If These Walls Had Ears (20 page)

Upstairs, Bret’s bedside lamp was on, though she was supposed to be asleep already. I’d like to think she was reading, but
she was probably playing with her Game Boy. Blair’s overhead light and ceiling fan were both going—she’s a teenager and hardly
ever comes out of her room, except to snarl that her mother is ruining her life. She was probably writing notes to one of
her friends. Downstairs, the tall lamps between the living and dining rooms cast a warm glow on the terra-cotta walls. I could
tell, too, from the color of the reflection on the wall near the hall that the light in the Geranium Room was on. Beth was
probably in there watching an old movie.

And I, of course, was lurking in the shadows looking for signs that my house was evil. I didn’t see it. Oh, I saw odd things—for
the first time ever, I noticed that the second story Charlie Armour added at the back of the house gives the structure the
vague shape of one of those fanciful old sailing vessels, like the
Niña
or the
Pinta
or the galleon of Captain Hook. The second story is the bridge, the jutting front porch the bow.

But I don’t believe that it’s a pirate ship. It’s just a ship of fools—always has been, always will be. The house is old now,
and it’s been through a lot in its days. I think that’s what my friend was seeing—not the house’s personality, but its damaged
heart, a wise old soul reflecting what it knows about the ominousness of life itself.

* * *

It’s hard to say exactly when a house becomes old. Despite Ruth’s efforts to update it, 501 Holly wasn’t really old when the
Murphrees bought it—it had been standing for only twenty-four years. Today, that would be a house built in 1972. That’s not
an old house, not in the way the word is used by people for whom
old
is a desirable quality. For those people, a house has to have patina, the sheen of another era. But beyond that, the era
evoked has to be attractive in some emotional way. A 1972 house conjures images of bell-bottoms and platform shoes. Even if
I live to be a hundred, that won’t be
my
idea of patina.

One reason is that I lived—as an adult—through the 1970s. People who want old houses are trying, consciously or not, to connect
with an earlier time. A decade ago, the architect and writer Witold Rybczynski wrote a wonderful book entitled
Home: A Short History of an Idea.
He actually puts dates to the concept of “old”—roughly the period from 1890 to 1930. “If department stores or home-decorating
magazines are any indication,” he says, “most people’s first choice would be to live in rooms that resemble, as much as their
budgets permit, those of their grandparents.” Rybczynski says old-house people are searching for comfort and security in a
world that no longer seems to provide such things.

Ed and Sheri Kramer were old-house people. So were Forrest and Sue Wolfe. So was Rita Grimes; her husband, Roy, wasn’t particularly,
but he went along with his wife’s desires. And if it was connections these old-house people were after, they found more than
they bargained for at 501 Holly. In fact, I think the stories of these three families are so interconnected that they have
to be told as one.

It begins, for me, in the middle, with a fiercely principled young Jewish man from Brooklyn and a strong-willed young gentile
woman from Arkansas falling in love in New York City. The year was 1969. Edward Lovett Kramer was the man, Sheri Mabry the
woman. Sheri, a petite, dark-haired beauty whose photographs from the era remind me of Jessica Lange, was twenty-seven at
the time of their meeting; Ed, bearded and already receding on top, was only twenty-two.

He was like no one Sheri had ever met before. He was an intellectual, but he wasn’t an egghead. Instead, he made her laugh
all the time, his own eyebrows dancing like Groucho’s behind dark-framed glasses. Ed was a New Yorker, but he had the manners
of a Southern gentleman. And he had more talents than any one man should be allowed—he could play the guitar and sing (he
might pick out a sensitive rendition of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” on his six-string, then segue into a campy tenor
version of “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby”); he could draw and paint; and he was a writer. He wrote movies. Movies were his life,
it seemed. Ed’s father had been a doctor, and Ed had grown up with the idea that he would follow in his father’s footsteps.
But he also loved movies and theater, and he wanted to be a writer, too. He had gone to his father’s alma mater, Tulane, but
instead of studying medicine he had gotten a master’s in screenwriting. Ed now had an actual job creating screenplays for
a producer who had a production deal with MGM. None of Ed’s scripts had been made yet, but he showed great promise—for a time,
a new director named Robert Altman wanted to shoot one of his screenplays, but the timing didn’t work out. When Ed wasn’t
writing movies, he was watching them. He was serious about watching movies. He studied the work of the greats in the business—James
Agee, Herman Mankiewicz, Graham Greene—and after he and Sheri got together, they would spend every Friday night,
all
night, in Ed’s apartment with the television tuned to the old-movie channel. He introduced her to classic films like
Sergeant York,
starring Gary Cooper.

Ed also loved listening to music of any kind, and in his tiny apartment next door to the Chelsea Hotel, he had a pair of speakers
that were nearly as big as his door-top desk. Sheri loved to sing, too, and though she was only five feet tall, she had a
big, full voice. She had sung in church in her hometown of Russellville, and then in Conway when her family moved there in.
Sheri’s tenth-grade year. But she had never developed her talent further. Instead, after college, she had studied to become
a medical technologist. She and Ed had been introduced shortly after Sheri moved to New York to work.

Now, though, they sang together—Sheri belting out an a cappela “Summertime” hot enough to scorch the downtown streets, or
the song she dedicated just to him—“Can’t Help Loving That Man of Mine.” Ed’s favorite group was the Drifters, who sang “Up
on the Roof.” Sometimes he and Sheri would do just that—go up onto the roof of their apartment building and sing or talk.
Sheri thought it was funny that in the midst of this big, dirty city, there was a sign on that roof that commanded DON’T SPIT
ON THE FLOOR. During their long conversations, Ed told her about his family and about the houses he had lived in. His father,
Aaron Sigmund Kramer, had been part of Gen. George Patton’s advance team at the end of the war, and he had been among the
first of the Allies to document the horrors that had taken place at Auschwitz. What nobody in the family knew was that Dr.
Kramer had heart problems. He died just a few years after finishing up his terrible duties abroad. Ed was eight years old.

Ed’s mother, Hazel, moved with her two sons out of their flat on New York Avenue—where Dr. Kramer had had his medical practice
in the apartment downstairs—and into her parents’ big three-story home in a gracious neighborhood on President Street in Brooklyn.
Ed’s brother, Lawrence, was eighteen by that time, so he was almost out on his own. But Ed was reared by his grandparents.
His grandmother Marjorie Lovett had a great influence on Ed’s love of theater. She was an actress and a model, and had done
three
Saturday Evening Post
covers for Norman Rockwell. She also performed on television in the early days. Living in the Lovetts’ elegant home, with
its fine furniture and intricate architectural details, also created an indelible impression on Ed. It was a cultured upbringing.
He learned to play the piano on an ornate concert grand that had once belonged to the robber baron Jay Gould. The instrument
had been one of five pianos created by Steinway for the five crowned heads of Europe. Gould had acquired this one, and then
Ed’s grandmother had inherited it from her mother. To keep the family from squabbling over it after she was gone, Marjorie
Lovett sold the piano to an anonymous buyer just before she died.

Sheri was mesmerized by this young man’s life. She had grown up in an old house, though not
a fine
old house, in Conway, the daughter of a state employee. Ed came from a different world. The two of them listened often to
opera, whose achingly beautiful arias seemed to capture the drama they themselves were living. There was one opera they particularly
loved, Jules Massenet’s
Thais,
in which a monk in ancient Egypt tries to reform a beautiful courtesan, only to fall in love with her as she renounces her
past and dies a saint. Sheri and Ed found the arias wonderfully sad. Whatever they did, wherever they walked or ate, they
tingled with the romance of the city—the big, impersonal, impossible metropolis in which
everything
was possible, including finding each other. When they married, they wanted the city to be part of it: They spoke their vows
before a justice of the peace at the picturesque old city hall downtown.

Shortly after their wedding, Sheri learned that her mother back in Arkansas had cancer. It was a particularly serious form,
requiring a radical mastectomy. That was disturbing enough, but there were other, even more ominous implications: Sheri’s
aunt and grandmother—her mother’s sister and mother—also were fighting cancer. Sheri decided she needed to go home to help
her family. Though he had always liked the South, never in his life had Ed Kramer entertained the notion of living in Arkansas.
Manhattan had the kind of life and color you could hardly give up. Ed loved telling the story of walking his dog in front
of his apartment, and suddenly the dog darted toward a hydrant and pulled the leash taut, tripping a woman walking by. She
was splayed out on the sidewalk, a disaster in floppy hat and purple granny glasses. When Ed went to help her, he realized
to his horror that it was Janis Joplin. She looked stunned, but then she smiled up at him. “Far out,” she said.

But he was a married man now, and his duty was to his wife. He of all people understood her need to be with her family. Besides,
it was a good time to be leaving Manhattan: The economy in 1971 was putting pressure on the movie business in general and
on his producer in particular. Ed and Sheri packed their belongings and set out to make a new home.

Her brother found them a small rental house in Little Rock, on Woodlawn Street, about nine blocks from Holly. Even that compact
house felt like a mansion compared with the tiny apartment they had lived in in Manhattan. For the move to Arkansas, Ed had
taken out of storage several pieces of furniture Sheri had never seen—a fine old table with shapely legs, a comfortable old
chair with wooden arms, and other items. These had been left to him by his mother, who had died when he was nineteen, and
he was happy to have them in his life again. In fact, except for the illness in Sheri’s family, life in Arkansas seemed uncommonly
good. Sheri soon got a job doing medical technology work, and within a month Ed landed a plum position as theater director
at the Arkansas Arts Center. The job paid $6,500 a year.

It wasn’t long before the status quo was changed again. At the end of 1971, Sheri became pregnant. The next August, she gave
birth to a son, James Sigmund Kramer, named for both Sheri’s and Ed’s fathers. The little boy whose name spanned such disparate
cultures became known as Siggy, though nobody in Arkansas seemed able to pronounce it. They persisted in calling him Ziggy,
after a character in the comic strips.

As Sheri remembers it, in the spring of 1973 she happened to be at the Safeway store in Hillcrest when she ran into an old
friend from her Russellville years, the former Rita Rhea—now Rita Grimes. Sheri and Rita had been very close before Sheri’s
family had moved away—the girls had spent the night at each other’s houses, and Sheri had even later been in Rita’s wedding.
That had been thirteen long years ago, and they hadn’t laid eyes on each other since. They were both thrilled to hook up again
after so many years. Neither could believe they now lived so close to each other.

Since Sheri wasn’t working, she began taking Siggy over to visit at Rita’s house. It was a wonderful house with a front porch
and a big side yard. Rita’s three oldest children were in school, but her youngest, Kristi, who was almost four, was still
at home. While their babies crawled and played, Sheri and Rita caught up on each other’s lives. At one point, Rita mentioned
to Sheri that she and her husband had decided to put their house on the market—that they had a weekend lake place now and
wanted to spend more time there.

Sheri began mulling over the idea of buying Rita’s house. The rental house she and Ed lived in was cramped, now that they
had a baby. Ed also happened to have a small inheritance—enough to afford a down payment on Roy and Rita’s asking price of
$33,500. Sheri soon arranged for Ed to come see the place, and he fell in love. The porch, the French doors, the den with
the floor-to-ceiling bookcases—that would be his study (never an “office”), the place where he would retreat at night to create
new movie masterpieces.

Neither Ed nor Sheri had ever bought a house before, but they decided to hold their collective breath and take the plunge.
After all, they were young, they were bright, and they’d been blessed time and again. And they were buying from one of Sheri’s
oldest friends. Didn’t the stars seem to be on their side?

Rita and her husband, Roy, didn’t know exactly what to make of Ed Kramer. He was a shortish, dark-bearded New Yorker, and
he was in the
theater.
Roy was a big old easygoing former high school basketball and football player at Russellville High, and he had gone on to
become an up-and-corning civil engineer with a respected Little Rock firm. In fact, it was largely because Roy was an engineer
that they had finally decided to put this house on the market in the first place. Had it been up to Rita, they would be staying—but,
then, she hadn’t been the one to spend all her Saturdays working on the place, trying to patch the walls, prop up the floors,
rebuild the windows. After seven years, Roy had just gotten tired of it all—he wanted his weekends back. Rita remembers thinking
that if she
had
to give up this house she loved, she was glad it was to a friend.