If These Walls Had Ears (33 page)

A vivacious blonde twelve years Jack’s junior, Donna was bold and outgoing in her touch: They ripped out the old kitchen (finally!)
and started over, and when it was done the kitchen was green, with green paisley wallpaper on the walls and ceiling. Donna
covered the downstairs bathroom in a pink floral-print fabric, and it was padded. The shower curtain was made of the same
material. The upstairs bath was padded fabric, too, as was the big bedroom across the hall. Green, lots of green. My stepdaughter
Blair remembers that one downstairs room had green shamrock wallpaper, which Blair wanted to keep because her birthday is
March 17.

Jack doesn’t spend a lot of time pondering the finer points of decorating. “I don’t really care,” he says. “That was Donna’s
deal. Donna has two sisters, and all three are into decorating. They really work the flea markets hard. The sisters are into
what color is in now, and what’s out. Donna got into greens. And our house was green.”

Burglars seemed to see it that way, too. I don’t know how thieves choose a target, but maybe it has something to do with telltale
electronics boxes stacked by the curb—and access, of course. The Burneys provided both. They were cleaned out twice—burglarized,
looted, once while they were out buying even
more
things. It was just before Christmas that first year. They came home from shopping to find all the Christmas gifts gone,
as well as the TVs and stereos and VCRs. Another time, after a weekend at their condo in Hot Springs, they returned to the
same sickening scene. There was no tall fence around the backyard in those days, and thieves could kick in the back door and
empty the house under cover of a thick tangle of trees. After the second burglary, Jack had a wooden fence built, with a heavy
wooden gate. That stopped the problem.

And so the party roared on. Throughout the eighties, the Burney house was a magnet for people. Maybe the energy emanated from
all those electronic gadgets, but whatever its source, the result was palpable—LaughMan, EatMan, DrinkMan, DanceMan,
Party
Man
.
Donna had causes—one year she was president of the Advocates for Battered Women (“Had nothing to do with me,” Jack says with
a salesman’s nudge), and they held fund-raisers here. Donna, who loved to cook, invited her company’s executive staff for
elegant Christmas fetes.

This house was the after-school hub for most of daughter Andi’s friends, and even though Jack’s children—Butch, Brad, and
Bitsi— didn’t live with their dad, when Brad ran for president of his senior class, Jack and Donna threw banner-painting parties
here several nights a week. Andi and Bitsi were the same age and in the same grade, and all their friends were invited here
to breakfast after their senior prom. The breakfast was supposed to be outside, but that night it rained. About 1:00
A.M.
, hundreds of inebriated teenagers showed up, and Jack and Donna took them in. The kids sprawled all over the house in their
hot pink taffeta and pastel tuxes, wet mud caking their
peau de soie
heels and rented patent-leather pumps, not to mention the house itself. The house was a wreck the next day, but everybody
had a good time—including Jack and Donna.

There was even a wedding here once. In January 1982, four months after the Burneys moved in, Jack’s old roommate during his
bachelor days decided he was going to get married. He asked if he could say his vows in this homey house, in the living room,
in front of the fireplace.

It’s very hard to find home alone. When Jack married Donna, he’d become weary of the single life. He likes marriage, he says.
But then you get the other side of the coin: Marriage requires putting up with other people. Remarriage means even
more
people who fall into that category. Next thing you know, married people start thinking they’d feel at home if only they were
single.

Jack says that if he and his first wife had had three sons, there wouldn’t have been a problem. As it was, they had two sons
and a daughter. In junior high, Bitsi and Andi didn’t go to the same school. But by the fall of 1984, both were tenth graders
at Central High. The way Jack tells it, the girls competed for everything, and their mothers monitored the contest like a
pair of peckish hens. You can guess where Jack stood in all of this.

“The two mothers were the problems,” Jack tells me. “Not the daughters. You understand that?”

“Yeah,” I say, “I do.”

If one daughter made cheerleader, the other had to make it, or there was hell to pay. If Jack bought one daughter a car, he
had to buy the other a car, too—and it had to be just as
good
a car, or there was hell to pay. If Jack gave one daughter a credit card—as he did—then he had to give the other one a credit
card, and that was
really
hell to pay.

Cotillion was vitally important to the girls’ mothers. The lady who ran the program in those days, a Mrs. Butts, ruled with
an iron hand. You had to pass muster to get in. Boys hated it; girls and their mothers loved it. One way for a girl to get
in was to have an older brother who’d been in cotillion. So Jack forced Brad to pave the way for Bitsi. Bitsi got in, but
when they submitted an application for Andi, she was turned down. “Donna wasn’t happy about that,” Jack says.

One day, Jack was flying home after doing business in Atlanta, and a woman sat down in the seat next to him. She looked to
be in her sixties. When the flight attendants pushed out the beverage cart, Jack asked the lady if he could buy her a drink.
She accepted a glass of wine and he ordered a beer. They talked awhile, and Jack bought her another drink, and they talked
awhile longer.

Finally, he introduced himself. The lady turned out to be Mrs. Butts. “Mrs.
Butts,
” Jack said, “I’m so glad to get to visit with you. I’ve got a real problem.” When he got home, they resubmitted Andi’s application.
Donna was very pleased with the outcome.

The porch was where Jack usually went to work out his problems. He recalls sitting out there a lot, especially during the
mid-eighties. He sold his half of his business to his partner about then, and for a while he didn’t do anything. “It was the
most boring time in my life,” he recalls.

One day, he was just sitting on the porch, pondering his life, when he was interrupted from his reveries by a voice. There
was a man standing down by the curb. Jack didn’t know him. “Would you mind,” the man was saying, “if I came up and sat on
that porch with you?” Jack said no, come on. So the man did. They talked for a long time. “I’ve been walking past this house
for years,” the man said, “and I’ve
always
wanted to sit on this front porch.”

The problem for Jack is, the porch became synonymous with trouble, with bad times. I should have brass plaques made up:
This is where Siggy lost his finger,
on the door to the kitchen.
This is where Ruth’s heart was broken,
in the middle room.
This is where Sue and Myke’s marriage is buried,
on the front room floor. Forjack, I would affix the plaque to the porch:
This is where a Burney tradition ended.

It was on the porch that Brad told his father he wasn’t pledging Sigma Chi.

You may think this is frivolous, but Jack Burney is a man for whom such things still matter deeply. His older son, Butch—Jack
junior—had decided not to go to college. Butch, in his father’s words, was “a holy terror” as a child. “You name it, he did
it,” Jack says. In Butch’s young teenage days, the Vietnam War was still going on. “It was the era of the hawks and the chickens,”
Jack recalls. “He was into the long hair and everything. I was a hawk. I couldn’t believe anybody didn’t want to go to Vietnam.
I’ve changed a lot since then. But Butch would fight everything I believed in. He did a lot just to aggravate me.”

Butch was so notorious that when the younger kids got to Central and people asked if they were kin to Butch Burney, it was
just easier to lie.

He was a musician, an artist, and after high school he decided he wanted to go to Hollywood and become an actor. Jack pulled
strings and got him into Lee Strasberg’s acting school. So Butch went west. He appeared in one episode of
Happy Days
and in a few plays, but, says Jack, he was just so immature that he didn’t take advantage of the opportunity.

“So he came home and worked for me. For a few years, he gave me lessons five hours a day. He preached to me. Then he got married,
and his life changed.”

With Butch, Jack hadn’t had the chance to pass along the tradition. Brad, on the other hand, was the perfect son—never got
in trouble, made good grades, was class president. Jack refers to Brad as “Mr. Do-Right,” and it was only after listening
to the tape later that I got the feeling there was a slight jab inherent in that nickname.

“I was a Sigma Chi,” Jack says again. “President of the Sigma Chi alums. True-blue Sigma Chi. Donna, not growing up here and
not going to the university, she really didn’t understand that. And so when Brad went through rush, I stayed out of it. He
knew how I felt, but I stayed out of it. He came and talked to Donna about it, and she told him, ‘You do what you think is
best. Your father will understand.’ But it’s a guy thing. And so he came and told me one day that he had accepted Phi Delt.
It was a real disappointment. Took me a year to get over it.

“It happened right out here on the porch.”

The house itself was hard on Jack. And to be perfectly honest, he was a little hard on it, too.

He’s the first to admit he’s not a handyman. Two or three times, he fell down the Lee Street hill while mowing the lawn. That
in itself doesn’t make a person unhandy, though you might have a hard time convincing anyone who was watching. But Jack’s
problem seemed to be this: As a handyman, he was a salesman. He wanted the best deal, not the best job. “I’m always trying
to find somebody to do something,” he says, “always cutting corners on it, and it’s always the wrong thing to do type deal.”

There was a time in this house’s life when all the upstairs windows rolled open and every window had a screen. When Beth and
I moved in, we had ten of the window frames repaired and repainted and new screens put in; I think that job cost two thousand
dollars. We no longer have that kind of money for such details, so even today there are several windows upstairs that have
no screens. Fortunately, most of them don’t open, either, since Jack’s antidote to Andi’s and Bitsi’s nocturnal adventuring
was to paint the windows shut and cut the tree they would shimmy down.

But when the Burneys were first here, the windows would open, and they had screens. The problem was, the windows needed painting.
Real painters cost a lot of money, so Jack came up with a better way. “I had these two friends of mine, guys I had met at
the Instant Replay, where I used to hang out before I got married. Big group of us would go down there on Thursday nights
and we’d pick the high school football games. These two friends were kind of halfway unemployed most of the time. Good beer
drinkers, worked part-time.”

Jack and his sons, Butch and Brad. The Burneys threw a lot of Razorback parties in that side yard
.

Jack hired these two fellows to paint his house.

On the back porch, where Jessie Armour slept during the war years, Jack had a refrigerator that was only for beer. He doesn’t
drink anything else, but he
loves
beer, and he makes certain that he never runs out. That’s why he kept this refrigerator. Like a separate telephone line for
the fax, this was a dedicated fridge.

On the day the two painters showed up to start the job, Jack began a certain ritual. Every morning before he left for the
office, he would take four to six beers out of the beer refrigerator and put them in the regular kitchen refrigerator. “Boys,”
he told his buddies that first day, “there’s some beer in the refrigerator. Whenever you get through each day, go on in there
and get you a beer.”

One day he forgot. When Andi got home from school, the painters were upset. “Andi,” they said, “your daddy doesn’t have any
beer in here today. He forgot to buy beer.”

“No way,” said Andi. “He’s
always
got beer.” And she showed them the stash, which they proceeded to clean out.

Jack didn’t see them for several days after that. When they came back, he forgave them. Soon they progressed to the point
of taking the screen frames off and removing the screens. They were going to repaint the frames and rescreen them. But in
the middle of that job, they came to Jack saying they needed money to buy new screens. On the way to get them, they stopped
off to pick up a little beer. Then the police pulled them over and ticketed them for DWI. Jack never saw the screens and never
got his money back. And that was the end of his drinking buddies’ painting, because Donna fired them.

He tells me that story by way of explaining all those empty frames stacked up in my shed.

The Burneys actually had to finish the job of painting the house themselves. When it came time to sell, they decided the house
looked too dark sitting up on this hill half hidden by trees. It looked like a place Boo Radley might live in. What if we
painted it? they thought. Not just the woodwork but the brick, too?