First In His Class (4 page)

W
ILLIAM
J
EFFERSON
B
LYTHE
III arrived in the world one month ahead of schedule. He was lifted from his mother's womb in a Caesarian section performed at Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, Arkansas, at an hour past dawn on August 19, 1946, weighing six pounds and eight ounces. The birth of this fatherless son in a place called Hope did not go unheralded. There had been record heat the day before, exceeding a hundred degrees, followed by a ferocious thunderstorm that cracked and boomed all night, igniting three fires in town. The local moviehouse happened to be showing a film that captured his twenty-three-year-old mother's predicament:
The Young Widow
, starring Jane Russell.

His mother, the young widow, Virginia Dell Blythe, took him home to Hervey Street, to a big white house with hardwood floors and French doors where she lived with her parents, Edith and Eldridge Cassidy, who from then on were known to him in the southern vernacular as “Mammaw” and “Pappaw.” His first gifts were a rocking horse and a pair of sandals, followed by a silver spoon and napkin holder. The first word he later uttered, as recorded in his baby book, was “Pappaw.” This was, if true, also his first political decision, the safest choice, for if Billy had babbled something resembling “Mama,” his mother and grandmother might have argued over which
one of
them he meant. It is central to understanding the man he would become that he began life in Hope with no father and, in essence, two mothers who competed for his love and attention. Virginia carried him and bore him, but once he was home, Edith assumed that she was in control. Virginia might escape to walk him in the stroller or rock with him on the front porch swing, but when he was in the house, Edith ordered his life. She had him eating and drinking at assigned times, pushing food in his mouth if necessary, and his sleep was regulated to the minute, napping and waking with metronomic discipline.

This was Mammaw's way. Edith Grisham Cassidy was forty-five when her grandson was born. She was one of Hope's dazzling characters, an imposing figure: short, wide, and intense, with penetrating eyes and high cheek-bones, her hair cropped and dyed a licorice black, her face a daily creation, framed by spit curls, heavily powdered in bright white, with circles of rouge on her cheeks and deep red lipstick, looking somewhat like a stylized character in a Japanese kabuki show. She was a respected private nurse in her small town, and loved to wear the uniform: the white headpiece, the white starched dress and white stockings, the flowing navy blue cape inscribed in golden initials. She got around Hope in a big Buick, her face barely visible over the steering wheel, and it seemed to one of her nieces that whenever Aunt Edith drove by, the car was tilting noticeably to the driver's side.

Most things tended to tilt in her direction. She was ambitious and tem-peramental, unsatisfied with her lot in life as the wife of a good-natured man who excelled at making friends but not at making money. She taught herself nursing through a correspondence course after growing restless as a housewife and frustrated by a style of life beneath her expectations. Sometimes it appeared that she was kinder to outsiders than to her own family, with the exception of grandson Billy once
he came
along. She was devoted to her patients, ministering to them with tender care, if necessary staying overnight to treat the sickest among them, occasionally traveling to Arizona in winter and Wisconsin in summer to nurse convalescents. When she was off regular duty, she often drove up to the black section of Hope and cared for the children of domestics and orderlies.

Edith had a mercurial nature, a rollicking sense of humor coupled with a mean streak most often directed at her daughter or husband. She had taken out the whip to punish Virginia for childhood indiscretions, and even when the daughter became a mother of her own and had outgrown the switch, she could not escape Edith's criticisms and orders. Nor could Edith's husband, who had known her since their early childhoods spent on neighboring cotton farms near the hamlet of Bodcaw ten miles east of Hope. Her temper grew fiercer over the years. She was a yeller and a thrower: Eldridge became adept at ducking flying objects. Her relatives would later talk openly about relationships they thought she had had with a few doctors, yet she constantly accused her husband of being too friendly with some of the ladies in town.

James Eldridge Cassidy, with his soft, easy voice and soothing smile, was irrepressibly friendly. He came off the farm with a fifth-grade education, raised by relatives after his father died, inclined to treat friends and strangers as part of an affectionate extended clan. When he moved to town in the twenties, he found his niche as the deliveryman for Southern Ice, first
riding a horse-drawn wagon along the oiled dirt roads and later driving a refrigerated truck down the paved streets. By either means of transporta-tion, he was proud of being the iceman of Hope, a job that allowed him to greet scores of people each day, entering their houses as though he were a member of the family, hauling slabs of ice on his back in a big black leather strap, his clothes dripping in sweat from the effort of carrying fifty -and seventy-five-pound blocks from the street to oak ice boxes in his customers' kitchens. Hope, the seat of Hempstead County, with a population of eight thousand, was the sort of place where everyone knew everyone else, but to know is not necessarily to like. Eldridge Cassidy was universally liked, a salt-of-the-earth fellow who let boys ride along with him as helpers and who invariably stopped to assist anyone who needed a tire fixed or an appliance repaired.

Eldridge doted on his only child Virginia, whom he called “Ginger.” He insisted on buying her new books for school rather than used ones so that she would not be embarrassed in front of her girlfriends, most of whom came from wealthier families. He was reduced to tears once, apologizing profusely, when he lacked the money to buy her an Easter dress. Sometimes at night, when Edith was shrieking at him, he would slip out to the front porch with his daughter and tell stories and watch the cars go up and down Hervey Street and listen to the screech and whistle of trains rolling into the depot two blocks away. By the time Virginia was twelve, Eldridge would offer her a swig or two of his whiskey. He was an antiprohibitionist, brought up among bootleg distillers, and believed that keeping things from people would only make them want them more. Virginia worshiped her daddy, while fearing her mother, but she took parts of her personality from each of them: Edith's task-oriented determination, and occasional temper, along with Eldridge's congeniality.

Virginia worked
during her teenage years as a waitress at the Checkered Café at the corner of South Main and Third Street downtown, and immersed herself in activities at Hope High School: National Honor Society, press club, library club, music club, science club, freshman class secretary, student council member. Yet she was also regarded as a lighthearted, unaffected girl who loved to laugh and to flirt. Her self-defining quote under her picture in the senior class yearbook was: “I'd like to be serious but everything is so funny.” In a section entitled “Just Imagine,” where graduates assumed opposite personalities, she was teased with the line, “Just imagine Virginia Cassidy with a sophisticated nature.” And in a “Last Will and Testament” in which seniors passed along a character trait, she wrote: “I, Virginia Cassidy, will to Mary Jo Monroe my magnetic attraction for boys.” As a young girl, she scoffed at her mother's penchant for bold makeup, but by the end of high school she was practicing the first brush
strokes of the painted face that would become her adult trademark: her dresser upstairs on Hervey Street was cluttered with mascara, lipstick, eyeliner, and eye shadow.

Virginia's senior yearbook was not a traditional leatherbound book with glossy paper, but a special edition of the local newspaper, the
Hope Star
. It was published on May 28, 1941, and the entire front page of the broadsheet was taken up by a staged photograph portraying the unpredictability of the world the seniors would enter after high school. Two students were shown standing on the stage of the school auditorium, gazing with earnestness and fear at an oversized die that they had tossed into the air, wondering whether it would land on the side that said “War” or the side that said “Peace.” Only a few days later, the federal government procured tens of thousands of acres of prime farmland on the outskirts of town for the construction of the Southwest Proving Ground, where the Army would test rifle shells, small bombs, and flares for use in the coming war. The proving ground became a metaphor for the Hope High graduates. They felt explosive, ready to prove something, recalled Jack Hendrix, one of Virginia's classmates. “
There was
a sense of getting on, getting away, getting out of Hope.”

V
IRGINIA
got away
to the nearest big city, Shreveport, fifty miles south in Louisiana, to study nursing at Tri-State Hospital. It was there, two years later, on a midsummer night in 1943, when she was working the late shift, that she met Bill Blythe. At least he called himself Bill in Shreveport. His family back in Texas knew him as W.J., the initials for William Jefferson. He went by other names with other people who had various claims on his affection. He could not be stuck with one identity, or even one birth date. His family placed his date of birth as February 27, 1918, but
in his
military records he said that he was one year and six days older, born on February 21, 1917. Vital statistics, in any case, were of no interest to Virginia Dell Cassidy on the night she caught sight of Bill Blythe. Whether he was twenty-six or twenty-five, his history did not matter, nor did hers. The moment she saw him, with his confident, fun-loving demeanor, sparkling blue eyes, broad shoulders, and sandy-brown hair, she forgot about an old boyfriend from Hope whose ring she had worn for four years.
Blythe was
“a handsome man,” she would say later. “But you see handsome all the time. This was some strange and powerful attraction. Love at first sight.”

Blythe had arrived at the hospital with a female companion, but if that was a forewarning, it was lost on the student nurse. While the woman, who had complained of sharp abdominal pains, ended up in the operating room for an emergency appendectomy, all Virginia could think about was
whether Blythe was married or engaged to the patient and, if not, how she could snare his attention.
She flirted
through eye contact, and as Blythe was leaving, halfway out the door, he turned around, came up, looked at the ring on Virginia's finger, and asked what it signified. “Nothing,” she said, and their romance began. In later recollections of the episode, Virginia never explained who the other woman was or what happened to her. She said Blythe portrayed himself as a traveling salesman who had made a brief stop in Shreveport on his way back to Sherman, Texas, his home town, to enlist in the Army. He was so struck by her, Virginia recounted later, that he decided to stay in town, find an apartment, and take a job selling Oldsmobiles.

There is
a contradiction at the center of that version of events. Blythe's military records show that he already had been in the Army for two months by the time Virginia said she first saw him. He was inducted by Selective Service System Board 2 in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, on April 24, 1943, and entered the service in Shreveport ten days later, on May 3. That means that rather than just passing through Shreveport, as he had implied to Virginia, he must have been there already for several months. There would have been no need for him to return to Sherman to enlist since he had already done so in Shreveport. It remains a mystery how he simultaneously managed to be in the Army and work at a car dealership, just as it is curious how Virginia, who by her account was with him almost every day during their courtship, could be unaware of his military status. But everything about Bill Blythe was contradictory and mysterious. He constantly reinvented himself, starting over every day, the familiar stranger and ultimate traveling salesman, surviving off charm and affability.
Anyone doubting
his persuasive powers need know only this: When Virginia brought her parents down to Shreveport to get their blessing for her to marry him, it took him only minutes to win over the skeptical, tough-minded Edith.

They were married in Texarkana on September 3, 1943, less than two months after they had met and five weeks before he would be shipped overseas. It was a classic wartime wedding, performed in private by a justice of the peace, bonding two people who knew little about each other's past and less about their future except that they would soon be separated. Virginia assumed that the man she was marrying had never been married before. She never asked, and Blythe never told.
She knew
that he had grown up on a forty-acre corn, cotton, and chicken farm on the road between Denison and Sherman on the north Texas plain; that he was the sixth of nine children of Willie Blythe and Lou Birchie Ayers; that the Blythes and Ayers came out of Corinth and Ripley, Mississippi; and that he began working at a dairy at age thirteen when his daddy got sick. She knew that he got a job as a mechanic when his daddy died, and that he eventually
left home for the life of a traveling salesman, determined to become rich, roaming Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, and all the way out to California, selling heavy equipment for the Manbee Equipment Com-pany. She knew that much and she knew that when she looked at him, she “became weak-kneed”—and that was all she knew.

She did
not know about the December 1935 marriage license filed across the state line in Medill, Oklahoma, recording the marriage of W. J. Blythe and Virginia Adele Gash, a seventeen-year-old daughter of a Sherman tavern owner; or about the divorce papers filed in Dallas a year later, after Adele had left the Sherman farmhouse and WJ. had sent her clothes on in a suitcase.

She did not know about the birth certificate filed in Austin, Texas, on January 17, 1938, two years after the divorce, listing W. J. Blythe as the father of Adele Gash's baby boy, Henry Leon Blythe.