If These Walls Had Ears
Read If These Walls Had Ears Online
Authors: James Morgan
Copyright © 1996 by James Morgan
All rights reserved.
Warner Books, Inc.,
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First eBook Edition: September 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56509-7
Photo credits:
The author wishes to thank the following for the use of their photographs. If not listed below, the photographs are from the author’s own collection.
Pages xii
,
3
,
13
,
16
,
24
,
35
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39
,
40
,
42
,
56
Mildred Armour;
page 74
Joyce Murphree Stroud;
page 4
Ruth Chapin;
pages 124
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178
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187
Forrest and Sue Wolfe;
pages 90
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105
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108
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116
Ruth Murphree;
pages 123
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132
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145
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153
Roy and Rita Grimes;
pages 158
,
168
Ed and Sheri Kramer;
page 198
Sue Goodman;
pages 226
,
239
Jack Burney.
For Beth
The history of a nation is not in parliaments and battlefields, but in what the people ay to each other on fair days and high
days, and in how they farm, and quarrel, and go on pilgrimage.
—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Contents
PART ONE: Fair Days and High Days
Chapter One: Beginnings 1890 - 1923
Chapter Two: Armour 1923 - 1926
Chapter Three: Armour 1926 - 1937
Chapter Four: Armour 1937 - 1947
Chapter Five: Murphree 1947 - 1984
Chapter Six: Murphree 1949 - 1956
Chapter Seven: Murphree 1957 - 1959
PART TWO: Quarrel and Pilgrimage
Chapter Eight: White Walls 1960 - 1966
Chapter Nine: Grimes 1966 - 1973
Chapter Ten: Kramer 1973 - 1976
Chapter Eleven: Wolfe 1976 - 1980
Chapter Twelve: Landers May 1980 - March 1981
Chapter Thirteen: Burney 1981 - 1989
Chapter Fourteen: Morgan 1989 - 1992
Here’s how 501 Holly looked right after it was built, in the fall of 1923
I
n the middle of the night, a house creaks under the weight of its secrets. This isn’t merely the racing imagination of someone
startled awake by strange noises; this is a middle-aged man’s bone-deep knowledge of the way life bears on living things.
A house is a body, like yours and mine. It’s not such a stretch to think of beams as bones, electrical wiring as a nervous
system, plaster and brick as the layers of skin that protect us from the elements. And yet uninhabited houses and uninhabited
bodies are only compelling to contractors and coroners. It takes a soul to give a body life.
I’ve always been curious about the houses I’ve lived in, wondered who lived there before me and what their stories were like.
But I never looked into any of their histories. There was always
today’s
business to attend to. Besides, as with so many of us in the last half of the twentieth century, I’ve lived in too many houses—twenty-five,
to be exact, counting student apartments and starter town houses, from the time I was born up through today. Until I moved
into the house I’m now in, and in which I’ve lived almost seven years, the longest I had lived in any one place was four years
and eight months. That was the house my family moved to in Miami, Florida, where I lived from the middle of eighth grade until
I left for college. They stayed there twenty years, but I never really went home again. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve been there
at all.
The story of America has always been the story of a search for home. It’s a restless journey in which we never quite seem
to arrive. In my case, five times I’ve followed jobs toward a goal I thought would make me complete. Probably not coincidentally,
I’ve moved twice from would-be homes exposed by failed marriages, setting out alone again to create in life that ideal home
that exists only inside my head. Though home is a spiritual concept, it tends to take on physical weight. For the longest
time, I couldn’t actually describe the place that pressed so upon me; I would just inch my way toward what felt right.
But somewhere along the journey, a picture began to develop in my consciousness. The house is larger inside than it looks
from the street. It has fourteen-foot ceilings and gracefully spacious rooms. Its furnishings are old and elegant and a little
bit worn. There are solid tables piled high with books and peopled with photos of loved ones in silver frames; in the hall,
still other family photographs cover one wall from floor to ceiling. A hardwood log crackles in the fireplace. In the dining
room, a massive table is set for twelve. There’s a screened back porch lined with rockers, and a laughing crowd of siblings
and cousins flows constantly between that porch and the kitchen, where the family is anchored by a sturdy round oak table
set dead in the center. Sometimes, in my daydreams, I’m among that group and sometimes I’m not. Sometimes I’m hidden away
in one of the nooks and crannies in this house that’s large enough to provide such places to get lost in, and I’m reading
a book in an easy chair, with the afternoon sun streaming in through the ceiling-high windows, filtered by the sheers.
Is anyone surprised that Ralph Lauren is a rich man?
But this isn’t some ideal I’ve absorbed from reading magazines. The house is actually my aunt May’s house in Hazlehurst, Mississippi.
What does it say about me that this is the first house I ever lived in, when my father was away at war and my mother took
me home to her sister’s?
As a home, that house turned out far from ideal for those who grew up in it day by day. But for me, that’s beside the point.
For me, the distance works. The distance spins magic, allowing me to create in my own head the illusion of a life that’s comfortable
and carefree and
safe.
That’s a childish notion, I know, but who believes that grown-ups are anything but vulnerable children at heart? Besides,
that’s one of the things that the home we all chase is—a place, a condition, in which the world can’t touch you.
My aunt’s house also probed this raw nerve of permanence with me. By the time she died in the spring of 1993, she had lived
in that house just shy of seventy years. She knew every square inch of wall, every layer of paint, every scuff on the baseboard,
every worn spot on the carpet. In the middle of the night, when she was awakened by creaks, she heard the squeals of her children
and the laughter of her friends arid, yes, the anguished howls of her own private demons. But at least they were
her
demons.
The house I live in now with my wife and stepdaughters fulfills some of the requirements of the house in my head. It’s a bungalow
in the Craftsman style, which means it’s low-slung and solid. It hugs a hill. And yet the house isn’t simple and forthcoming
in the usual Craftsman way—there are curlicues under the eaves, and arches that seem to curve slightly skyward, evoking an
air of mystery that’s almost Oriental. It also has a second story. At 3,200 square feet, with five bedrooms, a studio, and
an office, it’s larger than it looks from the outside, and many of our furnishings are old and elegant arid worn. We have
stacks of books and an open-air front porch lined with rockers. But our dining table won’t comfortably seat twelve, and we
somehow never get all our snapshots framed (or even developed). The ceilings are only ten feet high and the rooms, while generous,
aren’t as big as the rooms in my mind. There is no sturdy round anchor in the kitchen. The house is complex enough to provide
hiding places, if, as at my aunt’s house in recent years, there were only one person living in it. But with four of us and
a dog here, we can run but we can’t very well hide—at least not long enough to enjoy an uninterrupted book bathed in the warmth
of the afternoon sun.
In the upstairs hall, we’ve covered a wall with family photographs, but it’s the all-too-new kind of American family photo
gallery: spliced history. The center of this grouping is a montage from Beth’s and my wedding just over six years ago. Here
we are kissing, as her little girls, Blair and Bret, and my lanky boys, David and Matthew, look on—a little glumly, it seems
to me. Over here to the left there’s a snapshot of the new nuclear family, and, down here, a portrait of the new extended
family as well—four generations of Arnolds and three of Morgans, posed on a wide staircase, a hybrid genealogical tree forced
by modern life to put down new roots, and to tie off old ones. Some of the people in this picture have just met.
No wonder so many people gravitate to old houses, with their comforting implications about the test of time.
In the summer of 1992, on a night when Beth was out of town and the girls were with their dad, I had supper with our neighbors.
One of the couples had lived in their house six years, the other thirteen. They were telling stories about the neighborhood,
one of which concerned my house. It seems that during one period back in what the neighbors thought was the 1970s, this house
was briefly turned into apartments.
That surprised me. This area, called Hillcrest, isn’t what you would think of as an apartment neighborhood. It’s an old, tree
lined, church-steepled family ground, developed when people wanted to know their neighbors and so built front porches from
which to see and be seen on balmy evenings. This happens to be the neighborhood where Bill and Hillary Clinton moved after
he lost the governor’s race in 1980. Two days after the defeat, they bought an old house with a big porch about ten blocks
from here. I wouldn’t be surprised if he ambushed potential voters from the front steps as they strolled by.
The story about my house goes like this: One day a proper neighbor lady, seeing a moving van in front of the house, decided
to take the new people a cake. She dressed herself and marched over here to 501 Holly Street and knocked on the door. She
knocked again, then again. Apparently, the new people couldn’t hear her over the music, which, even out on the front porch,
she could
feel
thumping through the thick walls. Finally the door swung open and, to the wails of rock and roll, the astonished matron saw
a houseful of “hippies,” as she characterized them, roller-skating through the living room. The man who opened the door was
wearing a dress.
We all laughed, and I uttered that old cliche, “If the walls had ears.” The conversation turned to other things, but for the
rest of the evening, I couldn’t stop thinking about that notion.
It made me wonder about this house and its secrets. What bizarre scenes have these walls witnessed? What joy, what pain? What
human drama has taken place here in this very room where I write? People used to know such things, became people used to stay
put. Now we’re a nation of strangers, to one another and even to our surroundings.
It’s astonishing to me, a former magazine editor who actually reveled in assigning pieces on the topic du jour, that the older
I get, the more I find myself interested in history. I don’t mean the big, sweeping, official-record version of people, places,
and events; what attracts me now are the myriad small ways in which we’re connected to the lives that preceded us. The other
day I had some work done on the porch roof, and after the workmen had gone I found in the yard a fragment of rotted board
with a rusty nail sticking out of it. Instead of tossing it without a thought, I stood there holding this silly artifact in
my hand, wondering how old the nail was, and who drove it.
The truth is, I suspect that this kind of curiosity is becoming the topic du jour among the leading edge of the baby-boom
generation—whether they’ve recognized it or not. I was at my aunt’s cabin recently with an old friend, a man who once believed
so relentlessly in living in the present that he wouldn’t allow antiques in his house, and he began studying the way the sloping
ceiling boards were fitted together. “Look at this,” he said finally, running his fingers over the narrow planks that had
aged to a honeyed hue. “You know, it’s weird, but I’ve started noticing stuff like how cabin ceilings were built.”
