If These Walls Had Ears (19 page)

Then I got a better job and we moved to Minneapolis, where everything was white so much of the year. It was December 1973.
We were lucky: We found an affordable
old
house in the best old area of town—it had big trees in the yard and a creek not too far away. I felt that I was home. We
painted the living room a deep blue and had white carpet cut and bound. The inside of our house looked like a Minnesota winter
day. I papered my son’s room in bright red, white, and blue. I even painted my study a rich brown, that being the decorator
color of the 1970s. Then we had another son, and I papered over my study for him. I remember the dominant color was a fresh
green. Soon after that, I found the alien socks in my drawer. We lived in that house two and a half years.

I moved to an apartment—white walls again. I began dating—too seriously, too soon—for the first time in a dozen years. I bought
my own town house, painted the walls a sunny yellow. Then I got a call from a headhunter. It was the job I had been angling
for in Chicago. I sold the town house less than a year after I bought it. Some boxes I had never unpacked. In the fall of
1978, I got rid of my car and prepared for the urban life. The woman I was with told me she had always wanted to live in Chicago.

We moved into an old apartment building in Lincoln Park. The rooms were large, numerous, and as white as apathy. I threw myself
into my work. I explored Chicago, that most Southern of northern cities. In the very first week, I met a black man, a janitor,
who had come from Hazlehurst, Mississippi, and knew my uncle. I felt at home in Chicago and began looking for a place to buy.
It turned out to he a condominium, an old and cozy one near the lake. The woman and I, still unmarried, though talking about
it, moved in together. The walls were more of a cream than stark white.

In Chicago, I began consciously wrestling with this business of always angling for the next thing. It was time to stop, I
told myself. Besides, I now had the very job I had wanted since college. It was time to dig in and make a home. It was during
my time in Chicago that I realized my aunt May’s house had such meaning to me. I traveled to Hazlehurst frequently during
those years. I noticed that May’s rooms were painted a soothing green.

I married again in 1980. Three years later, we bought the old house on Chicago’s North Shore, the one whose sunroom renovations
I later dreamed of while mowing the lawn. This time, I had my small study papered in a rich Chinesey red, almost the color
of brick. I tried painting the downstairs sunroom terra-cotta, but it turned out all wrong—a horrible shade of pumpkin. We
had someone come in and repaint it. I can’t remember what color it finally was. We weren’t there long enough.

When my disillusionment with my dream job reached the critical point, I began angling again. I wanted to start my own magazine,
which, on the face of it, should’ve qualified me for permanent residence in a home for the hopelessly insane. My idea was
to start a magazine about the South. Some people in Little Rock had the same notion, and I agreed to go in with them. My wife
was stunned—she loved Chicago
and
her job—but said she would try it. I thanked her. The color of azaleas exploded in my head.

We made a lot of money on the Chicago house, and in 1986, we bought a big, relatively new place in west Little Rock. Starting
a magazine, I was hardly ever there. Most of our many walls were beige, and some were light gray. In less than a year, my
wife, a Minnesotan, decided she hated Arkansas, that it could never be home to her. She wanted to go back to Chicago, and
eventually she did. We divorced after eight years of marriage, and finally sold the house—for a loss—after three. She lived
in it a year and a half.

No more white walls: Beth and the girls in our colorful living room, Mother's Day, 1992
.

Now Beth and the girls and Snapp and I are together on Holly Street. Beth loves color, too. Her late brother Brent, a New
York decorator who died too young, left her with these words of wisdom: “Matisse colors, Vuillard patterns.” We painted the
living and dining rooms an earthy terra-cotta, and next time we’ll do it brighter. Our bedroom is periwinkle, a purplish blue
that evokes hydrangeas. Bret’s room is a bold Mediterranean blue, with curtains the color and pattern of Moroccan tiles. My
office-studio, in the Murphrees’ day known as the attic, is a warm yellow that could stand to be even warmer.

Most of us are afraid of color, no matter how much we yearn for it. I suspect it has to do with the way we’ve been conditioned.
When Beth and I were trying to choose a color to paint the room where we watch TV—it’s the former downstairs back bedroom—we
wanted it bright, in a reddish hue. And yet we were timid, forever watering it down in the direction of a comforting white.
The first run-through, we ended up with walls the color of Pepto-Bismol. Beth phoned her brother, who urged us to be brave—to
make a
commitment.

Now we call that room the Geranium Room, describing the color. It’s bold, brilliant, and more soothing than I could’ve ever
imagined. Every time I walk into it, I think about all those years I existed within white, easily transferable walls. I don’t
regret my running and my risks, but now the Geranium Room makes me dearly want to hold on to what I’ve got. Sometimes there’s
only a shade of difference between being ambitious and being lost.

Roy Grimes and his mother in the fall of 1966. Roy wasn't an old-house person, and at 501 Holly even the
trees
needed work
.

1966  
  
1973

J
ust as I was getting started on this book, a writer friend of mine from New York drove through Little Rock on his way out
west. As I was telling him about the history of the house, we walked out into the front yard, down by the Lee Street hill.
It was early evening and the lights were on upstairs and down. We stood out there in the dusk for a very long time; I was
pointing to this and that, and my friend was just listening. Finally, he said, “Do you want to know my impression of this
house?”

I told him I did.

“I find it ominous,” he said.

That was a shock to me. Never once had I perceived this house—the
appearance
of this house—as anything but warm and appealing. But I took another look at it, this time through my friend’s eyes. I began
to see what he was talking about.

It shows up often in photographs, especially at dusk, and especially in the late springtime. At that time of year, the trees
are bushy and dark-leafed, and they loom over the house like giants stepped from a child’s dream. At the end of the day, but
before nightfall, there are still shadows—vast, unseeable places in that high yard on a hill, where the trees have blocked
out light. The house takes on an air of mystery then. The porch that I find such a passive source of joy and contentment seems
to jut out almost aggressively. The eaves that I find so architecturally interesting become, recast in long shadows, a row
of daggers protruding from just beneath the roof over my family’s heads.

My writer friend has long since gone home to New York, but I’ve never seen this house in quite the same way since his visit.
It’s probably just as well. Even the sunniest of us has a dark side, and to think anything else is folly. But for quite a
while I wondered if what my friend had seen was the
true
personality of this house. Looking back over its history, you could make a case for portentousness and foreboding.

It started hopefully enough, as all houses—as all
lives
—
d
o. Then in 1926, Elizabeth Armor brought her insidious message of evil and despair, which was soon followed by the stock market
crash and the Great Depression and the unraveling of Charlie and Jessie’s dreams.

In some ways, poor Charlie didn’t even see the worst of it—his son held prisoner of war for the duration of World War II.

The Murphrees’ case is more subtle, but no less ironclad, it seems to me. I believe Billie invested this house with his own
sense of moral superiority at a time when morals and manners were changing radically. The Murphrees had a good life here—some
of the Murphrees more than others—but the house couldn’t possibly protect Billie and his family from the erosion that was
taking place all around them.

I said earlier that I feel as though something epic, and maybe heroic, has been lost since the time of the Armours and the
Murphrees—since the end of the 1950s, I suppose. Partly, that’s me romanticizing the carefree days of my childhood. But the
times did change, beginning in the 1960s, and this house not only reflected those mostly unhappy changes; you could say it
also presaged them.

Like the country itself, the house at 501 Holly had begun to feel the weight of age and the effects of decay at its core.
By the time the Murphrees left in 1966, there was an ominous bulge in the wall above the window in the downstairs back bedroom.
In the den, the floor felt suspiciously soft when you walked across it. Outside that infamous bay window, a row of bricks
originally angled to lead water
away
from the house had now kicked upward, inviting runoff rain from the pane to trickle into the dark space between the brick
exterior and the wooden dermis of the house itself. In the backyard, the garage, crammed with the detritus of decades, was
tilting precariously. The Murphrees had even discovered termites eating at the floor beneath the music room. All Billie’s
brooding about the water had been justified: It
had
given birth to corruption, to compromise. Can a floor once damaged ever be trusted as before?

And could there be a more perfect symbol for the restlessness of the past thirty years than an uncertain floor? It seems to
me that while the sweeping themes of the first half of the century were external, the themes of the second half have been
internal—a crash of identity, a world war deep within, a great depression of the spirit.

At the house on Holly Street, those themes intertwined in an episode I call the Great Termite War. It was more than an episode,
really—it was an era, twenty years in all. Sometimes it was a hot war, sometimes a cold war. Sometimes it took the form of
active termites, and sometimes it showed up as dry rot. But no matter how the conflict manifested itself, the cause was water.
Its dark, damp beginnings aren’t precisely known, but its destruction is. The destruction affected more than the house itself,
of course—it touched six families, eroding friendships, bank accounts, even marriages.

That being the case,
is
this house “ominous,” as my friend suggested? Does it bring bad luck to those who live in it?

The other night, I fixed a drink and went out into the side yard and studied my house. I stood, hidden by darkness, under
the long, graceful limbs of the maple tree. It seemed that every light in the house was on, which didn’t surprise me. Like
my father when I was young, I now spend much of my life walking around flicking off lights after other members of the family
have departed a room. This time, though, I was glad we were burning so much electricity—it allowed me to see more. Windows
are a house’s eyes. Just like with a person, you can never tell exactly what’s going on behind those panes, but if you peer
deeply enough and concentrate, you can form an impression of the life inside.