If These Walls Had Ears

by James Morgan

  At Billie Murphree’s funeral, his three daughters wore his favorite color—red. The choir sang “The Old Rugged Cross,” and he was buried with his Bible, duct tape arid all. Later, Ruth was diagnosed with lymphoma. At first, her daughters thought she was imagining it, but it turned out to be real. All three girls are proud of the way she’s coped. Joyce, the “perfect” daughter, lives in Little Rock with her husband of twenty-three years, and she checks on her mother regularly.

  Pat’s runaway marriage lasted about as long as Martha’s church marriage, but in 1979 she and Larry called it quits. Billie helped her finish school, and now she’s remarried and living in Atlanta. Some things don’t change, however—she still seems alienated from her sisters, especially from Martha, whose marriage to Jerry lasted two decades, during which she lived mostly in wild and crazy California. She’s now remarried. She and her second husband recited their vows in their Florida swimming pool. Since I began this book, they’ve sold their house and are now living on their boat.

  After Roy and Rita Grimes raised their children, Rita went back to college and got a degree in accounting. They stayed in Little Rock, in the house they moved to from Holly Street. Roy left Garver and Garver and went into business on his own. Mark works with him. Scott is in sales with IBM. Kristi, a physical therapist, has moved to Virginia to fulfill a pact she’d made with her sister—they were both planning to live near the ocean. But Lori died in a fire in 1992, on her twenty-sixth birthday. She was with her boyfriend in his mobile home, and they fell asleep with a cigarette burning. Rita got a letter from Sheri Kramer after that. It was the first time they’d communicated in almost twenty years, since the problem with the house.

  When I first met Roy and Rita, a year after Lori’s death, they were together. But who really knows what’s going on inside anyone’s house? In 1995, they separated, after thirty-five years of marriage.

  Ed and Sheri Kramer stayed in Little Rock for another nine years. In his thirties, Ed decided he wanted to become a doctor. He received his degree at age forty-one. Now he’s a neurologist in Fort Worth, Texas. Alicia is finishing her senior year at Vassar. Siggy has managed nicely without the tip of his finger—he’s taught himself to play guitar, and he recently had a small part in a movie, The Road to Wellville, with Anthony Hopkins. Sheri did have cancer, the cause of her lethargy while she was on Holly Street. The doctors removed the tumor shortly after she and Ed moved, and she’s been fine ever since. She stays home now, tending her plants and Ed. Together, they collect ideas for the house they want to build someday.

  Forrest and Sue Wolfe still live in the little house they moved to in the Heights, the one they can vacuum without unplugging the vacuum cleaner. Sue is teaching again, and Forrest is still with Blue Cross. They’re beginning to plan for retirement—“herbs, goats, and a bed-and-breakfast,” says Sue. The last I heard from them, they were getting into their car for a spontaneous trip to Memphis. There was a show at a museum they wanted to see.

  Myke and Sue Landers’s divorce, finalized in 1986, has been acrimonious from that day to this. They’ve both gone back to St. Louis, where Myke has tried his hand at several jobs. He’s now a chiropractor, and he spends much of his time in legal wrangling with Sue, who has taken back her father’s name—Goodman. She travels for a health-care company and lives with her younger daughter, Michelle, in the house she and Myke built together in 1977. Tracy is living with her boyfriend and is going to school.

  Jack and Donna separated just around Christmastime in 1991. When I met Jack, he was trying his hand drilling gas wells. I guess they didn’t come in, since he’s now selling real estate for the very company that represented him in the purchase of this house. Jack doesn’t know what Donna is doing now. Andi has moved to Missouri, where she works in real estate. Jack’s daughter, Bitsi, lives in Houston and has a job in the cellular-phone industry. His boys live in Little Rock. Butch is a partner in a bond business, and Brad handles wholesale mortgages for the Bank of Boston. Butch, the onetime terror, now has presented Jack with his first grandchild, and Jack is amazed at Butch’s patience with that baby.

  After this litany, could anyone possibly believe that home is a physical place you can actually go to?

  I spent a couple of weeks in Mississippi trying to finish this book. I stayed, alone, at my aunt May’s house. She had been dead two years, but her daughter, my cousin Augusta, lives next door and keeps the house the way it was. This was the longest time I’d spent there since I was a teenager fleeing from my father’s wrath. Wandering around through May’s rooms, I discovered something: The way my aunt’s house is situated, it’s impossible to sit by the floor-to-ceiling windows reading a book, with the afternoon sun streaming in, filtered by the sheers.

  “Memory,” said Vladimir Nabokov, “is the only real estate.” And a vision of the future affects the quality of today, which becomes the memory of tomorrow. You have to live not just in a house but in all the dimensions in which it exists.

  You have to become a citizen of time.

  When we moved here, this place stood like a sphinx— silent, stoic, mysterious. At night when we slept, I heard only creaks. All its spirits were still unseen. Then I started digging. During my research, it occurred to me to wonder how I was going to feel knowing so much about this place— whether there was such a thing as too much knowledge, and whether it would take away the attraction. It hasn’t. For one thing, I know 501 Holly still has secrets. Some things, we just don’t tell. Rick and Gene haven’t found the roller-skating transvestite hippies, and sometimes when I’m sitting quietly, I think I feel something sailing past my chair like a ghost breeze.

  But it’s not just that the house didn’t reveal everything it knows. For me, what it did reveal is plenty. Through the experience of writing this book, I’ve connected to something. I’ve placed myself, and my new family, into a continuum. That it turns out to be a continuum of search instead of discovery is beside the point. Now when I hear creaks in the night, they have voices. It’s as though this were the house I grew up in.

  One thing is different from my expectations, though. With many of my past houses, I harbored a secret hope that maybe that would be the place I stopped, the place where I lived out my days, the way my aunt May did in her house. Strangely, I don’t feel like that anymore—at least not right now. Digging in here has freed me in some way. I feel renewed, not resigned.

  Now I’m more interested in knowing what legacy we’ll leave for the next people, if we ever choose to move from this place. Mowing this lawn, I can’t help noticing how much the house needs painting. I’ve had the tuck pointing done, though that’s a constant battle when you reach a certain age. Skin spots, melanoma. With any luck, we’ll paint this fall. We’ve installed central heat and air upstairs, and I hope to add air downstairs soon. Middle-age dreams. We put the skylight in the playroom, now my office. By my count, that’s the fifty-sixth window in this house. No wonder it’s seen so much of life.

  And I guess that’s the legacy I’ve got in mind. Not the things, the improvements, though they’re certainly an integral part of inhabiting this house over time. More than inhabiting it, living up to its history. I don’t want to fail at that. I pray there won’t be debilitating decay or bloodcurdling calamity, but if there are, I hope we rise to those challenges, too. The legacy I’m talking about, though, has little to do with brick and wood and plaster and glass. It concerns instead that space in the middle, that charged air in which we act out our daily lives. At night before I doze, I like closing my eyes and drifting until the music comes, the tinny nasal Victrola that summons Jessie and Charlie from wherever they are, with their rugs rolled back and the soft slide of the fox-trot on the hardwood just beyond this wall. I like hearing Elvis, back when he was bad, and imagining Martha in the music room doing the dirty bop. I like hearing the tinkle of Jessie’s dinner parties and the click of Ruth’s cards.

  I want our chapter to ring with the sounds of life in our time. I want us to make good stor
ies. Because someday, somebody like me may need to hear them.

  And the walls have ears.

  acknowledgments

  Home is supposed to be the place where your privacy is sacrosanct. For that reason, I owe a great debt of thanks to all those former residents of 501 Holly who allowed me to probe into the lives they lived within these walls. I won’t name them again, since they are the story. But I want them to know that approached this project without judgment, and I end it the same way. For all homeowners, in this house and elsewhere, all I feel is a deep and abiding tenderness, and I hope that comes through in the book. Life is a struggle, and our relationships with our houses capture that struggle to a remarkable degree.

  Many others also helped me over the three years of this project. Since it would be impossible in this short space to spell out the specifics of every contribution, I’ll simply list the names and trust that each knows the degree of my gratitude: John and Linda Burnett, Patti Kymer and B. J. Davis, Don and Ruth Chapin, Annabelle Ritter, Susan Sims Smith, Guy Amsler Jr., Georgia and Bob Sells, Toni and Skip Cullum, Tina Poe, Maribeth Magby, Peg Smith, Mary Worthen, Kelly Marlowe, Tom Murphree, C. W. L. Armour III, Judith Long, John Witherspoon, Janet Jones, Lisa Matthews, Joe Kuonen, George Bilheimer, Jerry Russell, Jack Trotter, Linda Overton, Bill and Jennifer Rector, Max Brantley, Alan Leveritt, Olivia Farrell, Debbie Speck, Sandy McMath, Augusta Day, David Sanders, Lu and Dave Richards, Bliss Thomas and John Gerke, Richard Woodley, Steve Edwards, Betty O’Pry, “Gene” and “Rick,” Jan Emberton and the reference staff of the Little Rock Public Library, the staff at the Arkansas History Commission, Linda Green of the Bankruptcy Court, the helpful people at Beach Abstract and at the Pulaski County Clerk’s Office, Barbara Lindsey-Allen and Robin Baldwin of the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, and my agent, Joseph Vallely.

  In addition, many people whom I’ve never met or spoken with helped immeasurably by their writings, and I want to mention them in addition to those works I’ve already cited in the text: Cheryl Griffith Nichols for a paper called “The Development of Pulaski Heights,” plus many other works about the background of this area; James W. Bell for his Little Rock Handbook; Jim and Judy Lester for their book Greater Little Rock; F. Hampton Roy for his How We Lived: Little Rock as an American City. Alan Gurganus for his wonderful essay in the collection Home; Joseph Mitchell for Up in the Old Hotel; the film The Wisdom of the Dream, part two, on which you can hear Carl Jung’s description of the pivotal house dream. Also, though I mentioned Robert Grudin’s work, I didn’t give the title of his book, which I found so useful—Timeand the Art of Living.

  I want to single out the contributions of my editor, Jamie Raab, and her then-assistant, Rob McQuilkin. They loved the idea of this book from the beginning, and they never failed to let me know it. No wonder both of them have been promoted since we began this project. Jamie proved to be an astute and insightful editor, both in the big picture and in the small details, and I count myself lucky to have been able to work with her.

  Finally, I want to thank my family, beginning with my mother and father and brother, with whom I shared so many houses. For this book, my mother, Pat, refreshed my memory with her wonderful stories. My brother, Phil, a writer himself, read portions of the manuscript and offered insights of his own. My late father, Leger, simply loomed over the whole project, as he seems to loom over so many things I write, no matter how much I try to escape it. My own sons, David and Matthew, with whom I’ve shared so few houses, encouraged me to pursue this quest even when it looked like the longest of long shots.

  As for the current residents of 501 Holly—Beth, Blair, and Bret—I’m grateful to them all, not just for being such an important part of my story, but for their love and forbearance during my telling of it. Especially Beth, who knows right where I live.

  ON A SHADY STREET IN LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS, SITS A HOUSE WITH AN INTRIGUING STORY.

  NOW ONE MAN HAS DECIDED TO TELL IT…

  IF THESE WALLS HAD EARS

  “This is more than a history of a house. It is the story of people with a sense of place, of time passing, and of old vanished voices—all written in a wonderfully clean and incisive prose.”

  —Willie Morris, author of New York Days and My Dog Skip

  “If you have ever fantasized about hearing the walls of an old house talk, you will take joy and delight and find bounty in this book which gracefully reveals the sweetness and the gravity, and the tragedies of the ordinary.”

  —Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, author of Italian Days and An Accidental Autobiography

  “I immediately became enthralled. IF THESE WALLS HAD EARS is a great read: social history, personal stories, and a look at the decades, flowing smoothly from start to finish. A wonderful book!”

  —Larry L. King, author of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas