If These Walls Had Ears (2 page)

But it’s not the boards themselves that compel him, any more than it was the rusty nail that intrigued me. The hidden subject
here, I believe, is
connectedness.
It shows up in all sorts of ways. As we slouch toward middle age, we begin to turn inward. I’ve read that this is true, and
I’m now noticing it in myself: Family and home begin to matter more to us. The hot front-page story that Sam Donaldson gets
paid to be indignant about becomes less urgent to us, while the small human-interest story touches our souls. Sometimes we
become nostalgic, even for eras we never lived in. The past appeals from the point of a nail.

I don’t know why this is so—I only know what I and others are feeling. Maybe it has something to do with losing parents and
raising children. Maybe we start feeling a need to understand how we fit into the rhythm of life. Maybe as we get closer to
the edge, we start realizing that time past is a kind of centrifugal force.

These were the kinds of things I thought about that night at my neighbors’ house. As my friends laughed and talked, I scrolled
back over the houses I’ve lived in. Conventional wisdom holds that houses reflect their owners, but for me, it’s always gone
further than that. You make the best of wherever you live, but when you’re in the right place—and this is broader than mere
houses—your soul feels in sync.

And vice versa. I had lived a lot of vice versa in those other houses, those other towns. This house felt different, however—had
from the very beginning. I discovered it on a sunny Sunday morning in late summer, a couple of months before Beth and I were
to be married. It was a pivotal time in my life: After nearly twenty years behind a desk, drawing a steady paycheck, I had
decided to quit being a magazine editor in order to try to become a writer. Not only that, but I was head over heels in love
with a woman ten years younger than I, a woman who happened to have two young children—children who were soon to become my
stepdaughters. At the age of forty-five, I was taking on a new family. There was nothing rational about any of it.

In that situation, I’m sure my aunt May’s house, which for so long had whispered to me quietly of peace and safety, was now
positively screaming inside my head. I didn’t need a house; I needed a
sanctuary.
When the Realtor brought me over here that Sunday morning, I loved the wraparound porch immediately. I loved the massive
elm tree in the front yard. I loved the little French-doored study just to the left of the living room—it would make a wonderful
office. I loved the hardwood floors and the pink-and-black bathroom and the secluded little garden out back. But the thing
that sold me was a human touch. In the kitchen are French doors leading to the side yard. The doors were unlocked, and I opened
them and went out. This was the south side of the house, and at this time of day the yard—even with its half dozen old trees—was
bathed in sunshine. Then I looked down at the steps I was standing on, and there was a coffee cup that someone had left not
too long before. Whoever it was had been sitting out here on these steps off the kitchen, having a cup of coffee in the sunlight
of this peaceful Sunday morning. The coffee was still steaming. On the edge of the cup was a perfectly formed red lip print.
It brought the whole house to life.

That night at my neighbors’, I began to believe that it was somehow important for me to know about the lives that had been
lived in this house before me. It occurred to me that this time, in this house, in this city and state in which, to my surprise,
I’ve been
consciously
happy, it wasn’t enough just to slap a new layer of paint on the walls. For the first time ever, I felt ready to reverse
the process—to strip away the surface and dig in. I wanted to belong here. You can’t claim a history you don’t have, but maybe
you can reclaim one.

And if I did, I might finally come close to touching what’s eluded me all these years: continuity, connectedness, permanence.

A few days after that dinner, I drove downtown to the Beach Abstract Company. After 4:00
P.M.
, they’ll let you go in and nose through their books, those oversized volumes that contain the outlines of so many people’s
lives. The theme of these books is change, the narrative a relentless tale of moving on. The seller of a property is known
as the grantor; the buyer is the grantee. I started with the most recent sale of my property, when I was the grantee and Alfred
Jack Burney was the grantor. Working back through the years, I reconstructed a loose ownership history of this house: In 1989,
I bought it from Burney; in 1981, Burney bought it from Myron and Ellen Sue Landers; the Landerses bought it, in 1980, from
Forrest and Sue Wolfe; the Wolfes bought from Ed and Sheri Kramer in 1976; in 1973, the Kramers bought from Roy and Rita Grimes;
the Grimeses bought, in 1966, from Billie Lee and Ruth Murphree; the Murphrees bought it all the way back in 1947, from Jessica
J. Armour; C. W. L. and Jessica Armour
built
the house in the fall of 1923; earlier that summer, they had bought the land from Melissa Retan, who had owned this and other
parcels in the neighborhood since 1892.

An exclusive club, I thought: For an entire century, only nine families have owned this place—eight if you don’t count the
Retans. Eight families forever linked by having lived part of their lives in this one house, out of all the millions of houses
in the world.

For a few minutes, I pondered such big thoughts—and then I found myself squinting at the names on the list. Which one of you,
I wondered, built that ridiculous sloping patio in the backyard? Who had the brilliant notion of sticking the heating unit
in the closet in the back room? Who ripped out the original Craftsman casement windows and put in picture windows? Who rented
the place to the horde of roller-skating hippies, and why?

It’s a funny thing about houses—you tend to get personal about them.

I had never been a fan of traditional detective stories—all that shoe leather, those shot-in-the-dark leads, those tedious
hours of poring over yellowed documents buried away in dusty files. But, then, I’d never had my own case before. After that
initial trip to the abstract company, I began thinking of this as detective work, and I was riveted by it.

When I got home, the first thing I did was look in the phone book. I knew the Burneys were still in Little Rock, and I thought
the Wolfes might be. As for the rest of them, I had no idea. I found no Retans listed whatsoever. There was a Joseph Armour
in North Little Rock, but what were the odds that he would be related to a family who had built this house sixty-nine years
ago? I looked under Murphree, and there was a B. L. Murphree out in west Little Rock. Could this be the Murphree who had bought
this house all the way back in 1947? It was a possibility. I found a half column of Grimeses, but no R. L.; a handful of Kramers,
but no Ed. Forrest Wolfe was listed, no question. So was A. Jack Burney. As for Myron L. Landers, there was an M. L. Landers
in North Little Rock, but was this my man?

As one who has moved all too frequently, I was astonished at how many possibilities I had right here in town. Good thing I
was doing this in Little Rock and not in New York City, I thought. But even though I definitely could place two out of three
of the previous owners before me, there was a huge gap in the center of the chain, and no leads at the beginning. I had known
the recent stories were going to be the easiest to find; it just stands to reason. But what would I have if I had those and
didn’t have the stories that started it all? I began to see this project less as detective work and more as a classic construction
job: You start with the foundation and build up from there.

At neighborhood get-togethers, I shamelessly floated the riddles of this house by anyone who would listen—although, to most
people, I didn’t mention the word
book
at first; it carries too much potential for humiliation. I simply said I was poking around in the history of my house, trying
to learn about the people who had lived here. Most of the neighbors responded immediately to the idea of learning about the
past life of a house—they’d all been tempted to do it with their own homes. But as they wandered off to refill their wineglasses,
it occurred to me that, on the surface, they didn’t have any more interest in my house than I had in theirs. It was a valuable
lesson, I later decided. I made a note to myself that if this project was ever going to be more than an exercise for me, I
would have to tell a bigger story. At about that time, I ran across the quote from William Butler Yeats that appears as the
epigraph of this book: “ The history of a nation is not in parliaments and battlefields, but in what the people say to each
other on fair days and high days, and in how they farm, and quarrel, and go on pilgrimage.” If I could tell about the high
days and quarrels of the people who had lived in this one house in this one city in the heart of this country for the major
part of a century, maybe it would add up to something.

Fortunately, my next-door neighbors, John and Linda Burnett, responded to this project from the beginning. Having lived within
a few yards of four owners of this house, they had more than a passing interest in knowing what had gone on here. We’re all
voyeurs, given half a chance.

Linda remembered the Wolfes’ industriousness and the Burneys’ gregariousness. Of the Landerses, she mainly recalled Sue’s
desperation. Poor Sue Landers was so obsessed with the mortar coming out from between the bricks that she spent all her time
frantically trying to patch it. God, I thought, we all have so much of ourselves invested in our houses. I couldn’t wait to
know Sue Landers’s story.

Then John thought of a woman named Ruth Chapin. “You ought to call her,” he said. “They moved to Lawrence, Kansas, right before
you came. She lived in the house across the street all her life. She must be in her eighties now.”

I phoned Ruth Chapin cold, one day late in September, stammering out the reason for my call: I wanted to write “a biography
of a house,” I said. I wanted to “tell the story of the century through all the people who had lived in this one house.” By
now, you can see, I had a full-blown epic in mind. She didn’t laugh, though she did plead hard of hearing. I told her I’d
explain in a letter.

A week later, after she had received my note, we had a long conversation. She was intrigued by the project and would be glad
to help as much as possible. In fact, however, she
hadn’t
lived in the house across the street from mine all her life, but the house had remained in the family, so she had kept up
with the neighborhood. She rattled off a list of names that meant nothing to me—people, she said, who could tell me things
about the house and those who’d lived here. Then she told me that C. W. L. and Jessica Armour had had three children, only
one of whom she thought was still living. Her name was Jane, and she had married a Mr. McRae from the Scott community, a few
miles northeast of Little Rock.

I called directory information for Scott. There were two McRaes. I dialed the first one and an elderly woman answered. I asked
if she was Jane Armour McRae, and she said she was. “Well,” I said, spanning three-quarters of a century in a single leap,
“I Live in the house your parents built.”

* * *

The people who’ve owned this house include a soft-drink bottler and a home economist, a mortgage loan officer for the VA and
a secretary for a U.S. congressman, a civil engineer and a housewife, a theater director and a medical technologist, a Medicare
systems analyst and a teacher, an entrepreneur gone bust and a nurse, an electronics wholesaler and a time-share-company secretary,
and two writers. Fifteen children—eleven girls and four boys have lived here, and for three of them, it was their first home.
Hundreds of parties have been held in this house. People have danced here for parts of eight decades, from the Charleston
in the twenties to whatever we do to Hootie and the Blowfish in the nineties. Young people—and their parents—have courted
on the porch and in other places, and one dad even painted the upstairs windows shut to keep his daughter from climbing out
at night. One wedding has been performed here. In addition to the happy times, these walls have witnessed the finality of
death and every conceivable level of anguish leading to it. One son disappeared into the hands of the Japanese at the beginning
of World War II, not to be heard from for years—and then one day a taxi pulled up in front of this house and he stepped out
and walked up this sidewalk in his uniform. There have been bankruptcy, family feud, lawsuits, fire, cancer, horrible accidents,
divorce, even the grief of a loved one lost to AIDS. There have been fallings-out between buyer and seller, and in one case
the anger has persisted, and festered, for two whole decades.

In other words, life has been lived here. And, in its way, this house has mirrored the wider life that has gone on around
it.

That’s the story I’m going to tell you now. But beneath the surface, down where we all live our real lives, is the story of
every one of us in every house in America—the story of that ongoing search for a place that feels like home.

Fair Days
and
High Days