If These Walls Had Ears Read online

  As one who has moved all too frequently, I was astonished at how many possibilities I had right here in town. Good thing I was doing this in Little Rock and not in New York City, I thought. But even though I definitely could place two out of three of the previous owners before me, there was a huge gap in the center of the chain, and no leads at the beginning. I had known the recent stories were going to be the easiest to find; it just stands to reason. But what would I have if I had those and didn’t have the stories that started it all? I began to see this project less as detective work and more as a classic construction job: You start with the foundation and build up from there.

  At neighborhood get-togethers, I shamelessly floated the riddles of this house by anyone who would listen—although, to most people, I didn’t mention the word book at first; it carries too much potential for humiliation. I simply said I was poking around in the history of my house, trying to learn about the people who had lived here. Most of the neighbors responded immediately to the idea of learning about the past life of a house—they’d all been tempted to do it with their own homes. But as they wandered off to refill their wineglasses, it occurred to me that, on the surface, they didn’t have any more interest in my house than I had in theirs. It was a valuable lesson, I later decided. I made a note to myself that if this project was ever going to be more than an exercise for me, I would have to tell a bigger story. At about that time, I ran across the quote from William Butler Yeats that appears as the epigraph of this book: “ The history of a nation is not in parliaments and battlefields, but in what the people say to each other on fair days and high days, and in how they farm, and quarrel, and go on pilgrimage.” If I could tell about the high days and quarrels of the people who had lived in this one house in this one city in the heart of this country for the major part of a century, maybe it would add up to something.

  Fortunately, my next-door neighbors, John and Linda Burnett, responded to this project from the beginning. Having lived within a few yards of four owners of this house, they had more than a passing interest in knowing what had gone on here. We’re all voyeurs, given half a chance.

  Linda remembered the Wolfes’ industriousness and the Burneys’ gregariousness. Of the Landerses, she mainly recalled Sue’s desperation. Poor Sue Landers was so obsessed with the mortar coming out from between the bricks that she spent all her time frantically trying to patch it. God, I thought, we all have so much of ourselves invested in our houses. I couldn’t wait to know Sue Landers’s story.

  Then John thought of a woman named Ruth Chapin. “You ought to call her,” he said. “They moved to Lawrence, Kansas, right before you came. She lived in the house across the street all her life. She must be in her eighties now.”

  I phoned Ruth Chapin cold, one day late in September, stammering out the reason for my call: I wanted to write “a biography of a house,” I said. I wanted to “tell the story of the century through all the people who had lived in this one house.” By now, you can see, I had a full-blown epic in mind. She didn’t laugh, though she did plead hard of hearing. I told her I’d explain in a letter.

  A week later, after she had received my note, we had a long conversation. She was intrigued by the project and would be glad to help as much as possible. In fact, however, she hadn’t lived in the house across the street from mine all her life, but the house had remained in the family, so she had kept up with the neighborhood. She rattled off a list of names that meant nothing to me—people, she said, who could tell me things about the house and those who’d lived here. Then she told me that C. W. L. and Jessica Armour had had three children, only one of whom she thought was still living. Her name was Jane, and she had married a Mr. McRae from the Scott community, a few miles northeast of Little Rock.

  I called directory information for Scott. There were two McRaes. I dialed the first one and an elderly woman answered. I asked if she was Jane Armour McRae, and she said she was. “Well,” I said, spanning three-quarters of a century in a single leap, “I Live in the house your parents built.”

  * * *

  The people who’ve owned this house include a soft-drink bottler and a home economist, a mortgage loan officer for the VA and a secretary for a U.S. congressman, a civil engineer and a housewife, a theater director and a medical technologist, a Medicare systems analyst and a teacher, an entrepreneur gone bust and a nurse, an electronics wholesaler and a time-share-company secretary, and two writers. Fifteen children—eleven girls and four boys have lived here, and for three of them, it was their first home. Hundreds of parties have been held in this house. People have danced here for parts of eight decades, from the Charleston in the twenties to whatever we do to Hootie and the Blowfish in the nineties. Young people—and their parents—have courted on the porch and in other places, and one dad even painted the upstairs windows shut to keep his daughter from climbing out at night. One wedding has been performed here. In addition to the happy times, these walls have witnessed the finality of death and every conceivable level of anguish leading to it. One son disappeared into the hands of the Japanese at the beginning of World War II, not to be heard from for years—and then one day a taxi pulled up in front of this house and he stepped out and walked up this sidewalk in his uniform. There have been bankruptcy, family feud, lawsuits, fire, cancer, horrible accidents, divorce, even the grief of a loved one lost to AIDS. There have been fallings-out between buyer and seller, and in one case the anger has persisted, and festered, for two whole decades.

  In other words, life has been lived here. And, in its way, this house has mirrored the wider life that has gone on around it.

  That’s the story I’m going to tell you now. But beneath the surface, down where we all live our real lives, is the story of every one of us in every house in America—the story of that ongoing search for a place that feels like home.

  PART ONE

  Fair Days

  and

  High Days

  The Armours family in the yard outside their new home. From left, that's Fane, Carolee, Grandma fackson, Charles, and fessie. Charlie snapped the picture.

  This was taken from across the street in about in 1927. The girl holding the dog is Ruth Ream (now Ruth Chapin), and just over her shoulder you can see 501 Holly, with Charlie Armours's bizarre little Nu Grape car out in front.

  Chapter One

  Beginnings

  1890 1923

  The best way to get to know a piece of ground is to mow it. No telling how many miles I’ve pushed a lawn mower in my life. Well-meaning friends have suggested that I get someone to do that onerous job for me, and for a very brief time I did. It didn’t work out. I felt out of touch with my surroundings.

  My father, if he were alive, would laugh at that last sentence. When I was a teenager in Miami, Florida, we had an electric mower. I regularly cut the cord so I wouldn’t have to finish the job. I think you have to be a homeowner before you understand some of the subtleties of mowing.

  One is time for dreaming. For a very short while in a different life, I lived in an old house on the north shore of Chicago. It was a wonderful house, but if I’d had any real money, it could’ve been so much better. There were two sunrooms that jutted out from the back of the house, and as I mowed the backyard, I would redesign those rooms in my mind. The lower one was going to lose a wall and become part of the kitchen; the upper one was going to become a huge, sunny bathroom. Even then, I was aware that those plans were just fantasies. I already hated my job and knew I was going to have to leave that place, too.

  My mowing dreams at 501 Holly mostly concern the dining room. The living and dining areas are now all in one big space, which I would love to turn over totally to the living area. Then, knocking out the south wall, I would extend that area about twenty feet and that would be the new dining room. I figure I might as well add a family room next to it. It would be easy—just a couple of steps down from the kitchen’s French doors, with cool tiles imported from Spain.

  Or maybe that space would
be better as a swimming pool.

  Such are the things you ponder as you mow a lawn. It’s mindless work, mostly, but you absorb certain information as you go. After nearly seven years, I know this piece of ground pretty well, at least on the surface. From my perspective, the dominant image is steepness, what some people choose to call a terrace but which I know is a hill. The land slopes some in the front, which faces west, but it drops off most dramatically on the south, on the side of our house along Lee Street. I have to mow only part of that slope. A third of the way back, the hill is overgrown with hedge and trees and ground cover, providing in the summer a green buffer between our side yard and the whoosh of traffic on Lee.

  I have a regimen I follow. I do the steep Lee Street hill first, before the Arkansas humidity has sucked out every ounce of my energy. Standing at the bottom of the hill, I thrust the mower up the incline, left to right, trying to make sure I nudge the mower over at the apex so I can cut an inch or two of grass as the machine rolls back downhill. After the hill, I mow side to side across the front. Three or four swaths into the job, I reach a dip in the ground where a big tree once stood; I have to back the mower over that a couple of times, and even twist it some to make sure I don’t leave any long blades of grass. It’s at about this latitude that I also have to start edging around the roots of the huge elm near the driveway. Pretty soon, I can cross the brick sidewalk and forget the elm-tree side, which is planted with both lariope, commonly known as monkey grass, and ivy. For years, there was nothing but bare dirt under that tree, and in frustration planted both ground covers. I’ll go with whichever wins out.

  That’s another way you change when you become a homeowner. One of my fondest memories as a child was of just such grassless ground beneath great canopies of tree leaves, raised roots running out from the trunks to form hiding places for toy cowboys or Indians or olive-drab soldiers shouldering bazookas or aiming carbines. Even as a teen, I wasn’t embarrassed by bare dirt. Like so many other things—mossy bricks, a rope swing, a cracked sidewalk, a peeling wall—it evoked a certain decadent Southern life that I grew up in and liked the idea And yet, as a homeowner, I find myself fretting over bare spots in the yard, not to mention cracked sidewalks and peeling walls. That’s one of the tricks houses can play on you. If you grant them enough power, they’ll reveal you for the fraud you are.

  When I start mowing the side yard, I’m almost home free. Even though this house sits on an oversize lot, there isn’t that much grass to mow The north side is all driveway. The back, which faces east, is taken up by the garden and patio arid a tacky little storage shed where a garage used to be. Only the front and sough sides are mow-able lawns, and once I’ve crossed the fieldstone walk separating front and back, the job is nearly complete. The only hard parts are over by the Lee Street hedge, where I have to mow in and out and around the ancient swing set, and right up near the house where the ground rises and I have to angle the mower if I don’t want to leave an uncut sliver. In that spot, the grass also tends to grow over the fieldstone walkway, hiding the scrawls someone left long ago in the wet concrete: J. M. are the initials there. Next to that, there’s the word AUSTA.

  I had no idea whose marks those were or what they meant when I first walked in this yard almost seven years back. Now I do, of course. But when I would stand on this piece of ground pondering my house’s past, I knew that the story had to begin deeper than hieroglyphics in the concrete. An image from another house I once lived in kept coming to mind. Back during the final year of World War II, my mother and I stayed in Verona, Mississippi, with another aunt and uncle, Aunt Gusta and Uncle Wib, who were caretakers in the home of my great-aunt Laura. It was a sprawling, faded old house with an L-shaped front porch from which several doors opened onto shadowy bedrooms. I have many memories of that house, but none stronger than the memory of the seashells.

  Pearly and luminescent, they lined the long brick sidewalk that stretched some thirty yards from the porch to the dirt road in front. The shells were large enough to cover the side of my head when I held them up to hear the ocean. But the amazing thing about the shells was that they hadn’t been imported by any of my family from a visit to some far-off sea; instead, they had come up, over the course of eons, from the earth where they now lay.

  For the story of 501 Holly to emerge, you have to begin with the ground itself.

  A hundred or so years is far enough back—1890, to be specific. That was two years before Melissa Retan paid eighteen hundred dollars to the recently formed Pulaski Heights Land Company for this and several other parcels of land in a hilly, wooded area a mile west of Little Rock. Understand that when I say “parcels of land,” I mean squares drawn on a map; this lawn I mow was nothing but rocks and trees, as was all the land around it. But two men from St. Johns, Michigan, Henry Franklin Auten and his law partner, Edgar Moss, had come here in 1890, willing to bet their livelihoods that someday people like me—and lots more before I ever got my turn—would want to live among the trees on the high ground outside the city.

  Frank Auten was, by all accounts, an intense young man haunted by a search of his own. By 1889, he had decided that St. Johns wasn’t big enough to hold his dreams. During a train trip, he picked up a brochure that told about Arkansas. He was impressed, and came to investigate. Little Rock—population nearly 26,000 as of the 1890 census—was a city on the move. Some of the streets were even paved, a large improvement over a mere decade before, when a state legislator had introduced a bill classifying two of the city’s major streets as “navigable streams.” Sewer pipes were in the ground. Telephone service had been available for a dozen years, electric service for half a decade. Electric streetcars operated throughout the business district of the city. Downtown was even lit up at night by four strategically placed 125-foot towers, atop each of which were five carbon arc lights known as “star lights.” There was a med school and a horse track and even a baseball team—the formidable Litt] e Rockers. Most of the town’s power brokers lived in grand style in ornate houses a mere stroll from the business district.

  But Auten knew that as long as there have been cities—even back to biblical times—there’ve been people, usually the wealthier ones, who’ve looked beyond the city limits for a lifestyle that included healthier air, less noise, more greenery, greater space—and, yes, sometimes, more homogeneity. Auten and Moss played to that historical precedent. They formed a syndicate and bought eight hundred acres of land just west of Little Rock, land they named Pulaski Heights—Pulaski being the name of the county Little Rock is in, and Heights being an apt description of the property itself, whose cooler and healthier three-hundred-foot elevation was going to be one of the big selling points, Another selling point was homogeneity: “It is and will be exclusively for white residents,” Auten wrote in a slick brochure. “No property will be sold to colored people.” On my first day of research for this book, I ran into a fellow journalist at Beach Abstract. “Oh, Pulaski Heights,” he said. “Little Rock’s first white-flight suburb.”

  Auten and Moss persuaded several Michiganders to invest in their syndicate, and a few of those investors moved to Arkansas, too. Auten’s plan was for the founders of Pulaski Heights to set an example by building fine homes in this wilderness. The targeted Little Rock gentry was skeptical, of course. The problem with Pulaski Heights was that, while it lay little more than a mile from downtown, there were only two ways to get to it, and neither of them was pretty. You could take your horse and buggy and trot out along the River Road—but then you had to climb a steep and winding hill to the top of the ridge, where all the development was going to be. The other way involved taking the Seventh Street hill road, which ran out, becoming nothing more than a cow trail, just beyond the city limits, at what city folk considered the absolute end of the road—the insane asylum.

  Truth is, Auten had been promised a streetcar line, and he was banking on that to make Pulaski Heights an accessible Eden instead of a local joke. He had no way of knowing that it would be
ten long years—not until Thanksgiving Day of 1903—before a streetcar would connect Little Rock to the Heights.

  But by the time he found out the streetcar was going to be delayed, it was too late to back out. The Autens and seven other founding families had already built and moved into their houses. They settled in two areas, generally: Some made their homes near Moss, who built on a ridge above a wooded ravine, beyond which flat bottomland stretched a half mile or so to the Arkansas River; others followed Auten, who, about a quarter mile to the southwest of Moss, actually found and refurbished an old two-story farmhouse with Italianate detailing.

  One of the original Michiganders was Albert Retan, listed in Pulaski Heights Land Company literature as a “capitalist.” He had retired from his general store in Michigan and joined this adventure with his wife, Melissa, and their two daughters, Zillah and Carrie. The Retans, who built next door to the Autens, took seriously Frank Auten’s mission of impressing the Little Rock elite: They built a showplace, a Queen Anne mansion just as big and just as fancy as the ones downtown. Behind the Retan house stood an imposing carriage house, and behind the carriage house was a rocky piece of ground that, thirty years later, would form a hilly corner lot where Holly Street ran into Lee.