Mockingbird (12 page)

Faulkner could hardly believe his ears: he had been dreaming about an opportunity like this. He even had a potential partner lined up: the
Baldwin Times
editor, William Stewart. Quickly, as if worried that Lee might change his mind, Stewart and Faulkner scrambled to put together the financing, shaking every money tree they could. Stewart borrowed three thousand dollars from his brother, and Faulkner sold a parcel of timberland he owned for another three thousand dollars. With six thousand dollars in hand, they borrowed another nine thousand dollars, partly from Lee's former law partner, J. B. Barnett, now president of the Monroe County Bank, and the rest from the First National Bank in Mobile. Alice Lee completed the legal paperwork transferring ownership of the
Journal
to Faulkner and Stewart.

Thus after eighteen years in the newspaper business, the Lees were officially out of it. (Ten years later, Faulkner sold his half interest to his partner for $115,000; in the mid-1990s, Stewart sold the paper for $2 million.)
1
On June 26, 1947, A. C. Lee published his final editorial. “As we are bowing out of the newspaper field it is but natural that we allow our thoughts to go back over the years of our service for the purpose of a critical review. And with the added experience of the years we are unable to recall any position we have previously taken on any important question that we would wish to change. Again we express our most profound appreciation for the splendid cooperation accorded us through the years by our good friends throughout the county.”
2
He was letting go now of the small dynasty he had hoped to build in the town that had so richly rewarded his efforts. He wrung a concession at least from his daughter before she quit college altogether. In August, she boarded a train and rode it north to Tuscaloosa, for the sake of giving of giving law school another try.

*   *   *

It was no good, though. By spring 1948, it was clear she wasn't showing the same enthusiasm for practicing law that Alice had. Or perhaps Alice never was all that interested in becoming a lawyer in the first place but took up the challenge laid down by her father anyway. Her siblings Edwin and Louise had graduated from Auburn and were pursuing careers on their own: not the same dedication to family that Alice had shown. But only Nelle refused to go down the path of higher education followed by the older children.

So Mr. Lee agreed to provide an incentive—one that would acknowledge her love of literature. Perhaps, if she could have an experience that showed she was not making a Hobson's choice—law or nothing—she would see what a well-paid career such as law could provide, including the means to travel and write as an avocation. On April 29, 1948, an item in the
Monroe Journal
described what Miss Lee would be up to that summer: “Miss Nelle Lee, University of Alabama law student and daughter of Mr. and Mrs. A. C. Lee of Monroeville, has been accepted as an exchange student at Oxford University in England during the coming summer. She will sail from New York on June 16.”
3

It would be a pilgrimage to the land of her favorite writers—Austen, Stevenson, Lamb, Fielding, Butler—who until now had lived for her only between the covers of books. And perhaps it would break the spell of her unhappiness. It also suggests, however, that Mr. Lee indulged his youngest, which, if the Lee family ran true to the rest of the human race, Alice must have recognized. Maybe it inspired some jealousy. After all, it fell to Alice, the eldest, to fulfill her father's ambitions while Nelle was granted more latitude, more freedom. Somehow, she had become exempt from the fatherly expectations that her brother and two sisters had met.

*   *   *

Student exchanges with European countries—a new idea after World War II—were strongly supported by both Congress and religious and social service organizations. The purpose of the exchanges was to promote mutual understanding between the American people and other cultures; and “to correct misunderstandings about the United States abroad.” In addition, exchanges appealed to organizations such as the American Friends Service Committee and the Future Farmers of America as opportunities to send young people abroad as a gesture of peace and goodwill. In April 1947, the State Department received two C-4 troopships, the
Marine Tiger
and the
Marine Jumper,
to ferry students to Southampton, Plymouth, Genoa, and Cherbourg.

Things got off to a rather slow start. When the
Marine Jumper
sailed out of New York harbor in June 1947, only 105 American students were aboard. (Adding poignancy to the idealism behind student exchanges was the arrival three weeks later of seven foreign vessels bringing 2,920 European refugees to the United States, all in one day.)
4
The following year, 1948, when Nelle was scheduled to leave, organizers were confident that ten thousand students would sail by August.

On the other side of the Atlantic, European universities responded eagerly to student exchanges. Summer-term courses, anywhere from three to six weeks long, included German-Austrian culture near Salzburg; classical and archaeological studies in Naples; art and music appreciation in France. Six British universities offered Shakespeare, Elizabethan drama, or European civilization. Harper Lee enrolled in Oxford University's Extramural Studies Summer School program, “European Civilization in the Twentieth Century.”

On the morning she prepared to board the
Marine Jumper
in New York harbor
,
nearly six hundred young people were hugging their parents, posing for snapshots, and waving as they climbed the steep gangway. The ship, among the largest transports built during the war, was one and a half times the length of a football field, seventy-one feet wide, and still painted military olive-gray. The only indication that times had changed was a red, white, and blue band painted around the ship's smokestack. And the accommodations were rows of bunks with one shower room big enough for thirty-five people—“just like you'd expect in the army,” commented one of the students.
5

At last the hawsers were pulled in, and the
Marine Jumper
got under way, assisted by a tugboat or two to point the ship's bow toward the Atlantic. Then, after New York dipped below the horizon and they were well out to sea, coordinators on board assembled the students for the first of a series of orientation programs about the places they were going. A Harvard undergraduate said he met

Quakers, Youth Hostelers, Adventure Trailers, one delegate to the World Council of Churches, and huge numbers of young tourists going abroad ostensibly for study in London, Paris, Copenhagen, Geneva, and elsewhere. Their groups held orientation programs on the ship twenty-four hours a day, passed out reams of literature, held foreign language courses daily, and generally showed their eagerness to promote international understanding and prevent future war.
6

Meals on board were filling but greasy, contributing to seasickness.
7
But once the youngsters got used to the motion of the ship, the main deck on starry nights was usually dotted with travelers lying on their backs, feeling the thrum of the ten-thousand-horsepower turbines underneath them as the ship rolled through the swells at fifteen knots.

On Friday, June 25, via the loudspeakers between decks, it was announced that passengers bound for England should prepare for landing soon at Plymouth. After hastily eating breakfast, Lee waited until 9:00
A.M.
for a motor launch to pull alongside to ferry her group to customs. Over the hubbub of the milling crowd of students, officials loudly explained how to locate the luggage. After finding her bags, Lee went with the rest to the money-exchange counter and watched dollars become pounds, crowns, shillings, pennies, farthings. The money seemed byzantine. When it was her turn to purchase a ticket for the train to Oxford, she held out her hand and murmured like the others, “Take what you need.”
8

A four-hour train ride brought the spires of Oxford within sight, by which time the students were so hungry that they were bartering rolls and fruit saved from breakfast. As the train crossed the Isis River, on the west side of the university, Nelle could see Christ Church's octagonal Tom Tower, whose seven-ton bell has rung every night since the late 1600s to mark curfew. The welcoming dinner that evening was held in a centuries-old hall with stained-glass windows, carved beam ceilings fifty feet overhead, and wood-paneled walls.

She was enrolled in twentieth-century European civilization, but Lee was permitted to attend other lectures too, on philosophy, politics, economics, or general topics. There were three others every day to choose from, on topics such as free will, the nature of truth, political theories and moral beliefs, communism, modern painting, and the history of Oxford University. In all, there were seventy speakers taking a turn presenting, including the novelists Elizabeth Bowen and Joyce Cary; A.J.P. Taylor, one of the most controversial historians of the century; the pianist and music critic William Glock; Hugh Trevor-Roper, the historian of early modern Britain and Nazi Germany; and the pioneering geneticist J.B.S. Haldane.
9
For someone like Lee, a true Anglophile, it was a feast. She visited the Bodleian Library often, walking among rows and rows of centuries-old volumes—more than three million in all—including original manuscripts of Old English poetry and prose dating from
Beowulf,
and even earlier.

*   *   *

After that experience, Nelle lasted only one more semester in law school. She couldn't continue, because, as Alice said later, “She fell in love with England.”
10
She had walked streets known to writers she admired and had imagined herself in their company. What she needed to do now was to write earnestly. Truman had just published his first novel,
Other Voices, Other Rooms
, to extravagant reviews comparing him to William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor. She couldn't hope to duplicate his success the first time out, but she had to make a start. At the end of the first semester, she withdrew from law school and prepared to follow in Capote's footsteps to New York.

For a while she lived at home and saved money, waitressing at the Monroeville golf club. But having “got an itch to go to New York and write,” said Alice, twenty-three-year-old Nelle Lee did exactly that in 1949.
11
Her place was an unfurnished, cold-water flat in Manhattan, at 1539 York Avenue, two blocks from the East River, with an iron fire escape where she could sit and think on hot nights.

But breaking her ties with Monroeville was not as easy as that. Her mother's health was poor and continued to decline. One winter evening in early 1951 in Selma, Alabama, an alumna of Huntingdon College recognized Nelle walking along by herself, lost in thought. She pulled over and offered her a ride to wherever she was going. Nelle asked to be taken a few blocks to Vaughn Memorial Hospital—her mother was there. It was clear that she was preoccupied with worry and the two rode in silence the rest of the way.
12

Mrs. Lee never left the hospital, and on June 2, 1951, she died. Nelle was twenty-five. Her mother had long been beset by a “nervous disorder,” as the family preferred to call it, compounded by poor health in general. What Harper Lee understood about her mother, she poured into Aunt Alexandra's character in
To Kill a Mockingbird
, who closely resembles Frances Lee. “She was not fat, but solid, and she chose protective garments that drew her bosom up to giddy heights, pinched in her waist, flared out her rear, and managed to suggest that Aunt Alexandra's was once an hour-glass figure. From any angle it was formidable.” Aunt Alexandra also had “boarding-school manners,” as Mrs. Lee would have from attending Julia Tutwiler's School for Girls. If Aunt Alexandra shared another characteristic with Mrs. Lee too, it would be unfortunate for Nelle growing up: Scout says of her aunt, she was “analogous to Mount Everest: throughout my early life, she was cold and there.”

Just six weeks after Frances's long-expected passing, the Lees suffered a second loss. The previous March, at the beginning of the Korean War, Edwin Lee had been recalled to duty in the Army Air Forces and assigned to Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery. On July 12, after a strenuous game of softball, Major Lee complained of not feeling well and went to the officers' quarters to lie down. He was found dead the following morning of a cerebral hemorrhage at age thirty.
13

At the funeral in Monroeville, presided over by the Methodist Episcopal's new minister, Reverend Ray E. Whatley, several hundred mourners dressed in black surrounded the grave on all sides, including three ministers representing the major Protestant denominations in town. The July heat was suffocating, although the service had been delayed until 5:00
P.M.
for that reason. Standing beneath the awning over the grave site was Edwin's widow, Sara, with the couple's three-year-old daughter, Mary, their nine-month-old son, Edwin, Jr., the Lee sisters—Nelle, Alice, and Louise, who was now Mrs. Herschel Conner—and the Conners' eleven-year-old son, Hank.
14
A. C. Lee, seventy-one years old and bent under the weight of a double load of grief in such a short space of time, bore up as best he could.

Reverend Whatley concluded the service about 6:30
P.M.
The three other attending ministers complimented him on his handling of the funeral, one of his first in his new capacity. Though not a forceful man, Reverend Whatley always made a point of looking people in the eye and giving them a firm handshake. He remained by Edwin's grave for nearly an hour, receiving introductions to many of the people in his 376-member congregation.

Without Edwin, who had been living in Monroeville, the brunt of family affairs now fell squarely upon Alice. Harper Lee tweaked this reality only slightly in
Go Set a Watchman
. “Just about that time, Jean Louise's brother dropped dead in his tracks one day, and after the nightmare of that was over, Atticus, who had always thought of leaving his practice to his son, looked around for another young man.” Louise Lee had family responsibilities more than two hours away by car in Eufaula; and A.C. was getting on in years.
15
Nelle, of course, was far away in New York, working on a book, she said.