If These Walls Had Ears Read online

  He was like no one Sheri had ever met before. He was an intellectual, but he wasn’t an egghead. Instead, he made her laugh all the time, his own eyebrows dancing like Groucho’s behind dark-framed glasses. Ed was a New Yorker, but he had the manners of a Southern gentleman. And he had more talents than any one man should be allowed—he could play the guitar and sing (he might pick out a sensitive rendition of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” on his six-string, then segue into a campy tenor version of “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby”); he could draw and paint; and he was a writer. He wrote movies. Movies were his life, it seemed. Ed’s father had been a doctor, and Ed had grown up with the idea that he would follow in his father’s footsteps. But he also loved movies and theater, and he wanted to be a writer, too. He had gone to his father’s alma mater, Tulane, but instead of studying medicine he had gotten a master’s in screenwriting. Ed now had an actual job creating screenplays for a producer who had a production deal with MGM. None of Ed’s scripts had been made yet, but he showed great promise—for a time, a new director named Robert Altman wanted to shoot one of his screenplays, but the timing didn’t work out. When Ed wasn’t writing movies, he was watching them. He was serious about watching movies. He studied the work of the greats in the business—James Agee, Herman Mankiewicz, Graham Greene—and after he and Sheri got together, they would spend every Friday night, all night, in Ed’s apartment with the television tuned to the old-movie channel. He introduced her to classic films like Sergeant York, starring Gary Cooper.

  Ed also loved listening to music of any kind, and in his tiny apartment next door to the Chelsea Hotel, he had a pair of speakers that were nearly as big as his door-top desk. Sheri loved to sing, too, and though she was only five feet tall, she had a big, full voice. She had sung in church in her hometown of Russellville, and then in Conway when her family moved there in. Sheri’s tenth-grade year. But she had never developed her talent further. Instead, after college, she had studied to become a medical technologist. She and Ed had been introduced shortly after Sheri moved to New York to work.

  Now, though, they sang together—Sheri belting out an a cappela “Summertime” hot enough to scorch the downtown streets, or the song she dedicated just to him—“Can’t Help Loving That Man of Mine.” Ed’s favorite group was the Drifters, who sang “Up on the Roof.” Sometimes he and Sheri would do just that—go up onto the roof of their apartment building and sing or talk. Sheri thought it was funny that in the midst of this big, dirty city, there was a sign on that roof that commanded DON’T SPIT ON THE FLOOR. During their long conversations, Ed told her about his family and about the houses he had lived in. His father, Aaron Sigmund Kramer, had been part of Gen. George Patton’s advance team at the end of the war, and he had been among the first of the Allies to document the horrors that had taken place at Auschwitz. What nobody in the family knew was that Dr. Kramer had heart problems. He died just a few years after finishing up his terrible duties abroad. Ed was eight years old.

  Ed’s mother, Hazel, moved with her two sons out of their flat on New York Avenue—where Dr. Kramer had had his medical practice in the apartment downstairs—and into her parents’ big three-story home in a gracious neighborhood on President Street in Brooklyn. Ed’s brother, Lawrence, was eighteen by that time, so he was almost out on his own. But Ed was reared by his grandparents. His grandmother Marjorie Lovett had a great influence on Ed’s love of theater. She was an actress and a model, and had done three Saturday Evening Post covers for Norman Rockwell. She also performed on television in the early days. Living in the Lovetts’ elegant home, with its fine furniture and intricate architectural details, also created an indelible impression on Ed. It was a cultured upbringing. He learned to play the piano on an ornate concert grand that had once belonged to the robber baron Jay Gould. The instrument had been one of five pianos created by Steinway for the five crowned heads of Europe. Gould had acquired this one, and then Ed’s grandmother had inherited it from her mother. To keep the family from squabbling over it after she was gone, Marjorie Lovett sold the piano to an anonymous buyer just before she died.

  Sheri was mesmerized by this young man’s life. She had grown up in an old house, though not a fine old house, in Conway, the daughter of a state employee. Ed came from a different world. The two of them listened often to opera, whose achingly beautiful arias seemed to capture the drama they themselves were living. There was one opera they particularly loved, Jules Massenet’s Thais, in which a monk in ancient Egypt tries to reform a beautiful courtesan, only to fall in love with her as she renounces her past and dies a saint. Sheri and Ed found the arias wonderfully sad. Whatever they did, wherever they walked or ate, they tingled with the romance of the city—the big, impersonal, impossible metropolis in which everything was possible, including finding each other. When they married, they wanted the city to be part of it: They spoke their vows before a justice of the peace at the picturesque old city hall downtown.

  Shortly after their wedding, Sheri learned that her mother back in Arkansas had cancer. It was a particularly serious form, requiring a radical mastectomy. That was disturbing enough, but there were other, even more ominous implications: Sheri’s aunt and grandmother—her mother’s sister and mother—also were fighting cancer. Sheri decided she needed to go home to help her family. Though he had always liked the South, never in his life had Ed Kramer entertained the notion of living in Arkansas. Manhattan had the kind of life and color you could hardly give up. Ed loved telling the story of walking his dog in front of his apartment, and suddenly the dog darted toward a hydrant and pulled the leash taut, tripping a woman walking by. She was splayed out on the sidewalk, a disaster in floppy hat and purple granny glasses. When Ed went to help her, he realized to his horror that it was Janis Joplin. She looked stunned, but then she smiled up at him. “Far out,” she said.

  But he was a married man now, and his duty was to his wife. He of all people understood her need to be with her family. Besides, it was a good time to be leaving Manhattan: The economy in 1971 was putting pressure on the movie business in general and on his producer in particular. Ed and Sheri packed their belongings and set out to make a new home.

  Her brother found them a small rental house in Little Rock, on Woodlawn Street, about nine blocks from Holly. Even that compact house felt like a mansion compared with the tiny apartment they had lived in in Manhattan. For the move to Arkansas, Ed had taken out of storage several pieces of furniture Sheri had never seen—a fine old table with shapely legs, a comfortable old chair with wooden arms, and other items. These had been left to him by his mother, who had died when he was nineteen, and he was happy to have them in his life again. In fact, except for the illness in Sheri’s family, life in Arkansas seemed uncommonly good. Sheri soon got a job doing medical technology work, and within a month Ed landed a plum position as theater director at the Arkansas Arts Center. The job paid $6,500 a year.

  It wasn’t long before the status quo was changed again. At the end of 1971, Sheri became pregnant. The next August, she gave birth to a son, James Sigmund Kramer, named for both Sheri’s and Ed’s fathers. The little boy whose name spanned such disparate cultures became known as Siggy, though nobody in Arkansas seemed able to pronounce it. They persisted in calling him Ziggy, after a character in the comic strips.

  As Sheri remembers it, in the spring of 1973 she happened to be at the Safeway store in Hillcrest when she ran into an old friend from her Russellville years, the former Rita Rhea—now Rita Grimes. Sheri and Rita had been very close before Sheri’s family had moved away—the girls had spent the night at each other’s houses, and Sheri had even later been in Rita’s wedding. That had been thirteen long years ago, and they hadn’t laid eyes on each other since. They were both thrilled to hook up again after so many years. Neither could believe they now lived so close to each other.

  Since Sheri wasn’t working, she began taking Siggy over to visit at Rita’s house. It was a wonderful house with a front porch and a big side ya
rd. Rita’s three oldest children were in school, but her youngest, Kristi, who was almost four, was still at home. While their babies crawled and played, Sheri and Rita caught up on each other’s lives. At one point, Rita mentioned to Sheri that she and her husband had decided to put their house on the market—that they had a weekend lake place now and wanted to spend more time there.

  Sheri began mulling over the idea of buying Rita’s house. The rental house she and Ed lived in was cramped, now that they had a baby. Ed also happened to have a small inheritance—enough to afford a down payment on Roy and Rita’s asking price of $33,500. Sheri soon arranged for Ed to come see the place, and he fell in love. The porch, the French doors, the den with the floor-to-ceiling bookcases—that would be his study (never an “office”), the place where he would retreat at night to create new movie masterpieces.

  Neither Ed nor Sheri had ever bought a house before, but they decided to hold their collective breath and take the plunge. After all, they were young, they were bright, and they’d been blessed time and again. And they were buying from one of Sheri’s oldest friends. Didn’t the stars seem to be on their side?

  Rita and her husband, Roy, didn’t know exactly what to make of Ed Kramer. He was a shortish, dark-bearded New Yorker, and he was in the theater. Roy was a big old easygoing former high school basketball and football player at Russellville High, and he had gone on to become an up-and-corning civil engineer with a respected Little Rock firm. In fact, it was largely because Roy was an engineer that they had finally decided to put this house on the market in the first place. Had it been up to Rita, they would be staying—but, then, she hadn’t been the one to spend all her Saturdays working on the place, trying to patch the walls, prop up the floors, rebuild the windows. After seven years, Roy had just gotten tired of it all—he wanted his weekends back. Rita remembers thinking that if she had to give up this house she loved, she was glad it was to a friend.

  That, at least, is the way she felt about it at the time.

  It’s a funny thing how a relationship with a house can be so much like a love affair. At first it’s all magic, all rockets in flight. Then, sooner or later, the reality sets in. If it’s not going to work, the realization sneaks up on you gradually, moving from the feeling to the knowing, the way the awful need to end a marriage does.

  The Grimeses were the first of several families to divorce this house. By that, I mean several families left it not just to go toward something better; they left it mainly to get away from this house’s incessant misery, its overwhelming neediness. They left it to save themselves. But inevitably, such a break leaves scars on both sides.

  Rita was twenty-three and already the mother of three when she and Roy moved to 501 Holly. The year was 1966, the month September. As young as she was, she knew even then that she loved old houses. She thought of the one she had grown up in as “the old home place,” imbuing it with a magical quality that transcended mere brick and mortar. In the mid-sixties, however, she had been living with her husband, Roy, and three young children in an 1,100square-foot house in a new subdivision of houses all pretty much like theirs, all occupied by people pretty much their age. The house had actually been built for them, though—the developer showed them the lots they could choose from and then let them pick from among five or six floor plans. It was the training-wheels version of building a house. The plan Rita and Roy had selected was a three-bedroom ranch. They had moved in in 1963, when Rita was twenty.

  By then, they’d been married three years and already had two sons, Scott and Mark. Roy, who was six years older than Rita, was embroiled in his work with the engineering firm of Garver and Garver. It was an exciting time to be an engineer. Little Rock was being virtually encircled by the new interstate highway system, and Roy’s company was involved in a major study for part of that. Roy and Rita, who had met and married in their little central Arkansas hometown of Russellville, felt that their future was as limitless as that interstate highway now seemed to be. Rita had studied art for a while and then had switched to engineering herself. Finally, she had dropped out of school to marry Roy. Now she was happy just being a mother and housewife.

  After having lived in a succession of apartments, they even found their new house in the subdivision limitless at first. Then Rita got pregnant again. In February 1966, she gave birth to a daughter, Lori. Scott was two and a half, Mark was one and a half, and now they had a new baby. It was amazing how fast that house had shrunk. Rita started watching the want ads, circling and clipping descriptions of houses that seemed promising. One day, she ran across an ad for a house at 501 Holly. It sounded wonderful—a front porch, lots of bedrooms, wall-to-wall carpeting, a big corner lot. Not only that; there was no down payment required—the buyer would just assume the loan. The house was for sale by the owners themselves. That night when Roy came home from work, Rita had already made an appointment with the people, a Mr. and Mrs. Murphree.

  Dropping the kids off with Rita’s aunt, Roy and Rita drove from the new subdivision into the old tree-lined streets of Hillcrest. It was dark when they got to Holly Street, but the house lights glowed. In the blush of lamplight, the timeless dance ensued: Rita was mesmerized, the way Ruth had been on her first day almost twenty years before. Roy and Rita never even saw this house in daylight before buying it. There are times in your life when you don’t want to risk having your mind changed.

  Rita Grimes, second from right, with her two sons and Roy's sisters. Rita loved 501 Holly no matter what calamity came along.

  They told themselves the house was in a spectacular location for a family with young children—the Pulaski Heights school, offering nine grades in one location, was practically at their back doorstep. They told each other that no matter how hard they looked, they wouldn’t do better. The Murphrees were asking $24,000. Roy got them to knock fifteen hundred dollars off that. In the end, the Grimeses put $500 down and assumed the mortgage for $22,000.

  That September of 1966, 501 Holly’s third owners moved in. But it’s part of the alchemy of houses that even when a man and wife move into one together, they don’t necessarily move into the very same house. There’s a photograph of Rita, one of the few snapshots of her taken here, and she’s standing in front of the house with three of Roy’s four sisters, plus Scott and Mark, who’re perched upon one of the brick half columns, as though on a pedestal. Rita, in her bright yellow A-line and sixties bouffant, is only twenty-four in this picture, but her deep-dimpled smile says she’s shed her cookie-cutter box in the subdivision and slipped into a unique identity, an identity even older women would have to respect. Rita would love this house, the idea of it, the whole time they were here.

  There are numerous snapshots of Roy at 501, and many of them catch him, naturally, with a smile on his face. But one picture taken about the same time as the one of Rita captures what I now know to be the worry Roy felt about this place. He’s standing in front of the house, with his arm around his mother, and just over his left shoulder is a tree I had never known existed. He says it wasn’t much of a tree—it’d been struck by lightning or something, and the top was gone from it. As soon as Roy saw it, he knew he would have to take it down eventually. At this house, even the trees needed work. Roy’s expression in this photo says he had left his new, small, easily managed house in the subdivision and slipped into maintenance quicksand. He would be weary of it long before he would find a way to escape.

  They took to calling the living and dining space “the bowling alley.” With the sudden absence of Ruth’s heavy Victorian furniture, that sprawling expanse of beige carpet now looked incredibly empty. Rita and Roy had no dining room furniture at first, just a dinette set for the kitchen. They placed their small white brocade sofa and a couple of velvet chairs in the living room area, spreading an Oriental-style rug under the side-by-side cocktail tables. Rita arranged a few items—a picture, some sconces, one of those big decorative keys that were popular then—over the mantel and positioned her family knickknacks in the ot
herwise-empty bookcase by the fireplace. Still, it wasn’t exactly cozy. Every time they walked through the front door, they were met by the ringing reminder that this was a real house, and they were neophytes.

  They did have a piano, though, and a record player with an eight-track cassette deck. Rita put all of those music-related pieces in the room off the living area, which was now officially the music room. The middle room, the one with all those bookcases, became the den. That’s where the TV set was. Nineteen sixty-six was the year color television became the norm—the demand for color sets was so great that you had to wait to get one because local stores would be out of stock for months at a time. Roy and Rita had just made the switch, buying a big black Magnavox console model, which they placed in front of the bookcases. The years the Grimeses lived in this house spanned the eras from The Green Hornet to Kung Fu, from The Milton Berle Show to The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour. In the evenings, Roy and Rita would settle back in the old green Herculon chair or spread out across the floral-print sofa, while the children sprawled on the floor in front of the TV, their chins in their hands.

  The whole family slept upstairs. In the beginning, the two boys shared the big bedroom where Martha Murphree had walked on doorknobs; in the smaller room adjacent, little Lori slumbered in her crib. Rita and Roy, who had a king-size bed, planned to use the big attic room as their master suite. This room does have wonderful potential for that. It’s cozy; the ceiling slopes on either side, evoking the romantic aura of a Parisian garret—especially at night, when the shadows from the big elm brush across the walls. Back when the Murphrees had taken out the first pair of French doors downstairs, they’d knocked out a couple of windows facing the front of the house and installed the French doors here. Now you could open those doors and step out onto the roof of the front porch; in theory, it was like having your own terrace off the master bedroom.