with the slip of paper, folding it into a slim rectangle as she did with emptied Splenda packets.

  I could feel a little pink rising in my cheeks. Usually she wanted to be alerted to such things, because she couldn’t hear voices behind her very well. But not tonight.

  Nelle told us she’d ordered something to help with hearing. They were earbuds with a microphone that hangs down on the chest, similar to something Alice used to have. She smiled as she tried to describe the device.

  She cupped her hands behind her ears. “Artificial palms.”

  She also noticed that the diner’s cash register was new and quieter. She could no longer rib me that I should feel right at home there with a cash register that “sounded like the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre—all machine guns.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Big, fat raindrops drummed the roof of my Dodge. Kenny was running errands with me. We parked in front of the post office, waiting for a break in the downpour. Water streamed down the windows. It made the interior feel snug. I looked over at Kenny and smiled. We are buddies.

  I needed a dose of that joy. As fascinated as I was by the Lees and their world, I got lonely. Kenny’s enthusiasm for simple pleasures lifted my spirits. He liked to cruise around town with me in my humble Dodge Stratus. He tuned in the oldies station and turned up the volume. Anything by Elvis Presley got him singing along, making up the words here and there as needed.

  With the rain still falling hard, I turned off the car and, with it, the radio. We sat quietly for a bit. I asked Kenny if he’d like to write a letter to Harper Lee, who was back in New York by that time. I had note cards in the car. I was a letter writer of long standing, a stationery freak. The sheer loveliness of Alice’s regular correspondence only deepened my resolve to stay in touch with people that way.

  For Nelle, inundated with letters from strangers and acquaintances, most seeking autographs, introductions, replies, book blurbs, or donations, a letter from Kenny would be a refreshing exception. He didn’t want a thing from her—except her affection, which he already possessed, in abundance.

  Kenny could read box scores and weather graphics in the Mobile Register, and write some words, but he didn’t correspond. I offered to transcribe what he said. “Just like I say it,” he told me. He grew quiet. A moment later, he began dictating, his enthusiasm accelerating as he went along.

  Dear Harper Lee,

  I am sitting in a car with Marja, my sister.

  How’d it go—the New York Mets?

  I want you to come over someday.

  The duck sign is missing.

  Miss Alice Lee is doing fine.

  The ducks and geese, too.

  Love,

  Kenny Croft

  I jotted down what he said in a notebook and then copied it, in neater handwriting, onto the note card. I handed the card to Kenny for him to sign his name. He did, using a notebook as a hard surface, and handed it back. He thought of one more thing to say. “P.S.,” I added, and took down his postscript: “Mom and Daddy and me, Kenny, love Harper Lee so much.”

  I added, “MM transcribed this note—Kenny’s words. Kenny signed his name.”

  Kenny and Nelle enjoyed a teasing camaraderie. They liked to exchange gag gifts and make faces at each other. Kenny nearly purred when Nelle would laugh and give his crew cut a playful rub.

  Kenny always called his friend “Harper Lee,” pronounced “Hoppalee,” as if the three syllables were a first name. His parents called her Nelle. So did Ila and most of her other friends. Alice always called her “Nelle Harper.” Dale also usually said “Nelle Harper.” Ed and Marianne called her “Dody.” Kathryn Dawkins called her “Harper.” That’s what Gregory Peck called her, too.

  She was the author, Harper Lee, to most of the world. It wasn’t a persona, exactly. Not in the way the dark-haired Norma Jeane Mortenson and the people around her created Marilyn Monroe. But it was something of a separate identity, a shield between private life and public.

  She was Nelle Lee to the older people in her hometown who first knew her as Mr. Lee’s youngest child. The more informal “Nelle” fit with the friends she made as an adult, too, people like Judy and Ila. At home on West Avenue, she always would be Alice’s little sister, Nelle Harper.

  I asked Nelle why she chose to be Harper Lee on the book cover. It was a practical decision, mostly, she said. She didn’t want to be mistakenly called “Nellie.” “Nelle” got mispronounced as “Nellie” or misspelled as “Nell.” Even “Nelle Lee” can sound like “Nellie.”

  “Harper Lee” had other benefits that became clear early on. Especially in the early years, not everyone knew the author was a woman. The name could be either. Would S. E. Hinton’s novel about troubled Tulsa teens have taken hold the way it did, especially with boys, if the name on the cover was Susan Eloise Hinton? Joanne Rowling published Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone under that name, but her publishers were looking at the marketplace and so her future books came out under J. K. Rowling. Nelle enjoyed the Harry Potter books, she told me, but for the most part didn’t read much contemporary fiction.

  She said she felt lucky Mockingbird was published when it was. Much later, and it might have been classified as young adult fiction and never reached the audience, and all the adults, it did.

  —

  Not long after I unpacked my suitcase back on West Avenue, after the New Jersey trip, Ila invited Judy, Nelle, and me for coffee at her house in Mexia. Judy was picking us up this time, a hot day under a light blue sky in the summer of 2005. I was keeping an eye out for her blue Buick. When I spotted it, I hurried across my front yard to the Lees’ driveway. Nelle climbed into the passenger seat and I slid into the backseat. Judy drove the two and a half blocks to Claiborne Street and turned left.

  This had become a familiar route. We skimmed past the armory and the Mt. Zion Baptist Church, a black congregation. It had a sign out front, the kind with movable letters that noted the title of that Sunday’s sermon as well as the slogans that tickled Alice and Nelle. By the time we crossed under the railroad trestle a mile down, Monroeville was behind us and ahead was open road, slicing through rural fields and wooded areas, on the way to Ila’s.

  Mexia is named for a Texas town to which a local man had a connection. With no real downtown or center of gravity, and a collection of newer houses on cul-de-sacs, Mexia looks like a tiny suburban subdivision stranded in the Monroe County countryside. Surrounding it are stands of skinny pines and ravines draped in kudzu. Red dirt roads end in scruffy compounds where relatives have cobbled together a mishmash of trailer homes, clotheslines, and tire planters.

  It was worth the trek to Mexia. After James retired from shift work at the pulp mill, and Ila closed the beauty parlor at the back of their house on the nearby highway, they found what they wanted here in their retirement: the close-knit Southern Baptist congregation out on Old Salem Road; a spacious, one-story house at the end of their cul-de-sac; and plenty of space. Ila grew tomatoes and cucumbers in the large garden out back. James spent long hours at the buzz saw in the big woodworking shop he built in the side yard
. There he fashioned the wall of oak cabinetry that housed the Crofts’ big-screen television, and the large bookcase in the Lees’ entryway.

  Alice and Nelle had little room or desire for new furnishings at the house, noticeably smaller than the homes of most of their friends. But a big bookshelf was a lifeline amid the rising tide of books the sisters couldn’t bear to part with. James had also fashioned another gift they cherished. He made an oak dictionary stand, waist-high and strong enough to support the enormous Oxford English Dictionary opened to the latest page Alice or Nelle had consulted. They placed it to the left of their plaid living room sofa, the one with skinny wooden arms, near the small stretch of built-in white bookcases that housed copies of To Kill a Mockingbird in Spanish and Italian, French and German, Polish and Russian.

  In Mexia, the Jeters’ home looked over a ravine. Nelle suggested that perhaps she could toss all her belongings in there and burn them, preferably shortly before she died, so she wouldn’t have to worry about her personal things falling into the wrong hands. She was only half kidding. I looked over at the ravine as Judy pulled into Ila’s driveway.

  Inside, Nelle nodded across the table at me. “You haven’t said much about Chicago, child.”

  “It was a good trip. I got done what I needed to. And I ended up giving a party.” I took a quick sip of coffee. “A friend of mine at the paper—her name is Julia—got good news. She won a Pulitzer Prize, for feature writing.”

  Nelle looked genuinely pleased. “Oh, that’s wonderful,” she said. She paused and gave me a pointed look, one that surprised me. “See?” she said. “It can happen.”

  The Chicago Tribune friend, Julia Keller, wrote a three-part series that vividly re-created the destruction of a tornado that swept through Utica, Illinois. Residents were left not only to grieve their dead and rebuild the town but also to try to come to terms with the randomness of fate. When the tornado hit, what should have been decisions of no consequence instead meant the difference between life and death. Very quickly, the tornado took down buildings on one side of a street but left them intact on the other.