If These Walls Had Ears by James Morgan

Author:James Morgan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780446565097
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-09-25T21:00:00+00:00

Rita Grimes, second from right, with her two sons and Roy's sisters. Rita loved 501 Holly no matter what calamity came along.

They told themselves the house was in a spectacular location for a family with young children—the Pulaski Heights school, offering nine grades in one location, was practically at their back doorstep. They told each other that no matter how hard they looked, they wouldn’t do better. The Murphrees were asking $24,000. Roy got them to knock fifteen hundred dollars off that. In the end, the Grimeses put $500 down and assumed the mortgage for $22,000.

That September of 1966, 501 Holly’s third owners moved in. But it’s part of the alchemy of houses that even when a man and wife move into one together, they don’t necessarily move into the very same house. There’s a photograph of Rita, one of the few snapshots of her taken here, and she’s standing in front of the house with three of Roy’s four sisters, plus Scott and Mark, who’re perched upon one of the brick half columns, as though on a pedestal. Rita, in her bright yellow A-line and sixties bouffant, is only twenty-four in this picture, but her deep-dimpled smile says she’s shed her cookie-cutter box in the subdivision and slipped into a unique identity, an identity even older women would have to respect. Rita would love this house, the idea of it, the whole time they were here.

There are numerous snapshots of Roy at 501, and many of them catch him, naturally, with a smile on his face. But one picture taken about the same time as the one of Rita captures what I now know to be the worry Roy felt about this place. He’s standing in front of the house, with his arm around his mother, and just over his left shoulder is a tree I had never known existed. He says it wasn’t much of a tree—it’d been struck by lightning or something, and the top was gone from it. As soon as Roy saw it, he knew he would have to take it down eventually. At this house, even the trees needed work. Roy’s expression in this photo says he had left his new, small, easily managed house in the subdivision and slipped into maintenance quicksand. He would be weary of it long before he would find a way to escape.

They took to calling the living and dining space “the bowling alley.” With the sudden absence of Ruth’s heavy Victorian furniture, that sprawling expanse of beige carpet now looked incredibly empty. Rita and Roy had no dining room furniture at first, just a dinette set for the kitchen. They placed their small white brocade sofa and a couple of velvet chairs in the living room area, spreading an Oriental-style rug under the side-by-side cocktail tables. Rita arranged a few items—a picture, some sconces, one of those big decorative keys that were popular then—over the mantel and positioned her family knickknacks in the otherwise-empty bookcase by the fireplace. Still, it wasn’t exactly cozy.

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