If These Walls Had Ears Read online

  In February 1945, the Associated Press circulated stories of two different Japanese prison ships that had been torpedoed or bombed by American planes, with heavy losses among the American POWs. The ships had been en route from the Philippines to Japan. Obviously, the Japanese were beginning to feel the heat and were attempting to get their prisoners back to Japan. A few months after those reports, she heard from a man whose name had been mentioned in one of the stories.

  22 June 1945

  My dear Mrs. Armour:

  You probably, this week, received the good news that your son, Charles, is alive and now in Japan. While I did not know him intimately, I was in prison camps in the Philippines until last December 1944, and the Casualty Section of the Navy Department, where I am now on temporary duty, has suggested that I write you about your son.

  Most of the time Charles was at the prison camp in Davao, Mindanao; he then came to camp # 1, where I had been the previous 2 years, and I met him here for the first time.

  We met through a mutual friend, Lt. James Lynch of the Army Engineers.… Charles, Lt. Lynch and I were among the 1600 prisoners who were on the prison ship which sailed from Manila on 13 December 1944. It was sunk on 15 December 1944, at which time I escaped. Charles and Lt. Lynch were recaptured and later shipped to Japan, as we learned just a few days ago.

  We all hope with you that the end of the war is not long distant and that your son will again be with you.

  In my mind’s eye, I always see Charles’s homecoming in slow motion, as though it were a movie.

  Pem, back from Massachussetts, is mowing the lawn at 501 Holly, struggling with the steep Lee Street hill, when he sees the taxi coming toward him on Lee. For some reason, he stops his mowing and, instead, watches the cab as it gets closer and closer. When it reaches Peru, it slowly makes the turn onto Holly, then pulls up at the curb in front of the house. The door opens and a gaunt man in a naval officer’s uniform slowly unfolds himself from the backseat. By this time, Pem sees that Jane has already seen Charles arrive and is running out to meet him. Her arms are outstretched, and tears are streaming down her face.

  I picture Charles, arm in arm with Jane, walking up that sidewalk toward the red-brick house with the comforting front porch, the house of his mother and father and sisters and grandmother, the house that had been secured with nails he had carried fir the workmen so many years before. They had held. No matter what he had seen or done or been through over the past forty-four months, the house still stood. It was what he had gone to war for.

  In real life, even if Charles was thinking such lofty thoughts, they weren’t the only thing on his mind. He was sick and worried, and there’s evidence that he was also angry: He would tell a friend, “For thirty years I’ve been the fuckee. Now I’m going to be the fucker.” After the atomic bombs arid the Japanese surrender, Jessie had received word that Charles was coming back to the States, to Memphis, 127 miles away. Jane and Pem arid their two childrenJanesy and Anne—were back in Little Rock by then. But the navy made no suggestion that the family visit Charles during the two months he had to spend in the navy hospital. Charles needed time to recuperate.

  Then one day, he showed up in a taxi in front of 501 Holly. On the surface, he was home.

  But when Jane ran out to the cab and threw her arms around him, she had the feeling that she seemed like a stranger to him. “He looked at me so strangely,” she says. Jessie was still at work when Charles got there. While Jane took her brother inside, Pem ran all over the neighborhood shouting, “Charles is at home! Charles is at home!” Before long, the house was filled with neighbors. They didn’t speak of the war, at least not in detail. Charles told them he’d been treated for beriberi and scurvy. They could see, by the scars on his face, that he’d had skin cancers removed. When he first came back to the hospital, he’d also had hives on his legs and terrible intestinal problems from dysentery. For the time being, he was only going to be home on weekends; later, he would be mostly in Little Rock and would go back to the hospital for short checkup visits.

  When Jessie got home and the family was alone together, Charles told them something else: There was a woman in his life. Her name was Mildred Ahrens—or Millie, as he called her. She was a navy nurse whom he had met in the hospital. They’d been going out since shortly after he got there. She was—well, she was a Yankee, from New York. Jessie had been in the South so long—nearly forty years—that she thought of herself as Southern. It was obvious that Charles was smitten, though, and Jessie told him he should bring Millie home with him some weekend. He thought that was a splendid idea—one he’d already had himself.

  To the family, Charles seemed distant. He would sit in the house by himself, sometimes just staring off into space. Most afternoons, he would put on his uniform and catch the streetcar to the movie theater. There were lots of movies about the war, and Jane thought he was trying to find out what he had missed. Sometimes he would sit through the same movie two or three times, coming home in the early dark of winter to a house warmed by lights.

  It wasn’t long before he took Jessie up on her invitation to Millie. They rode over together on the train and were met by Jessie at the station. Millie still remembers how intimidated she was by Jessie. She seemed so tall, so self-assured. She was a handsome woman dressed to the nines, and she talked nonstop. As Jessie drove them to Holly Street, Millie took in the neighborhood. Kavanaugh was curvy and tree-lined, with old Craftsman houses and stone-fronted apartment houses. It all looked quaint to a girl from New York.

  Millie was embarrassed to talk—she felt awkward about her Yankee accent—but with Jessie around, that was no problem. Jessie filled the rooms with words. Millie had never encountered anyone who knew so much about the neighbors. Jessie even took out Charles’s christening dress, telling her about Charles as a baby and holding the dress up for Millie’s inspection.

  There were no longer any boarders. Charles slept downstairs in the bedroom he had once shared with Grandma Jackson. Millie slept upstairs in Annabelle’s old room. Jane and Pem and their babies were across the hall in the room that opened to the upstairs bath. Millie would share that bath, entering from the hall, and Jessie had given explicit instructions on how to lock both doors. Still, Millie was uncomfortable knowing those strangers, with unpredictable little children, were just on the other side of the bathroom door.

  In the morning, Millie woke to find Charles in her room, giving her a good-morning kiss.

  That June, the summer of 1946, Jessie’s Cape jasmine bush bloomed thick and sweet outside the kitchen door. She cut armloads of flowers for the wedding, which was held in a Presbyterian chapel in Memphis. Afterward, the new bride and groom, his family, and five or six of the couple’s friends had an elegant dinner at the Peabody Hotel, where Millie and Charles had done much of their courting. There was a ballroom on top of the hotel, and a restaurant that Charles especially liked. Even if he and Millie had been going to a movie, Charles had insisted on dinner first. He couldn’t get enough to eat. In prison camp, he arid his fellow POWs had passed the time trading recipes, sustaining themselves on the sheer memory of the scents and tastes of home.

  Jessie also decorated the dining table with Cape jasmine. There was an abundance of champagne, and many; many toasts. Jessie insisted that Charles use some of his considerable back pay to buy Millie a fur coat. Millie, who wasn’t used to alcohol, drank too much and passed out at the table. The next morning, her husband had breakfast brought in. When she felt better, they made up for the night before.

  After a few days in Memphis, the newlyweds came home to 501 Holly. They moved into the back bedroom downstairs. It was only temporary, until Charles figured things out. He was trying to get a retirement so that if anything happened to him, Millie would be taken care of. He would go to Washington for up to two weeks at a time, partly to be treated for his skin cancer and partly to work on getting the retirement. His worry was palpable. Beriberi caused heart damage, and he seemed to have an acute sense of his mort
ality. Many—too many—of his sentences began with “If anything happens to me…”

  With Charles in Washington and Jessie and Pem at work, Millie and Jane were thrown together all day long. They would do chores like washing the clothes and hanging them out to dry in the backyard. Jessie would come home from the state hospital with jars of food, which she would pour into pans and heat up for supper. One night about a month after the wedding, Millie said, “I can’t eat; I’m sick.” Jessie took one look at her and said, “You’re pregnant.” Jessie was right. That complicated Charles and Millie’s plans a little, but they were ecstatic.

  Charles had decided to go back to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville to finish up and get his law degree. Millie was thinking of getting a graduate degree in nursing. They had their sights set on the spring semester of 1947. Jane and Pem had big plans, too. They were planning to buy a house, but they weren’t going to put all their money down, because Pem wanted to start his own radio-repair business.

  During that fall of 1946, Jessie worked with Millie to get ready for the baby. They embroidered sixteen little receiving blankets, and they had a whole layette fixed. They enjoyed doing that together. It was a good time in the house, the first truly hopeful time in almost twenty years. On the other hand, in a matter of months all the children would be gone and Jessie would be left there by herself. She was almost sixty years old. It was too much house for one person, and boarders weren’t an answer anymore. It was postwar—people were going to college, having children, buying houses of their own. Besides, Jessie didn’t need the money now. Uncle Ben had died and left everything to her. Why stay here? Why not take an apartment at the state hospital and sell this place? She might even travel a bit—might finally get to visit some of those exotic spots in the world that Charlie, with his kindred adventurous spirit, had hoped to see but never had.

  One night at dinner, Jessie brought up the subject: Despite the pain that these walls had known, this house had been good to her, to all of them. They had made many memories here—the music and the dancing and the slow, cradling arc of the porch swing on summer nights—but those memories were theirs forever, no matter where they might live. Maybe, after nearly twenty-four years, more than a generation, it was time to move on.

  I have a photograph, probably taken their last fall at 501 Holly. Jessie and Charles and some of their neighbors are gathered around the front steps just feet from where the Nu Grape car and the spindly elm were in that photo from two decades past. Charles is telling a story, and everyone is laughing.

  But I see another snapshot within that one: Charles is frail and balding, and Jessie is an old woman with white hair and the stiff stance of age. In the upper right-hand corner, mature tree leaves rustle near the house, casting shadows.

  Ruth Talyor and Billie Lee Murphree courting in the 1930s.

  Chapter Five

  Murphree

  1947 1948

  These words are being written in mid-March, which means spring in Arkansas. The French doors to my upstairs office are open. The baby leaves on the elm tree are backlit by the sun, rendering them a translucent yellow-green. Golden jonquils sway in the yard.

  The older I get, the more I appreciate spring. The other day I sat on the steps outside the kitchen, eating a bowl of cereal. I watched a cardinal hopping in the hedge. I noticed the shoots of new lariope pushing through the ground. I saw a squirrel sail from the upper branches of the walnut tree, which already has buds popping, to the maple, which doesn’t. Used to be, spring meant I could play golf or run on real ground instead of a treadmill. Now I welcome spring from a deeper part of me.

  To a homeowner, though, spring is like the aftermath of an accident: You’ve apparently survived, but you have to check yourself all over to see if your parts are still in working order. I took my coffee out into the yard and inspected the house. A board has bowed away from an upstairs window. A little more paint seems to have flaked off from the eaves. The part of the porch roof that was rebuilt two years ago already looks a tad warped, and more nails are pushing up through the tar paper on top. The required physical therapy includes serious splints and skin grafts, most of which I won’t find the time or the money to do right away. Instead, I’ll worry about it while attending to the relatively simple acts of regrooming, like a man who needs a heart bypass but gets a haircut instead.

  Inside, Beth prunes the girls’ closets, while I tend to the bushes that clothe the house. We buy herbs, and in time we’ll plant a host of impatiens, the only flower that blooms with any consistency in the shady back garden. I carry plants from their inside winter quarters back out to the open-air porch. I round up dead leaves from the driveway and patio. Sometimes, when I want to stretch the job and dream, I use the big new push broom Beth bought me. Other times, I go to the trouble of hauling out the orange electric cords and cranking up my noisy leaf blower—the one half-covered in dried tar from when my stack of paint cans and roof tar caved in and spilled last summer in the darkness of the shed when I was away on vacation. There’s something disconcerting about a tar-encrusted electric yard tool. I remind myself more and more of my father.

  Ivy patrol is one of my spring rituals. Ivy and houses, both con artists, have joined forces in a fascinating collusion. Ivy on a house speaks to us in soothing terms of permanence, stability, stateliness, even money. The truth is, ivy is nothing but death in a green suit. When growing on a brick or stucco wall, ivy will leech out the mortar and fester the skin. Last year, I spent a day ripping the ivy away from the north side of the house. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t remove some of the pieces of the vine itself, short sections marked with tiny cross-hatchings from which leaves used to grow. They’re still there, looking like sutured slashes. The people who painted this house last time simply coated over old ivy scars, incorporating marks of past mortal encounters into the building’s newest face.

  Spring always surprises me by revealing a kind of amnesia on my part. I guess it’s a self-protective forgetting, a way to forge ahead blindly instead of being debilitated by focusing on all the things that are wrong with this life—or, more specifically, this house. For example, during the winter I inevitably forget how absurdly slanted the back patio is. It’s true that the ground itself slopes from north to south, but you’d think that whoever built this brick patio would’ve considered the genial rite of balancing a gin and tonic on a table rather than simply going with nature’s flow. Actually, I now know who constructed this patio, a story I’ll tell in due time. Knowing who built it only amazes me more.

  In spring, I inevitably think how nice it would be to open all the windows and catch some of that cross ventilation old Charlie Armour so cunningly cultivated. Then I recall that the windows are painted shut. Downstairs, the windows are still sealed. Upstairs, we’ve spent thousands of dollars refurbishing the casement windows and screens so we can open the house to the breezes of spring. Casement windows require a cranking tool, however, and all of the original window-opening tools were lost. We had one of the workmen make a couple of ersatz tools, and now we know why we couldn’t find the originals—half the time, we can’t even find the new ones. “Have you seen the thing?” is a question that will forever mean spring to me.

  Spring is also the season when I curse poor old Charlie Armour just a little bit. Surprisingly, it’s because of the front porch, that charmer that has seduced so many starry-eyed buyers, including me. The porch makes an L, the short end jutting a few feet along the side of the house, the long part stretching across the front. And yet the porch roof only goes three-fourths of the way across the front of the house. This means that I pull my car into the driveway and, if it’s raining, I step out and walk ten feet or so uncovered. What was the sense in that? Why on earth, if you were going to have a porch at all, wouldn’t you cover it all the way over to where you park your car?

  I usually ponder this as I scrub that unprotected portion of the porch in spring. All winter long, that section has been exposed to the elem
ents, which, in one cracked spot particularly, have built up layer by layer into a nasty deposit of sediment. But here’s where my annual amnesia comes in. It’s while I’m scrubbing the porch that I’m reminded of the seasons within the season. Beginning in spring, the elm tree that hovers above the open part of the porch is always dropping something. First, there’s the joyous bud season, followed closely by an intense week of what can only be called spring bird-shit season, followed by the delicate baby-leaf season, followed by some kind of translucent-spore season, which coincides with pollen season, whose hallmark is a coat of green dust over cars, rocking chairs, and, certainly, the unexposed part of the porch. Then comes summer, with the elm’s glorious leafy shade. I’m convinced that that elm tree saves us hundreds of dollars every year in air-conditioning costs. In summer, the branches are full of chirping, singing birds, which are wonderful to listen to on the front porch. They don’t announce their presence as insistently as before, but it’s still inadvisable for me to own a convertible. Then fall comes, producing some kind of seed that results in fall bird-shit season. Then the leaves dry up. Finally, they die and float gently to the ground.

  I guess it’s just life. Maybe Charlie Armour left part of the porch uncovered to remind himself that a house can’t protect you all the time.

  Spring is an appropriate season to be thinking about the Murphrees moving to Holly Street. There’s a rhythm to life itself, an ebb, a flow. After a quarter century, the Armours’ time here was spent. But as Jessie, old and tired, was coming to that decision, seven blocks away a woman half her age named Ruth Murphree was complaining to her husband, Billie, that they had to have more space. Their conversation wasn’t warm or wistful. Ruth was angry and had been for years. Billie had been away in the navy since 1942. When the war was over, his discharge had been frozen for reasons Ruth couldn’t fathom. They didn’t release him until February 1946. By then, everybody was home, the good jobs taken. But the main complaint was that while Billie had been stuck in the South Pacific on a mail ship, Ruth had been cooped up in a tiny house on Pine Street with two preschool daughters plus Billie’s recently widowed mother and her nine-year-old son, whom. Ruth referred to as a “menopause baby,” plus having to work as secretary to U.S. congressman Brooks Hays. No, Ruth hadn’t been charmed by this arrangement. “The next war we have,” she told her husband, “I’ll go and you’ll stay home.”