If These Walls Had Ears Page 13

  Ruth says the reason they moved was that Billie finally got sick of mowing that terrace, that Lee Street hill. He’d taken to tying a rope around his lawn mower and tethering it to a tree, so that if he slipped, the mower wouldn’t careen into the path of a car. It was, of course, ridiculous. After two decades, the hill had become just too steep. “I want a flat lot,” Billie told Ruth one day. It was music to her ears. They decided to build a house farther west, in a newer, more fashionable part of town.

  By the time they did, those of us in their children’s generation had already launched our own pilgrimages. Our restless journeys would take many forms and would branch in wild new directions, but the destination would always be the same.

  Some of us would think we’d reached it at a house on Holly Street.

  Surely there’s meaning in the fact that the first two families in this house lived here a total of forty-three years, while the rest of us, six families in all, have come and mostly gone over a period of only twenty-nine.

  I don’t pretend to know precisely why that is. All I know is that Billie Murphree’s generation seems to have been the last to regard change as something not to be sought. Billie came home from World War II arid stayed at one job for three decades. He was married to one woman for more than half a century. He and Ruth moved just three times during all those years. They bought cemetery plots and picked out their coffins when they were in middle age. And Billie, because of his sideline real estate business, turned out to be a millionaire.

  Those days seem gone forever. To me, though, it sometimes feels like something epic has been lost—some sweep, some heroic, poetic willingness to stand against outside forces—only to be replaced by something that’s festered up from deep inside us and caused us to run, and to keep on running, shifting directions whenever the wind blows. It feels as though the search has become indistinguishable from whatever it is we’re searching for.

  In house terms, I know from experience that this restlessness has its own palette. It’s pale, neutral, not nearly as passionate as you might think.

  My oldest friend has had the same telephone number and post office box since we graduated front college almost thirty years ago. Since he married in 1969, he and his wife—the same wife—have lived in one apartment and two houses, the latter for the past fifteen years. My friend claims he’s had to fill out an entire Rolodex just to keep track of me. I hate when lie says that, because it’s so close to true. And yet I think I’m more nearly typical of American life—certainly of our generation—than he is. “In the United States,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835, “a man builds a house in which to spend his old age, and he sells it before the roof is on.” I’ve read that the average American lives in sonic thirteen residences during his lifetime. This is about twice the rate in England and France, four times the rate in Ireland, and half the rate for me—so far. People who analyze such things attribute American rootless ness to several factors—a greater likelihood of divorce, for one; a wider geographic dispersal of economic opportunity, for another. Those strike me as mere mile-stones on a circle. Tocqueville suspected a deeper cause—that our classless society gives the average American more opportunity, which produces in him “anxiety, fear, and regret.” As a result, he’s always searching, always looking over his shoulder, always changing his plans “and his abode.”

  And when he changes his abode, he paints it beige or white so it’ll sell or rent more easily the next time.

  I’ve always loved color, loved its power to express the soul. And yet it took me years to sense what the expectation of moving was doing to the quality of my life. In 1968, after I finished graduate school, my wife and I moved to Kansas City; where I went to work for Hallmark. We rented an apartment, had a son, rented another apartment, then a house, then yet another apartment. All of them had white walls. I changed jobs, discovered the magazine business. The moment I got into it, I started angling for the next magazine, the next position. We bought a house, my first—an almost-new house. The only color in it was the gold shag carpeting and our icy blue drapes.

  Then I got a better job and we moved to Minneapolis, where everything was white so much of the year. It was December 1973. We were lucky: We found an affordable old house in the best old area of town—it had big trees in the yard and a creek not too far away. I felt that I was home. We painted the living room a deep blue and had white carpet cut and bound. The inside of our house looked like a Minnesota winter day. I papered my son’s room in bright red, white, and blue. I even painted my study a rich brown, that being the decorator color of the 1970s. Then we had another son, and I papered over my study for him. I remember the dominant color was a fresh green. Soon after that, I found the alien socks in my drawer. We lived in that house two and a half years.

  I moved to an apartment—white walls again. I began dating—too seriously, too soon—for the first time in a dozen years. I bought my own town house, painted the walls a sunny yellow. Then I got a call from a headhunter. It was the job I had been angling for in Chicago. I sold the town house less than a year after I bought it. Some boxes I had never unpacked. In the fall of 1978, I got rid of my car and prepared for the urban life. The woman I was with told me she had always wanted to live in Chicago.

  We moved into an old apartment building in Lincoln Park. The rooms were large, numerous, and as white as apathy. I threw myself into my work. I explored Chicago, that most Southern of northern cities. In the very first week, I met a black man, a janitor, who had come from Hazlehurst, Mississippi, and knew my uncle. I felt at home in Chicago and began looking for a place to buy. It turned out to he a condominium, an old and cozy one near the lake. The woman and I, still unmarried, though talking about it, moved in together. The walls were more of a cream than stark white.

  In Chicago, I began consciously wrestling with this business of always angling for the next thing. It was time to stop, I told myself. Besides, I now had the very job I had wanted since college. It was time to dig in and make a home. It was during my time in Chicago that I realized my aunt May’s house had such meaning to me. I traveled to Hazlehurst frequently during those years. I noticed that May’s rooms were painted a soothing green.

  I married again in 1980. Three years later, we bought the old house on Chicago’s North Shore, the one whose sunroom renovations I later dreamed of while mowing the lawn. This time, I had my small study papered in a rich Chinesey red, almost the color of brick. I tried painting the downstairs sunroom terra-cotta, but it turned out all wrong—a horrible shade of pumpkin. We had someone come in and repaint it. I can’t remember what color it finally was. We weren’t there long enough.

  When my disillusionment with my dream job reached the critical point, I began angling again. I wanted to start my own magazine, which, on the face of it, should’ve qualified me for permanent residence in a home for the hopelessly insane. My idea was to start a magazine about the South. Some people in Little Rock had the same notion, and I agreed to go in with them. My wife was stunned—she loved Chicago and her job—but said she would try it. I thanked her. The color of azaleas exploded in my head.

  We made a lot of money on the Chicago house, and in 1986, we bought a big, relatively new place in west Little Rock. Starting a magazine, I was hardly ever there. Most of our many walls were beige, and some were light gray. In less than a year, my wife, a Minnesotan, decided she hated Arkansas, that it could never be home to her. She wanted to go back to Chicago, and eventually she did. We divorced after eight years of marriage, and finally sold the house—for a loss—after three. She lived in it a year and a half.

  No more white walls: Beth and the girls in our colorful living room, Mother's Day, 1992.

  Now Beth and the girls and Snapp and I are together on Holly Street. Beth loves color, too. Her late brother Brent, a New York decorator who died too young, left her with these words of wisdom: “Matisse colors, Vuillard patterns.” We painted the living and dining rooms an earthy terra-cotta, and next time we’ll do it bri
ghter. Our bedroom is periwinkle, a purplish blue that evokes hydrangeas. Bret’s room is a bold Mediterranean blue, with curtains the color and pattern of Moroccan tiles. My office-studio, in the Murphrees’ day known as the attic, is a warm yellow that could stand to be even warmer.

  Most of us are afraid of color, no matter how much we yearn for it. I suspect it has to do with the way we’ve been conditioned. When Beth and I were trying to choose a color to paint the room where we watch TV—it’s the former downstairs back bedroom—we wanted it bright, in a reddish hue. And yet we were timid, forever watering it down in the direction of a comforting white. The first run-through, we ended up with walls the color of Pepto-Bismol. Beth phoned her brother, who urged us to be brave—to make a commitment.

  Now we call that room the Geranium Room, describing the color. It’s bold, brilliant, and more soothing than I could’ve ever imagined. Every time I walk into it, I think about all those years I existed within white, easily transferable walls. I don’t regret my running and my risks, but now the Geranium Room makes me dearly want to hold on to what I’ve got. Sometimes there’s only a shade of difference between being ambitious and being lost.

  Roy Grimes and his mother in the fall of 1966. Roy wasn't an old-house person, and at 501 Holly even the trees needed work.

  Chapter Nine

  Grimes

  1966 1973

  Just as I was getting started on this book, a writer friend of mine from New York drove through Little Rock on his way out west. As I was telling him about the history of the house, we walked out into the front yard, down by the Lee Street hill. It was early evening and the lights were on upstairs and down. We stood out there in the dusk for a very long time; I was pointing to this and that, and my friend was just listening. Finally, he said, “Do you want to know my impression of this house?”

  I told him I did.

  “I find it ominous,” he said.

  That was a shock to me. Never once had I perceived this house—the appearance of this house—as anything but warm and appealing. But I took another look at it, this time through my friend’s eyes. I began to see what he was talking about.

  It shows up often in photographs, especially at dusk, and especially in the late springtime. At that time of year, the trees are bushy and dark-leafed, and they loom over the house like giants stepped from a child’s dream. At the end of the day, but before nightfall, there are still shadows—vast, unseeable places in that high yard on a hill, where the trees have blocked out light. The house takes on an air of mystery then. The porch that I find such a passive source of joy and contentment seems to jut out almost aggressively. The eaves that I find so architecturally interesting become, recast in long shadows, a row of daggers protruding from just beneath the roof over my family’s heads.

  My writer friend has long since gone home to New York, but I’ve never seen this house in quite the same way since his visit. It’s probably just as well. Even the sunniest of us has a dark side, and to think anything else is folly. But for quite a while I wondered if what my friend had seen was the true personality of this house. Looking back over its history, you could make a case for portentousness and foreboding.

  It started hopefully enough, as all houses—as all lives—do. Then in 1926, Elizabeth Armor brought her insidious message of evil and despair, which was soon followed by the stock market crash and the Great Depression and the unraveling of Charlie and Jessie’s dreams.

  In some ways, poor Charlie didn’t even see the worst of it—his son held prisoner of war for the duration of World War II.

  The Murphrees’ case is more subtle, but no less ironclad, it seems to me. I believe Billie invested this house with his own sense of moral superiority at a time when morals and manners were changing radically. The Murphrees had a good life here—some of the Murphrees more than others—but the house couldn’t possibly protect Billie and his family from the erosion that was taking place all around them.

  I said earlier that I feel as though something epic, and maybe heroic, has been lost since the time of the Armours and the Murphrees—since the end of the 1950s, I suppose. Partly, that’s me romanticizing the carefree days of my childhood. But the times did change, beginning in the 1960s, and this house not only reflected those mostly unhappy changes; you could say it also presaged them.

  Like the country itself, the house at 501 Holly had begun to feel the weight of age and the effects of decay at its core. By the time the Murphrees left in 1966, there was an ominous bulge in the wall above the window in the downstairs back bedroom. In the den, the floor felt suspiciously soft when you walked across it. Outside that infamous bay window, a row of bricks originally angled to lead water away from the house had now kicked upward, inviting runoff rain from the pane to trickle into the dark space between the brick exterior and the wooden dermis of the house itself. In the backyard, the garage, crammed with the detritus of decades, was tilting precariously. The Murphrees had even discovered termites eating at the floor beneath the music room. All Billie’s brooding about the water had been justified: It had given birth to corruption, to compromise. Can a floor once damaged ever be trusted as before?

  And could there be a more perfect symbol for the restlessness of the past thirty years than an uncertain floor? It seems to me that while the sweeping themes of the first half of the century were external, the themes of the second half have been internal—a crash of identity, a world war deep within, a great depression of the spirit.

  At the house on Holly Street, those themes intertwined in an episode I call the Great Termite War. It was more than an episode, really—it was an era, twenty years in all. Sometimes it was a hot war, sometimes a cold war. Sometimes it took the form of active termites, and sometimes it showed up as dry rot. But no matter how the conflict manifested itself, the cause was water. Its dark, damp beginnings aren’t precisely known, but its destruction is. The destruction affected more than the house itself, of course—it touched six families, eroding friendships, bank accounts, even marriages.

  That being the case, is this house “ominous,” as my friend suggested? Does it bring bad luck to those who live in it?

  The other night, I fixed a drink and went out into the side yard and studied my house. I stood, hidden by darkness, under the long, graceful limbs of the maple tree. It seemed that every light in the house was on, which didn’t surprise me. Like my father when I was young, I now spend much of my life walking around flicking off lights after other members of the family have departed a room. This time, though, I was glad we were burning so much electricity—it allowed me to see more. Windows are a house’s eyes. Just like with a person, you can never tell exactly what’s going on behind those panes, but if you peer deeply enough and concentrate, you can form an impression of the life inside.

  Upstairs, Bret’s bedside lamp was on, though she was supposed to be asleep already. I’d like to think she was reading, but she was probably playing with her Game Boy. Blair’s overhead light and ceiling fan were both going—she’s a teenager and hardly ever comes out of her room, except to snarl that her mother is ruining her life. She was probably writing notes to one of her friends. Downstairs, the tall lamps between the living and dining rooms cast a warm glow on the terra-cotta walls. I could tell, too, from the color of the reflection on the wall near the hall that the light in the Geranium Room was on. Beth was probably in there watching an old movie.

  And I, of course, was lurking in the shadows looking for signs that my house was evil. I didn’t see it. Oh, I saw odd things—for the first time ever, I noticed that the second story Charlie Armour added at the back of the house gives the structure the vague shape of one of those fanciful old sailing vessels, like the Niña or the Pinta or the galleon of Captain Hook. The second story is the bridge, the jutting front porch the bow.

  But I don’t believe that it’s a pirate ship. It’s just a ship of fools—always has been, always will be. The house is old now, and it’s been through a lot in its days. I think that’s wha
t my friend was seeing—not the house’s personality, but its damaged heart, a wise old soul reflecting what it knows about the ominousness of life itself.

  * * *

  It’s hard to say exactly when a house becomes old. Despite Ruth’s efforts to update it, 501 Holly wasn’t really old when the Murphrees bought it—it had been standing for only twenty-four years. Today, that would be a house built in 1972. That’s not an old house, not in the way the word is used by people for whom old is a desirable quality. For those people, a house has to have patina, the sheen of another era. But beyond that, the era evoked has to be attractive in some emotional way. A 1972 house conjures images of bell-bottoms and platform shoes. Even if I live to be a hundred, that won’t be my idea of patina.

  One reason is that I lived—as an adult—through the 1970s. People who want old houses are trying, consciously or not, to connect with an earlier time. A decade ago, the architect and writer Witold Rybczynski wrote a wonderful book entitled Home: A Short History of an Idea. He actually puts dates to the concept of “old”—roughly the period from 1890 to 1930. “If department stores or home-decorating magazines are any indication,” he says, “most people’s first choice would be to live in rooms that resemble, as much as their budgets permit, those of their grandparents.” Rybczynski says old-house people are searching for comfort and security in a world that no longer seems to provide such things.

  Ed and Sheri Kramer were old-house people. So were Forrest and Sue Wolfe. So was Rita Grimes; her husband, Roy, wasn’t particularly, but he went along with his wife’s desires. And if it was connections these old-house people were after, they found more than they bargained for at 501 Holly. In fact, I think the stories of these three families are so interconnected that they have to be told as one.

  It begins, for me, in the middle, with a fiercely principled young Jewish man from Brooklyn and a strong-willed young gentile woman from Arkansas falling in love in New York City. The year was 1969. Edward Lovett Kramer was the man, Sheri Mabry the woman. Sheri, a petite, dark-haired beauty whose photographs from the era remind me of Jessica Lange, was twenty-seven at the time of their meeting; Ed, bearded and already receding on top, was only twenty-two.