The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee (34 page)

I had reams of information to organize, to research, and to shape into book chapters. Even before poring through the material again and again to glean the meaningful comments, recall the telling detail, certain memories would rise unbidden to the surface “clear as a June night,” as Nelle would say. These were times I felt I was glimpsing something essential of what it meant to be Nelle, of what it meant to be Alice, in this time in their lives. They struck me immediately.

I still hear the clattering of heels up brick steps to a grand Monroeville home with white columns and a ladies’ fancy luncheon, a modern-day version of something from the Maycomb of
To Kill a Mockingbird,
the Monroeville of Nelle’s youth. Beside me, Nelle is wearing flats, her footsteps silent. She is out of her element but taking in every detail. We are attending the event, she says, as part of my coming to understand this part of the world that is Monroe County.

That evening, she is back on comfortable ground at the Main Street Diner in the neighboring town of Excel, where she and I drink coffee while our respective loads of laundry tumble dry in the Laundromat next door. This is the diner where, just as at other such places, she is animated, laughing, talking about books and friends and the colorful characters of her childhood. Of Aunt Alice and Cousin Louie, Aunt Kitty and the husband she herself called Mr. Nash.

She regales two friends, Dale and Judy, with tales of the luncheon and remembers another couple of people I should interview. She is a master storyteller here as well as on the page, no surprise. With one problem. She gets to laughing before she can get the story out. She tries again. Same problem. She takes her glasses off, tips back her head a bit, and lets loose with the kind of contagious laugh that washes across a room.

I see Nelle and Alice together, too, heading out to feed the ducks and geese just before dusk on a Saturday afternoon. In their living room, I am in the low, brown rocking chair pulled up to the foot of Alice’s gray recliner. She can hear me better this way and she has become so accustomed to my flipping over the little cassettes in my tape recorder every thirty minutes that she automatically pauses in her stories as I do so.

Before dusk, as the light begins to soften, Nelle appears from the back bedroom, the one that used to be her father’s quarters and now are hers. We are off to feed the ducks and geese. The ducks and geese know Nelle’s car. Even before she has parked at the small lake, they come running, wings flapping, raising a honking, quacking ruckus. Alice counts the ducks methodically, concerned one is missing. Nelle does the same but quickly, in fits and starts, and grows exasperated. The women are taking it all in: the way the creatures interact with one another, the little power plays on webbed feet, the ducklings that follow around their momma.

And I see Alice late one evening alone at the kitchen table. Or rather, I know she is there because she has told me she will be up late working on tax returns, on Nelle’s and on those of the clients she has had for fifty years. Her little sister is asleep in the back bedroom. Or it could be title work that has Alice up, or someone’s will. She sits alone at the cluttered table in the 1950s kitchen, a green banker’s lamp glowing at her right elbow.

She is doing the work her father, her law partner, used to do, determined that every figure add up, every rule be followed, stressed by the amount of work but buoyed by the sense of purpose. On plat maps, her bony fingers trace the property lines that etch stories for her, stories of families and businesses that go back generations, that her own family has known for generations. She is a solitary figure but doesn’t seem entirely alone. Her Methodist faith, her kinship with her late father, are unseen presences in the small kitchen of the modest redbrick house under the skinny assembly of tall pines.

At that moment, with her little sister still sound asleep in the back bedroom, it seems as if this is how it always has been, always will be.

Epilogue

T
his memoir of my time in Monroeville with the Lees and their friends and family is a chronicle of the last chapter of life as they knew it.

Nelle suffered a serious stroke in February 2007. She underwent months of hospital treatment and rehabilitation, first in New York and then in Birmingham, and hoped to be able to walk again instead of relying on a wheelchair. That didn’t happen.

She moved, permanently, into an assisted living center, a far cry from the rambling house on Alabama Avenue where Nelle was born and raised, where the weathered little Mel’s Dairy Dream now dispensed hamburgers and shakes from a walk-up window.

In November, she attended the White House ceremony at which President George W. Bush presented her and seven others with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Privately, members of the U.S. Marine Band surprised her by playing music from Elmer Bernstein’s
To Kill a Mockingbird
score. It moved her to tears.

She was able, for a time, to keep up with some reading, to hold the kind of conversations she used to with friends, to get out a fair amount. She had good days and bad days.

I’d be back to Monroeville on at least annual visits over the next several years.

On one visit, as I went over shared experiences and conversations I wanted to include in the book, Nelle added comments here and there and spoke fondly, again, of Gladys Burkett.

Nelle had told me over the years that she resented any speculation that her editor, Tay Hohoff, had a larger role in shaping the manuscript than she did, as Nelle saw it. And the rumor that Capote wrote any of it was still infuriating, she made clear, and absurd. It didn’t stop there.

“Rumors get started on the thinnest of evidence,” Nelle said.

We were at a table in the dining area of the assisted living center. The residents’ rooms were down a couple of hallways off the common area, where they could sit in sofas and chairs with visitors, and the adjacent dining area.

Nelle and I were sipping coffee from the two large cups I’d brought from McDonald’s. Rather, I was sipping and scribbling away in my notes. She was draining the large cup rather quickly.

She wasn’t fond of the coffee at the assisted living center.

“What they call coffee, isn’t.”

She discussed the rumors regarding the writing of the novel, her voice tinged with anger, then resignation.

“If all the people who said they had a hand in writing or editing it were put together, they’d fill a whole church. I’ll give you an example,” Nelle said.

After Nelle had finished the manuscript, she said, she gave the pages to Burkett to read. Once she had, the teacher had a student cross the school yard to return the manuscript, a stack of pages in the customary thin cardboard box, to Nelle at home across the street. It took all of a few minutes.

Burkett hadn’t written many comments on the pages of the manuscript, Nelle said. The teacher did scribble a William Shakespeare quotation Nelle’s novel brought to mind.

“She returned it with a quotation from
Macbeth.
Or was it
Hamlet
?”

Nelle began reciting the quotation from memory.

“‘Life’s but a walking shadow that struts and frets upon the stage and then is seen no more.’”

She cocked her head to one side and tried to remember again if it was from
Macbeth
or
Hamlet
.

Later, I Googled “walking shadow” to find the full quotation online. I considered copying it down by hand to give to Nelle, along with the notation that it was from
Macbeth,
as she first thought. I knew the idea of my looking that up online when it was easily findable in books ran the risk of giving Nelle indigestion. I pictured her shaking her head at me as she lamented the death of civilization.

Nelle’s memory had been good, if not word for word, for the famous pronouncement in
Macbeth
.

Leaning closer to the screen of my laptop, I read the full quotation, from which Faulkner drew his title for
The Sound and the Fury
.

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

I wasn’t sure how this pessimistic view applied to the novel, but that wasn’t the issue. Earlier that day, Nelle’s point was that the student’s school yard errand to return the manuscript for Gladys Burkett was enough to spur speculation that she somehow had contributed to the writing or the editing of
To Kill a Mockingbird
.

I thought of all the times Nelle had, easily and unpretentiously, recited a line, or paraphrased a passage, from the literature she hadn’t
just read but taken into her heart and her view of the world. The times she’d refer to Faulkner or Welty or that quotation from
The Pilgrim’s Progress
that Brock Peters’s death brought to mind for her.

The words were a constant, a comfort, and an inspiration, when so much around her was changing. Even now—especially now, perhaps—when the stroke had left her in a wheelchair and home no longer was the familiar brick house on West Avenue but an assisted living center.

Things became increasingly difficult as Nelle’s condition worsened and her memory failed, as had Louise’s, who died in 2009 at age ninety-three. By the time I saw her a couple of visits later, she was not the Nelle I knew.

Nelle’s decline was hard on Alice. She continued her daily work at the law office and went by to see Nelle most afternoons. On September 11, 2011, Alice turned one hundred. Family and friends held celebrations to honor her. My mother and I returned to Monroeville for the festivities. Two mornings in a row after the office celebration, Alice invited me to her home. I pulled the rocker up to her recliner, where the stories rolled once again, this time of her joy in having four generations of their family come together for the occasion.

A bout of pneumonia in December 2011 put Alice in the hospital and from there she was released into an assisted living center as well, not the same one as Nelle’s. Alice grew more frail and the hope that she would be able to return to her house and routines dimmed. She had been active just a few months earlier at her centennial gatherings, but declined at the assisted living center.

I like to picture them, still, as they were all those years on West Avenue, when they would set off in Nelle’s Buick for the country highways and red dirt roads they knew so well.

“We go out in every nook and cranny,” Alice told me on my first
visit. “We explore. If a new road opens up, we try it. We have done that all our lives.”

In the time I spent with the Lees, I was in the car for many of those drives. It was a privilege and a lot of fun. I remember the drive, early on, when I was in the backseat and Nelle was behind the wheel with Alice beside her. I realized they saw a different Monroe County out the windows than I did. They saw the stories behind the houses and buildings, the characters of another era who struggled and scraped by, who gossiped and worshipped, who married one another and buried one another, and who couldn’t have fathomed the changes that were to come in just a few generations.

It’s the old Monroeville—the old Maycomb—that lives on in the imaginations of so many readers. It’s the people and the places the Lees saw out the windows of the Buick all those years later. Nelle’s portrait of that community was so richly detailed, so specific and true to the small-town South during the Depression, that something universal emerged and, with it, the remarkably enduring popularity of the novel. And
To Kill a Mockingbird
remains one of the all-time great Southern stories. In Nelle—and in Alice—this land of stories and storytellers had produced two masters of the art.

All those years later, Nelle’s dark hair now white, her hands arthritic, her voice in
To Kill a Mockingbird
still could be heard on those Sunday drives, as she and Alice remembered a place that
was.