If These Walls Had Ears (23 page)

To Ed Kramer, a boy from Brooklyn, a tree was a precious thing’especially the towering tulip tree, at right in this picture
.

1973  
  
1976

I
t rained hard last night. We knew it was coming because the TV station kept a small boxed picture of the state in the lower
left corner of the screen throughout the evening. All the counties in Arkansas were shown, and as the storm overtook a county,
the color of that county went from white to red. The rain reached us early, but not the real storm. That would probably hit
while we were sleeping. Before I went to bed, I walked through the house, checking windows, securing doors, making sure the
skylight was shut tight. I turned out the lights—and then, for just a moment, I stood in the kitchen in the dark, looking
out at the yard, watching the tree branches sway in that ominous way they do, like horses sensing snakes.

I couldn’t sleep. As I lay there listening to the patter on the roof, the image of young Mark Grimes came to mind. His childhood
fear of rain is fascinating to me. It’s almost as though he was prescient about the lethal mix of houses and water—of how
truly
vulnerable
a house is to nature. We build houses to protect us from nature’s Darwinian ways, and as soon as the house is completed,
the assault begins. Animals probe until they find a weakness. When they do, I go to my Rolodex and look up the phone number
of my urban trapper, a strange man who comes and captures the beasts and, whenever possible, takes them back to the wild.
He has rid this house of squirrels and raccoons, and at my previous Little Rock house he snared—with peanut butter and vanilla
wafers left in a cage—a succession of opossum. Practicing a wilderness art in an urban environment, he comes across as a Hollywood
high concept—Natty Bumppo meets Sherlock Holmes. I once went with him up on the roof of this house. He pointed to some slick-looking
yellow seeds in the crease where two angles of the roof come together. “Raccoon droppings,” he said. I’ve forgotten what the
creatures had been sitting on my roof eating and eliminating, but I was impressed nevertheless. When we reached the spot where
the upstairs section of the house meets the original roofline, the trapper squinted his eyes and reached over and picked up
a microscopic hair between his thumb and forefinger. He held it up, as though studying it under Sherlock’s magnifying glass.
Then he cut his eyes at me. “See that?” he said. I nodded.

“Flying squirrel,” he said proudly.

Animals are easy, though. At least you can hear them. Water is an opponent from a
Terminator
movie—it slinks and slips and runs and hides. It rises from the earth and falls from the sky. It
morphs—
sometimes as brooding pools dooming joists in the dark, other times as arrogant hail tap-dancing on rooftops. It freezes in
pipes and explodes into rooms. Water and houses are a dialogue about uncertainty. In the natural world, water is good—it’s
the source of life. In the spiritual world, too—at Billie Murphree’s Baptist church, once-lost souls were regularly submerged
in water to be saved for eternity. But water is death to a house.

The most frightening moments I’ve ever had in houses have been because of water. In Chicago, my wife and I once came home
from a vacation and found our basement flooded. The water was deep and dirty, and I half-expected to find a body floating
in it. In Beth’s and my early months in this house, we had water problems. The bathroom floor had to be replaced when we moved
in—rotted joists again, just as in the Murphrees’ day. And we had a house-guest one rainy night who, at breakfast the next
morning, casually mentioned that we might want to check the roof. I went upstairs and there was a huge stain on the bedroom
ceiling. Water was dripping from the ceiling fan.

Another time, just after we had spent thousands to have most of the downstairs painted, Beth and 1 were sitting in the living
room having a drink when I suddenly noticed a small bulge in the beautiful terra-cotta paint above the mantel. It soon began
to move, a sag on the run, drooping down the wall in a narrow track. Imagine looking in the mirror one morning and seeing
a puffiness under your eye and then staring in horror as the puffiness built up and sagged more, gathered steam and ran like
a bloated blister all the way to your chin. That’s what sitting in the living room watching the paint sag was like for me.

Another rainy night, I heard Beth screaming for me to come upstairs. I got to Blair’s room, and Beth pointed me to the large
cedar closet. Water was
pouring
in along the line where the wall meets the ceiling. It was a veritable waterfall. We ran and got stacks of towels, and I
spent hours holding the towels against the ceiling while Beth carried Blair’s clothes into the bedroom amid piled them on
the bed. Finally, thankfully, the rain let up.

Most of those leaks were in the almost-flat roof in the added-on part of the house, and we’ve had that roof fixed. The leak
over the mantel started around the chimney, for which the remedy was new flashing.

But despite our repairs, I maintain a low-level anxiety about the roof, the way Billie Murphree did about the water under
the house. One night about a year ago, I awoke to what I thought was the sound of rain. Rain hadn’t been predicted. I got
up and looked out the front window—no rain in sight. I went back to bed, but I kept hearing the sound of rain on the driveway:
a constant spatter, like bacon frying. By this time, I was a little more awake. I looked out the Geranium Room window—nothing.
Then I went into the kitchen. The rain was louder. When I flipped on the light, I saw that the rain was flowing from the ceiling
in the back porch/pantry, the area where Jessie Armour had slept during the war years. God, I thought, it’s leaking this hard
through two floors. For a brief moment, I considered ending my life with a kitchen knife—the homeowner’s battle with nature
inevitably raises the ancient fight-or-flight dilemma, and after a while you get so
tired.
But the problem turned out not to be another roof leak. The hose on the washing machine had burst and water had been shooting
out all over the room, spurting as high as the ceiling. It was a mess, but I was actually relieved.

Then four months ago, the washing machine started dancing during the spin cycle. We found that the floor had rotted—the vertical
overflow pipe, or whatever you call it, had become clogged and water was slipping over the top and running invisibly down
the pipe to hide in the soft wood. A few more dirty clothes and the washer would’ve fallen through the porch floor.

All of which is why, on nights when driving rainstorms are predicted, I’m a little nervous. Last night’s storm came at 4:30
in the morning. I awoke to the sound of wind howling. But there was an ominous noise inside the house, too—somewhere upstairs,
a door or a window was pounding. I got up and went to look. One of the old casement windows in the hall had sprung open. There
was water on the floor, and even a few twigs that had slipped in under the screen. Of course, I couldn’t find the
thing—
the tool we use to open and close those windows. I lifted the screen and, holding it with my back, manipulated the mechanism
on the window and pulled it almost shut. I made another round of the house and then went back to bed. None of my girls had
even rolled over.

The storm lasted about an hour. This morning when I took Bret to school, I was shocked at the, damage—huge oak trees were
down, some snapped in two. A block from our house, an uprooted tree lay across the street. Traffic had to detour. The morning
seemed eerily quiet to me—quiet, but not necessarily peaceful: The battle is always joined; nature is always pressing. But
water is the most persistent challenger of all.
Water wants
in—that’s a basic fact of the life of a house. And once in, water flays open the house to other intruders.

Apparently, that had been happening in this house since the time of the Murphrees.

“I must tell you, I could’ve killed the Grimeses.” Those were very nearly the first words Ed Kramer said to me when I first
spoke with him, by phone, a couple of years ago. I hadn’t met him at the time, and in fact I wondered later if I would like
him. He struck me as a man quick to blame and slow to forget—twenty years after the fact, he still felt passionately that
the Grimeses hadn’t been forthcoming about the problems with the house. He was also angry at the people who came
after
him, Forrest and Sue Wolfe, because they cut down the tulip poplar tree. “I don’t know
what
the hell,” Ed grumbled, disgustedly, about the Wolfes. “Their aesthetics are just different from those of anyone I know.”

At which point his wife,, Sheri, piped in from the other phone: “They had like nine or ten cats, too.”

One of the great joys of owning a home is telling horror stories about the former owners—and then, after you’ve sold the house,
driving slowly by and being offended at what the next people have done to it. If you really love a place, you’ll feel a pang
of possessiveness forever. It’s like hearing that an old flame—even one you had grown to hate—has married, You want, to feel
superior to the new suitor, no matter how many digs you have to get in to do it. Joyce Murphree—now Joyce Stroud—walked through
501 Holly once when the Burneys had the house on the market, but before I bought it. At the time, she hadn’t been inside this
house in twenty-three years. When I met Joyce, she tried to convey the shock she had felt. “Every room in the house was”—she
wrinkled her nose distastefully at this point—“green.”

“I
know,”
I said, sounding every bit the catty girlfriend.

Since I’ve been writing this book, I’ve collected photographs from the various owners, showing how the house looked at different
times in the past. At supper, I’ll hold each picture up in turn, asking Beth, Blair, and Bret to “name that room.” It’s amazing
how much paint or wallpaper or other people’s furnishings can all but obscure these rooms we live in day to day. And of course,
no matter how attractive the rooms look in the photographs, we think the way
we’ve
decorated them is better than the way the other owners did. It would be sad if we didn’t feel that way.

But it’s best not to let on about it.

It’s particularly revealing, I think, that Donna Burney is the only former owner who has refused to meet with me for this
book. Although Jack Burney says this is not the case, I suspect it’s because when Beth and I bought the house, Donna found
out through the Realtor that we weren’t going to keep her pretty-but-too-fussy-for-our-taste floral shower curtain, the one
that matched the padded floral fabric she had installed on the walls of the pink-and-black bathroom. Donna contacted me through
the Realtor and asked if she could have the shower curtain, and I was happy to oblige. Since I wasn’t going to be home, I
folded it up and left it for her on the front porch. I think now that maybe that seemed insensitive—that if I wasn’t going
to lie and say I loved it, I could’ve arranged to hand it to her in person, or at least to have packaged it with a little
more respect. That’s part of what’s fascinating about houses—fascinating in the way that land mines are fascinating. There’s
nothing about them, not even the blandest beige paint, that isn’t wired to a powder keg of ego stored
somewhere.

Most of that is just the silliness of human nature—we’re curious, we’re competitive, we’re insecure, and we get our feelings
hurt. We act like children. We tear others down to build ourselves up.

But there’s something more important that we do with houses. Maybe we unwittingly fool ourselves, or maybe—because houses
are such a personal reflection of who we are or want to be—we bend memory to corroborate a truth we can live with. Inevitably,
a house looked terrible when we moved in, yet looked just fine when we moved out. But take that pattern from one owner to
the next, and it doesn’t hold up.

Ruth Murphree says this house was in good shape when she and Billie left here; Roy Grimes says he was surprised that the Murphrees
could live in a house that looked the way this one did. Roy says he fixed that back-bedroom window that was falling out; the
Kramers imply that when they moved in, it was practically hanging by a thread. Forrest arid Sue Wolfe say that when they bought,
there were huge, fist-size gaps in the living room plaster; the Kramers’ mouths drop open at the very suggestion.

I’ve learned, I hope, not to judge anybody for anything they’ve done to or in a house. Oh, I’m riot so noble: I grouse about
them, and I curse them—I think you sell the rights to take your name in vain whenever you sell someone a house. But even as
I’m cursing, I
understand.
An old editor friend of mine keeps a needlepoint pillow on the couch in his office: “Life is tough,” the saying on it goes,
“and then you die.” I think the pillow’s message might well be amended to read, “Life is tough—and then you become a homeowner.”
That’s why I found Jack Burney’s candor so endearing the first time I interviewed him for this book. “I’m not handy,” said
the man who sold me this house, “and I did everything I could to cut corners and save money.”