If These Walls Had Ears (37 page)

I think Jessie Armour would approve of most of the parties her house now hosts. They haven’t all been as wine-soaked as that
Monet lunch in the garden. We’ve also had rollicking croquet parties on the side lawn, like the Murphrees did so many years
before. We’ve had elegant dinners and Mexican suppers and catfish fries and torch light garden toasts to returning friends.
When we first moved here, we sometimes came home and found our neighbors sitting on our porch, waiting for us, drink in hand.
The porch has been our island. We eat supper there sometimes. We go there to get away from life, and we go there to celebrate
life. And sometimes we go there just to
be
there. Beth and I have bundled up at midnight in the dead of January and carried cups of coffee to the hammock at the end
of the porch, where we’ve lain like Eskimos, watching our breath blend with the coffee’s steam, the wind chimes ringing like
crystal in the cold, crisp air.

Left to my own devices, I wouldn’t have a life like this. I know that, so I’m glad, mostly, not to be left to my own devices.
This old house, with its flawed past and its walls gone to gray, will always be identified in my memory as the place where
I knocked and they let me in.

But
memory
is the key word. Martha Murphree says she grieved when her parents sold 501 Holly. Whenever she would come to town for a
visit, she would drive her car over to the old neighborhood, and she would park across the street and up the hill. From there,
she had a perfect view of the house she’d grown up in. She was a wife and mother and a wife again, but home for her hadn’t
been any of the places she had lived as an adult.

That’s why nostalgia is so strong a force on us. The very word is compounded from the Greek
nostos,
meaning “a return home,” and
algos,
“pain.” To me, it captures perfectly that bittersweet yearning to go back to a place where life felt secure, peaceful, controlled.
The pain comes from knowing that no such place really exists.

Home, I think, is a moment, and that’s what attracts us to houses. We search for home in houses because houses stand still.
They seem rooted in a place. We want to stop time, like in a photograph. But we know—don’t we?—that even houses are changing
constantly. Once the photograph is taken, what you have left is memory.

Outside the frame of the picture, time moves on. Jessie Armour lived in her apartment at the state hospital for the rest of
her life. She traveled some. In 1952, her son, Charles, had a heart attack while walking along a street in Little Rock, and
there was nobody to help him. He survived that attack as he had survived the war camp—barely. As Charles and Millie got to
know each other better, he gradually told her about the
war—his
war. Late at night, lying next to her, he told her he
had
been on the Bataan Death March—the last half of it—and that the horrors had only increased from there.

Jessie died of cancer in 1952, and Charles had a final heart attack the next year. He and Millie had had a child in 1947,
but the baby was premature and died in the hospital. Millie remembers being handed the child and weeping, the bundle in her
arms reminding her of a porcelain doll she’d had as a girl, and which she had dropped and broken. Two years before Charles
died, Millie gave birth to a son, Charles Webster Leverton Armour III— Jessie took it upon herself to name her grandson, and
Millie didn’t dare object. He’s now a Methodist minister in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and his mother lives nearby. Millie never
remarried. She hasn’t spoken with her sister-in-law Jane in forty years. There was some problem with Jessie’s will, and Jane
let it be known that she wanted to have no more to do with Millie.

Jane’s husband, Pem, had a radio business and later worked for the state forestry commission. Years ago, they moved to Pem’s
family plantation out in the community of Scott. Jane and Pem’s widowed daughter, Janesy, lives in a house on the plantation,
and Anne lives with her second husband in Little Rock. But back in the seventies, the McRaes’ son, John Pem, was killed in
a car wreck. Jane didn’t tell me that—Millie did. She said she read it in the newspaper.

At Billie Murphree’s funeral, his three daughters wore his favorite color—red. The choir sang “The Old Rugged Cross,” and
he was buried with his Bible, duct tape arid all. Later, Ruth was diagnosed with lymphoma. At first, her daughters thought
she was imagining it, but it turned out to be real. All three girls are proud of the way she’s coped. Joyce, the “perfect”
daughter, lives in Little Rock with her husband of twenty-three years, and she checks on her mother regularly.

Pat’s runaway marriage lasted about as long as Martha’s church marriage, but in 1979 she and Larry called it quits. Billie
helped her finish school, and now she’s remarried and living in Atlanta. Some things don’t change, however—she still seems
alienated from her sisters, especially from Martha, whose marriage to Jerry lasted two decades, during which she lived mostly
in wild and crazy California. She’s now remarried. She and her second husband recited their vows in their Florida swimming
pool. Since I began this book, they’ve sold their house and are now living on their boat.

After Roy and Rita Grimes raised their children, Rita went back to college and got a degree in accounting. They stayed in
Little Rock, in the house they moved to from Holly Street. Roy left Garver and Garver and went into business on his own. Mark
works with him. Scott is in sales with IBM. Kristi, a physical therapist, has moved to Virginia to fulfill a pact she’d made
with her sister—they were both planning to live near the ocean. But Lori died in a fire in 1992, on her twenty-sixth birthday.
She was with her boyfriend in his mobile home, and they fell asleep with a cigarette burning. Rita got a letter from Sheri
Kramer after that. It was the first time they’d communicated in almost twenty years, since the problem with the house.

When I first met Roy and Rita, a year after Lori’s death, they were together. But who really knows what’s going on inside
anyone’s house? In 1995, they separated, after thirty-five years of marriage.

Ed and Sheri Kramer stayed in Little Rock for another nine years. In his thirties, Ed decided he wanted to become a doctor.
He received his degree at age forty-one. Now he’s a neurologist in Fort Worth, Texas. Alicia is finishing her senior year
at Vassar. Siggy has managed nicely without the tip of his finger—he’s taught himself to play guitar, and he recently had
a small part in a movie,
The Road to Wellville,
with Anthony Hopkins. Sheri did have cancer, the cause of her lethargy while she was on Holly Street. The doctors removed
the tumor shortly after she and Ed moved, and she’s been fine ever since. She stays home now, tending her plants and Ed. Together,
they collect ideas for the house they want to build someday.

Forrest and Sue Wolfe still live in the little house they moved to in the Heights, the one they can vacuum without unplugging
the vacuum cleaner. Sue is teaching again, and Forrest is still with Blue Cross. They’re beginning to plan for retirement—“herbs,
goats, and a bed-and-breakfast,” says Sue. The last I heard from them, they were getting into their car for a spontaneous
trip to Memphis. There was a show at a museum they wanted to see.

Myke and Sue Landers’s divorce, finalized in 1986, has been acrimonious from that day to this. They’ve both gone back to St.
Louis, where Myke has tried his hand at several jobs. He’s now a chiropractor, and he spends much of his time in legal wrangling
with Sue, who has taken back her father’s name—Goodman. She travels for a health-care company and lives with her younger daughter,
Michelle, in the house she and Myke built together in 1977. Tracy is living with her boyfriend and is going to school.

Jack and Donna separated just around Christmastime in 1991. When I met Jack, he was trying his hand drilling gas wells. I
guess they didn’t come in, since he’s now selling real estate for the very company that represented him in the purchase of
this house. Jack doesn’t know what Donna is doing now. Andi has moved to Missouri, where she works in real estate. Jack’s
daughter, Bitsi, lives in Houston and has a job in the cellular-phone industry. His boys live in Little Rock. Butch is a partner
in a bond business, and Brad handles wholesale mortgages for the Bank of Boston. Butch, the onetime terror, now has presented
Jack with his first grandchild, and Jack is amazed at Butch’s patience with that baby.

After this litany, could anyone possibly believe that home is a physical place you can actually go to?

I spent a couple of weeks in Mississippi trying to finish this book. I stayed, alone, at my aunt May’s house. She had been
dead two years, but her daughter, my cousin Augusta, lives next door and keeps the house the way it was. This was the longest
time I’d spent there since I was a teenager fleeing from my father’s wrath. Wandering around through May’s rooms, I discovered
something: The way my aunt’s house is situated, it’s
impossible
to sit by the floor-to-ceiling windows reading a book, with the afternoon sun streaming in, filtered by the sheers.

“Memory,” said Vladimir Nabokov, “is the only real estate.” And a vision of the future affects the quality of today, which
becomes the memory of tomorrow. You have to live not just in a house but in all the dimensions in which it exists.

You have to become a citizen of time.

When we moved here, this place stood like a sphinx— silent, stoic, mysterious. At night when we slept, I heard only creaks.
All its spirits were still unseen. Then I started digging. During my research, it occurred to me to wonder how I was going
to feel knowing so much about this place— whether there was such a thing as too much knowledge, and whether it would take
away the attraction. It hasn’t. For one thing, I know 501 Holly still has secrets. Some things, we just don’t tell. Rick and
Gene haven’t found the roller-skating transvestite hippies, and sometimes when I’m sitting quietly, I think I feel something
sailing past my chair like a ghost breeze.

But it’s not just that the house didn’t reveal everything it knows. For me, what it did reveal is plenty. Through the experience
of writing this book, I’ve connected to something. I’ve placed myself, and my new family, into a continuum. That it turns
out to be a continuum of search instead of discovery is beside the point. Now when I hear creaks in the night, they have voices.
It’s as though this were the house I grew up in.

One thing is different from my expectations, though. With many of my past houses, I harbored a secret hope that maybe that
would be the place I stopped, the place where I lived out my days, the way my aunt May did in her house. Strangely, I don’t
feel like that anymore—at least not right now. Digging in here has freed me in some way. I feel renewed, not resigned.

Now I’m more interested in knowing what legacy we’ll leave for the next people, if we ever choose to move from this place.
Mowing this lawn, I can’t help noticing how much the house needs painting. I’ve had the tuck pointing done, though that’s
a constant battle when you reach a certain age. Skin spots, melanoma. With any luck, we’ll paint this fall. We’ve installed
central heat and air upstairs, and I hope to add air downstairs soon. Middle-age dreams. We put the skylight in the playroom,
now my office. By my count, that’s the fifty-sixth window in this house. No wonder it’s seen so much of life.

And I guess
that’s
the legacy I’ve got in mind. Not the things, the improvements, though they’re certainly an integral part of inhabiting this
house over time. More than inhabiting it, living up to its history. I don’t want to fail at that. I pray there won’t be debilitating
decay or bloodcurdling calamity, but if there are, I hope we rise to those challenges, too. The legacy I’m talking about,
though, has little to do with brick and wood and plaster and glass. It concerns instead that space in the middle, that charged
air in which we act out our daily lives. At night before I doze, I like closing my eyes and drifting until the music comes,
the tinny nasal Victrola that summons Jessie and Charlie from wherever they are, with their rugs rolled back and the soft
slide of the fox-trot on the hardwood just beyond this wall. I like hearing Elvis, back when he was bad, and imagining Martha
in the music room doing the dirty bop. I like hearing the tinkle of Jessie’s dinner parties and the click of Ruth’s cards.

I want our chapter to ring with the sounds of life in our time. I want us to make good stories. Because someday, somebody
like me may need to hear them.

And the walls have ears.

Home is supposed to be the place where your privacy is sacrosanct. For that reason, I owe a great debt of thanks to all those
former residents of 501 Holly who allowed me to probe into the lives they lived within these walls. I won’t name them again,
since they
are
the story. But I want them to know that approached this project without judgment, and I end it the same way. For all homeowners,
in this house and elsewhere, all I feel is a deep and abiding tenderness, and I hope that comes through in the book. Life
is a struggle, and our relationships with our houses capture that struggle to a remarkable degree.

Many others also helped me over the three years of this project. Since it would be impossible in this short space to spell
out the specifics of every contribution, I’ll simply list the names and trust that each knows the degree of my gratitude:
John and Linda Burnett, Patti Kymer and B. J. Davis, Don and Ruth Chapin, Annabelle Ritter, Susan Sims Smith, Guy Amsler Jr.,
Georgia and Bob Sells, Toni and Skip Cullum, Tina Poe, Maribeth Magby, Peg Smith, Mary Worthen, Kelly Marlowe, Tom Murphree,
C. W. L. Armour III, Judith Long, John Witherspoon, Janet Jones, Lisa Matthews, Joe Kuonen, George Bilheimer, Jerry Russell,
Jack Trotter, Linda Overton, Bill and Jennifer Rector, Max Brantley, Alan Leveritt, Olivia Farrell, Debbie Speck, Sandy McMath,
Augusta Day, David Sanders, Lu and Dave Richards, Bliss Thomas and John Gerke, Richard Woodley, Steve Edwards, Betty O’Pry,
“Gene” and “Rick,” Jan Emberton and the reference staff of the Little Rock Public Library, the staff at the Arkansas History
Commission, Linda Green of the Bankruptcy Court, the helpful people at Beach Abstract and at the Pulaski County Clerk’s Office,
Barbara Lindsey-Allen and Robin Baldwin of the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, and my agent, Joseph Vallely.