If These Walls Had Ears Page 10

  Beyond that, Ruth had problems with Jessie’s French doors. All that glass between the dining room and the bedroom bothered her, made the bedroom feel too public for Ruth’s taste. Besides, French doors were too formal for the postwar style. The modern house was loose, open, more free-form. If you sat in the living room of this Craftsman bungalow, browsing through The Saturday Evening Post and McCall’s, when you looked up at your own surroundings, this house suddenly felt old and tight. The flow that Charlie Armour had worked so hard to achieve with French doors seemed, to the Murphrees, to make the house feel “all chopped up.” That indictment extended to the doors separating the living and dining rooms, and even to the narrow breakfast room with its clever built-in serving counter that Jessie had loved.

  New times require new thinking. So do new owners.

  One year after they moved into this house, Ruth and Billie took part in a ritual that was symbolic of the new postwar optimism: They conceived another child. The baby, their third daughter, was born three days after Christmas. They named her Joyce. She was the very first child born to this house.

  As if in celebration of the postwar ideal of family, Billie surprised his girls with a special gift that Christmas of 1948. It was one of the new 16-mm Kodak movie cameras that were all the rage. Using it was quite a production, but Billie didn’t care—not, at least, on birthdays and holidays, when the clan was over and the table was set and everyone was all smiles. And on nights when he would show the home movies, they would gather in the living room, Martha and Pat fighting for the best spot on the floor. As their grainy figures tottered across the screen, the Murphrees would laugh and clap, basking in the flickering image of family that danced from the projector on a smoky beam of light.

  The Murphree girls—pat,Joyce,and Martha—in the side yard in 1949.

  Chapter Six

  Murphree

  1949 1956

  I’m riveted by a photograph of the three Murphree daughters taken in the early summer of 1949, posed in the side yard in approximately the same spot where Jessie, Jane, and Charles Armour and Grandma Jackson were pictured with Uncle Ben on that long-ago Christmas after Charlie’s mother had descended upon the house. The photo of the Murphree girls is every bit as revealing about its era as that other frozen moment of time was about its own.

  Pat, just-turned six, and Martha, almost nine, are sitting on opposite edges of the table surrounding Joyce’s built-in baby seat. Pat, her hair in little-girl bangs, is wearing a lace-shouldered little-girl sundress and white socks and Mary Janes, with a little-girl skinned shin and a little-girl absence of front teeth in her open mouth. She’s facing the camera straight on, imploring it to—what?—not overlook her? Meanwhile, Martha all but languishes on the table, her eyes coyly downturned, her hair pulled to the side. All that’s missing is a flower over her ear. She wears a ruffled bare-midriff top and skirt and shows an astonishingly long, bare leg, tapering to a sockless foot in an open sandal. Wide-eyed, six-and-a-half-month-old Joyce, oblivious to the drama going on around her, studies the camera notas something to be responded to emotionally—something to be needed or seduced—but as merely a fascinating gadget with moving parts she’d like to get her hands on.

  I find this photo compelling because the Murphree household was one dominated by females—much like the one I now live in—and the rivalries are palpable. The great unseen presence, of course, is Ruth, with whom all of the girls in this picture—even baby Joyce, later—were in some degree of competition. As was Billie, I guess, husbands and wives being the way they are.

  Despite her precocious glamour in this snapshot, Martha was the tomboy, the adventurous one—the one Ruth found irrepressible. She and two other girls in the neighborhood had a group they proudly called the Lee Street Terrors. When a new house was built at Woodlawn and Holly, Martha and her friends were so incensed over the homeowner’s taking their vacant lot that they poured a concoction of black ink, Kool-Aid, and mud through the mail slot, and it landed on the people’s new carpet. Another time, just after Ruth had bought some fashionable new pull-cord draperies, she came home and found that Martha and her friend across Lee had rigged up a tin-can phone using the drapery cord.

  Martha was almost six and Pat nearly four when they moved to Holly Street, and, even then, the two spent much of their time at each other’s throats. Martha thought Pat was a crybaby. “She whined and complained about everything,” Martha says, “and she was prissy. I just didn’t have much patience with that type of individual.” Martha loved dogs; Pat loved cats. Not only that, but every year each daughter got to choose the meal that would be served on her birthday. Pat always asked for liver and onions.

  Their shared bedroom was a war zone. “We played the games all sisters play,” Pat remembers: “You’re on my side of the bed. Here’s the line—don’t get your foot on my side!’” When Joyce came along, Ruth and Billie separated the older girls. Martha, being the older andmore aggressive, claimed the big room with the cedar closet. Pat and her dolls shared the smaller bedroom across the hall.

  In the fall of 1992, Martha arid Joyce returned to 501 Holly Street. Joyce had been in the house once a few years before, when it was for sale, but for Martha this was the first visit in twenty-six years. The sisters were now mothers and wives, but as they walked through the rooms of their childhood home, I watched them become girls again.They reminded me of Jung’s story of probing deeper into himself the further he ventured into the house of his dream. At first, they spoke of halcyon days with no worries; then as they talked, their memories grew darker and more complex.

  Martha remembered straddling the floor furnaces Billie and Ruth installed in the music room arid the hall. Joyce remembered riding her tricycle down the stairs, knocking out her front teeth on the oak dining table. Martha remembered living in a secret world in which her bedroom floor represented vague arid unnamed dangers, and the only way to avoid them was never to touch the floor. She mastered the art of walking the entire circuniference of the room on doorknobs, swinging over to dressers, and so on all the way around. Joyce remembered the day the hot-water tank caught fire and destroyed part of the kitchen (giving Ruth an opportunity to redecorate). She recalled the neighborhood as a wonderful place to roam—with the exception of the creepy old Retail house on the next corner, which she was scared to walk by because everybody said it was haunted.

  Then Joyce asked, “Is my dog’s name still in the sidewalk by the house?” I told her I had never seen it. She took me outside. In the spot where the fieldstone walk curves away from the house toward Lee, she pulled back the grass that had grown over the edge of the walk. There it was—AUSTA, along with Joyce’s initials. How many other secrets, I wondered, have time and this house tried to conceal?

  * * *

  For the Murphree girls, life at 501 Holly breaks into two parts—before the mid-1950s, and after. Before was magical; after was torment.

  I imagine the early Murphrees as very much like one of those sitcom families on TV. Billie was among the first in town to buy his family a television set. It was a big dark mahogany console model, with an octagonal screen and rabbit ears on top. They put it in the living room, but then Ruth decided the children would ruin the good furniture. That gave her a good excuse to do something about those French doors to the bedroom: She had them ripped out and replaced by a solid wall, with a floor-to-ceiling bookcase on the bedroom side.

  Except that this was no longer the bedroom—it was now the den. It was a quiet and cozy spot for Ruth to thumb through her Saturday Evening Post and for Billie to concentrate on his Saturday-evening Bible study for Sunday morning’s lesson. Ruth had her bedroom furniture moved to the back room, where Martha and Pat had slept before Ruth separated them. In the den, Ruth arranged a couple of easy chairs and a long sofa. The TV set was also brought in, positioned near the door to the music room. Billie didn’t allow much TV watching on school nights, but on Fridays the family gathered to watch The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. The nearest TV s
tation being Memphis, Martha and Pat had to squint through clouds of snow to catch a glimpse of their heartthrob, Ricky Nelson.

  As long as she was adding the bedroom wall, Ruth went ahead and removed the one between the kitchen and the breakfast room. That gave her live-in maid, Mattie (who resided in the garage’s “servant’s quarters,” one room with a chain-pull toilet tucked into a tiny space beneath wooden outside steps), more space to prepare sumptuous desserts for Ruth’s afternoon bridge parties.

  Those parties had become more frequent in 1950, when Ruth quit her job with Brooks Hays to become a full-time bridge-playing,house-remodeling mother and housewife. She wore hats and went shopping downtown. She lunched. She sent her sheets out to be pressed. Life was good. There was a picnic table in the side yard, and on those pre-air conditioning summer evenings, Ruth and Billie would frequently invite their friends or family over for cookouts. Later, the webbed lawn chairs would be arranged in a circle in the dark, and the talk would be as soft as the air itself, a comfortable murmur of prosperity punctuated occasionally by sparkling laughter.

  Ruth and Billie’s competition was relatively low-key in those days. The girls say Ruth resented Billie’s interminable hand shaking and socializing after church, but, then, Billie was a deacon and superintendent of the Sunday school. Sometimes, especially later, the girls saw Ruth try to pick fights with Billie, but he would never engage her. Ruth called Billie by his given name, but he called her “Mama.” At times when he needed a little extra leverage—such as when he got Martha the goat—he would call her “Mommy.” For all his Baptist piety, Billie Murphree was a bit of a flirt with women. “Now, Mommy,” he would say, “you’re not going to be mad at your old daddy, are you?” Everybody said Billie had the patience of Job. He never got angry at Ruth—or, if he did, he didn’t show it.

  In the Murphree household, the females referred to Billie as “the king of duct tape.” For most jobs, that wide gray tape was Billie’s answer to the problem. In later years when he began driving the Cadillac Ruth wanted, he even taped on a broken taillight. That embarrassed Ruth, though maybe not as much as when he patched his Bible with great swaths of the tape and carried it to church that way.

  He insisted on doing most of the repairs at his rental houses—“If you hire everything out, you can’t make any money,” Billie would say—as well as at home. If he couldn’t use duct tape, he resorted to what was known among the Murphrees as “nigger rigging” —a tortured, make-do solution, such as the wires he and Tommy ran allover the house to hook up extra, unreported telephones. When the Murphrees moved into 501 Holly, the old heater in the fireplace had a couple of ceramic burners that had slipped. Billie rigged up a pair of coat hangers to hold the sagging burners in place.

  The subterranean water problem baffled him, though. He had worried about it after the bathroom floor repair, but his concerns grew after he’d had floor furnaces installed in the hall and the music room. The girls began to notice that the grate to the music room’s floor furnace would rise whenever there was a hard rain. The grate appeared to be floating. If that was so, it meant that the water under the music room was so high that it was washing up against the bottom of the furnace.

  Martha says you could always tell when Billie was wrestling with a problem. He would put the tips of his fingers together and press them into a point—into the shape of a steeple, or a temple. His index fingers, especially, would be pressed against each other so tightly that the knuckles would pop. He would stare at the temple he’d made with his fingers and continue to pop his knuckles. When the popping stopped, his decision was made. Years later, Martha read in a psychology magazine that people who hold their fingers together that way think of themselves as superior to everyone else.

  Billie tried a sump pump to remove the standing water, but the pool kept building up. Then he decided water was seeping down from the house next door, which stood higher than his. To fix that, he gathered a pile of brick and fieldstone—whatever he could find—and mixed them with concrete, fashioning a retaining wall along the driveway on the line between the two houses. He and Tom also paved the old strip-concrete driveway, toddler Joyce adding her initials in the wet cement for good measure. The idea was that maybe now the water running off the roof would trickle away and not steal into the darkness of the foundation, where the very structure of the house would be at risk.

  I find myself thinking of Billie and the water in symbolic terms, as though the water were the physical incarnation of all the undercurrents of society that he tried desperately to keep from seeping into his family’s life. In the 1950s, Billie was appointed to the Little Rock Censor Board, a group formed decades before when the local PTA had become alarmed by movie scenes it considered unfit for youngsters. The ordinance creating the censor board stated that its purpose was “to protect the public peace, sense of decency, and safety,” and it went on to name those things that would from then on be illegal:

  Scenes and acts in which the names of God and Jesus Christ were used without veneration; scenes and acts exhibiting nakedness; scenes and acts in which dialogue and jokes, gestures, and songs had a double meaning, suggesting obscenity or sex relations; scenes and acts in which proper home life was ridiculed and immorality or underworld life or unfaithfulness in marriage was made to seem attractive; and scenes and acts where marriage or love scenes between different races were portrayed.

  The board had been lax during the war, but by 1947 it was clear to those concerned that something had to be done about the increase in lurid magazines and books and pictures. A new ordinance was written, one less didactic than the original. The new one left definitions of lewdness to the discretion of the censor board.

  Billie took his board duties very seriously—after all, he had two daughters about to come of age, and he owed an all-out effort to them. That meant his house, this house, had to be an ark capable of withstanding the flood.

  Sunday was a day of rest at 501 Holly. Billie’s rule was: no television, no card playing, no music, no wearing of shorts on that day. Sunday was a time to be quiet and praise the Lord—and besides, the preacher often came for after-church dinner.

  Pat remembers that the day inevitably started with her father singing hymns as he dressed for Sunday school. Billie wasn’t an accomplished singer, but he loved the old Baptist standards. As he shaved in the new pink-and-black bathroom, he would hum or sing “The Old Rugged Cross,” one of his mother’s favorites. From behind the shower curtain came his lilting melody of “Just as I Am.” Putting on his white shirt, blue suit, and red tie, he launched into “How Great Thou Art.”

  Ruth and the girls could hear him throughout the house as they ate breakfast and got themselves ready. Then, at the appointed time, the family would walk out the door to the car, Bibles in hand. There’s a scene in one of the home movies, probably at Easter, when the Murphree females come swishing out of the house in hats and gloves and full-skirted dresses like a gaggle of Loretta Youngs on the way to a party. During the ten-minute ride to Second Baptist downtown, Billie drove and the whole family sang along:

  On a hill far away

  Stood an old rugged cross.…

  Every one of the Murphrees went to Sunday school and then to church. On Sunday afternoons, the girls were required to attend Baptist Training Union—BTU—and then evening church service. On Wednesday nights, there was prayer meeting. The Murphrees were typical of the times. In 1954, McCall’s reported that church membership “has rocketed from 50 million in 1929 to more than 95 million—a gain of 90 percent, while the population was increasing only 31.4 percent.” Even outside church, the trend was reflected in the public’s choice of reading. Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, Catherine Marshall’s A Man Galled Peter, Thomas Chastain’s The Silver Chalice, and the new Revised Standard Version of the Bible all hit the best-seller lists in 1952 and stayed there into 1953. In 1954, President Eisenhower changed thePledge of Allegiance to reflect the mood of the country: He added the words
under God.

  I think I understand how deeply the Murphrees’ religion affected the life inside this house. I grew up Baptist, too, attended BTU and prayer meeting, and I remember that church felt mighty aggressive in those days. Maybe it was the Russians—the Cold War against “Godless communism” was heating up—or maybe it was simply an expression of postwar superiority. Preachers had a lot of power, and they weren’t shy about telling their flock how to live their lives. For most of my childhood, we had a Sunday-morning ritual much like the Murphrees’, though with more grumbling and less singing. Then one morning-1 guess I was in high school—it became noticeable to everyone that my father wasn’t getting dressed. We couldn’t see him, but we knew he was still sitting in the living room reading the paper. My brother and I exchanged meaningful glances. Finally, my mother had to break the ice. “Honey!” she said. “It’s time to get ready!”

  Phil and I held our collective breath. Dead silence for a long moment. Then we heard our father’s voice from the other room. “I’m not going,” he said. “I’m not going ever again.” As he later explained it, he was fed up with the hypocrisy of the Baptist Church. He shopped around for a while, and eventually he and Mother began going to the Presbyterian.

  But the Murphrees lived a mid-century Baptist life. Joyce remembers that Catholics and Jews weren’t spoken of highly in their household (never mind Negroes). Pat recalls that her mother wouldn’t let her play with one little girl whose mother had been divorced. When Billie took the family out to eat, if they walked into a restaurant and Billie noticed alcohol being served, he would quietly say, “Let’s don’t eat here.” In general, says Joyce, if you didn’t come from a family in which the father went to work, the mother stayed home, and everyone attended your kind of church, then “the Murphrees didn’t need to be friends with you.”