The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee (26 page)

Peck told this to an audience at
A Conversation with Gregory Peck
. In 1999, the actor, then in his early eighties, traveled to regional theaters around the country. He took questions and told stories, in that sonorous voice, about making
To Kill a Mockingbird,
as well as
Roman Holiday
with newcomer Audrey Hepburn and, later,
MacArthur,
about the World War II general. His daughter and her fellow filmmaker Barbara Kopple recorded those evenings.

In the documentary, Cecilia and writer Daniel Voll are expecting their first child. It’s the spring of 1998. Peck and his wife, the French-born Veronique Passani, are in Washington, D.C., for him to receive the National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton. Cecilia and Daniel visit their hotel room.

Peck tells his daughter about a phone conversation with Harper Lee.

“I talked to Harper yesterday for a long time.”

“Where is she? In Monroeville?”

“She’s in Monroeville looking after her sister. After a nice long talk—we talked about many things—I told her about you.” Peck pauses. “Furthermore I told her if it had been a girl, it might well have been named Harper. She was very touched by it.”

“What if I gave her name to a boy baby?”

Cecilia’s mother, Veronique, knows the answer to that. “I think she’d still be happy about it. It’s a great name for a boy.” And indeed, their boy is named Harper Daniel Peck Voll.

Peck and Nelle had kept up a long correspondence and Nelle stayed with the Pecks in their Holmby Hills home on occasion. When Cecilia Peck lived in New York, Harper Lee would go over and read to the young Harper.

When Peck died at eighty-seven in June 2003, the family tried to reach Nelle in New York by phone but she was out that day. She learned of his death, she told me, on the evening news.

Brock Peters delivered Peck’s eulogy. With more than a thousand people assembled at a cathedral in Los Angeles, Peters also sang a Duke Ellington song, “They Say.” He concluded, “To my friend Gregory Peck, to my friend Atticus Finch,
vaya con Dios
.”

Nelle did not attend the funeral but later visited Veronique Peck in Los Angeles.

Their grandson, Harper, was about six—Scout’s age in the novel—when Nelle came over one day with a request. She wanted to buy him a kite and have it shipped to California. She wondered what we could find online. She wanted an old-fashioned kite, “plain, no writing on it, nothing fancy. Just a classic kite.” She was frustrated that this was more difficult to find than ones with rainbows, gimmicks, or neon colors.

As I showed her what I was finding for kites online—nothing satisfactory that day—she glanced down at the hopeless tangle of power cords I had corralled into a basket on my floor. Cords for my laptop, my cell phone charger, my printer, and the copier all were twisted together and shoved in a basket to one side so I wouldn’t trip over them. She shook her head slowly. “Mercy,” was all she said.

—

T
hat January 2005, Nelle also had an appearance coming up. At the end of the month, she was to attend an annual
To Kill a Mockingbird
luncheon in Tuscaloosa. No matter how relieved, and even pleased, Nelle might feel after an appearance, the days leading up to an event were fraught with anxiety.

Mystique raises expectations. Being anyone’s favorite author raises
expectations, much less being so many people’s favorite author. Still, this was not new to Nelle. Shouldn’t it get easier with time? Apparently not. As the event drew closer, a swirl of apprehension, resentment, and irritation gained momentum.

Nelle told me she continued to do the event partly because of her friendship with the event’s organizers. She also liked that the focus was on students reading and writing about the novel.

Students at a predominantly black Tuscaloosa high school and at a predominantly white one write about the novel and what it means to them. Those judged to have the best essays are honored at the stately home of the president of the University of Alabama.

Nelle was modest about it, but she knew her presence was a thrill for those students. She felt like less of a commodity there. A lot of the awards offered to her, she suspected, were mostly an attempt to get Harper Lee to show up and lend cachet to an event. This was different.

When Nelle studied in Tuscaloosa in the early 1940s, it took longer to travel the 138 miles to the college town on the banks of the Black Warrior River. Now you can make the drive in two hours and forty-five minutes. It seemed farther, though, the way people in Monroeville talked about it. Tuscaloosa has ninety thousand people and all those professors and students, dreamers and gadflies, that university towns attract. Monroeville it isn’t.

The event was less than a week away, and over coffee at McDonald’s, in the usual booth by the window, she fretted about it: the logistics, the need to dress up, the expectations that greeted her anytime she made an appearance.

Nelle knew those sitting at her table would be repeating whatever she said as their Harper Lee anecdote, that people would want to have
their picture taken with her, that accounts of the event might make it into the newspaper.

It comes in handy to have a hairdresser in your posse. For Nelle, getting ready for a public appearance held all the appeal of having a tooth pulled. The one annual event she agreed to was this one. As the event drew closer, Ila offered to trim Nelle’s hair. She would trim Judy’s and mine as well while she was at it.

“Oh, would you, hon?” Nelle said, relieved. “Bless you.” She was uncomfortable with the fuss of primping for things like this.

Ila Jeter retired but kept her professional shears. For years, she ran a one-woman beauty shop. She shampooed and conditioned, cut and curled, teased and styled. She laughed with her customers and sympathized with their troubles. She was a natural.

For Nelle, there was reassurance in shopping for an outfit with Judy or having Ila trim her hair in the comfort and privacy of Ila’s home.

And so it was that a few days before Nelle’s appearance, she and Judy and I gathered at Ila’s handsome one-story house at the end of the cul-de-sac in Mexia. Ila shepherded all three of us into the roomy master bathroom. It was easily five times the size of the main bathroom at the Lee house.

Ila motioned for Nelle to sit in the chair she had dragged in for this purpose. She draped a thin smock, the kind with a snap in the back, over Nelle’s casual, button-down shirt. I perched on the steps to the Jacuzzi, and Judy sat on the window seat. Ila wet Nelle’s hair. She went to work with an efficient snip, snip, snip.

“Are you going to make me look presentable?” Nelle asked Ila. She added wryly: “To the extent that’s possible.”

“More than presentable,” Ila said.

“You know me,” Nelle said. “It’s short hair, leave it white, and be done with it.”

“This is quite a bathroom,” Judy said. It was gracious, spacious. In fact, Ila told us, with her husband James’s cancer progressing, he had mused that perhaps they should just roll a hospital bed in here near the end and make it his room. “He said, ‘Everything would be right here.’”

“Oh, bless his heart,” Nelle said. It was vintage James Jeter. He was a practical man, and he didn’t want to make things any harder than necessary for Ila. She lightly brushed a little wet, white hair off Nelle’s smock. Ila stepped back to regard her work and returned to trimming Nelle’s bangs.

“How long did you work as a hairdresser?” I asked Ila.

“Thirty years.”

“So you knew all about what was happening in people’s lives,” I said.

“Girl, you don’t know. I knew more than I wanted to know.” She had a longtime customer who Ila knew was having an affair with the husband of another regular. She made sure not to book their appointments back-to-back. A last-minute change one day meant that happened, nonetheless.

So Ila worked quickly, she told us. She tried to nudge the freshly coiffed wife out the door without being obvious. She got nowhere. The woman was in a talkative mood and in no hurry. She departed, finally, right before the other woman arrived.

Ila pantomimed her relief. Nelle’s laughter bubbled over. “Mercy.”

Nelle had a question. Had Ila ever read “Petrified Man,” the Eudora Welty short story that takes place in a beauty shop?

“I don’t think so,” Ila said.

“Oh, you should.”

“I can make a copy for you,” I told Ila.

“Oh, would you?” Nelle said.

“Great,” Ila said.

Ila refused to let Nelle or Judy or me pay her. As we left her house, I told Ila I’d drop off the copy of “Petrified Man.”

“I know you’ll enjoy it,” Nelle told her.

Welty published the story in 1939. It became a staple of high school English classes. That’s when I read it, sitting in the overheated, old library of West High in Madison. All these years later, I remembered something about a human specimen preserved in a jar but not much else.

Not long after, I found “Petrified Man” in my copy of
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
. At my bedside printer, I lifted the lid to make the copy. Before setting the book facedown on the glass, I glanced again at the first couple of lines of the story.

“‘Reach in my purse and git me a cigarette without no powder in it if you kin, Mrs. Fletcher, honey,’ said Leota to her ten o’clock shampoo-and-set customer. ‘I don’t like no perfumed cigarettes.’”

I read on. Mrs. Fletcher marvels at the peanuts in Leota’s purse. Leota tells her they came from Mrs. Pike. Who is that? Mrs. Fletcher wants to know.

I put the lid to the printer back down. I couldn’t be expected to stop there, not without knowing who Mrs. Pike was or what was up with Mrs. Fletcher and Leota. The feeling I’d had reading the story twenty-five years earlier was returning to me. It was a feeling about the confining lives of the characters, more like hearing a familiar song in a distant room than recalling anything specific. I still couldn’t remember the details of what happened in that Mississippi beauty shop.

I thought, I’ll just read another a page or two. I climbed up on the
bed and sat cross-legged with the book. Mrs. Fletcher is pregnant, married to a man she expects to reform. She has a multitude of reasons for resenting Mrs. Pike, whom she knows only through Leota’s gossip. There was a “petrified man,” too, a person who could stand stock-still so long he appeared to be made of stone. He turns out to be a wanted criminal, a rapist on the run. Inside the lavender walls of the beauty shop, the gossip flows. The women reveal themselves and their predicaments, more than they know.

I had errands to run, starting with getting a photocopy of the story to Ila. But there were a dozen other stories in the Welty collection.

One more and then it’s back to work.

Maybe two.

Chapter Twenty-seven

I
n February I told Nelle that I was planning to drive to Princeton Junction, New Jersey, later that month to visit my college roommate and her family. I asked Nelle if she wanted to come along, since she was returning to New York about that same time, and flying, of course, was not an option. She could catch an easy commuter train from there. She said yes.

I began my preparations, turning to practical aspects, fighting the urge to get a window sign that said
PLEASE BE CAREFUL. NATIONAL TREASURE ON BOARD.

I did, however, join AAA, stock the car with water bottles, and, much to Alice’s amusement, buy collapsible orange traffic cones for my trunk.

On Thursday morning, February 24, we piled our things in the car and I backed out of her driveway, dipping a back tire off the edge of the narrow cement strip, causing a noticeable bounce. “So much for getting off to a good start,” Nelle told me with a wry smile.

That night I faxed Alice from Newnan, Georgia, telling her that Nelle, even with drops in her eyes, helped to get me on 85, and it
was an easy drive. Nelle dashed off a note on the fax to confirm our arrival and signed off as “Dody.” The nickname goes back to childhood when a young Nelle, as the family story goes, mispronounced a word as
dody
and the name stuck.

After a day of driving and several cups of coffee each, we stopped at another Hampton Inn, in Fredericksburg, Virginia. I managed to get lost trying to find the Bonefish Grill, a seafood restaurant chain. By the time I pulled into the parking lot, we were both tired and stiff from a day in the car. “My treat,” Nelle said. She wanted us to enjoy a quiet dinner at a nice place.

It wasn’t the subdued place we had pictured. Young men and women, still in suits after work, crowded the bar and waiting area. Waiters rushed by and people chatted loudly on cell phones. Nelle took all this in and sank onto a bench for diners waiting to be seated. “Mercy,” she said.

After we sat down for dinner, our conversation turned to the grim topic people were grappling with in Monroeville. The brutal murder of a beloved local doctor and his wife the previous year had shocked everyone. Now trial preparations were under way for the couple’s thirty-one-year-old adoptive son, Timothy Jason Jones, who had a history of drug addiction and anger. The prosecutor had decided this would be a death penalty case, and sentiment in town seemed to be largely in favor of that. What gave some pause was Jones’s long history of addiction. The crime appeared to be related to a dispute over money he wanted for drugs.