If These Walls Had Ears Read online

  Roy and Rita had big plans—they were eventually going to level the floor, and there was talk of building a bathroom in the big storage closet just inside the door. To get them started, though, Roy covered the bare floor planks with rust-colored linoleum designed to look like a basket-weave pattern of bricks. Thirty years later, that linoleum is still here. There’s no bathroom. A marble still rolls to the wall.

  Eventually, Roy and Rita traded rooms with the boys, giving them the attic and painting their old room a bold and cheery gold, complemented by a red-and-gold bedspread and curtains, as well as by a bright red piece of carpet that captured the spirit of their Spanish-style furniture. It hadn’t taken Rita long to decide the attic wasn’t for her. That first arrangement was scrapped after a night when Roy was out of town and Rita was trying to drift off to sleep. Suddenly, a book on the bookshelf fell over. Rita was petrified. What was that noise? She was afraid to scream, afraid to do anything. She lay there hugging her pillow all night long.

  Old houses, with their creaks and groans and gothic shadows, do have a way of playing tricks on your mind. I once lay awake for hours in our big old house in Hazlehurst, convinced that the hooded figure in the far corner was Death and that, although I could see him plainly, I would never again see morning.

  All these years later, Roy Grimes can still take a sheet of tattersall drafting paper and sketch out a precise portrait of the malaise that had overtaken the den. He shows me how time, conspiring against joists in the damp darkness beneath the subfloor, eventually succeeded in shifting bricks in full sunlight outside the window, allowing rain to invade the wall. It’s a lesson of life, taught by a house: Everything is connected. Joists had rotted, the floor had dropped, and the brick had kicked up. Roy spent a good portion of his first months at 501 Holly crawling on his knees beneath the den, propping up the joists with concrete blocks, firming up the sagging floor as far to the north edge of the house as he could go—which wasn’t quite far enough.

  He takes out another piece of paper and draws one slanted line, representing the angle of the terrain sloping from right to left—north to south. Then he draws a horizontal line, representing the subfloor of the house. The lines intersect at the far right. He explains that this house was actually built into this hill, and the contractor didn’t excavate completely on the north side. There’s no room to crawl under there—which means you may have no idea if something else is crawling under there. A man had to come out and jack up the corner of the house in order to reset the row of tipped brick.

  The garage was obviously on its last legs. Roy was afraid to park his Mustang in it, but more than that, he was afraid for his children’s safety. Young boys love to explore musty car sheds, where old tools hang from bared ribs and boxes of potential treasure loom in the half-light. After six months of worrying, Roy came to a decision: The garage had to go. He hired a crew of high school boys, who came over wielding sledgehammers and testosterone. They probably would’ve paid Roy to let them do the job, though he paid them two hundred dollars instead. When it was over, Roy had dirt hauled in to fill the void where the garage had been. With that area built up to the slant of the rest of the backyard, he blocked off the driveway with railroad ties and a section of fence. He did away with the wooden gate between the garage and the back sidewalk. Finally, in the spot where Jessie Armour’s servant’s quarters had stood, he poured a slab of concrete and put up a white prefab metal shed from Sears.

  Had Rita been watching this process from the downstairs back bedroom, she would’ve been careful not to get too close to the window, which was about to fall out. Obviously, there had been movement in the floor and wall, and the entire window frame was now cocked out at the top. Roy had to jack the windows, horizontally, back into place. Then he went in like a surgeon and reattached the frame to the wooden skeleton inside the wall.

  Throughout the house, the story was always the same—the ravages of time, combined with carelessness or neglect. The infrastructure was crumbling. Tile in the upstairs shower had been painted over and was peeling. There was some problem with the plaster in the corner bedroom upstairs—wallpaper wouldn’t stick to it, and they papered that room three times in the seven years they were here. The kitchen was covered in what Rita says was “cheap paneling”—even the cabinets were made out of it. There were no built-ins, and the stove was twenty years old. Roy had a carpenter come in and redo the kitchen. The man added cabinets, plus a new stove and dishwasher in that buttery seventies yellow. There’s a photograph obviously taken by Rita—it’s of her family posed before the new stove and range. Somehow, the aim of the photographer has shifted slightly, so that Roy, Scott, Mark, and Lori are off center to the left, sharing the spotlight with the sparkling new range top.

  Rita says the kitchen was the big change they made in the appearance of this house. Here in this old place, they indulged in very little of what you might call pure decorating—changes made to please the soul instead of to redress the injustices of age. For a while, Rita’s brother lived in the downstairs back bedroom, and he wanted his room red. They bought him the paint and let him do it. Their most ambitious attempt at pure cosmetics was in the living and dining area—the bowling alley. Just before they moved out, they tried a two-tone green motif, lighter on the walls and a tad darker on the squares of decorative molding. Rita felt, after it was all done, that she hadn’t quite pulled it off, that the two colors hadn’t contrasted enough.

  When the days and evenings of work were over, they would retreat to the den and watch television—which increasingly featured news of the Vietnam War or the trial of the Chicago Seven or the search for the Weathermen. Those were unsettling times, and the anxiety of the era was reflected in the house itself. Sitting there in the den at 501 Holly, Roy and Rita could usually hear footsteps skittering in the walls, as if the decay all around them had thousands of legs and could outrun any human effort to overtake it. One night, the footsteps weren’t in the walls. Roy cornered a huge rat in the music room. He yelled for Rita to bring him a towel, arid when the rat tried to get past him, Roy pounced on it with the heavy cloth. He took it outside and beat it until it stopped squealing.

  There’s such a thing as being out of sync with your surroundings. I haven’t said this to Rita and Roy, but I believe that’s what happened to them. In one respect, they were ahead of their time; in another, they were too late.

  When they moved to Hillcrest, the area at large had become old—both the houses and the people who lived in them. The commercial buildings on Kavanaugh were clearly deteriorating. A neighborhood study showed that the population of Pulaski Heights had dropped .10 percent between 1960 and 1970. In the early 1960s, the Methodist church—the church the Grimeses attended—even considered leaving its location on Woodlawn Street and moving farther west, following the trend. Like the Murphrees, that’s where most of the people had gone. Others had simply died. Over the next decade, the restless generation would discover this old neighborhood and move into it, feverishly fixing up the inexpensive houses and trying to connect with a life that had charm and meaning. In those terms, Roy and Rita were practically alone when they came here. They were gentrification pioneers.

  Many of their neighbors were elderly. One old lady was on the telephone the minute the Grimes family dog, a Pekinese named Pixie, started barking. Others seemed to resent any evidence of fun, especially if it involved music that wasn’t by Lawrence Welk. One summer night, Roy and Rita and a few friends had cooked out and then migrated to the front porch. It was only around nine o’clock, and they were swinging and rocking and enjoying themselves when one of the men started everybody singing—Roy doesn’t remember the song, only that it was loud. Soon Mr. Grimes was wanted on the phone.

  “Are you having a party over there?” said a voice. It was someone from a few houses away.

  “Well,” said Roy, “kind of.”

  “Well, this is a decent neighborhood,” said the caller, “and we’d appreciate it if you’d get quiet.”
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br />   Another night, the entire family was spread out on the floor in the bowling alley, playing Monopoly. The children were fidgeting and crawling and trying to pay attention, and Roy and Rita were shaking the dice, dealing the cards, and handling the money. Suddenly, there was a knock on the door. Roy opened it and two policemen stood there. “We have a report that you’re gambling in this house,” the cop said. Even now, Roy and Rita are incredulous about that episode. They suspect that someone who was canvassing the neighborhood for a charity had come to the door and caught a glimpse of them through the window and then had dashed off to report the further decline of morals in Hillcrest.

  In August 1969, Rita went to the hospital to have another baby. It was a girl, Kristi—the second child born to this house. While Rita was gone, Roy stayed home with the children. Scott was seven, Mark six, Lori three and a half. The three males used that time to build a patio in the backyard. Roy spread a bed of sand and ordered a load of bricks to lay in it. He worked for hours on his knees in the hot sun, the boys bringing him brick after brick. He laid them in with out mortar, two this way and two that, effecting the classic basket weave. When he finished the patio, he poured concrete and installed a gas grill, the latest thing. Scott and Mark etched their initials in the concrete. Everything looked beautiful, except that anyone sitting on the patio would list north to south at about ten degrees. I asked Roy, the civil engineer, why he did it that way. “That’s the way the land was,” he said. He didn’t recall their using the patio very much.

  The four Grimes children, posed in front of Rita's new stove and range.

  Scott and Mark were both at Pulaski Heights Elementary that fall, Scott in the second grade, Mark in the first. Rita found herself feeling lonely with the boys off at school. Scott, she says, kept the house pretty lively when he was at home, and I can see what she means even in his photographs. There’s a sunny kind of cockiness that comes through in the way he angles his head and breaks into his lazy smile. Rita says Scott took great delight in pestering his little brother and Lori, keeping them upset, making them run and tell. Mark was mischievous but sweet, always flashing an engaging, snaggle-toothed grin from having knocked out a tooth in a fall when he was three. The strange thing about Mark was that he was scared to death of rain. Sometimes the family would go sit on the porch in a spring storm, but Mark wouldn’t set foot outside the door. Lori, on the other hand, looks like someone the rain wouldn’t touch even if she was standing in it. There’s a wonderful photo of her—of all the kids—again taken in front of the new stove. Lori, probably age five or six, is wearing nothing but white underpants, and she looks like a golden-haired California girl, one of those suntanned angels glowing with good health and blessed with promise.

  In fact, looking at photographs like that one, I have a hard time remembering that not everything was perfect in the Grimes household.

  Even though Lori was good company, Rita felt like a bit of a misfit on Holly Street. She yearned to have a conversation during the day with somebody over the age of three. In her old neighborhood, several of the mothers gathered daily with their children and helped one another pass the time. There might’ve been as many as fifteen kids in tow, all under the age of six. It had been madness, but fun. Here on Holly, Rita was by far the youngest woman on the block. Most of the other wives worked, and the ones who stayed home were old. It was just another way the Grimeses were out of sync.

  In 1971, Rita and Roy learned that the Little Rock school district was going to start court-ordered busing. This was one of those wrangles that seemed to have been going on forever—since Central High, at least, which had been fifteen years before. Throughout the sixties, the Little Rock school board had been studying ways of achieving “desegregation,” and even in 1966 there had been articles in the newspaper that pointed clearly to busing. Rita says she hadn’t noticed them, or hadn’t paid attention. Now, suddenly, having nine grades just three blocks from Holly Street was totally moot.

  To add the proverbial insult to injury, Scott and Mark didn’t qualify to be actually bused to school. The rule was, if you lived two miles away from your new school as the crow flies, a bus would pick you up and bring you home. By that measurement, Forest Park Elementary was just under two miles from 501 Holly.

  Rita’s days of boredom were over, replaced with a regimen that kept her on the go. She packed five-year-old Lori and two-year-old Kristi up in the morning so she could take the boys to school. To complicate matters, Lori was starting kindergarten that year. In the afternoons, Rita and Kristi had to drive one place to pick Lori up at noon, then come back for Mark and Scott at 3:30. The next year Mark was transferred to a school farther away, so he was bused. That didn’t help, since Rita still had to be away from the house morning and afternoon hauling Scott and Lori. Rita remembers one period when she had to make three afternoon pickups—at noon, 2:00, and 3:30.

  The truth is, moving to 501 Holly had taken some of the fun out of life for Rita and Roy. Since they’d been here, they hadn’t been able to go and do the way they had in the past. Of course, now they had four children —that had something to do with it. But the house itself was expensive to keep up. Before, they had partied at restaurants and clubs, Now, at Holly Street, they tended to invite friends to play cards at home. Occasionally, on fall Saturdays, a group would meet here and they would all walk the nine blocks to War Memorial Stadium for an Arkansas Razorbacks football game. They threw only one major party in this house in seven years, on New Year’s Eve 1970. Rita’s mother kept the kids, and Roy cleared the furniture out of the bowling alley and everybody danced to the eight-track—to hell with the neighbors. Cabin fever had definitely set in. Rita says there’s an 8-mm movie of that party, but she refuses to let me see it.

  I think it’s telling that one of the fondest memories Rita and Roy seem to have of their time in this house didn’t happen here. One spring in the early 1970s, they went to New Orleans with their Russellville friends Jim and Lynn Hardin to celebrate both couples’ wedding anniversaries. Lynn had introduced Roy to Rita, and Jim and Roy had been friends for ages. On this night in New Orleans, they all had a wonderful time eating and drinking and catching up with what was important in one another’s lives. Soon these couples would decide to build a lake house together, an A-frame nestled among the oaks and hickories on Greer’s Ferry Lake, two hours north of Little Rock. From the wistful way both Roy and Rita tell me this story, I sense that this joint lake house was an expression of how much they had missed one another, how much they had been missing the good times.

  The celebration, the toasts, went on for hours. Before the night was over, these old friends were walking arm in arm together through the ancient streets of the French Quarter, and the song they were singing was “American Pie,” an anthem about changing times.

  Roy’s escape came with a phone call out of the blue. Rita’s aunt owned quite a few pieces of property, and she regularly worked with a certain Realtor. One day, this Realtor called Roy and asked if he could come look at their house. Being nice to the man because of Rita’s aunt, Roy agreed. The Realtor was interested in seeing everything, so Roy and Rita escorted him around.

  A couple of days later, the man called Roy again. He said he could sell this house if Roy was interested. The truth is, Roy and Rita never had openly discussed selling. Rita loved the house despite the problems with the neighborhood, and Roy had repaired the major defects. They’d even bought an antique dining room suite, so the bowling alley was no longer quite so empty. Roy told the man he wasn’t interested in selling. The Realtor said to let him know if he changed his mind.

  Then, before he hung up, Roy said, “What do you think you could sell it for?” The Realtor threw out a number.

  Weekends at the lake house, the kids water skiing, Roy and Jim reeling in the bass. At the end of the day, there was the party barge—was anything more peaceful than drifting on the glassy lake at sunset, sipping a cocktail, watching the day go orange and slip beyond the water?

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sp; All in all, Roy decided, he’d rather spend his weekends like that, instead of painting and wallpapering and watching for the latest crack in the plaster. He let the Realtor know their decision.

  And then Sheri Mabry walked back into Rita’s life.

  To Ed Kramer, a boy from Brooklyn, a tree was a precious thing’especially the towering tulip tree, at right in this picture.

  Chapter Ten

  Kramer

  1973 1976

  It rained hard last night. We knew it was coming because the TV station kept a small boxed picture of the state in the lower left corner of the screen throughout the evening. All the counties in Arkansas were shown, and as the storm overtook a county, the color of that county went from white to red. The rain reached us early, but not the real storm. That would probably hit while we were sleeping. Before I went to bed, I walked through the house, checking windows, securing doors, making sure the skylight was shut tight. I turned out the lights—and then, for just a moment, I stood in the kitchen in the dark, looking out at the yard, watching the tree branches sway in that ominous way they do, like horses sensing snakes.

  I couldn’t sleep. As I lay there listening to the patter on the roof, the image of young Mark Grimes came to mind. His childhood fear of rain is fascinating to me. It’s almost as though he was prescient about the lethal mix of houses and water—of how truly vulnerable a house is to nature. We build houses to protect us from nature’s Darwinian ways, and as soon as the house is completed, the assault begins. Animals probe until they find a weakness. When they do, I go to my Rolodex and look up the phone number of my urban trapper, a strange man who comes and captures the beasts and, whenever possible, takes them back to the wild. He has rid this house of squirrels and raccoons, and at my previous Little Rock house he snared—with peanut butter and vanilla wafers left in a cage—a succession of opossum. Practicing a wilderness art in an urban environment, he comes across as a Hollywood high concept—Natty Bumppo meets Sherlock Holmes. I once went with him up on the roof of this house. He pointed to some slick-looking yellow seeds in the crease where two angles of the roof come together. “Raccoon droppings,” he said. I’ve forgotten what the creatures had been sitting on my roof eating and eliminating, but I was impressed nevertheless. When we reached the spot where the upstairs section of the house meets the original roofline, the trapper squinted his eyes and reached over and picked up a microscopic hair between his thumb and forefinger. He held it up, as though studying it under Sherlock’s magnifying glass. Then he cut his eyes at me. “See that?” he said. I nodded.