Read The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee for Free Online

had a baby. The memory prompted an affectionate chuckle from Alice. “She said she didn’t want to move out there with all the owls and bats.”
    On her extended visits home from New York, Nelle had a new place to call home. As a girl, she liked to watch her father in action at the courthouse. As a woman, she still accompanied him to the law office some days to work on her manuscript about the character he inspired, Atticus Finch.
    Alice and her house held a wealth of Lee family stories. In this spare room with the fax, we lingered in front of a bookcase. I asked Alice about their favorite authors. High on her sister’s list, she told me, were William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, Jane Austen and Thomas Macaulay. The first three are familiar names to most people who’ve taken high school English, whether or not they remember what they read. Nowadays, Home Alone actor Macaulay Culkin has far greater name recognition than Thomas Babington Macaulay, the British writer, historian, and Whig politician. Thomas Macaulay died in 1859. More than a century later, Culkin’s parents named him in honor of the original Macaulay. Fame is a strange beast.
    Alice preferred nonfiction, especially British and Americanhistories, and Nelle devoured those, too. I spotted a shelf lined with many such histories. Judging by the jackets, some were recent, but many were published decades ago.
    “Have you spent time in England?” I asked.
    She ran her deeply lined hand across the spines of a row of books. It was a tender gesture. Loving, even. “This,” she said, “is how I’ve traveled.”
    Alice’s room, down the hallway a bit and on the left, had a bed with a bright pink coverlet, an old dresser, and, naturally, a crammed bookcase. Other books were in piles on a chair and on the floor. Still more books and rafts of papers were scattered across half the bed.
    Like her father, I would later learn, Alice had a peculiar reading habit at bedtime. She would lie flat on her back and hold the open book above her face to read it. Seems like an uncomfortable position but it worked for A. C. Lee and it worked for his daughter. If Alice couldn’t fall asleep, she had her own version of counting sheep. She silently ran through the names of Alabama’s counties. Or American vice presidents. Chronologically. But in reverse order.
    At the end of the hallway, she showed me Nelle’s bedroom. This originally was their father’s quarters. It was as modest as the rest of the house. When Nelle was in New York, Julia occupied the room. The walls were blue. Built-in bookshelves lined the wall to the left of the door. A small figurine of a cat perched on a shelf at eye level. A trunk sat under one window. A small door led to the private bath.
    As fascinated as I was by this unexpected house tour, I didn’t want to overstay my welcome. But Alice brushed aside my concern about that and continued the conversation.
    My thoughts turned to Terrence again. I told Alice that he was out in the car. Would it be okay if he came in to take her photograph?
    “Well, yes. All right. Invite him in.”
    I hurried out through the darkness to the rental car. It was still a warm night but not nearly as warm and close as in the house.
    Terrence lowered his window. He grinned.
    “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” I said it so fast it came out as one word. “I had no idea I’d be in there so long. That is Miss Alice. She’s wonderful, Terrence. Come on in. She said it’s okay to bring your camera.”
    “Oh, fantastic.” Terrence followed me up the wooden steps to the front door.
    Already I was looking forward to telling him about my conversations on our drive back to the Best Western.
    “I hope you have enjoyed your visit to Monroeville,” Alice told Terrence.
    “Very much.”
    We chatted some more in the living room, and then Terrence, tentatively, got down to business. “Is this good here?” he asked. Alice had resumed her spot in the recliner.
    “Yes.” Alice smiled at Terrence