If These Walls Had Ears (6 page)

Jessie and Charlie were the first.

* * *

I like to think that the house was the way they saw themselves. Outside, the dark red brick spoke of strength and practicality
and endurance. The great square porch columns seemed solidly rooted in Arkansas rock. The white concrete capping on the arch
and half columns evoked images of new snow on rich old ground—or maybe white hair on a couple who had lived long and watched
life pass from that very porch.

Inside, the house was warmed by cream-colored walls. There was a fireplace, too, and on either side of that was a built-in
bookshelf so the family could sit in the living room on winter nights and read good books by the fire. The mantel was more
classical than Craftsman in design. On either end, squares of molding sat above rectangles, evoking columns. Larger squares
of the same decorative molding refined the walls. Over the casement windows in front, Jessie shut out the world with heavy
drapes hanging on thick rods from large wooden rings. The floor in the living room was strewn with several six-by-nine-foot
Oriental rugs. After supper, the children would lie on the rugs and read or draw. Jessie placed a pair of morris chairs—something
I imagine to be like early recliners—on either side of the fireplace so Charlie could smoke his pipe arid read and she could
tend to her sewing. Grandma Jackson sat on the sofa, listening to music front the Victrola or the player piano.

The house was basically built along two parallel lines. You entered from the front porch into the living room, and straight
beyond that were the dining room, the breakfast room, the kitchen, and a back porch or utility room. Left of the front entrance,
French doors opened to a small front bedroom, shared by Carolee and Jane. Beyond that was a middle bedroom—Jessie and Charlie’s.
Then came a hall—where Carolee would sit for what seemed hours talking on the heavy black telephone—with a bath to the left,
and a large back bedroom, which was shared by Grandma Jackson and Charles.

I can imagine Jessie loving the French doors. She was a woman who appreciated elegance—in clothes, in furniture—and there’s
something undeniably elegant about French doors. There’s also an inherent sociability to them. If you’re shy and private,
you can’t hide behind double glass doors. French doors, you
fling
open with both arms, and, in so doing, you open your arms wide to the world. That strikes me as Jessie. She even had pongee-covered
French doors separating her and Charlie’s bedroom from the dining room.

Passing from the living room through the double French doors into the dining room, you would’ve come upon a large Oriental
rug that formed the perfect base for Jessie’s pedestal table. It could easily seat twelve and often did. A china cabinet stood
just inside the room, to the right. There, Jessie displayed her beloved Haviland china. But her favorite piece was placed
against the east wall, straight ahead, so that even people in the living room could see it. It was an Empire sideboard with
a rounded glass front that opened. She kept her fine glassware in there. On either side were a couple of drawers in which
she stored candles and silverware and place cards and such. Below that were four drawers for linens—Jessie liked big, elegant,
twenty-four-inch napkins, and tablecloths that draped to the floor. The sideboard also had two little pull-down doors. In
one of those was where, after Prohibition, liquor was kept.

The breakfast room represented a triumph of Jessie’s domestic science. It was a small space, but very efficient. In the wall
between the breakfast room and the kitchen was a cut-out panel with sliding doors that opened to a counter on the breakfast-room
side. Jessie could keep meals hot in the kitchen, and then, at the last minute, could open the sliding doors and set the platters
of food on the counter. The family would serve themselves buffet-style. She had a small gateleg table that she folded out
when the family took meals in the breakfast room. In the mornings, they would sit at that table in elegant bentwood chairs—there
were eight of them throughout the house—with the sun streaming in through the French doors that led out to the side steps
and yard. It was a serene way to begin the day.

There were no built-ins in the kitchen. The sink was under the south windows. To the left of that was a tall freestanding
cupboard with two doors on one side for storing bowls and pans and plates. On the other side was a single door, which, when
opened, revealed Jessie’s flour sifter. She would pour her flour into the large container for storage. Then when she wanted
to use some, she would fiddle with a lever that allowed flour to sift down into her bowl. Jane was mesmerized by this process.
It was so ingenious, so
modern.

But that was nothing compared to the stove. Standing against the big wall across from the sink, it was a gas stove of state-of-the-art
design. It was cream-colored, the approximate hue of eggnog or boiled custard, and it was trimmed in pistachio green. It had
legs, instead of being set squarely on the floor. In Jessie’s home, the stove was always the cornerstone. She and Charlie
had bought this stove brand-new for this house.

The back bedroom was given to Grandma Jackson because she had developed asthma, and that room was the most private. Charles
slept in her bed at first. As he got older, he used a roll-away bed, but he still stayed with her. Jane recalls thinking Charles
was their grandmother’s pet.

The hall must’ve been Charlie’s tribute to Grand Central Station. It’s not a hall in the long and narrow sense of the word;
it’s simply a small room in the center of the house, a room whose only purpose is connecting the other rooms with one another.
The hall has no fewer than seven doors—back bedroom, attic, coat closet, breakfast room, dining room, middle bedroom, bathroom.
It’s hell to wallpaper, but a good place to wait out a tornado warning.

In Charlie and Jessie’s time, the bathroom was clean and entirely white, like a medical room. It had a pedestal sink and a
floor comprised of hundreds of tiny octagonal tiles that played tricks on your eyes if you stared at them too long. There
was a built-in wall heater to keep you warm when you stepped out of the big tub.

In the middle bedroom, Charlie and Jessie slept in a huge sleigh bed whose head was placed in the center of a bay window on
the north side of the house, next to the driveway. Mostly, the curtains on those windows were kept drawn because the Armour
house was lower on the hill than the house next door. If you weren’t careful, the neighbors could look right in and catch
you in your underwear—or worse. Jessie had a dresser on the east wall, and she kept her clothes in the closet opposite. For
all their attention to detail in this house, Charlie and Ray Burks hadn’t drawn in many closets—just one small one per bedroom,
and the one in the hall. Charlie’s suits, hats, shirts, shoes, and accessories were stored in a massive armoire on the wall
between the French doors and the door leading to the girls’ room. The armoire was made of a heavy mahogany. To young Charles,
it must’ve been a magical piece—dark, brooding, filled with the rites and rituals of manhood.

Before they moved to 501 Holly, Jessie already had a set of beautiful white wicker furniture. As it became obvious that Carolee
and Jane would share a room until Carolee—now seventeen—left for college, Jessie went out and found another piece of wicker—a
long couch that opened into a bed. In the daytime and evenings, the front bedroom could be a charming sitting room, one where
Carolee could have privacy with her beaux and still be in sight of the living room, thanks to the French doors. At bedtime,
Carolee and Jane could fold out the couch.

And when they did, Charlie and Jessie would sometimes go out on the porch alone, if the weather wasn’t too cold. Jane says
they sat on the porch a lot, especially in the beginning. I can see them watching the stars sparkling in the western sky.
You could do that then, when there weren’t so many man-made lights west of Holly to dim the view. Other times, they would
go out at day’s end to wait for the glorious red sunsets. They’d hung a swing on the porch’s south end, so they could see
the front and side of their house at the same time. They’d planted evergreens around the porch, and several trees in the yard—that
spindly elm in front of the house, near the driveway, and a tulip poplar on the edge of the hill overlooking Lee. On the side
of the house, near a mature walnut tree, they’d planted a young maple. Charlie and Jessie had, quite literally, put down roots.

It was—it is—a good feeling. There’s something especially warming about certain accomplishments around a house—a new purchase,
a big project crossed off the list, evens a simple thing like a day of yard work completed. It’s as though all is right with
the universe. It’s the feeling of
home
distilled—a feeling that you’re keeping up, not losing ground. Many’s the evening Beth and I have sat on that very porch,
and we’ve marveled at our industriousness and our good fortune, as Charlie and Jessie surely must have at theirs. I wonder
if, during dusks like that, they felt as I have—hat the silhouetted rafters in the porch overhang looked like the swags of
a theater curtain.

These are moments in a house you have to cherish, like the sunsets. One minute the sky is a blaze of color. The next minute
everything is gone.

Soul
is a hard word to pin down. It’s the word we use to name something ephemeral, but just giving that something a name doesn’t
capture it. Soul isn’t captured. It’s
revealed.

In Jessie and Charlie’s house, it manifested itself in optimism, gregariousness, efficiency, pride. It floated through every
room on the scents from Jessie’s kitchen—from her incomparable sweet-potato croquettes, or Grandma Jackson’s famously sinful
doughnuts, or the apple pies Grandma said she baked “especially for Charlie—though others can have a taste if they wish.”
In the mornings, the aroma of coffee announced that Charlie was up and ready to go to work. In her back bedroom, Grandma Jackson
would prop herself up in bed, because Charlie never failed to take his mother-in-law the first cup poured.

Music was another revelation of this family’s soul. It makes me happy to know that this house was filled with music—was
conceived
with music in mind. My parents seldom played music in our houses when I was growing up. They liked music, but it just wasn’t
a priority. I think a house without music robs you of something, both at the time and later, too. My forty-seven-year-old
brother, Phil, recently went back to see the house on Churchill Drive in Jackson, Mississippi, where we had lived for a while
in the early fifties. He says that just
looking
at it after forty years didn’t take him back. Where memory is concerned, the senses of sight and touch aren’t as evocative
as smell and taste and hearing. Hearing music is the best transporter of all.

Music works on memory like the emulsion on film—it freezes time into keepable slices:
Standing in the backyard in Jackson talking with my mother through the window, asking if I can keep the stray dog I’m holding,
while somewhere a radio plays “Young at Heart.” Waking up
in Miami at 3:00
A.M.
to the sound of sultry Keely Smith singing “Love for Sale” on my brown-and-orange bedside radio. In a star-crossed bedroom
in Minnesota, hearing my five-year-old son singing a line from his favorite song: “I’m on the
top
of the world looking down on creation. . .”
None of it is especially important—except that, after it’s over, that’s what you’ve got.

Almost three-quarters of a century after the fact, Jane Armour McRae remembers her grandma Jackson sitting by the radio and
listening to “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” Radio took off in the early 1920s, and Grandma Jackson was one of the first people
in the neighborhood to have one. She had been fascinated by the idea that you could sit there in your house and listen to
someone sing “Barney Google (with the goo goo googledy eyes)” from a box on the table. You could also hear news. Grandma Jackson
had
to have a radio.

It was a big one, a console, and she placed it in the dining room, near the windows. That was as far away from the bedrooms
as she could get it—she didn’t want to disturb anyone while she sat up till all hours twisting the dial. Jessie and Charlie
put her chair next to the radio, and that became her throne. She sat there from morning till night, listening. Not only did
she know all the latest songs but she became the family’s ear to a world that was getting larger by the minute. Every night
at dinner, she would tell them all the amazing things she had heard that day.

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?