Mockingbird (35 page)

“This is very exciting,” she said slowly, “because I do not speak at colleges. The prospect of it is too intimidating. Surely, it's obvious—rows of bright, intense, focused students, some even of the sciences, all of them analyzing my every word and staring fixedly at me—this would terrify a person such as myself. So I wisely agreed to come here, where the atmosphere would be far more relaxing and welcoming than on a rigid, strict, rule-bound, and severely disciplined college campus.”

For the first time since becoming a class, the young men laughed together, and followed their laughter with a roar of applause.

Knowing that the young men were away from home, many for the first time, she made a subtle comparison between aspects of
To Kill a Mockingbird
and the cadets' future mission as soldiers:

When we seek to replace family in new environs, we seek to reestablish trust, and love, and comfort. But too often we end up establishing difference instead of love. We like to have all our comforts and familiars about us, and tend to push away that which is different, and worrisome. That is what happened to Boo Radley, and to Tom Robinson. They were not set apart by evil men, or evil women, or evil thoughts. They were set apart by an evil past, which good people in the present were ill equipped to change. The irony is, if we divide ourselves for our own comfort,
no one
will have comfort. It means we must bury our pasts by seeing them, and destroy our differences through learning another way.

Regarding people who were difficult to accept or respect, Nelle said, “Our response to these people represents our earthly test. And I think, that these people enrich the wonder of our lives. It is they who most need our kindness,
because
they seem less deserving. After all,
anyone
can love people who are lovely.”

Then she reflected on how writing
To Kill a Mockingbird
had influenced her life. “People in the press have asked me if this book is descriptive of my own childhood, or of my own family. Is this very important? I am simply one who had time and chance to write. I was that person before, and no one in the press much cared about the details of my life. I am yet that same person now, who only misses her former anonymity.”
39

*   *   *

A few weeks after speaking at West Point, Nelle received another request for her presence, one that couldn't be further away in spirit from speaking to an audience of hopeful, forward-looking young men. Perry Smith and Dick Hickock asked her to attend their executions. They had the right to choose witnesses and they had both named Nelle and Truman.

“Truman tracked down Nelle to the Old Stone House and called her there,” Joy Hafner-Bailey, Maurice's niece, remembered. “He said the killers had asked for her and he needed her besides for this final episode that would close the book. But she didn't want to go. She refused.” Nelle formally replied to Warden Charles McAtee that she would not attend.
40

The killers' appeals had been heard and denied, twice, by the U.S. Supreme Court. Finally, five years after their conviction in Garden City, they were sentenced to hang on April 14, 1965, between midnight and 2:00
A.M.
The scaffold was a simple structure made of rough, unfinished lumber located in a jumbled warehouse at Kansas State Penitentiary, in Leavenworth. Inmates called the spot “The Corner.” Thirteen steps led to the platform, where a noose dangled over a trapdoor. Fifteen men had been hanged there.

On the night of the fourteenth, the executioner, an anonymous paid volunteer from Missouri, sped through the rain in a black Cadillac. He wore a long, dingy coat and a large felt hat to hide his face. Smith, assuming both Nelle and Truman had denied his request, wrote a hasty note at 11:45
P.M.
: “I want you to know that I cannot condemn you for it & understand. Not much time left but want you both to know that I've been sincerely grateful for your friend[ship] through the years and everything else. I'm not very good at these things—I want you both to know that I have become very affectionate toward you. But harness time. Adios Amigos. Best of everything. Your friend always, Perry.”
41

In a hotel nearby, Truman agonized and wept in his room, trying to decide whether he should go or not. Finally, he hurried to the prison in time to say goodbye. A handful of reporters and KBI agents were waiting in the warehouse. Hickock arrived first, trussed in a leather harness that held his arms to his sides. “Nice to see you,” he said pleasantly, smiling at faces he recognized. He was pronounced dead at 12:41
A.M
. When it was Smith's turn on the gallows, twenty minutes later, Capote became sick to his stomach.

On April 17, Al Dewey submitted the final report on the Clutter murders, ending it with the statement that it was a “joint report of Special Agents Roy Church, C. C. Duntz, Harold Nye and the writer. The executions were witnessed by the above four mentioned agents.” An unidentified hand wrote “Closed” on the outside of the folder.
42

Capote flew home to New York immediately. “Perry and Dick were executed last Tuesday,” he wrote to his friend Cecil Beaton. “I was there because they wanted me to be. It was a terrible experience. Something that I will never really get over. One day I will tell you about it—if you can bear it.”
43

To mark the killers' side-by-side graves in row twenty-nine of Mount Muncie Cemetery, Truman paid $70.50 apiece for basic granite headstones.

*   *   *

With such a macabre event behind her, Lee could look forward to Maurice Crain accompanying her on a visit to her hometown in May. “Nelle Harper and Maurice are leaving Sunday for their trip to Alabama,” Annie Laurie Williams wrote to James Mitchell, a British mystery author who wrote under the name James Munro. “Maurice will spend about a week visiting her family and then will fly back to New York. She will stay in Monroeville, Alabama (that is her home as you know) until late August when she comes back to New York to see her plastic surgeon.”
44

Nelle's friends in New York were fascinated by the aura around Monroeville created by the novel.
45
Crain had grown up in small Texas towns, but he wanted to take a gander and compare for himself Nelle's description of Monroeville with fictional Maycomb. A lot had changed, of course. “I don't know what you'd really care to see in Monroeville, except maybe a new courthouse standing beside an old one, or an underwear factory,” Nelle said apologetically to another visitor later that summer.
46
But Crain was not disappointed, especially because Alice and Nelle, both history buffs, arranged for a tour of famous southern battlefields.

Returning from his journey to the Deep South, Crain raved to his wife about the wonderful time he'd had. “Maurice has never expressed to you folks what he felt about the memorable trip,” Williams wrote to Alice. “Just being away from the office for awhile helped Maurice and he has been much calmer since he got back. You all were so good to him and he did appreciate it.… It is almost seven o'clock and Maurice gets hungry around this time (we used to eat at eight) so I will stop talking and go along to Stouffers with him.”
47

Lately Crain had been getting hungrier earlier. And Williams noticed that even though he scooped up the cake and cookies she put out for teatime, he wasn't gaining any weight. Although no one knew it yet, he was showing early symptoms of cancer from years of heavy smoking.

*   *   *

For the rest of the summer of 1965 in Monroeville, Nelle buckled down again to work. It had been five years since the publication of
To Kill a Mockingbird.
Although novelists often go years between books, she had been trading on her first novel for quite some time. But now she shunned interviews: first, because questions about
To Kill a Mockingbird
had become redundant; second, because she had gone on record a number of times that a second novel was in the offing. So far, it was a promise she hadn't made good on. What she needed was “paper, pen, and privacy,” the formula that had produced her first success.

She made one exception to turning down interviews, however. A young Mississippian, Don Keith, approached her about granting one for a small quarterly, the
Delta Review.
She consented to a “visit,” not an interview, perhaps because she saw in the earnest young writer a glimpse of herself from her
Rammer Jammer
days.

Keith, who would go on to become a first-rate journalist in New Orleans, provided a remarkably fresh portrait of Nelle, placing her in the context of a writer at work. “When I met her that Sunday afternoon in Monroeville, Alabama, she was the same as I knew she would be. We had spoken twice briefly over the telephone. I had written her two letters; she had written me one. But regardless of the long distance acquaintance, we exchanged hello kisses in that familiar manner characteristic of Southerners. Once inside the modest but comfortable brick house,” they settled down to a “long talk over coffee and cigarettes. She consumes both in abundance.”

The young visitor was the first to use the term
recluse
in connection with Nelle, but he did so for the sake of denying she was one. “Harper Lee is no recluse,” he said. “She is no McCullers or Salinger whose veneer of notoriety cannot be punctured to reveal, after all, another individual. She is real and down-to-earth as is the woman next door who puts up fig preserves in the spring and covers her chrysanthemums in winter.

“During most of our afternoon together, she sat at a card table placed in front of an armchair in the living room. On the table was a typewriter, not new, and an abundance of paper. A stack of finished manuscript lay nearby, work on a new novel.” Nelle explained that she hadn't set a deadline for it, and that her publisher, Lippincott, didn't know the entire plot yet. But she hinted that it was set in a southern town again, perhaps Maycomb. Whether Jem, Scout, and Atticus would figure in the story, she wouldn't say.

Also piled near the table were new books, sent by publishers in the hope that she might pen a blurb for their back covers, or even write a review. Alfred A. Knopf had sent her four such requests, for instance, but she never replied.

The conversation turned to another literary project that needed her attention. She was scheduled to leave the next week for New York, where she was to read, before publication, Capote's finished manuscript.

“It must seem a chore,” Keith said.

“But one I'm looking forward to,” replied Nelle. As always, she was Capote's friend and advocate.
48

*   *   *

It was a pivotal interview, this final “visit” that Lee consented to. Despite Keith's avowal that “Harper Lee is no recluse,” she was in fact becoming one. Granted, she disliked publicity, but unlike most writers she also evinced a continual lack of interest in participating in the literary scene. She didn't accept a post as a writer-in-residence at a college, or speak at a writers' conference, or participate in the Iowa Writers' Workshop, for example, although she knew the director, Paul Engle, well. When friends from Alabama called her and expressed an interest in meeting certain authors during a visit to New York, Lee replied, “I don't know them myself.”
49
Once
To Kill a Mockingbird
was launched and sailing on its own, Nelle turned back to being “the woman next door who puts up fig preserves in the spring and covers her chrysanthemums in winter.” She was withdrawing into an ordinary life and writing, as she once described Jane Austen, “cameo-like, in that little corner of the world of hers.” Perhaps her temperament and interests weren't as suited to the arena of literature as she had once dreamed. Reentering the difficult and demanding fray of public literary life was a sacrifice and, apparently, she was unwilling to make it.

Besides needing to be in New York to read Truman's typewritten manuscript of
In Cold Blood
, it was time for Nelle to let a doctor examine her injured hand and see if surgery would be required. Everyone hoped for a good prognosis. “We were all looking at her hand and were pleased and surprised how beautifully it has healed. We hope when she sees Dr. Stark on the 19th [of September] that he will tell her she doesn't have to have the operation,” Williams wrote to Alice.
50

Lee could hold a pen or pencil again, but her fingers' movement was slightly constricted and her handwriting—normally open and highly legible—looked compressed. Perhaps because of this, she jotted only succinct comments on Capote's pages. Regarding a piece of dialogue, for instance, she noted, “Everybody talks in short sentences. Mannered.”
51

In August, however,
McCall's
magazine published her first piece—“When Children Discover America”—since
Vogue
had carried “Love—In Other Words” in 1961. But the new article, just like the
Vogue
essay, showed none of Nelle's hallmark humor or vividness. In fact, a strong whiff of sanctimony replaced the exuberance that readers would have expected after
To Kill a Mockingbird.
It was as if her high spirits and insouciant wit were being tamped down by too much self-consciousness, perhaps a result of her being in the public eye.

I do not think the youngest or even the most jaded citizen could go to Washington and through the Capitol or the Smithsonian Institution without having the feeling of yes, we
are
something; yes, we
do
have a history.… Younger children may not respond in words, but they will drink everything in with their eyes, and fill their minds with awareness and wonder. It's an experience they will enjoy and remember all their lives; and it will give them greater pride in their own country.
52