The Mockingbird Next Door

by Marja Mills

The Lees’ doctor in Monroeville, Rayford Smith, advised that Frances Lee go to Selma for tests. These days, people in Monroeville travel to Mobile or Pensacola for specialists they can’t find in town. But in Frances’s day, Selma was the place. A.C. dropped off his wife at what was then Vaughan Memorial Hospital in Selma on that Wednesday and then continued along to the conference. A few days of tests would, they hoped, explain why Frances was feeling ill.

  On Friday, conference business concluded, A.C. drove to Selma to pick up Frances. He was not prepared for the grim news that greeted him.

  “He was told she was in the last stages of malignancy in the lungs and the liver,” Alice said. “She probably had three months to live.”

  A.C. drove back to the house on Alabama Avenue and broke the news to Alice. They made the difficult calls to Louise in Eufaula, Ed in Montgomery, and Nelle Harper in New York.

  “We called Nelle just to alert her, and said, Don’t come yet.”

  They’d know more in a day or two, when she could plan accordingly. Alice and A.C. spent a restless night at home. They drove to Selma the next morning. Louise and Ed met them there.

  Alice fell silent for a few moments as she recalled the scene. Nearly fifty years removed from the event, her sadness was still palpable. “Sometime in the afternoon we went out to get some food, and when we got back to the hospital, Mother had gone,” Alice said. Frances had suffered a heart attack and did not regain consciousness. “She was unconscious when we returned to the hospital,” Alice said, “and died that evening.

  “Then we called Nelle Harper so she’d have time to get money out to come home,” Alice continued. “Fortunately, she was working at BOAC at that time and they made arrangements for her. And we had to make arrangements for [the funeral].” Perhaps the only thing worse than being with their mother in Selma that day was, in Nelle’s case, not being there.

  Nelle never spoke of that time; only Alice did.

  Still reeling, Alice and A.C. found some comfort in returning to the routines of their law office. Nelle stayed on a while with the family before going back to Manhattan, to her typewriter, to her friends, to her airline job.

  Six weeks after Frances’s death, Nelle’s day began like any other. Her life as an aspiring writer in New York City was not as predictable as her father’s and Alice’s. But weekdays were routine as Nelle rose and dressed for her job at the airline. She could look at her watch at any given hour on any given workday and know what the two of them were doing back home.

  A blink ago there’d been three in Monroeville, with Frances at home while A.C. and Alice practiced law in their office two blocks away. Now father and daughter found solace in the familiar. At Barnett, Bugg & Lee, there were, as usual, clients to see, documents to draft, cases to research. Both A.C. and Alice were creatures of habit. Now their routines were something more: a relief, something useful to do as they adjusted to the loss.

  That July morning father and daughter were at their desks in adjacent offices when the call came from Montgomery. It was 8:30 A.M. “We were both there, but for some reason I answered the phone,” Alice told me, “and this voice identified himself as the commandant at Maxwell Air Force Base. Could he speak to Mr. Lee? I called Daddy and said, It’s for you.”

  Something told Alice to stay on the line. “I don’t know why,” she says. “I never did that. I heard the commandant say, ‘I’m sorry to tell you, but your son did not wake up this morning. He was found dead in his bunk.’ So there we were.”

  An autopsy revealed that Ed had died of a brain aneurysm, probably several hours before his body was discovered on the morning of July 12.

  If Alice and A.C. took comfort in the routines of the law office, Nelle found solace with artistic expression. For a time, she wrote less and instead painted. The sea scene she painted as she coped with the losses hangs above the living room piano in the sisters’ home. I’d seen it a hundred times before I thought to ask Alice its provenance. I could hear the pride of an older sister in her reply.

  Nelle’s creativity always had extended beyond writing and her foray into painting. She was musical. On our drives, she sometimes sang random lines of the hymns of her childhood. Or show tunes from the Broadway shows she saw as an adult. One day, under her breath, she began singing “Love Lifted Me.” She picked up the lyrics partway through the hymn. “Dah dum, sinking to rise no more.” Another time, more playfully, it was a jaunty line from The Pirates of Penzance. “I am the very model of a modern Major-General.” I couldn’t get that tune out of my head for the rest of the day. Despite her vocal ability, Nelle’s early efforts to learn the violin did nothing to further their mother’s desire to have another musician in the family. Nelle sawed away at it as a girl, and then gave it up. Nobody tried to talk her out of it.

  As a family, they loved the literary arts, of course. A. C. and Frances Lee devoted lots of time to reading to their children. When Louise and, later, Ed both married and had children, A.C. read to his grandchildren. He was a somewhat formal man, even at home, but his lap was a welcoming place to enjoy a book.

  The sorrow over Ed’s sudden death, with his children so young, was something to be borne, not gotten over. Ed’s widow, Sara Anne, went on to marry again, a man who also had lost his spouse and was raising a young child, Stella. John and Sara Anne went on to have a fourth child, Martha. A.C.’s oldest grandchild called him “Opp,” a mispronunciation of “Pop” or “Poppa.” He became Opp to the other grandchildren when they came along.

  A.C. wrote a letter to her in her new life that Sara Anne shared with me all those years later. It is on Barnett, Bugg & Lee letterhead. His distinctive blend of formality and affection is evident.

  The stationery notes in smaller letters on the upper left the names of four lawyers, two of them living: J. B. Barnett (1874–1952); L. J. Bugg (1870–1938); A. C. Lee; Alice F. Lee. (Two minor spelling errors are corrected below.)

  LAW OFFICES OF BARNETT, BUGG & LEE

  October 25, 1955

  Addressed to Mr. and Mrs. John A. Curry Jr.,

  310 Woodfield Drive, Auburn, Alabama

  Dear John and Sara Anne:

  As I grow older, I become more thoroughly convinced that the policy of passing out flowers during life time is wise and proper.

  I am not given to lavish flattery where not deserved, yet I feel that we should recognize well earned meritorious accomplishments as we see them. With this idea in mind I take this method of conveying to you two my earnest congratulations and high appreciation for the outstanding job you have done and are still doing in the matter of welding two families into one.

  And in this connection I would not overlook the part Stella has played in this accomplishment. You can easily understand my keen interest in observing the situation from its inception; and I have always recognized in her a most commendable attitude, and a desire to promote the development of the new family relationship.

  I now say again, I want the whole family to feel that our home is your home too; and particularly, I want always to be “Opp” to all the children.

  With love for the entire family,

  Very sincerely yours,

  A C Lee

  “I can’t tell you what that meant to me,” Sara Anne said. “What it meant to us. It was typical of him, even when he had lost Ed.”

  I first interviewed Sara Anne in the Monroeville dental office of her son, Ed, just a baby when his father died. Sara Anne and her husband, John, had driven from Auburn for the day for dental work and a visit with the family.

  She and Nelle had been classmates when she was Sara Anne McCall. She married Ed Lee in the summer of 1947. The Methodist church grew so hot that June day she told me, that the candles melted and fell over to one side.

  The personalities of the four Lee children, as Sara Anne observed them, were in full force by the time they reached young adulthood. Alice, from an early age, was respon
sible, steady, one to look after the others in the family. Louise was the prettiest of the girls, lively and social. Ed was the all-American who loved football, studied engineering, and went off to serve in Europe in World War II. Nelle, even as a girl, was the nonconformist, feisty and independent.

  When she was ten, Nelle was feeling put out as Christmas approached. Usually this was a festive time of year for the Lees, even during the Depression, and a season rich in anticipation for the youngest among them. That year, however, 1936, all the family’s energies were devoted to the upcoming wedding of twenty-year-old Louise. Or at least that is how it felt. Nelle groused that this wasn’t going to be much of a Christmas.

  On Christmas Day, out of nowhere, a red bicycle appeared. It was a gift from her parents. Nelle was thrilled. They had kept their secret well, and in an instant her dejection turned to elation.

  “She rode off,” Alice said with a chuckle, “and we didn’t see much of her for a while after that.”

  Later, Nelle recalled her childhood Christmases in an essay for McCall’s magazine. “Christmas to Me” appeared in December 1961, amid perhaps the most eventful period of her life.

  What I really missed was a memory, an old memory of people long since gone, of my grandparents’ house bursting with cousins, smilax, and holly. I missed the sound of hunting boots, the sudden open-door gusts of chilly air that cut through the aroma of pine needles and oyster dressing. I missed my brother’s night-before-Christmas mask of rectitude and my father’s bumblebee bass humming “Joy to the World.”

  That Christmas of 1961, To Kill a Mockingbird was still on the best-seller list seventeen months after it was published. The book was proving to be a genuine phenomenon, with all the attendant adulation and money, demands, and hassles.

  Perhaps the harshest critics were in her hometown. Some resented the focus on racial injustice in their part of the world. Others thought the to-do over the book by Mr. Lee’s little girl was plain silly.

  That year, Writer’s Digest asked several authors, “What advice would you offer a person who aspires to a writing career?”

  Lee’s response was telling. “I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.”

  In small type below her signature, the magazine identifies her as the “author of To Kill a Hummingbird.”

  (In 2012, the magazine’s editors, recalling that 1961 survey, wrote about her long public silence. “Here’s to hoping it wasn’t because we cited Lee as the author of ‘To Kill a Hummingbird.’ Oy. Some 50 years later, WD still regrets [and heavily cringes at] the error. Sorry, Harper!”)

  In Hollywood, meanwhile, the filming of To Kill a Mockingbird was under way, as was a close friendship between Nelle and its star, Gregory Peck, and his wife, Veronique. Nelle told interviewers of her struggle, and determination, to produce a second novel.

  The following year, 1962, she lost the father on whom she had based her beloved character Atticus. A.C. had been ailing and died on April 15. Eight months later, in December, the film was released.

  That year also marked the beginning of a tradition, one that yielded an abundance of adventures, misadventures, and, always, stories. For the decade after their father died, the three Lee sisters took annual trips, seeing much of the country by car, train, and even riverboat.

  At this time in their lives, the difference in their ages mattered less. And Nelle’s celebrity status not at all. In this group, she was the baby sister, plain and simple.

  So Alice, Louise, and Nelle would plan and correspond, talk and anticipate, and then meet up in the designated city. They would look around if any museums or restaurants drew their interest. But then they would take to the open road or board a train. One vacation would end and they’d begin thinking about where to go next. By this time the oldest, Alice, was settled in Monroeville. Middle sister, Louise, lived in Eufaula, Alabama, two hundred miles away. Nelle, the youngest, was in New York. The trips stopped when the uncertain health of Louise’s husband meant she no longer felt comfortable being away for long.

  As different as the three sisters were, they all had their Aunt Alice’s sense of adventure. They could squabble with the best of them, but their pleasure in one another’s company, the way they made their own fun, was obvious. On one such trip, in 1965, the observation came from a fellow steamboat passenger they hadn’t even met. For a change of pace that year, they boarded a Mississippi riverboat, the Delta Queen.

  “I never shall forget the morning we were to get off the Delta Queen.”

  “I never shall forget.” I didn’t know anyone besides Alice who used that phrase. A story followed, always.

  Five years after To Kill a Mockingbird was published, the three sisters met up in Ohio to take a riverboat down the Mississippi to New Orleans. From Alabama, Louise and Alice took the train north to Cincinnati. Nelle arrived by rail from New York and met them there. They boarded the Delta Queen on a Saturday for the eight-day trip to New Orleans.

  That last day, as they waited for their luggage before getting off, the three women did what they had been doing all along. They reclined in chairs on the deck, soaking in some sun, laughing, talking, finishing one another’s stories.

  A passenger they had not met approached the sisters.

  “She said, ‘Do you mind if I speak to you?’ And we said, ‘Certainly not.’

  “She said, ‘I’ve been watching you all week. You have never [mixed] with anybody. You haven’t participated in any of the entertainment, as most of the passengers have done. And yet you seem like you’ve had the best time of anybody.’

  “And we just said, ‘We’re three sisters and we live in different parts of the country and when we get together this is what happens.’”

  Another time, Louise and Alice met Nelle in New York. The three rented a car for a drive through the autumn blaze of color in New England. In Connecticut, they saw a farmer in a field with his horse, not an uncommon sight. As they got closer, the horse suddenly bolted for the road and ran smack into their rental car. The ladies were unhurt; the horse seemed okay, too. Alice wondered aloud if the clerk would believe them when they returned the car and had to explain the dents. Nelle was persuasive.

  “You’re not going to believe this, but a horse ran into us. We didn’t run into the horse. It ran into us.”

  Another year, the three took Amtrak’s Empire Builder from Chicago up through Minnesota, west through North Dakota and Montana, all the way to Seattle.

  On one of their last trips together, Nelle’s agent, Maurice Crain, joined the sisters for a swing through the South. Word got back to the sisters that upon his return, Crain had this to say about the three of them: “They laugh all the time. They don’t agree on anything, not even the temperature. But they have the best time of anybody you ever saw.”

  Even so, this trip was bittersweet. Maurice already was in failing health and didn’t have his usual stamina. He died a couple of years later, in 1970. He was sixty-eight. Nelle would grieve his loss for a long time.

  Perhaps the most animated I ever saw Nelle was in, of all places, the darkened, charmless parking lot at the Walmart strip mall off Alabama Avenue. Tom and Hilda Butts and Nelle and I had lingered over dinner at China Star, the storefront Chinese restaurant a couple of doors down from Walmart. Only a few other tables were occupied that night, and it afforded privacy.

  Nelle had been telling us about Crain’s experiences in World War II and continued the conversation as we walked to our cars. A native of Texas, he spent time in a German prisoner-of-war camp.

  “Can you imagine being a young man from Texas,” Nelle said, “in those conditions, not knowing if you will survive, and if you do, what will happen?” She could listen to him talk about it for hours, she said, but he didn’t speak about it all that much. “That was true of a lot of the men when they returned, you know.”<
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  I nodded.

  “And then to think Jewish men returning home from the war were still treated like second-class citizens when they wanted to move into a certain building or join a country club. Just nonsense.”

  Nelle cut herself off.

  “Listen to me going on and on,” she said. “We should be going. I don’t mean to keep you.”

  With a hint of a warm breeze, and Nelle in high spirits and a talkative mood, there was no place I’d rather have been than standing in that strip mall parking lot under a blanket of stars.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Predicaments make for the best stories. One wrong turn was all it took for Nelle to drive into trouble years ago near the tiny town of Tunnel Springs. The misstep left Nelle and their Aunt Alice alone in a quandary on a cold night.

  “It had rained heavily,” Alice said, “and as they started down a hill, they realized how deep the stream was at the foot of it.

  “Nelle Harper was afraid to go down for fear the car would drown out. Well, she had started down the hill. It was slick. And she couldn’t back up. There was nowhere to turn. She either had to go through the water or back to the top. Well, she said something told her not to get in the water. She had no idea how deep it was.”

  They waited for another car to come along, but it turned out they were on a little-used logging road and no one came.

  “Nelle Harper was afraid,” Alice said. “It was spring so they had only lightweight garments on when they set out, but it was going to get cool at night. And Auntie was very crippled from rheumatism and could not walk—her knees—she could not walk distances. Nelle Harper was afraid to leave her there by herself while she tried to walk out. They had no idea how far they’d gone in. So they just had to spend the night in the car.

  “The timber was high on each side of the road and the only thing they could see was the sky above them. Occasionally they’d see lights from an airplane, and they heard all the sounds of the night.”