If These Walls Had Ears Read online

  We’re all works in progress, if we’re continuing to live and grow. Our houses are works in progress, too. Yet some people postpone life to devote themselves to their houses. They spend all their time decorating and redecorating and fixing and fussing, as if fidgeting on a grand scale. Have you ever received a newspaper or magazine in which the printing is slightly out of register? People who work on their houses to the exclusion of everything else remind me of that: They keep tinkering with the second image in the vain hope that it’ll blend with the first, giving them that feeling of wholeness, completeness—comfort.

  I wasn’t happy with my life during that period in Chicago, so I spent all my time working on my house. I invited nobody in. I can just imagine what old Dr. Jung would say about that. A house can be a refuge in ways we don’t even realize. Home is where the heart is. But as the Eagles used to say, every form of refuge has its price.

  I’m not saying the Wolfes wanted to hide from life during their time at 501 Holly. The house needed the work, and it is certainly the better for their having lived here. But the regimen they set for themselves was all-consuming. Even if the intent wasn’t there, the effect was the same. Forrest woke up on Saturday mornings and Sue’s lists were his marching orders. First, he had to tend to the lawn—had to push that infernal mower up what he had labeled “Heart Attack Hill.” After that, he came back inside, only to find that no job on the list was simple or freestanding. It was like with Uncle Remus’s Tar Baby—every time Forrest poked at one problem, he ended up mired in another. Once, hooking up a new washing machine, he discovered that the floor in the back porch area was rotten. “I actually saw a live termite,” he says. They called Adams and had the house checked and sprayed. But no matter—the new washing machine now couldn’t be installed until Forrest built a new floor to set it on.

  It was the same with the upstairs bath. Forrest and Sue especially wanted to save the old white shower tiles that had languished for decades beneath increasing layers of paint. The tiles had once been beautiful, back in 1926 when Charlie Armour had built the upstairs addition, but now they were eaten up with mold. Still, Sue tried to clean them—only to find that the shower pan was rusted out and would have to be replaced. To get to the pan, the workmen had to tear out the tiles. Forrest and Sue replaced the white tiles with a soft but undistinguished yellow, then went on to the next job.

  That turned out to be near at hand. While working in the shower, they discovered that the three windows in the upstairs bathroom were completely rotten. Forrest had never installed windows, but he decided to give it a try He and Sue splurged on Pella, instead of settling for a cheap brand. “We dreamed of putting Pella windows in,” says Sue. Dreamed of Pella windows—how profoundly sad, I sometimes think. Often I catch myself daydreaming about laying black-and-white tile on the kitchen floor, or of installing central air downstairs. A house can steal your youth if you don’t watch out. Some days I have to remind myself that I still lust for a Porsche.

  For Forrest and Sue, there were times when Margaritaville blended so with what passed for real life that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. Forrest repapered the hall—the small room with seven doorways—while lie was drinking Jack Daniel’s:

  FORREST: You talk about something that’s hard to paper...

  SUE: There’s not one complete wall...

  FORREST: When I papered this, Sue was sick...

  SUE: Lying on the couch...

  FORREST: And I was inebriated. I wasn’t normal when I did this. If I’d been normal, it probably would’ve turned out pretty....

  When I try to put myself in the Wolfes’ shoes, I inevitably think of that famous stress chart from the seventies, the one that applied a numerical value to various life events—divorce, death in the family, a job change, a change in financial situation. When you added them up, you had an indication of your stress level.

  Forrest and Sue’s were probably at the top of the chart during their time on Holly Street. Besides the constant grind of the house and the major expense involved, each of the Wolfes changed jobs twice in the four years they lived here. As Medicare and Medicaid boomed in the mid-seventies, Forrest found himself well positioned to take advantage of the growth. In his job as state administrator for Medicaid, he had made valuable contacts. One was with a California company called Optimum Systems, Inc., or OSI, which had the contract with Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield for Medicare software. Forrest left the state to go with OSI, working in the Blue Cross building downtown. After a while, Blue Cross itself, which had contracts with Medicaid for both drug and physician claims, made him a better offer. Forrest joined Blue Cross as manager for the drug-claims division.

  Even though Sue still liked teaching, she wanted to go into business for herself. A woman she knew was opening a gift shop in an old house in Hillcrest, and Sue thought that might be just the opportunity she’d been looking for. It wasn’t. She joined the other woman as a partner, but after six months it was obvious that they weren’t compatible. Besides, there wasn’t enough volume to support two people out of that little shop, which added to the conflicts. Sue left and went into sales for the Du Pont Corporation.

  So much change put great pressure on the two of them, and when they turned to their usual refuge—their home—it failed to provide comfort. On the downstairs woodwork and walls, they counted some ten layers of paint. The house was a living photograph album. The colors of times past were frozen moments for them to study. Then they would peel them away and move on.

  With their own lives on hold, Forrest and Sue found themselves taking refuge in their neighbors’lives. They didn’t say that, but that’s my interpretation. When the Wolfes first told me about their time in this house, the neighbors across the street figured prominently in their story. It makes sense, of course: In our hearts, we all know that the national pastime isn’t baseball; it’s watching and speculating about our neighbors. That’s especially true when we’re trying to avoid the turmoil within our own walls.

  Besides, Forrest and Sue didn’t have just any neighbors. They had the Treadways.

  I first heard about the Treadways approximately half a day after I moved here six years ago. Since I’ve been working on this book, numerous people have raised the Treadway name. The presence of this unique couple, who owned the bungalow directly across Holly Street from 1968 to 1978, obviously enriched the experience of living at 501 Holly for the Grimeses, the Kramers, and the Wolfes. Of all of them, though, Forrest and Sue seem to have been the closest to the legendary couple.

  The Treadways’ names were Bill and Jimmie. He owned an electric-supply company, and she ran a beauty college. But that wasn’t what made them such compelling neighbors. What did it was their strange obsession. Forrest and Sue are practically uncontainable on the subject:

  SUE: We could tell you stories about them all... day... long...

  FORREST: They were fire freaks. They had an antique fire truck in the front yard. They also had matching fire outfits. And any fire—they had seventeen or eighteen scanners in their house, all of them going—any fire in town, at any time, you could look over there and here they came, going to the fire. He was considered some kind of expert, and he could get in with the firemen.

  SUE: They had one million fire things in their house. Lamps were made out of fire extinguishers. They had all kinds of little fire hydrants sitting around—every kind of thing you could imagine. They collected old Cadillacs, too—fire-engine red. Everything had to be red. We loved taking care of their house. We’d take care of the cats and dogs whenever, and the minute they left we’d get that key and we’d go through that house....

  FORREST: The funniest thing I’ve ever known, they left here and built a big house over in the Heights. They were very wealthy people. And they had a dog they loved, so they built a doghouse out there in the backyard. They heated it. And it caught fire!

  One Saturday tnorning, Sue noticed that something was wrong with Forrest. He was glum. She detected
signs of crankiness. “What’s the matter?” Sue said, glancing at her schedule to make sure they weren’t falling behind.

  “Those lists,” Forrest said. “I hate those damned lists.” He said it with such pent-up conviction that she knew another change was headed her way.

  “We had to come to an understanding,” Sue says. The understanding was that they would take back their life.

  Their final year here was the best. By that time, they had finished most of the messy work and could focus on the enjoyable task of decorating. Having taken the upholstery class, they began keeping an eye out for old pieces of furniture they could pick up for practically nothing. One such piece was a French Provincial sofa, which they covered in a chocolate brown suede trimmed out in white. It was pure seventies—and they decorated the entire living and dining rooms around it.

  The walls became a rich chocolaty brown, with the wood trim painted a dazzling white. The floors, which Forrest’s dad had rewoven after removing the furnaces, had also been refinished a dark brown. “Mediterranean,” says Sue. “That was in then.” In photos from the time, the living and dining areas look like rooms from a gingerbread house. Forrest and Sue’s dining table was glass and chrome, and it stood on an imitation Oriental rug. Bentwood chairs, whose seats had been upholstered in a pale plaid in tones of tan and white, completed the tableau. There was a shag rug in the conversation area of the living room. Above the mantel, Sue hung a beveled mirror on the bias, the way a decorator would’ve done.

  They painted the den a rich blue and the solarium a soft yellow-green, almost a chartreuse. Sue took great delight in wallpapering the closet in that front room, knowing full well that such radical creativity would baffle her friends. When the women of Sue’s book club first came to 501 Holly for a meeting, they were indeed amazed. “They had no idea how people lived in houses like this,” Sue says. “They were used to the suburban three-bedroom ranch-style, with the fireplace in the corner and all the paneling around. We were the wild ones.” When the other women went home to their houses with hollow doors, Sue sat back and smiled.

  Toward the end, they did more porch sitting and felt less guilt about it—-even on Saturdays, which had once been ruled by the tyranny of Sue’s lists. On one such day, Forrest and Sue were swinging on the porch, watching a violent thunderstorm. It was the middle of the afternoon. The rain was coming down in sheets, and the thunder was crashing as though the gods were making a point. Lightning slashed the sky. Suddenly, there was a tremendous noise, the front yard turned white, and the tulip poplar tree split right down the middle.

  SUE: You could see where the lightning went. It dug a ditch up and down...

  FORREST: It went under the house, went into the electricity, came up in the den and ruined my stereo. It was very frightening....

  The first time I spoke with Ed Kramer, I told him the Wolfes had had to cut down the tulip poplar tree. It didn’t seem to register. Then when I met him and he was railing about what kinds of people would level a tree like that, I explained it to him again. This time he seemed to understand—and even to feel better.

  I didn’t tell him everything, though. I just couldn’t bring myself to mention that, because the tree was on the arboreal equivalent of the Historical Register, the Wolfes got to take a huge tax write-off that year.

  Myke and Sue Landers in St. Louis in November 1979—the night they announced to family and friends that they were moving to Little Rock to seek their fortune.

  Chapter Twelve

  Landers

  May 1980 March 1981

  The 1980s, as we know them, actually began at the end of the previous decade. I remember assigning a magazine article in early 1979 about the new trend in condominiums. The writer turned in a prescient piece, perfectly capturing the fever of the go-go market in which buyers were paying ever-higher prices to own a part of—well, a part of whatever condominiums were. The condo craze didn’t seem to be about home; it was about money. I remember our illustration showed a skyscraper puffing up like a giant balloon, just waiting for the inevitable pinprick.

  That article reflected the Chicago influence on me—my image of home had always been a single-family house, and I was fascinated by this other way of living. As it turned out, though, the writer’s words had resonance beyond the metropolitan centers. The fever that had infected urban condo buyers was also boiling up in home seekers across the country. I guess it was a confluence of factors. The so-called sixties generation had reached their mid-thirties; they had jobs and money and fancy cars, and the next puzzle piece in their self-image was a place of their own. Plus, the steady climb in interest rates sparked some kind of wild landgrab spirit in them—get in before the rates rise. I’ve often wondered what the social fallout from that time has been. I mean in terms of expectations, fears, and disappointments. For a lot of people, this was their first house-buying experience.

  The market was moving so fast in the late seventies and early eighties that strange, mutant chains were created. People were making deals to get into houses any way they could, and sellers were carrying notes for buyers. That meant that when time came for the buyers to move, the former sellers were still involved—sometimes many years later—in the process.

  To me, it’s always intriguing to step back and observe how the stars fell into place, or didn’t. One second later on this end, a moment earlier on that end—it’s a meditation on chance, fate, the bittersweet mystery of what might have been, especially after the rhythm of life, so steady in the Armour and Murphree years, had become a staccato beat.

  For example, one day, with no discussion beforehand, Sue Wolfe simply got into her car and drove off to look at other houses. Later, when she told Forrest about it, he realized he was ready. He had a no-nonsense criterion for their next house: “I wanted a place,” he says, “where I could vacuum the entire house without unplugging the vacuum.”

  The Wolfes were beneficiaries of the real estate fever. In just four years, the market had changed to the point that they could ask double what they had paid for their house. They had invested plenty in it, of course, but that wasn’t the determining factor. Markets speak louder than sweat and tears. Forrest and Sue had rolled up their sleeves in the Bicentennial spirit of renewal; now, in the prevailing mood of commerce, they were due a payday.

  And the stars presented Myron Landers, a man who never would’ve bought this house had it not been for a peculiar series of events that led to this moment.

  Myron goes by the name of Myke, with a y. By the time Myke found his way to Little Rock. in the waning months of 1979, he was a thirty-year-old man who had labored in his wife’s family scrap business in St. Louis for seven years. Now, finally; he was striking out on his own. He and two partners had selected Little Rock as the place to launch their recycling company. They were pros; they had done their homework. On paper, everything looked great. No wonder Myke was excited. Arriving in town a couple of months before his wife and two young daughters, he shared an apartment in west Little Rock with one of the partners and buried himself in the exhilarating details of creating something from scratch. In his head, he harbored the visions that every young entrepreneur has—of achieving independence, of gaining respect, of being his own man.

  But when his wife, Sue, came down for the whirlwind weekend home search, she brought along visions of her own. It’s possible that her visions were more complicated than Myke’s, or at least more embellished—looping forward and back, outward and inward, from childhood to adulthood, from fantasy to fact. In any case, I think it’s safe to say that his visions were influenced more by hers than the other way around.

  Sue says this house called her. The way she says it brings to mind images from the realm of myth—a ship on a journey, choppy waters, a young woman at the bow, hair trailing in the wind, gown flowing, her hand shielding her eyes as she scans the horizon for her destiny. Then, from the porch at 501 Holly, the siren song.

  The Landerses bought the house from the Wolfes for $72,500. S
ue Wolfe remembers they seemed in a rush, and that they got in just as interest rates were edging into double digits. They took a mortgage with Savers Federal Savings & Loan. But they were still a little short, so Forrest and Sue agreed to a bit of creative financing, carrying a note for a second mortgage. That in turn left the Wolfes a little short, so the people whose house they were buying also had to carry a note for them.

  It wasn’t as clean as everybody would’ve liked, but that was the new way. You had to join the chain if you wanted to break free.

  There is a photograph, as there almost always is. Once again, those who know the subjects look at this frozen moment and invest it with whatever truth they wanted it to capture. To Myke and Sue, born three months apart in the same Jewish hospital, this is a picture of the two of them celebrating their joint thirtieth birthday with a cake made to look like a football field. The month is November, the year 1979. It’s also the night they announced to their family and friends that they were leaving St. Louis to seek their fortune in Little Rock.

  I took an oil-painting course a few years ago, the first such course I’d taken since high school. The instructor talked about how most of us don’t really see things. We look, and we see what we expect to see. But we don’t see the nuances, the interactions, the gradations. I’ve tried to train myself to see better. Looking now at this photograph of Myke and Sue, I can’t say for certain what I would see if I didn’t already know their story. But where Sue, even today, sees a happy moment, I see a heavyset man and a thin woman on either side of a table, a man in jeans and western shirt and a woman in disco clothes, and a cake in the shape of a contest.

  Myke would leave for Little Rock soon after this photograph was taken, and Sue would follow five months later. Now, after fifteen years and all they’ve been through, when they each sit down to tell the story of what they thought they were doing in Little Rock, the result is two stories, two agendas. It’s hard to know exactly which feelings existed then and which have been clarified by the filter of time. But what’s obvious is that these stories, intersecting at points and then veering this way and that in wildly different directions, form a diagram of a marriage. Maybe houses, like airports and office buildings, should be rigged with an X ray at the door, with a glowing monitor that tracks the shape and weight of the baggage being carried over the threshold.