If These Walls Had Ears (14 page)

Not all was perfect, however. Ruth saw problems and felt an uneasiness that couldn’t be solved by the simple positioning of
cherished possessions. She had some painting done before they moved in, and she noticed that the downstairs bathroom tile
was loose. When the tile man began poking around, he found that all the joists beneath that floor had rotted. Water had been
seeping in from somewhere. Ruth and Billie had to put in a whole new subfloor, but that wasn’t the worst of it. From then
on, Billie would worry about water and whether more of it was coming in—and, if so, from where. A house is man’s attempt to
stave off the anarchy of nature. Ripping up that floor had allowed a disturbing glimpse into the house’s secret life. It’s
more comfortable not to know about such things.

Ruth remodeled the whole bathroom in pink-and-black tile, a color combination then still considered avant-garde but one that
all the trendy magazines would be touting before long. She also replaced the single pedestal sink with two chrome-legged lavatories.
As for the rest of the problems, they would have to wait. The kitchen still had one of those old four-legged ceramic sinks
with the built-in drain board; Ruth surely wanted to replace that. Also, the house was a freezer. There was no heating system,
just a few small stoves here and there. In the living room fireplace, a gas heater had been stuck into the space where the
logs used to go. At some point, Jessie Armour had plugged up the fireplace and inserted the heater to try to ward off the
cold. The Murphrees knew nothing of Jessie Armour’s life, of course. All they saw was an old heater that should’ve been vented
but wasn’t, and that didn’t put out much heat anyway. Fortunately, warmer weather was coming. Ruth made a note to have floor
furnaces installed as soon as possible.

Beyond that, Ruth had problems with Jessie’s French doors. All that glass between the dining room and the bedroom bothered
her, made the bedroom feel too public for Ruth’s taste. Besides, French doors were too formal for the postwar style. The modern
house was loose, open, more free-form. If you sat in the living room of this Craftsman bungalow, browsing through
The Saturday Evening Post
and
McCall’s,
when you looked up at your own surroundings, this house suddenly felt old and tight. The flow that Charlie Armour had worked
so hard to achieve with French doors seemed, to the Murphrees, to make the house feel “all chopped up.” That indictment extended
to the doors separating the living and dining rooms, and even to the narrow breakfast room with its clever built-in serving
counter that Jessie had loved.

New times require new thinking. So do new owners.

One year after they moved into this house, Ruth and Billie took part in a ritual that was symbolic of the new postwar optimism:
They conceived another child. The baby, their third daughter, was born three days after Christmas. They named her Joyce. She
was the very first child born to this house.

As if in celebration of the postwar ideal of family, Billie surprised his girls with a special gift that Christmas of 1948.
It was one of the new 16-mm Kodak movie cameras that were all the rage. Using it was quite a production, but Billie didn’t
care—not, at least, on birthdays and holidays, when the clan was over and the table was set and everyone was all smiles. And
on nights when he would show the home movies, they would gather in the living room, Martha and Pat fighting for the best spot
on the floor. As their grainy figures tottered across the screen, the Murphrees would laugh and clap, basking in the flickering
image of family that danced from the projector on a smoky beam of light.

The Murphree girls—pat,Joyce,and Martha—in the side yard in 1949.

1949  
  
1956

I
’m riveted by a photograph of the three Murphree daughters taken in the early summer of 1949, posed in the side yard in approximately
the same spot where Jessie, Jane, and Charles Armour and Grandma Jackson were pictured with Uncle Ben on that long-ago Christmas
after Charlie’s mother had descended upon the house. The photo of the Murphree girls is every bit as revealing about its era
as that other frozen moment of time was about its own.

Pat, just-turned six, and Martha, almost nine, are sitting on opposite edges of the table surrounding Joyce’s built-in baby
seat. Pat, her hair in little-girl bangs, is wearing a lace-shouldered little-girl sundress and white socks and Mary Janes,
with a little-girl skinned shin and a little-girl absence of front teeth in her open mouth. She’s facing the camera straight
on, imploring it to—what?—not overlook her? Meanwhile, Martha all but languishes on the table, her eyes coyly downturned,
her hair pulled to the side. All that’s missing is a flower over her ear. She wears a ruffled bare-midriff top and skirt and
shows an astonishingly long, bare leg, tapering to a sockless foot in an open sandal. Wide-eyed, six-and-a-half-month-old
Joyce, oblivious to the drama going on around her, studies the camera notas something to be responded to emotionally—something
to be needed or seduced—but as merely a fascinating gadget with moving parts she’d like to get her hands on.

I find this photo compelling because the Murphree household was one dominated by females—much like the one I now live in—and
the rivalries are palpable. The great unseen presence, of course, is Ruth, with whom all of the girls in this picture—even
baby Joyce, later—were in some degree of competition. As was Billie, I guess, husbands and wives being the way they are.

Despite her precocious glamour in this snapshot, Martha was the tomboy, the adventurous one—the one Ruth found irrepressible.
She and two other girls in the neighborhood had a group they proudly called the Lee Street Terrors. When a new house was built
at Woodlawn and Holly, Martha and her friends were so incensed over the homeowner’s taking
their
vacant lot that they poured a concoction of black ink, Kool-Aid, and mud through the mail slot, and it landed on the people’s
new carpet. Another time, just after Ruth had bought some fashionable new pull-cord draperies, she came home and found that
Martha and her friend across Lee had rigged up a tin-can phone using the drapery cord.

Martha was almost six and Pat nearly four when they moved to Holly Street, and, even then, the two spent much of their time
at each other’s throats. Martha thought Pat was a crybaby. “She whined and complained about everything,” Martha says, “and
she was prissy. I just didn’t have much patience with that type of individual.” Martha loved dogs; Pat loved cats. Not only
that, but every year each daughter got to choose the meal that would be served on her birthday. Pat always asked for liver
and onions.

Their shared bedroom was a war zone. “We played the games all sisters play,” Pat remembers: “You’re on my side of the bed.
Here’s the line—don’t get your foot on my side!’” When Joyce came along, Ruth and Billie separated the older girls. Martha,
being the older andmore aggressive, claimed the big room with the cedar closet. Pat and her dolls shared the smaller bedroom
across the hall.

In the fall of 1992, Martha arid Joyce returned to 501 Holly Street. Joyce had been in the house once a few years before,
when it was for sale, but for Martha this was the first visit in twenty-six years. The sisters were now mothers and wives,
but as they walked through the rooms of their childhood home, I watched them become girls again.They reminded me of Jung’s
story of probing deeper into himself the further he ventured into the house of his dream. At first, they spoke of halcyon
days with no worries; then as they talked, their memories grew darker and more complex.

Martha remembered straddling the floor furnaces Billie and Ruth installed in the music room arid the hall. Joyce remembered
riding her tricycle down the stairs, knocking out her front teeth on the oak dining table. Martha remembered living in a secret
world in which her bedroom floor represented vague arid unnamed dangers, and the only way to avoid them was never to touch
the floor. She mastered the art of walking the entire circuniference of the room on doorknobs, swinging over to dressers,
and so on all the way around. Joyce remembered the day the hot-water tank caught fire and destroyed part of the kitchen (giving
Ruth an opportunity to redecorate). She recalled the neighborhood as a wonderful place to roam—with the exception of the creepy
old Retail house on the next corner, which she was scared to walk by because everybody said it was haunted.

Then Joyce asked, “Is my dog’s name still in the sidewalk by the house?” I told her I had never seen it. She took me outside.
In the spot where the fieldstone walk curves away from the house toward Lee, she pulled back the grass that had grown over
the edge of the walk. There it was—AUSTA, along with Joyce’s initials. How many other secrets, I wondered, have time and this
house tried to conceal?

* * *

For the Murphree girls, life at 501 Holly breaks into two parts—before the mid-1950s, and after. Before was magical; after
was torment.

I imagine the early Murphrees as very much like one of those sitcom families on TV. Billie was among the first in town to
buy his family a television set. It was a big dark mahogany console model, with an octagonal screen and rabbit ears on top.
They put it in the living room, but then Ruth decided the children would ruin the good furniture. That gave her a good excuse
to do something about those French doors to the bedroom: She had them ripped out and replaced by a solid wall, with a floor-to-ceiling
bookcase on the bedroom side.

Except that this was no longer the bedroom—it was now the den. It was a quiet and cozy spot for Ruth to thumb through her
Saturday Evening Post
and for Billie to concentrate on his Saturday-evening Bible study for Sunday morning’s lesson. Ruth had her bedroom furniture
moved to the back room, where Martha and Pat had slept before Ruth separated them. In the den, Ruth arranged a couple of easy
chairs and a long sofa. The TV set was also brought in, positioned near the door to the music room. Billie didn’t allow much
TV watching on school nights, but on Fridays the family gathered to watch
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.
The nearest TV station being Memphis, Martha and Pat had to squint through clouds of snow to catch a glimpse of their heartthrob,
Ricky Nelson.

As long as she was adding the bedroom wall, Ruth went ahead and removed the one between the kitchen and the breakfast room.
That gave her live-in maid, Mattie (who resided in the garage’s “servant’s quarters,” one room with a chain-pull toilet tucked
into a tiny space beneath wooden outside steps), more space to prepare sumptuous desserts for Ruth’s afternoon bridge parties.

Those parties had become more frequent in 1950, when Ruth quit her job with Brooks Hays to become a full-time bridge-playing,house-remodeling
mother and housewife. She wore hats and went shopping downtown. She lunched. She sent her sheets out to be pressed. Life was
good. There was a picnic table in the side yard, and on those pre-air conditioning summer evenings, Ruth and Billie would
frequently invite their friends or family over for cookouts. Later, the webbed lawn chairs would be arranged in a circle in
the dark, and the talk would be as soft as the air itself, a comfortable murmur of prosperity punctuated occasionally by sparkling
laughter.

Ruth and Billie’s competition was relatively low-key in those days. The girls say Ruth resented Billie’s interminable hand
shaking and socializing after church, but, then, Billie was a deacon and superintendent of the Sunday school. Sometimes, especially
later, the girls saw Ruth try to pick fights with Billie, but he would never engage her. Ruth called Billie by his given name,
but he called her “Mama.” At times when he needed a little extra leverage—such as when he got Martha the goat—he would call
her “Mommy.” For all his Baptist piety, Billie Murphree was a bit of a flirt with women. “Now, Mommy,” he would say, “you’re
not going to be mad at your old daddy, are you?” Everybody said Billie had the patience of Job. He never got angry at Ruth—or,
if he did, he didn’t show it.