If These Walls Had Ears Read online

  Seventy years after that, you could drive by on any other summer Saturday and watch me pushing my old lawn mower up that very hill.

  The first picture I ever saw of any of this house’s past lives was sent to me by Ruth Chapin, who had grown up across the street. It was actually a photocopy of a snapshot, dated “1927 or ’28,” and it was gray and grainy, like memory itself.

  In the foreground are two young women, identified as Ruth Ream—at that time—and Clara Young, who lived in the house next door to 501. It’s a snowy day, and Ruth is holding what looks like a black-and-white dog. I can see Clara’s house in the background and, next to it, the unmistakable shape of the one I’ve come to know. But there are disturbing differences. There’s a nakedness to my house. Then 1 realize the massive elm tree by the driveway seems to be missing. No: Resorting to a magnifying glass, I can just make out a thin vertical line that looks, comparing it to the house, to be about ten or fifteen feet tall, and skinny.

  Then I look up from my desk and out through the front French doors upstairs. Broad limbs, heavy with age, stretch up and out, their span not even contained within the double window frame. Three years ago, I even had to have that tree cabled together at the Y to keep it from splitting from its weight. I look back at the grainy picture. It’s hard to reconcile the two images.

  Photographs are tricky, and I’ve come to believe that most of us don’t really see what’s in them. More than once over the past year, I’ve studied faces and bodies in a picture snapped in this yard, and then I’ve stepped outside to look at the very spot where it was taken half a century, or more, before. No one is there, of course. I pore over the backgrounds to see if I can pick up an echo.

  Over time, though, I’ve become able to summon up the figures and faces, and I realize now that this process is one of the great benefits of this quest of mine. One of the major characters in this saga is time. Most of us see the world only the way it is as we’re looking at it. We take a snapshot of that moment and believe we’ve captured something. But time, that invisible trickster, is the real subject of every photograph. Every item in every snapshot is shaped, or colored—or faded—by time in one of its permutations. A brilliant writer named Robert Grudin has called time “the fourth dimension,” and I’ve become increasingly able to see this house in that way: height, width, depth, time. When I first moved into 501 Holly, the rooms looked empty. Now I live with ghosts.

  One of them drove the car parked in front of the house in that grainy snapshot Ruth sent me. That it’s not a normal car is apparent even without the magnifying glass. It looks like an old wooden barrel on wheels, with a flimsy canvas top. I’ve since learned that it was an automobile built in the shape of a Nu Grape soda pop bottle, that it was painted purple, and that the radiator (which I can’t see in this picture) was made to look like a bottle cap.

  The man who created that car was named Charles Webster Leverton Armour, known to his wife, Jessica, as Charlie. Charlie and Jessie, as he called her, had met in the still-frontierish town of Fort Smith, Arkansas, sometime around 1908. Jessie Jackson, then age twenty-one, was a bright, outgoing, self-confident young woman from St. Paul, Minnesota. A graduate dietician, as successful home ec majors were known in those days, she had sent letters to schools all over the country announcing her qualifications and her willingness to relocate. She was a woman ahead of her time. One day, Jessie heard from the principal of the high school in Fort Smith. He wondered if she would come establish a “domestic science” program at his school. It was just the kind of adventure Jessie was looking for. She packed up her best friend and took her along, too.

  Jessie Armours with her children, fane and Charles.

  Jessie’s best friend also happened to be her mother. Cynthia Jane Paxton Jackson had been widowed when Jessie was three, and the two of them had gone to live with Cynthia’s brother, Ben Paxton, a bachelor doctor and world traveler. Jessie’s father, William Malcolm Jackson, had also been a doctor. Back in those days, doctors made house calls—even out to the country in the middle of a Minnesota winter. After one such visit, Dr. Jackson caught pneumonia and died. Cynthia never remarried.

  The above story was told to me one crisp blue day in the fall of 1992. I had driven out to the Scott community northeast of town to see Jane Armour McRae, then seventy-six, the only surviving child of Jessie and Charlie Armour. Jane is a tall woman, angular, and on the day of that first meeting I noted that she was wearing heavy blue eye shadow and a rinse on her hair the approximate color of Windex. She laughed heartily and often. On a later visit, the color was less vibrant, but her attitude was the same: When she looks at you, you get the feeling there’s a party going on behind her eyes.

  Her mother, Jane said, had two great loves: talking and dancing. In Fort Smith, she met a man who shared both of those passions.

  A garrulous real estate salesman from Kansas, Charlie was seventeen years older than Jessie, and he had a past. For one thing, this was his second career. He had studied civil engineering at the University of Kansas and had spent several years surveying for a railroad down in Louisiana. He was brimming with tales about that exotic land, which was about as different from his own home state as any place could possibly be. He mesmerized Jessie with stories of wildcats and things up in trees that would howl in the night. He could still make the sound of a panther. He had loved Louisiana, had been taken with its food, its eccentricities, its attitude. He had adopted those Southern ways with the passion of one who happens upon a new part of the world and discovers himself in it. To Jessie Jackson, who had lived her entire life in the North, this smooth-talking fellow seemed the epitome of Southern charm, especially with his three first names. Up where Jessica came from, they’re more frugal with their appellations.

  He had also been married once, and had a young daughter, a toddler, Caroline, called Carolee, who lived with him. He was a widower, he said. He and his daughter lived in an imposing Queen Anne mansion on a hill outside of town. It was the kind of estate that had a name—Lone Pine, which referred to a massive old tree that towered over the house and stood out in solitary splendor against the sky. There was a story about that house. Even if Charlie hadn’t told Jessica about it, she would’ve heard. It was the sort of story that people would whisper behind their hands whenever Charlie walked into a room.

  His first wife had killed herself at Lone Pine. One day Charlie and his daughter were walking out in the large yard when Charlie heard a shot. He swept Carolee into his arms and ran back to the house. When they got to the front steps, they saw her—his wife, and Carolee’s mother—sprawled dead on the porch, a pistol in her hand. If Charlie had any idea why she did it, he never said. All his family ever knew was that his first wife was “nervously unbalanced” and took her own life.

  Jessie and Charlie were both big people, tending toward heaviness, he standing five foot nine or ten, and Jessie five six or seven. They had big spirits, too. Each threatened to outtalk the other. Charlie teased Jessie and her mother, and both women were smitten by him. In 1912, when forty-two-year-old Charlie asked Jessie to marry him, she responded with an unqualified yes. She and her mother moved into the big house on the hill, and for several years they lived there together, a blended family—rare in those days. Charlie pursued his real estate business and Jessie taught school. Cynthia Jane, now known as Grandma Jackson, spent her days taking care of Carolee, this instant grandchild who had washed into her life by fate. Carolee was six at the time of the marriage.

  In 1914, Jessie gave birth to her first child, a son. All four of his father’s names were bestowed upon him, and he went by Charles. Two years later, a daughter was born. She was named Jane, after Jessie’s mother.

  * * *

  Charlie Armour as a young grid star in Kansas. His son, Charles, would always feel that he never quite measured up in his father’s eyes.

  In time, through research, I would come to know things about her parents that even Jane didn’t know. Still, I worried that they were eluding me.
It’s impossible to get inside another person’s heart, even if you live together. But these were people I had never met, people who had lived in a completely different age. I stared at photographs and read stories into them.

  Jessie displays a face straight from a Grecian urn—strong chin, prominent nose, high forehead, with a tousle of thick dark curls. Her eyes are intelligent, hawklike, ready. I imagine her dancing, whirling. I imagine her as a fiercely protective mother.

  As for Charlie, I can’t see much at all in his pictures. In every one, from his college days as a football player to his middle years as head of a household, the camera doesn’t catch his spark. With some people, it does. He had a face like Kansas—wide, open, no sharp angles. With him, the rest of his family will be smiling, but he stands there expressionless. It’s not anger, not pomposity, not shyness. It’s just nothing: no hint of the salesman with the gift of gab:, no glimpse of the music lover undaunted by a dance floor; no sign of the searching heart that would cause this man to reinvent himself time and time again.

  Charlie scares me. He strikes me as a man who was forever chasing something but never quite held it securely in his hands.

  Jessie and Charlie were married for eleven years before they built the house on Holly Street. In that time, they had lived in four other houses in three other towns. They left Fort Smith in 1918 because Charlie was offered the chance to manage a cotton plantation in Elaine, Arkansas. They left Elaine after a race riot erupted and many people were killed. They next moved to Memphis, where they lived in a big two-story rented house and Charlie went back into real estate. They moved from that house to a smaller one when, in 1921, Charlie’s head was turned by the discovery of oil in south Arkansas. He just had to try his luck in the oil fields, but there’s no evidence that he had any luck—not the kind that would’ve changed his luck. He was fifty-one and still struggling.

  While he was gone, Jessie made sure the family was well clothed and well fed. She sewed their outfits, cooked their meals. Carolee was a teenager by this time, and the smaller children were both in school. Young Charles may’ve been glad to have some time away from his father. Charles was a worrier, and lie wasn’t particularly athletic. Many years later, he would confess that he never felt he measured up in his father’s eyes.

  In the spring of 1923, the Armours packed themselves into their Overland touring car and headed west from Memphis toward the site of Charlie’s latest incarnation. It was to take place in Little Rock, Arkansas. The family was moving so Charlie could try his hand in the hot new industry of soda-pop bottling.

  It looked like a sure bet for the times—especially now with Prohibition, when people couldn’t openly slake their thirst with beer. More than that, though, bottled soft drinks seemed a perfect response to the whimsy, the mobility, and the pleasure seeking of the 1920s. I can imagine Charlie bursting with anticipation. This was totally different from anything he had ever done, and yet it was right up his alley. He was a people person, and this was a people business. He had lots of ideas that he wanted to try. Everybody knew that men all over the country had gotten filthy rich owning Coca-Cola bottling plants. This wasn’t going to be that, exactly—Charlie was becoming a partner in something called Arkola, which had started in 1920 to take advantage of the cola craze. The company also bottled ginger ale and root beer. But the big reason Charlie was so excited was that the company had just landed the contract for Nu Grape, and this was going to be Charlie’s baby.

  It didn’t take the Armours long to find out that the most desirable neighborhood in Little Rock was a western suburb called Pulaski Heights. By this time, the Heights had become annexed to Little Rock. Charlie and Jessie took the family on a spin through the hilly, winding streets. The old trees—oaks and elms and walnuts and pines—formed canopies over the paved roadways. By now, there were different neighborhoods within the Heights itself, and commercial areas had sprung up at different points along the streetcar line. The area where Auten and Moss had built their homes was now called Hillcrest, and its commercial district included a beautiful two-story Spanish Gothic building that encompassed the town hall, the civic center, and five storefronts facing Prospect Avenue. Across the street was a fire station. The Heights was home to Little Rock College, to a Catholic girls’ school called Mount St. Mary’s, and to several elementary and junior high schools.

  Another big attraction to the Armours was an amusement park that some old-timers still called Forest Park but that had recently been refurbished and renamed White City. The ostensible reason for the name change was that all the structures had been painted a sparkling white, but the not-so-subtle message to Little Rock Negroes was no doubt considered a happy by-product. The park—which, the Armours learned, had originally been built to attract a streetcar line to the Heights—now featured an outdoor swimming pool that was a whole city block long and half a block wide. Parkgoers could even enjoy the recent invention called the “dodgem”—four padded cars with erratic steering and guaranteed collisions. The automobile culture had changed the park in other ways, too—White City now included a campground for tourists traveling by car.

  Charlie and Jessie liked what they saw. When they drove along Woodlawn Street, they found it a kind of church row. There were a Methodist, an Episcopal, and a Presbyterian church all within three blocks of one another. On down Woodlawn, there was even a Baptist church just where Woodlawn ran into Prospect. In Hillcrest, no matter what denomination you were, you could get up on a Sunday morning and walk to church if you wanted.

  It was time. Jessie knew it, and Charlie knew she knew it. It was time to dig in and make a stand, if ever they were going to do it. The stars hadn’t been so auspiciously aligned at any time during their eleven years of marriage. Building a house, which they would have to do, was a major commitment—especially for Charlie. It’s a frightening thing, especially for a man, to say, This is it. This is where I live and where I’m going to live—no matter what. You cross off all your options. You have to make it work here. At least Charlie could be comforted by the fact that nice houses in Hillcrest didn’t sit empty—if, God forbid, something happened and they were forced to move again.

  They began searching for exactly the right lot—one close to schools, churches, and the shopping district. Finally, they found a large parcel of land on the corner of Lee and Holly. It was on a hill, which was nice—the better to catch the breezes. The property was owned by a Melissa Retan, who, the Armours were told, had once owned the big Queen Anne house right behind this lot—so close, in fact, that shade from the imposing Retan carriage house fell on this property in the mornings. Melissa and her late husband, Albert, had been part of the original group who had developed the Heights. The house next to the Retan house was the Auten place, home of another Heights founder, who had died only recently, in 1918. Albert Retan had died way back in 1909, and Melissa had decided the big house was too much for her and her remaining single daughter, Zillah. So she had sold the property and moved to a smaller place.

  Charlie and Jessie were impressed with the neighborhood. Holly Street was only one block long, and it was a very nice block. Across the street from the lot they were considering was a smallish but very neat bungalow with an interesting Oriental trellis on the gable. A substantial house stood next door to the north—a wooden two-story with a porch and decorative woodwork on the windows. Catty-cornered across the street was a big, comfortable-looking house with a porch and columns out in front. And next door to that, on the corner of Woodlawn and Holly, there was a fabulous house—huge, with upper and lower wraparound verandas and exotic mimosa trees in the yard. Combine that with the Retan and Auten houses just to the rear—you could even say the Retan house was next door—and, yes, this was a neighborhood anyone would be proud to drive home to every day.

  On July 18, 1923, Charlie and Jessie paid Melissa Retan two thousand dollars for the land, which was officially known as “Pulaski Heights block 004, lot 007, the west one hundred feet of 007, and the south 40 feet of th
e west 100 feet of 008.” A month later, they took out a loan of $5,800 to build the house. In the 1920s, the average annual income in the United States was one thousand dollars. What Charlie was to be making at Arkola, I have no idea. But while there were certainly many houses more expensive in Hillcrest, this was nevertheless a major expense.

  They also had the added fee of their architect, a man named H. Ray Burks. The generally acknowledged “best” architect working in Hillcrest in 1923 was Charles Thompson, who designed very large and very showy homes. He had been working in Little Rock for many years, and in fact was said to have designed the Queen Anne house for the Retans in 1893. Another well-known Heights architect was K. E. N. Cole, who specialized in bungalows. Ray Burks would go on to create numerous houses and buildings in Hillcrest, but in 1923, at age thirty-three, he still had his best work ahead of him. He was a member of Kiwanis, as was Charlie Armour. I like to think of their meeting over rubber chicken and too-green English peas, two loyal clubmen happy to do business within the fold.

  But what kind of business? In 1923, the trends in house design included a fair amount of harkening back to the romantic styles of the past, architecture that whispered—or sometimes shouted—its alignment with English, Spanish, or French designs. When Charlie and Jessie drove through the Heights, they saw quite a few houses that were English Revival, Colonial Revival, or American Foursquare. The style they saw the most, however, was the Craftsman bungalow, or some variation on it. During the period of Hillcrest’s first major development—between 1910 and 1920—the Craftsman influence, an architectural offshoot of the English Arts and Crafts movement of the late 1800s, was at its peak in the United States. Arts and Crafts celebrated individual craftsmanship as opposed to tasteless overmechanization.