If These Walls Had Ears Read Online Free PDF

idea why she did it, he never
     said. All his family ever knew was that his first wife was “nervously unbalanced” and took her own life.
    Jessie and Charlie were both big people, tending toward heaviness, he standing five foot nine or ten, and Jessie five six
     or seven. They had big spirits, too. Each threatened to outtalk the other. Charlie teased Jessie
and
her mother, and both women were smitten by him. In 1912, when forty-two-year-old Charlie asked Jessie to marry him, she responded
     with an unqualified yes. She and her mother moved into the big house on the hill, and for several years they lived there together,
     a blended family—rare in those days. Charlie pursued his real estate business and Jessie taught school. Cynthia Jane, now
     known as Grandma Jackson, spent her days taking care of Carolee, this instant grandchild who had washed into her life by fate.
     Carolee was six at the time of the marriage.
    In 1914, Jessie gave birth to her first child, a son. All four of his father’s names were bestowed upon him, and he went by
     Charles. Two years later, a daughter was born. She was named Jane, after Jessie’s mother.
    * * *

    Charlie Armour as a young grid star in Kansas. His son, Charles, would always feel that he never quite measured up in his father’s eyes.
    In time, through research, I would come to know things about her parents that even Jane didn’t know. Still, I worried that
     they were eluding me. It’s impossible to get inside another person’s heart, even if you live together. But these were people
     I had never met, people who had lived in a completely different age. I stared at photographs and read stories into them.
    Jessie displays a face straight from a Grecian urn—strong chin, prominent nose, high forehead, with a tousle of thick dark
     curls. Her eyes are intelligent, hawklike,
ready.
I imagine her dancing, whirling. I imagine her as a fiercely protective mother.
    As for Charlie, I can’t see much at all in his pictures. In every one, from his college days as a football player to his middle
     years as head of a household, the camera doesn’t catch his spark. With some people, it does. He had a face like Kansas—wide,
     open, no sharp angles. With him, the rest of his family will be smiling, but he stands there expressionless. It’s not anger,
     not pomposity, not shyness. It’s just
nothing:
no hint of the salesman with the gift of gab:, no glimpse of the music lover undaunted by a dance floor; no sign of the searching
     heart that would cause this man to reinvent himself time and time again.
    Charlie scares me. He strikes me as a man who was forever chasing something but never quite held it securely in his hands.
    Jessie and Charlie were married for eleven years before they built the house on Holly Street. In that time, they had lived
     in four other houses in three other towns. They left Fort Smith in 1918 because Charlie was offered the chance to manage a
     cotton plantation in Elaine, Arkansas. They left Elaine after a race riot erupted and many people were killed. They next moved
     to Memphis, where they lived in a big two-story rented house and Charlie went back into real estate. They moved from that
     house to a smaller one when, in 1921, Charlie’s head was turned by the discovery of oil in south Arkansas. He just
had
to try his luck in the oil fields, but there’s no evidence that he had any luck—not the kind that would’ve
changed
his luck. He was fifty-one and still struggling.
    While he was gone, Jessie made sure the family was well clothed and well fed. She sewed their outfits, cooked their meals.
     Carolee was a teenager by this time, and the smaller children were both in school. Young Charles may’ve been glad to have
     some time away from his father. Charles was a worrier, and lie wasn’t particularly athletic. Many years later, he would confess
     that he never felt he measured up in his father’s eyes.
    In the spring of 1923, the Armours packed themselves