If These Walls Had Ears (25 page)

They kept their memories in other ways, too. On weekends, Ed would turn on the tape recorder in the living room while the
family gathered around him on the floor. Picking out something like “Froggy Went A-Courtin’ “ on his guitar, Ed would try
to get Siggy to sing along. One of their tapes has Ed and Sheri coaxing and cajoling, but Siggy won’t sing a note. Finally,
Sheri begins to sing and Sig immediately throws a tantrum. Next thing you know, he’s warbling along with his father on “Yes
Sir, That’s My Baby,” Sig taking the “do-wacka-do-wacka-do” part all by himself.

Sheri says she sang a lot in this house. She loved the way her voice reverberated through the rooms. Today, she protests that
she smoked for too many years to sing well now, but on the tapes you can hear her, a crystal-clear coloratura soprano, singing
a lilting harmony in the background, all the way from the kitchen maybe, while Ed and Sig croon into the mike in the living
room.

But after the episode with the bathroom wall, minor chords began to sound in the singing at 501 Holly. Sheri started noticing
herself feeling tired a lot. It was true she had had two C-sections in fifteen months, and now she had two babies to take
care of, but this weariness felt somehow elemental. She was exhausted to her core. The money was a worry, of course, but that
wasn’t all that was on her mind. She couldn’t shake the specter of the cancer that had brought her back home in the first
place. Her grandmother had already died, and her aunt would die while Sheri was still in this house. What about her mother?

And what about her
own
inexplicable tiredness?

She was too tired even to sleep. She found herself channeling her worry into an obsession about the house, specifically on
the cracks in the stairwell plaster. Late at night, after everyone else had gone to bed, Sheri would set up a stepladder on
the stairs, balancing precariously, and she would slather spackling compound into the cracks. They never seemed to get filled.
No matter how much compound she knifed in, the house would consume it, and still be ready for more.

One fall, probably their second in the house, Sheri called the gas company to come turn on the gas for the floor furnaces.
The man who came out took one look and said he was sorry but that he wouldn’t be able to turn on the gas—the exhaust pipe
from the floor furnace didn’t meet current code, which decreed that such exhaust had to have at least a twelve-foot clearance
of the roof. The one at 501 Holly was barely two feet above the roof. That meant, the man said, that carbon monoxide had probably
been blowing back into the house for years. Thank God the upstairs windows wouldn’t shut completely, Sheri says.

The cost of bringing the twenty-five-year-old floor furnaces up to code was prohibitive, so the only answer was a new central
heating system. Sheri and Ed had Sears come out. The man recommended putting the new furnace in the closet in the back bedroom.

It all made Sheri even more weary. She became increasingly angry at Ed, resenting his absence, begrudging his arty little
life by day and his selfish retreats at night. They had no money—the repairs had devoured Ed’s inheritance the way the wall
swallowed spackle—and Ed didn’t make enough to save anything.

With Sheri not working, it soon became obvious that Ed would have to give up this job he loved and find one that paid enough
money to relieve some of the pressure at home.

For a child, one of the great pleasures of any house is in what my family called “meddling.” I did a lot of meddling when
I was young. We would go to visit my aunt Gusta and uncle Wib in Tupelo, and, while the grown-ups were talking in the living
room, I would wander off into the back of the house, where no one could see me. My aunt and uncle had a fascinating dresser
that sat back into an alcove between the hall and their bedroom. This dresser had a few big drawers containing boring clothes,
but it also had a number of smaller drawers at the top. Inside those drawers, a meddler could find cuff links, old coins,
political buttons, photographs, exotic fountain pens, you name it. That was part of the fun, the imminence of discovery. Not
to mention the voyeurism, the private peeking into secret lives.

I eventually got caught, of course, but not in the way you might imagine. I was at my aunt May’s and uncle Alex’s house in
Hazlehurst, and I was old enough to know better—a teenager, as I recall. Upstairs at May’s, there’s a room that used to be
an attic, but which she finished off once she began having grandchildren. That room became known as “the dormitory.” There
was a chest of drawers up there that I was particularly attracted to. Part of the attraction was a number of small boxes tucked
away in the upper drawers. Usually, they contained pieces of May’s costume jewelry, and I seem to recall once finding one
of my uncle’s old fraternity pins. On this particular afternoon, absorbed in my meddling, 1 picked up a curious little white
box. I shook it, then shook it again. Then I slowly lifted off the
lid—only to find my uncle’s glass eye staring hack at me!
Alex had lost one of his eyes playing tennis back in the twenties, arid I guess he kept an extra just in case. But I felt
caught, as though that unbound eye had seen right through me.

I always think of that story when I think of Siggy and the pistol.

In late 1975, Ed had made the necessary career change. He had given up his beloved theater to become part of the state bureaucracy—though,
for a government job, it did have a degree of glamour. His title was Director of Information and Education for the Governor’s
Highway Safety Program. With the title came a badge emblazoned
OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR
. Ed says he decided that a man with
a badge ought to have a gun to go with it. Sheri hastens to add that he’s joking—that a series of rapes had Hillcrest homeowners
nervous—but I sense that he isn’t entirely facetious. “I was fraternizing with people who carry guns,” Ed recalls, “so I bought
one, too. It was a Smith
8c
Wesson .38 Chief Special.”

Siggy was three years old when the gun episode occurred. Ed and Sheri were downstairs in the living room, and they thought
both Alicia and Sig were asleep upstairs. Suddenly, Ed heard a noise. When he got up to look, he found Siggy at the top of
the stairs in his little back-flap pajamas, and he was laughing and waving Ed’s loaded pistol like a drunken cowboy.

Ed always kept the pistol in its holster on top of an armoire in his and Sheri’s bedroom upstairs. Either Sig had known the
gun was on the armoire or he had been meddling and found it. How he climbed up to get it, Ed couldn’t fathom, but that wasn’t
the most important problem at the moment. For the next five minutes or so, Ed played the role of police negotiator, gently
trying to persuade his son to give up his weapon. “What you got, honey?” Ed cooed. “Show Daddy what you have in your hand.”
Sig, enjoying the spotlight, played his own role to the hilt, doing everything but calling for the media.

In the end, Ed managed to close the distance between them without startling his son, and what could’ve been the worst episode
of their time at 501 Holly was averted. As it turned out, that honor was reserved for something that happened not at the top
of the stairs but at the bottom.

Ed was standing in the dining room, looking into the mirror over the piano bar, tying his tie for work. In his peripheral
vision, he saw Sheri come downstairs and turn left to go to the kitchen. She was angry. He heard a door slam on the other
side of the wall—he
saw
the slam, shaking his very image in the mirror. But the moment the door slammed, that sound was drowned out by a bloodcurdling
scream that wouldn’t stop.

Dashing into the hall, Ed found Siggy on the floor, wailing and holding his right hand, which was covered with blood. Sheri
threw open the kitchen door and was in tears herself as she and Ed tried to get Siggy to let them see. When they finally got
a glimpse of his hand, they saw that the end of his little finger was missing.

Ed had the presence of mind to find the finger and wrap it in ice before running to the car and speeding Siggy to the hospital.
The doctors sewed the tip of the finger back on, but it didn’t take. Six weeks later, the finger was turning black.

Soon afterward, they decided to move—accepting, finally, that the longer they stayed here. the less whole this house would
leave them.

Forrest and Sue Wolfe rescued 501 Holly, but they also paid price—years of living like this. They scraped ten layers of paint
off this den woodwork
.

1976  
  
1980

A
friend of mine says his idea of home is a place where the only hand tool he needs is a telephone. The older I get, the more
I agree with him.

And yet, here I am, living in a seventy-two-year-old house in which things break or rot or give or snap or wear out all the
time. It’s happening somewhere around me right this minute, and I don’t even know it. All I know is that if your manhood is
tied to being handy, a house will show you no mercy. One of the first times I cried as an adult was the result of trying to
fix a bathroom leak. Even after that shameful moment—for
years
after it, in fact—I maintained the facade, even to myself. Now, for various reasons, I feel close to uttering the words the
house so obviously wants to hear: I’m not handy. I’m so unhandy that even my
toolbox
is broken.

It’s part of the perversity of these old houses that they have the power to attract people like me—or like Ed Kramer, for
that matter. Old houses
look,
like home to us. They appeal not to our practical side but to whatever romantic part of us traffics in hopes and dreams,
or wallows in nostalgia. They’re flirts, old houses. They get painted up real pretty—the way this house was when I first saw
it—and they show off a lot of front porch and invite you in for a little French dooring, and the next thing you know, they’ve
snared another sucker. Of all the men who’ve lived here, probably Roy Grimes knew the most about fulfilling the requirements
of a house like this. Or maybe Forrest Wolfe.

Me, I’m just a sugar daddy: I write checks.

Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about this business of being handy. I’ve come to believe it’s as much a matter of attitude
as aptitude. I used to think I had both, and to a certain extent, I did. In my lifetime in houses, I’ve wallpapered, painted
(both inside and out), laid linoleum, put down tile, grouted, stripped layers of paint off a staircase and mantel, installed
rheostats, built shelves, put on a new roof, built a driveway, stripped wallpaper, ripped up layers of flooring, used an auger
to dig postholes for a new fence, put up a cork wall, installed a bathroom vanity, packed faucets to repair leaks, fixed shutters,
reglazed windows, planted bushes and trees, and, of course, mowed hundreds of miles of lawns. I’m sure there are jobs I’ve
forgotten—I’ve spackled and plastic wooded, screwed and drilled and hammered. Some jobs I did better than others, but all
of them I felt reasonably competent to do. After all, was I not my father’s son?

The shadows of our parents fall long across our houses. My father could seemingly do anything when I was growing up. One Saturday
morning in Miami, lie rousted me out of bed—my Saturdays before noon always belonged to him—and as I was trying to clear the
sleep from my head, he said, “Get up, Jim—we’re going to put a new roof on your room today.” Sure enough, in an hour or so
I could stand in my bedroom and see the sky. On this particular Saturday, my dad and I ripped out and replaced the rotten
beams, hammered down new wood, and then covered the once-afflicted spot with the requisite layers of heavy rolled tar paper
and great gobs of tar.

Another time, my father decided he needed to repair the ceiling in the living room. This was one time I thought he wouldn’t
pull it off—Mother was due to have a bridge party, but something like that never stopped Dad. When he got it in his mind to
do something, he just did it. While Mother was nervously planning her table seatings, Dad was on a ladder, knocking great
chunks of the ceiling down onto the living room carpet. To the best of my memory, he managed to slap plaster in the hole and
give it a few decorative twists with the trowel before Mother’s guests arrived. Of course, the huge spot on the ceiling was
wet and unpainted and couldn’t be missed by anyone stepping inside the door. Why would my father have chosen that moment to
take on that job? I’ve pondered that a lot. Maybe he felt that a mess of
commission
reflected better on him than a mess of
omission.
I’ve caught myself thinking that way. Company coining is one of the most powerful incentives to getting house chores done.