If These Walls Had Ears (3 page)

The Armours family in the yard outside their new home. From left, that's Fane, Carolee, Grandma fackson, Charles, and fessie.
Charlie snapped the picture.

This was taken from across the street in about in 1927. The girl holding the dog is Ruth Ream (now Ruth Chapin), and just
over her shoulder you can see 501 Holly, with Charlie Armours's bizarre little Nu Grape car out in front.

1890  
  1923

T
he best way to get to know a piece of ground is to mow it. No telling how many miles I’ve pushed a lawn mower in my life.
Well-meaning friends have suggested that I get someone to do that onerous job for me, and for a very brief time I did. It
didn’t work out. I felt out of touch with my surroundings.

My father, if he were alive, would laugh at that last sentence. When I was a teenager in Miami, Florida, we had an electric
mower. I regularly cut the cord so I wouldn’t have to finish the job. I think you have to be a homeowner before you understand
some of the subtleties of mowing.

One is time for dreaming. For a very short while in a different life, I lived in an old house on the north shore of Chicago.
It was a wonderful house, but if I’d had any real money, it could’ve been so much better. There were two sunrooms that jutted
out from the back of the house, and as I mowed the backyard, I would redesign those rooms in my mind. The lower one was going
to lose a wall and become part of the kitchen; the upper one was going to become a huge, sunny bathroom. Even then, I was
aware that those plans were just fantasies. I already hated my job and knew I was going to have to leave that place, too.

My mowing dreams at 501 Holly mostly concern the dining room. The living and dining areas are now all in one big space, which
I would love to turn over totally to the living area. Then, knocking out the south wall, I would extend that area about twenty
feet and that would be the new dining room. I figure I might as well add a family room next to it. It would be easy—just a
couple of steps down from the kitchen’s French doors, with cool tiles imported from Spain.

Or maybe that space would be better as a swimming pool.

Such are the things you ponder as you mow a lawn. It’s mindless work, mostly, but you absorb certain information as you go.
After nearly seven years, I know this piece of ground pretty well, at least on the surface. From my perspective, the dominant
image is
steepness,
what some people choose to call a terrace but which I know is a hill. The land slopes some in the front, which faces west,
but it drops off most dramatically on the south, on the side of our house along Lee Street. I have to mow only part of that
slope. A third of the way back, the hill is overgrown with hedge and trees and ground cover, providing in the summer a green
buffer between our side yard and the whoosh of traffic on Lee.

I have a regimen I follow. I do the steep Lee Street hill first, before the Arkansas humidity has sucked out every ounce of
my energy. Standing at the bottom of the hill, I thrust the mower up the incline, left to right, trying to make sure I nudge
the mower over at the apex so I can cut an inch or two of grass as the machine rolls back downhill. After the hill, I mow
side to side across the front. Three or four swaths into the job, I reach a dip in the ground where a big tree once stood;
I have to back the mower over that a couple of times, and even twist it some to make sure I don’t leave any long blades of
grass. It’s at about this latitude that I also have to start edging around the roots of the huge elm near the driveway. Pretty
soon, I can cross the brick sidewalk and forget the elm-tree side, which is planted with both lariope, commonly known as monkey
grass,
and
ivy. For years, there was nothing but bare dirt under that tree, and in frustration planted both ground covers. I’ll go with
whichever wins out.

That’s another way you change when you become a homeowner. One of my fondest memories as a child was of just such grassless
ground beneath great canopies of tree leaves, raised roots running out from the trunks to form hiding places for toy cowboys
or Indians or olive-drab soldiers shouldering bazookas or aiming carbines. Even as a teen, I wasn’t embarrassed by bare dirt.
Like so many other things—mossy bricks, a rope swing, a cracked sidewalk, a peeling wall—it evoked a certain decadent Southern
life that I grew up in and liked the idea And yet, as a homeowner, I find myself fretting over bare spots in the yard, not
to mention cracked sidewalks and peeling walls. That’s one of the tricks houses can play on you. If you grant them enough
power, they’ll reveal you for the fraud you are.

When I start mowing the side yard, I’m almost home free. Even though this house sits on an oversize lot, there isn’t
that
much grass to mow The north side is all driveway. The back, which faces east, is taken up by the garden and patio arid a
tacky little storage shed where a garage used to be. Only the front and sough sides are mow-able lawns, and once I’ve crossed
the fieldstone walk separating front and back, the job is nearly complete. The only hard parts are over by the Lee Street
hedge, where I have to mow in and out and around the ancient swing set, and right up near the house where the ground rises
and I have to angle the mower if I don’t want to leave an uncut sliver. In that spot, the grass also tends to grow over the
fieldstone walkway, hiding the scrawls someone left long ago in the wet concrete: J. M. are the initials there. Next to that,
there’s the word
AUSTA
.

I had no idea whose marks those were or what they meant when I first walked in this yard almost seven years back. Now I do,
of course. But when I would stand on this piece of ground pondering my house’s past, I knew that the story had to begin deeper
than hieroglyphics in the concrete. An image from another house I once lived in kept coming to mind. Back during the final
year of World War II, my mother and I stayed in Verona, Mississippi, with another aunt and uncle, Aunt Gusta and Uncle Wib,
who were caretakers in the home of my great-aunt Laura. It was a sprawling, faded old house with an L-shaped front porch from
which several doors opened onto shadowy bedrooms. I have many memories of that house, but none stronger than the memory of
the seashells.

Pearly and luminescent, they lined the long brick sidewalk that stretched some thirty yards from the porch to the dirt road
in front. The shells were large enough to cover the side of my head when I held them up to hear the ocean. But the amazing
thing about the shells was that they hadn’t been imported by any of my family from a visit to some far-off sea; instead, they
had come up, over the course of eons, from the earth where they now lay.

For the story of 501 Holly to emerge, you have to begin with the ground itself.

A hundred or so years is far enough back—1890, to be specific. That was two years before Melissa Retan paid eighteen hundred
dollars to the recently formed Pulaski Heights Land Company for this and several other parcels of land in a hilly, wooded
area a mile west of Little Rock. Understand that when I say “parcels of land,” I mean squares drawn on a map; this lawn I
mow was nothing but rocks and trees, as was all the land around it. But two men from St. Johns, Michigan, Henry Franklin Auten
and his law partner, Edgar Moss, had come here in 1890, willing to bet their livelihoods that someday people like me—and lots
more before I ever got my turn—would want to live among the trees on the high ground outside the city.

Frank Auten was, by all accounts, an intense young man haunted by a search of his own. By 1889, he had decided that St. Johns
wasn’t big enough to hold his dreams. During a train trip, he picked up a brochure that told about Arkansas. He was impressed,
and came to investigate. Little Rock—population nearly 26,000 as of the 1890 census—was a city on the move. Some of the streets
were even paved, a large improvement over a mere decade before, when a state legislator had introduced a bill classifying
two of the city’s major streets as “navigable streams.” Sewer pipes were in the ground. Telephone service had been available
for a dozen years, electric service for half a decade. Electric streetcars operated throughout the business district of the
city. Downtown was even lit up at night by four strategically placed 125-foot towers, atop each of which were five carbon
arc lights known as “star lights.” There was a med school and a horse track and even a baseball team—the formidable Litt]
e Rockers. Most of the town’s power brokers lived in grand style in ornate houses a mere stroll from the business district.

But Auten knew that as long as there have been cities—even back to biblical times—there’ve been people, usually the wealthier
ones, who’ve looked beyond the city limits for a lifestyle that included healthier air, less noise, more greenery, greater
space—and, yes, sometimes, more homogeneity. Auten and Moss played to that historical precedent. They formed a syndicate and
bought eight hundred acres of land just west of Little Rock, land they named Pulaski Heights—Pulaski being the name of the
county Little Rock is in, and Heights being an apt description of the property itself, whose cooler and healthier three-hundred-foot
elevation was going to be one of the big selling points, Another selling point was homogeneity: “It is and will be exclusively
for white residents,” Auten wrote in a slick brochure. “No property will be sold to colored people.” On my first day of research
for this book, I ran into a fellow journalist at Beach Abstract. “Oh, Pulaski Heights,” he said. “Little Rock’s first white-flight
suburb.”

Auten and Moss persuaded several Michiganders to invest in their syndicate, and a few of those investors moved to Arkansas,
too. Auten’s plan was for the founders of Pulaski Heights to set an example by building fine homes in this wilderness. The
targeted Little Rock gentry was skeptical, of course. The problem with Pulaski Heights was that, while it lay little more
than a mile from downtown, there were only two ways to get to it, and neither of them was pretty. You could take your horse
and buggy and trot out along the River Road—but then you had to climb a steep and winding hill to the top of the ridge, where
all the development was going to be. The other way involved taking the Seventh Street hill road, which ran out, becoming nothing
more than a cow trail, just beyond the city limits, at what city folk considered the absolute end of the road—the insane asylum.

Truth is, Auten had been promised a streetcar line, and he was banking on that to make Pulaski Heights an accessible Eden
instead of a local joke. He had no way of knowing that it would be ten long years—not until Thanksgiving Day of 1903—before
a streetcar would connect Little Rock to the Heights.

But by the time he found out the streetcar was going to be delayed, it was too late to back out. The Autens and seven other
founding families had already built and moved into their houses. They settled in two areas, generally: Some made their homes
near Moss, who built on a ridge above a wooded ravine, beyond which flat bottomland stretched a half mile or so to the Arkansas
River; others followed Auten, who, about a quarter mile to the southwest of Moss, actually found and refurbished an old two-story
farmhouse with Italianate detailing.

One of the original Michiganders was Albert Retan, listed in Pulaski Heights Land Company literature as a “capitalist.” He
had retired from his general store in Michigan and joined this adventure with his wife, Melissa, and their two daughters,
Zillah and Carrie. The Retans, who built next door to the Autens, took seriously Frank Auten’s mission of impressing the Little
Rock elite: They built a showplace, a Queen Anne mansion just as big and just as fancy as the ones downtown. Behind the Retan
house stood an imposing carriage house, and behind the carriage house was a rocky piece of ground that, thirty years later,
would form a hilly corner lot where Holly Street ran into Lee.

Seventy years after that, you could drive by on any other summer Saturday and watch me pushing my old lawn mower up that very
hill.