If These Walls Had Ears (21 page)

That, at least, is the way she felt about it at the time.

It’s a funny thing how a relationship with a house can be so much like a love affair. At first it’s all magic, all rockets
in flight. Then, sooner or later, the reality sets in. If it’s not going to work, the realization sneaks up on you gradually,
moving from the feeling to the knowing, the way the awful need to end a marriage does.

The Grimeses were the first of several families to divorce this house. By that, I mean several families left it not just to
go
toward
something better; they left it mainly to get away from this house’s incessant misery, its overwhelming neediness. They left
it to save themselves. But inevitably, such a break leaves scars on both sides.

Rita was twenty-three and already the mother of three when she and Roy moved to 501 Holly. The year was 1966, the month September.
As young as she was, she knew even then that she loved old houses. She thought of the one she had grown up in as “the old
home place,” imbuing it with a magical quality that transcended mere brick and mortar. In the mid-sixties, however, she had
been living with her husband, Roy, and three young children in an 1,100square-foot house in a new subdivision of houses all
pretty much like theirs, all occupied by people pretty much their age. The house had actually been built for them, though—the
developer showed them the lots they could choose from and then let them pick from among five or six floor plans. It was the
training-wheels version of building a house. The plan Rita and Roy had selected was a three-bedroom ranch. They had moved
in in 1963, when Rita was twenty.

By then, they’d been married three years and already had two sons, Scott and Mark. Roy, who was six years older than Rita,
was embroiled in his work with the engineering firm of Garver and Garver. It was an exciting time to be an engineer. Little
Rock was being virtually encircled by the new interstate highway system, and Roy’s company was involved in a major study for
part of that. Roy and Rita, who had met and married in their little central Arkansas hometown of Russellville, felt that their
future was as limitless as that interstate highway now seemed to be. Rita had studied art for a while and then had switched
to engineering herself. Finally, she had dropped out of school to marry Roy. Now she was happy just being a mother and housewife.

After having lived in a succession of apartments, they even found their new house in the subdivision limitless at first. Then
Rita got pregnant again. In February 1966, she gave birth to a daughter, Lori. Scott was two and a half, Mark was one and
a half, and now they had a new baby. It was amazing how fast that house had shrunk. Rita started watching the want ads, circling
and clipping descriptions of houses that seemed promising. One day, she ran across an ad for a house at 501 Holly. It sounded
wonderful—a front porch, lots of bedrooms, wall-to-wall carpeting, a big corner lot. Not only that; there was no down payment
required—the buyer would just assume the loan. The house was for sale by the owners themselves. That night when Roy came
home from work, Rita had already made an appointment with the people, a Mr. and Mrs. Murphree.

Dropping the kids off with Rita’s aunt, Roy and Rita drove from the new subdivision into the old tree-lined streets of Hillcrest.
It was dark when they got to Holly Street, but the house lights glowed. In the blush of lamplight, the timeless dance ensued:
Rita was mesmerized, the way Ruth had been on
her
first day almost twenty years before. Roy and Rita never even saw this house in daylight before buying it. There are times
in your life when you don’t want to risk having your mind changed.

Rita Grimes, second from right, with her two sons and Roy's sisters. Rita loved 501 Holly no matter what calamity came along
.

They told themselves the house was in a spectacular location for a family with young children—the Pulaski Heights school,
offering nine grades in one location, was practically at their back doorstep. They told each other that no matter how hard
they looked, they wouldn’t do better. The Murphrees were asking $24,000. Roy got them to knock fifteen hundred dollars off
that. In the end, the Grimeses put $500 down and assumed the mortgage for $22,000.

That September of 1966, 501 Holly’s third owners moved in. But it’s part of the alchemy of houses that even when a man and
wife move into one together, they don’t necessarily move into the very same house. There’s a photograph of Rita, one of the
few snapshots of her taken here, and she’s standing in front of the house with three of Roy’s four sisters, plus Scott and
Mark, who’re perched upon one of the brick half columns, as though on a pedestal. Rita, in her bright yellow A-line and sixties
bouffant, is only twenty-four in this picture, but her deep-dimpled smile says she’s shed her cookie-cutter box in the subdivision
and slipped into a unique identity, an identity even older women would have to respect. Rita would love this house, the
idea
of it, the whole time they were here.

There are numerous snapshots of Roy at 501, and many of them catch him, naturally, with a smile on his face. But one picture
taken about the same time as the one of Rita captures what I now know to be the worry Roy felt about this place. He’s standing
in front of the house, with his arm around his mother, and just over his left shoulder is a tree I had never known existed.
He says it wasn’t much of a tree—it’d been struck by lightning or something, and the top was gone from it. As soon as Roy
saw it, he knew he would have to take it down eventually. At this house, even the
trees
needed work. Roy’s expression in this photo says
he
had left his new, small, easily managed house in the subdivision and slipped into maintenance quicksand. He would be weary
of it long before he would find a way to escape.

They took to calling the living and dining space “the bowling alley.” With the sudden absence of Ruth’s heavy Victorian furniture,
that sprawling expanse of beige carpet now looked incredibly empty. Rita and Roy had no dining room furniture at first, just
a dinette set for the kitchen. They placed their small white brocade sofa and a couple of velvet chairs in the living room
area, spreading an Oriental-style rug under the side-by-side cocktail tables. Rita arranged a few items—a picture, some sconces,
one of those big decorative keys that were popular then—over the mantel and positioned her family knickknacks in the otherwise-empty
bookcase by the fireplace. Still, it wasn’t exactly cozy. Every time they walked through the front door, they were met by
the ringing reminder that this was a
real
house, and they were neophytes.

They did have a piano, though, and a record player with an eight-track cassette deck. Rita put all of those music-related
pieces in the room off the living area, which was now officially the music room. The middle room, the one with all those bookcases,
became the den. That’s where the TV set was. Nineteen sixty-six was the year color television became the norm—the demand for
color sets was so great that you had to
wait
to get one because local stores would be out of stock for months at a time. Roy and Rita had just made the switch, buying
a big black Magnavox console model, which they placed in front of the bookcases. The years the Grimeses lived in this house
spanned the eras from
The Green Hornet
to
Kung Fu,
from
The Milton Berle Show
to
The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.
In the evenings, Roy and Rita would settle back in the old green Herculon chair or spread out across the floral-print sofa,
while the children sprawled on the floor in front of the TV, their chins in their hands.

The whole family slept upstairs. In the beginning, the two boys shared the big bedroom where Martha Murphree had walked on
doorknobs; in the smaller room adjacent, little Lori slumbered in her crib. Rita and Roy, who had a king-size bed, planned
to use the big attic room as their master suite. This room does have wonderful potential for that. It’s cozy; the ceiling
slopes on either side, evoking the romantic aura of a Parisian garret—especially at night, when the shadows from the big elm
brush across the walls. Back when the Murphrees had taken out the first pair of French doors downstairs, they’d knocked out
a couple of windows facing the front of the house and installed the French doors here. Now you could open those doors and
step out onto the roof of the front porch; in theory, it was like having your own terrace off the master bedroom.

Roy and Rita had big plans—they were eventually going to level the floor, and there was talk of building a bathroom in the
big storage closet just inside the door. To get them started, though, Roy covered the bare floor planks with rust-colored
linoleum designed to look like a basket-weave pattern of bricks. Thirty years later, that linoleum is still here. There’s
no bathroom. A marble still rolls to the wall.

Eventually, Roy and Rita traded rooms with the boys, giving them the attic and painting their old room a bold and cheery gold,
complemented by a red-and-gold bedspread and curtains, as well as by a bright red piece of carpet that captured the spirit
of their Spanish-style furniture. It hadn’t taken Rita long to decide the attic wasn’t for her. That first arrangement was
scrapped after a night when Roy was out of town and Rita was trying to drift off to sleep. Suddenly, a book on the bookshelf
fell over. Rita was petrified.
What was that noise?
She was afraid to scream, afraid to do anything. She lay there hugging her pillow all night long.

Old houses, with their creaks and groans and gothic shadows, do have a way of playing tricks on your mind. I once lay awake
for hours in our big old house in Hazlehurst, convinced that the hooded figure in the far corner was Death and that, although
I could see
him
plainly, I would never again see morning.

All these years later, Roy Grimes can still take a sheet of tattersall drafting paper and sketch out a precise portrait of
the malaise that had overtaken the den. He shows me how time, conspiring against joists in the damp darkness beneath the subfloor,
eventually succeeded in shifting bricks in full sunlight outside the window, allowing rain to invade the wall. It’s a lesson
of life, taught by a house: Everything is connected. Joists had rotted, the floor had dropped, and the brick had kicked up.
Roy spent a good portion of his first months at 501 Holly crawling on his knees beneath the den, propping up the joists with
concrete blocks, firming up the sagging floor as far to the north edge of the house as he could go—which wasn’t quite far
enough.

He takes out another piece of paper and draws one slanted line, representing the angle of the terrain sloping from right to
left—north to south. Then he draws a horizontal line, representing the subfloor of the house. The lines intersect at the far
right. He explains that this house was actually built into this hill, and the contractor didn’t excavate completely on the
north side. There’s no room to crawl under there—which means you may have no idea if something
else
is crawling under there. A man had to come out and jack up the corner of the house in order to reset the row of tipped brick.

The garage was obviously on its last legs. Roy was afraid to park his Mustang in it, but more than that, he was afraid for
his children’s safety. Young boys love to explore musty car sheds, where old tools hang from bared ribs and boxes of potential
treasure loom in the half-light. After six months of worrying, Roy came to a decision: The garage had to go. He hired a crew
of high school boys, who came over wielding sledgehammers and testosterone. They probably would’ve paid Roy to
let
them do the job, though he paid them two hundred dollars instead. When it was over, Roy had dirt hauled in to fill the void
where the garage had been. With that area built up to the slant of the rest of the backyard, he blocked off the driveway with
railroad ties and a section of fence. He did away with the wooden gate between the garage and the back sidewalk. Finally,
in the spot where Jessie Armour’s servant’s quarters had stood, he poured a slab of concrete and put up a white prefab metal
shed from Sears.

Had Rita been watching this process from the downstairs back bedroom, she would’ve been careful not to get too close to the
window, which was about to fall out. Obviously, there had been movement in the floor and wall, and the entire window frame
was now cocked out at the top. Roy had to jack the windows, horizontally, back into place. Then he went in like a surgeon
and reattached the frame to the wooden skeleton inside the wall.

Throughout the house, the story was always the same—the ravages of time, combined with carelessness or neglect. The infrastructure
was crumbling. Tile in the upstairs shower had been painted over and was peeling. There was some problem with the plaster
in the corner bedroom upstairs—wallpaper wouldn’t stick to it, and they papered that room three times in the seven years they
were here. The kitchen was covered in what Rita says was “cheap paneling”—even the cabinets were made out of it. There were
no built-ins, and the stove was twenty years old. Roy had a carpenter come in and redo the kitchen. The man added cabinets,
plus a new stove and dishwasher in that buttery seventies yellow. There’s a photograph obviously taken by Rita—it’s of her
family posed before the new stove and range. Somehow, the aim of the photographer has shifted slightly, so that Roy, Scott,
Mark, and Lori are off center to the left, sharing the spotlight with the sparkling new range top.