If These Walls Had Ears Read online

  I think I can understand why Charlie and Jessie were the Craftsman type. Jessie liked her nice clothes and her clubs, but essentially she was a practical woman. She was a Minnesotan, and I’ve lived in Minnesota. Minnesotans are unemotional, at least compared with the Southern women Jessie now lived her life around. She was sure of herself and her abilities. In a sense, she applied the Arts and Crafts ideals to the running of her home: She took joy in cooking, in making the children’s clothes, in being a hands-on mother and wife. Charlie may’ve been less practical than his wife, but he wasn’t a pretentious man. Besides, the Craftsman bungalow was the most house you could build for the money, and it was infinitely adaptable.

  He and Jessie opted for a house larger than the smallest bungalow, but smaller than a high-style Craftsman. It wouldn’t be as big as most of the other houses in the neighborhood, but it wouldn’t be the smallest, either. Also, the extra property would carry some weight. When you approached from the west on Lee Street, you would see the house there on the high ground. The overall effect would be impressive. And the house would be very nice—one story with a big porch, plus a garage and servant’s quarters. A good, sturdy middle-class house.

  Charlie spent much time with Ray Burks trying to figure out the most advantageous layout for breezes and air flow. He wanted a house that breathed. The house would face west, and the porch would stretch two-thirds of the way across the front and wrap slightly on the south side—that way, it could catch the wind from all four directions. Wide eaves would keep out the rain and the hot southern and western sun. Casement windows, a traditional Craftsman touch, would allow the Armours to open the house, and interior French doors throughout much of the downstairs would let the air circulate from one side to the other. Those French doors also had another purpose. As Charlie and the architect were planning, Jessie said to her husband, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could dance here!” It would indeed, “ Charlie said. The French doors, which opened the house to a world of such possibilities, were immediately sketched in.

  While their house was being built, the family rented a place nine blocks east, on a street called Midland. Every day before school started that fall, young Charles and Jane would trudge up Lee Street—Charles half a block ahead so as not to be seen walking with his seven-year-old sister—past the Pulaski Heights Elementary they would attend, toward the construction site. Charles monitored everything that happened. For a while, he even got himself hired on as a kind of water boy and nail fetcher, necessary credentials for mingling in that world of men. As for Jane, she stood by on the Holly Street side and watched the workers framing in the room that she had already moved into in her mind.

  For the Armours, who had wandered so long, this house must’ve felt like a new beginning—the first step toward finally making a home. Jessie was beside herself. That Christmas, when they were finally in, she sent photographs of the house to friends and relatives.” The new house on Holly, “ she wrote on the back,”—complete at last!”

  Charlie and Jessie Armour in the side yard. This was in the late twenties, when all things still seemed possible.

  Chapter Two

  Armour

  1923 1926

  All houses are fantasy, constructed as much of desires and dreams as wood and brick. They’re receptacles to hold not just us but also everything we want to be. Sometimes we don’t even know what that is. Sometimes we move into houses empty and expect them to fill us up.

  Houses have such power because they live in us as much as we live in them. I know a woman, a psychologist, who tells me that Carl Jung’s theory of a collective unconscious came to him after he had dreamed about a house. He described the dream this way:

  I was in a house I didn’t know. It was my house. In the upper house there was a kind of salon furnished in Rococo style. I did not know what the lower floor looked like. There everything was much older. This part of the house must date from the fifteenth or sixteenth century. The floors are of a red brick, the furnishings are medieval. I went from one room to another thinking, “Now 1 really must explore the whole house.” I came upon a heavy door and opened it. A stone stairway led me to a cellar. Descending again, I found myself in a beautiful vaulted room which looked exceedingly ancient. The walls datedfrom Roman times. The floor was of stone slabs, and in one of these I discovered a ring. The slab lifted. I saw a staircase of narrow stone steps leading down. I descended and entered a low cave. In dust were scattered bones and broken pottery, like remains of a primitive culture. I discovered two human skulls, obviously very old and half disintegrated.

  Then I awoke. It was plain to me that the house represented an image of the psyche.

  No wonder we have such strong feelings toward our houses: They are us; we are them. Dream analysts will tell you that when you dream about a house, many times you’re actually dreaming about yourself. Jung used his house dream to develop a theory about certain universal symbols—the house among them—and the reason people all over the world respond so emotionally to them. He believed that dreams are the way our unconscious self communicates with our conscious self. What excited him about the house dream was that he had spoken to himself from a deeper level, and with a structure that illustrated what was happening. To Jung, the salon represented consciousness, and the ground floor stood for the first, or personal, level of the unconscious. Many dreams come from there. As he went deeper, though, the scene became darker and more alien. He interpreted the Roman cellar and the prehistoric cave as signifying past times and past stages of consciousness—times and consciousness beyond the personal self. From this dream, he began research that resulted in his notion of archetypes, primordial images shaped by the repeated experience of our ancestors and expressed in myths, dreams, religion, literature. These images are prelogical. They’re imprinted on the deepest levels of our being. So when you see a house with a cozy front porch, all sorts of feelings and urges many of them entirely irrational—may wash over you. It’s happened to many people right here at 501 Holly.

  Jessie and Charlie were the first.

  * * *

  I like to think that the house was the way they saw themselves. Outside, the dark red brick spoke of strength and practicality and endurance. The great square porch columns seemed solidly rooted in Arkansas rock. The white concrete capping on the arch and half columns evoked images of new snow on rich old ground—or maybe white hair on a couple who had lived long and watched life pass from that very porch.

  Inside, the house was warmed by cream-colored walls. There was a fireplace, too, and on either side of that was a built-in bookshelf so the family could sit in the living room on winter nights and read good books by the fire. The mantel was more classical than Craftsman in design. On either end, squares of molding sat above rectangles, evoking columns. Larger squares of the same decorative molding refined the walls. Over the casement windows in front, Jessie shut out the world with heavy drapes hanging on thick rods from large wooden rings. The floor in the living room was strewn with several six-by-nine-foot Oriental rugs. After supper, the children would lie on the rugs and read or draw. Jessie placed a pair of morris chairs—something I imagine to be like early recliners—on either side of the fireplace so Charlie could smoke his pipe arid read and she could tend to her sewing. Grandma Jackson sat on the sofa, listening to music front the Victrola or the player piano.

  The house was basically built along two parallel lines. You entered from the front porch into the living room, and straight beyond that were the dining room, the breakfast room, the kitchen, and a back porch or utility room. Left of the front entrance, French doors opened to a small front bedroom, shared by Carolee and Jane. Beyond that was a middle bedroom—Jessie and Charlie’s. Then came a hall—where Carolee would sit for what seemed hours talking on the heavy black telephone—with a bath to the left, and a large back bedroom, which was shared by Grandma Jackson and Charles.

  I can imagine Jessie loving the French doors. She was a woman who appreciated elegance—in c
lothes, in furniture—and there’s something undeniably elegant about French doors. There’s also an inherent sociability to them. If you’re shy and private, you can’t hide behind double glass doors. French doors, you fling open with both arms, and, in so doing, you open your arms wide to the world. That strikes me as Jessie. She even had pongee-covered French doors separating her and Charlie’s bedroom from the dining room.

  Passing from the living room through the double French doors into the dining room, you would’ve come upon a large Oriental rug that formed the perfect base for Jessie’s pedestal table. It could easily seat twelve and often did. A china cabinet stood just inside the room, to the right. There, Jessie displayed her beloved Haviland china. But her favorite piece was placed against the east wall, straight ahead, so that even people in the living room could see it. It was an Empire sideboard with a rounded glass front that opened. She kept her fine glassware in there. On either side were a couple of drawers in which she stored candles and silverware and place cards and such. Below that were four drawers for linens—Jessie liked big, elegant, twenty-four-inch napkins, and tablecloths that draped to the floor. The sideboard also had two little pull-down doors. In one of those was where, after Prohibition, liquor was kept.

  The breakfast room represented a triumph of Jessie’s domestic science. It was a small space, but very efficient. In the wall between the breakfast room and the kitchen was a cut-out panel with sliding doors that opened to a counter on the breakfast-room side. Jessie could keep meals hot in the kitchen, and then, at the last minute, could open the sliding doors and set the platters of food on the counter. The family would serve themselves buffet-style. She had a small gateleg table that she folded out when the family took meals in the breakfast room. In the mornings, they would sit at that table in elegant bentwood chairs—there were eight of them throughout the house—with the sun streaming in through the French doors that led out to the side steps and yard. It was a serene way to begin the day.

  There were no built-ins in the kitchen. The sink was under the south windows. To the left of that was a tall freestanding cupboard with two doors on one side for storing bowls and pans and plates. On the other side was a single door, which, when opened, revealed Jessie’s flour sifter. She would pour her flour into the large container for storage. Then when she wanted to use some, she would fiddle with a lever that allowed flour to sift down into her bowl. Jane was mesmerized by this process. It was so ingenious, so modern.

  But that was nothing compared to the stove. Standing against the big wall across from the sink, it was a gas stove of state-of-the-art design. It was cream-colored, the approximate hue of eggnog or boiled custard, and it was trimmed in pistachio green. It had legs, instead of being set squarely on the floor. In Jessie’s home, the stove was always the cornerstone. She and Charlie had bought this stove brand-new for this house.

  The back bedroom was given to Grandma Jackson because she had developed asthma, and that room was the most private. Charles slept in her bed at first. As he got older, he used a roll-away bed, but he still stayed with her. Jane recalls thinking Charles was their grandmother’s pet.

  The hall must’ve been Charlie’s tribute to Grand Central Station. It’s not a hall in the long and narrow sense of the word; it’s simply a small room in the center of the house, a room whose only purpose is connecting the other rooms with one another. The hall has no fewer than seven doors—back bedroom, attic, coat closet, breakfast room, dining room, middle bedroom, bathroom. It’s hell to wallpaper, but a good place to wait out a tornado warning.

  In Charlie and Jessie’s time, the bathroom was clean and entirely white, like a medical room. It had a pedestal sink and a floor comprised of hundreds of tiny octagonal tiles that played tricks on your eyes if you stared at them too long. There was a built-in wall heater to keep you warm when you stepped out of the big tub.

  In the middle bedroom, Charlie and Jessie slept in a huge sleigh bed whose head was placed in the center of a bay window on the north side of the house, next to the driveway. Mostly, the curtains on those windows were kept drawn because the Armour house was lower on the hill than the house next door. If you weren’t careful, the neighbors could look right in and catch you in your underwear—or worse. Jessie had a dresser on the east wall, and she kept her clothes in the closet opposite. For all their attention to detail in this house, Charlie and Ray Burks hadn’t drawn in many closets—just one small one per bedroom, and the one in the hall. Charlie’s suits, hats, shirts, shoes, and accessories were stored in a massive armoire on the wall between the French doors and the door leading to the girls’ room. The armoire was made of a heavy mahogany. To young Charles, it must’ve been a magical piece—dark, brooding, filled with the rites and rituals of manhood.

  Before they moved to 501 Holly, Jessie already had a set of beautiful white wicker furniture. As it became obvious that Carolee and Jane would share a room until Carolee—now seventeen—left for college, Jessie went out and found another piece of wicker—a long couch that opened into a bed. In the daytime and evenings, the front bedroom could be a charming sitting room, one where Carolee could have privacy with her beaux and still be in sight of the living room, thanks to the French doors. At bedtime, Carolee and Jane could fold out the couch.

  And when they did, Charlie and Jessie would sometimes go out on the porch alone, if the weather wasn’t too cold. Jane says they sat on the porch a lot, especially in the beginning. I can see them watching the stars sparkling in the western sky. You could do that then, when there weren’t so many man-made lights west of Holly to dim the view. Other times, they would go out at day’s end to wait for the glorious red sunsets. They’d hung a swing on the porch’s south end, so they could see the front and side of their house at the same time. They’d planted evergreens around the porch, and several trees in the yard—that spindly elm in front of the house, near the driveway, and a tulip poplar on the edge of the hill overlooking Lee. On the side of the house, near a mature walnut tree, they’d planted a young maple. Charlie and Jessie had, quite literally, put down roots.

  It was—it is—a good feeling. There’s something especially warming about certain accomplishments around a house—a new purchase, a big project crossed off the list, evens a simple thing like a day of yard work completed. It’s as though all is right with the universe. It’s the feeling of home distilled—a feeling that you’re keeping up, not losing ground. Many’s the evening Beth and I have sat on that very porch, and we’ve marveled at our industriousness and our good fortune, as Charlie and Jessie surely must have at theirs. I wonder if, during dusks like that, they felt as I have—hat the silhouetted rafters in the porch overhang looked like the swags of a theater curtain.

  These are moments in a house you have to cherish, like the sunsets. One minute the sky is a blaze of color. The next minute everything is gone.

  Soul is a hard word to pin down. It’s the word we use to name something ephemeral, but just giving that something a name doesn’t capture it. Soul isn’t captured. It’s revealed.

  In Jessie and Charlie’s house, it manifested itself in optimism, gregariousness, efficiency, pride. It floated through every room on the scents from Jessie’s kitchen—from her incomparable sweet-potato croquettes, or Grandma Jackson’s famously sinful doughnuts, or the apple pies Grandma said she baked “especially for Charlie—though others can have a taste if they wish.” In the mornings, the aroma of coffee announced that Charlie was up and ready to go to work. In her back bedroom, Grandma Jackson would prop herself up in bed, because Charlie never failed to take his mother-in-law the first cup poured.

  Music was another revelation of this family’s soul. It makes me happy to know that this house was filled with music—was conceived with music in mind. My parents seldom played music in our houses when I was growing up. They liked music, but it just wasn’t a priority. I think a house without music robs you of something, both at the time and later, too. My forty-seven-year-old brother, Phil, recently went back to
see the house on Churchill Drive in Jackson, Mississippi, where we had lived for a while in the early fifties. He says that just looking at it after forty years didn’t take him back. Where memory is concerned, the senses of sight and touch aren’t as evocative as smell and taste and hearing. Hearing music is the best transporter of all.

  Music works on memory like the emulsion on film—it freezes time into keepable slices: Standing in the backyard in Jackson talking with my mother through the window, asking if I can keep the stray dog I’m holding, while somewhere a radio plays “Young at Heart.” Waking upin Miami at 3:00 A.M. to the sound of sultry Keely Smith singing “Love for Sale” on my brown-and-orange bedside radio. In a star-crossed bedroom in Minnesota, hearing my five-year-old son singing a line from his favorite song: “I’m on the top of the world looking down on creation. . .” None of it is especially important—except that, after it’s over, that’s what you’ve got.

  Almost three-quarters of a century after the fact, Jane Armour McRae remembers her grandma Jackson sitting by the radio and listening to “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” Radio took off in the early 1920s, and Grandma Jackson was one of the first people in the neighborhood to have one. She had been fascinated by the idea that you could sit there in your house and listen to someone sing “Barney Google (with the goo goo googledy eyes)” from a box on the table. You could also hear news. Grandma Jackson had to have a radio.

  It was a big one, a console, and she placed it in the dining room, near the windows. That was as far away from the bedrooms as she could get it—she didn’t want to disturb anyone while she sat up till all hours twisting the dial. Jessie and Charlie put her chair next to the radio, and that became her throne. She sat there from morning till night, listening. Not only did she know all the latest songs but she became the family’s ear to a world that was getting larger by the minute. Every night at dinner, she would tell them all the amazing things she had heard that day.