If These Walls Had Ears Read online

  “Flying squirrel,” he said proudly.

  Animals are easy, though. At least you can hear them. Water is an opponent from a Terminator movie—it slinks and slips and runs and hides. It rises from the earth and falls from the sky. It morphs—sometimes as brooding pools dooming joists in the dark, other times as arrogant hail tap-dancing on rooftops. It freezes in pipes and explodes into rooms. Water and houses are a dialogue about uncertainty. In the natural world, water is good—it’s the source of life. In the spiritual world, too—at Billie Murphree’s Baptist church, once-lost souls were regularly submerged in water to be saved for eternity. But water is death to a house.

  The most frightening moments I’ve ever had in houses have been because of water. In Chicago, my wife and I once came home from a vacation and found our basement flooded. The water was deep and dirty, and I half-expected to find a body floating in it. In Beth’s and my early months in this house, we had water problems. The bathroom floor had to be replaced when we moved in—rotted joists again, just as in the Murphrees’ day. And we had a house-guest one rainy night who, at breakfast the next morning, casually mentioned that we might want to check the roof. I went upstairs and there was a huge stain on the bedroom ceiling. Water was dripping from the ceiling fan.

  Another time, just after we had spent thousands to have most of the downstairs painted, Beth and 1 were sitting in the living room having a drink when I suddenly noticed a small bulge in the beautiful terra-cotta paint above the mantel. It soon began to move, a sag on the run, drooping down the wall in a narrow track. Imagine looking in the mirror one morning and seeing a puffiness under your eye and then staring in horror as the puffiness built up and sagged more, gathered steam and ran like a bloated blister all the way to your chin. That’s what sitting in the living room watching the paint sag was like for me.

  Another rainy night, I heard Beth screaming for me to come upstairs. I got to Blair’s room, and Beth pointed me to the large cedar closet. Water was pouring in along the line where the wall meets the ceiling. It was a veritable waterfall. We ran and got stacks of towels, and I spent hours holding the towels against the ceiling while Beth carried Blair’s clothes into the bedroom amid piled them on the bed. Finally, thankfully, the rain let up.

  Most of those leaks were in the almost-flat roof in the added-on part of the house, and we’ve had that roof fixed. The leak over the mantel started around the chimney, for which the remedy was new flashing.

  But despite our repairs, I maintain a low-level anxiety about the roof, the way Billie Murphree did about the water under the house. One night about a year ago, I awoke to what I thought was the sound of rain. Rain hadn’t been predicted. I got up and looked out the front window—no rain in sight. I went back to bed, but I kept hearing the sound of rain on the driveway: a constant spatter, like bacon frying. By this time, I was a little more awake. I looked out the Geranium Room window—nothing. Then I went into the kitchen. The rain was louder. When I flipped on the light, I saw that the rain was flowing from the ceiling in the back porch/pantry, the area where Jessie Armour had slept during the war years. God, I thought, it’s leaking this hard through two floors. For a brief moment, I considered ending my life with a kitchen knife—the homeowner’s battle with nature inevitably raises the ancient fight-or-flight dilemma, and after a while you get so tired. But the problem turned out not to be another roof leak. The hose on the washing machine had burst and water had been shooting out all over the room, spurting as high as the ceiling. It was a mess, but I was actually relieved.

  Then four months ago, the washing machine started dancing during the spin cycle. We found that the floor had rotted—the vertical overflow pipe, or whatever you call it, had become clogged and water was slipping over the top and running invisibly down the pipe to hide in the soft wood. A few more dirty clothes and the washer would’ve fallen through the porch floor.

  All of which is why, on nights when driving rainstorms are predicted, I’m a little nervous. Last night’s storm came at 4:30 in the morning. I awoke to the sound of wind howling. But there was an ominous noise inside the house, too—somewhere upstairs, a door or a window was pounding. I got up and went to look. One of the old casement windows in the hall had sprung open. There was water on the floor, and even a few twigs that had slipped in under the screen. Of course, I couldn’t find the thing—the tool we use to open and close those windows. I lifted the screen and, holding it with my back, manipulated the mechanism on the window and pulled it almost shut. I made another round of the house and then went back to bed. None of my girls had even rolled over.

  The storm lasted about an hour. This morning when I took Bret to school, I was shocked at the, damage—huge oak trees were down, some snapped in two. A block from our house, an uprooted tree lay across the street. Traffic had to detour. The morning seemed eerily quiet to me—quiet, but not necessarily peaceful: The battle is always joined; nature is always pressing. But water is the most persistent challenger of all. Water wants in—that’s a basic fact of the life of a house. And once in, water flays open the house to other intruders.

  Apparently, that had been happening in this house since the time of the Murphrees.

  “I must tell you, I could’ve killed the Grimeses.” Those were very nearly the first words Ed Kramer said to me when I first spoke with him, by phone, a couple of years ago. I hadn’t met him at the time, and in fact I wondered later if I would like him. He struck me as a man quick to blame and slow to forget—twenty years after the fact, he still felt passionately that the Grimeses hadn’t been forthcoming about the problems with the house. He was also angry at the people who came after him, Forrest and Sue Wolfe, because they cut down the tulip poplar tree. “I don’t know what the hell,” Ed grumbled, disgustedly, about the Wolfes. “Their aesthetics are just different from those of anyone I know.”

  At which point his wife,, Sheri, piped in from the other phone: “They had like nine or ten cats, too.”

  One of the great joys of owning a home is telling horror stories about the former owners—and then, after you’ve sold the house, driving slowly by and being offended at what the next people have done to it. If you really love a place, you’ll feel a pang of possessiveness forever. It’s like hearing that an old flame—even one you had grown to hate—has married, You want, to feel superior to the new suitor, no matter how many digs you have to get in to do it. Joyce Murphree—now Joyce Stroud—walked through 501 Holly once when the Burneys had the house on the market, but before I bought it. At the time, she hadn’t been inside this house in twenty-three years. When I met Joyce, she tried to convey the shock she had felt. “Every room in the house was”—she wrinkled her nose distastefully at this point—“green.”

  “I know,” I said, sounding every bit the catty girlfriend.

  Since I’ve been writing this book, I’ve collected photographs from the various owners, showing how the house looked at different times in the past. At supper, I’ll hold each picture up in turn, asking Beth, Blair, and Bret to “name that room.” It’s amazing how much paint or wallpaper or other people’s furnishings can all but obscure these rooms we live in day to day. And of course, no matter how attractive the rooms look in the photographs, we think the way we’ve decorated them is better than the way the other owners did. It would be sad if we didn’t feel that way.

  But it’s best not to let on about it.

  It’s particularly revealing, I think, that Donna Burney is the only former owner who has refused to meet with me for this book. Although Jack Burney says this is not the case, I suspect it’s because when Beth and I bought the house, Donna found out through the Realtor that we weren’t going to keep her pretty-but-too-fussy-for-our-taste floral shower curtain, the one that matched the padded floral fabric she had installed on the walls of the pink-and-black bathroom. Donna contacted me through the Realtor and asked if she could have the shower curtain, and I was happy to oblige. Since I wasn’t going to be home, I folded it up and left it for her on
the front porch. I think now that maybe that seemed insensitive—that if I wasn’t going to lie and say I loved it, I could’ve arranged to hand it to her in person, or at least to have packaged it with a little more respect. That’s part of what’s fascinating about houses—fascinating in the way that land mines are fascinating. There’s nothing about them, not even the blandest beige paint, that isn’t wired to a powder keg of ego stored somewhere.

  Most of that is just the silliness of human nature—we’re curious, we’re competitive, we’re insecure, and we get our feelings hurt. We act like children. We tear others down to build ourselves up.

  But there’s something more important that we do with houses. Maybe we unwittingly fool ourselves, or maybe—because houses are such a personal reflection of who we are or want to be—we bend memory to corroborate a truth we can live with. Inevitably, a house looked terrible when we moved in, yet looked just fine when we moved out. But take that pattern from one owner to the next, and it doesn’t hold up.

  Ruth Murphree says this house was in good shape when she and Billie left here; Roy Grimes says he was surprised that the Murphrees could live in a house that looked the way this one did. Roy says he fixed that back-bedroom window that was falling out; the Kramers imply that when they moved in, it was practically hanging by a thread. Forrest arid Sue Wolfe say that when they bought, there were huge, fist-size gaps in the living room plaster; the Kramers’ mouths drop open at the very suggestion.

  I’ve learned, I hope, not to judge anybody for anything they’ve done to or in a house. Oh, I’m riot so noble: I grouse about them, and I curse them—I think you sell the rights to take your name in vain whenever you sell someone a house. But even as I’m cursing, I understand. An old editor friend of mine keeps a needlepoint pillow on the couch in his office: “Life is tough,” the saying on it goes, “and then you die.” I think the pillow’s message might well be amended to read, “Life is tough—and then you become a homeowner.” That’s why I found Jack Burney’s candor so endearing the first time I interviewed him for this book. “I’m not handy,” said the man who sold me this house, “and I did everything I could to cut corners and save money.”

  I refrained from saying that he wasn’t telling me anything new. I guess I could afford to be magnanimous. Then, as now, I hadn’t discovered a hidden disaster the way some past owners had—starting with Ed and Sheri Kramer.

  Before Ed Kramer moves into a house, he gets the dimensions of its rooms, and he draws them out on paper. Then he pencils in the furniture, erasing and resketching until he gets the placement just right.

  He pooh-poohs any deeper reading of this, saying that it’s simply a smart way to handle what otherwise would be a pressured task. “It keeps us from having to decide while the movers stand around waiting,” he says.

  But I think there’s more to it than that. When I was twelve and living in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, I persuaded my parents to buy me my first pair of loafers—cool shoes, as compared with whatever lace-ups I had been wearing. The local department store didn’t have my size, so they had to order the shoes. I thought I couldn’t stand it until those loafers—my new persona—arrived, and every day in Mrs. Smith’s sixth-grade class, I drew pictures of the shoes in the margins of my notebook.

  Ed is a man who would understand that. He feels deeply about his surroundings, and he attributes that to having seen the worst fears of childhood come true—he lost both his parents early and found himself in a way dispossessed. Heirlooms and mementos and items of personal expression take on special meaning for him. They add up to home. “I love the enclosures that I’m in,” he says. “I adapt them to myself, and try to make them resonate with me.”

  He and Sheri generally agree on decor, Ed says, and I don’t doubt it: I sense that Sheri has enough strength to be sensitive to his greater need to make rooms his own and that she allows Ed to impress her continually with his talent, his imagination, his wit. For example, when he lived in New York, he built a “piano bar,” a visual pun—a bar made from the top of a piano. At Holly Street, he sketched that into the place of honor in the dining room—the east wall, the one you see straight ahead when you walk through the front door. Above the piano bar, he drew in a nice mirror. To separate the living room from the dining room, he penciled in their champagne-colored sofa, with the shapely legged heirloom table at the end by the wall. Across the room, near his precious stereo equipment, he drew in the armchair from his mother.

  He took special care sketching in the room that was to be his study. In the bay window, he pictured his massive sawhorse-anddoor-top desk, with his typewriter in the center. He envisioned himself working facing the window, his back to the room—to the wall-to-wall bookcase holding his beloved books, to the sprawling beanbag chair that Sheri had made just for him, to the urn of dried flowers she had lovingly placed in the corner by the door.

  When they finally moved in in the spring of 1973, Sheri painted Ed’s study a deep and moody blue. It’s a color he loves. He remembers one night being in his wonderful new study all alone, unpacking his books, and suddenly he couldn’t believe that all this space was just for him. “The sense of space made me giddy,” he says. “There was so much space that I would get lonesome, and I would have to go upstairs where Sheri was unpacking in another room.”

  Soon after that, he took his seat at his desk and rolled a piece of paper into his typewriter. He placed his fine, gently curving pipe to his lips and fired it up. Sheri says she hardly saw him again the three years they lived here.

  During the days, Ed would be at the Arts Center, working with the theater group. At night, after supper—and on evenings when some of the cast didn’t come over to plan or rehearse behind closed doors in Ed’s study—he would repair to his room and work on a screenplay he was calling Sweet William, about a countrified criminal investigator who found himself teamed up on a bizarre case with a hypochondriacal medical examiner. Ed would sit there at his typewriter, dreaming about another world, tapping late into the night.

  Ed and Siggy in the front yard, four months after they moved in.

  Whenever he needed inspiration, day or night, he would step outside into his yard and walk among the trees, smoking his pipe and absorbing the miraculous strength of this house and land he now owned. He couldn’t believe his good fortune. I have a photograph of Ed and Siggy in the front yard of 501 Holly in the fall of 1973. It’s one of those sun-dappled days—not just in the neighborhood, but in Ed Kramer’s young life. He would’ve been twenty-six in this picture, and Sig would’ve been just over a year old. They had been in this house for only four months. On the September day this photo was snapped, Sheri was two months away from giving birth to their sec ond child. It’s a moment out of time. Far away from this halcyon spot, the President of the United States was being assailed for sins against the people who had sent him to office. But here in the middle of the country, on this insignificant plot of land, there was still hope in the lasting virtues of home and family.

  “To think,” Ed says, still amazed, “that I could, at that age, presume to have a house like that, in that neighborhood.” He counted the trees, and he would say, over and over to make it sink in, “These are my trees. These are my trees.” He felt a kinship with each and every one of them. He particularly loved the tulip poplar, which, people had told him, had been designated the number-one tree of its kind in all of Arkansas. It grew straight and tall, towering over the house. It was taller by far than the other trees—the big elm, the maple, the walnut in the side yard, any of them. The tulip tree stood in the front on the edge of the hill, and twice a year it stunned passersby with the beauty of its blossoms.

  To a boy from Brooklyn, a tree was a precious thing. This one was simply magnificent.

  Rita Grimes visited often in the early days. Sheri still recalls the time Rita and Mark arrived on the front porch, and Mark, who tried to open the front door but found it locked, threw a tantrum screaming and kicking the door, still not quite grasping that t
his house he had lived in for so long was no longer his.

  At first, Rita enjoyed being back on Holly Street. But it wasn’t long before she noticed a change in Sheri’s attitude. Sheri herself admits to having a temper, and Rita says Sheri never had any trouble expressing her opinion. That’s what began happening during Rita’s visits. Before the Kramers had bought the house, Sheri had asked Rita what their real estate taxes were. Rita had given her a number, but now the property had been reassessed and taxes had been increased. Sheri was upset, and she let Rita know it. She began mentioning the taxes every time Rita came over. “She thought we had pulled a fast one on her,” Rita says. After a few such visits, Rita stopped going—the situation was just too uncomfortable. Rita says Sheri never once called to see why she’d stopped coming to see her.