The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee (16 page)

I turned over one of the cassettes to read the cover.

“Kathryn Tucker Windham,” Nelle said. She beamed. “She’s wonderful.”

“Wow. Thank you.” I read aloud from the cassette covers.
“At Home with My Daddy’s Stories.”
And the other:
“Women to Remember
.
”
I knew of Windham, just in passing, the Alabama newspaperwoman and storyteller, now in her eighties. I’d hear snatches of her on NPR now and then. Her voice was as comforting as an embrace, and the stories of small-town shenanigans and growing up near Selma poured out of her. The tales were popular with NPR listeners and had become a staple of national storytelling festivals. She was nostalgic without being sentimental. Human nature amused her.

She had that in common with Nelle, who had taken her usual seat at the table. She pushed her teacup toward me, a supplicant for coffee. Once she smelled it brewing, she didn’t like to wait.

I set down the cassettes and picked up the glass carafe.

“Strong coffee, coming up.”

“Please.”

Nelle didn’t stay. She was there just long enough to gulp one cup and go over the logistics of our upcoming movie night with Judy and Ila. We’d watch Christopher Guest’s satirical
Best in Show
. I ordered it from Netflix and a few days later the rectangular red envelope showed up in my box at the post office. Nelle thought this was a more involved process than it was. She always gave me props for procuring her movie requests, as if it required more than hitting “rent” on the Netflix site. I started to explain how easy it was but she waved that away. It was the Lees’ need-to-know approach to technology. If they didn’t need to know the specifics, all the better. As long as the movies showed up, the
how
didn’t matter. I was curious to see what else she would request. The next ones she suggested were
A Mighty Wind
and installments of the British television comedy
Yes, Prime Minister.

Her appreciation of satire was reflected in her choices of British and American films. During my time in Monroeville, those included
Wallace & Gromit, Kind Hearts and Coronets
(an Ealing British black comedy with Alec Guinness playing eight different members of the same family),
Fargo, Heavens Above!
(a British film in which a minister is accidentally appointed to a snobbish parish, starring Peter Sellers),
Heaven Help Us,
and Guest’s
Waiting for Guffman
.

I stood at the sun catcher window and watched Nelle start back across my front yard. I picked up the cassettes and carried them down the wide, wood-floored hallway to my bedroom. I kicked off my clogs and climbed onto the bed. It was still morning but I was feeling the short night of sleep. I slipped
At Home with My Daddy’s Stories
out of the case and into the tape player and pushed it to the other side of the bed. Windham’s voice, warm, almost golden, was in the room.

I reached over for the green fleece throw and curled up on my side, gently hugging a pillow. I closed my eyes and listened.

“I’m Kathryn Windham in my home in Selma, Alabama [long pause], remembering tales about my father, other members of my family [pause], sitting in his rocking chair, talking about stories he told me and stories I heard about him and learned from him [pause] a long time ago in Thomasville, Alabama.”

The stories poured like honey: smooth, then faster, then slower.

“Every now and then somebody will say to me, ‘I notice when you tell stories you always pause and there are periods when you don’t say anything.’ And it occurs to me that may be because my father would pause in his storytelling while he lighted his pipe to get it going again. And though I don’t smoke a pipe”—Windham laughed—“that may have influenced my storytelling.”

Nelle later requested Windham be inducted into the Alabama Academy of Honor, and attended the event.

Chapter Thirteen

N
elle told me to come by at three that afternoon. We’d stop off at McDonald’s for a cup of coffee and then collect Alice at the office and head over to the lake to feed the ducks and geese.

Nelle came to the door practically clucking. I don’t know if it struck me that way because we were off to feed the ducks later but it was as if her feathers were ruffled and she was deciding whether to talk about it or not.

She apologized for the delay in answering my knock. She had been on the phone. Then, with no other preamble, she paused and said, “Do you know the dirtiest word in the English language?” She stood just inside the house.

I thought quickly. I wanted to see if I had the knowledge, by this point, to guess correctly what she would say.

Bigotry
, I thought. No, maybe
poverty.
But there was a moral indignation to the way she posed the question, so maybe . . .

She answered before I did. This was rhetorical, anyway.

“Entitlement.”
She spit the word out.

Instead of asking, especially when she was irritated or angry, I’d
learned to wait for her to volunteer details if she wanted to do so. She didn’t, at least not on that day, but it was a topic she would refer to again and again.

One afternoon, Nelle glanced at the
Mobile Register
on my coffee table. The paper had another story about the trials of Richard Scrushy, former CEO of HealthSouth, the large health-care company, and a codefendant with former Alabama governor Don Siegelman. Known for extravagant personal spending, Scrushy and the governor were eventually convicted in 2006 of federal funds bribery, conspiracy, and fraud.

“Greed is the coldest of the deadly sins, don’t you think? At least lust, gluttony are . . .” She paused. “Human.”

I had to think what the other cardinal sins were. Unitarians aren’t big on those. Our Sunday school classes never touched on them.

I knew, at least, that there were seven deadly sins. So what were the four others besides greed, lust, and gluttony? Sloth was one. Envy another.

I had to Google the other two later. Pride and wrath.

Greed, especially, did gall Nelle. In part, that was because on occasion people took advantage of her goodwill to make money.

“She’ll give you the shirt off her back,” Hilda Butts told me for the newspaper story, “but don’t try to take it without her permission.”

Love of money and the things it can buy didn’t motivate Nelle. She just wasn’t interested in luxury, though she did value the opportunity to give bountiful sums to charity and to educate people behind the scenes.

The fortune she earned from the book did afford her the opportunity to live her life, from her midthirties on, without having to worry about money, or holding down a traditional job. And that was something she cared about, deeply: the ability to live her life on her own
terms. She answered to nobody. She had no husband or children. No boss. With her withdrawal from public life, she rarely committed to public appearances or other obligations of that sort. She did look to Alice for guidance and support, and was keenly aware of Alice’s high standards of personal conduct. But Nelle’s life, and her choices, were her own.

Chapter Fourteen

T
hose first weeks I got by with a rental car and then one borrowed from the Crofts. But I needed my own wheels. I never cared about cars. I was nearly thirty when I got my first one, and only got it then because there was no public transportation to my job. Living in downtown Chicago, as I did when I decided to spend more time in Monroeville, I could again get by without one.

But there was no getting around the need for a car in Monroeville. I wanted a car that Alice and Nelle, Dale and Tom, and the rest of my gray-haired posse could get in and out of without need of a crane or orthopedic surgeon. That narrowed the field. Nothing that rode too low or too high.

I test-drove a few cars at the dealership while Tom rode shotgun. I tried a bigger car with a bench seat. I was used to smaller Japanese cars. This felt like driving a parade float down the street. I glanced over at Tom.

“I feel like I don’t know where my sides are.”

“You’d get used to it.”

I made an awkward, wide turn at the intersection and he qualified his prediction.

“Or maybe not.”

We tried a 2001 Dodge Stratus with sixty thousand miles on it. It was smaller, more familiar. It was in my price range.

“Okay, Tom. What do you think? How is it for getting in and out?”

“It ain’t a Cadillac. But it ain’t bad, either. I think this’d do fine.”

I paid seven thousand dollars for it. Tom and I puzzled over what color it was. Silver is what the title said. And it did look silver, sort of, from some angles. In other light it was closer to metallic blue. After a few months, when the car had more miles and some Monroe County red clay dust on it and the air conditioner would blow only full blast or not at all, Tom started calling it “Old Blue.”

I faxed the Lees about my progress. “Dear Alice and Nelle, Hallelujah! I now have a car and fridge, phone and fax. Feels luxurious . . .”

With Christmas getting closer, we were exchanging more faxes about logistics. By that Wednesday, December 22, the rain was cold and steady. It wasn’t good weather for travel but Nelle and Alice were headed out with a nephew to Jacksonville, Florida, where Louise was now. I read the latest from Nelle. It referred to the little wooden Christmas ornament, a violin, I had found for them at the gift shop of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

“Thanks for the info and the Strad—it’s lovely.” She outlined their plans and ended with a cheery “Merry C. & love, Nelle.”

—

T
he three Lee sisters remained close throughout their lives, but Louise, in marrying and having a family, had chosen a more traditional path for a woman of her era. Alice and Nelle, in choosing to pursue male-dominated professions, made their own way. Their mother did not want them to have the same limitations she had. It
galled both Lees that Frances did not get the credit she deserved in that respect.

Growing up, Frances had wanted to be a nurse. It didn’t happen. Her parents agreed with the prevailing wisdom that this was not a job for young ladies. It wasn’t proper, not with bed pans to empty and patients to bathe, and all the rest.

“She felt that disappointment throughout her life,” Alice told me. “And she made sure all four of us felt free to do whatever we wanted.”

Frances Lee wasn’t the only one thwarted in her career ambitions. Just as nursing wasn’t considered ladylike, being a secretary was off-limits for Ida Gaillard, a Lee family friend who had taught at the local high school. Both Alice and Nelle remained close with her.

“You should talk to Ida, no question,” Nelle had told me. “Don’t wait too long on that one. She’s ninetysomething, you know.”

Nelle and Alice were both matter-of-fact about the issue of age, Alice advising me to interview one retired doctor “while he still has his marbles,” and Nelle, a Pentecostal preacher “while she’s still aboveground.” The same words accompanied the stories Alice told me about people she grew up with. “He’s dead now.” Or, “She’s gone now.”

Ida Gaillard not only was aboveground and in possession of her marbles, she was enthusiastic about an afternoon of storytelling. Nelle called ahead to tell her about me, and to let her know it was all right to share memories of Nelle and the Lee family.

At ninety-eight, Ida still lived, with help, in the home in which she was raised. The white house with a large front porch was near Perdue Hill, twenty minutes outside Monroeville.

“I always wanted to do secretarial work. But my father said no. I finished high school when I was sixteen and he didn’t want me to go
into an office so young. In those days they didn’t think young girls ought to do things like that.”