If These Walls Had Ears (27 page)

FORREST
: Compulsive...

SUE
:
Compulsive.
My mother makes
me
look laid-back. And she would come in, and one of the things she’d always say was, “Now, Sudie, all you need to do is…” And
I swear, I could’ve
killed
her. That’s how I put myself to sleep at night, thinking of torturous ways to get
rid
of that old woman....

The first thing they did was establish their limits. For phase one, they planned to focus on the large living/dining area,
the front room, which they called the solarium, and the den. In those rooms, their goal was to repair the plaster in walls
and ceilings and to strip the half-century worth of paint back down to the bare wood. Like the Kramers, they shut off the
downstairs back bedroom, using it for storage. They planned to do no work in the kitchen, even though they hated how it looked.
Other than what the Grimeses had taken away, the kitchen was still covered—walls and cabinets alike—in the paneling Ruth Murphree
had installed after the fire in 1958. Upstairs, only the shower was part of their plan—though, once they really delved into
that bathroom, they had to revise their thinking. They also planned to take up the rotting wall-to-wall carpet, remove the
floor furnaces and reweave the floors, and then sand, stain, and refinish the hardwood throughout the downstairs.

And those were the fun jobs. It was time, Forrest knew, to redo the fifty-three-year-old plumbing in this house. He hired
a plumber who worked with his brother-in-law, and those men crawled around under the subfloor for weeks. “I tell you,” the
plumber would say to them time and again when he came up for air, “this old house will be here after we’re all dead and gone.”
In the fume-filled den, stripping back this house’s past to find its future, Forrest and Sue thought the plumber might well
have a point.

Until they got the den done, there were few places of real refuge. Their bedroom—the big one upstairs, with the cedar closet—wasn’t
comfortable in any way. They hated the hot gold walls and red carpet left from the Grimes era, but that was just the start
of it. In the summer, the room was too hot; in the winter, it was freezing. “The windows fit so poorly,” Sue says, “that at
night we had to pin the curtains down to keep them from billowing.”

The only place they could go to hide from their troubles was the front porch. ‘They bought a swing, and Forrest hung it on
the south end of the porch, just where it begins to jut east around the house. It was an unexpectedly private place—hidden,
high on that hill, by the west corner of the porch, and by the immense shadow of the tulip poplar tree just to the west. The
porch swing became a favorite spot, a haven more rewarding than the den would ever be.

A few months after the Wolfes moved to 501 Holly, the singer Jimmy Buffett came out with his hit song “Margaritaville.” That’s
what Forrest and Sue began calling their cocktail hours, which dragged on long after the sun had set. Surrounded by their
cats and relaxed by the drinks, they would swing on the porch for hours. When the moon on the trees made the shadows just
right, Forrest would tease Sue that he could see the faces of a man arid a woman in the brick columns of the house. “Watch
‘em, Sue!” he would say, spooking her. And then they would swing awhile more, giggling like children in the dark.

If you’re the type who’ll fool yourself into thinking you have a life when you don’t, a house will all too gladly be a partner
in your self-deception.

When I lived on Chicago’s North Shore, my then wife and I spent a solid year working on our old house. I painstakingly stripped
sixty years’ worth of paint off a walnut staircase and mantel. We supervised the replastering and painting of entire walls
and ceilings. I sanded and refinished the floor of the front porch. We shopped for and ordered wallpaper and expensive Berber
carpeting. We bought new furniture—very,
very
costly pieces. We bought antique Japanese prints and had them framed to museum specifications. We planned out a room at a
time and checked the items off our list—beds, lamps, bedspreads, miniblinds. One night, after our own stint in Margaritaville,
I went to the basement and came back with a crowbar, which I used to rip up layers of kitchen linoleum. As I recall, the strata
ran six deep. At the bottom was hardwood, a combination of oak and cherry, which we had bleached and sealed.

On the surface, it
seemed
like a life. It was certainly full-time. But it wasn’t a life at all. Instead, it was an escape from life.

For close to nine months, no one but my wife and I and the various workmen walked through the door of our house. We didn’t
see our few friends—the house wasn’t
ready—
and I invited none of my colleagues from work. But one of these days, I told myself, we would have all those couples over
for an elegant dinner, and boy, weren’t they going to be impressed. First, though, there was that upstairs bedroom that needed
papering.

In Witold Rybczynski’s book
Home: A Short History of an Idea,
he traces the way people have lived in houses since the middle Ages. He shows that, slowly and over a long period of time,
home—as
opposed to the relatively cold concept of
house—has
come to be equated with the word
comfort. Comfort
is a word whose definition certainly requires an entire book. Its meaning can be as simple as having everything you need
close at hand—in my daydreams of Aunt May’s house, there’s always that image of me reading a book in an easy chair, with the
afternoon sun streaming through the ceiling-high windows, filtered by the sheers. But comfort can also mean something as complex
as being at home in your own skin. You can decorate and decorate and
decorate
a house and yet never achieve that.

We’re all works in progress, if we’re continuing to live and grow. Our houses are works in progress, too. Yet some people
postpone life to devote themselves to their houses. They spend all their time decorating and redecorating and fixing and fussing,
as if fidgeting on a grand scale. Have you ever received a newspaper or magazine in which the printing is slightly out of
register? People who work on their houses to the exclusion of everything else remind me of that: They keep tinkering with
the second image in the vain hope that it’ll blend with the first, giving them that feeling of wholeness, completeness—comfort.

I wasn’t happy with my life during that period in Chicago, so I spent all my time working on my house. I invited nobody in.
I can just imagine what old Dr. Jung would say about that. A house can be a refuge in ways we don’t even realize. Home
is
where the heart is. But as the Eagles used to say, every form of refuge has its price.

I’m not saying the Wolfes wanted to hide from life during their time at 501 Holly. The house needed the work, and it is certainly
the better for their having lived here. But the regimen they set for themselves was all-consuming. Even if the intent wasn’t
there, the effect was the same. Forrest woke up on Saturday mornings and Sue’s lists were his marching orders. First, he had
to tend to the lawn—had to push that infernal mower up what he had labeled “Heart Attack Hill.” After that, he came back inside,
only to find that no job on the list was simple or freestanding. It was like with Uncle Remus’s Tar Baby—every time Forrest
poked at one problem, he ended up mired in another. Once, hooking up a new washing machine, he discovered that the floor in
the back porch area was rotten. “I actually saw a live termite,” he says. They called Adams and had the house checked and
sprayed. But no matter—the new washing machine now couldn’t be installed until Forrest built a new floor to set it on.

It was the same with the upstairs bath. Forrest and Sue especially wanted to save the old white shower tiles that had languished
for decades beneath increasing layers of paint. The tiles had once been beautiful, back in 1926 when Charlie Armour had built
the upstairs addition, but now they were eaten up with mold. Still, Sue tried to clean them—only to find that the shower pan
was rusted out and would have to be replaced. To get to the pan, the workmen had to tear out the tiles. Forrest and Sue replaced
the white tiles with a soft but undistinguished yellow, then went on to the next job.

That turned out to be near at hand. While working in the shower, they discovered that the three windows in the upstairs bathroom
were completely rotten. Forrest had never installed windows, but he decided to give it a try He and Sue splurged on Pella,
instead of settling for a cheap brand. “We dreamed of putting Pella windows in,” says Sue.
Dreamed of Pella windows—how
profoundly sad, I sometimes think. Often I catch myself daydreaming about laying black-and-white tile on the kitchen floor,
or of installing central air downstairs. A house can steal your youth if you don’t watch out. Some days I have to remind myself
that I still lust for a Porsche.

For Forrest and Sue, there were times when Margaritaville blended so with what passed for real life that it was hard to tell
where one ended and the other began. Forrest repapered the hall—the small room with seven doorways—while lie was drinking
Jack Daniel’s:

FORREST
: You talk about something that’s hard to paper...

SUE
: There’s not
one
complete wall...

FORREST
: When I papered this, Sue was sick...

SUE
: Lying on the couch...

FORREST
: And I was inebriated. I wasn’t normal when I did this. If I’d been normal, it probably would’ve turned out pretty....

When I try to put myself in the Wolfes’ shoes, I inevitably think of that famous stress chart from the seventies, the one
that applied a numerical value to various life events—divorce, death in the family, a job change, a change in financial situation.
When you added them up, you had an indication of your stress level.

Forrest and Sue’s were probably at the top of the chart during their time on Holly Street. Besides the constant grind of the
house and the major expense involved, each of the Wolfes changed jobs twice in the four years they lived here. As Medicare
and Medicaid boomed in the mid-seventies, Forrest found himself well positioned to take advantage of the growth. In his job
as state administrator for Medicaid, he had made valuable contacts. One was with a California company called Optimum Systems,
Inc., or OSI, which had the contract with Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield for Medicare software. Forrest left the state
to go with OSI, working in the Blue Cross building downtown. After a while, Blue Cross itself, which had contracts with Medicaid
for both drug and physician claims, made him a better offer. Forrest joined Blue Cross as manager for the drug-claims division.

Even though Sue still liked teaching, she wanted to go into business for herself. A woman she knew was opening a gift shop
in an old house in Hillcrest, and Sue thought that might be just the opportunity she’d been looking for. It wasn’t. She joined
the other woman as a partner, but after six months it was obvious that they weren’t compatible. Besides, there wasn’t enough
volume to support two people out of that little shop, which added to the conflicts. Sue left and went into sales for the Du
Pont Corporation.

So much change put great pressure on the two of them, and when they turned to their usual refuge—their home—it failed to provide
comfort. On the downstairs woodwork and walls, they counted some ten layers of paint. The house was a living photograph album.
The colors of times past were frozen moments for them to study. Then they would peel them away and move on.

With their own lives on hold, Forrest and Sue found themselves taking refuge in their
neighbors’lives.
They didn’t say that, but that’s my interpretation. When the Wolfes first told me about their time in this house, the neighbors
across the street figured prominently in their story. It makes sense, of course: In our hearts, we all know that the national
pastime isn’t baseball; it’s watching and speculating about our neighbors. That’s especially true when we’re trying to avoid
the turmoil within our own walls.

Besides, Forrest and Sue didn’t have just
any
neighbors. They had the Treadways.

I first heard about the Treadways approximately half a day after I moved here six years ago. Since I’ve been working on this
book, numerous people have raised the Treadway name. The presence of this unique couple, who owned the bungalow directly across
Holly Street from 1968 to 1978, obviously enriched the experience of living at 501 Holly for the Grimeses, the Kramers, and
the Wolfes. Of all of them, though, Forrest and Sue seem to have been the closest to the legendary couple.

The Treadways’ names were Bill and Jimmie. He owned an electric-supply company, and she ran a beauty college. But that wasn’t
what made them such compelling neighbors. What did it was their strange obsession. Forrest and Sue are practically uncontainable
on the subject:

SUE
: We could tell you stories about them
all... day... long...

FORREST
: They were fire freaks. They had an antique fire truck in the front yard. They also had matching fire outfits. And any fire—they
had seventeen or eighteen scanners in their house, all of them going—any fire in town, at any time, you could look over there
and here they came, going to the fire. He was considered some kind of expert, and he could get in with the firemen.

SUE
: They had
one million
fire things in their house. Lamps were made out of fire extinguishers. They had all kinds of little fire hydrants sitting
around—every kind of thing you could imagine. They collected old Cadillacs, too—fire-engine red.
Everything
had to be red. We loved taking care of their house. We’d take care of the cats and dogs whenever, and the
minute
they left we’d get that key and we’d go through that house....