If These Walls Had Ears

by James Morgan

  For Sue, her brief time at 501 Holly—ten months—was a turning point in her life. Even as she was living it, she had an inkling that it might be. The problem was, she could feel her plan moving in the wrong direction. Sue fully admits she married a concept, not a man. I suppose it’s not unusual for a young woman to look for a husband who reminds her of her father; it does seem rare, however, to recognize that fact so clearly and still push ahead with such resolve. Sue’s dad always said he’d gone about as far as a poor Jewish boy could go. He’d been raised in a rural area outside St. Louis. Trained as a lawyer, he’d become an assistant prosecuting attorney in his early days. But at the time he reminisced to his five children about his upbringing, he was a wealthy, successful businessman, having gone to work for his father-in-law in the scrap-paper industry. The company had prospered, becoming a multimillion-dollar international firm. Now Sue’s dad was a leader in the community, the first Jewish president of the city’s athletic club. He was popular, a man’s man. “He was a great gin rummy player, a great golfer,” Sue recalls. “He had all the right attributes.”

  Sue and Myke had met at the University of Missouri in Columbia and had started courting after her sophomore year. Myke’s background was totally different from hers. He was adopted. His folks had wanted him to become a doctor, but then a high school biology teacher had told him—wrongly—that he didn’t have the aptitude for science. “Then you can be a lawyer,” his parents said. When Sue met him, that’s what Myke planned to be.

  Sue felt herself at odds with sonic of her female classmates in the late sixties. Major changes were coming, they all said. They had choices now. But Sue’s choice was what it had always been: “One of my driving forces, being the middle child, was, I wanted attention,” she says. “I wanted affection. My older brother and sister had moved away and were living kind of hippie lifestyles, so I decided, if I was normal—if I stayed in St. Louis, married to a normal guy, having children gradually... As a freshman in college, I started doing all these things that got me the attention and affection I had been craving, so I went on this pattern.” Her internal plan called for her to be engaged by her senior year, then to get married right after school, then maybe work for a few years before settling down and becoming, essentially, her mother. That meant her husband had to be her dad. Myke looked like a good candidate to fit the dream.

  She graduated, they got married, and she began working as a nurse. She figured three years. Meanwhile, Myke, a year behind her, was getting ready for law school. He took the boards, made his applications. Sue made Myke her pet project. “I saw him as a diamond in the rough, and I was the rescuer,” she says. “I spent a lot of energy trying to change him. He was kind of on the chunky side, and I came from a skinny family. I spent a lot of energy.” She liked dancing—disco especially. “That outfit I’m wearing in the photograph, it’s a Danskin leotard with a matching skirt. It was really hot. I had these wild three-inch burgundy heels with gold.” Myke was less interested in dancing, but he tried.

  One Sunday, after a weekend trip home to St. Louis, he told her that her father had mentioned his joining the family business. It was an idea he obviously liked. When Sue asked about law school, Myke said he was having doubts about it. He wasn’t sure the law was for him.

  Sue was enjoying her nursing even more than she’d expected, and Myke’s going home to work in St. Louis meant she would have to give that up. But the idea of Myke’s joining the family business had its appeal. Sue decided the move would work for her—even though today she remembers a tiny voice inside her head: Something doesn’t feel right. Her mother, of course, was thrilled with the news.

  Myke worked for Sue’s father for most of the seventies. They started a family. Sue gave birth to two daughters, Tracy, in 1975, and Michelle, in 1977. She found motherhood incredibly hard—overwhelming, in fact. That brought her new respect for her mother’s accomplishments. “I was amazed that any woman could be a mother and still function and keep her sanity,” Sue says. The difficulties were offset by the fact that Myke and Sue were “on the upward socioeconomic momentum.” They’d even built a house.

  When Myke began complaining about his job, Sue wasn’t shocked. All her life, she’d heard her father grousing about butting heads with his brother-in-law. That’s the nature of a family business. But Myke wanted to leave. Through business, he’d met a man in New York. I’ll call him Tom. Myke and Tom wanted to start their own recycling company. “Well, gee, if you’re unhappy ...” said Sue.

  Myke began working up a business plan. He and Sue traveled to New York several times to get to know Torn and his wife. Myke and Tom had considered a handful of cities and their criteria pointed to Little Rock. There was another mart there who would become a partner. The two couples visited, and Sue liked what they saw. She’d even begun to warm to the idea of going into business. “For me, there was this underlying thing,” she says. “Not only did h want to have affection from my parents but I also wondered if maybe I could do better than they had. This was an opportunity for us to do better. I remember telling a friend, ‘We’re going to make a lot of money.”

  Which brings us, inexorably, back to the photograph of the happy couple and the gridiron cake. Everyone was shocked that night when they dropped the bomb about their new venture. Sue has always kept a diary, in which she outlines her dreams and names her fantasies. After her announcement that night, when she’d met her mother’s eye, this is what she entered in her book: “I felt like I had stabbed my mother in the heart.”

  Myke knew exactly what kind of man Sue wanted. “I tried to he like her father,” he says. “But then, as I got older, I realized you can’t be somebody else. You have to be yourself.”

  As himself, Myke Landers was a far cry from Sue’s dad. Despite his engaging laugh, he’s introverted, not particularly social. He was a marketing and history major in college, but in real life he found that he didn’t like to sell. He’s an intellectual. He says he reads five hundred pages a week—biographies, spy novels, military history. Myke loves military history. One of his great pleasures is watching war movies on TV. He even attends World War II reunions to talk with the old warriors firsthand. “I love the army,” Myke says.

  He joined the Army Reserves in the mid-sixties as an E-1—buck private. Twenty years later, he retired with the rank of major. In Little Rock, he commanded a smoke-generating company, which is part of the Chemical Corps. In battle, smoke companies use diesel fuel to generate a smoke screen for advancing armor and infantry units. For Myke, the army provided things you didn’t get in, say, a family business. “I like a disciplined environment,” he says. “You have structure. You know what you’re going to do, and what everybody else is going to do.” The part he liked least was the internal politics, just as in the business world. In St. Louis, the politics drained him. “If I said, ‘It ought to be this way,’ or ‘Why don’t you give me credit,’ they’d say, ‘Be quiet so you don’t upset so-and-so.’ And I would say, ‘Yes, but so-and-so isn’t pulling his weight, and I am.’ ‘Yes,’ they would say, ‘but it’ll all come out in the wash.’ After awhile, you get tired of waiting for the wash.”

  It wasn’t like that in the military. It was clean. You had rank, privilege, camaraderie, perks. You had the respect your position and performance deserved. “For me,” Myke says, “the military is a comfort zone.”

  Sue’s dad retired as a major, too. She grew up loving to hear him tell his war stories. Maybe if they’d simply skipped Little Rock and gone into the army, things wouldn’t have turned out the way they did.

  * * *

  Myke’s partner Tom and his wife rented a place, and Tom suggested the Landerses do likewise. But Myke felt that Sue needed a house of her own. Having grown up in a small ranch-style tract house, Myke wasn’t an old-house guy himself. “I’ve always had reservations about older homes,” he says. “You don’t know what you’re getting. The one guarantee is that it’s going to take time and money to make it livable.” But at this
point, he was still trying to live Sue’s dream, even as he was trying to break away front it. He wanted her to feel at home, and the house her parents lived in was big and rambling and old.

  From Sue’s diary, written, as a catch-up, in July 1980:

  In May, I picked out a big older home in Little Rock in an area called Hillcrest. 1 saw at least 20 homes in one day. We decided on a large older home done in dramatic colors. It needs a lot of work. My only reservation is it is on a busy street on one side.

  We bought it peeling paint and all.

  Myke doesn’t remember much about that first summer—that only summer—sixteen years ago. He was too busy at work. The recycling business was located in a warehouse district on the edge of downtown Little Rock, close to where Charlie Armour’s Nu Grape plant had stood six decades before. Myke recalls that one of his daughters played with some children on the corner of Holly and Woodlawn, and that those people invited them all to the country club that Fourth of July to see the fireworks. He remembers pouring concrete to anchor the green jungle gym/swing set they’d brought from their house in St. Louis. He remembers flowing the lawn. He remembers occasionally sitting on the front porch, especially that fall, when things started to unravel. Otherwise, 501 Holly hardly exists for him.

  Sue, thanks to her diary, can summon more:

  I was so supersexed the summer of 1979. This year, I have been dead. I have had so few fantasies. I have been depressed this summer of 1980. More on that later.

  Sue’s diary is, by her admission, a candid record of a young woman’s battle against low self-esteem. She needed to be seen as pretty, as desirable. She needed for her internal plans to be working in the real world. It seems that when she felt comfortable with herself, her fantasy life was full and vibrant; when her real life was out of kilter, that’s the only thing she was left with.

  Her diary entries for the summer of 1980 mostly concerned the events of the spring. That fall, she would spell out the extent to which her plans had gone off track so soon. In the meantime, from the outside looking in, there were few hints that all wasn’t well at 501 Holly.

  One of the reasons this house had appealed to Sue was that it was so perfectly laid out for entertaining. She had planned a lot of parties in St. Louis. Now she loved how her antique dining room furniture looked against the chocolate brown walls. And yet, the only parties she had here were for the children. She and Myke didn’t know many people, and besides, Myke was never at home anyway. When he was, he was upstairs in his study or watching late-night war movies on TV. Sue occupied her time working with her plants. She filled the small green front room with ferns and scheffleras; and called it the “plant room.” She hung her Indian prints on the blue walls in the den, and she liked walking by and catching a glimpse of how finished that room looked, with the curtains, the pictures, the couch she’d covered in blue denim. The kids, especially, spent a lot of time in that room watching TV. Children from the neighborhood were in and out. One of the girls’ greatest thrills was to get their pillows and ride them down the steep stairs into a laughing pile at the bottom.

  There were other projects Sue eventually wanted to tackle—the kitchen needed to have all that old paneling ripped off—but she wasn’t in any hurry. “I thought we were going to live in this house forever,” she says. That was at the beginning of the summer.

  She was friendly, outgoing. She was on speaking terms with the Chapins, an older couple who lived catty-cornered across the street. Ruth Chapin had been Ruth Ream, and she had played with Carolee Armour as a girl in the twenties. The Chapins told Sue stories about the house—how, years before, the garage had been consumed by termites; how Forrest Wolfe had put in those great Pella windows.

  Not all the neighbors were as approachable. Shortly after she arrived in Little Rock, Sue thought she detected anti-Semitism from a woman who lived in the house behind 501 Holly. “I sensed something different, a kind of coolness,” she says. The Landerses weren’t what you would call Orthodox—in St. Louis, the girls had had Christmas trees and Easter bunnies. Now, though, they were the only Jewish family in the neighborhood. When fall came, Tracy was the only Jewish child at school. It was an awakening for Sue. “I felt a kind of commitment. Whenever I had the opportunity to volunteer, to be the mother in charge, if there was a chance to present some aspect of Judaism—which I knew very little about—I would try to work it in.” Tracy and Michelle remember 1980 mainly as the year they stopped getting to have a Christmas tree.

  They were too young, of course, to know how much was actually happening. In September, Sue needed a new volume for her diary entries. She found exactly what she was looking for at a store on Kavanaugh Street. Late at night, she would sit alone in the den and make her notations. Sometimes, as in this passage, she used her diary as a way of focusing the increasing bitterness that was bubbling up in her.

  From Sue’s diary, September 6, 1980:

  Dear Diary,

  This book is very special. I have bought it at a time when money does not come easily. Upon seeing this book with lovely cover and light pages, I was seized by the desire I must have it, and I deserve it, for times have been difficult.

  Myke has been drawing no income. He has been stabbed in the back by so-called best friend [Tom]. Myke and I have been through much anger and depression in the last two months.... Supposedly [Tom] is stabbing Myke to get him out of the company for whatever greedy reasons he may have. The whole thing has been heartbreaking. Myke spent so many hours, months setting this up. I have gone through a period of self-pity. I have seen my dreams shattered at least temporarily. We really extended ourselves. We owe so much money in house loans and car loans. I am working part-time. It is not enough to meet the bills.

  Sue cashed in some stocks. She began teaching private aerobics classes, as well as signing up for temporary work as a nurse. Eventually, she found a full-time job at the VA Hospital in North Little Rock. She worked in the Chronic Organic Brain Syndrome Unit. She joined a women’s soccer team, then quit when the coach didn’t let her play. She took clog dancing.

  From Sue’s diary, September 8, 1980:

  Poor Myke suffers daily. The children are jewels of light.

  She began working the night shift at the hospital. It depressed her to take care of the old people, and then she felt like a zombie during the day. But on those long nights away from her family, she had time to think about her dreams, her marriage, and herself. When good news finally came, she reflected on that.

  From Sue’s diary, September 30, 1980:

  A ray of hope and joy. Myke has a job offer selling insurance. It sounds fairly good. It will bring in more income than I make now....

  I have seen a bit more of the kids. They are getting used to Daddy caring for them. I do like the excuse of not doing the daily work of bathing and feeding them.... I guess this experience has taught us to work together. Also I need to take charge of my life...

  In early October, they went to a football game at the University of Missouri. After the game, they planned to spend the weekend at Sue’s family farm a couple of hours outside St. Louis. It was a home to her, the place where she had spent so many happy times as a child.

  From Sue’s diary:

  I’m going to plant my yellow tulip bulbs there. I don’t want to plant them in Little Rock. I probably won’t be here next spring to see them.

  Myke says he and his business partners had philosophical differences. Eventually, they offered to buy him out, and he accepted. He used his time that fall to organize a door-to-door campaign for Ronald Reagan. He also worked to defeat Bill Clinton, who was in an uphill battle for reelection as governor of Arkansas. During the few months Myke was with the recycling company, he’d been in meetings attended by attorney Hillary Clinton, and he had taken an intense dislike to her. “We were there as part of opposing interests,” he says. “Even sitting over on the side, she was radiating, I am the governor’s wife, and this is what I’d really like to see happen. I took great delight in s
eeing Clinton lose that election.”

  Reagan’s success brought Myke an opportunity, he says. “Under Nixon, our chemical capability had gone to pot. Nixon, of course, was goaded into that by the liberals he had his back against the wall because of Watergate. So when Reagan came in, he said, We’ve got to fix this pretty fast. So they activated lots of chemical officers.”

  Myke recalls that the army “started breathing down my neck in October. Everybody could see that Reagan was coming.” At one Reserve meeting, a man approached him and several other chemical captains and told them the army was going to start calling them up. The man said that if they would volunteer, they would at least get to choose their first assignment.

  There’s nothing in Sue’s diary about that, but Sue doesn’t believe it happened that way. “I don’t recall any pressure from the army,” she says. “I recall that he was looking for employment, and this was an opportunity for him.” Myke admits that the army, his comfort zone, came back into his life at a time when he certainly needed comforting. He decided to go in for a three-year tour of duty.

  So as the air turned crisp and the leaves began to fall, Myke began the process of getting himself back in shape. Countless times a day he would run up Holly Street toward Woodlawn—up the hill, up the hill, as they say in the army—then come down and do it all over again. It was hard work, shedding all he’d been carrying. But he was a happy man. Home was on the horizon.