If These Walls Had Ears

by James Morgan

  Meanwhile, next door, John and Linda Burnett noticed something they thought was very odd. They remember seeing Sue Landers out in her driveway a lot that fall, standing alone near the bay window with a trowel in her hand and a tub of strange red mortar at her feet. She spent hours there, the dead leaves blowing around her, as she knifed that bizarre filling into the cracks in her house.

  From Sue’s diary, October 7, 1980:

  This week I tuck-pointed for the first time.... There is so much to do, but I’m getting the hang of it. It does me proud to teach myself a new skill. I do enjoy being outdoors. I m still not tired of raking up leaves. There are many here.

  Myke wants to put this house on the market. I am sad to do that: I do like this house. I did, then I didn’t. Now that we will lose it (sell it), of course I’ve become more attached to it. Everything becomes dear to me when I have to leave it behind.

  And so we come, at last, to the roller-skating transvestite hippies. It strikes me as a particularly cruel joke that their brief fling here took place during the ownership of Sue and Myke Landers. Sue, who always wanted to be so “normal.”

  Myke left for Fort McClellan, in Anniston, Alabama, in early February 1981. Sue and the girls packed up and followed at the end of March. They put the house on the market and continued to make payments, but they wanted to sell as fast as possible. No one involved admits renting out the house, but obviously someone did. My guess is that it was the Realtor, Janet ones. Janet remembers nothing about a rental and says she has no paperwork on it. But she admits it sometimes happens that a Realtor will rent out a sale house, following the conventional wisdom that prospective buyers can visualize home more easily in a house that has people living in it. In theory, the conventional wisdom holds true. I’ll never forget the lightning-bolt effect of that one red lipstick print the day I first saw this house.

  By all accounts, there were plenty of lipstick prints around 501 Holly during the few months of its rental.

  I have to confess, right here, that I don’t know the names of the roller-skating transvestite hippies. Owners’ lives are splayed open like bodies on an operating table, but the renters still glide—giddily, in my mind—down shadowy corridors. a feel them taunting me. I suppose I should be impressed that this house hasn’t given up all its secrets so readily.

  Their time here was just four months, from April through July 1981. If you lived in the neighborhood, you noticed the difference—especially late at night. John Burnett recalls the first time he heard the red car. Fifteen years ago, throbbing automobile stereos weren’t as pervasive a fact of life as they are today. Most people listened to their radios or their cassette decks without feeling the need to share their pleasure with the world. Today, music lovers are more thoughtful.

  John was sleeping. Suddenly, his bedroom was invaded by a noise that sounded as if all the drummers in all the rock bands in all the world had been captured inside a metal container and were trying to beat their way out. But they were pounding in unison, boom-boomba-boom-boomba-boom, keeping it going, steady, endless. John looked at the clock. It was 2:00 A.M. He went to the window. The car was a Firebird, and it was shaking. The driver, whom he couldn’t see, was sitting there listening to a song at top volume on the car stereo. John couldn’t hear the music, but the bass notes throbbed down through the metal and into the molecules of the spring night, pounding the bruised air into the bricks of John’s foundation, from which the noise vibrated up the wall, passed through his headboard, and rattled his spine. This began to happen every night.

  For a long time, I thought I had a suspect. Maribeth, the woman who cleans our house, told me she knew a man who said he’d once lived here. I’m going to call him Bob. And in fact I did call him. He said he had sublet from someone whose name he couldn’t remember. Bob denied having ever roller-skated here, much less in a dress, but he described the inside of this house with enough accuracy that I wanted to meet with him. His spot was a water bed in the attic. He told me that another renter, a poet, had slept in a closet across the room—the very closet, I was guessing, where Beth and I now keep our supplies.

  I made a date for Bob to come walk through the house with me. He stood me up. I called again, and again he stood me up. I called again. Each time, he was maddeningly blase. Something had always come up at the last minute. I tried to get other names out of him, but he couldn’t remember any. And then, just as I was ready to write him off, he would recall some juicy tidbit—a woman with the “Rainbow” name of May Apple, who didn’t live at the house but grew opium poppies in planters here. I would make a date to see him, and he wouldn’t show. This would go on for weeks at a time, and then I would get busy with some other aspect of the story and put Bob aside until later.

  I placed a classified ad in the local paper, asking anybody who’d ever known anyone who lived at this address to contact me. The Grimeses’ old paperboy responded. A woman called and said, yes, she had lost her husband while she lived in this house. I was on the line with another caller at the time, and when I phoned her back, I found the number she’d given me was that of the local police department. Another woman left a message on the answering machine: “Call Mary Ann at three-seven-two-HORE.”

  One afternoon, I heard from a man who said, “I know some things about that house. Weird things. Supernatural things.” “Such as?” I asked. “My former girlfriend lived there for a while,” he said, “and sometimes, even on hot days, you’d be walking through the living room and suddenly a gust of cold, cold air would hit you. It seemed to conic up through the floor” The man promised to put me in touch with the old girlfriend, though there was some reason he couldn’t do it at that precise moment. He was going to call me back. When he didn’t, I called him. He wasn’t at that number.

  I could just hear the roller-skating transvestite hippies shrieking with bent delight.

  From Sue’s diary, Anniston, June I, 1981, 1:30 A.M.:

  Still financial trouble looms. 2 houses vacant—the situation has to change. We can’t go on like this one more month. We won’t make it. I don’t trust Myke with money matters at all. It’s been almost disastrous for our marriage.

  On that summer night in 1992 when I’d had supper at the Burnetts’ house, they said the person who had actually seen the roller-skating transvestite hippies in action was Judith Long, who lives at the head of the block, where Holly runs into Woodlawn. I called Judith and told her who I was and what I was doing. Then I asked her about the incident.

  “No, it wasn’t me,” she said. “I think it was Toni Cullum.” She gave me the number. The Cullums had lived on Woodlawn for years but had moved to a bigger house over in the Heights.

  I called the Cullums. A woman answered. Yes, this was Toni Cullum. She had a refined Southern accent, soft like gardenias, and there was caution in her voice. When I mentioned roller-skating hippie males in dresses, there was utter silence on the other end of the line.

  Finally, she said, “I think you must be mistaken.” I apologized and got off the phone as fast as possible. It was dawning on me that the story that had spawned this entire book might be apocryphal.

  But late that afternoon, Beth came upstairs bearing a small, heavy buff envelope. While she’d been on the phone in her office, a woman had stopped in front of our house and had run up and dropped this note in our mailbox. It was from Toni Cullum. She hadn’t gotten my name, but she’d called her husband after she’d hung up with me. He remembered the story vividly. It was Toni. She’d obviously repressed the memory.

  Toni is from Alabama. She’s younger than I am, but she reminds me of Southern belles I knew in college—khaki shorts, Weejuns, madras. That’s not the way she was dressed when I met her, but that’s the manner in which she was dressed. I thought of her as very traditional—which made her encounter with the hippies all the more amusing.

  “First of all,” she told me, as we sat in her spacious sunroom, “they weren’t hippies.” She’d asked her husband, Skip, to come home at lunch to si
t in on our meeting. It occurred to me that she considered it improper otherwise.

  “Not hippies?” I said.

  “No,” she said, her eyebrows lifting slightly and her head moving ever so perceptibly closer to mine. “They were transvestites.” I was thrilled. I’d been afraid that part was an embellishment. Like a sorority sister dishing dirt, I asked her to tell me the story.

  “I’d made a cake to welcome the new neighbors,” she said. “In this neighborhood, there were a lot of people who stayed home at that time. You kind of noticed when people came and went.”

  It happened at maybe three o’clock on a weekday afternoon. “I made the cake and took it down and rang the doorbell. And there I stood with my little cake in my hands. A person answered the door, and it was a very large —person. In women’s clothing. With a blonde Barbra Streisand wig, and makeup, and long white fingernails. There was no furniture in the house, and they were all on roller skates, in fifties dresses. There was music. I think they were making a circle through the house. I can’t remember how many there were, but there were quite a few.”

  The very thought still has the power to produce a blush.

  “Everybody was a little uncomfortable. There was a lot of looking back and forth and that kind of thing. And there they were in shoe skates on those hardwood floors. I can’t remember any of the conversation or anything, except that I just tried to stumble through my ‘Welcome to the neighborhood’—you know—’We’re so glad to have you.’And I handed the cake over and left.”

  She has a nervous laugh when flustered or embarrassed. I’d bet the Holly Street Streisand heard that very laugh as he shut the door.

  “The thing that stands out most in my mind,” said Toni, looking off into some twilight zone beyond the window, “are those big-male hands, with those long white artificial nails. It was the last time I ever took a cake to a family.”

  At the end of June, the Landerses got word they had an offer on the house. That, as they say, was the good news. The bad news was that the offer was for only $67,500—five thousand dollars less than the Landerses had paid scarcely a year before. “I was looking for a house with a lot of possibilities,” Jack Burney says today, “but that I could buy right.” He means at the right price. At 501, the owners had moved; the house was being abused by renters. It looked like Jack had found the perfect place.

  On the contract, his Realtor had made the following notation: “Offer is further conditional on buyer having the floors inspected within two weeks and approving the cost of repairs.” Jack says the living room floor was buckled in the center. He shows me, putting his fingers together into a point the way Billie Murphree did when he had a tough decision to make.

  Neither Jack nor his Realtor, his friend John Witherspoon, ever met any of the people who were living in the house. But they saw evidence of them. “The house was in horrible shape,” Jack says. “The renters had kept dogs upstairs, and it smelled. They had let them go to the bathroom on the floor, and it was still up there.” John Witherspoon tried to dissuade Jack from buying this house, but it was the wrong time—Jack wasn’t rational. He was a man in love.

  At the time he first saw 501 Holly, Jack Burney was a fun-loving forty-six-year-old entrepreneur who had been divorced for four years. He was close with his family. Every weekend, he saw his two young sons and one daughter, who lived in Little Rock with his ex-wife. He also made sure he stayed in touch with his elderly parents, who were very religious and didn’t approve of his lifestyle. What they didn’t know was that Jack had decided to get married again.

  Which is why he needed a house. And why, instead of focusing on the problems with the place, he was seduced by its homey charms. You can fix floors. You can clean up dog doo. “I loved the porch,” Jack says with a sheepish grin.

  Jack’s floor man told him that to take out the buckle would require going underneath the house and putting in new sills, then jacking up the floor. That didn’t mean much to Jack—he knew what a windowsill was, but the rest of it was just so much blather. The floor man explained that sills arc the horizontal pieces that hold up the vertical parts of a frame. It’s all connected—when one piece settles, or rots, then whatever is resting on it will sink, too. If it doesn’t sink uniformly, but only on one end, then the other end will kick up—causing, for example, a buckled floor to appear inside the living room. The now-buckled floors were, of course, the very hardwoods the Wolfes had refinished to such elegance just a couple of years before. Obviously, the weight of large roller-skating men in dresses had been enough to tip the floors into a full-scale Billie Murphree steeple.

  Jack’s man figured the cost of repairs, and that became part of the negotiation—part of the rationale for offering so much less than the Landerses had paid. Myke and Sue weren’t in a position to argue. They were apart for much of that summer. Myke had been transferred to Fort Hood, Texas, and it had made financial sense for Sue arid the girls to stay with her parents in St. Louis until Myke could get situated. For Sue, it was a summer of worry, and of reassessment. To occupy her time, she’d signed up for a modern-dance class at Washington University. It felt good to exercise, to move her body. The instructor kept telling the students to “use the music, use the music.” They could move any way they wanted, act out any fantasies they chose. For Sue, it was a kind of salvation.

  She and Myke said yes to Jack Burney. The closing was set for July 31.

  The elusive Bob continued true to form. I would call, offer to buy him lunch, and he would accept. He would meet me, he’d say. I would know him by his red car, he told me. He’d already said that everybody who lived here liked their music loud. Now he revealed an interesting preference in car colors. I took it to be a sign.

  But he never would show. I would call again, and we would have a long conversation on the phone, during which he would recall playing a lot of chess in this house, as well as doing his share of drugs. “Maybe I was having a bad acid stomach,” he would say, explaining why he couldn’t seem to remember this or that. But “this or that” amounted to amazingly huge gaps in his brain. He couldn’t recall the name of anyone who had lived here with him. He vaguely remembered renting from someone who “worked at a head shop on Kavanaugh.” A head shop in the early eighties? I suppose. But that was another problem: Bob felt certain he had lived here in the early seventies.

  I felt certain he wasn’t certain.

  Not long ago, I was complaining about Bob to the woman who cuts what’s left of my hair. Kelly Marlowe is her name, and we’ve been friends for years. Her shop is in Hillcrest, about four blocks from Holly Street. Kelly was trying to concentrate, and I was haranguing about this Bob. I wasn’t even sure she was listening. Then I used his full name. “Bob?” she said, her comb and scissors dropping to her side. “Bob? I know Bob. I cut his hair!” Then she fell into a spasm of laughter—inspired, I assumed, by the wondrous smallness of the world we live in. She couldn’t even speak. She was shaking her head and laughing, doubling over, holding her side. Then she managed to get a few words out: “He is,” she said, “the most obnoxious person I’ve ever met in my life.” I realized she was laughing because Bob was my only lead.

  After she regained her composure, she told me an amazing thing—that Bob was due to get his hair cut three weeks from that day, at eleven o’clock. “Why don’t you surprise him,” she said, her eyes dancing.

  I rescheduled a trip around it.

  On the appointed day, at five to eleven, my phone rang. It was Kelly. “He’s here,” she whispered. I gave them another five minutes. I wanted Bob sitting in the chair with that cloth snapped tightly around his neck, a pair of razor-sharp scissors pointed at his head.

  I walked in carrying my briefcase. Kelly feigned surprise. “Hi, Kel,” I said. “I’m on my way to an interview, but I can’t remember what time I’m supposed to get my hair cut tomorrow.” I nodded, by way of saying, Pardon me, at the guy in the chair. He looked pleasant enough. He was a big fellow, with a long, wet ponytail hanging
down the back of the chair. I wondered how he would look in a Streisand wig. Most of him was covered. All I could see were his Birkenstock sandals (how had I known?), with no socks.

  Kelly pretended to check the schedule; then we made small talk for a few seconds. Finally, Kelly said, “Oh, I’m sorry, do you guys know each other? Jim, this is Bob. Bob, Jim.” She used our first and last names.

  I acted astounded. My mouth dropped; my eyes got wide. Maybe I even slapped my forehead. I pointed to him with both hands. “Bob!” I said. “I can’t believe this! You’re the guy who’s been standing me up for two years!” There was a slightly sick look on his face. He was nailed and lie knew it. Kelly pretended to be absolutely amazed.

  “Hey,” I said, “as long as we’re finally in the same place, do you mind if I ask you a few questions?” He said he didn’t. I pulled out my tape recorder and turned it on. Then I handed him a picture of 501 Holly. “Is this the house you lived in?”

  A huge hand (I glanced at the fingernails) came out from beneath the cloth. He took the photo and studied it. “Yeah,” he said. “There aren’t many porches that look like that one.” After which, we made a headlong run toward our usual impasse—the man at the head shop, the water bed on the floor, sleeping atop the front porch at night. “I don’t even roller-skate,” he said, referring to the story I had told him on the phone.

  “Ever wear a dress?” I asked, laughing.

  “Not since last Halloween,” he said.

  He insisted that he was married and living out of state in the spring of 1981. “Well, how,” I said, “do you reconcile the fact that you know this house, that you’ve identified it from a photograph, and yet you couldn’t have lived here when you said you did?” He had no answer.

  We left it like this: I would go right home (completely abandoning my story of being on the way to an interview), and when he finished his haircut, he would come over. “I’ll just retrace my steps—just ‘go home’ like I used to,” he said. I expected never to see him again. Kelly called, laughing, to say he had left, and I went to the door to watch for his red car.