The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee (19 page)

“Create as much mischief, you mean?”

“Did not create as much humor as Auntie did. Auntie would make up these funny words and things like that. Mother was more proper.” Alice laughed.

Nelle and Alice, even in their eighties and nineties, reached into their aunt’s improvised vocabulary. They knew what the other one meant, even if no one else did. Their favorite word of hers was
cyphaloon,
which referred to weather so bad it might as well be a cyclone crossed with a typhoon.

One afternoon, Nelle, Alice, and I were making the short trek from their front door to the driveway. We stepped outside and saw dark clouds hanging low. A faint breeze carried that feeling of a storm brewing. Nelle looked skyward but said nothing. The Lees had installed a few wide, unvarnished wooden steps up to the front door. They took the place of the original cement ones. When Alice was concentrating on taking those steps carefully, anyone with her waited until she was in the car to address her.

Nelle walked with her to the passenger seat and handed me the walker. I folded it and placed it in the trunk. Once we were in the car, Nelle turned to Alice and said in a raised voice, “Cyphaloon coming.” From the backseat, I heard Alice’s low chuckle.

“I b’lieve so,” she said.

Frances Lee had four children. Alice McKinley had five, all of them boys. Hers was a rambunctious household.

Until the last four years of her life, Frances took every chance she got to spend time at the Gulf shore. Sometimes the whole family went. Other times, A.C. or a friend would accompany her so she would not be alone. It was the only place she got relief from terrible allergies.
Where rows of condos now stand near Destin, Florida, seaside cottages back then offered a peaceful retreat.

“Life was one big sneeze for her and when she would get within ten miles of salt water, she’d be free. So she would spend not only the summers but some of the cooler weather down there across from Pensacola. That was the only time she had any pleasure, when she would not sneeze. She was allergic to everything. Everything they could test for she was allergic to. Salt water stopped it.”

Aunt Alice survived Frances by thirty years, decades in which she shared any number of misadventures with her adoring nieces. Alice McKinley was older and arthritic when she and Nelle would set out on one of their country drives to ride past places like an old Scottish church they both liked.

The bonds of the family were strong, in part because of the terrible events of the summer of 1951. Every family has its defining events, and for the Lees, that summer held two of them. Frances Lee’s death in June was an unexpected blow. Her youngest, Nelle, was only twenty-five; her oldest, Alice, almost forty; Louise was thirty-five, and married with two young sons. Ed, thirty, the only son, also was married, and had a young daughter and baby son. Six weeks after Frances’s death, the still grieving family got that shocking news from Montgomery. Just the evening before, all had been fine when Ed chatted by phone with his wife in Monroeville.

That summer had begun as usual, with A. C. Lee a delegate to the Methodists’ regional annual conference, this time in southwestern Alabama. It was business as usual for Nelle, too, in New York, where she’d moved in 1949 to pursue her writing while working as an airline reservations clerk. She lived in a small apartment on the Upper East Side and had resumed her friendship with her old neighbor and now rising literary star, Truman Capote.

The Lees’ doctor in Monroeville, Rayford Smith, advised that Frances Lee go to Selma for tests. These days, people in Monroeville travel to Mobile or Pensacola for specialists they can’t find in town. But in Frances’s day, Selma was the place. A.C. dropped off his wife at what was then Vaughan Memorial Hospital in Selma on that Wednesday and then continued along to the conference. A few days of tests would, they hoped, explain why Frances was feeling ill.

On Friday, conference business concluded, A.C. drove to Selma to pick up Frances. He was not prepared for the grim news that greeted him.

“He was told she was in the last stages of malignancy in the lungs and the liver,” Alice said. “She probably had three months to live.”

A.C. drove back to the house on Alabama Avenue and broke the news to Alice. They made the difficult calls to Louise in Eufaula, Ed in Montgomery, and Nelle Harper in New York.

“We called Nelle just to alert her, and said, Don’t come yet.”

They’d know more in a day or two, when she could plan accordingly. Alice and A.C. spent a restless night at home. They drove to Selma the next morning. Louise and Ed met them there.

Alice fell silent for a few moments as she recalled the scene. Nearly fifty years removed from the event, her sadness was still palpable. “Sometime in the afternoon we went out to get some food, and when we got back to the hospital, Mother had gone,” Alice said. Frances had suffered a heart attack and did not regain consciousness. “She was unconscious when we returned to the hospital,” Alice said, “and died that evening.

“Then we called Nelle Harper so she’d have time to get money out to come home,” Alice continued. “Fortunately, she was working at BOAC at that time and they made arrangements for her. And we had
to make arrangements for [the funeral].” Perhaps the only thing worse than being with their mother in Selma that day was, in Nelle’s case, not being there.

Nelle never spoke of that time; only Alice did.

Still reeling, Alice and A.C. found some comfort in returning to the routines of their law office. Nelle stayed on a while with the family before going back to Manhattan, to her typewriter, to her friends, to her airline job.

Six weeks after Frances’s death, Nelle’s day began like any other. Her life as an aspiring writer in New York City was not as predictable as her father’s and Alice’s. But weekdays were routine as Nelle rose and dressed for her job at the airline. She could look at her watch at any given hour on any given workday and know what the two of them were doing back home.

A blink ago there’d been three in Monroeville, with Frances at home while A.C. and Alice practiced law in their office two blocks away. Now father and daughter found solace in the familiar. At Barnett, Bugg & Lee, there were, as usual, clients to see, documents to draft, cases to research. Both A.C. and Alice were creatures of habit. Now their routines were something more: a relief, something useful to do as they adjusted to the loss.

That July morning father and daughter were at their desks in adjacent offices when the call came from Montgomery. It was 8:30
A.M.
“We were both there, but for some reason I answered the phone,” Alice told me, “and this voice identified himself as the commandant at Maxwell Air Force Base. Could he speak to Mr. Lee? I called Daddy and said, It’s for you.”

Something told Alice to stay on the line. “I don’t know why,” she says. “I never did that. I heard the commandant say, ‘I’m sorry to tell
you, but your son did not wake up this morning. He was found dead in his bunk.’ So there we were.”

An autopsy revealed that Ed had died of a brain aneurysm, probably several hours before his body was discovered on the morning of July 12.

If Alice and A.C. took comfort in the routines of the law office, Nelle found solace with artistic expression. For a time, she wrote less and instead painted. The sea scene she painted as she coped with the losses hangs above the living room piano in the sisters’ home. I’d seen it a hundred times before I thought to ask Alice its provenance. I could hear the pride of an older sister in her reply.

Nelle’s creativity always had extended beyond writing and her foray into painting. She was musical. On our drives, she sometimes sang random lines of the hymns of her childhood. Or show tunes from the Broadway shows she saw as an adult. One day, under her breath, she began singing “Love Lifted Me.” She picked up the lyrics partway through the hymn. “Dah dum, sinking to rise no more.” Another time, more playfully, it was a jaunty line from
The Pirates of Penzance
. “I am the very model of a modern Major-General.” I couldn’t get that tune out of my head for the rest of the day. Despite her vocal ability, Nelle’s early efforts to learn the violin did nothing to further their mother’s desire to have another musician in the family. Nelle sawed away at it as a girl, and then gave it up. Nobody tried to talk her out of it.

As a family, they loved the literary arts, of course. A. C. and Frances Lee devoted lots of time to reading to their children. When Louise and, later, Ed both married and had children, A.C. read to his grandchildren. He was a somewhat formal man, even at home, but his lap was a welcoming place to enjoy a book.

The sorrow over Ed’s sudden death, with his children so young,
was something to be borne, not gotten over. Ed’s widow, Sara Anne, went on to marry again, a man who also had lost his spouse and was raising a young child, Stella. John and Sara Anne went on to have a fourth child, Martha. A.C.’s oldest grandchild called him “Opp,” a mispronunciation of “Pop” or “Poppa.” He became Opp to the other grandchildren when they came along.

A.C. wrote a letter to her in her new life that Sara Anne shared with me all those years later. It is on Barnett, Bugg & Lee letterhead. His distinctive blend of formality and affection is evident.

The stationery notes in smaller letters on the upper left the names of four lawyers, two of them living: J. B. Barnett (1874–1952); L. J. Bugg (1870–1938); A. C. Lee; Alice F. Lee. (Two minor spelling errors are corrected below.)

LAW OFFICES OF BARNETT, BUGG & LEE

October 25, 1955

Addressed to Mr. and Mrs. John A. Curry Jr.,

310 Woodfield Drive, Auburn, Alabama

Dear John and Sara Anne:

As I grow older, I become more thoroughly convinced that the policy of passing out flowers during life time is wise and proper.

I am not given to lavish flattery where not deserved, yet I feel that we should recognize well earned meritorious accomplishments as we see them. With this idea in mind I take this method of conveying to you two my earnest congratulations and high appreciation for the outstanding job you have done and are still doing in the matter of welding two families into one.

And in this connection I would not overlook the part Stella has played in this accomplishment. You can easily understand my keen interest in observing the situation from its inception; and I have always recognized in her a most commendable attitude, and a desire to promote the development of the new family relationship.

I now say again, I want the whole family to feel that our home is your home too; and particularly, I want always to be “Opp” to all the children.

With love for the entire family,

Very sincerely yours,

A C Lee

“I can’t tell you what that meant to me,” Sara Anne said. “What it meant to us. It was typical of him, even when he had lost Ed.”

I first interviewed Sara Anne in the Monroeville dental office of her son, Ed, just a baby when his father died. Sara Anne and her husband, John, had driven from Auburn for the day for dental work and a visit with the family.

She and Nelle had been classmates when she was Sara Anne McCall. She married Ed Lee in the summer of 1947. The Methodist church grew so hot that June day she told me, that the candles melted and fell over to one side.

The personalities of the four Lee children, as Sara Anne observed them, were in full force by the time they reached young adulthood. Alice, from an early age, was responsible, steady, one to look after the others in the family. Louise was the prettiest of the girls, lively and social. Ed was the all-American who loved football, studied engineering, and went off to serve in Europe in World War II. Nelle, even as a girl, was the nonconformist, feisty and independent.

When she was ten, Nelle was feeling put out as Christmas
approached. Usually this was a festive time of year for the Lees, even during the Depression, and a season rich in anticipation for the youngest among them. That year, however, 1936, all the family’s energies were devoted to the upcoming wedding of twenty-year-old Louise. Or at least that is how it felt. Nelle groused that this wasn’t going to be much of a Christmas.

On Christmas Day, out of nowhere, a red bicycle appeared. It was a gift from her parents. Nelle was thrilled. They had kept their secret well, and in an instant her dejection turned to elation.

“She rode off,” Alice said with a chuckle, “and we didn’t see much of her for a while after that.”

Later, Nelle recalled her childhood Christmases in an essay for
McCall’s
magazine. “Christmas to Me” appeared in December 1961, amid perhaps the most eventful period of her life.

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.”

That Christmas of 1961,
To Kill a Mockingbird
was still on the best-seller list seventeen months after it was published. The book was proving to be a genuine phenomenon, with all the attendant adulation and money, demands, and hassles.

Perhaps the harshest critics were in her hometown. Some resented the focus on racial injustice in their part of the world. Others thought the to-do over the book by Mr. Lee’s little girl was plain silly.