Living History by Unknown (the lemonade war series txt) 📗

lonely childhood was imprinted on my heart. I knew that when I decided to marry, I wanted it to be for life.

Looking back to that time and to the person I was, I realize how scared I was of commitment in general and of Bill’s intensity in particular. I thought of him as a force of nature and wondered whether I’d be up to the task of living through his seasons.

Bill Clinton is nothing if not persistent. He sets goals, and I was one of them. He asked me to marry him again, and again, and I always said no. Eventually he said, “Well, I’m not going to ask you to marry me any more, and if you ever decide you want to marry me then you have to tell me.” He would wait me out.

ARKANSAS TRAVELER

Soon after we returned from Europe, Bill offered to take me on another journey―this time to the place he called home.

Bill picked me up at the airport in Little Rock on a bright summer morning in late June. He drove me down streets lined with Victorian houses, past the Governor’s Mansion and the State Capitol, built to resemble the Capitol building in Washington. We made our way through the Arkansas River Valley with its low-slung magnolia trees, and into the Ouachita Mountains, stopping at overlooks and dropping by country stores so Bill could introduce me to the people and places he loved. As dusk fell, we arrived, at last, in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

When Bill and I first met, he spent hours telling me about Hot Springs, founded around the hot sulfur springs that Indians had bathed in for centuries and that Hernando De Soto had “discovered” in 1541, believing them to be the fountain of youth. The thoroughbred racetrack and illegal gambling had attracted visitors like Babe Ruth, Al Capone and Minnesota Fats. When Bill was growing up, a lot of the restaurants in town had slot machines, and the nightclubs featured the famous entertainers of the 1950s―Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett, Liberace and Patti Page. Attorney General Robert Kennedy shut down the illegal gambling operations, which slowed business for the big hotels, restaurants and bathhouses on Central Avenue. But the city rebounded, as more and more retirees discovered the area’s mild weather, its lakes and natural beauty―and the generous spirit of so many people who lived there.

Hot Springs was Virginia Cassidy Blythe Clinton Dwire Kelley’s natural element.

Bill’s mother was born in Bodcaw, Arkansas, and raised in nearby Hope, eighty miles to the southwest. During World War II she attended nursing school in Louisiana, and that’s where she met her first husband, William Jefferson Blythe. After the war, they moved to Chicago and lived on the North Side, not far from where my parents were living. When Virginia became pregnant with Bill, she went home to Hope to wait for the baby. Her husband was driving down to see her when he had a fatal accident in Missouri in May of 1946. Virginia was a twenty-three-yearold widow when Bill was born on August 19, 1946. She decided to go to New Orleans to train to become a nurse anesthetist because she knew she could make more money that way to support herself and her new son. She left Bill in the care of her mother and father, and when she got her degree, she returned to Hope to practice.

In 1950, she married Roger Clinton, a hard-drinking car dealer, and moved with him to Hot Springs in 1953. Roger’s drinking got worse over the years, and he was violent. At the age of fifteen, Bill was finally big enough to make his stepfather stop beating his mother, at least when he was around. He also tried to look out for his little brother, Roger, ten years younger. Virginia was widowed again in 1967 when Roger Clinton died after a long battle with cancer.

We first met in New Haven during a visit she made to see Bill in the spring of 1972.

We were each bewildered by the other. Before Virginia arrived, I had trimmed my own hair (badly) to save money. I didn’t use makeup and wore jeans and work shirts most of the time. I was no Miss Arkansas and certainly not the kind of girl Virginia expected her son to fall in love with. No matter what else was going on in her life, Virginia got up early, glued on her false eyelashes and put on bright red lipstick, and sashayed out the door. My style baffled her, and she didn’t like my strange Yankee ideas either.

I had a much easier time relating to Virginia’s third husband, Jeff Dwire, who became a supportive ally. He owned a beauty parlor and treated Virginia like a queen. He was kind to me from the first day we met and encouraging of my continuing efforts to build a relationship with Bill’s mother. Jeff told me to give it time, she would come around. “Oh, don’t worry about Virginia,” he would tell me. “She just has to get used to the idea. It’s hard for two strong women to get along.”

Eventually Virginia and I grew to respect each other’s differences and developed a deep bond. We figured out that what we shared was more significant than what we didn’t: We both loved the same man.

Bill was coming home to Arkansas and taking a teaching job in Fayetteville, at the University of Arkansas School of Law. I was moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to work for Marian Wright Edelman at the newly created Children’s Defense Fund (CDF). I rented the top floor of an old house, where I lived alone for the first time. I loved the work, which involved a lot of travel and exposure to problems affecting children and teenagers around the country. In South Carolina I helped investigate the conditions under which juveniles were incarcerated in adult jails. Some of the fourteen-and fifteen-year-olds I interviewed were in jail for minor transgressions. Others were already serious offenders.

Either way, none