If These Walls Had Ears (13 page)

Most of all, those were days when your home and your neighborhood were the nucleus of your life. You went to church in the
neighborhood, you shopped in the neighborhood, from merchants you knew, and you played with friends in the neighborhood. Nobody’s
mother hauled children all over town to take gymnastics or tennis lessons. You learned the games you needed to know from the
kids you lived near. Life seemed as easy as a shortcut through the neighbors’ yard. I lived in Mississippi during that magical
time. Five hours away, in a big corner house in Little Rock, the Murphree family lived their own version of the same illusion.

I met Ruth Murphree in the fall of 1992. I simply called the number in the phone book, and she answered. It had been twenty-six
years since she’d lived in this house. She listened warily while I made my spiel. Then, to my slight surprise, she agreed
to see me.

A widow since 1989, Ruth lives today in a retirement complex in west Little Rock. Her apartment is relatively new, and the
scale of the rooms doesn’t suit her preference in furniture, which is Victorian—large, dark, imposing. But these pieces are
here because they’re not just objects; they’re memories, many of them from her days on Holly Street.’

Ruth is a small woman, and her reactions are often obscured by the glare of her glasses. Nor does she betray much through
expressions or mannerisms. Occasionally, she’ll chuckle. During that first meeting, I got the feeling that she’s very careful
about what she says, and to whom. Once, after I had told her daughter Joyce that I wanted to talk with some of her parents’
friends, Ruth complained to her, “Why does he need to talk to
them?”
And yet she seemed pleased enough to talk with me about her husband, who died shortly after their fiftieth wedding anniversary,
about her three daughters—Martha, Pat, and Joyce—and about 501 Holly, where the Murphree family lived for nineteen long years,
from the big-band era to that of the Beatles. Between that initial meeting in 1992 and the beginning of 1995,1 would have
several conversations with Ruth and with all three of her daughters. I would visit Martha in Florida and Pat in Atlanta. Joyce,
here in Little Rock, would help me read the animosities and the alliances and would tell me what I was seeing in family snapshots
and on Murphree home movies.

Through it all, I would come to absorb the story of one family struggling to hold together through the wrenching changes of
mid-century America—changes that were reflected, always, within the walls of 501 Holly.

The postwar world seemed specially scripted for Bille Lee Murphree. It was a time When a smart, energetic, and morally upright
Young man could make a real mark for himself. Billie was all of that, and more. A country boy with city polish, he was movie-star
handsome, and he exuded self-confidence. He liked people, and they liked him. His gift of gab would eventually take him into
teaching for a while, even though he’d dropped out of college following the 1929 crash. That’s what he was doing when he met
Ruth Taylor. Later, he would go into county politics, serving as comptroller for Pulaski County before the war.

He wasn’t a man to sit back and live on a salary, though. His sideline business was real estate. He would buy houses and fix
them up to rent out, remortgaging them and using the new money to buy still more rental houses. Billie’s daughters love retelling
the family legend of how their daddy established credit. He went to the bank and borrowed one hundred dollars, which he put
in a drawer and didn’t touch. When the note was due, he paid the money back with a small amount of interest. Then he asked
for a larger amount—three hundred dollars, say—and did the same thing. Finally, when he was known at the bank as a good credit
risk, he hit them for enough to buy a small house. He was off and running.

Shortly after his return, Billie pulled strings to land a job with the Veterans Administration. Congressman Hays, Ruth’s boss
and Billie’s former Sunday school teacher, simply phoned the head man at the VA. “My friend Bill Murphree needs a job,” the
congressman said. The GI bill offered all the returning veterans’ favorable terms on money to go to college, to start a business,
to buy a house or a farm. Billie began work in the mortgage department of the Little Rock VA. He took to the work naturally.
With his interest in people, his war experience, and his knowledge of real estate, it was an almost fateful fit. Before long,
he would rise to the position of supervisor, in charge of GI mortgage loans throughout Arkansas and a portion of Texas. A
lot of soldiers had been dreaming of home for a very long time. Now, in his part of the country, Billie Lee Murphree Would
become no less than gatekeeper to the American dream.

But for all his charm and ambition and entrepreneurial skill, the thing that made Billie Murphree so perfect a reflection
of his times was his moral certainty. A strict Baptist, he lived the way he thought: Never lie, never drink, never smoke,
never break the law, go to church regularly, live by the Ten Commandments, and your life will turn out wonderfully. He took
great pride in telling the story of how, when his daughter Martha was born, lie picked Ruth and the baby up at the hospital,
dropped Ruth off at home; arid took Martha with him straight to church. He did this, Martha now realizes, not just to show
her off but also to indoctrinate her into the life he wanted her to lead. He felt the same way about the other girls when
they came along.

Most people who knew the Murphrees then probably thought Ruth shared her husband’s sense of certainty. She surely wasn’t timid
about expressing her opinions. But now, approaching her eightieth year, Ruth can admit to a weakness of the soul: She was
inclined toward envy and had to fight to avoid letting it get the best of her. She says the worst time was when she envied
a friend whose banker husband hadn’t had to go to war, and Billie had—banking was an “essential” job and being a county comptroller
wasn’t. It made Ruth bitter. Later, Ruth’s daughters thought she envied people who drove bigger cars, lived in better houses,
had newer things.

She was a petite thing from the same general area of northeast Arkansas that Billie came from, but even in early photographs
you can tell her tastes were far from country. As a wife, she was a hard worker, helping Billie with the paperwork on his
rental-house business, but she enjoyed playing bridge, being a member of women’s clubs, and going downtown to shop. Downtown
was nice then. The Gus Blass department store had a mezzanine restaurant where ladies in hats would meet over salmon croquettes
and iced tea. Blass’s also had a new escalator, the first in Arkansas. The ladies laughed about a matron who, seeing it for
the first time, said, “It’s nice, but shouldn’t they have somebody here to show us how to use it?”

It was a perfect world, at least on the surface, and Ruth’s daughters say that she worked hard to maintain that appearance.
Whenever one of the girls breached their mother’s idea of the norm, Ruth would say, “What will the neighbors think?” She wanted
to keep anything potentially embarrassing within their own walls. The things that were embarrassing were whatever belied the
happy image of
family
—devoted mother, successful, good-natured father, obedient children.

This image extended even beyond Billie and Ruth’s immediate family. At age thirty-eight, Billie was the patriarch of his own
sprawling clan. His youngest brother, Tom, refers to him as the family’s “Godfather.” Billie helped them financially, and
when he bought 501 Holly, it became the de facto family home. Even if Ruth hadn’t wanted to spend so much time with her in-laws,
she would’ve been outvoted by Billie. To him, family equaled home. At Christmas, Easter, and on the Fourth of July, this house
throbbed with the energy of brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins and nieces and nephews.

I can’t help feeling that Ruth was the one member of the clan not quite in the loop. Ruth’s daughters say they had more of
a bond with their father than with their mother. Sometimes this manifested itself in the form of pets. The Murphree house
was a veritable menagerie—at various points they had dogs, cats, turtles, birds, chickens, ducks, a goat, and an alligator.
Billie loved animals, loved seeing the children playing with them. Never did he come home from a trip that he didn’t bring
the girls a turtle or two. “Go look in the car,” he would say, and they would race to the driveway, to find an old terrapin
hunched down in the backseat. They would keep him a few days, maybe painting the date on his shell with fingernail polish,
and then finally they would let him go back to the wild.

Ruth loved the dogs; some of the other pets were underfoot because she was simply outnumbered. To this very day, Martha seems
to be only half-joking when she claims her mother pushed her pet goat off the garage stairs and broke its neck.

They moved in on a March day in 1947, but the weather wasn’t springlike, the way it is this year. Instead, the wind howled
and the rain beat down. Little Pat, three years old, stood weeping in the drafty living room. “I want to go home!” she told
her mother. “I want to go home!”

Ruth hugged her baby tight. “But this
is
home,” she said. Pat wailed all the more.

It’s one thing to build the house you’ve already constructed in your head, the one you’ve calculated will be right for you;
it’s another to move into what was once someone else’s dream and try to reshape it to match a vague template in your heart.
Those of us who’ve done it know what Ruth was feeling. You’re standing in the living room of a house you’ve walked through
no more than a few times, maybe only once. You know—in your head—where the various rooms are, but still the whole place looks
alien. It almost seems to float. If you’ve moved a few times, you know that eventually you’ll come to see these very rooms
differently, and that later it’ll be fun to try to remember the way you saw them on this very first day. Later, the space
will take on a different measure; rooms will seem to have been viewed from a completely different angle. By then, the alien
place will have become centered around your own things.

Things:
I’m talking about our personal possessions—mementos, heirlooms, cherished pieces of furniture or art, totemic objects that
ground us, that connect our present with our past. Surely, only things allow us to move as often as we do. Whenever I think
of things and their importance in making a home, I think of the way my mother moved to Florida. The year was 1957, and we
were leaving Hazlehurst, Mississippi, bound for Miami. This was at the end of a strange interlude in my father’s working life.
After he had gotten out of the service he, like Billie Murphree, had gone to work for the Veterans Administration. He did
that in Tupelo and later in Jackson. Then there were cutbacks. My father was told he could stay on, but at a lower grade.
He refused. For a time during our Jackson years, he worked for a company that sold toys. He traded the car for a panel truck.
My brother and I, blissfully ignorant, were excited about the toys, though I remember being embarrassed going to church in
the truck. Then my father took a job running a grocery store in Hazlehurst for a nephew of my uncle Alex, Aunt May’s husband.
My uncle’s family owned a lumber business, and this store sold to people who worked at the mill. My father was promised a
share of the profits, but then he found out this store wasn’t supposed to turn a profit. It was a disaster for my parents,
but, like Charles and Jane Armour during Charlie’s crisis, I was unaware.

Finally, my father was offered a job with Vocational Rehabilitation in Florida. He would go on to great success there, eventually
becoming director for all of South Florida. In the fall of 1957, though, he couldn’t wait to get out of Hazlehurst, where
he had run through his savings and his pride. He couldn’t, or didn’t, hire a moving van; instead, he hooked up a U-Haul trailer
to our blue 1955 Ford. He told my mother they could take only what they could fit into the U-Haul. She left many things, including
the bedroom suite of her mother’s, in Hazlehurst with her sister. There was an understanding that Mother was going to get
them later, but of course life seldom works out that way.

Ruth Murphree understands the importance of things. Today, her red velvet mahogany settee still comforts her the way it did
on that March day almost half a century ago. When she moved her family into Holly Street, she placed the settee—then covered
in green velvet—on the left side of the living room, with her leather-inlaid coffee table in front and her two green velvet
Victorian side chairs flanking the fireplace. Her gold brocade wing-back chair sat in the corner between the dining room and
what Ruth had decided was the music room. Across from that, between the front door and the music room, her red brocade chair
echoed the gold in regal symmetry.

A visitor walking into the Murphrees’ house back then could glance straight ahead through the French doors and catch sight
of an impressive oak dining table in the center. Against the far wall, where Jessie Armour had placed her Empire sideboard,
stood Ruth’s antique buffet. The music room provided a more modern vista. Under the windows to the front porch was a sleek
beige couch that evoked the stylishness of the 1930s. Ruth placed their record player/radio console under the north windows.
On the east wall was the spinet piano. Both Ruth and Billie loved music—classical, jazz, gospel—and they encouraged their
girls to love music, too. Billie’s mother had taught piano, and Ruth believed every girl should be able to play. The Murphree
girls would grow to love this room, but not in the way their parents hoped. For the girls, the music room would become a conduit
to a wider, less certain world.

Beyond the music room, for the time being, was Ruth and Billie’s bedroom. A mahogany four-poster and dresser anchored this
space. Martha and Pat started out sharing the downstairs back bedroom, the one young Charles Armour and his Grandma Jackson
had slept in so many years before. As it happened, just as Billie and Ruth bought this house, Billie found another rental
house for his mother and Tommy. All during the war years, Ruth had yearned for a day when she would no longer be constricted
by circumstance. Now she found herself living in a house with
three
empty bedrooms.