If These Walls Had Ears

by James Morgan

  In a minute or two, I saw him rounding the corner. This time, I really couldn’t believe it. From the upstairs French doors I watched him slow down and look at the house—and then pass on by. He turned left at Lee and I lost him behind the trees. I had no idea how to read that.

  A few minutes later, Beth came home with a trunkful of groceries. Just as I had nestled two heavy bags into my arms, the red car pulled up at the curb. Bob got out, and I guess he could see from my expression that I hadn’t expected him. “It was Ridgeway,” he said, referring to a street about six blocks down Lee Street. He ambled on up the sidewalk as I stood there on the porch—“holding the bag,” was the phrase that came to mind. Two years I had chased this man. He explained that the house looked a lot like this one.

  And then the funny thing was, he wouldn’t leave. This was what Kelly had said about him. He was a big old goofy guy who invaded your space. Now he wanted to talk about books. He followed me in so I could put clown the groceries. He commented on our art. He asked for my card. He wanted to give me all the time in the world, now that I couldn’t think of him as a roller-skating transvestite. I’ve got a joint in the car,” he said.

  Later that day, I drove down to Ridgeway. The house is bigger than ours, with natural stone columns. It has a porch, but that’s about the only similarity. It doesn’t even face in the same direction. I suppose it’s possible, if you’ve had enough bad acid stomachs, to confuse the two.

  But you’ll pardon me if I cling to a scintilla of doubt.

  After all but crossing Bob off my list, I had no choice but to turn to other sources. And I have, as it turns out, other sources. I once read that many transvestites actually aren’t gay; but some are. We happen to be friends with several gay men, one of whom—call him Gene—particularly likes to lip-synch in drag. I haven’t seen him do it, but I’ve seen him on video. He’s a very funny man, in women’s clothes or not. At parties, after a few drinks, he affects that laconic, just this side of bitchy tone gay men do so well, and he says things like, “Let’s all get drunk and rearrange the furniture.” Gene and another gay man—Rick—came to a Monet lunch Beth and I gave last year in the garden. It was on a Sunday afternoon—all Sunday afternoon. After several bottles of wine, Rick was mincing around that perilous sloping patio in one of the women guest’s turquoise high heels. I remember wondering, if he broke a heel and hurt himself, would our umbrella policy pay?

  After the party, Rick—still in heels—and Gene drove several of us around in Rick’s recently deceased mother’s big boat of a Cadillac. I suppose we might’ve been carrying a bottle of champagne or two. Every time we passed a male jogger, Rick and Gene would roll down the windows and shout in prissy unison, “Show us your dick! Show us your dick!”

  Gene and Rick are now on the case of the roller-skating transvestites.

  Early on the morning of July 31, 1981, Jack Burney received a call at home from the floor man. Jack figures it must’ve been around 8:00 A.M. The real estate closing wasn’t scheduled until one o’clock that afternoon, but the man had had a cancellation on another job and asked Jack if he couldn’t just get started at 501 Holly. Since nobody was in the house, Jack said fine, go ahead.

  The Landerses weren’t going to be at the closing. Myke was in the army at Fort Hood, and Sue was still in St. Louis. All their paperwork had been handled by their agent, Janet Jones. Sue had been instructed to call in at a certain time that afternoon to check the status of the deal. Sue could hardly wait—at last, one major financial burden off their shoulders.

  The other interested party was the Wolfes. For a year, they had been carrying a note for the Landerses in the amount of $22,500. Forrest and Sue were ready to get their money and put the Holly Street chapter of their lives behind them.

  By 9:00 A.M. on that hot summer Friday, Jack was at his office getting ready for his day. The phone rang, and it was John Witherspoon on the line. “I’m at Holly Street,” he said. Jack remembers that there was a definite note of urgency in John’s voice. “You better get your ass out here.”

  When Jack did, he found his Realtor and his house leveler looking like greeters at a funeral home. The floor man broke the bad news: “Every time I try to jack up a sill, the jack goes right through it. You’ve got some real problems here.”

  Jack called off the closing—called off the deal itself. When Janet Jones heard about it, she was furious that Jack had let the floor man in before the closing. “She tried to force Jack to close anyway,” John Witherspoon says, though Jones doesn’t recall that. John says he told her no way. There were frantic and angry phone calls to the abstract company, to Adams Pest Control, to the floor leveler, and back and forth between the agents.

  Meanwhile, far away in St. Louis, Sue Landers was blithely enjoying her day. Myke was in Texas, the girls were at her mother’s, and Sue was free to do whatever she wanted. Besides, it was her last day of indentured servitude to that disaster in Little Rock. She drove to her modern-dance class feeling lighter than air.

  Years later, one of Sue’s most vivid memories of that dance class was how the hardwood floors shone so. They seemed so well taken care of, so resilient, so solid. She and the other women in the class were moving to the music—swaying, feeling, interpreting, being. The day’s assignment was to lust get in your own little space and do what you want to with the music.” The cheery instructor was psyched about this group’s energy.

  At the appointed time, Sue excused herself from the class and went to use the phone in the hall. By now, she thought, it should be a done deal. She dialed, waited, finally heard Janet Jones’s voice on the other end. It’s another scene I think of as from a movie: Sue’s face dropping, her hand clasping her mouth, her head shaking in disbelief

  Back inside the studio, the instructor watched Sue rejoin the class. There was a slight slump to her shoulders now, evidence of an invisible burden she had brought into the room. Attitude, feeling, interpretation. Sue began swaying to the music, began trying to dance, but she just couldn’t do it. She collapsed on the floor, curled into a fetal ball, and began writhing wildly.

  The instructor watched, fascinated, for a moment, then came and stood over her pupil. “Boy,” she said to Sue, “you really use that music well.”

  Donna and Fack Burney on their wedding day in September 1981.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Burney

  1981 1989

  Study one house over time, and it’ll tell you all you need to know of life and death, of dreams and disappointments, of vanity, desperation, duplicity, denial.

  Sue Wolfe remembers receiving a call from Sue Landers in the wee hours of the morning following the aborted closing. “She was hysterical, shrieking. She said they’d found that termites had eaten out the entire floor and that it was going to cost them seven thousand dollars to fix it. She said they thought we had cheated them.”

  Sue Landers says this house was the beginning of the end for her marriage. She and Myke never actually laid eyes on the grave site, which was just inches below the floor of the space that Sue had called her plant room. In hindsight, how appropriate, all those potted plants marking the spot.

  The damage wasn’t as extensive, or as costly, as Sue had first thought. But it was bad enough. I found a diagram of the problem in the files of Adams Pest Control: The damage stretched across the front beneath the living room and along the side into the den, but it looks as though the problem centered under that front room just off the living rooni—the room that had caused Billie Murphree so much worry about water, the room in which Martha Murphree had seen the floor furnace float. Apparently, because of how the house was built into the hill, there had never been enough room to get under that part to check adequately. For almost sixty years, time had been taking its silent toll. And now that that substructure was known to be rotten, there wasn’t room to go under the house and do the work required.

  So they had to tear out the floor from inside the room. Neighbors who peered through the windows during c
onstruction describe the scene as though describing an open grave—a dark hole in the surface, surrounded by that which once had covered it and soon would be put back in place, thankfully resealing the sight from human eyes.

  The work took only a couple of days. The Landerses credited Jack Burney $3,800 for the repairs. The Wolfes discounted by two thousand dollars the note they were holding for the Landerses. The closing was rescheduled for August 14. At the end of the day, the Landerses—who, with Sue’s father’s help, had put down $20,000 on this house the year before—walked away with $8,334.93.

  The repair work wasn’t begun until after the closing. Before it was started, much less finished, the Landerses were trying to find someone to blame. When they finally took a good look at their termite contract from Adams Pest Control, they discovered that, as with most insurance policies, it came with a caveat: “Note: Existing damage to front sill & joists, center sill & joists, and left & rear sills and joists not to be replaced.” If they looked further, they might’ve found a letter sent from Glynn Adams to Landmark Abstract/Title at the time they bought the house from the Wolfes:

  May 6, 1980

  Gentlemen:

  You will please be informed that we have inspected the above-captioned property and are pleased to report to you that our inspection revealed no evidence of active termites. However, there is evidence of past infestation and existing damage.

  Our original treatment was performed on this structure April 20, 1973. The owners have maintained a Termite Protection Contract on the structure since that time. The coverage is effective through April 20, 1981. Attached is our Termite Protection Contract reflecting that the existing damage is excluded from coverage.

  It is evident that such areas as finished floors, studding, sheathing, interior trim and others could not be visibly inspected for possible damage; therefore, all future claims or adjustments, if any, will he based on actual infestation at the time damage is found.

  This letter is not to be considered a letter of clearance. It is merely a transfer of an existing Termite Protection Contract which has an exclusion of existing damage.

  Of course, there wasn’t actual infestation—just old, sad bones that’d returned to dust.

  The Landerses hired an attorney, who contacted the Realtor with whom they’d worked when they bought the house. The Realtor, whose company had since gone out of business, steadfastly denied any liability or responsibility for the “oversight” of allowing the termite contract to be transferred, instead of requiring a standard letter of clearance. The attorney recommended filing a complaint with the Arkansas Real Estate Commission; if that brought no relief, then they could sue the Realtor for damages.

  Myke and Sue decided they’d had enough. They dropped the effort to find an external scapegoat and instead went on with their lives.

  I sometimes think of that gash in the floor in 1981 as the physical equivalent of Ruth Murphree’s emotional cave-in when Pat eloped twenty-two years before. Each in its way marked the end of something and the start of something else. Not, as you’ll see, that the problems with rot were entirely over. But the gash in Sue and Myke Landers’s plant room seemed to mark, literally and finally, a bottoming out—a culmination of the long, painful slide that had been taking place since the end of the Murphree years.

  It had been a period during which existence of the house had overshadowed existence in it.

  Now that’s changed. With Jack and Donna Burney, and later with Beth and me, this house has seen parties again—more, it seems, than at any time since the Armour years. There’s another similarity, and probably you could make a connection between the two. For both the Burneys and the Morgans, 501 Holly represented a new beginning—the first home of a newly blended family.

  Shortly before Jack closed on this house, he brought his parents over to see it. The floor was buckled, of course, and the place looked the way Jack has described it. His father wandered around, taking it all in. “Boy,” he finally told his son, “I think you’ve bitten off a lot here.” Jack’s mother didn’t say a word the entire time.

  A couple of weeks later, Jack went to see his parents. He sat them down and told them he had something to say. “I’m going to get married again,” he said, “and I just wanted to let you know about it.” He gave them all the details about Donna, who lived in Dallas but who would be coming to Little Rock the very next weekend. He promised to take her over to meet them.

  Jack’s mother was beside herself. “Oh, Jackie,” she said, “I’m so happy. I was just so afraid you were going to buy that house arid move some girl in there and live with her.”

  He did, for a few weeks. He and Donna wouldn’t marry until late September, but they had to move in at the beginning of the month. They wanted to get the floor work going, but that wasn’t the main reason. The real reason was that Jack had a tradition to uphold.

  On the day in 1993 when I finally met Jack, I had a sense that I had known him somewhere before. I liked him, found him to be an affable, easygoing sort of fellow. I could imagine having a beer with him. As he told stories about his time in this house, I watched his face and listened to the way he talked— the way he tacked on the phrase “that type of deal” to other things he was saying, such as in “I had eight people working for me, and that type of deal.” It was involuntary, a nervous filler; or it was just good-old-boy imprecision. That type of deal. Then it came to me: Even at age fifty-eight, Jack Burney reminded me of several guys I’d known in college.

  The aura of college surrounds Jack like— well, I was going to say like ivy, but that gives the wrong message. The aura Jack projects reads more like pep rallies, panty raids, frat cats, and beer busts. He’s a product of the rah-rah fifties, before the world changed so, and he admits that in his mind he’s never really gotten out of college. He went to the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. After he left that day, I thought of Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom. Jack probably wouldn’t have been a basketball star, but he gives off a sense of having found the old days golden. Until recently, he was president of the local Sigma Chi alumni group. He even looks the way I imagine Rabbit to look: the boyish shock of hair gone to gray; the collegiate khakis and fraternity-boy blazers in a middle-age size.

  No, the reason Jack had to be in this house early that September was because of his annual first game Razorback party.

  He and Donna and her twelve-year-old daughter Andi moved in— without furniture—and slept upstairs on a mattress while saws buzzed and clouds of dust filled the downstairs. The important things were the pigs. Jack has a collection of red concrete razorback hogs, the Arkansas mascot, and he positioned them around the side. yard like garden ornaments from a Martha Stewart nightmare. He set up his kegs and his buffet tables and that was it. He and Donna invited fifty couples. Jack and his guests dressed in red and white and drew themselves a few cool ones, no doubt celebrating a new season not just for the Hogs but for good old Jack— husband, homeowner, host.

  An hour before game time, they flung open the French doors to the kitchen and the men simply picked up the tables, food and all, and set them inside. Then as many as could fit piled into Jack’s car and rode the few blocks to the stadium, which was designed by the same architect who had designed Jack’s house, and parked in Jack’s special close-in parking space before pouring themselves out into the wider sea of red. After the game, they returned to 501 Holly and carried the groaning buffet tables back out to the yard, and they picked up again right where they’d left off. Jack’s new neighbors could tell that a whole new era had been ushered in. “Woooooooooooo PIG!” went the cheer that, time and again, pierced the soft fall night. “Sooieee!”

  Though the fifties tugged gently on Jack’s blazer sleeve, the life he and his family lived here strikes me as more representative of their time than any family since the Murphrees. The Burneys were pure eighties. There were three reasons for that: one, their work; two, their materialism; and three, their family.

  Jack was then and still is a s
alesman. When he moved here, he and a partner owned a wholesale distributorship for appliances and electronics. They had Gibson ranges and air conditioners, Sharp microwaves, televisions, and VCRs, plus various car radios and stereos. They were the middlemen, selling to dealers throughout Arkansas, north Louisiana, and east Texas. The public had a passion for the latest in electronics, and Jack reaped the profits from that passion. Meanwhile, Donna, who in Texas had worked for a construction firm, found a good job as executive secretary to the comptroller of Fairfield Communities, a company riding another eighties wave—time-sharing.

  Their house reflected their taste and times. When I first walked through here, I remember thinking that I had never seen so many television sets and sofas in one house in all my life. There was one of each in almost every room. A big-screen TV stood right where Jessica Armour had lovingly placed her Empire sideboard; where her guests had dined at a table for twelve, the Burneys lolled on a sectional sofa. In other words, they didn’t use their dining room as a dining room; it became instead a kind of shrine to the god of electronics, with the remote as a much-fingered rosary. The downstairs back bedroom—our Geranium Room—was where they placed their dining room table.

  I’m slightly surprised that Jack bought this house. I guess, after four years of his being single, it said home to him in a way that a new house in the suburbs couldn’t quite manage. Or maybe it was Donna who liked old houses. Her decorating was certainly fussier than the family’s apparent lifestyle.

  A vivacious blonde twelve years Jack’s junior, Donna was bold and outgoing in her touch: They ripped out the old kitchen (finally!) and started over, and when it was done the kitchen was green, with green paisley wallpaper on the walls and ceiling. Donna covered the downstairs bathroom in a pink floral-print fabric, and it was padded. The shower curtain was made of the same material. The upstairs bath was padded fabric, too, as was the big bedroom across the hall. Green, lots of green. My stepdaughter Blair remembers that one downstairs room had green shamrock wallpaper, which Blair wanted to keep because her birthday is March 17.