I Am Scout (10 page)

So at the end of the first semester,
1948
, she withdrew from the University of Alabama without a degree—not even a bachelor's, since she had begun law school her junior year and didn't take the final exams. For a short while she lived at home and saved money. Then, having “got an itch to go to New York and write,” as Alice said later, trying to put the best spin on the situation,
23
-year-old Nelle Lee prepared to move out of the family home.
33

Nelle found her niche at the University of Alabama writing for the campus newspaper and as editor of the
Rammer Jammer,
a humor magazine. She “hated” law school, however, and dropped out. (
The Corolla
Yearbook)

Truman Capote went to New York City during the mid-1940s and was famous by 1948. His example inspired Harper Lee to leave Alabama and become a writer in the literary center of the world. (Henry Cartier Bresson/Magnum Photos)

Her send-off from Alabama was not festive, mainly because of her parents' doubts about her departure. Her mother imagined the direst scenarios befalling her daughter. Her father was crestfallen that his youngest child had burned her bridges by dropping out of law school a semester short of graduation.

After saying good-bye to the rest of the family, father and daughter drove down South Alabama Avenue, where Nelle had played tag, caught fireflies in jars, shot marbles, and stolen fruit from the neighbors' trees. They passed rickety picket fences,
100
-year-old trees, and homes where people had been born, lived, and died without ever feeling the need to venture far.

Then Mr. Lee turned south out of the square and left Monroeville behind, the white dome of the courthouse receding in the rearview mirror. At Repton, he caught Route
84
, going
24
miles east to Evergreen. The Louisville & Nashville Railroad steamed almost daily into Evergreen, tugging a line of Pullman cars. From there, his headstrong daughter could begin the
1
,
110
-mile journey to New York City.

For the trip, Alice had insisted she wear white gloves. But when Nelle finally arrived at Penn Station the following day, she removed them, kicked off her high heels, and walked in her stocking feet. Scout had arrived in the big city.
34

Chapter 5

“Willing to Be Lucky”

In 1949, the year Nelle arrived in New York City, author E. B. White wrote, “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.”
1

As every newcomer knew, the giant city had riches worth having, but at the time of Nelle's arrival there was practically no place to live. The wartime housing shortage hadn't ended yet, and apartment dwellers weren't budging because rent controls ensured that they already had the best deals they could get. No Vacancy signs were everywhere.

Nevertheless, Nelle managed to find an apartment—although without hot water—at
1539
York Avenue between East
81
st and
82
nd Streets, in a pleasant neighborhood seven blocks east of Central Park, and a block and a half west of the East River, on the East Side of Manhattan. It was an old German-Czech-Romanian low-rise community of taverns, grocery stores, newsstands with papers in East European languages, delicatessens, coffeehouses, flower shops, drugstores, and German-language movie theaters. The city didn't supply enough garbage cans, so some protesting residents dumped their trash in the gutters.
2
On windy days, cyclones of newspapers, bread wrappers, and cigarette cellophane whirled through the air. In the heat, squashed fruit stank and the flies were as big as raisins.

Nelle needed a job, of course, and the first one she landed was in a bookstore.
3
At least she might meet writers there, she thought. But she discovered that unpacking books, shelving them, and ringing up sales was boring. Not the literary life she'd expected. The pay was low, too, and her father would not have been pleased to see her walloping parking meters to dislodge a quarter for a slice of pie and a cup of coffee.
4

Things began looking up financially in
1950
when she took a position as a ticket agent at Eastern Airlines. Then she moved over to British Overseas Air Corporation (BOAC) because employees could fly to Britain at a discount, an adventure she liked to think about.

In the evenings she sat down at the wooden door she was using for a huge desk and wrote. At first, the din of the city was hard to shut out: taxis blowing their horns, trucks, fire engines, and radio shows squawking through open windows. On sultry nights, people sat outside smoking and talking until all hours. With time, however, she was able to ignore the noise and settle into writing reveries. She was making a start.

*   *   *

But breaking her ties with Monroeville was not easy. Her mother's health was poor and continued to decline. The burden of shuttling Mrs. Lee to doctors' appointments had fallen on Alice because Edwin and Louise were married with children. Mr. Lee was
70
and simply not up to it.

Using her vacation time from work, Nelle went home as often as she could. One winter evening in
1951
, a classmate from Huntingdon College caught a glimpse of her in Selma, Alabama, walking along by herself, lost in thought. The woman pulled over and offered a ride. Nelle asked to be taken to the hospital a few blocks away; her mother was there. Since she was clearly preoccupied with worry, there was no talk of mutual friends and the good old days in college. The two rode the rest of the way in silence.
5

Mrs. Lee never left the hospital, and on June
2
,
1951
, she died. Nelle was only
25
, not an adult long enough to have resolved the biggest emotional mystery of her upbringing, which was why her mother had practically ignored her. It was true that her mother was beset by a “nervous disorder,” as the family described it. But how far did that go in explaining the absence of normal attachments between parent and child?

It was one of those questions that death makes harder to answer.

*   *   *

No sooner had the family begun to recover from the long-expected passing of Mrs. Lee than they suffered a second blow that staggered them. Six weeks after the death of their mother, Edwin died at the age of
30
. He had been recalled to duty for the Korean War and one hot day, following a vigorous game of softball at Maxwell Airfield near Montgomery, he sank into his bunk in the officers' quarters to rest. The next morning, July
12
, he was found dead. The autopsy revealed a cerebral hemorrhage.

At the funeral in Monroeville, several hundred mourners dressed in black surrounded the grave on all sides, including three ministers representing the major Protestant denominations in town. A. C. Lee, bent under the weight of a double load of grief in such a short space of time, bore up as best he could. He never could have predicted such a turn of events in such a short space of time. Being a widower was a stage in life he had been anticipating. But his son! Edwin had been an outgoing, charismatic young man. A. C. Lee had hoped that someday he would rise to positions of leadership in the community like his father.

Standing by the graveside, Nelle must have wished she could give her father a gift—proof that he was, as she said later, “one of the most beloved men” in south Alabama.
6
Something that would extend his legacy, despite what fate had decided.

*   *   *

Nelle returned to New York and continued the routine of working at BOAC airlines during the day and writing at night. It was a rather lonely life at times because she hadn't made a lot of friends.

There was a party-loving bunch of ex-Alabamians living in New York, but they thought Nelle was rather boring. One of the chief revelers was Eugene Walter, a native of Mobile, who kept a stuffed monkey under a glass bell jar and who was finishing a novel,
The Untidy Pilgrim.
“All the Southerners in New York would get together about every ten days or two weeks…,” Eugene said. “There was a community, like a religious group except it wasn't a church. Southerners always, by secret gravity, find themselves together.… You always knew, if there was any kind of trouble, that was like cousins in town.”
7

Nelle put in an appearance at these gatherings from time to time, often accompanied by Truman, who had lived in the New York area since his mother's remarriage. But to most everyone else in the room she seemed to be an ordinary, shy young woman in worn-out jeans and a tomboy haircut, ill at ease among sophisticates. “Here was this dumpy girl from Monroeville,” remarked Louise Simms, an Alabamian and wife of jazz saxophonist Zoot Simms. “We didn't think she was up to much. She said she was writing a book, and that was that.”
8

It was through Truman, however, that Nelle finally made two close friends. It happened in autumn of
1954
, during rehearsals of the Broadway musical
House of Flowers
at the Alvin Theater on West
52
nd Street. Nelle wouldn't normally have found herself in the wings of a theater examining the mysteries of light boards, scrim, cables, and pulleys, but Truman had brought her along. He had co-written the playscript and lyrics with Harold Arlen, the composer of “Over the Rainbow” for
The Wizard of Oz.
As Truman's tagalong friend for the day, Nelle got to listen to run-throughs of songs and dance numbers for the show.

Helping to freshen up some of the lyrics was another young arrival on the New York arts scene, Michael Martin Brown, originally from Mexia, Texas. Michael was almost exactly the same age as Nelle's late brother, Edwin. “He was brilliant and lively; his one defect of character was an inordinate love of puns,” Nelle wrote later for
McCall's
magazine. “His audacity sometimes left his friends breathless—who in his circumstances would venture to buy a townhouse in Manhattan?”
9
With his wife, Joy, and two small sons, Michael lived in a late-
1800
s two-story town house on East
50
th Street, dominated by his ebony grand piano. He enjoyed nothing better than dropping down on the piano bench and performing numbers from his cabaret act for the entertainment of his guests.

Since Nelle lived only a ten-minute subway ride north of the Browns, Michael invited her over to meet his wife.

Joy Brown turned out to be an “ethereal, utterly feminine creature,” in Nelle's eyes.
10
She had trained with the School of American Ballet and danced with several companies, including the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and Les Ballets de Paris. The three new friends sang show tunes at Michael's piano, or gorged on one of Joy's latest chocolate concoctions in front of the fireplace. “Common interests as well as love drew me to them,” Nelle wrote. “An endless flow of reading material circulated amongst us; we took pleasure in the same theater, films, music; we laughed at the same things, and we laughed at so much in those days.”
11
Michael and Joy listened as she confided in them her hopes for becoming a writer, and they applauded the stories she read to them in an embarrassed voice.

*   *   *

December
1956
arrived, and Nelle was still working for BOAC. More than half a dozen years had slipped by since her arrival in New York, and not much had changed in her life. Usually around the holidays, she tried to schedule a vacation to Monroeville so she could spend Christmas with her family. A trip to the balmy South acted as a vaccination against the long, dark, slushy months of winter that descended on the Northeast.

This year her supervisor said that she could have off Christmas Eve and Day, but, otherwise, she would be needed at the ticket counter. Her disappointment brought on a sudden bout of homesickness and sad memories. “New York streets shine wet with the same gentle farmer's rain that soaks Alabama's winter fields.… I missed Christmas away from home, I thought. What I really missed was a memory, an old memory of people long since gone, of my grandparents' house bursting with cousins, smilax, and holly. I missed the sound of hunting boots, the sudden open-door gusts of chilly air that cut through the aroma of pine needles and oyster dressing. I missed my brother's night-before-Christmas mask of rectitude and my father's bumblebee bass humming ‘Joy to the World.'”
12