If These Walls Had Ears Read online

  So when Blair said what she said to me that morning after the wedding, I understood. By then, I understood many things about the way divorce affects our life in houses. For that very reason, I declined to have the girls call me Dad, as my ex-wife instructed my sons to address her new husband.

  But I’m not a hero in this cause. In addition to the decision to marry Beth and give up magazine editing, I had made another decision in the summer of 1989: Never again did I want to have to move from a house because of a divorce. Never again did I want to give up things that were dear to me. I had done it twice. I could’ve stayed in the houses, of course, had I been able to raise the money to pay my wives for their share. But in the first instance, I wasn’t earning enough to do that. In the second, there was too much equity involved.

  So with 501 Holly, I decided to buy it myself. There was a bad moment with Beth, I remember, just as I was leaving her to meet with the real estate woman. Beth asked if the house was going to be in both our names, and I said I didn’t know, that I would ask the advice of the agent. But I knew already. This had nothing to do with my love for Beth. This had to do with that thing I mentioned at the beginning—my bone-deep knowledge of the way life hears on living things.

  So I bought this house on my own. And during one early fight with Beth, I spoke the unspeakable: “Well,” I blurted, “after all, this is my house.” To which she responded, “Well, in the state of Arkansas, a wife owns half of a husband’s property.” It was true, and I knew it, even at the time I bought the house. But I didn’t want to hear it. I wanted, somehow, if only in my own mind, to be protected from being forced to leave my house again.

  That instinct filters down to the lowest levels. The other day, while I was cleaning out some junk that had piled up on our back porch and pantry, I ran across a red plastic case that I didn’t recognize at first. When I opened it, I realized it was Beth’s toolbox. I have a toolbox, too, but mine isn’t nearly so pristine. In fact, it’s a junky bunch of hammers and levels and pliers and loose screws tossed into a small wooden chest that belonged to my second wife.

  Seeing Beth’s nice toolbox gave me an idea. “How about we combine these toolboxes?” said. “I’ll weed mine out and put my stuff in with yours.”

  She looked doubtful. She bounced her head from side to side arid clicked her mouth in that way that could’ve either meant, I’m thinking about it, or, No, but I don’t want to hurt your feelings. It was the latter. “Oh, let’s don’t,” she said. “That was Brent’s toolbox.”

  “Fine,” I said, and it was fine. Marriage has to be a careful balance of you, me, and us. But it made me think of how secretly territorial we all are, how we try to protect ourselves, and how that affects the life we lead within these walls.

  Marriage is hard enough without having to set up housekeeping together. I guess the trick is for one party to care and the other not to. The Burneys were that way. We’re not so fortunate. Beth and I both care a great deal about our surroundings, but she’s always held the trump card—her brother the New York decorator.

  When I refer to decorating in this context, I don’t mean one of those Talbot-suited Junior Leaguers who dresses out your rooms in trendy matching tones of green and mauve. I mean international high style—poufs, leopard-skin beds, port-toned velvet with gold church symbols, obelisks, giant prints of Voltaire, period wallpaper, vahses. Soon after we moved in, a no-nonsense friend who’d worked with us at the magazine came over to visit. I asked what he thought of the living room. “It’s a mishmash,” he said. “Nothing goes together.”

  That’s the kind of decorating I refer to here.

  I like it. I like antiques. I like eclectic. I like the layered textures of silk and challis and taffeta. I like the Vuillard blend of patterns, and the Matisse burst of color. But I also don’t want to lose myself in it.

  When we moved into 501 Holly, Beth and I, combined, had a lot of furniture. (We have more now, but that’s a story for later.) Even in this big old house, it wasn’t long before we started running out of room. Almost inevitably, if something had to be stored or sold, it would be something of mine. Even though I often preferred Beth’s things—generally, Brent had sent them or helped her pick them out—the trend was disturbing. In the back of my head was that old scene of starting over in another apartment. As Beth and I sparred over furnishings, I began to keep silent score: my rugs, my dining room table, my lacquer bed, my European sofas, my rattan chairs.

  And then: her recamiers, her fifties lamp, her forties table, her Arts and Crafts desk, her fifties swivel chairs, her lacquer bar, her lawyer’s bookcases, her iron bed, her trestle table, her sideboard, her... her... her....

  * * *

  We have a set of matching side chairs in our living room. They’re small, and they have no arms. They’re covered in silk. The pattern is a plaid, actually, but not in the way you’re thinking. On this silk, red checks fade toward white, with a stop at dove gray. The gray blocks linger like an echo.

  Often, when I look at these chairs, I wonder which one Beth sat in while her brother died.

  This is Beth’s story to tell, which I know she’ll do in due time. I’m going to relate it only in terms of how it changed our lives at 501 Holly. Brent phoned one day in March of 1990. Beth wasn’t home, so I answered. He told me he’d been to the doctor that day, and the doctor had diagnosed a particularly virulent strain of lymphoma. We didn’t discuss a time frame; that wasn’t Brent’s way. But it was cancer, a bad kind. Doctors Beth later consulted gave him only a matter of months.

  Beth came home in a while. I heard her in the kitchen, and so I summoned my courage and went in there. Moments like this change a house forever for me. Mundane backdrops become players in a drama. I remember, in our house in Jackson, watching my mother carried out in the middle of the night by paramedics. She’d had an attack of appendicitis, and the ambulance had arrived in the dark, its eerie red lights flashing across all the familiar things in our living room. The red was like a stain in my mind. Another time, in Tupelo, my brother managed to slip his body through the bars of his baby bed. I heard my mother screaming, and when I got there—I was five—she was holding him up so he wouldn’t hang. She dispatched me to get my cousin around the block, but by the time we got back, Phil had been freed by a neighbor who’d heard Mother’s screams. never walked into that room—even years later, as a grown-up, when my aunt Gusta lived in that house—that I didn’t replay that scene in my head.

  Beth was unloading groceries—was standing by the drawer where we keep the mixer beaters and the barbecue brushes and the rubber spatulas. She saw the look on my face and stopped what she was doing. “Brent called,” I said.

  Over the next few months, Beth traveled back and forth between Little Rock and New York eight times. She was gone, in total, for ten or twelve weeks. To try to please her, I had our bedroom painted once while she was away—periwinkle, a shade of blue that Brent had picked. At night I would call her and we would talk for a few minutes. Then she would say she had to get off.

  I was jealous. I liked Brent enormously, but this wasn’t about Brent. I occupied myself by straightening the rusted doors of the shed out back. Then I sanded and primed the shed and painted it blue. As sheds went, it was now okay. I liked looking at it through the Geranium Room windows—my cool blue shed framed in the heat of Brent’s perfect red.

  Brent died that November, amid plans for a gala Thanksgiving party at his loft. Beth and I had flown up to help. She was cooking, making pies, planning menus, and I was doing whatever she needed me to do. Brent was all but confined to his bed, and he had a full-time nurse. He was concerned about getting his hallway papered before his guests came, and on Monday, the paperhanger stayed late into the night. The nurse and I helped Brent up at one point to inspect the work.

  A few hours later, he took a turn for the worse. Beth talked with the doctor, who told her it was time. We pulled up chairs next to his bed, and Beth held his hand while I held hers. He died at about seven
the next morning. She sat in one of the silk plaid chairs with the red that fades into gray.

  A couple of months later, a moving van from New York pulled up in front of 501 Holly in Little Rock. In preparation for its arrival, we’d moved my big European sofa from the Geranium Room to the attic, which was then called “the playroom.” We’d put my black lacquer bed and dresser and tables into storage. What poured out of that van was a procession of pieces the likes of which most of us never see except in magazines—a table shaped like a cannon, a bed upholstered in faux leopard skin, a massive, manly chifforobe, giant lamps with striped shades and fringe, a pouf upholstered in silk and velvet, a pair of red plaid chairs, a canvas screen—firm-breasted Greek maidens and strong young men with penises like jalapenos—that once belonged to Andy Warhol. Overnight, our house was transformed. And in some ways, so were we.

  We now lived in one of the many, many houses in the world that had been touched by AIDS, and Brent’s furniture was a daily reminder. Beth was both comforted and grief-stricken, in the way I imagine Jessie Armour was when she came back to this house and its familiar surroundings after the death of Charlie. Beth cried a lot. We were trying to write a screenplay together, and we fought constantly. Beth withdrew more and more. She couldn’t work. I tried to comfort her, but I didn’t do a good job of it. I didn’t know how. Once, when I received an assignment from the Atlantic Monthly, I was thrilled and went to tell Beth about it. “Brent did that,” she said. “Brent made that happen for you.” She meant Brent the angel. I should’ve let it go, but I didn’t. We pushed further apart. Another time, she told me our entire house had become a shrine to Brent. I began spending more time in the playroom, hiding away like Billie Murphree had, placing my drink on my Middle Eastern table and reading in my club chairs that I had bought with my first wife, back in Kansas City in 1968.

  Then in the summer of 1991, Beth went to Mexico to a spa called Rancha La Puerta. She came home better. Not a hundred percent, but with a noticeable interest in moving forward. She wrote a wonderful magazine piece about her experience there, and the very act of writing helped her be ready to write more.

  That fall, we finished the screenplay, and she began taking on magazine assignments. The next summer, she went to another spa, the Golden Door. While she was gone, I had dinner at my neighbors’ house, where I heard the story of the roller-skating transvestite hippies. The story made me think more deeply about this house in which our own lives were being buffeted so. It made me think more deeply about our lives. I wanted to dig in, to hang on, not to let go this time. I made a conscious decision to hold the center. My way of doing it was to go back and find the roots in these rooms, and to connect myself—and us—to them.

  That fall, I made contact with the first characters in the saga that would become this book. That fall, we also renegotiated the mortgage on this house, to lock in a lower rate. Beth and I both went. We both signed the papers.

  Epilogue

  The grass, here in mid-July, is slow-growing in the heat, but it gets ragged and needs mowing nevertheless. There comes a point when the Bermuda on the slope of the front hill begins to sprout a tendril, whose top in turn pops a four-pronged extension. It’s like a fireworks display out of the earth.

  I’ve noticed a disturbing thing this summer—the area of bare dirt under the maple tree seems to be growing. Rocks are coming to the surface. A crisscross pattern of small roots is now visible, looking like a railroad switchyard viewed from on high. I don’t know why this is happening. When I’m mowing like this, seeing it, it worries me. It’s moving toward the house. I sometimes wonder if the land is starting the process of reclaiming itself, dust to dust, from the man-made world upon it.

  I often look back at the very first photograph I have of this house, taken on a fine fall day in 1923. The house was new then. Its roof was sturdy, its masonry tight. Its walls were as unblemished as a promise. The second story hadn’t been added yet. That would come three years later, with the cold wind that brought Elizabeth Armor to this place. I wonder what the house and its future would’ve been like had she never come. Her arrival was the end of the innocence. And yet I don’t wish otherwise. It’s possible that the loss she inflicted gives the house the very appeal that’s attracted some of us to it.

  Of all the houses I’ve lived in, I feel the most kinship with this one. Could be, that’s partly a function of my age—now, as I stare at myself in the bathroom mirror, I can empathize with what I know of the house’s slow nod to gravity. It’s important to feel that you’re a true part of your surroundings.

  But I’ve felt myself gravitating toward this house, this life, for years. I feel at home writing and hope I can continue to do it. I also feel at home with Beth, despite the fact that we fight like cats and dogs. We’re often at odds about our ideas of living in this house. I like more open spaces, but she leans, at least now with Brent’s things, toward clutter. We have to rearrange the furniture to build a fire. Also, I like doors closed, so I can read without hearing the com motion. Beth likes doors open, likes three TVs and the stereo going at the same time. She lives her life that way—noisy, busy, doing many things at once. I try to focus, to lose myself in whatever I’m doing. I suspect there’s something in the tension between us that keeps us alive. A house provides a couple an endless playing field.

  We have traditions here now—Blair’s ballet recital the first of every June, our Most Bizarre Pumpkin and Easter Egg contests in the fall and spring (I did a Judge Ito Egg last year), baking cookies at Christmas, having the neighbors over for our special eggnog. More than that, we have the comfort of routines and rituals—Bret and Snapp and I bound for school every morning, Bret trying to avoid finishing the milk she got up too late to drink at home; the girls setting the table and me doing the dishes; Beth and I going to the gym every morning to keep ourselves sane.

  I think Jessie Armour would approve of most of the parties her house now hosts. They haven’t all been as wine-soaked as that Monet lunch in the garden. We’ve also had rollicking croquet parties on the side lawn, like the Murphrees did so many years before. We’ve had elegant dinners and Mexican suppers and catfish fries and torch light garden toasts to returning friends. When we first moved here, we sometimes came home and found our neighbors sitting on our porch, waiting for us, drink in hand. The porch has been our island. We eat supper there sometimes. We go there to get away from life, and we go there to celebrate life. And sometimes we go there just to be there. Beth and I have bundled up at midnight in the dead of January and carried cups of coffee to the hammock at the end of the porch, where we’ve lain like Eskimos, watching our breath blend with the coffee’s steam, the wind chimes ringing like crystal in the cold, crisp air.

  Left to my own devices, I wouldn’t have a life like this. I know that, so I’m glad, mostly, not to be left to my own devices. This old house, with its flawed past and its walls gone to gray, will always be identified in my memory as the place where I knocked and they let me in.

  But memory is the key word. Martha Murphree says she grieved when her parents sold 501 Holly. Whenever she would come to town for a visit, she would drive her car over to the old neighborhood, and she would park across the street and up the hill. From there, she had a perfect view of the house she’d grown up in. She was a wife and mother and a wife again, but home for her hadn’t been any of the places she had lived as an adult.

  That’s why nostalgia is so strong a force on us. The very word is compounded from the Greek nostos, meaning “a return home,” and algos, “pain.” To me, it captures perfectly that bittersweet yearning to go back to a place where life felt secure, peaceful, controlled. The pain comes from knowing that no such place really exists.

  Home, I think, is a moment, and that’s what attracts us to houses. We search for home in houses because houses stand still. They seem rooted in a place. We want to stop time, like in a photograph. But we know—don’t we?—that even houses are changing constantly. Once the photograph is taken, what
you have left is memory.

  Outside the frame of the picture, time moves on. Jessie Armour lived in her apartment at the state hospital for the rest of her life. She traveled some. In 1952, her son, Charles, had a heart attack while walking along a street in Little Rock, and there was nobody to help him. He survived that attack as he had survived the war camp—barely. As Charles and Millie got to know each other better, he gradually told her about the war—his war. Late at night, lying next to her, he told her he had been on the Bataan Death March—the last half of it—and that the horrors had only increased from there.

  Jessie died of cancer in 1952, and Charles had a final heart attack the next year. He and Millie had had a child in 1947, but the baby was premature and died in the hospital. Millie remembers being handed the child and weeping, the bundle in her arms reminding her of a porcelain doll she’d had as a girl, and which she had dropped and broken. Two years before Charles died, Millie gave birth to a son, Charles Webster Leverton Armour III— Jessie took it upon herself to name her grandson, and Millie didn’t dare object. He’s now a Methodist minister in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and his mother lives nearby. Millie never remarried. She hasn’t spoken with her sister-in-law Jane in forty years. There was some problem with Jessie’s will, and Jane let it be known that she wanted to have no more to do with Millie.

  Jane’s husband, Pem, had a radio business and later worked for the state forestry commission. Years ago, they moved to Pem’s family plantation out in the community of Scott. Jane and Pem’s widowed daughter, Janesy, lives in a house on the plantation, and Anne lives with her second husband in Little Rock. But back in the seventies, the McRaes’ son, John Pem, was killed in a car wreck. Jane didn’t tell me that—Millie did. She said she read it in the newspaper.