The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee by Marja Mills Page B

given him their blessing to speak to me.
    Butts told me Nelle Harper liked to tease him if he missed a literary reference, such as the time he came up short on his knowledge of the writing of Sydney Smith.
    “She’ll say, ‘Dr. Butts!’” He mimicked her mock outrage. “‘I thought you were an educated man.’” Once, on the way back from fishing at the home of a mutual friend, he was pulled over for a rolling stop at a stop sign. His passenger turned to him as the officer approached their car.
    “Quick,” she said, according to his recollection. “Don’t you have aclerical collar in the glove compartment or something you could put on?” She was kidding. Maybe.
    Butts said he helped administer charitable donations, through the Methodist Church, that Lee didn’t want to carry her name. Neither sister talks much about their faith, he said, but their ties to the Methodist Church are strong. That is how they were raised.
    “They are very traditional in some ways,” Butts said of Alice and Nelle Harper. “They tithe. They like good, old-fashioned preaching. They don’t believe in spending a lot on themselves, although they could.”
    “And then, in other ways, they seem so different,” I said.
    “Miss Alice is very calm and deliberate, and yet powerful in the statements she makes,” Butts said. “Whereas Nelle Harper has more hell and pepper in her. . . . She has that public reserve but her feelings get expressed rather graphically sometimes. An injustice stings her to the bone.
    “And, of course, Alice is a very systematic person,” Butts added, “whereas Nelle goes at [a task] like she’s fighting a fire and then won’t do anything more about it for a month or two. When she’s going somewhere it’s always a last-minute struggle to get ready.”
    If Alice had an event to attend or a trip to make, she was ready a week ahead of time. When Nelle Harper prepared to return to New York each year, she spent the last few days in Monroeville rushing around and muttering about all the boxes she had to ship, the bags she needed to pack, the loose ends she needed to tie up.
    Like all of Nelle’s friends, I would come to know this quirk of hers. “Can’t talk. Fifty-eleven things to do before I leave,” was her flustered greeting when she was preparing to return to New York.
    I asked Tom about Nelle’s life in New York, where she had a small one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side. For many years,Nelle had divided her year between her home in New York and Monroeville. She would say she was going south to look after Alice. Once Alice no longer drove, Nelle would take her to and from the office, “Driving Miss Alice,” as she said. Among her friends, the feeling was that Nelle needed Alice as much as, if not more than, Alice needed her.
    Once home, they would get to clucking over each other, Alice telling Nelle to drive carefully and Nelle telling Alice not to work herself to death. The two women had this much in common: Sisterly admonitions aside, they did as they saw fit. As Nelle prepared to go back to New York, Julia teased her about that. “You know she’s going to be back to it,” Julia said, “as soon as your feet hit the street.”
    Tom had spent time with her in New York the previous month. He served as guest preacher for a few Sundays at Christ United Methodist on Park Avenue, as he had done every summer for more than fifteen years. He stayed in the apartment of the regular minister, who was away on vacation with his family. Tom’s grandson, fifteen-year-old T. L. Butts, visited from Mobile.
    Nelle, whom he described as a “rabid Mets fan,” nonetheless took the reverend and his grandson to the place the young man wanted to visit: Yankee Stadium. The three took the subway there and back and sat in the bleachers, apparently drawing not a single second look. “We go all around,” Butts said, “and no one even knows they are seeing one of the great literary figures of the twentieth