If These Walls Had Ears

by James Morgan

  But when it came to being handy, there was something antithetically out of control in my father. I sense that whatever caused it in him has caused it in me, too.

  I don’t read directions, and I can’t imagine that he did, either. He was impetuous. He would come home from church and, getting out of the car in his suit, he would notice something that needed fixing. Next thing you knew, he was tackling that job, still in his Sunday best. He often mowed the lawn in his good shoes. He spent a large portion of his life at the hardware store, and he had what seemed like hundreds of tools. And yet he would often pick up whatever was at hand and go at the job with that, rather than taking the time to get the right tool. I do that, too. The other day, I spent five minutes trying to loosen a Phillips-head screw with the palette knife from my art table, instead of walking downstairs and getting my Phillips screwdriver.

  But my father—who as a teenager ran away from his family farm and his fifteen siblings, and who put himself through high school, college, and graduate school—had a stronger innate sense of house than of home, and in the glorious moment of improvisation he would sometimes overstep himself. Once I came home and found that he had used the metal playing field from my electric football game to dredge dirt from under the house. This was my favorite game—I had sat hunched over it for hours at a time. You had football players on metal foot plates, and when you turned on the juice, the men would vibrate across the green chalk-marked playing field toward the end zone. My father, needing to make more crawl space under the house, drilled holes in the corners of the metal field and ran small pieces of rope through the holes. Then he lay on his back and tossed the game board into the nethermost reaches of the crawl space. When he pulled the board toward him, he also pulled great mounds of soft dirt. He had turned my frivolous toy into hardware.

  Hardware was a theme in my relationship with my father, which means it’s been a theme in my life. One of the biggest fights Dad and I ever had was over hardware—a hardware store, to be exact. He obviously found solace in hardware stores—found some kind of peace from rubbing the cool steel of the levels and fiddling with the symmetrical bolts of the turnbuckles. The summer before I went to college, he got me a job in a hardware store—one of those dark, primeval, plank-floored places with a twenty-foot pressed-tin ceiling and fans turning lazily overhead. One entire wall was taken with shelves of screws stacked floor to ceiling, and my job for the summer was to take inventory—count those screws. Being an arrogant teenager, I resigned after the first numbing afternoon. My father was furious. To get me out of his sight, my mother sent me to spend the rest of the summer in Hazlehurst, at my aunt May’s house, that illusive home where everything appeared to run smoothly and the sound of hammering—of things being fixed–was seldom heard.

  Throughout my early years in houses, pure attitude propelled my illusion of handymanliness. I wanted to do right—was determined to put into practice those lessons my father had tried to teach me about tools and hardware. For most jobs, it never occurred to me to call anyone else. I had the good sense to be scared of electricity, but even plumbing was something I thought I ought to do on my own. That tearful session with the leaky faucet took place twenty years ago in my house in Minnesota. The leak was in the small half bath on the first floor. I had to go down into the basement to turn the water off, come back upstairs to work on the leak, go back downstairs to turn the water back on, and then come back upstairs to see if the faucet was still leaking. I followed that routine for maybe three hours, and every single time I came upstairs, the leak was waiting for me. Finally, I just put my head down on the vanity and sobbed in frustration. But of course the frustration wasn’t just about the leak.

  It’s only recently—since I’ve lived at 501 Holly—that I’ve admitted to myself how little I actually learned from my father: just enough to make me feel guilty hiring someone to come fix whatever’s broken. That wasn’t my father’s fault; it was mine. I didn’t pay attention, and now I seem to have forgotten everything he told me. Oh, some things come back whenever I practice the skills: Last weekend, I was sawing, and I remembered how he used to say not to saw straight across but, rather, to saw down at the same time, using the arc to cut deeper. Hammering a nail last Saturday, I remembered how he told me to grip the hammer at the bottom of the handle and really pound the nail, instead of tapping tentatively.

  But I don’t practice those skills much these days. In apology for hiring out the big jobs around this house, I generally tell people that I just got to a point where I couldn’t meet my own standards—which is true enough—or that, working for yourself, you don’t have the luxury of a salary to allow you to take valuable hours for ambitious household projects. I think that’s true, too, at least at this stage of my writing career. Mainly, though, I’ve just lost the attitude, and the aptitude has vanished with it. I don’t want to have to fix things around a house anymore.

  I tell this by way of introduction to the story of Forrest and Sue Wolfe, who moved to 501 Holly in 1976, the year my father died. On the surface, their story was all about hardware and hardware stores. But there was something more. Their life in this house began during the Bicentennial summer. You remember that: tall ships, firecrackers, a celebration of who we were. It was a looking outward and a looking inward, a quest for both our future and our past.

  No theme could describe the Wolfes’ time here better.

  We often receive the things we need at the moment we need them most. That’s what happened to this house when the Wolfes bought it.

  Forrest and Sue will be embarrassed by this, but, to my mind, it was almost as though they had been sent to offset the corrosion begun half a century earlier during the era of Elizabeth Armor.

  On the other hand, maybe they just came for comic relief.

  Not that their life here was particularly funny. It was, in fact, an almost unbelievable grind—a grim and perpetual battle against decadence and degradation. But Forrest and Sue are funny telling about it, whether they mean to be or not. They have no children, and by now they’ve been married almost thirty years. Their conversation is a kind of ongoing jointly told story, a sentence and an echo, reflecting all the hours they’ve spent, alone, in each other’s company:

  SUE: Every inch of the woodwork in these rooms—the paint was all removed...

  FORREST: All down to the bare wood...

  SUE: We used plastic playing cards. We bought—

  FORREST: Bought paint remover in five-gallon cans...

  SUE: And we did every inch of this...

  FORREST: Did it ourselves...

  SUE: We had no money. We couldn’t afford this house...

  FORREST: The plaster was all cracked. We finished the den first, so we would have a haven...

  SUE: Oh, it was awful. It was horrible...

  FORREST: It was horrible...

  SUE: It almost killed us, almost broke up our marriage, almost bankrupted us...

  FORREST: Well, it didn’t almost break up our marriage...

  SUE: But we made a lot of money off it...

  Until they moved to Holly Street, Forrest and Sue had lived in a small, newer house in southwest Little Rock. Nothing wrong with southwest Little Rock, but it wasn’t quaint; it didn’t have character—it lacked the patina of age. The Wolfes had friends who lived in an old house on Lee Street, right across from 501 Holly. “We loved their house,” Sue says, “and we wanted an old house, too.” For many couples, dreams like that get lost in life’s shuffle—children, careers, just keeping heads above water. But couples without children have more resources for nurturing their dreams.

  At the time they moved to Holly Street, Sue, thirty-five, was a high school teacher, and Forrest, thirty-eight, worked for the State of Arkansas administering the burgeoning Medicaid program. The Wolfes had been married ten years, during which they had become used to a certain amount of freedom. They liked to travel, liked to go out to eat, liked to spend Saturdays poking around antique shops. Sue had a desire to become an inte
rior decorator, so she and Forrest signed up for an upholstery class. Otherwise, they were homebodies. To them, their house was a refuge. In their evenings at home, just the two of them and their cats, they enjoyed long, leisurely cocktail hours. Forrest was a Jack Daniel’s man. Sue was partial to manhattans. It was their time to dream.

  Their friends on Lee had learned the Kramers were selling, and they immediately called Forrest and Sue, who phoned the listing Realtor. They walked through this house just once, and never looked at another. They fell in love with the front porch.

  It’s no wonder Ed Kramer feels a bit hemmed in between the Grimeses and the Wolfes. Not only had the dry rot cost Ed his inheritance but that injury had been compounded by an insulting loss on the sale, too. Forrest and Sue Wolfe bought this house for $32,500, a thousand dollars less than Ed and Sheri had paid just three years before.

  Despite all that, Ed continued to love this place, even as he was forced to leave it. Two decades later, looking back over his family photos of their brief time on Holly Street, he can still summon a hint of the softness he felt at the beginning. “It’s got great street appeal,” he says, holding up a view of the house with the tulip poplar in the foreground. “The house is just an embracing, warm, generous-feeling kind of a place. A big, open, happy space the best I’ve seen for a writer to work in.”

  He smiles in my direction—a bit wistfully, it seems to me. I think he’s finished talking, but then he continues. “Just as married people tend to grow to look alike as time goes by, so, too, do houses seem to attract the same kind of people—I really think that. If I had gotten to know Rita and Roy better, there probably would’ve been a lot better feeling there.”

  In the summer of our Bicentennial year, though, Ed Kramer wasn’t inclined toward such mellowness. As firecrackers popped like corks in the distance, as neighbors draped red, white, and blue from homey front porches, as all over the country grills filled the air with the very scent of the American dream, Ed and Sheri packed their belongings into cardboard boxes bound for a smaller house a few blocks away.

  Meanwhile, out in southwest Little Rock, Forrest and Sue loaded their few pieces of furniture, and their beloved cats, for a move up in the world.

  * * *

  Before Forrest repaired it, their three cats came and went through a hole in the closet floor.

  It wasn’t really nine or ten cats, the image that Sheri Kramer has harbored, out of emotional self-defense, for twenty long years. “Three cats,” says Sue flatly. “Well, at one time we had eight here—but it was just because we couldn’t leave one, and she had a litter of kittens. But we got rid of all of them.”

  During Forrest and Sue’s era, 501 Holly was a pretty good house to live in—if you were a cat. The den closet had a hole in the floor—all the way down to the close dark ground—and the Wolfes’ cats found they could come and go through that hole at will. Forrest says that after they repaired the hole in the closet, whenever he and Sue were away, the cats came and went through the unclosable gaps in the upstairs windows.

  Not that he and Sue traveled much in those years. They hadn’t lived here long before they realized the enormity of their situation. Fortunately for this house, they decided to meet it head-on. They were what 501 Holly had been waiting for—a couple with good jobs and no children, with the will to use all their time and money to reclaim this house from its rush to dust. Not only that; they also had the know-how—Forrest’s father, a carpenter in Mississippi, had taught his son well. Sue’s parents had redone a house in Pine Bluff, and Sue had absorbed many of the skills required. Others she had simply been born with:

  SUE: I’m a Virgo, and Virgos—

  FORREST: Make lists...

  SUE: Make lists. For months, I would wake up on Saturday morning and I would say, Okay, we get up at seven-thirty, bathe at eight. Eight-fifteen to eight-thirty, we—

  FORREST: Eat breakfast and read the paper...

  SUE: Eat breakfast and read the paper, eight-thirty to nine—I would have every minute of the day planned. And I have a mother who is, um...

  FORREST: Compulsive...

  SUE: Compulsive. My mother makes me look laid-back. And she would come in, and one of the things she’d always say was, “Now, Sudie, all you need to do is…” And I swear, I could’ve killed her. That’s how I put myself to sleep at night, thinking of torturous ways to get rid of that old woman....

  The first thing they did was establish their limits. For phase one, they planned to focus on the large living/dining area, the front room, which they called the solarium, and the den. In those rooms, their goal was to repair the plaster in walls and ceilings and to strip the half-century worth of paint back down to the bare wood. Like the Kramers, they shut off the downstairs back bedroom, using it for storage. They planned to do no work in the kitchen, even though they hated how it looked. Other than what the Grimeses had taken away, the kitchen was still covered—walls and cabinets alike—in the paneling Ruth Murphree had installed after the fire in 1958. Upstairs, only the shower was part of their plan—though, once they really delved into that bathroom, they had to revise their thinking. They also planned to take up the rotting wall-to-wall carpet, remove the floor furnaces and reweave the floors, and then sand, stain, and refinish the hardwood throughout the downstairs.

  And those were the fun jobs. It was time, Forrest knew, to redo the fifty-three-year-old plumbing in this house. He hired a plumber who worked with his brother-in-law, and those men crawled around under the subfloor for weeks. “I tell you,” the plumber would say to them time and again when he came up for air, “this old house will be here after we’re all dead and gone.” In the fume-filled den, stripping back this house’s past to find its future, Forrest and Sue thought the plumber might well have a point.

  Until they got the den done, there were few places of real refuge. Their bedroom—the big one upstairs, with the cedar closet—wasn’t comfortable in any way. They hated the hot gold walls and red carpet left from the Grimes era, but that was just the start of it. In the summer, the room was too hot; in the winter, it was freezing. “The windows fit so poorly,” Sue says, “that at night we had to pin the curtains down to keep them from billowing.”

  The only place they could go to hide from their troubles was the front porch. ‘They bought a swing, and Forrest hung it on the south end of the porch, just where it begins to jut east around the house. It was an unexpectedly private place—hidden, high on that hill, by the west corner of the porch, and by the immense shadow of the tulip poplar tree just to the west. The porch swing became a favorite spot, a haven more rewarding than the den would ever be.

  A few months after the Wolfes moved to 501 Holly, the singer Jimmy Buffett came out with his hit song “Margaritaville.” That’s what Forrest and Sue began calling their cocktail hours, which dragged on long after the sun had set. Surrounded by their cats and relaxed by the drinks, they would swing on the porch for hours. When the moon on the trees made the shadows just right, Forrest would tease Sue that he could see the faces of a man arid a woman in the brick columns of the house. “Watch ‘em, Sue!” he would say, spooking her. And then they would swing awhile more, giggling like children in the dark.

  If you’re the type who’ll fool yourself into thinking you have a life when you don’t, a house will all too gladly be a partner in your self-deception.

  When I lived on Chicago’s North Shore, my then wife and I spent a solid year working on our old house. I painstakingly stripped sixty years’ worth of paint off a walnut staircase and mantel. We supervised the replastering and painting of entire walls and ceilings. I sanded and refinished the floor of the front porch. We shopped for and ordered wallpaper and expensive Berber carpeting. We bought new furniture—very, very costly pieces. We bought antique Japanese prints and had them framed to museum specifications. We planned out a room at a time and checked the items off our list—beds, lamps, bedspreads, miniblinds. One night, after our own stint in Margaritaville, I went to the basement an
d came back with a crowbar, which I used to rip up layers of kitchen linoleum. As I recall, the strata ran six deep. At the bottom was hardwood, a combination of oak and cherry, which we had bleached and sealed.

  On the surface, it seemed like a life. It was certainly full-time. But it wasn’t a life at all. Instead, it was an escape from life.

  For close to nine months, no one but my wife and I and the various workmen walked through the door of our house. We didn’t see our few friends—the house wasn’t ready— and I invited none of my colleagues from work. But one of these days, I told myself, we would have all those couples over for an elegant dinner, and boy, weren’t they going to be impressed. First, though, there was that upstairs bedroom that needed papering.

  In Witold Rybczynski’s book Home: A Short History of an Idea, he traces the way people have lived in houses since the middle Ages. He shows that, slowly and over a long period of time, home—as opposed to the relatively cold concept of house—has come to be equated with the word comfort. Comfort is a word whose definition certainly requires an entire book. Its meaning can be as simple as having everything you need close at hand—in my daydreams of Aunt May’s house, there’s always that image of me reading a book in an easy chair, with the afternoon sun streaming through the ceiling-high windows, filtered by the sheers. But comfort can also mean something as complex as being at home in your own skin. You can decorate and decorate and decorate a house and yet never achieve that.