The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee (20 page)

That year,
Writer’s Digest
asked several authors, “What advice would you offer a person who aspires to a writing career?”

Lee’s response was telling. “I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.”

In small type below her signature, the magazine identifies her as the “author of
To Kill a Hummingbird
.”

(In 2012, the magazine’s editors, recalling that 1961 survey, wrote about her long public silence. “Here’s to hoping it wasn’t because we cited Lee as the author of ‘To Kill a Hummingbird.’ Oy. Some 50 years later, WD still regrets [and heavily cringes at] the error. Sorry, Harper!”)

In Hollywood, meanwhile, the filming of
To Kill a Mockingbird
was under way, as was a close friendship between Nelle and its star, Gregory Peck, and his wife, Veronique. Nelle told interviewers of her struggle, and determination, to produce a second novel.

The following year, 1962, she lost the father on whom she had based her beloved character Atticus. A.C. had been ailing and died on April 15. Eight months later, in December, the film was released.

That year also marked the beginning of a tradition, one that yielded an abundance of adventures, misadventures, and, always, stories. For the decade after their father died, the three Lee sisters took annual trips, seeing much of the country by car, train, and even riverboat.

At this time in their lives, the difference in their ages mattered less. And Nelle’s celebrity status not at all. In this group, she was the baby sister, plain and simple.

So Alice, Louise, and Nelle would plan and correspond, talk and anticipate, and then meet up in the designated city. They would look around if any museums or restaurants drew their interest. But then they would take to the open road or board a train. One vacation would
end and they’d begin thinking about where to go next. By this time the oldest, Alice, was settled in Monroeville. Middle sister, Louise, lived in Eufaula, Alabama, two hundred miles away. Nelle, the youngest, was in New York. The trips stopped when the uncertain health of Louise’s husband meant she no longer felt comfortable being away for long.

As different as the three sisters were, they all had their Aunt Alice’s sense of adventure. They could squabble with the best of them, but their pleasure in one another’s company, the way they made their own fun, was obvious. On one such trip, in 1965, the observation came from a fellow steamboat passenger they hadn’t even met. For a change of pace that year, they boarded a Mississippi riverboat, the
Delta Queen.

“I never shall forget the morning we were to get off the
Delta Queen
.”

“I never shall forget.” I didn’t know anyone besides Alice who used that phrase. A story followed, always.

Five years after
To Kill a Mockingbird
was published, the three sisters met up in Ohio to take a riverboat down the Mississippi to New Orleans. From Alabama, Louise and Alice took the train north to Cincinnati. Nelle arrived by rail from New York and met them there. They boarded the
Delta Queen
on a Saturday for the eight-day trip to New Orleans.

That last day, as they waited for their luggage before getting off, the three women did what they had been doing all along. They reclined in chairs on the deck, soaking in some sun, laughing, talking, finishing one another’s stories.

A passenger they had not met approached the sisters.

“She said, ‘Do you mind if I speak to you?’ And we said, ‘Certainly not.’

“She said, ‘I’ve been watching you all week. You have never [mixed] with anybody. You haven’t participated in any of the entertainment, as
most of the passengers have done. And yet you seem like you’ve had the best time of anybody.’

“And we just said, ‘We’re three sisters and we live in different parts of the country and when we get together this is what happens.’”

Another time, Louise and Alice met Nelle in New York. The three rented a car for a drive through the autumn blaze of color in New England. In Connecticut, they saw a farmer in a field with his horse, not an uncommon sight. As they got closer, the horse suddenly bolted for the road and ran smack into their rental car. The ladies were unhurt; the horse seemed okay, too. Alice wondered aloud if the clerk would believe them when they returned the car and had to explain the dents. Nelle was persuasive.

“You’re not going to believe this, but a horse ran into us. We didn’t run into the horse. It ran into us.”

Another year, the three took Amtrak’s Empire Builder from Chicago up through Minnesota, west through North Dakota and Montana, all the way to Seattle.

On one of their last trips together, Nelle’s agent, Maurice Crain, joined the sisters for a swing through the South. Word got back to the sisters that upon his return, Crain had this to say about the three of them: “They laugh all the time. They don’t agree on anything, not even the temperature. But they have the best time of anybody you ever saw.”

Even so, this trip was bittersweet. Maurice already was in failing health and didn’t have his usual stamina. He died a couple of years later, in 1970. He was sixty-eight. Nelle would grieve his loss for a long time.

Perhaps the most animated I ever saw Nelle was in, of all places, the darkened, charmless parking lot at the Walmart strip mall off
Alabama Avenue. Tom and Hilda Butts and Nelle and I had lingered over dinner at China Star, the storefront Chinese restaurant a couple of doors down from Walmart. Only a few other tables were occupied that night, and it afforded privacy.

Nelle had been telling us about Crain’s experiences in World War II and continued the conversation as we walked to our cars. A native of Texas, he spent time in a German prisoner-of-war camp.

“Can you imagine being a young man from Texas,” Nelle said, “in those conditions, not knowing if you will survive, and if you do, what will happen?” She could listen to him talk about it for hours, she said, but he didn’t speak about it all that much. “That was true of a lot of the men when they returned, you know.”

I nodded.

“And then to think Jewish men returning home from the war were still treated like second-class citizens when they wanted to move into a certain building or join a country club. Just nonsense.”

Nelle cut herself off.

“Listen to me going on and on,” she said. “We should be going. I don’t mean to keep you.”

With a hint of a warm breeze, and Nelle in high spirits and a talkative mood, there was no place I’d rather have been than standing in that strip mall parking lot under a blanket of stars.

Chapter Eighteen

P
redicaments make for the best stories. One wrong turn was all it took for Nelle to drive into trouble years ago near the tiny town of Tunnel Springs. The misstep left Nelle and their Aunt Alice alone in a quandary on a cold night.

“It had rained heavily,” Alice said, “and as they started down a hill, they realized how deep the stream was at the foot of it.

“Nelle Harper was afraid to go down for fear the car would drown out. Well, she had started down the hill. It was slick. And she couldn’t back up. There was nowhere to turn. She either had to go through the water or back to the top. Well, she said something told her not to get in the water. She had no idea how deep it was.”

They waited for another car to come along, but it turned out they were on a little-used logging road and no one came.

“Nelle Harper was afraid,” Alice said. “It was spring so they had only lightweight garments on when they set out, but it was going to get cool at night. And Auntie was very crippled from rheumatism and could not walk—her knees—she could not walk distances. Nelle Harper was afraid to leave her there by herself while she tried to
walk out. They had no idea how far they’d gone in. So they just had to spend the night in the car.

“The timber was high on each side of the road and the only thing they could see was the sky above them. Occasionally they’d see lights from an airplane, and they heard all the sounds of the night.”

They got cold, afraid of carbon monoxide if they kept the heater on too long.

“Now, this was in the spring of the year, during turkey hunting season,” Alice explained. “And if you know anything about turkey hunting, people go into the woods before daylight and sit and wait for the turkeys to come off the roost.

“At first light, Nelle Harper started out walking and ran into a turkey hunter. She told him her predicament. He went on down there and was able to back up the car and get it out, because the road had dried some during the night. Nelle Harper measured on the car odometer how far they were from the highway. They’d gone six miles.

“The turkey hunter and his young son had gotten everything fine for ’em. Back in those days, we had evening services at our church. We don’t have ’em anymore in the evening, not a church service. But when I came back to Monroeville that Sunday afternoon, Nelle Harper was sitting on the front steps. She said to me, ‘I’m going to church tonight. I want to tell Fletcher—the minister—not to fuss at his congregation—this man and his little boy were Methodists—not to fuss at his Methodist members who turkey-hunted on Sunday morning. They might be friends indeed.’”

All these years later, Alice had a big laugh about it again.

Predicaments also inspire the best humor.

Late one morning, Nelle and I were taking the long way back from McDonald’s to West Avenue. Instead of making the usual right onto
Alabama, Nelle took the back way out of the McDonald’s lot. She made a left onto the Highway 21 Bypass. We sped along past the Subway sandwich shop and the Ace Hardware store, both to our left, and up the incline to the intersection with Pineville Road. The Bypass ended here. Turn right and you were on the rural stretch of highway to Julia Munnerlyn’s house in the country and, just beyond, to the tiny town of Peterman.

Turn left on Pineville, as we did, and you were headed toward the Methodist church. Immediately to our right, we drove past a couple of abandoned structures, a weathered house and a dilapidated gas station, neither of which looked to have been occupied since the Depression, give or take. We passed Dale’s large redbrick Baptist church on our right. Nelle slowed and glanced over at me. We were coming up on First Methodist, its white steeple stately against a blue sky.

“Do you mind if we stop off in the cemetery?”

I did not mind.

She knew her way around the cemetery and idled the car in front of a few headstones. They weren’t names I recognized. She didn’t volunteer information about the interred and I didn’t ask. Something reminded her of a story and a smile spread.

“Has Alice told you about our Aunt Alice and Cousin Louie encountering a problem at the cemetery?” Nelle laughed.

I’d heard about other Aunt Alice capers, to be sure, but none in a cemetery.

“You see, Cousin Louie took Aunt Alice and a couple of other old ladies to pay a visit to the cemetery.” This was not in Monroeville but, she thought, Atmore. They paid their respects at a number of graves, and were having a perfectly pleasant outing, as cemetery visits go. Then Louie, who was driving, got the underside of the car caught on a
mound of grass—more of a small, steep hill—she tried to drive over. The car was stuck there, like a turtle on a short pole.

Louie tried to go forward. Nothing. She tried to put the sedan in reverse. Nothing. They were stuck. The ladies peered out the car windows. They would have to half-step, half-drop out of the car to get out. And then there still would be the problem of what to do next.

Louie clambered down onto the grass from the driver’s seat. She took several steps back and surveyed the situation. She walked around the car, perched firmly atop the grass mound, and issued her report to the others, who remained in the vehicle.

“What confronts us,” Louie declared, “is a problem of physics.”

Nelle dissolved into laughter as she said this, so much so that I never did hear the solution.

Years later, Alice found herself in a predicament of her own, one that involved Nelle only after the fact.

Alice was about seventy years old then. She was heading back to Monroeville from yet another Methodist conference, this one in Dallas. She was getting ready to board a Greyhound bus when she realized her pocketbook was open and her wallet was missing. Someone had slipped in a hand and snatched it.

“I’d already given the bus man my ticket, but there I was with no ID.” And not a penny for the journey home. She took a seat.

A hand appeared over her seat back. A sympathetic stranger had realized Alice’s situation and offered a twenty-dollar bill. Alice was relieved and grateful. She tucked her benefactor’s address in her purse to reimburse her later. Meantime, she’d have food money along the way.

Once she was home, Alice set about replacing her driver’s license and the other contents of the stolen wallet. She wasted no time sending the woman a check to reimburse her, as well as a gift to say thanks.
It was a nightgown and robe, a pretty summer peignoir, from Vanity Fair. She mentioned the kindness of that stranger to Nelle.