If These Walls Had Ears (28 page)

FORREST
: The funniest thing I’ve ever known, they left here and built a big house over in the Heights. They were very wealthy people.
And they had a dog they loved, so they built a doghouse out there in the backyard. They heated it. And it
caught fire!

One Saturday tnorning, Sue noticed that something was wrong with Forrest. He was glum. She detected signs of crankiness. “What’s
the matter?” Sue said, glancing at her schedule to make sure they weren’t falling behind.

“Those lists,” Forrest said. “I hate those damned lists.” He said it with such pent-up conviction that she knew another change
was headed her way.

“We had to come to an understanding,” Sue says. The understanding was that they would take back their life.

Their final year here was the best. By that time, they had finished most of the messy work and could focus on the enjoyable
task of decorating. Having taken the upholstery class, they began keeping an eye out for old pieces of furniture they could
pick up for practically nothing. One such piece was a French Provincial sofa, which they covered in a chocolate brown suede
trimmed out in white. It was pure seventies—and they decorated the entire living and dining rooms around it.

The walls became a rich chocolaty brown, with the wood trim painted a dazzling white. The floors, which Forrest’s dad had
rewoven after removing the furnaces, had also been refinished a dark brown. “Mediterranean,” says Sue. “That was in then.”
In photos from the time, the living and dining areas look like rooms from a gingerbread house. Forrest and Sue’s dining table
was glass and chrome, and it stood on an imitation Oriental rug. Bentwood chairs, whose seats had been upholstered in a pale
plaid in tones of tan and white, completed the tableau. There was a shag rug in the conversation area of the living room.
Above the mantel, Sue hung a beveled mirror on the bias, the way a decorator would’ve done.

They painted the den a rich blue and the solarium a soft yellow-green, almost a chartreuse. Sue took great delight in wallpapering
the closet in that front room, knowing full well that such radical creativity would baffle her friends. When the women of
Sue’s book club first came to 501 Holly for a meeting, they were indeed amazed. “They had no idea how people lived in houses
like this,” Sue says. “They were used to the suburban three-bedroom ranch-style, with the fireplace in the corner and all
the paneling around.
We
were the wild ones.” When the other women went home to their houses with hollow doors, Sue sat back and smiled.

Toward the end, they did more porch sitting and felt less guilt about it—-even on Saturdays, which had once been ruled by
the tyranny of Sue’s lists. On one such day, Forrest and Sue were swinging on the porch, watching a violent thunderstorm.
It was the middle of the afternoon. The rain was coming down in sheets, and the thunder was crashing as though the gods were
making a point. Lightning slashed the sky. Suddenly, there was a tremendous noise, the front yard turned white, and the tulip
poplar tree split right down the middle.

SUE
: You could see where the lightning went. It dug a ditch up and down...

FORREST
: It went under the house, went into the electricity, came up in the den and ruined my stereo. It was very frightening....

The first time I spoke with Ed Kramer, I told him the Wolfes had
had
to cut down the tulip poplar tree. It didn’t seem to register. Then when I met him and he was railing about what kinds of
people would level a tree like that, I explained it to him again. This time he seemed to understand—and even to feel better.

I didn’t tell him everything, though. I just couldn’t bring myself to mention that, because the tree was on the arboreal equivalent
of the Historical Register, the Wolfes got to take a huge tax write-off that year.

Myke and Sue Landers in St. Louis in November 1979—the night they announced to family and friends that they were moving to
Little Rock to seek their fortune
.

May 1980  
  
March 1981

T
he 1980s, as we know them, actually began at the end of the previous decade. I remember assigning a magazine article in early
1979 about the new trend in condominiums. The writer turned in a prescient piece, perfectly capturing the fever of the go-go
market in which buyers were paying ever-higher prices to own a part of—well, a part of whatever condominiums were. The condo
craze didn’t seem to be about home; it was about money. I remember our illustration showed a skyscraper puffing up like a
giant balloon, just waiting for the inevitable pinprick.

That article reflected the Chicago influence on me—my image of home had always been a single-family house, and I was fascinated
by this other way of living. As it turned out, though, the writer’s words had resonance beyond the metropolitan centers. The
fever that had infected urban condo buyers was also boiling up in home seekers across the country. I guess it was a confluence
of factors. The so-called sixties generation had reached their mid-thirties; they had jobs and money and fancy cars, and the
next puzzle piece in their self-image was a place of their own. Plus, the steady climb in interest rates sparked some kind
of wild landgrab spirit in them—get
in before the rates rise. I’ve
often wondered what the social fallout from that time has been. I mean in terms of expectations, fears, and disappointments.
For a lot of people, this was their first house-buying experience.

The market was moving so fast in the late seventies and early eighties that strange, mutant chains were created. People were
making deals to get into houses any way they could, and sellers were carrying notes for buyers. That meant that when time
came for the buyers to move, the former sellers were still involved—sometimes many years later—in the process.

To me, it’s always intriguing to step back and observe how the stars fell into place, or didn’t. One second later on this
end, a moment earlier on that end—it’s a meditation on chance, fate, the bittersweet mystery of what might have been, especially
after the rhythm of life, so steady in the Armour and Murphree years, had become a staccato beat.

For example, one day, with no discussion beforehand, Sue Wolfe simply got into her car and drove off to look at other houses.
Later, when she told Forrest about it, he realized he was ready. He had a no-nonsense criterion for their next house: “I wanted
a place,” he says, “where I could vacuum the entire house without unplugging the vacuum.”

The Wolfes were beneficiaries of the real estate fever. In just four years, the market had changed to the point that they
could ask double what they had paid for their house. They had invested plenty in it, of course, but that wasn’t the determining
factor. Markets speak louder than sweat and tears. Forrest and Sue had rolled up their sleeves in the Bicentennial spirit
of renewal; now, in the prevailing mood of commerce, they were due a payday.

And the stars presented Myron Landers, a man who never would’ve bought this house had it not been for a peculiar series of
events that led to this moment.

Myron goes by the name of Myke, with a
y.
By the time Myke found his way to Little Rock. in the waning months of 1979, he was a thirty-year-old man who had labored
in his wife’s family scrap business in St. Louis for seven years. Now, finally; he was striking out on his own. He and two
partners had selected Little Rock as the place to launch their recycling company. They were pros; they had done their homework.
On paper, everything looked great. No wonder Myke was excited. Arriving in town a couple of months before his wife and two
young daughters, he shared an apartment in west Little Rock with one of the partners and buried himself in the exhilarating
details of creating something from scratch. In his head, he harbored the visions that every young entrepreneur has—of achieving
independence, of gaining respect, of being his own man.

But when his wife, Sue, came down for the whirlwind weekend home search, she brought along visions of her own. It’s possible
that her visions were more complicated than Myke’s, or at least more embellished—looping forward and back, outward and inward,
from childhood to adulthood, from fantasy to fact. In any case, I think it’s safe to say that his visions were influenced
more by hers than the other way around.

Sue says this house
called
her. The way she says it brings to mind images from the realm of myth—a
ship on a journey, choppy waters, a young woman at the bow, hair trailing in the wind, gown flowing, her hand shielding her
eyes as she scans the horizon for her destiny. Then, from the porch at 501 Holly, the siren song.

The Landerses bought the house from the Wolfes for $72,500. Sue Wolfe remembers they seemed in a rush, and that they got in
just as interest rates were edging into double digits. They took a mortgage with Savers Federal Savings & Loan. But they were
still a little short, so Forrest and Sue agreed to a bit of creative financing, carrying a note for a second mortgage. That
in turn left the Wolfes a little short, so the people whose house they were buying also had to carry a note for
them.

It wasn’t as clean as everybody would’ve liked, but that was the new way. You had to join the chain if you wanted to break
free.

There is a photograph, as there almost always is. Once again, those who know the subjects look at this frozen moment and invest
it with whatever truth they wanted it to capture. To Myke and Sue, born three months apart in the same Jewish hospital, this
is a picture of the two of them celebrating their joint thirtieth birthday with a cake made to look like a football field.
The month is November, the year 1979. It’s also the night they announced to their family and friends that they were leaving
St. Louis to seek their fortune in Little Rock.

I took an oil-painting course a few years ago, the first such course I’d taken since high school. The instructor talked about
how most of us don’t really see things. We look, and we see what we expect to see. But we don’t see the nuances, the interactions,
the gradations. I’ve tried to train myself to see better. Looking now at this photograph of Myke and Sue, I can’t say for
certain what I would see if I didn’t already know their story. But where Sue, even today, sees a happy moment, I see a heavyset
man and a thin woman on either side of a table, a man in jeans and western shirt and a woman in disco clothes, and a cake
in the shape of a contest.

Myke would leave for Little Rock soon after this photograph was taken, and Sue would follow five months later. Now, after
fifteen years and all they’ve been through, when they each sit down to tell the story of what they thought they were doing
in Little Rock, the result is two stories, two agendas. It’s hard to know exactly which feelings existed then and which have
been clarified by the filter of time. But what’s obvious is that these stories, intersecting at points and then veering this
way and that in wildly different directions, form a diagram of a marriage. Maybe houses, like airports and office buildings,
should be rigged with an X ray at the door, with a glowing monitor that tracks the shape and weight of the baggage being carried
over the threshold.

For Sue, her brief time at 501 Holly—ten months—was a turning point in her life. Even as she was living it, she had an inkling
that it might be. The problem was, she could feel her plan moving in the wrong direction. Sue fully admits she married a concept,
not a man. I suppose it’s not unusual for a young woman to look for a husband who reminds her of her father; it does seem
rare, however, to recognize that fact so clearly and still push ahead with such resolve. Sue’s dad always said he’d gone about
as far as a poor Jewish boy could go. He’d been raised in a rural area outside St. Louis. Trained as a lawyer, he’d become
an assistant prosecuting attorney in his early days. But at the time he reminisced to his five children about his upbringing,
he was a wealthy, successful businessman, having gone to work for his father-in-law in the scrap-paper industry. The company
had prospered, becoming a multimillion-dollar international firm. Now Sue’s dad was a leader in the community, the first Jewish
president of the city’s athletic club. He was popular, a man’s man. “He was a great gin rummy player, a great golfer,” Sue
recalls. “He had all the right attributes.”