by Marja Mills
“You ready now?”
“You bet.”
“See you at the car.”
“Sounds good. See you in a minute.”
I slipped my shoes back on, grabbed my purse, and headed to her driveway. She sat behind the wheel, ready to go.
I was feeling a little shaky. The gnarled tree roots I usually stepped over with ease seemed higher.
Then I felt the earth rise up and slam me in the head.
It took a moment to realize I was on the ground. I saw my red leather purse next to me, on its side. Some of the contents—my tube of Burt’s Bees rhubarb lip balm and a couple of black felt-tip pens—had spilled onto that patchy grass.
From the car, Nelle saw me go down. I was only yards away. What she saw was me heading toward the car and then dropping out of view from her perch behind the wheel. I got up but went down again right away.
Nelle recounted this to Bill Miller. “She was there and then she was down,” Nelle told him. “Then she was up. Then down again.”
It didn’t feel like fainting or tripping or whatever it was that happened. It felt like I was minding my own business and the earth rushed up to whack me on the head a second time.
“Oh, hon,” Nelle said when she reached me. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, I think so.” Waves of embarrassment washed over me.
“No, you’re not all right.”
I was on my feet again but trembling. She helped me to my front door.
We hardly ever used this door. It was closer to their house, yes, but the kitchen door was where all the coming and going happened. The to-ing and fro-ing, in Nelle’s words. I fished my house key out of my purse. My hands were shaking and I couldn’t get the key into the lock. Nelle took the key and unlocked the door. She escorted me the short distance to the sofa, under the picture window.
She looked alarmed. I was mortified.
The world felt upside down. My head hurt. We were using the door we never used and I was sitting on the sofa I never sat on.
“Stay here. I’ll get water. And Judy.”
I just wanted to skulk off to my bedroom, recover, and know that Nelle and Judy weren’t having to get involved.
I remember parts of the week that followed. People told me the rest. The Crofts had relieved Nelle and were on the phone to my parents in Madison.
I didn’t know it then, but I had gotten dehydrated, seriously dehydrated, and that was descending into delirium. I was shaking and my coordination was off. I’d be lucid and then not.
This happens more commonly with old people, especially if they live alone and fall ill or lose their appetite. In my case, mouth sores, probably from lupus, had made it painful to eat and drink. The real peril of delirium is this: By the time you need medical care, and fluids, right away, you’re too muddled to realize it. If you’re lucky, someone recognizes you need help.
Whatever this was, a mystery at the time, the consensus was I’d be better off with my own doctors at Northwestern Hospital. In Madison, my mother booked the last available seat on the only direct flight out of Pensacola the following morning.
In my kitchen, Judy heated some of her homemade vegetable soup and placed it before me. I wanted to show I was okay but it was hard to keep the soup on the spoon.
I remember sitting at the kitchen table, mentally “running the differential,” as the docs say. I felt a door was closing, a nothingness descending, and I needed to get a handle on this while I still had my wits about me. Even if half of them had jumped ship already.
I didn’t tremble like this, ever. Was lupus attacking my central nervous system? Unlikely. Was I having a nervous breakdown? Doubtful, but how embarrassing would that be? An infection? Maybe.
It’s an odd predicament, wanting to appear normal while you are losing your faculties.
Later, Judy and I were in my bedroom, gathering anything I’d need for my hastily arranged flight. I passed out again that evening. Judy saw it coming and leaped over to break my fall. She dived over and fell with me, protecting my head, like some kind of superhero in a sensible sweater and glasses.
An ambulance took me to the local hospital. On the mortification scale, this was getting progressively worse. I got fluids in the ER and was released to spend the night at home. Judy lay beside me on my bed that night. I slept. She didn’t. So much for not wanting to put anyone out.
The next morning, the Crofts made the nearly two-hour drive to the Pensacola airport. Because this was a one-way ticket booked at the last minute, I was flagged by the TSA. Finally, after that rigmarole, Judy got permission to deliver me, a shaky, confused mess in a wheelchair, right to the gate.
I remembered her saying something to me about a friend’s son. A cute, nice son who was about my age. It turned out he was at the gate as well. For Nelle and Dot and Judy, my would-be matchmakers, the dating prospects never got past the musing-aloud stage. And now here was someone else who conceivably, improbably but theoretically possibly, could be a match. If I had been coherent. Hard to make a good first impression otherwise.
My parents would meet me at the other end of the two-and-a-half-hour flight. They drove from Madison to O’Hare and bundled me off to Northwestern Hospital. Chicago made it to twenty-six degrees that day; Monroeville, seventy. It was lost on me.
I was out of it for the first couple of days in the hospital, mumbling and making no sense. The doctors diagnosed the delirium, gave me fluids, took me off any newer medications that could have interacted or made things worse.
Within days, I was well enough to write the Lees. Someone faxed the letter for me.
Dear Alice and Nelle,
I believe you owe me a cup of coffee, Nelle. As soon as possible, I’ll be back to collect.
Another small herd of men and women in white coats just stopped by, poked and clucked and predicted I might be released as early as tomorrow.
“Or not,” as someone else usually points out.
I’ll have an EEG and MRI today. Yesterday’s spinal tap and blood tests came out fine.
Hope to see you soon.
Love,
Marja
p.s. Best to Julia.
—
Iwas back, but only long enough to finish some interviews, pack up, and say my good-byes. I filled more notebooks, recorded more long afternoon interviews with Alice. I spent time with Alice and with Nelle going over anything else, besides what they had noted already, they felt should be off the record. In most cases, they again told me to use my judgment.
I was returning to Chicago with far more than I’d taken with me. I had more books and a little more clothing. Mostly, what I had accumulated resided in memory and copious notes, going back to that August day in Chicago five years earlier when my editor stopped by my cubicle.
The days became months and the months became years. The notes, the interview transcripts, the file folders captured hundreds of shared experiences. That is what I wanted to do, to preserve the stories only they and their trusted circle there could tell, those that they were willing to share. And I wanted to understand daily life in Monroeville, its routines and rhythms, past and present, in this out-of-the-way place that shaped Harper Lee and the novel beloved by three generations of readers.
I continue to visit Monroeville periodically, to correspond with my friends. I still get the Monroe Journal mailed to my Chicago high-rise once a week. Lupus continued to be unpredictable. I had to rest a lot; most of this book was written in bed on a laptop.
I had reams of information to organize, to research, and to shape into book chapters. Even before poring through the material again and again to glean the meaningful comments, recall the telling detail, certain memories would rise unbidden to the surface “clear as a June night,” as Nelle would say. These were times I felt I was glimpsing something essential of what it meant to be Nelle, of what it meant t
o be Alice, in this time in their lives. They struck me immediately.
I still hear the clattering of heels up brick steps to a grand Monroeville home with white columns and a ladies’ fancy luncheon, a modern-day version of something from the Maycomb of To Kill a Mockingbird, the Monroeville of Nelle’s youth. Beside me, Nelle is wearing flats, her footsteps silent. She is out of her element but taking in every detail. We are attending the event, she says, as part of my coming to understand this part of the world that is Monroe County.
That evening, she is back on comfortable ground at the Main Street Diner in the neighboring town of Excel, where she and I drink coffee while our respective loads of laundry tumble dry in the Laundromat next door. This is the diner where, just as at other such places, she is animated, laughing, talking about books and friends and the colorful characters of her childhood. Of Aunt Alice and Cousin Louie, Aunt Kitty and the husband she herself called Mr. Nash.
She regales two friends, Dale and Judy, with tales of the luncheon and remembers another couple of people I should interview. She is a master storyteller here as well as on the page, no surprise. With one problem. She gets to laughing before she can get the story out. She tries again. Same problem. She takes her glasses off, tips back her head a bit, and lets loose with the kind of contagious laugh that washes across a room.
I see Nelle and Alice together, too, heading out to feed the ducks and geese just before dusk on a Saturday afternoon. In their living room, I am in the low, brown rocking chair pulled up to the foot of Alice’s gray recliner. She can hear me better this way and she has become so accustomed to my flipping over the little cassettes in my tape recorder every thirty minutes that she automatically pauses in her stories as I do so.
Before dusk, as the light begins to soften, Nelle appears from the back bedroom, the one that used to be her father’s quarters and now are hers. We are off to feed the ducks and geese. The ducks and geese know Nelle’s car. Even before she has parked at the small lake, they come running, wings flapping, raising a honking, quacking ruckus. Alice counts the ducks methodically, concerned one is missing. Nelle does the same but quickly, in fits and starts, and grows exasperated. The women are taking it all in: the way the creatures interact with one another, the little power plays on webbed feet, the ducklings that follow around their momma.
And I see Alice late one evening alone at the kitchen table. Or rather, I know she is there because she has told me she will be up late working on tax returns, on Nelle’s and on those of the clients she has had for fifty years. Her little sister is asleep in the back bedroom. Or it could be title work that has Alice up, or someone’s will. She sits alone at the cluttered table in the 1950s kitchen, a green banker’s lamp glowing at her right elbow.
She is doing the work her father, her law partner, used to do, determined that every figure add up, every rule be followed, stressed by the amount of work but buoyed by the sense of purpose. On plat maps, her bony fingers trace the property lines that etch stories for her, stories of families and businesses that go back generations, that her own family has known for generations. She is a solitary figure but doesn’t seem entirely alone. Her Methodist faith, her kinship with her late father, are unseen presences in the small kitchen of the modest redbrick house under the skinny assembly of tall pines.
At that moment, with her little sister still sound asleep in the back bedroom, it seems as if this is how it always has been, always will be.
Epilogue
This memoir of my time in Monroeville with the Lees and their friends and family is a chronicle of the last chapter of life as they knew it.
Nelle suffered a serious stroke in February 2007. She underwent months of hospital treatment and rehabilitation, first in New York and then in Birmingham, and hoped to be able to walk again instead of relying on a wheelchair. That didn’t happen.
She moved, permanently, into an assisted living center, a far cry from the rambling house on Alabama Avenue where Nelle was born and raised, where the weathered little Mel’s Dairy Dream now dispensed hamburgers and shakes from a walk-up window.
In November, she attended the White House ceremony at which President George W. Bush presented her and seven others with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Privately, members of the U.S. Marine Band surprised her by playing music from Elmer Bernstein’s To Kill a Mockingbird score. It moved her to tears.
She was able, for a time, to keep up with some reading, to hold the kind of conversations she used to with friends, to get out a fair amount. She had good days and bad days.
I’d be back to Monroeville on at least annual visits over the next several years.
On one visit, as I went over shared experiences and conversations I wanted to include in the book, Nelle added comments here and there and spoke fondly, again, of Gladys Burkett.
Nelle had told me over the years that she resented any speculation that her editor, Tay Hohoff, had a larger role in shaping the manuscript than she did, as Nelle saw it. And the rumor that Capote wrote any of it was still infuriating, she made clear, and absurd. It didn’t stop there.
“Rumors get started on the thinnest of evidence,” Nelle said.
We were at a table in the dining area of the assisted living center. The residents’ rooms were down a couple of hallways off the common area, where they could sit in sofas and chairs with visitors, and the adjacent dining area.
Nelle and I were sipping coffee from the two large cups I’d brought from McDonald’s. Rather, I was sipping and scribbling away in my notes. She was draining the large cup rather quickly.
She wasn’t fond of the coffee at the assisted living center.
“What they call coffee, isn’t.”
She discussed the rumors regarding the writing of the novel, her voice tinged with anger, then resignation.
“If all the people who said they had a hand in writing or editing it were put together, they’d fill a whole church. I’ll give you an example,” Nelle said.
After Nelle had finished the manuscript, she said, she gave the pages to Burkett to read. Once she had, the teacher had a student cross the school yard to return the manuscript, a stack of pages in the customary thin cardboard box, to Nelle at home across the street. It took all of a few minutes.
Burkett hadn’t written many comments on the pages of the manuscript, Nelle said. The teacher did scribble a William Shakespeare quotation Nelle’s novel brought to mind.
“She returned it with a quotation from Macbeth. Or was it Hamlet?”
Nelle began reciting the quotation from memory.
“‘Life’s but a walking shadow that struts and frets upon the stage and then is seen no more.’”
She cocked her head to one side and tried to remember again if it was from Macbeth or Hamlet.
Later, I Googled “walking shadow” to find the full quotation online. I considered copying it down by hand to give to Nelle, along with the notation that it was from Macbeth, as she first thought. I knew the idea of my looking that up online when it was easily findable in books ran the risk of giving Nelle indigestion. I pictured her shaking her head at me as she lamented the death of civilization.
Nelle’s memory had been good, if not word for word, for the famous pronouncement in Macbeth.
Leaning closer to the screen of my laptop, I read the full quotation, from which Faulkner drew his title for The Sound and the Fury.
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
I wasn’t sure how this pessimistic view applied to the novel, but that wasn’t the issue. Earlier that day, Nelle’s point was that the student’s school yard errand to return the manuscript for Gladys Burkett was enough to spur speculation that she somehow had contributed to the writing or the editing of To Kill a Mockingbird.
I thought of all the times Nelle had, easily and unpretentiously, recited a line, or paraphrased a passage, from the literature she hadn’t just read but taken into her heart and her view of the world. The times she’d refer to Faulkner or Welty or that quotation from The Pilgrim’s Progress that Brock Peters’s death brought to mind for her.
The words were a constant, a comfort, and an inspiration, when so much around her was changing. Even now—especially now, perhaps—when the stroke had left her in a wheelchair and home no longer was the familiar brick house on West Avenue but an assisted living center.
Things became increasingly difficult as Nelle’s condition worsened and her memory failed, as had Louise’s, who died in 2009 at age ninety-three. By the time I saw her a couple of visits later, she was not the Nelle I knew.
Nelle’s decline was hard on Alice. She continued her daily work at the law office and went by to see Nelle most afternoons. On September 11, 2011, Alice turned one hundred. Family and friends held celebrations to honor her. My mother and I returned to Monroeville for the festivities. Two mornings in a row after the office celebration, Alice invited me to her home. I pulled the rocker up to her recliner, where the stories rolled once again, this time of her joy in having four generations of their family come together for the occasion.
A bout of pneumonia in December 2011 put Alice in the hospital and from there she was released into an assisted living center as well, not the same one as Nelle’s. Alice grew more frail and the hope that she would be able to return to her house and routines dimmed. She had been active just a few months earlier at her centennial gatherings, but declined at the assisted living center.
I like to picture them, still, as they were all those years on West Avenue, when they would set off in Nelle’s Buick for the country highways and red dirt roads they knew so well.
“We go out in every nook and cranny,” Alice told me on my first visit. “We explore. If a new road opens up, we try it. We have done that all our lives.”
