The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee (5 page)

I realized I was still holding the crumpled paper towel.

“Is there a . . .”

“I’ll take that,” Julia said. She threw away the paper towel and returned to the stove.

Julia soon finished making the fried green tomatoes and covered the plate with a paper towel.

I nodded at Julia. “Very nice to meet you.”

She gave me a warm smile, still looking amused. “Nice to meet you, too.”

I followed Alice into the rather dark hallway, with wooden floors, on the other side of the kitchen. It led to the home’s three bedrooms. First, immediately on the left, was a small bathroom with pink tiles. A pair of women’s stockings hung to dry. Above the sink, a dental appointment reminder was tucked into the side of the mirror.

Across the hallway was a compact room with a spare bed. This was
the only bedroom with a window on West Avenue and the blinds were drawn. The room held additional bookshelves and, on a small table, the fax machine that was Alice’s lifeline to friends and family now that her severely limited hearing made phone calls impossible. It was Alice’s quickest link to her sister in New York and even her friends just down the street.

Every week, she told me, Nelle faxed her the Sunday
New York Times
crossword puzzle. The puzzles were a shared pleasure, one they had in common with their mother.

Alice began to tell me about their family. Frances Lee had died in 1951. Nelle was only twenty-five then and still adjusting to life in New York City. She worked as an airline reservations clerk and wrote on the side.
To Kill a Mockingbird
wouldn’t be published for another nine years. Only six weeks after Frances Lee died unexpectedly that summer, following a surprise diagnosis of advanced cancer, Alice, Nelle, and their middle sister, Louise, lost their only brother, Ed. He was found lifeless in his bunk one morning at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery. Only thirty years old, he’d had a brain aneurysm and left a wife and two small children.

The sorrow of those events still flickered across Alice’s face as she recounted them a half century later. When she spoke of the shock of the two deaths, Alice dropped her gaze, and her already raspy voice grew scratchier.

“Daddy was a trouper,” she said. “He lost his wife and his son in a short period but he kept going.” And so did Alice. At work at their firm, the two of them took refuge in the purpose and routine of their shared law practice.

The following year, Alice and A.C. moved to this house from the family’s longtime home on Alabama Avenue where Frances Lee gave
birth to Nelle in an upstairs bedroom, where Nelle and Ed climbed the chinaberry tree in the yard, where A.C. pored over the
Mobile Register
and
Montgomery Advertiser
every day and indulged his fascination with the crimes detailed in magazines such as
True Detective.

But Alabama Avenue was growing more commercial, and the tranquillity of West Avenue appealed to father and daughter. A.C. had suggested the move to West Avenue before the events of that terrible summer, but Frances wasn’t interested. She didn’t want to leave the street where she had friends for a wooded area being newly developed. She’d been out there, to visit a friend who had just had a baby. The memory prompted an affectionate chuckle from Alice. “She said she didn’t want to move out there with all the owls and bats.”

On her extended visits home from New York, Nelle had a new place to call home. As a girl, she liked to watch her father in action at the courthouse. As a woman, she still accompanied him to the law office some days to work on her manuscript about the character he inspired, Atticus Finch.

Alice and her house held a wealth of Lee family stories. In this spare room with the fax, we lingered in front of a bookcase. I asked Alice about their favorite authors. High on her sister’s list, she told me, were William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, Jane Austen and Thomas Macaulay. The first three are familiar names to most people who’ve taken high school English, whether or not they remember what they read. Nowadays,
Home Alone
actor Macaulay Culkin has far greater name recognition than Thomas Babington Macaulay, the British writer, historian, and Whig politician. Thomas Macaulay died in 1859. More than a century later, Culkin’s parents named him in honor of the original Macaulay. Fame is a strange beast.

Alice preferred nonfiction, especially British and American
histories, and Nelle devoured those, too. I spotted a shelf lined with many such histories. Judging by the jackets, some were recent, but many were published decades ago.

“Have you spent time in England?” I asked.

She ran her deeply lined hand across the spines of a row of books. It was a tender gesture. Loving, even. “This,” she said, “is how I’ve traveled.”

Alice’s room, down the hallway a bit and on the left, had a bed with a bright pink coverlet, an old dresser, and, naturally, a crammed bookcase. Other books were in piles on a chair and on the floor. Still more books and rafts of papers were scattered across half the bed.

Like her father, I would later learn, Alice had a peculiar reading habit at bedtime. She would lie flat on her back and hold the open book above her face to read it. Seems like an uncomfortable position but it worked for A. C. Lee and it worked for his daughter. If Alice couldn’t fall asleep, she had her own version of counting sheep. She silently ran through the names of Alabama’s counties. Or American vice presidents. Chronologically. But in reverse order.

At the end of the hallway, she showed me Nelle’s bedroom. This originally was their father’s quarters. It was as modest as the rest of the house. When Nelle was in New York, Julia occupied the room. The walls were blue. Built-in bookshelves lined the wall to the left of the door. A small figurine of a cat perched on a shelf at eye level. A trunk sat under one window. A small door led to the private bath.

As fascinated as I was by this unexpected house tour, I didn’t want to overstay my welcome. But Alice brushed aside my concern about that and continued the conversation.

My thoughts turned to Terrence again. I told Alice that he was out in the car. Would it be okay if he came in to take her photograph?

“Well, yes. All right. Invite him in.”

I hurried out through the darkness to the rental car. It was still a warm night but not nearly as warm and close as in the house.

Terrence lowered his window. He grinned.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry.” I said it so fast it came out as one word. “I had no idea I’d be in there so long. That is Miss Alice. She’s wonderful, Terrence. Come on in. She said it’s okay to bring your camera.”

“Oh, fantastic.” Terrence followed me up the wooden steps to the front door.

Already I was looking forward to telling him about my conversations on our drive back to the Best Western.

“I hope you have enjoyed your visit to Monroeville,” Alice told Terrence.

“Very much.”

We chatted some more in the living room, and then Terrence, tentatively, got down to business. “Is this good here?” he asked. Alice had resumed her spot in the recliner.

“Yes.” Alice smiled at Terrence but also looked a touch wistful. “I never did like photographs of myself. The problem is they look like me.”

Terrence spoke to her gently, put her at ease as much as he could.

“I just hope I don’t crack your camera,” Alice told him. She said this with the wry delivery I came to know well. The real life “Atticus in a Skirt,” as Nelle called her, had that in common with the novel’s quiet attorney. Just as a neighbor in the novel observes of Atticus, Alice could be “right dry.”

Alice had one request for me. Could I stay on long enough to interview the Methodist minister who was a good friend to both Lees? I said I’d like to and I’d ask my editors if I could extend my visit.

I inquired if I might ask her some more questions the following day, either here or at her law office. I expected she might decline,
reasonably enough. Already she had been generous with her time. To my delight, she invited me to stop by her office.

Terrence and I bid her good night and slid into the rental car. We drove back to the motel, excited by this unexpected development.

The next morning, I called my editors. We agreed it made sense to stay on. Alice speaking on the record, particularly about their parents and her sister’s experience with fame, was unusual.

We had another long interview that day, in the suite of offices above the Monroe County Bank. Barnett, Bugg & Lee was a two-lawyer firm consisting of Alice and a young male attorney she had taken under her wing. Another attorney was of counsel. A receptionist sat at a desk near the front door and relayed callers’ messages to Alice. She could no longer hear well enough to use the telephone. As with Atticus Finch and many other small-town lawyers, real estate transactions, tax returns, and wills were at the heart of Alice’s practice.

At one point I asked her about her sister’s long public silence. “I don’t think any first-time author could be prepared for what happened. It all fell in on her,” Alice said, “and her way of handling it was not to let it get too close to her.”

And what about the first question everyone had about her sister: Why didn’t she write another book?

Alice leaned forward in her office chair. “I’ll put it this way . . . When you have hit the pinnacle, how would you feel about writing more? Would you feel like you’re competing with yourself?”

Chapter Three

T
he following day, my phone rang at the Best Western.

“Hello?”

“Miss Mills?”

“Yes, this is Marja.”

“This is Harper Lee. You’ve made quite an impression on Miss Alice. I wonder if we might meet.”

It was as if I had answered the phone and heard “Hello. This is the Wizard of Oz.” I felt my adrenaline spike. With effort, I kept my speaking voice from going up a couple of octaves.

“That would be wonderful.”

The voice on the other end was slightly husky and almost musical, her Alabama accent undiminished by the years in New York City. She didn’t sound the least bit shy.

This was not to be an interview for my newspaper story, she said, but a chance to visit. “Would eleven
A.M.
be all right? At the Best Western?”

“That would be great. Whatever works best for you.”

“All right, then. I’ll see you at eleven.”

I hung up the phone and collected myself.

I called Terrence’s room, then Tim in Chicago. Who would have guessed? It was exciting and a little nerve-wracking.

Tim reacted as Terrence had. “What? Really?”

That night, in bed, I opened the novel again. I slipped under the covers and into the cadence of her prose and the pace of life in 1930s Maycomb.

No matter what the parameters were, I was intrigued by the opportunity to meet with this mysterious literary legend, this woman whose book had meant the world to so many millions of people for so many years. And I never expected to actually be able to speak with her, anyway; so many reporters, year after year, had come to Monroeville before me and left with nothing to write except more stories about hunting for Harper Lee.

The next morning, I went over my notes. I imagined she might want to know who had spoken with me.

The knock came at the appointed time.

I opened the door to my motel room. The light was harsh compared with the dark room. I blinked. Everything about the woman before me looked solid and practical: the short white hair, the large glasses, the black sneakers fastened with wide Velcro straps. Her bangs were cut high and straight across her forehead. She was solidly built and on the tall side. She wore a simple white cotton blouse over casual tan pants. She had on a bit of lipstick but otherwise no makeup or jewelry.

“Hello,” I said. “Please come in.”

“Miss Mills.” She smiled and stepped into the coolness of the room. I closed the door.

“I’m so glad to meet you,” I said. “Would you like to have a seat here?” I motioned to the small table. Not that there was much alternative. Other than a chair pulled up to the desk against the wall opposite
the beds, the table offered the only place to sit. It was a bit cramped, shoved up against the window immediately to the left of the front door as you entered the room. I took the chair by the window and she sat to my left, facing the window. “I can open this if you’d like more light,” I said with a shrug. I wondered if she would prefer the privacy of closed curtains.

“No, this is just fine. Thank you.”

Based on what I’d read, I expected either someone of great reserve or perhaps someone angry about my being in town and unafraid to express her displeasure.

She was neither. Her voice had a pleasant lilt, and although she was reserved while we exchanged greetings, as soon as we began talking she came across as down-to-earth and self-assured. She repeated nearly word for word what she had said on the phone. “Well, you’ve made quite an impression on Miss Alice.”