Mockingbird (5 page)

Truman disliked Nelle's mother, partly out of loyalty to his friend but also because Mrs. Lee was an “eccentric character” and an “endless gossip,” he thought. He poked fun at her in a story he submitted to the
Mobile Register
for a children's writing contest. She was Old Mrs. Busybody, “a fat old widow whose only amusement was crocheting and sewing. She was also fond of knitting. She didn't like the movies and took an immediate dislike to anyone who did enjoy them. She also took great delight in reporting children to their mothers over the slightest thing that annoyed her. In other words no one liked her and she was considered a public nuisance and a regular old Busybody.” Over the next twenty-seven pages of Truman's childish handwriting, Mrs. Busybody is driven to distraction by a visit from her loud and embarrassing in-laws, until they leave on the train for their home in “Slumtown.”
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The story was so true to life, Capote claimed, that when it appeared in the newspaper, he instantly became a notorious character on South Alabama Avenue. “I'd walk down the street and people on their front porches would pause, fanning for a moment. I found they were very upset about it. I was a little hesitant about showing anything after that. I remember I said, ‘Oh, I don't know why I did that, I've given up writing.' But I was writing more fiercely than ever.”
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The differences between Nelle and her mother were sharpened because Mrs. Lee, sometime after Nelle's birth, began to show signs of mental illness. Truman's cousin, Marie Faulk Rudisill, visited the Lees now and then and saw evidence of it.

She was very kind and very sweet to us. Always had a watermelon for us out on the back porch, but she didn't talk to us at all. I never saw her even speak to one of her children. She got up in the morning and started playing that darned piano all day long, or going outside on her front porch and tending to her nasturtiums in flower boxes on the end of the porch. Those were the only things I ever saw Mrs. Lee do, but as far as providing companionship for the children that wasn't so because Mrs. Lee never left the house.
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“She would speak to you. She would speak to you,” remembered a visitor to the house. “She was a big, heavyset lady—but I don't think she was well.”
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From the time she was small, Nelle mainly knew her mother as an overweight woman with a host of demons; her symptoms suggest what is now known as bipolar disorder. The “gentle soul” of the household could become inexplicably upset or unaccountably happy at the drop of a hat. On certain days, Mrs. Lee acted withdrawn: she might remain blank-faced in response to a greeting, as if she didn't know the person, or she might only nod in reply. On other occasions, she would veer to the opposite pole, her mind racing, words tumbling out; at these times she seemed to fear the worst. One hot day, Mrs. Lee spotted someone walking quickly past the house. Thinking he was going to get sunstroke, she charged out on the porch and—pointing to another passerby, who was strolling—she shouted with a note of desperation, “Walk like her!”
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How serious the situation was, no one could deny after an incident when Nelle was two. According to Truman, whose account was substantiated by others, one day Mrs. Lee tried to drown toddler Nelle in the bath. Mrs. Lee was an older parent, in her forties, and perhaps she was suffering postpartum depression after the birth of her fourth (and very difficult) child. In any case, Alice and Louise heard the commotion and rushed into the bathroom to save their sister. Truman claimed it happened again. In
To Kill a Mockingbird
, Scout says, “Our mother died when I was two, so I never felt her absence.” Perhaps the emotional bond snapped between mother and daughter with lasting impact on Nelle's development, deprived as she was of approval from one of the most important figures in a child's life. Her mother's illness almost certainly denied her the constancy children need to feel secure.

The Lees coped with Frances's “nervous disorder,” as they preferred to call it, as well as they could. Monroeville, especially during the hard-bitten years of the Great Depression, was a place with few resources for someone with mental health problems. After the stock market crashed in 1929, the town, like a boat unmoored, drifted back into the economic twilight that had preceded its two golden decades between 1910 and 1930. The standard of living in the South at the end of the 1920s was already the lowest in the nation. The South ranked at the bottom in almost everything: ownership of automobiles, radios, residence telephones; income per capita; bank deposits; homes with electricity, running water, and indoor plumbing. Its residents subscribed to the fewest magazines and newspapers and read the fewest books; they also provided the least support for education, public libraries, and art museums.
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To compensate for the lack of health care, Mr. Lee made it a practice to send his wife on long summer vacations to Orange Beach on the Gulf of Mexico, under the watchful eye of his secretary Maggie Dees. There Mrs. Lee was free to read and rest. (Capote said, “Mrs. Lee, who was a brilliant woman, could do a
New York Times
crossword puzzle as fast as she could move a pencil.”) Meanwhile, he packed Nelle off to his sister-in-law's house in Atmore, hoping for a little peace and quiet for a few weeks. Daughter Alice, whose family nickname was “Bear,” shifted some of her father's burdens onto herself by acting as his substitute helpmate in practical affairs. The two other Lee children had their own ways of getting by. Louise maintained an active social life and moved away as soon as she was old enough. Edwin, simply called Brother, stuck close to a few good friends, played sports, and kept his head down.

A.C. responded to his wife's maladies with a stiff upper lip. A quiet, thoughtful man, he went about his business without complaint, probably reasoning that everybody had some kind of cross to bear and that in the scale of things he had much to be grateful for.

Also, Mrs. Lee had hired help, as was customary among better-off white families.
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Hattie Belle Clausell was the cook, housekeeper, and nanny; every day except Sunday, she walked over to South Alabama Avenue from the “colored” part of town, known as “the quarters,” which was literally on the other side of the tracks.
30
Mrs. Clausell kept the house organized with a sort of Spartan plainness: there were no rugs to vacuum or shake out, the chairs were cane-backed, the iron bedsteads had been painted white, and the pine floors gleamed from regular rubbings with oil.
31
When Nelle barged through the screen door after a day of playing, sunburned and grass-stained, it was Mrs. Clausell who ordered “Miss Frippy Britches” out of her overalls, to be washed, combed, and given supper in the kitchen.
32

Meanwhile, Mrs. Lee's health continued to deteriorate. Although she wasn't supposed to go out when she was feeling bad, she went out anyway, until steps were taken to keep her on the premises. Sympathetic neighbors spoke of her condition as “hardening of the arteries” or “having a second childhood”—expressions used at the time to describe mental illness including dementia in older people.

Truman's aunt, his mother's sister, Marie Rudisill, was a teenager in those days and used to visit with Mrs. Lee sometimes. “I think she loved people, but she had a very hard time expressing it.”
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*   *   *

Nelle came into the world with a mother who was ill; Truman's unhappiness, on the other hand, began even before he was born. His mother simply didn't want him; in fact, she abandoned him.

Lillie Mae Faulk, five foot two, with brown eyes, had the reputation of being a “rare beauty” in Monroeville.
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When she sold tickets at the Strand Theater, the only movie house in town, teenaged boys gawked at her as if she were something wonderful on display inside the glass ticket booth.

Then in the spring of 1923, Archulus Julius Persons (pronounced “PEER-sons”), arrived in a chauffeur-driven Packard Phaeton.
35
He was in town visiting fraternity brothers from college. As a suitor, Arch had some considerable baggage: he was a huckster, a disbarred lawyer, and a world-class liar. But Lillie Mae was smitten, even if her suitor did wear spectacles as thick as magnifying glasses. More and more often, Persons came calling for his sweetheart at the Faulks' home, where Lillie, for reasons that are unclear, was living with Jenny, Callie, Sook, and Bud instead of with her parents. On August 14, 1923, a silver-haired probate judge named Murdoch McCorvey Fountain granted Arch and Lillie a marriage license. Arch was not quite twenty-six, and Lillie Mae was just sixteen. A week later, on a sweltering day, a Baptist minister conducted the wedding in the Faulk home, as guests consumed gallons of iced tea and lemonade. At the piano, Nelle's mother played classical music.

It only took a few weeks for the glamour of romance to wear off. In New Orleans, where the couple were kicking up their heels in the French Quarter, Arch confessed to his child-wife that he was in “straitened means”—in other words, he was broke and “between opportunities.” Tearful and humiliated, Lillie Mae returned alone to Monroeville. Arch hung back in New Orleans, probably suspecting, with good reason, that Jenny Faulk would brain him with a skillet if he dared show his face. Once before, years earlier, she had driven off with a horsewhip a man she didn't think was fit to court her sister, Callie. The newlyweds reconciled and fell out again several times over the next year.

Their only child, Truman Streckfus Persons, was born on September 30, 1924. Arch named him “Truman” after one of his college friends; “Streckfus” was intended to flatter Arch's most recent employer, the Streckfus Steamship Line, a fleet of old-fashioned paddle wheelers called “tramps” that offered hot jazz by Louis Armstrong and other musicians during one-night trips on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers.

But the marriage was doomed. Threats of divorce smoldered as Lillie Mae and Arch both pursued extramarital affairs while Truman grew into a toddler. The Faulks' housekeeper, Corrie, was unsurprised, saying Lillie Mae “will never be content. She's born greedy for mens an' money.”
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Lillie Mae, determined to immerse herself in cosmopolitan excitement and sophistication, would check into hotels in places like New Orleans and Mobile. If Truman was with her, she would lock him in alone for the evening, instructing the front desk to ignore his hysterical screams.
37

In the summer of 1930, Lillie Mae brought Truman to Monroeville to live indefinitely with his Faulk relatives; she divorced Persons the following year. Freed from the financial burdens of parenthood, Arch slipped away in a rented limousine in pursuit of get-rich-quick schemes, while Lillie Mae flew like a butterfly to New York, having won an Elizabeth Arden beauty contest. Truman started throwing red-faced tantrums, legs flailing in the air. “Lillie Mae was that most treacherous of mothers,” wrote a reviewer of Gerald Clarke's
Capote
(1988), “a discontented small-town beauty who would appear in his life for a day or two, wafting the perfume of motherhood over him, then disappear.” The metaphor is more than apt: once, after Lillie Mae had departed again, Truman drank a bottle of her perfume to try to keep some of her essence inside him.
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But there was an aspect of him he could never change, and Lillie Mae was repulsed by it: his behavior was effeminate. She resented her son for not conforming to her idea of what a boy ought to be. Lillie Mae continually attacked him; she rode him constantly.

“Truman, I swear, we give you every advantage, and you can't behave. If it were just failing out of school, I could take it. But, my God, why can't you be more like a normal boy your age? I mean—well, the whole thing about you is so obvious. I mean—you know what I mean. Don't take me for a fool.”
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So he was trapped. Craving his mother's love, he missed it keenly; on the other hand, there was an aspect about him that he couldn't change, and it repelled her. Like Nelle, he was who he was.

*   *   *

Gender expectations and sexual orientation troubled Nelle as a child as well, if we accept that Capote was portraying her accurately in his first published novel,
Other Voices, Other Rooms
(1948). She is Idabel Thompkins in Capote's telling—a forceful personality, quick with a dirty joke, haughty, and angry about the constraints of her gender. When Joel, the main character, expresses embarrassment about undressing in front of Idabel, she retorts,

“Son,” she said, and spit between her fingers, “what you got in your britches is no news to me, and no concern of mine: hell, I've fooled around with nobody but boys since first grade. I never think like I'm a girl; you've got to remember that, or we can't never be friends.” For all its bravado, she made this declaration with a special and compelling innocence; and when she knocked one fist against the other, as, frowning, she did now, and said: “I want so much to be a boy: I would be a sailor, I would…” the quality of her futility was touching.
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A reviewer for
Time
wrote, “For all his novel's gifted invention and imagery, the distasteful trappings of its homosexual theme overhang it like Spanish moss.”
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Truman and Nelle were just, in Truman's phrase, “apart people,” different from most other children their age.
42
(“Hell is eternal apartness,” Jean Louise comments in
Go Set a Watchman
.) A classmate of theirs at Monroeville Elementary School recalled seeing them play a word game before the start of the Saturday matinee at the Strand Theater. “They were a little above the rest of the kids in town.”
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