If These Walls Had Ears

by James Morgan

  Sheri doesn’t remember the tax problem, but she does recall an incident about a year after they had lived in the house. Sheri and Ed were at a department store, and suddenly who ambles over to say hello but Roy Grimes. Ed was livid. “Come on,” he said to his wife, “I’m not waiting. Let’s get out of here.” And with that, he stomped away, Sheri following behind.

  The anger festering in Ed Kramer had begun with the discovery that the wall and part of the floor of the downstairs bathroom were rotten and would need to be replaced, along with the walls in the back bedroom. “We had a termite inspector go under the house,” Ed recalls. “The guy said, ‘Right under this bathroom, all this wood is just bad wood. It’s going to have to come out.’ He told us of various sites on the underframing of the house that looked very bad.”

  Even now, Ed is adamant in his belief that the Grimeses weren’t fully forthcoming during the sale of 501 Holly. Ed admits that he and Sheri were infatuated with the house and so overlooked certain problems—Sheri recalls that the floor seemed to sag between the living room and the former music room, and there were cracks in the plaster, especially going up the stairwell wall. Of course, the trouble in the downstairs back bedroom was obvious, even to buyers blinded by the worst case of house fever: The window frames were literally falling out of the wall, Sheri recalls, though no air seemed to be coming in. That room was so bad that, after they bought the house, Ed and Sheri simply shut the door and never went in there. It became a storage room.

  “Yes, we saw things that needed to be done,” says Ed, “but they were just the tip of the iceberg. When we moved in, we set priorities—we’ll fix this but we won’t worry about that now. We figured it was a lifelong process. I like to live in a house awhile before I go about changing it. You don’t know in what way you want to alter the house, or alter yourself to the house. You want to give the house a chance to represent itself.

  “Then we came to find out there was all this extensive work that was going to need to be done. It absolutely devastated us financially. It stripped our resources entirely.”

  So that when Ed looked up in the department store and saw a smiling Roy Grimes walking toward him, all the rage that had been bubbling up in him overflowed. “I was so angry, I couldn’t even face him,” Ed remembers. “I turned away, and I ordered Sheri to come with me. I was not going to stand there and make polite chatter after realizing that this man had just single-handedly demolished all my savings—by not having fessed up from the head end what kinds of expenses we might be incurring.”

  Roy Grimes, who doesn’t remember that incident, says he is astounded by Ed’s anger. When I told him about it—told him it was still boiling after all these years—Roy called Adams Pest Control and had them send a copy of die termite protection contract he had taken out on April 20, 1973, in order to sell the house to the Kramers. The Murphrees had given the Grimeses a similar policy, but the company providing it had gone out of business. Apparently, Adams bought out the other company. There’s an entry in Adams’s 501 Holly file dated October 10, 1971, indicating that the left side of the substructure was “badly damaged,” and that the joists and subfloor were “badly damaged” In April 1973, Roy had Adams go under the house to install a four-by-four subsill along the north wall. When that work was completed, Roy received the termite protection contract that he later passed on to the Kramers.

  The contract states that Adams would, for a period of one year, protect the property at 501 Holly “against the attack of subterranean termites for the sum of $265.00.” The liability of the termite company wasn’t to exceed five thousand dollars. Inspections would be conducted at least once a year, and the policy would remain in force for an annual fee of eighteen dollars. Ed Kramer acknowledges having received the termite contract.

  A Little Rock Realtor, when I told her this story, said there’s hardly any old house in this section of town that doesn’t have some past termite damage. I told that to Ed. Could it be, I asked, that because this was the first house he’d ever bought, he just didn’t know what he was getting into? Could it be that he was, and still is, being unreasonable?

  “I don’t think so,” he says. “I asked them point-blank—I said, `Is there any termite damage in this house?’ and they said no. That’s as straightforward as you can make it. I wasn’t saying, ‘Is this house termite infested?’ I was asking if it had any termite damage. They said no, it’s been looked at, it’s been checked. Then to learn otherwise was a cold shock.”

  He thinks about that for a moment, and then adds this coda: “They had been, ostensibly, Sheri’s good friends. I thought that if anybody was going to be faithful and straightforward and honest to you, it would be somebody you had known since childhood. I felt that they had betrayed that friendship to us.”

  Roy Grimes just shakes his head. “If anything,” he says, “because we were selling to Rita’s friends, I wanted to bend over backward to make sure everything was okay. I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry he feels that way. It’s just not the way I remember it.”

  Alicia was born in November 1973, months before Ed and Sheri’s disillusionment set in. They were still living in a magical world then, and so they gave their daughter the middle name Thais, after that opera they had loved when they were courting. Alicia Thais Kramer was the third child born to this house.

  Looking at the Kramers’ scrapbook/photo album from the Holly Street years, I don’t see the disillusionment, of course. As with houses, such stresses arc usually hidden. What I see instead is a young family enjoying their life and taking pleasure in the memories they were making. Their album itself, an imposing corduroy and leather volume such as banks once used to note their transactions, attests to the importance Ed and Sheri placed on the moments captured within: There are photos of Ed’s productions at the Arts Center; news clips from the local press about Ed and the work he was doing; snapshots of everyday family life. Ed made sure these moments were pasted down in appropriate order, and, in his role as official wit of the family, he penned clever captions at the bottom of every photo: “Siggy getting ready to mow the lawn,” reads the line accompanying a photo of Sig climbing on the lawn mower.

  They kept their memories in other ways, too. On weekends, Ed would turn on the tape recorder in the living room while the family gathered around him on the floor. Picking out something like “Froggy Went A-Courtin’ “ on his guitar, Ed would try to get Siggy to sing along. One of their tapes has Ed and Sheri coaxing and cajoling, but Siggy won’t sing a note. Finally, Sheri begins to sing and Sig immediately throws a tantrum. Next thing you know, he’s warbling along with his father on “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby,” Sig taking the “do-wacka-do-wacka-do” part all by himself.

  Sheri says she sang a lot in this house. She loved the way her voice reverberated through the rooms. Today, she protests that she smoked for too many years to sing well now, but on the tapes you can hear her, a crystal-clear coloratura soprano, singing a lilting harmony in the background, all the way from the kitchen maybe, while Ed and Sig croon into the mike in the living room.

  But after the episode with the bathroom wall, minor chords began to sound in the singing at 501 Holly. Sheri started noticing herself feeling tired a lot. It was true she had had two C-sections in fifteen months, and now she had two babies to take care of, but this weariness felt somehow elemental. She was exhausted to her core. The money was a worry, of course, but that wasn’t all that was on her mind. She couldn’t shake the specter of the cancer that had brought her back home in the first place. Her grandmother had already died, and her aunt would die while Sheri was still in this house. What about her mother?

  And what about her own inexplicable tiredness?

  She was too tired even to sleep. She found herself channeling her worry into an obsession about the house, specifically on the cracks in the stairwell plaster. Late at night, after everyone else had gone to bed, Sheri would set up a stepladder on the stairs, balancing precariously, and she would slather spackling compound
into the cracks. They never seemed to get filled. No matter how much compound she knifed in, the house would consume it, and still be ready for more.

  One fall, probably their second in the house, Sheri called the gas company to come turn on the gas for the floor furnaces. The man who came out took one look and said he was sorry but that he wouldn’t be able to turn on the gas—the exhaust pipe from the floor furnace didn’t meet current code, which decreed that such exhaust had to have at least a twelve-foot clearance of the roof. The one at 501 Holly was barely two feet above the roof. That meant, the man said, that carbon monoxide had probably been blowing back into the house for years. Thank God the upstairs windows wouldn’t shut completely, Sheri says.

  The cost of bringing the twenty-five-year-old floor furnaces up to code was prohibitive, so the only answer was a new central heating system. Sheri and Ed had Sears come out. The man recommended putting the new furnace in the closet in the back bedroom.

  It all made Sheri even more weary. She became increasingly angry at Ed, resenting his absence, begrudging his arty little life by day and his selfish retreats at night. They had no money—the repairs had devoured Ed’s inheritance the way the wall swallowed spackle—and Ed didn’t make enough to save anything.

  With Sheri not working, it soon became obvious that Ed would have to give up this job he loved and find one that paid enough money to relieve some of the pressure at home.

  For a child, one of the great pleasures of any house is in what my family called “meddling.” I did a lot of meddling when I was young. We would go to visit my aunt Gusta and uncle Wib in Tupelo, and, while the grown-ups were talking in the living room, I would wander off into the back of the house, where no one could see me. My aunt and uncle had a fascinating dresser that sat back into an alcove between the hall and their bedroom. This dresser had a few big drawers containing boring clothes, but it also had a number of smaller drawers at the top. Inside those drawers, a meddler could find cuff links, old coins, political buttons, photographs, exotic fountain pens, you name it. That was part of the fun, the imminence of discovery. Not to mention the voyeurism, the private peeking into secret lives.

  I eventually got caught, of course, but not in the way you might imagine. I was at my aunt May’s and uncle Alex’s house in Hazlehurst, and I was old enough to know better—a teenager, as I recall. Upstairs at May’s, there’s a room that used to be an attic, but which she finished off once she began having grandchildren. That room became known as “the dormitory.” There was a chest of drawers up there that I was particularly attracted to. Part of the attraction was a number of small boxes tucked away in the upper drawers. Usually, they contained pieces of May’s costume jewelry, and I seem to recall once finding one of my uncle’s old fraternity pins. On this particular afternoon, absorbed in my meddling, 1 picked up a curious little white box. I shook it, then shook it again. Then I slowly lifted off the lid—only to find my uncle’s glass eye staring hack at me! Alex had lost one of his eyes playing tennis back in the twenties, arid I guess he kept an extra just in case. But I felt caught, as though that unbound eye had seen right through me.

  I always think of that story when I think of Siggy and the pistol.

  In late 1975, Ed had made the necessary career change. He had given up his beloved theater to become part of the state bureaucracy—though, for a government job, it did have a degree of glamour. His title was Director of Information and Education for the Governor’s Highway Safety Program. With the title came a badge emblazoned OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR. Ed says he decided that a man with a badge ought to have a gun to go with it. Sheri hastens to add that he’s joking—that a series of rapes had Hillcrest homeowners nervous—but I sense that he isn’t entirely facetious. “I was fraternizing with people who carry guns,” Ed recalls, “so I bought one, too. It was a Smith 8c Wesson .38 Chief Special.”

  Siggy was three years old when the gun episode occurred. Ed and Sheri were downstairs in the living room, and they thought both Alicia and Sig were asleep upstairs. Suddenly, Ed heard a noise. When he got up to look, he found Siggy at the top of the stairs in his little back-flap pajamas, and he was laughing and waving Ed’s loaded pistol like a drunken cowboy.

  Ed always kept the pistol in its holster on top of an armoire in his and Sheri’s bedroom upstairs. Either Sig had known the gun was on the armoire or he had been meddling and found it. How he climbed up to get it, Ed couldn’t fathom, but that wasn’t the most important problem at the moment. For the next five minutes or so, Ed played the role of police negotiator, gently trying to persuade his son to give up his weapon. “What you got, honey?” Ed cooed. “Show Daddy what you have in your hand.” Sig, enjoying the spotlight, played his own role to the hilt, doing everything but calling for the media.

  In the end, Ed managed to close the distance between them without startling his son, and what could’ve been the worst episode of their time at 501 Holly was averted. As it turned out, that honor was reserved for something that happened not at the top of the stairs but at the bottom.

  Ed was standing in the dining room, looking into the mirror over the piano bar, tying his tie for work. In his peripheral vision, he saw Sheri come downstairs and turn left to go to the kitchen. She was angry. He heard a door slam on the other side of the wall—he saw the slam, shaking his very image in the mirror. But the moment the door slammed, that sound was drowned out by a bloodcurdling scream that wouldn’t stop.

  Dashing into the hall, Ed found Siggy on the floor, wailing and holding his right hand, which was covered with blood. Sheri threw open the kitchen door and was in tears herself as she and Ed tried to get Siggy to let them see. When they finally got a glimpse of his hand, they saw that the end of his little finger was missing.

  Ed had the presence of mind to find the finger and wrap it in ice before running to the car and speeding Siggy to the hospital. The doctors sewed the tip of the finger back on, but it didn’t take. Six weeks later, the finger was turning black.

  Soon afterward, they decided to move—accepting, finally, that the longer they stayed here. the less whole this house would leave them.

  Forrest and Sue Wolfe rescued 501 Holly, but they also paid price—years of living like this. They scraped ten layers of paint off this den woodwork.

  Chapter Eleven

  Wolfe

  1976 1980

  A friend of mine says his idea of home is a place where the only hand tool he needs is a telephone. The older I get, the more I agree with him.

  And yet, here I am, living in a seventy-two-year-old house in which things break or rot or give or snap or wear out all the time. It’s happening somewhere around me right this minute, and I don’t even know it. All I know is that if your manhood is tied to being handy, a house will show you no mercy. One of the first times I cried as an adult was the result of trying to fix a bathroom leak. Even after that shameful moment—for years after it, in fact—I maintained the facade, even to myself. Now, for various reasons, I feel close to uttering the words the house so obviously wants to hear: I’m not handy. I’m so unhandy that even my toolbox is broken.

  It’s part of the perversity of these old houses that they have the power to attract people like me—or like Ed Kramer, for that matter. Old houses look, like home to us. They appeal not to our practical side but to whatever romantic part of us traffics in hopes and dreams, or wallows in nostalgia. They’re flirts, old houses. They get painted up real pretty—the way this house was when I first saw it—and they show off a lot of front porch and invite you in for a little French dooring, and the next thing you know, they’ve snared another sucker. Of all the men who’ve lived here, probably Roy Grimes knew the most about fulfilling the requirements of a house like this. Or maybe Forrest Wolfe.

  Me, I’m just a sugar daddy: I write checks.

  Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about this business of being handy. I’ve come to believe it’s as much a matter of attitude as aptitude. I used to think I had both, and to a certain extent, I di
d. In my lifetime in houses, I’ve wallpapered, painted (both inside and out), laid linoleum, put down tile, grouted, stripped layers of paint off a staircase and mantel, installed rheostats, built shelves, put on a new roof, built a driveway, stripped wallpaper, ripped up layers of flooring, used an auger to dig postholes for a new fence, put up a cork wall, installed a bathroom vanity, packed faucets to repair leaks, fixed shutters, reglazed windows, planted bushes and trees, and, of course, mowed hundreds of miles of lawns. I’m sure there are jobs I’ve forgotten—I’ve spackled and plastic wooded, screwed and drilled and hammered. Some jobs I did better than others, but all of them I felt reasonably competent to do. After all, was I not my father’s son?

  The shadows of our parents fall long across our houses. My father could seemingly do anything when I was growing up. One Saturday morning in Miami, lie rousted me out of bed—my Saturdays before noon always belonged to him—and as I was trying to clear the sleep from my head, he said, “Get up, Jim—we’re going to put a new roof on your room today.” Sure enough, in an hour or so I could stand in my bedroom and see the sky. On this particular Saturday, my dad and I ripped out and replaced the rotten beams, hammered down new wood, and then covered the once-afflicted spot with the requisite layers of heavy rolled tar paper and great gobs of tar.

  Another time, my father decided he needed to repair the ceiling in the living room. This was one time I thought he wouldn’t pull it off—Mother was due to have a bridge party, but something like that never stopped Dad. When he got it in his mind to do something, he just did it. While Mother was nervously planning her table seatings, Dad was on a ladder, knocking great chunks of the ceiling down onto the living room carpet. To the best of my memory, he managed to slap plaster in the hole and give it a few decorative twists with the trowel before Mother’s guests arrived. Of course, the huge spot on the ceiling was wet and unpainted and couldn’t be missed by anyone stepping inside the door. Why would my father have chosen that moment to take on that job? I’ve pondered that a lot. Maybe he felt that a mess of commission reflected better on him than a mess of omission. I’ve caught myself thinking that way. Company coining is one of the most powerful incentives to getting house chores done.