If These Walls Had Ears Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 1996 by James Morgan

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc.,

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: September 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56509-7

  Photo credits: The author wishes to thank the following for the use of their photographs. If not listed below, the photographs are from the author’s own collection. Pages xii, 3, 13, 16, 24, 35, 39, 40, 42, 56 Mildred Armour; page 74 Joyce Murphree Stroud; page 4 Ruth Chapin; pages 124, 178, 187 Forrest and Sue Wolfe; pages 90, 105, 108, 116 Ruth Murphree; pages 123, 132, 145, 153 Roy and Rita Grimes; pages 158, 168 Ed and Sheri Kramer; page 198 Sue Goodman; pages 226, 239 Jack Burney.

  For Beth

  The history of a nation is not in parliaments and battlefields, but in what the people ay to each other on fair days and high days, and in how they farm, and quarrel, and go on pilgrimage.

  —WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

  Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  PART ONE: Fair Days and High Days

  Chapter One: Beginnings 1890 - 1923

  Chapter Two: Armour 1923 - 1926

  Chapter Three: Armour 1926 - 1937

  Chapter Four: Armour 1937 - 1947

  Chapter Five: Murphree 1947 - 1984

  Chapter Six: Murphree 1949 - 1956

  Chapter Seven: Murphree 1957 - 1959

  PART TWO: Quarrel and Pilgrimage

  Chapter Eight: White Walls 1960 - 1966

  Chapter Nine: Grimes 1966 - 1973

  Chapter Ten: Kramer 1973 - 1976

  Chapter Eleven: Wolfe 1976 - 1980

  Chapter Twelve: Landers May 1980 - March 1981

  Chapter Thirteen: Burney 1981 - 1989

  Chapter Fourteen: Morgan 1989 - 1992

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Here’s how 501 Holly looked right after it was built, in the fall of 1923

  Prologue

  In the middle of the night, a house creaks under the weight of its secrets. This isn’t merely the racing imagination of someone startled awake by strange noises; this is a middle-aged man’s bone-deep knowledge of the way life bears on living things.

  A house is a body, like yours and mine. It’s not such a stretch to think of beams as bones, electrical wiring as a nervous system, plaster and brick as the layers of skin that protect us from the elements. And yet uninhabited houses and uninhabited bodies are only compelling to contractors and coroners. It takes a soul to give a body life.

  I’ve always been curious about the houses I’ve lived in, wondered who lived there before me and what their stories were like. But I never looked into any of their histories. There was always today’s business to attend to. Besides, as with so many of us in the last half of the twentieth century, I’ve lived in too many houses—twenty-five, to be exact, counting student apartments and starter town houses, from the time I was born up through today. Until I moved into the house I’m now in, and in which I’ve lived almost seven years, the longest I had lived in any one place was four years and eight months. That was the house my family moved to in Miami, Florida, where I lived from the middle of eighth grade until I left for college. They stayed there twenty years, but I never really went home again. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve been there at all.

  The story of America has always been the story of a search for home. It’s a restless journey in which we never quite seem to arrive. In my case, five times I’ve followed jobs toward a goal I thought would make me complete. Probably not coincidentally, I’ve moved twice from would-be homes exposed by failed marriages, setting out alone again to create in life that ideal home that exists only inside my head. Though home is a spiritual concept, it tends to take on physical weight. For the longest time, I couldn’t actually describe the place that pressed so upon me; I would just inch my way toward what felt right.

  But somewhere along the journey, a picture began to develop in my consciousness. The house is larger inside than it looks from the street. It has fourteen-foot ceilings and gracefully spacious rooms. Its furnishings are old and elegant and a little bit worn. There are solid tables piled high with books and peopled with photos of loved ones in silver frames; in the hall, still other family photographs cover one wall from floor to ceiling. A hardwood log crackles in the fireplace. In the dining room, a massive table is set for twelve. There’s a screened back porch lined with rockers, and a laughing crowd of siblings and cousins flows constantly between that porch and the kitchen, where the family is anchored by a sturdy round oak table set dead in the center. Sometimes, in my daydreams, I’m among that group and sometimes I’m not. Sometimes I’m hidden away in one of the nooks and crannies in this house that’s large enough to provide such places to get lost in, and I’m reading a book in an easy chair, with the afternoon sun streaming in through the ceiling-high windows, filtered by the sheers.

  Is anyone surprised that Ralph Lauren is a rich man?

  But this isn’t some ideal I’ve absorbed from reading magazines. The house is actually my aunt May’s house in Hazlehurst, Mississippi. What does it say about me that this is the first house I ever lived in, when my father was away at war and my mother took me home to her sister’s?

  As a home, that house turned out far from ideal for those who grew up in it day by day. But for me, that’s beside the point. For me, the distance works. The distance spins magic, allowing me to create in my own head the illusion of a life that’s comfortable and carefree and safe. That’s a childish notion, I know, but who believes that grown-ups are anything but vulnerable children at heart? Besides, that’s one of the things that the home we all chase is—a place, a condition, in which the world can’t touch you.

  My aunt’s house also probed this raw nerve of permanence with me. By the time she died in the spring of 1993, she had lived in that house just shy of seventy years. She knew every square inch of wall, every layer of paint, every scuff on the baseboard, every worn spot on the carpet. In the middle of the night, when she was awakened by creaks, she heard the squeals of her children and the laughter of her friends arid, yes, the anguished howls of her own private demons. But at least they were her demons.

  The house I live in now with my wife and stepdaughters fulfills some of the requirements of the house in my head. It’s a bungalow in the Craftsman style, which means it’s low-slung and solid. It hugs a hill. And yet the house isn’t simple and forthcoming in the usual Craftsman way—there are curlicues under the eaves, and arches that seem to curve slightly skyward, evoking an air of mystery that’s almost Oriental. It also has a second story. At 3,200 square feet, with five bedrooms, a studio, and an office, it’s larger than it looks from the outside, and many of our furnishings are old and elegant arid worn. We have stacks of books and an open-air front porch lined with rockers. But our dining table won’t comfortably seat twelve, and we somehow never get all our snapshots framed (or even developed). The ceilings are only ten feet high and the rooms, while generous, aren’t as big as the rooms in my mind. There is no sturdy round anchor in the kitchen. The house is complex enough to provide hiding places, if, as at my aunt’s house in recent years, there were only one person living in it. But with four of us and a dog here, we can run but we can’t very well hide—at least not long enough to enjoy an uninterrupted book bathed in the warmth of the afternoon sun.

  In the upstairs hall, we’ve covered a wall with family photographs, but it’s the all-too-new kind of American family photo gallery: spliced history. The center of this grouping is a montage from Beth’s and my wedding just over six yea
rs ago. Here we are kissing, as her little girls, Blair and Bret, and my lanky boys, David and Matthew, look on—a little glumly, it seems to me. Over here to the left there’s a snapshot of the new nuclear family, and, down here, a portrait of the new extended family as well—four generations of Arnolds and three of Morgans, posed on a wide staircase, a hybrid genealogical tree forced by modern life to put down new roots, and to tie off old ones. Some of the people in this picture have just met.

  No wonder so many people gravitate to old houses, with their comforting implications about the test of time.

  In the summer of 1992, on a night when Beth was out of town and the girls were with their dad, I had supper with our neighbors. One of the couples had lived in their house six years, the other thirteen. They were telling stories about the neighborhood, one of which concerned my house. It seems that during one period back in what the neighbors thought was the 1970s, this house was briefly turned into apartments.

  That surprised me. This area, called Hillcrest, isn’t what you would think of as an apartment neighborhood. It’s an old, tree lined, church-steepled family ground, developed when people wanted to know their neighbors and so built front porches from which to see and be seen on balmy evenings. This happens to be the neighborhood where Bill and Hillary Clinton moved after he lost the governor’s race in 1980. Two days after the defeat, they bought an old house with a big porch about ten blocks from here. I wouldn’t be surprised if he ambushed potential voters from the front steps as they strolled by.

  The story about my house goes like this: One day a proper neighbor lady, seeing a moving van in front of the house, decided to take the new people a cake. She dressed herself and marched over here to 501 Holly Street and knocked on the door. She knocked again, then again. Apparently, the new people couldn’t hear her over the music, which, even out on the front porch, she could feel thumping through the thick walls. Finally the door swung open and, to the wails of rock and roll, the astonished matron saw a houseful of “hippies,” as she characterized them, roller-skating through the living room. The man who opened the door was wearing a dress.

  We all laughed, and I uttered that old cliche, “If the walls had ears.” The conversation turned to other things, but for the rest of the evening, I couldn’t stop thinking about that notion.

  It made me wonder about this house and its secrets. What bizarre scenes have these walls witnessed? What joy, what pain? What human drama has taken place here in this very room where I write? People used to know such things, became people used to stay put. Now we’re a nation of strangers, to one another and even to our surroundings.

  It’s astonishing to me, a former magazine editor who actually reveled in assigning pieces on the topic du jour, that the older I get, the more I find myself interested in history. I don’t mean the big, sweeping, official-record version of people, places, and events; what attracts me now are the myriad small ways in which we’re connected to the lives that preceded us. The other day I had some work done on the porch roof, and after the workmen had gone I found in the yard a fragment of rotted board with a rusty nail sticking out of it. Instead of tossing it without a thought, I stood there holding this silly artifact in my hand, wondering how old the nail was, and who drove it.

  The truth is, I suspect that this kind of curiosity is becoming the topic du jour among the leading edge of the baby-boom generation—whether they’ve recognized it or not. I was at my aunt’s cabin recently with an old friend, a man who once believed so relentlessly in living in the present that he wouldn’t allow antiques in his house, and he began studying the way the sloping ceiling boards were fitted together. “Look at this,” he said finally, running his fingers over the narrow planks that had aged to a honeyed hue. “You know, it’s weird, but I’ve started noticing stuff like how cabin ceilings were built.”

  But it’s not the boards themselves that compel him, any more than it was the rusty nail that intrigued me. The hidden subject here, I believe, is connectedness. It shows up in all sorts of ways. As we slouch toward middle age, we begin to turn inward. I’ve read that this is true, and I’m now noticing it in myself: Family and home begin to matter more to us. The hot front-page story that Sam Donaldson gets paid to be indignant about becomes less urgent to us, while the small human-interest story touches our souls. Sometimes we become nostalgic, even for eras we never lived in. The past appeals from the point of a nail.

  I don’t know why this is so—I only know what I and others are feeling. Maybe it has something to do with losing parents and raising children. Maybe we start feeling a need to understand how we fit into the rhythm of life. Maybe as we get closer to the edge, we start realizing that time past is a kind of centrifugal force.

  These were the kinds of things I thought about that night at my neighbors’ house. As my friends laughed and talked, I scrolled back over the houses I’ve lived in. Conventional wisdom holds that houses reflect their owners, but for me, it’s always gone further than that. You make the best of wherever you live, but when you’re in the right place—and this is broader than mere houses—your soul feels in sync.

  And vice versa. I had lived a lot of vice versa in those other houses, those other towns. This house felt different, however—had from the very beginning. I discovered it on a sunny Sunday morning in late summer, a couple of months before Beth and I were to be married. It was a pivotal time in my life: After nearly twenty years behind a desk, drawing a steady paycheck, I had decided to quit being a magazine editor in order to try to become a writer. Not only that, but I was head over heels in love with a woman ten years younger than I, a woman who happened to have two young children—children who were soon to become my stepdaughters. At the age of forty-five, I was taking on a new family. There was nothing rational about any of it.

  In that situation, I’m sure my aunt May’s house, which for so long had whispered to me quietly of peace and safety, was now positively screaming inside my head. I didn’t need a house; I needed a sanctuary. When the Realtor brought me over here that Sunday morning, I loved the wraparound porch immediately. I loved the massive elm tree in the front yard. I loved the little French-doored study just to the left of the living room—it would make a wonderful office. I loved the hardwood floors and the pink-and-black bathroom and the secluded little garden out back. But the thing that sold me was a human touch. In the kitchen are French doors leading to the side yard. The doors were unlocked, and I opened them and went out. This was the south side of the house, and at this time of day the yard—even with its half dozen old trees—was bathed in sunshine. Then I looked down at the steps I was standing on, and there was a coffee cup that someone had left not too long before. Whoever it was had been sitting out here on these steps off the kitchen, having a cup of coffee in the sunlight of this peaceful Sunday morning. The coffee was still steaming. On the edge of the cup was a perfectly formed red lip print. It brought the whole house to life.

  That night at my neighbors’, I began to believe that it was somehow important for me to know about the lives that had been lived in this house before me. It occurred to me that this time, in this house, in this city and state in which, to my surprise, I’ve been consciously happy, it wasn’t enough just to slap a new layer of paint on the walls. For the first time ever, I felt ready to reverse the process—to strip away the surface and dig in. I wanted to belong here. You can’t claim a history you don’t have, but maybe you can reclaim one.

  And if I did, I might finally come close to touching what’s eluded me all these years: continuity, connectedness, permanence.

  A few days after that dinner, I drove downtown to the Beach Abstract Company. After 4:00 P.M., they’ll let you go in and nose through their books, those oversized volumes that contain the outlines of so many people’s lives. The theme of these books is change, the narrative a relentless tale of moving on. The seller of a property is known as the grantor; the buyer is the grantee. I started with the most recent sale of my property, when I was the grantee and Alfred
Jack Burney was the grantor. Working back through the years, I reconstructed a loose ownership history of this house: In 1989, I bought it from Burney; in 1981, Burney bought it from Myron and Ellen Sue Landers; the Landerses bought it, in 1980, from Forrest and Sue Wolfe; the Wolfes bought from Ed and Sheri Kramer in 1976; in 1973, the Kramers bought from Roy and Rita Grimes; the Grimeses bought, in 1966, from Billie Lee and Ruth Murphree; the Murphrees bought it all the way back in 1947, from Jessica J. Armour; C. W. L. and Jessica Armour built the house in the fall of 1923; earlier that summer, they had bought the land from Melissa Retan, who had owned this and other parcels in the neighborhood since 1892.

  An exclusive club, I thought: For an entire century, only nine families have owned this place—eight if you don’t count the Retans. Eight families forever linked by having lived part of their lives in this one house, out of all the millions of houses in the world.

  For a few minutes, I pondered such big thoughts—and then I found myself squinting at the names on the list. Which one of you, I wondered, built that ridiculous sloping patio in the backyard? Who had the brilliant notion of sticking the heating unit in the closet in the back room? Who ripped out the original Craftsman casement windows and put in picture windows? Who rented the place to the horde of roller-skating hippies, and why?

  It’s a funny thing about houses—you tend to get personal about them.

  I had never been a fan of traditional detective stories—all that shoe leather, those shot-in-the-dark leads, those tedious hours of poring over yellowed documents buried away in dusty files. But, then, I’d never had my own case before. After that initial trip to the abstract company, I began thinking of this as detective work, and I was riveted by it.

  When I got home, the first thing I did was look in the phone book. I knew the Burneys were still in Little Rock, and I thought the Wolfes might be. As for the rest of them, I had no idea. I found no Retans listed whatsoever. There was a Joseph Armour in North Little Rock, but what were the odds that he would be related to a family who had built this house sixty-nine years ago? I looked under Murphree, and there was a B. L. Murphree out in west Little Rock. Could this be the Murphree who had bought this house all the way back in 1947? It was a possibility. I found a half column of Grimeses, but no R. L.; a handful of Kramers, but no Ed. Forrest Wolfe was listed, no question. So was A. Jack Burney. As for Myron L. Landers, there was an M. L. Landers in North Little Rock, but was this my man?