If These Walls Had Ears Read online

  As planned, Jessie and Charlie did dance in this house. They belonged to a dance club, a group of eight or ten couples who organized dances at one another’s houses. Jessie would open all the French doors, and Charlie would move back the furniture and roll up the rugs. Jane’s job was always to wind the Victrola and change the records—or, if they were using the player piano, she had to change the rolls and pump the piano. Her parents and their friends mostly fox-trotted or two-stepped, so Jane would play current favorites like “Always” or “Rhapsody in Blue.” If somebody was feeling frisky, they might request “Sweet Georgia Brown.” Carolee and her group were also dancing by the time she moved to this house. Carolee’s coming of age had coincided with that of a new dance called the Charleston. On nights when Jane deejayed for her sister’s crowd, she played songs that rocked the entire neighborhood—“Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue” and “If You Knew Susie Like I Know Susie.” Jane learned to dance early, because some of the older boys and men would ask her to take a turn around the room with them. If she could prevail on someone else to take over her duties—Charles would do it, but then she owed him—she would get to enjoy the party even more. Jessie was happy for Jane to dance. Dancing was a celebration of the soul.

  * * *

  So is humor. Jane Armour McRae remembers her father as charming, outgoing, the kind of man who would walk guests out to their cars and never stop talking. People could hardly escape his hospitality. His dour photographs aside, the man obviously had a sense of humor. How else could he have created the Nu Grape car?

  Nu Grape was going well. Over at the White City pool, you could hear young girls say, “If you can swim all the way across, I’ll buy you a Nu Grape.” The distinctively cinch-waisted bottle certainly helped. “She has a shape like a Nu Grape bottle” was another popular saying—usually from the young men watching those girls swim in the pool. But though business was good, Charlie decided he needed a gimmick. Selling had gotten sophisticated. With radio, the public had lots of new demands on their attention. You had to reach out and grab them. The idea Charlie came up with was to build a car in the shape of a Nu Grape bottle.

  He began with a Chevrolet chassis, but by the time Charlie got through with it, you wouldn’t have recognized it as a Detroit product. Actually, the car became a kind of work in progress. At first, it didn’t have the roof I saw in that first grainy photograph—just two seats up front and a back end shaped like the Nu Grape bottle. The radiator looked like a bottle cap from the start. Naturally, the car had to be painted purple. The back opened so Charlie could carry cases of soda, or proposals, or whatever a Nu Grape bottler needed to have on hand. Immediately, the car achieved Charlie’s purpose—people all over Little Rock knew about “the Nu Grape car.” It was good for business. As for Charlie’s image, he had finally acquired a degree of that Southern eccentricity he had admired so in Louisiana.

  He took to driving the Nu Grape car back and forth to work every day. At night, he would park it out in front of the house so people couldn’t miss it. In the mornings, before he went to the office, he would drop Charles and Jane off at school. Poured them out with everyone watching. They weren’t the least bit embarrassed. They loved the car, found it enormously funny. Their classmates considered Charles and Jane celebrities because of it. The car also advertised the fact that Charles and Jane had a never-ending supply of soft drinks cooling in their icebox at home. After school, 501 Holly was a very popular hangout.

  To help sell soda pop, Charlie Armour create this car shaped like a Nu Grape bottle. fane and young Charles here—outside his dad's bottling plant—love it.

  Eventually, Charlie decided that having no top on the car was impractical. He commissioned a canvas top, with curtains that could be locked into the windows on cold or rainy days. He even installed a primitive heater. All this “winterizing” belied an ulterior motive. There was to be a bottlers’ convention in Buffalo, New York, and Charlie wanted to drive his purple pop bottle the two thousand-plus miles to Buffalo. Not only that, he wanted Jessie to go with him.

  She thought it was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard. This was a gimmick, not an automobile. And highways were unpredictable, not to mention unpaved. Jessie’s world didn’t allow for such tomfoolery. She lived a swirl of meals and sewing and grocery shopping and child rearing and club work. She belonged to the Culture Club, one of the finest women’s organizations in the Heights. She also taught a young women’s Sunday school class at Pulaski Heights Presbyterian Church. Yes, she had a maid, a Negro woman named Mabel, but Mabel wasn’t always dependable. She lived out in back over the garage, and though she was good when she was working, sometimes she would just leave. She once went to Brownsville, Texas, for a year. Then, one day, she showed up again, asking for her job back. Jessie gave it to her.

  So Charlie had to woo Jessie about the Buffalo trip. He was persistent, and he could be charming. He would take everybody for drives on Sunday afternoons, making sure Grandma had a blanket to cover her legs. Sometimes he would surprise the family by buying tickets to the Majestic Theater downtown. It was a movie theater with vaudeville shows between the films, which were still silent. Jessie and Grandma Jackson loved the Majestic, losing themselves in the flickering pictures while the piano player matched the mood. The kids loved the vaudeville acts, because if you went on your birthday, you got to sit in a special box and the entertainer would come over and talk to you. Charlie would usually get tickets for Friday or Saturday nights, the best nights, when it was reserved seating only.

  When time for the convention finally arrived, Jessie went. It took days each way. She was exhausted when she got home, but Charlie was beaming. His Nu Grape car had been the talk of the show.

  * * *

  In the spring of 1926, Charlie received a letter saying that his mother was coming to live with them. This was not considered good news.

  A severe, humorless woman, Elizabeth. Leverton Armor spelled her surname like warfare—minus her son’s softening u. Charles and Jane didn’t remember her, so Jessie told them stories of when Grandfather and Grandmother Armor had visited in Fort Smith when Charles and Jane were little, or even before they were born. Grandfather Armor’s name was Charles Webster Armor. He had fought in the Civil War on the Union side, and he loved to tell stories about his exploits. Whenever the Armors had visited Fort Smith, Mr. Armor was the center of attention for the duration of the trip. He was a character, a raconteur. As a young man, he had ridden for the Pony Express. That was a very dangerous job, Jessie told Charles and Jane—both of whom were spellbound by this rambunctious relative they had never really known. They wished he were coming instead of his widow.

  Jessie told them they were to address Mrs. Armor as Grandmother Armor—never Grandma. What she didn’t tell them was that Charlie’s mother was a strict, straitlaced, ill-tempered old biddy and that Grandfather Armor’s most perilous exploit had been living with her.

  Charlie, meanwhile, had more practical concerns—such as where to put everybody. This house just wasn’t large enough for another person. And yet they loved it here and didn’t want to move. One night at supper, Charlie announced a bold plan. “What we’ll do,” he said, “is add on.”

  In August, he and Jessie borrowed money from the Prudential Insurance Company, and the work began immediately. Architect Ray Burks recommended adding a second level at the back of the house. Charlie wanted to add three bedrooms and a bath—and, by now, some good-size closets. As before, they didn’t stint: on details. The upper floor would be reached by the stairs that previously had gone to the attic. At the top of the stairs, you took a right and there was a small bedroom with casement windows on the east and south sides. That room was connected by French doors to a larger room with windows all across the south wall and two more on the west side. This room also had a huge walk-in cedar closet. The plan was for Charlie and Jessie to move up here, and Jane would take the small room adjoining. Across the hall was a nice-size bedroom for Charles. It had windows
on the east and north walls, so that when you woke up in the morning, you felt as though you’d slept in a tree house. A door in Charles’s room led to a bath with a pedestal sink and a beautiful black-and-white tile shower. Charlie, Jessie, and Jane could also get to that bathroom by a door that opened to the hall. It was a well-thought-out floor plan. Carolee would need a place when she came home to visit, so she and Grandma Jackson would keep their rooms, and Grandmother Armor could have the middle one that Charlie and Jessie had been using. Until the new addition was finished, everybody would just have to make do.

  Elizabeth Armor arrived, as best can be determined, with the chill of autumn. It was a difficult fall, with all the dust and noise and the workmen tramping in and out. Then, too, there was this stranger in their midst. Jessie did her best to soothe frayed nerves. There was little entertaining because of the work, but she cooked up great steaming platters of comforting foods for the family. Grandmother Armor, with her mouth set hard and her hair bound in a bun, was not comforted. At suppertime, if Jessie served her something she didn’t like, instead of eating it graciously, she would take her index finger and slowly push the plate away. The children found her impossibly strict and unapproachable—as opposed to their Grandma Jackson, who fried them doughnuts and read to them and occasionally talked Jessie into letting them go to the picture show. Grandmother Armor had little use for anybody, much less children.

  Elizabeth Armor, Charlie’s mother.

  The Addition was finished by Christmas. That year, 1926, Uncle Ben, Grandma Jackson’s brother, came to spend the holidays in Little Rock. He was on his way to the Hawaiian Islands, just another in a long list of his exotic jaunts. The man travelled almost as much as he practiced medicine. Charles and Jane loved it when Uncle Ben would come. He was so funny when he talked about the places he’d been. The truth was, he was kind of a snob about travel. Once he had come to see them after a trip to Venice. All he could talk about was how bad the place had smelled.

  Grandma Jackson was overjoyed to see him. She wanted to show off her new radio, not to mention their new house. She was seventy-four that year, and her health wasn’t all that she wished. The asthma was getting worse—even though Jessie sent notes with the Christmas cards saying Grandma was “spry as a cricket.” Cynthia and Ben sat by the radio for hours that year, listening and talking, reminiscing. It was a wonderful Christmas. The new addition, made of stucco and painted white, sat atop the old structure like a big white cake from Jessie’s kitchen. On Christmas Day, the family posed outside in the yard—everyone but Carolee, who wasn’t there, and Charlie, who took the picture, and Grandmother Armor.

  Christmas Day 1926, Despite Uncle Ben's visit and the house renovations being completed, nobody in this picture seems to be having a happy holliday.

  Looking at that photograph, you’d never know it was a happy occasion. A frown creases every face. It’s as though a vague communal uneasiness had now permeated this house, filling each member of the family with an unnamed dread.

  Only Jessie, indomitable Jessie, seems to be trying to summon up something resembling a smile.

  Here’s the house with the second story Charlie added when his mother came to live with them. It was the fall of 1926, the beginning of the beginning of the troubles.

  Chapter Three

  Armour

  1926 1937

  For much of my life, even my adult life, I thought that you worked hard, you achieved and acquired things, and that those things would forevermore be yours. It’s an embarrassingly naïve view of the world.

  The thing that opened my eyes was a simple pair of socks. It was in that bedroom in Minnesota. In my sock drawer, I discovered a pair of socks that wasn’t mine. I asked my wife about them, but she said I must be mistaken’. I knew I wasn’t. Not coincidentally, her boss soon left his wife and moved away, taking a job in New England. And my wife asked for a divorce and took our two sons home to her mother’s house in Florida. Shortly after our divorce was final, she moved to New England and married her ex-boss. Though I certainly wouldn’t have been able to script out that specific scenario, I knew, from the moment I found those socks, that my life would never again be quite the same.

  That’s part of what fascinates me about houses—how major life changes are precipitated, or at least revealed, in the most mundane ways. To my mind, Elizabeth Armor was a harbinger. Nobody alive today remembers why she came, and maybe there never was a plausible answer. But it’s as though she were the embodiment of some larger, darker disturbance loose in the land. It’s as though this pinched soul from the heart of America interrupted the Armours’ happiness as a warning: that life, and fortune, can shift with the suddenness of a letter being plucked from the mailbox. Whatever her reason for coming, the truth of the matter is this: She lived with them for more than two years. And even after she was gone, their life at Holly Street was never as good again.

  Maybe you can trace a portion of that to Charlie’s decision to build a second story onto the house. That was a gesture born of hopefulness, of optimism, of confidence. And why wouldn’t Charlie have been confident? He was successful—didn’t his fine house with all its elegant appointments prove that? He had built this house from nothing. I’ve never commissioned the building of a house, but I can imagine that, once the work is completed and you realize that indeed you have afforded it, a heady feeling of power might ensue. You’ve put something on this earth that wasn’t here before, something that will stand a hundred years. It’s natural to believe you can keep doing it.

  Besides, the Nu Grape business had been going well—so well that Charlie had invested more and more of his money in it. By 1928 he had two plants, the main one in Little Rock and a smaller one in Pine Bluff, forty-three miles south. Charlie believed in making his money work for him. Pem McRae, Jane’s husband, remembers Charlie saying, “Money tied up in a house is wasted. That’s expensive living. That money could be making money for you somewhere else.” All over the country, businessmen were doing exactly as Charlie Armour was doing—investing in American business.

  Even young Charles wasn’t immune to the lure of big money. Much to his mother’s horror, he decided to drop out of Little Rock High School to go into business with his dad. Charlie gave Charles a job loading cases of Nu Grape on and off one of the big trucks. Later, Charles graduated to driver, with a truck of his own. He was making more money than he’d ever seen in his life. Meanwhile, Jessie remained distressed at his dropping out of school. One day, one of her friends came over to have coffee, and as Jessie poured the cups, she also poured out her fears. The friend told Jessie not to worry.” Charles will be all right,” she said. “Just wait’ll he gets over fool’s hill.”

  Before the decade was finished, many an American businessman older than young Charles Armour had gotten over fool’s hill the hard way—by tumbling down the steep side. On October 29, 1929, when the dizzying rise of stock prices finally imploded in the famous crash, people went broke overnight. Businesses began closing. Over the next two months, $15 billion in paper value would simply vanish.

  And, though it wasn’t obvious at that moment, so would the market for soft drinks.

  Most of us, when we’re growing up, have no idea how hard it is to hold the center. If we’re lucky, we never have to think about there being such a thing as a center to hold. Economic and emotional gravity keep us tethered, keep us believing that we’re part of something solid, something warm, comfortable, and secure.

  For a long time, Charles and Jane weren’t aware of how precarious their world had become. There was food to eat; there were clothes on their backs. Charles arid his father still had a bottling business to go to. Even after the Depression had begun in earnest and Charlie was forced to close the Little Rock plant, his children had no idea how bad things were.

  At first, Charlie tried to scale down. In 1930, he gave up the big plant at Second and Rector and moved his operation to a smaller building on Broadway. He worked out of that office for a couple of years
, but he could see that things were getting worse instead of better. Orders were dropping off at a steady pace. It couldn’t have made him feel any better to read in the trade news that even gigantic Coca-Cola, which owned some two-thirds of the market, was feeling the pinch. Coke’s sales declined more than 20 percent between 1930 and 1932. Nobody had even a nickel to spend on soda pop.

  In the house at 501 Holly, there was, added to this external gloom, a sadness of a more personal nature. Grandma Jackson died in January 1932. She had been getting weaker, and for the past year Jessie had moved her into the middle bedroom, where she could remain in bed and still be part of the goings-on. Everyone who came to the house wanted to see her; it had always been that way. Now Jessie would just open the French doors, and the bedroom became a kind of salon, where Jessie and her guests could drink coffee and chat while Grandma lay propped up in the big sleigh bed. Some days were better than others. Some days, she just wanted to doze, with the radio tuned low at her side. She died in the evening, with her family around her.

  Jessie’s feeling of emptiness must’ve been overwhelming. She was forty-five years old and had never, other than during college, lived apart from her mother. She turned her attention to her garden, planting two huge Cape jasmine bushes just outside the kitchen door. She had always planned to wallpaper those wall panels in the living and dining rooms, but the window had closed on that—wallpaper cost too much money. She stepped up her church work. Even during the weekdays, she spent many hours “going calling,” as she termed it, visiting young women to try to persuade them to attend Sunday school.

  Charlie’s mother soon prompted a different kind of mourning. On July 18, 1932, probably at work, Pulaski County Sheriff Blake Williams came to see Charlie. The sheriff reached into his coat pocket and placed a summons in Charlie’s hand. “In the Circuit Court of Pulaski County,” it began. Then the words became almost unbelievable: “Elizabeth Armor, Plaintiff, vs. C. W. L. Armor (also known as C. W. L. Armour), Defendant.”