The Mockingbird Next Door by Marja Mills

Author:Marja Mills [Mills, Marja]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-06-05T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Nelle pulled into the driveway next door and, with a wave, she and Alice disappeared inside.

Alice explored the world from that modest house. She did it year after year, her appetite undiminished, from her perch in the living room, in those classic suits and panty hose, one slim ankle crossed over the other.

If the gray recliner was command central, as I came to think of it, it also was a nest, the reading chair with the floor lamp on one side and the mounting stacks of books, always threatening to topple over, on the other.

Nelle’s life in a wider world, her singular experience being Harper Lee, with all that meant, expanded Alice’s world, too. So many of her stories unfolded as Alice sat in that same living room chair, Nelle in her own reading chair across from her, telling her about the famous people she met, the trips she took to England, the things she did in New York, and, yes, the books she was reading.

It wasn’t the same, of course, as if she had poked around those English villages in person, or walked the streets of all the other places she visited by books and imagination. But I was struck by how fully she seemed to have experienced the world.

“This is how I’ve traveled,” Alice told me that first evening I met her, running her hand across a row of books.

“You know,” Tom said one day, “here Nelle Harper is this famous author who has traveled all over and met so many famous people. And I used to wonder if that wasn’t a little hard for Alice, who knows more about English history than most British people and never has gone there. But I’ve never seen any envy there. She gets such a kick out of Nelle’s stories but I don’t think there’s ever been resentment about that.”

On one Saturday afternoon I was recording Alice’s stories about the Lee family when she told me about the letter Nelle sent home the summer she was studying at Oxford.

“The American students that were over there that summer—see, it was still close enough after the war that everyone was still rationed and gas was still—you went everywhere on bicycle, nearly. Occasionally, Nelle Harper would see one of those big hogs on wheels—one of the Rolls-Royces.”

It turned out, Alice told me, that one of the Oxford boys was going to London because he had a letter of introduction to a member of Parliament. “Something had happened that his girl couldn’t go,” Alice said, “and he asked Nelle Harper if she’d like to go. And she went. I think maybe they bicycled all the way in but, you know, it’s not far. And they were having tea on the terrace and this man who was hosting them excused himself from the table for a short time and returned with somebody.”

Alice paused and looked at me with the relish of a cook about to serve something special. “And that somebody was Winston Churchill.”

She continued,

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