The Mockingbird Next Door

by Marja Mills

  —

  Nelle 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

  Three things out of Nelle’s control were in the works. Not one but two movies were being filmed about Truman Capote researching his 1966 bestselling book, In Cold Blood, in Kansas with his friend Harper Lee. Worse still, the first major Lee biography was under way by someone she didn’t know or trust. Charles Shields, the man working on the biography, had written Nelle to request her help. She wanted nothing to do with it.

  “Hell, no,” she wrote him. He proceeded without her. She would get word of Shields sightings. He had been spotted at the Old Courthouse, asking about her. He had contacted a longtime friend of hers in New York with questions. Tom Butts was getting e-mails from Shields, though he declined the repeated requests for interviews.

  For Nelle, after years of dodging the limelight, any one of those projects would have been unnerving. Three under way at once felt like a siege. She didn’t know how she would be depicted in any of the three and was trying, unsuccessfully, it seemed to me, to quell the sense of foreboding they stirred in her.

  I went online one night, her bedroom light glowing across from mine, our blinds drawn. I sat cross-legged on my bed, searching Google on my laptop for any tidbits about what she might expect from the two films. There wasn’t much. Infamous, with Sandra Bullock as Nelle and Toby Jones as Truman, had been filming in Austin, Texas. The other movie, Capote, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, was generating buzz for his ability to channel the diminutive writer. I printed out what I found to show her over coffee. She was coming over the next day.

  Given Nelle’s feelings about these projects, I was reminded how unusual it was for her and Alice to have encouraged me the way they had. I was a known quantity; that helped. So did the leisurely pace at which this all was unfolding, and in their hometown.

  That morning, my phone rang. I was pretty sure it would be Nelle and she’d have four words by way of greeting. It was and she did.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hi, hon. You pourin’?”

  “I sure am,” I said. “Come on over.”

  “You sure this is still a good time? I don’t want to keep you from anything.”

  “No, this is a great time, Nelle. I’d love a cup of coffee with you. Come on over whenever you’re ready.”

  “All righty. I’m on my way. Bye.”

  She had a playful way of saying “Bye” sometimes, exaggerating the Alabama accent. I took this as a sign she was in good spirits.

  I hustled to turn the oven on and get a pot of strong coffee started. I had defrosted the round tin of Sister Schubert’s rolls I got at Winn-Dixie. I was sliding the tin onto the top rack of the oven when I heard Nelle’s smart rap on the kitchen door.

  “Hi, there,” I said. Nelle was a little out of breath. She made a beeline for her usual spot at my kitchen table. In that chair, her back was to the wall and she was facing out to the rest of the room. “In Chicago, that would be the gangster chair, you know,” I told her. She liked to tease me about being from the city of Al Capone and John Dillinger. I knew she didn’t like to wait one minute for her coffee so I poured her a cup as I spoke.

  I sat across the round oak table from her and handed her the printouts with some short articles about the two Capote movies. There was no mistaking that the young Harper Lee, as played by Bullock in one and Catherine Keener in the other, would have a major role in both films. Nelle leafed through the pages I had printed out. “These are from your magic box, I assume?” Nelle said, her eyebrows arched in mock disdain once again.

  “’Fraid so,” I said. She didn’t meet my smile. Maybe that wasn’t mock disdain but the real thing. Nonetheless, she read with interest. She wanted to know about a picture a friend had spotted in People magazine. Bullock, as Lee, was on location. In the photo, she was crossing a street wearing white socks with black pumps. Nelle wasn’t one to care about fashion but this was too much. “I never,” she said.

  Nelle squinted to read the printouts. She stood and held them under the windows by the table, where there was more light. “Gwyneth Paltrow,” she read aloud. The actress had recently signed on to perform a song in the film starring Jones and Bullock. Nelle seemed to know very little about the plans for either film. She finished skimming the printouts in silence and returned to her coffee. I refilled her cup and she added another Splenda, folding the yellow
packet over and over in the way that she did. It joined a couple of other crumpled yellow packets by her saucer. She tapped her index finger on the printouts. “May I have these?”

  “Yeah, those are for you,” I said.

  She gave me one of those long, even looks that were hard to read.

  “You don’t know how Hollywood works,” she told me.

  “Educate me,” I said.

  “They do stuff and then they tell you about it later.”

  —

  Capote hit theaters in September 2005. Judy Croft told Nelle, half in jest, that they could try to disguise her in a wig and smuggle her into a movie theater in Mobile to watch it. But with her hearing, she wouldn’t be able to catch much in that setting anyway. Instead, on this November evening, Nelle had an early videotape of Capote, something not yet available to the public since the movie was still in some theaters. She told me Veronique Peck had sent the bootlegged copy to her from Los Angeles. Nelle already had tried viewing it once but had difficulty hearing. She hadn’t caught much.

  So we would make an evening of it: Her friend Kathryn would supply the VCR, Nelle the tape, and I would operate the remote control. Only among this Monroeville posse, most of them in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, would I be considered the person with technical expertise. I could rewind, fast-forward, and pause, and that was enough to earn the gratitude and relieved thanks of Nelle and Kathryn.

  We’d need to fortify ourselves for this. Kathryn and I would get hamburgers to go from Radley’s. Nelle requested only a salad from Burger King. She was watching her cholesterol. She was in good spirits, despite a hectic day centered on a funeral. She had jeans on and the crisp white shirt she had worn to the funeral. “It never stopped,” she said. She’d had to contend with a plumber for a problem at the house while preparing to attend longtime friend Joe Watley’s funeral at First Methodist. Tom Butts performed the service with another minister.

  Kathryn’s home, like the Lees’ and mine, was a one-story redbrick ranch. After dinner, we took the two steps down from Kathryn’s living room and dining area to her television room. Time for the movie. The room, once a screened porch, now was enclosed. It had bright green indoor/outdoor carpeting and white wicker furniture. On one wall hung three rural Alabama scenes painted by Kathryn’s great-aunt. Those, too, held a personal story, like the painting above the Lees’ fireplace, that I would learn only later. Kathryn’s high-strung pug, Rocky, ran around the porch and settled in at her feet.

  Nelle dragged a white wicker rocker up near the set. “Thank goodness you know how to work this . . .”

  The movie opens with a moody scene of endless Kansas wheat fields under a gray sky with black, billowy clouds. We see a traditional white farmhouse at a distance, and then, inside the eerily quiet old house, is a glimpse of the aftermath of the brutal 1959 shotgun murders of Herb and Bonnie Clutter and two of their four children.

  No one has spoken yet in the film. Already, though, the scene has drawn a reaction from Nelle. “Their house was nothing like that,” Nelle said. “It was sort of modern.”

  Just a sentence into the first dialogue, Nelle was leaning forward and frowning. “What was that?” she said. I pulled my chair up near hers, remote in hand. “Tell me when the volume is right,” I said, and moved it up and up and up. I rewound the tape and started it again. Nelle put her hand to her ear when the dialogue began again, and shook her head. She wasn’t catching much. I paused the tape, faced her, and repeated the dialogue, enunciating the words loudly.

  We proceeded that way.

  After a scene of Nelle and Truman—Catherine Keener and Philip Seymour Hoffman—on the train to Kansas, we see Nelle behind the wheel of a yellow and white car, the Kansas wheat fields stretching to the horizon. Nelle glances at Truman, who is staring out the window at the rural scene.

  “Does this make you miss Alabama?” she asks.

  “Not even a little bit,” he answers.

  “You lie,” Nelle shoots back. It is friendly banter between the two.

  “I don’t lie,” Truman insists.

  I paused the tape and resumed my loud enunciating, facing Nelle. “You said to Truman, ‘Does this make you miss Alabama?’ And he said, ‘Not even a little bit.’ Then you said, ‘You lie.’ And he said, ‘I don’t lie.’”

  If this felt odd to me, telling the Harper Lee in the room what the Harper Lee in the car said, I could only try to imagine how it was for her.

  Catherine Keener’s Nelle is the modest, steady, sensible—but fun—counterpart to Hoffman’s erratic, eccentric, manipulative—but funny—Truman. The dialogue might be mostly the product of a screenwriter’s informed imagination, but that dynamic was true to what I had learned of Nelle and Truman’s friendship back then.

  We see Perry Smith, one of the two men captured and charged with the murders, walking with a halting step. “Why is that man limping?” Kathryn asked from her own white wicker chair, near the paintings.

  I paused the movie. “He had,” Nelle said, and paused, “leg injuries.”

  In one scene three-quarters of the way through the movie, Truman and Nelle are back in New York. Truman joins Nelle at a glittering reception at the Plaza Hotel following the premiere of the film starring Gregory Peck. Flashbulbs pop as photographers in fedoras snap Truman entering the hotel. At this development, Nelle—the real one in Monroeville, forty-three years after the film was released—leaned back in her wicker rocker for a moment. She took her glasses off, tipped her head back, and laughed. “If there was a premiere and a party in New York,” she told us, “they didn’t invite me.” She laughed again and put her glasses back on.

  When it was over, Nelle leaned back in her rocker again and was quiet. She seemed relieved. Kathryn and I were relieved she was relieved. Nelle liked the movie for the most part, she told us, though she pronounced it “historical fiction.”

  Forty-six years had passed since Nelle boarded the train to Holcomb, Kansas, to help her old friend research In Cold Blood, forty-six years since Nelle had submitted the manuscript for To Kill a Mockingbird to her publisher, J. B. Lippincott Company. She wanted, she told me, to help Capote, whose career had been “on hold.” He envisioned a book that would break new ground with meticulous reporting of a true story that nonetheless would read like a novel. He had established his reputation with novels such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Other Voices, Other Rooms but had been casting about for a different kind of project.

  Now he needed Nelle, not only her writer’s eye but her down-to-earth charm, her ability to fit right in around a small-town kitchen table as they made the rounds. He wouldn’t inspire the same confidence, not with his floor-length camel-hair coat, flamboyant manner, and peculiar, childlike voice. Nelle and I scraped our chairs back to where they had been, away from the set, and sat facing Kathryn. “Lord, Nelle,” Kathryn said. We were quiet again. “That man must have studied everything about Truman,” Kathryn said of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance.

  “That was uncanny,” Nelle said. “He’ll get an Oscar for this.” She was right. Kathryn rose from the couch. “I’m going to put that cobbler in bowls and we’ll eat it out here,” Kathryn said.

  “I’ll give you a hand,” I said.

  “That’s okay, sugar. You keep talking.”

  “Was he as duplicitous as he is portrayed?” I asked Nelle.

  “Oh, honey,” she said. “He lied. That’s what he did. I think he had to.”

  Kathryn brought out bowls with blueberry cobbler from Food World, topped with vanilla ice cream. “This is delicious, Kathryn,” Nelle said. We all turned our attention to the cobbler, eating more than talking for a couple of minutes. Our spoons clinked against the bowls.

  The only scene that unfolded as she remembered it, Nelle told us, was the perp walk up the courthouse steps one cold night.

  Before long, we said our good-nights to
Kathryn and made the short drive home. I pulled into Nelle’s driveway to drop her off. Alice had the porch light on but Nelle lingered in the car. She wondered aloud why filmmakers make so much up in movies about real people.

  “The truth,” she said, “is always a better story.” She was in good sprits. We had our windows down. This November weather was odd, a mix of warm and cool, often in the same day. I felt the faintest stirrings of a breeze. I turned off the ignition. I was struck by the privilege and the pleasure of the evening we had spent, the conversation we were having.

  For some reason—maybe because we’d just seen a film—in my mind’s eye an image flashed of the two of us in the car. Then I saw us from a greater distance, as if this were all a movie and the camera were panning back from two women sitting in a blue Dodge, porch light casting a yellow glow. At a greater distance than that, the Lees’ home was one of many in Monroeville with a porch light on that evening. And from an even greater distance, Monroeville would be just one dot in the state of Alabama.

  We were quiet a little while, thinking. As I spent more time with Nelle, I’d noticed, there was an ease to silences like this. They didn’t feel awkward but rather companionable. Spending this much time with two women who didn’t hear well changed the way I thought about silence.

  I’d been in the habit, I realized, of not letting silences last too long. It was true in the car, out for coffee, or over dinner. It seemed more polite, more natural, to chat. But the opposite was true for those with difficulty hearing. When I was with Nelle or Alice, chatting just to chat made no sense. It required effort, especially in places like a car or a noisy restaurant, to catch what the other person was saying. Silence was a chance to rest.

  As wonderful as they were as conversationalists, the shared, companionable silence was a pleasure of its own. It was a chance to gather one’s thoughts, not to talk just for the sake of talking.