The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee (30 page)

The small-town woman was off to begin life as an aspiring writer in the big city. Truman already was there, publishing short stories and magazine articles and reveling in the excitement of Manhattan. The children who sparked each other’s imaginations in Monroeville
already had grown into adults with sharply different sensibilities. But both appreciated the escape New York offered from small-town prying eyes.“On any person who desires such queer prizes,” White wrote in that first sentence that still moved Nelle, “New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.”

White describes three tribes of New Yorkers: commuters, natives, and settlers. Nelle Harper belonged to the latter group. White goes on to list the different types of settlers coming to New York, including “a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors.”

A half century had passed since she made that first trip to New York and rented an apartment in Manhattan. At seventy-nine, Nelle once again was making the trip from Monroeville back to Manhattan.

She reminded me of American expatriates I spent time with in England and Spain, in Mexico and Paraguay. They navigate two places very well: the country where they were raised and the one in which they live. They may not be fully understood in either one, and that’s fine by them. There’s some privacy in that, even a bit of mystery, an unknowable quality, that follows them back and forth.

For those New Yorkers who heard her Alabama accent and inquired how long she had been in the city, Nelle had a stock answer: “Since before you were born.” That settled that.

Chapter Thirty-one

O
n a July morning in 2005, Tom was reading the sky. He looked up to the heavens and knew trouble was coming. Of course, with television weathermen talking incessantly about Doppler radar and fronts moving in and all that, he already knew. But checking for himself, looking across Pineville Road and spotting the threat hanging low in the sky over the Methodist church steeple, that was what quickened his own pulse. By now, reports were clear: A hurricane was headed to the Gulf Coast and Monroe County could be in its path.

Nelle Harper, under a peaceful New York sky, was suffering the anxiety of being far away and worried about Alice. Everyone raised in this poor, rural county knows how quickly a hurricane or ferocious tropical storm can blow inland and wreak its random havoc. They’ve seen it before. In one county, homes are destroyed, lives are lost. In the neighboring county, branches blow down and that’s about it. You don’t know which fate is yours until it is upon you.

Alice, always the one thinking ahead, had a plan for when the danger drew closer. Tom and Hilda planned to ride it out at their home on Pineville Road. Alice thought it would be unwise to be in our
neighborhood with all the tall trees that could fall on her roof or mine. “You haven’t been through this here,” she told me before I left her house for mine. “You don’t know what this weather can do. I don’t want you to be frightened but I want you to be careful.”

As she spoke, she gave me one of her looks, the appraising look. She studied faces the way Tom, and his father before him, surveyed the skies: to get a read on things. I was tempted sometimes to shield the oldest among us from the worries of the day, even as able and steady as she was. But there wasn’t much point in that. She seemed to just know. She paid attention to everyone with whom she interacted.

That eye for detail made her the kind of lawyer she was, the kind of lawyer her father was, the kind of lawyer Nelle brought to life in Atticus Finch. Alice Finch Lee was as observant a person as I’ve ever met. She was low-key, understated, most of the time. It’s worth remembering that Atticus’s stirring speech to the jury in
To Kill a Mockingbird
was an exception to his usual practice of law. He drafted wills, resolved disputes, handled land transactions. A careful attention to detail, far more than any courtroom drama, was at the heart of his practice.

This time I easily could pass Alice’s subtle scrutiny. The Yankee wasn’t freaking out. Yes, I was a midwesterner facing my first hurricane. But, as Alice knew, I’d been through tornado seasons in Wisconsin and the 1993 Los Angeles earthquake. I didn’t suffer anything more than a few bruises in the earthquake, but my building was damaged, then condemned and torn down. At least with a hurricane, there was more warning. But Alice wanted to be sure Julia and I had a safe place to go. Final plans couldn’t be made until we had a better idea of when the hurricane would hit.

By that Friday, Hurricane Dennis was predicted to make landfall Sunday near Pensacola. Alice was home from the office, and she faxed
me the strategy. We would ride out the storm in the bank. She then had to go because her machine was lit up with faxes, especially from Nelle Harper.

The bank building, with her law office on the second floor, should be able to withstand even a hurricane. It didn’t have a basement; most houses and buildings here don’t. But it had a vault. Where else in town are you going to find thick walls of steel designed to be impenetrable?

And so, on Sunday, as the winds picked up and the rains began, our ragtag little group gathered at the bank, which was closed for business. Alice and Nelle Harper’s nephew Ed Lee, the dentist, and his wife, Marianne, were there. So were Haniel, Judy, and Kenny, as well as several others. People brought snacks and flashlights and magazines.

We’d take refuge inside the vault only if it looked like the bank building itself could go to pieces. I wondered if the FDIC has rules about letting noncustomers like me in a bank vault. Surely this was a case where it would be better to ask forgiveness than permission. Or was Alice only kidding about taking refuge in the vault if need be?

We sprawled out in a conference room. The reports on the radio were growing more ominous. Monroeville still looked like it could be in the path of the hurricane. I peeked out a window; otherwise, we were standing and sitting clear of them. It was unsettling to see the familiar street scene transformed. No one was out. The air was taking on a sickening yellow hue. The branches and leaves on the trees were blowing straight back, like long hair in the wind.

Nelle Harper’s calls to Ed’s cell phone were picking up speed, just like the storm. Yes, he told her, Alice is fine. No, really. Everyone is fine. We’ll keep you posted when it’s over, if the power and cell phone service stay on.

Alice, as usual, was the calmest among us. I don’t think it’s just that
she couldn’t hear the howling wind or the urgent tone of the radio broadcasts. She had made her plan. It was a good one. And now her part was over.

She serenely worked her crossword puzzle while the rest of us buzzed around, trying to predict what couldn’t be predicted. No doubt she had learned long ago the futility of trying to know the unknowable. Every now and then Ed passed along Nelle’s admonitions to stay safe. Alice responded with an amused look, another in her now-familiar repertoire of meaningful looks and glances. This was the expression of a calm big sister dealing with her more excitable baby sister.

After a few hours, the winds let up. The power was out and we could see branches were down but the worst of the storm had skirted Monroeville. Ed and his wife had a small generator and invited Alice, Julia, and me to spend the night at their home on the other side of town. The drive there was eerie. After all the commotion leading up to this, the town was still. By the time we settled in and said our good-nights, it was late.

Alice said she would sleep better in the recliner, positioned way back. She drifted off with a throw tucked around her slight frame. I stretched out under a blanket on a sofa near Alice’s chair. I was tired but not sleepy. I tiptoed over to the pullout sofa where Julia lay. I could hear the steady rise and fall of her breathing. She was asleep, too. I snuggled back under the throw on my sofa. After the thunder and lightning, the lashing rain and the howling winds, this was a quiet that filled the ears. I was reminded of the silence that enveloped my bedroom that first night next door to Alice and Nelle. I could hear Alice’s soft breathing and listened for Julia’s. I thought about the three very different lives that had intersected, for the time being, in this shelter from the storm.

—

N
elle had known that the “dry technicalities” of a legal practice were not for her. The oldest person weathering the hurricane was ninety-three but those technicalities still filled her days.

Most folks would consider the kinds of law Alice practiced to be technical stuff. Alice didn’t.

“She made it seem like detective work,” said Faye Dailey, who grew up the daughter of a Monroeville grocer. Dailey, now retired, did some work for Alice years ago, tracing property rights for a petroleum company. “We were trying to track down information, to piece together a puzzle. She actually made it interesting.”

Alice was showing me property lines on a plat map one day, tracing them with her index finger. She was sitting at her kitchen table. Her old-fashioned adding machine, the kind that prints long slips of thin white paper with figures on them, was pushed to one side. Next to it was the banker’s lamp she used those evenings she worked late on income taxes or other work she brought home. For her, those lines on the Monroe County plat map told a story about generations of a family who lived on the property. She remembered the way they fought over the land, the way some thought ahead about how to divide it to spare hard feelings among their heirs.

Generations of clients counted on Alice’s discretion, whether she was preparing their income taxes, arranging a property sale, or drafting their wills. What she knew about the personal conflicts, wishes, and finances of the men and women of Monroeville could fill a library.

Right after my father graduated from law school in 1963, I told Alice, he wrote wills for servicemen stationed aboard a nuclear
submarine. He always said that what you learned about all those sailors and officers in order to write their wills could inspire a lifetime of short stories.

Alice told me, “You learn a lot about people when they go to make their wills. I never shall forget all of these people involved.”

People, for example, like the prosperous client whom she had known for years. He set up an appointment with her. He wanted to write his will so that he left his assets to his wife—“until such time as she might remarry.” Alice shook her head ever so slightly. They had been a close couple.

“I said, ‘Why on earth would you do this?’ And he said, ‘She might marry somebody no good. And I can’t think of somebody else benefiting [from] what I’ve spent my life putting together.’ I said—I couldn’t resist it—I said, ‘She married you, didn’t she? What kind of judgment did she show?’”

I could see the mirth in Alice’s eyes.

“That didn’t change the man’s mind, though. I couldn’t resist his questioning her judgment. They had worked together, had a very nice, comfortable home. He just had visions of somebody coming in and occupying that home that he had worked for. To me, that’s selfish.”

Whether or not she agreed with the contents of a will, she wrote it to hold up to any legal challenges. Nelle wrote in
To Kill a Mockingbird
that Atticus could write a will “so airtight” nothing could slip through the cracks.

“You find a story everywhere,” Alice said. “If you were a novelist, you’d get all kinds of ideas because the truth is stranger than fiction.”

Stranger than fiction and, in Nelle’s words, “always a better story.”

Alice fixed her gaze on me. The house was as warm as ever. I could feel the usual sheen of perspiration on my face and hoped she didn’t notice. There was, once again, no place I’d rather be. “So if you ever get tired of this,” Alice said, referring to my book, “just pick out any dysfunctional family down here and get your plot.”

Chapter Thirty-two