The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee (13 page)

I didn’t see this. I had been in the kitchen helping Judy and returned to the living room, which was suddenly abuzz. “Was that?” someone asked. “I think so,” came the answer.

If Alice was taking it all in, she gave no indication. Nelle appeared to experience these Super Bowl developments with a mixture of surprise, consternation, and barely suppressed amusement, in that order. Not that we spoke of it again. She told an off-color joke in private now and then but also lamented the erosion of a particular kind of public propriety. “She grows frustrated,” Tom told me in one of our first interviews, “with a country and a culture grown coarse and obscene.”

Alice spent the commercial breaks and halftime show in conversation or absorbed in the coffee table book I had given her as a belated Christmas gift. She ran her arthritic fingers across the photos in Thomas Pakenham’s
Remarkable Trees of the World,
and studied the text. On the cover, an older man in hiking boots, gazing upward, stood dwarfed at the foot of an enormous redwood. I bent over Alice a bit and raised my voice so she could hear better. “In honor of your most remarkable tree,” I told her.

“Alice’s tree” is what her friends called a giant, sheltering live oak people guessed might be a couple of hundred years old. The tree didn’t belong to anyone she knew. It wasn’t even on a main road. It shaded a good portion of a large yard in the town of Uriah, a forty-five-minute drive southeast of Monroeville. It was just something striking she had come across years ago and liked to check on, to appreciate out on drives. The oak prompted Nelle, on an earlier Sunday drive, to observe
about the two sisters, “One thing about us, we can appreciate beauty without needing to possess it.” The moment she said it, I knew that comment would stay with me.

The game turned out to be memorable for more than the brief nudity and the novelty of the men’s pharmaceutical ads. The score was close. The Patriots narrowly beat the Panthers, 32–29. Soon it would be time to take our places at the more informal of the Crofts’ two dining tables, this one on a large rug between the kitchen and the living room.

Following some postgame analysis, Alice again was absorbed by her new book of photographs. Nelle leaned over Alice’s chair and put her left arm on the backrest to brace herself. This way her face was closer to Alice’s.

“Alice,” Nelle asked her tenderly, amused, “are you ready to surrender your trees?” Alice smiled. She was not. Not just yet. It was almost time to eat, though, and Nelle was getting hungry. A few minutes later, her voice tinged with exasperation, she tried again.

“Alice, will you surrender your trees?”

She did.

As we lingered at the table after dessert, Nelle warmly thanked Haniel and Judy. “I suppose we should be on our way,” she said. She pushed back a bit from the rectangular table. I could see the mirth in her eyes when she explained.

“One of us at this table has to be at work in the morning.”

There was silence at the table for a moment and then a ripple of appreciative laughter. All eyes had come to rest on Alice. The ninety-two-year-old was the one who had to be at work in the morning.

That night, with the three Crofts sound asleep, I lay awake in the guest room. It was close to midnight, dark and silent. The best days
always lingered in my memory as sounds, even a day like this that just ended.

The sounds were still in my ears. Before the game, Nelle’s slightly husky voice reading aloud the “Rocky Hills News,” unable to finish before that infectious laugh took over, with Judy joining in. “Oh, Nelle.”

During a commercial, Haniel leaning over Alice to comment on a play, his deep voice mixing with her soft rasp, for the time not banker and attorney who had worked together but old friends talking football on a relaxed Sunday afternoon. Kenny’s muted
rat-tat-tat
of his drumsticks against the living room rug.

Nelle’s circle of close friends was a down-to-earth group, eclectic in that it included a retired hairdresser, a pharmacy clerk, a one-time librarian, and a former bookkeeper who also was the wife of a retired bank president. None cared too much about status. Nelle got a kick out of it when one of the town’s socially prominent women referred, a bit dismissively, to Nelle’s unpretentious running buddies as “that crowd.”

Nothing about the day spent with that crowd—not the ease of it, not the familiarity of it, certainly—would have been imaginable two and a half years earlier when Terrence and I rented a car in Atlanta and bent over a map to find Monroeville. I had been surprised—pleased, sometimes thrilled, but always surprised—as strangers I didn’t expect to meet opened the doors to their homes, and as people I spent time with, to discuss the Lees and the area, became new friends. In several cases, those new friends, with time and talk and shared experiences, began to be good friends.

Chapter Ten

I
was back in Chicago to build stamina to return to my newspaper job. But my friendship with Alice and Nelle offered a glimpse at life before the onslaught of modern communications. Not until a year later, in 2005, at the urging of Gregory Peck’s wife, Veronique, would Nelle finally give in and get a cell phone for the long Amtrak journey she was undertaking from New York to Los Angeles. She was going there for Peck’s library fund-raiser. Otherwise, at home in Monroeville, the Lees stuck with the telephone in their hallway nook.

But we shared a favorite mode of transportation: trains. Railroad tracks connected the places that mattered in their world in the South. They connected Evergreen, thirty miles from Monroeville, to Selma, and Selma to Birmingham, Birmingham to Atlanta. The rails also connected one generation to the next in their family as well as mine.

Before passing the bar in 1915, A.C. kept books for Barnett & Bugg and did work for the Manistee & Repton Railroad, a client. A train gave the young Alice and her friend Evelyn Barnett the thrill of their lives when A.C. took them along on a trip to St. Louis. Years later, when Nelle set her sights on being a writer in New York, like her friend Truman, A.C. dropped her off at the Evergreen train station for the
long journey east. Alice made it through the twentieth century without boarding an airplane. Her doctor told her flying would be a bad idea due to an ear condition. Nelle did fly, for a time. She worked as a reservations clerk for the British Overseas Airways Corporation for several years, after all, to pay her rent in New York. That’s the problem, however, with working for an airline. She learned too much about what could go wrong and cause an airplane to crash. After BOAC, she abandoned the skies. Amtrak took her back and forth between New York and Alabama, between one way of life and the other. She made that overnight train trip through her thirties, her forties, her fifties, her sixties, and her seventies, when I met her.

I was looking to return to my job, to keep up with the rigors of newspaper reporting. Well into a period of convalescence, though I was still in bed a lot and no closer to that goal. As my rheumatologist predicted, I’d have to stay on disability leave for the foreseeable future. I decided to explore with the Lees the idea of spending more time in Monroeville, and perhaps renting a place there.

If nothing else, I thought I could begin gathering information for a book about
Mockingbird
country, captured as the fictional Maycomb County in the novel. I didn’t know at that point if Nelle would want to be much involved, but Alice was a remarkable story in her own right. As she entered her tenth decade and our rapport grew, she was ready to talk candidly. Friends of the Lees predicted that Alice would be steadfast in her view of my undertaking and Nelle would run hot and cool on her enthusiasm for it.

I was stunned Alice hadn’t committed their family stories to paper. She knew the family background she shared with Nelle was of lasting interest.
Mockingbird
’s importance in American culture ensured that.

She wrote exceptionally well. Nelle, in fact, once said to me, “Alice is the real writer in the family.” Alice cherished history. She knew
history. She could recount these stories as no one else. She had an eye for details and the memory to do them justice.

“It just wasn’t for me,” she told me when I asked her about that. She didn’t explain why. For years, friends and family had been gently suggesting she put the recollections on paper. She was the authority on Lee family stories and most of the community’s history as well. Precision mattered to her, and accuracy. When she wasn’t sure of something, there was no fudging of facts or embellishing of tales. She found the answer or made it clear she didn’t know.

On days when I was up to it, I pulled out my tape recorder and began the slow, deliberate, and often enthralling project of recording oral histories of Alice Lee and her friends and neighbors in Monroeville. As I did, I could almost feel an invisible hand pushing me. I knew I had to hurry. Alice would one day be gone, and her stories would go with her.

“You know that African proverb ‘When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground’? When Alice dies,” Tom said, “it will be like a library burning.”

A motel wouldn’t suffice for a long-term stay. Yet my search for short-term rentals led to a series of sketchy apartments and depressing dead ends. I hoped to find a mother-in-law-type apartment above someone’s garage or a tiny guesthouse behind a family home. Those existed here and there. Friends asked around for me and I followed a couple of leads, but the places either were occupied or not something available to be rented. If nothing else, I was learning my way around Monroeville’s residential streets and getting a sense of what were considered desirable neighborhoods and not, and why.

I talked to Tom about any older people around town who might be willing to rent a room and grant kitchen privileges to me. It wouldn’t be ideal but it could be workable. The problem was the couple of
people who might consider that also were looking for some live-in assistance from such a person and I didn’t want to commit to any particular schedule.

One lucky day, Dale Welch told me about a house that might be available two doors down from the sisters. She knew the owners. They were fixing it up to sell but might consider renting it to me.

Naturally, my first thought was, No way. The Lees, I assumed, would be less than thrilled at the prospect of having a Chicago journalist as a neighbor, even one with whom they’d formed a friendship.

I was wrong. Nelle and Alice were pleased with the idea.

They weren’t so pleased, however, with the $650 a month rent the owners proposed. “Highway robbery,” Nelle said, indignant. Dale wondered aloud what I already was thinking: What about the other house, next to the Lees, that also was for sale? I didn’t want to even ask the owner unless the Lees approved. They encouraged me to check it out and offered themselves as references to their former neighbor, a young man named Wes Abrams. Would he consider renting it? Turns out he would, and for $450 a month.

The day I met him, Wes wore a camouflage shirt and jeans. His big dog, Buck, happily followed him from room to room in their old house. A year earlier, Wes was transferred to Jackson, Alabama, an hour’s drive from Monroeville. After finding a place there, he put his house up for sale. In a sluggish market, the one-story, three-bedroom home in one of Monroeville’s less glamorous neighborhoods was a tough sale. Priced at eighty thousand dollars, the house sat across the street from the junior high school and featured a screened breezeway off the eat-in kitchen and built-in bookshelves next to a fireplace. In the high-rise where I live in Chicago, not a fancy one by downtown standards, eighty thousand dollars will get you two parking spaces in the underground garage.

Wes and I agreed I would rent month to month while the house remained up for sale.

The house had been empty for several months before I moved in. Well, empty of human occupants, anyway. But I was not alone. I came to realize that my residency was preceded by that of scuttling spiders, alarmingly big cockroaches, and aggressive mildew brought on by storm damage. The formerly living things were no better company. Wes loved to hunt, and these were his trophies. A large deer head sporting an impressive set of antlers was mounted high on the wall of the small room where I put the folding table that served as my desk. What looked to be a stuffed bobcat watched me from a shelf in another room; another crouching creature via taxidermist—I had no idea what—perched nearby. In the kitchen, even the green and white dishes had a duck theme.

I didn’t have much to unpack. I stacked my books, including my paperback copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird,
its margins now filled with my scribbled annotations, on the shelves, hung up my clothes, and made up the bed with the butter-yellow sheets that Dale Welch had lent me. The bed was rather high off the ground, with a white metal frame. When I sat on the edge of the bed, my feet didn’t quite reach the floor. As I settled in, it seemed to me that the unblinking eyes of the animals, as cold as marbles, followed me ominously around the house.