If These Walls Had Ears

by James Morgan

  Once Billie got a taste of what Ruth had been putting up with, it didn’t take him long to say to her, “Go find us a bigger house.” They preferred to stay in Hillcrest. One morning, she saw an advertisement for a house at 501 Holly. It had five or six bedrooms, depending on your needs. Ruth thought that sounded heavenly. She called the Realtor and arranged a viewing. It was love at first sight. She was enchanted by the front porch, the beautiful hardwood floors, the music room, the overwhelming spaciousness of the place.

  She took Billie back that very afternoon. He was impressed, too. Besides, if it pleased Ruth, that was saying a lot. In the decade they had been married, he had found that she wasn’t easy to satisfy. They bought it without quibbling, paying Jessica J. Armour $13,500 in cash for the right to play out their own dreams of home.

  The Murphrees lived in this house during a seasonal change in the country, too. It began as a kind of springtime, a postwar blush of budding promise, though it didn’t end that way. I remember the beginning of that time as a brief moment when it was possible to believe in goodness and mercy and safety and peace—to assume those things. That was in the period from the late 1940s until the mid-1950s. I was a child then, age five to about eleven, and I’m sure that was a good part of it, the illusions of childhood. But the times seemed to foster illusions—maybe even to depend on them. I know now that my parents dealt in those years with the timeless trials of adulthood, but even they appeared to cling to the idea of something approaching innocence.

  For me, those were days of roaming loose through my neighborhood, of playing army and cowboys and, occasionally, doctor under the house with neighbor girls. They were days of comic books and baseball cards and bike riding with no hands. There were heroes like Mickey Mantle and Eddie Mathews and Roy Rogers and Lash La Rue. There were fears of the requisite neighborhood bully, in my case a strange bird called “Booger Red,” who leapt out of trees onto people. There was a first bite of a new dish called “pizza pie,” and a sip of my dad’s Schlitz, a taste that lives in my memory and still defines beer for me. There were after-church dinners of fried chicken with rice and gravy. There were lightning bugs, and games of kick the can until dark, when you heard your mother calling you for supper and you reluctantly parted from your friends for the night and trudged in the blue dusk toward the lights of home.

  Most of all, those were days when your home and your neighborhood were the nucleus of your life. You went to church in the neighborhood, you shopped in the neighborhood, from merchants you knew, and you played with friends in the neighborhood. Nobody’s mother hauled children all over town to take gymnastics or tennis lessons. You learned the games you needed to know from the kids you lived near. Life seemed as easy as a shortcut through the neighbors’ yard. I lived in Mississippi during that magical time. Five hours away, in a big corner house in Little Rock, the Murphree family lived their own version of the same illusion.

  I met Ruth Murphree in the fall of 1992. I simply called the number in the phone book, and she answered. It had been twenty-six years since she’d lived in this house. She listened warily while I made my spiel. Then, to my slight surprise, she agreed to see me.

  A widow since 1989, Ruth lives today in a retirement complex in west Little Rock. Her apartment is relatively new, and the scale of the rooms doesn’t suit her preference in furniture, which is Victorian—large, dark, imposing. But these pieces are here because they’re not just objects; they’re memories, many of them from her days on Holly Street.’

  Ruth is a small woman, and her reactions are often obscured by the glare of her glasses. Nor does she betray much through expressions or mannerisms. Occasionally, she’ll chuckle. During that first meeting, I got the feeling that she’s very careful about what she says, and to whom. Once, after I had told her daughter Joyce that I wanted to talk with some of her parents’ friends, Ruth complained to her, “Why does he need to talk to them?” And yet she seemed pleased enough to talk with me about her husband, who died shortly after their fiftieth wedding anniversary, about her three daughters—Martha, Pat, and Joyce—and about 501 Holly, where the Murphree family lived for nineteen long years, from the big-band era to that of the Beatles. Between that initial meeting in 1992 and the beginning of 1995,1 would have several conversations with Ruth and with all three of her daughters. I would visit Martha in Florida and Pat in Atlanta. Joyce, here in Little Rock, would help me read the animosities and the alliances and would tell me what I was seeing in family snapshots and on Murphree home movies.

  Through it all, I would come to absorb the story of one family struggling to hold together through the wrenching changes of mid-century America—changes that were reflected, always, within the walls of 501 Holly.

  The postwar world seemed specially scripted for Bille Lee Murphree. It was a time When a smart, energetic, and morally upright Young man could make a real mark for himself. Billie was all of that, and more. A country boy with city polish, he was movie-star handsome, and he exuded self-confidence. He liked people, and they liked him. His gift of gab would eventually take him into teaching for a while, even though he’d dropped out of college following the 1929 crash. That’s what he was doing when he met Ruth Taylor. Later, he would go into county politics, serving as comptroller for Pulaski County before the war.

  He wasn’t a man to sit back and live on a salary, though. His sideline business was real estate. He would buy houses and fix them up to rent out, remortgaging them and using the new money to buy still more rental houses. Billie’s daughters love retelling the family legend of how their daddy established credit. He went to the bank and borrowed one hundred dollars, which he put in a drawer and didn’t touch. When the note was due, he paid the money back with a small amount of interest. Then he asked for a larger amount—three hundred dollars, say—and did the same thing. Finally, when he was known at the bank as a good credit risk, he hit them for enough to buy a small house. He was off and running.

  Shortly after his return, Billie pulled strings to land a job with the Veterans Administration. Congressman Hays, Ruth’s boss and Billie’s former Sunday school teacher, simply phoned the head man at the VA. “My friend Bill Murphree needs a job,” the congressman said. The GI bill offered all the returning veterans’ favorable terms on money to go to college, to start a business, to buy a house or a farm. Billie began work in the mortgage department of the Little Rock VA. He took to the work naturally. With his interest in people, his war experience, and his knowledge of real estate, it was an almost fateful fit. Before long, he would rise to the position of supervisor, in charge of GI mortgage loans throughout Arkansas and a portion of Texas. A lot of soldiers had been dreaming of home for a very long time. Now, in his part of the country, Billie Lee Murphree Would become no less than gatekeeper to the American dream.

  But for all his charm and ambition and entrepreneurial skill, the thing that made Billie Murphree so perfect a reflection of his times was his moral certainty. A strict Baptist, he lived the way he thought: Never lie, never drink, never smoke, never break the law, go to church regularly, live by the Ten Commandments, and your life will turn out wonderfully. He took great pride in telling the story of how, when his daughter Martha was born, lie picked Ruth and the baby up at the hospital, dropped Ruth off at home; arid took Martha with him straight to church. He did this, Martha now realizes, not just to show her off but also to indoctrinate her into the life he wanted her to lead. He felt the same way about the other girls when they came along.

  Most people who knew the Murphrees then probably thought Ruth shared her husband’s sense of certainty. She surely wasn’t timid about expressing her opinions. But now, approaching her eightieth year, Ruth can admit to a weakness of the soul: She was inclined toward envy and had to fight to avoid letting it get the best of her. She says the worst time was when she envied a friend whose banker husband hadn’t had to go to war, and Billie had—banking was an “essential” job and being a county comptroller wasn’t. It made Ruth bitter. Later, Ruth’s dau
ghters thought she envied people who drove bigger cars, lived in better houses, had newer things.

  She was a petite thing from the same general area of northeast Arkansas that Billie came from, but even in early photographs you can tell her tastes were far from country. As a wife, she was a hard worker, helping Billie with the paperwork on his rental-house business, but she enjoyed playing bridge, being a member of women’s clubs, and going downtown to shop. Downtown was nice then. The Gus Blass department store had a mezzanine restaurant where ladies in hats would meet over salmon croquettes and iced tea. Blass’s also had a new escalator, the first in Arkansas. The ladies laughed about a matron who, seeing it for the first time, said, “It’s nice, but shouldn’t they have somebody here to show us how to use it?”

  It was a perfect world, at least on the surface, and Ruth’s daughters say that she worked hard to maintain that appearance. Whenever one of the girls breached their mother’s idea of the norm, Ruth would say, “What will the neighbors think?” She wanted to keep anything potentially embarrassing within their own walls. The things that were embarrassing were whatever belied the happy image of family—devoted mother, successful, good-natured father, obedient children.

  This image extended even beyond Billie and Ruth’s immediate family. At age thirty-eight, Billie was the patriarch of his own sprawling clan. His youngest brother, Tom, refers to him as the family’s “Godfather.” Billie helped them financially, and when he bought 501 Holly, it became the de facto family home. Even if Ruth hadn’t wanted to spend so much time with her in-laws, she would’ve been outvoted by Billie. To him, family equaled home. At Christmas, Easter, and on the Fourth of July, this house throbbed with the energy of brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins and nieces and nephews.

  I can’t help feeling that Ruth was the one member of the clan not quite in the loop. Ruth’s daughters say they had more of a bond with their father than with their mother. Sometimes this manifested itself in the form of pets. The Murphree house was a veritable menagerie—at various points they had dogs, cats, turtles, birds, chickens, ducks, a goat, and an alligator. Billie loved animals, loved seeing the children playing with them. Never did he come home from a trip that he didn’t bring the girls a turtle or two. “Go look in the car,” he would say, and they would race to the driveway, to find an old terrapin hunched down in the backseat. They would keep him a few days, maybe painting the date on his shell with fingernail polish, and then finally they would let him go back to the wild.

  Ruth loved the dogs; some of the other pets were underfoot because she was simply outnumbered. To this very day, Martha seems to be only half-joking when she claims her mother pushed her pet goat off the garage stairs and broke its neck.

  They moved in on a March day in 1947, but the weather wasn’t springlike, the way it is this year. Instead, the wind howled and the rain beat down. Little Pat, three years old, stood weeping in the drafty living room. “I want to go home!” she told her mother. “I want to go home!”

  Ruth hugged her baby tight. “But this is home,” she said. Pat wailed all the more.

  It’s one thing to build the house you’ve already constructed in your head, the one you’ve calculated will be right for you; it’s another to move into what was once someone else’s dream and try to reshape it to match a vague template in your heart. Those of us who’ve done it know what Ruth was feeling. You’re standing in the living room of a house you’ve walked through no more than a few times, maybe only once. You know—in your head—where the various rooms are, but still the whole place looks alien. It almost seems to float. If you’ve moved a few times, you know that eventually you’ll come to see these very rooms differently, and that later it’ll be fun to try to remember the way you saw them on this very first day. Later, the space will take on a different measure; rooms will seem to have been viewed from a completely different angle. By then, the alien place will have become centered around your own things.

  Things: I’m talking about our personal possessions—mementos, heirlooms, cherished pieces of furniture or art, totemic objects that ground us, that connect our present with our past. Surely, only things allow us to move as often as we do. Whenever I think of things and their importance in making a home, I think of the way my mother moved to Florida. The year was 1957, and we were leaving Hazlehurst, Mississippi, bound for Miami. This was at the end of a strange interlude in my father’s working life. After he had gotten out of the service he, like Billie Murphree, had gone to work for the Veterans Administration. He did that in Tupelo and later in Jackson. Then there were cutbacks. My father was told he could stay on, but at a lower grade. He refused. For a time during our Jackson years, he worked for a company that sold toys. He traded the car for a panel truck. My brother and I, blissfully ignorant, were excited about the toys, though I remember being embarrassed going to church in the truck. Then my father took a job running a grocery store in Hazlehurst for a nephew of my uncle Alex, Aunt May’s husband. My uncle’s family owned a lumber business, and this store sold to people who worked at the mill. My father was promised a share of the profits, but then he found out this store wasn’t supposed to turn a profit. It was a disaster for my parents, but, like Charles and Jane Armour during Charlie’s crisis, I was unaware.

  Finally, my father was offered a job with Vocational Rehabilitation in Florida. He would go on to great success there, eventually becoming director for all of South Florida. In the fall of 1957, though, he couldn’t wait to get out of Hazlehurst, where he had run through his savings and his pride. He couldn’t, or didn’t, hire a moving van; instead, he hooked up a U-Haul trailer to our blue 1955 Ford. He told my mother they could take only what they could fit into the U-Haul. She left many things, including the bedroom suite of her mother’s, in Hazlehurst with her sister. There was an understanding that Mother was going to get them later, but of course life seldom works out that way.

  Ruth Murphree understands the importance of things. Today, her red velvet mahogany settee still comforts her the way it did on that March day almost half a century ago. When she moved her family into Holly Street, she placed the settee—then covered in green velvet—on the left side of the living room, with her leather-inlaid coffee table in front and her two green velvet Victorian side chairs flanking the fireplace. Her gold brocade wing-back chair sat in the corner between the dining room and what Ruth had decided was the music room. Across from that, between the front door and the music room, her red brocade chair echoed the gold in regal symmetry.

  A visitor walking into the Murphrees’ house back then could glance straight ahead through the French doors and catch sight of an impressive oak dining table in the center. Against the far wall, where Jessie Armour had placed her Empire sideboard, stood Ruth’s antique buffet. The music room provided a more modern vista. Under the windows to the front porch was a sleek beige couch that evoked the stylishness of the 1930s. Ruth placed their record player/radio console under the north windows. On the east wall was the spinet piano. Both Ruth and Billie loved music—classical, jazz, gospel—and they encouraged their girls to love music, too. Billie’s mother had taught piano, and Ruth believed every girl should be able to play. The Murphree girls would grow to love this room, but not in the way their parents hoped. For the girls, the music room would become a conduit to a wider, less certain world.

  Beyond the music room, for the time being, was Ruth and Billie’s bedroom. A mahogany four-poster and dresser anchored this space. Martha and Pat started out sharing the downstairs back bedroom, the one young Charles Armour and his Grandma Jackson had slept in so many years before. As it happened, just as Billie and Ruth bought this house, Billie found another rental house for his mother and Tommy. All during the war years, Ruth had yearned for a day when she would no longer be constricted by circumstance. Now she found herself living in a house with three empty bedrooms.

  Not all was perfect, however. Ruth saw problems and felt an uneasiness that couldn’t be solved by the simple positioning of c
herished possessions. She had some painting done before they moved in, and she noticed that the downstairs bathroom tile was loose. When the tile man began poking around, he found that all the joists beneath that floor had rotted. Water had been seeping in from somewhere. Ruth and Billie had to put in a whole new subfloor, but that wasn’t the worst of it. From then on, Billie would worry about water and whether more of it was coming in—and, if so, from where. A house is man’s attempt to stave off the anarchy of nature. Ripping up that floor had allowed a disturbing glimpse into the house’s secret life. It’s more comfortable not to know about such things.

  Ruth remodeled the whole bathroom in pink-and-black tile, a color combination then still considered avant-garde but one that all the trendy magazines would be touting before long. She also replaced the single pedestal sink with two chrome-legged lavatories. As for the rest of the problems, they would have to wait. The kitchen still had one of those old four-legged ceramic sinks with the built-in drain board; Ruth surely wanted to replace that. Also, the house was a freezer. There was no heating system, just a few small stoves here and there. In the living room fireplace, a gas heater had been stuck into the space where the logs used to go. At some point, Jessie Armour had plugged up the fireplace and inserted the heater to try to ward off the cold. The Murphrees knew nothing of Jessie Armour’s life, of course. All they saw was an old heater that should’ve been vented but wasn’t, and that didn’t put out much heat anyway. Fortunately, warmer weather was coming. Ruth made a note to have floor furnaces installed as soon as possible.