The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee (27 page)

Was someone in the grips of addiction, even someone who repeatedly had spurned his parents’ efforts to help him get his life back on track, fully responsible for his actions?

I had asked Alice about the case during one of our Sunday
afternoons with recliner, rocking chair, and recorder. How did she feel about the death penalty?

“No one abhors what he did more than I,” Alice said. “Dr. Jones and his wife were my friends. But my faith tells me that everyone has a spark of the divine in them. I wouldn’t want to serve on a jury that sent him to his death.”

As I recounted this to Nelle, she leaned forward.

“That’s what Alice said? That’s fascinating.”

“You haven’t discussed the case with her?”

“Well, not in those terms. What do you think about it?”

“I understand both sides of it, I think. I do. But I don’t support the death penalty. There are too many problems. Who gets executed and why. And the whole idea of executing people . . .”

Nelle nodded.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I understand both sides of it, too,” she said. She demurred on what she thought should happen in the Jones case, or in general.

If she still were writing, I wondered to myself, would a case like this be the inspiration for something she might write in a novel? The trial in
To Kill a Mockingbird
is still taught in some law schools. People are fascinated by her thoughts about social issues like that, about criminal justice. And
In Cold Blood
was about the road to the hanging of the two killers.

There was no point in wondering, though. She wasn’t going to be doing that. It was another book I pictured on the shelf of those she could have written. The imaginary row of books that made me wistful when I thought about it. Wistful for what Nelle might have accomplished and taken pride in doing with her talent, with her insight. Wistful for all of us who would have loved to read them. But that decision
was hers to make and she’d made it, however gradually over the years, for her host of reasons, starting with the difficulty of living up to the impossible expectations raised by
To Kill a Mockingbird
.

In my conversations with Alice and Tom, that impediment loomed large, as they saw it. Tom knew the whole question was a tiresome topic for Nelle. He let her bring it up rather than doing so himself. And she did, every now and then. As he recalled it, this was one late-night conversation over a bottle of Scotch.

“Do you ever wonder why I never wrote anything else?” Nelle asked him. She dropped it into their conversation apropos of nothing, but with a certain intensity.

Tom paused and looked at her with a hint of a smile.

“Well, along with about a million other people, yes.”

He knew, Tom told her, that it would have been daunting to compete with the success of
To Kill a Mockingbird
. He began to expand on that, but she cut him off.

“Bullshit,” she said. “Two reasons. First, I wouldn’t go through all the pressure and publicity I went through with
Mockingbird
for any amount of money.”

Tom nodded.

“Second, I have said what I wanted to say and I will not say it again.”

Tom nodded again but thought to himself, he later told me, that he, personally, didn’t put a lot of stock in that second reason. Only she knew, of course. It was for her to say.

But in his experience, she did have more to say. Plenty more to say. Issues of family and faith, race and religion, character and community, still animated her conversations. Someone sustained by ideas, who still was a writer to her core whether or not she had published anything in decades, had to have more to say. Didn’t she?

Later on that trip, as we got closer to New Jersey, I offered again to drive Nelle into Manhattan. I knew it would be hairy but I wondered if I shouldn’t deliver her to her door. “Don’t even think about it. It’s too difficult doing that. I want to take the train in. It’s better for you and me.”

Nelle and I arrived early at the Princeton Junction station, a quaint stone structure with wooden pews for waiting passengers. She had shipped all but what she needed for the car trip so her bag was easy to manage. The station wasn’t crowded; most of the wooden benches were unoccupied and we found a quiet spot to sit. I sat with her bag while she went to the window and got a ticket to Penn Station.

“Thanks a bunch, hon,” Nelle said. “You have a good time with your friends. And drive safely.”

The train came to a stop and Nelle boarded with small clusters of others waiting on the platform. The doors closed and the train pulled out of the station. And she was gone.

I’d been close to my New Jersey friends since we’d studied together at Georgetown University. After visiting them, I decided to make the twelve-hour drive to Chicago rather than return to Monroeville. It was easier than dealing with a flight to Chicago later on, and I was overdue to make the usual round of medical appointments and to spend time with friends and family, especially my young nephews, Tommy and Andrew. At home, I received a letter from New York. Nelle thanked me for the trip and the good company.

Across the top she dashed off a line about the dark felt-tip pen I had given her, one that was supposed to be easier for people with vision problems to see. “I love this pen!”

While Nelle was in New York, Alice faxed me her phone number there so I would have it. I wrote Nelle’s phone number in my little
pink address book but not under Lee. Earlier, I had recorded her address under a made-up name. I was afraid if it were ever lost or stolen I would feel compelled to leap from the Sears Tower rather than owning up to the security breach.

I had thought about what name I could come up with that would fall right before Lee. Leder. I’d heard the name. I put the information under “Natalie Leder.” Someone with the initials N.L. would remind me but mean nothing to any purse snatcher who, theoretically, would turn out to have a literary bent, would know Nelle Lee was Harper Lee, and would auction off the address or phone number.

While Nelle still was in New York, I returned to Monroeville with my mother. Nelle would take the train to Los Angeles for a May 19 library foundation fund-raiser planned by Veronique Peck and then another train to New Orleans for a stretch in Monroeville. She got back two weeks after my mother left. “Your mother was a big hit around here,” she told me when she returned. It was true.

Having a sweet-spirited, smart momma made my stock rise a bit, I think, among my friends here. She and I were close, always, and she knew more about my experiences in Alabama than anyone else.

It was a treat to show my mother around the town she had heard so much about, to take a long country drive with Alice, see the play, and go to dinner at the Crofts’ and the Butts’. With tender pride, Julia showed my mother the giant red amaryllis she had cultivated in the Lees’ small flower bed. Finally, Julia had a true gardener next door, if only for a short time, someone who could talk annuals and perennials with her. My own gardening amounted to admiring the yellow lantana that grew wild by my driveway. Not that I knew it was called lantana until my mother saw it and told me.

In the Lees’ front yard, Julia was telling us more about the amaryllis when a mockingbird alighted on a tree branch and offered us its song. Mockingbirds are a fairly common sight around Monroeville but to have one join us in Harper Lee’s yard was a bit of magic.

My mother and I just looked at each other. We paused and listened. Julia volunteered her take on mockingbirds.

“They just sing their song and don’t care what anybody say about it. It’s their song and they gonna sing it.”

Mockingbirds sing loudly and don’t take kindly to other birds infringing on their territory. There’s something strong but also vulnerable about mockingbirds; those qualities applied to the one in the tree as well as the ones living in the house.

That night, Julia finally went to see the annual play. Later, with the tape recorder rolling at my kitchen table, I asked her what she thought of it.

“It was different from what I thought it would be like. Because I had never read the book either. I have the book, but I had never read it or seen the play. Miss Alice told me. ‘Julia?’

“And I said, [she speaks in a high voice] ‘Yes ma’am?’

“‘You ever seen that play?’

“‘No ma’am.’

“She said, ‘Well, Julia, when it plays again you’d better go see it.’

“So I did.”

She chuckled.

What had she expected?

“I really expected that this lawyer that defend the accused, that he’d have more action than what he really did, you know. He didn’t, he didn’t
pound
his fist saying, “I don’t
believe
he did it.” Julia pounded her fist on the table to illustrate. “It was just a regular calm thing, you
know. I thought—I was expecting more action on his part than there really was.”

I told her there’s more action in the movie, though Atticus is still pretty calm in the courtroom. She didn’t like courtrooms, she told me, because they reminded her of Judgment Day in the Bible.

Chapter Twenty-eight

W
eighty histories and long biographies were not the only books captivating the Lees.

That year, 2005, Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays, two Mississippi women, had just published
Being Dead Is No Excuse.
The slim book is, as the subtitle explains,
The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral.

The authors had tongue-in-cheek fun with the various traditions, when it comes to funerals and receptions and all that is right and proper and reflects one’s social standing, among the various denominations in their town. The book made the rounds among the people I knew: Nelle and Alice, Judy and Dale, Tom and Hilda.

As a Methodist minister’s wife well versed in funerals, the normally soft-spoken Hilda erupted with laughter reading the book aloud one evening. I had joined her and Tom at their kitchen table for a dinner of beef vegetable soup, salad, and her fragrant homemade sourdough rolls, famous among their friends as devilishly impossible to resist. She made batches of them in round baking tins, used layers of plastic wrap and aluminum foil to preserve them in the freezer, and always gave me a package for the road. The only problem was the
difficulty in driving while liberating the thawed rolls from those tight layers of plastic wrap.

Nelle told me her favorite passage was the one with the Episcopalian woman trying to remember the origin of her bruised knees.

“I just don’t know,” the woman said as she dyed Easter eggs in her kitchen, “Did I hurt my knees yesterday afternoon doing the Stations of the Cross? Or did I do it falling down drunk last night?”

In fairness, the authors, and Nelle, too, had fun at the expense of the whole array of Protestant denominations.

—

N
ot long after Nelle and I chuckled about the book over coffee, we attended a society luncheon in Monroeville.

Nelle called one afternoon and got right to the point.

“We’ve been invited to a to-do at Patsy’s house.” Patsy McCall was a shirttail relative of Nelle’s who lived in a large, elegant house atop a small hill on the other side of town. Patsy married Lloyd McCall, whose sister Sara Anne married Ed Lee. Patsy was Nelle’s sister-in-law’s sister-in-law. No wonder people default to the all-purpose “They’re kin to them.”

We?

“I think they invited me so that you’d come.” No, she wasn’t kidding.

The occasion was an elaborate luncheon series for two dozen or so women, held September through May. Hostess duties rotated among the homes of several of the women. Nelle wanted me to see this aspect of life in Monroeville.

This was not the kind of gathering Nelle frequented.

“Well,” I asked Nelle, “would you like to go?”

“I’ll go if you go.”

And so, on the second Friday in November, I walked next door. Nelle was still getting ready. I kept watch, just inside the front door, for our ride. Marianne Lee, the effervescent wife of her nephew Ed Lee, would be by to pick us up.

Nelle emerged from the bedroom hallway, smoothing her hair and sort of fluttering into the room. I’d never seen her quite like this. She seemed festively discombobulated, if such a thing is possible. This would be a fairly dressy gathering, she told me, and she was as dressed up as I’d seen her, save when she made one of her rare public appearances to accept an award.

She had on black pants and a pink silk shirt, and her bangs were combed straight down. On her collar was a glittery cat pin. On her feet, black loafers with a gold buckle.

She smoothed her hair again as she surveyed my outfit. I had on black slacks, low heels, and a cotton turquoise blazer. And longer earrings than usual.

“Are you dressed to the nines?” she said.

“I tried to find some nines to dress in.” I smiled.