The Fiddler in the Subway Read online

  The baby, a boy, was born in a hospital in Sherman, Ramey says, and after the mother moved away, W.J. came to her and said, “Don’t worry, Puddin’, it wasn’t mine anyway.” The mother and child moved to California somewhere, and have not been heard from in a long, long time. That’s the story as Ramey swears she remembers it.

  APPLE VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, is a cozy oasis in the western Mojave Desert. The wooden sign above the door of the simple stucco ranch house says THE COFFELT’S. Adele Gash Coffelt looks like someone’s favored grandma. Though seventy-five, she seems fifteen years younger, and her handiwork is all over the house: a fruit pie cooling on the kitchen table, handsome quilts on the couch, elaborate Christmas stockings that she sews for her grandchildren. On the wall in a hallway is a photograph of her only child, Henry Leon, born in Sherman, Texas, more than fifty years ago. He is a pleasant-looking man with a high forehead and a plebeian nose.

  Is he W. J. Blythe’s son?

  “Yes.”

  Adele Coffelt says she knew W.J. from the time they were both children, that they were good friends and that she married him at seventeen. He was seventeen, too. They lied about their age, which is why they went to Madill.

  She was definitely not pregnant, she says. No truth to that at all. It may be that she and W.J. were keeping too close company and that her father wanted them to marry to avoid scandal. That could be true, she says. But she was not pregnant.

  Exactly why did they marry?

  “Well, I wasn’t madly in love with him, or anything like that.”

  She sits back on the sofa and says she doubts anyone could really understand who did not live through those times.

  “All I wanted,” she says, “was a home.”

  Adele’s mother died when she was six years old. Her father owned a bar and a domino hall, which he believed was not a suitable environment to raise a girl. And so Adele and her younger sister, Faye, spent their childhood raised by aunts and other relatives.

  When she and W.J. were seventeen, an opportunity arose. W.J. was in line for a job at the dairy that would have given him meager living quarters on the company grounds. A home! And so they got married. Just like that.

  “Young and dumb is what we were.”

  The job and the apartment never came through, and Adele moved in with the Blythes in that tiny house on Preston Road. Adele says she liked W.J.—“he was a clean, pleasant, decent person”—and might have stayed with him for a long time if they’d just had some privacy.

  She and W.J. shared a bedroom with Earnest Blythe and his wife, Ola Maye.

  “I don’t require a whole lot. I never wanted to be rich, but I never lived with so little,” Adele Coffelt says. “We were poor, but they were poorer than we were.”

  She says the Blythes treated her well, and she liked and respected all of them, but that she felt as though she was a terrible burden on a family that could weather no additional burdens.

  After a few months, Adele went to visit an aunt in Dallas. W.J. was supposed to come for her in a few days. Instead, she says, a package arrived in the mail. It was all of her clothing.

  “That’s how it ended, right there.” Adele Coffelt is smiling. “I stayed in Dallas.” She got a divorce the following year.

  None of which explains the baby.

  Coffelt says that after her divorce, she returned to Sherman several times and would spend time with W.J. It was on one of these trips, she says, that her son was conceived. She stayed in Sherman to give birth.

  When she is told that someone in the family said W.J. was not the father, she is thunderstruck.

  “It wasn’t anybody but W.J.” Pause. “Why would anyone say that?”

  She is told why, and for the first time her formidable composure deserts her.

  “If I am not telling the truth, may God strike me dead.”

  The public records support her version of events. The certificate recording her marriage to W.J. is dated December 1935. The divorce petition, on file in Dallas, is dated one year later. And Henry Leon’s birth certificate, on file in Austin, is dated January 17, 1938. It lists W. J. Blythe as the father.

  “I’m not proud of everything I did in my life,” Adele Coffelt says, “but I am not sorry, either.” In fact, she is deeply grateful to W.J. for giving her a child. In 1939, just before her second marriage—a happy one to the police chief of Brawley, California, that would last more than thirty years, until his death—she was involved in a serious auto accident that shattered her pelvis. She could never bear children again.

  “People without children,” she says, “are miserable.”

  When her baby was a few months old, she says, W.J. came to visit her in California. He was traveling for his company. He hugged her, held Leon, “and was as nice as he ever was.” He left that night, and it was the last time she ever saw him.

  There is one more thing.

  “W.J. also married my sister.”

  What?

  “It was a fling thing,” she says. “Didn’t last long.”

  In 1940 or ’41, Coffelt says she got a distressed phone call out of the blue from her younger sister, Faye. “She was back East somewhere, and she wanted to know if she could come to live with me. She had married W.J. and it wasn’t going to work.”

  Why not?

  “She did not say and I did not ask. I did not care to know.”

  But—

  “When someone needs help, you give it to them. You don’t ask questions.”

  Why did they get married? Was she pregnant?

  “No, some other gal was pregnant. . . . The reason he married her was to keep from having to marry a girl who was pregnant. That’s what my sister told me.”

  (Faye is ill and unable to sit for an interview. But Ola Maye Blythe Hazelwood, Earnest’s widow, later confirms that, yes, she recalls something about W.J. coming back to marry Faye. And, yes, there was some trouble with another girl who was pregnant.)

  There is a TV in the Coffelts’ living room, and at this moment Bill Clinton’s face flashes on the screen.

  “Doesn’t mean anything to me that he is W.J.’s son,” Adele says. “He doesn’t look that much like W.J. But I wish him well. He’ll always be welcome in this house, you tell him that if you talk to him.”

  A big smile.

  “But I didn’t vote for him.”

  IT IS SAID that people are shaped the most not by what they want, but by what they fear. Perhaps W. J. Blythe—who watched his father die screaming and his mother lose the family home—so feared death and destitution that he became a man of relentless good cheer, with a ferocious appetite for life-affirming things, sometimes at the expense of good sense and good judgment. But even those people who had cause to dislike him could not find it in themselves to do so. He must have been a wonderful salesman. When he met and married Virginia Cassidy, he took a new name, shedding the initials with which he grew up. For the first time in his life, he became Bill Blythe, the only name his new wife ever knew him by, and it was as Bill Blythe that he was to start a family. It may well be that the change represented something of a turning point, that W.J. was prepared at last to settle down and take responsibility for himself.

  It’s a theory, as good as any, half a century later.

  For four months, Bill Clinton’s mother declined repeatedly to discuss her first husband for this article. Finally reached by telephone last week and asked about Bill Blythe’s other life, she said it was all news to her. Blythe never told her about his marriage to Adele Gash, or his marriage to Faye Gash, or any other marriages or children he may have had along the way. She also said W.J.’s family never told her, either, even after his death.

  “I’m seventy years old,” said Virginia Kelley, “and things sometimes slip my mind. But as far as I can remember, no one ever told me.”

  What does she think of it?

  There is the briefest of pauses.

  “I don’t know what to think,” she said. “I loved him very much. He was a wonderful
person to me. For his own reasons, he did not mention it to me.”

  If he had, would it have bothered her?

  “I’m sure it would have bothered me.” Might she not have married him? Might she never have had a child with him?

  “It’s hypothetical what I would have done about it.”

  Life is full of might could’ves.

  LIKE MANY OF Clinton’s relatives, Vera Ramey was invited to the inaugural events in January. She attended the big gala, and saw Michael Jackson and Chuck Berry, but she wasn’t really enjoying herself. All the while she was fighting a hollow feeling she could not quite puzzle out.

  Afterward, without telling anyone, not even her husband, she got in her car and drove three hours to Hope, Arkansas, to the Rose Hill Cemetery, where a footstone marks the grave of William Jefferson Blythe, born February 27, 1918, died May 17, 1946.

  For four hours, she talked to her big brother about the family. Mostly, she talked about what had become of his baby boy. Just in case he didn’t know.

  Feeling much better, she drove back home.

  ADELE COFFELT DID not discover that the father of her son was also the father of Bill Clinton until a relative sent her a clipping from People magazine, during the presidential campaign, mentioning the name William Blythe. And so, of course, her son did not find out about his famous half-brother until then either.

  Henry Leon Ritzenthaler—he changed his name from Blythe when his mother’s second husband adopted him—is fifty-five. He lives in Paradise, California, with his wife, Judith, a hairdresser. He has two children. The former owner of a janitorial service, Ritzenthaler was forced to retire some time ago because of ill health. He has a heart condition.

  Late in the campaign, he and Judith wrote to Bill Clinton, care of the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock. Ritzenthaler says he introduced himself, included a copy of his birth certificate, and requested any information the governor could give them about the Blythe family’s health history.

  “I don’t want any money out of this or anything,” Ritzenthaler said. “All I would like to do is meet the man. I would be honored to get to know him a little. To find out after fifty-five years that I’ve got a brother eight years younger than I am, well, that’s kind of nice.”

  Not to mention that he is the president of the United States?

  “It’s very nice.”

  Ritzenthaler says he never heard back from Clinton or his office, but that he doesn’t take it personally.

  “In the business he is in, I’m sure he was busy and under a lot of pressure. I would just consider it an honor and a privilege to get a phone call or a letter from the man, saying, ‘Hey, I know you’re alive.’”

  The Ghost of

  the Hardy Boys

  What does it mean that the literature that most influenced my love of writing turns out to be some of the worst bilge ever published?

  This is a story about the soul of writing. I started working on it with a chip on my shoulder; I ended it with a lump in my throat.

  August 9, 1998

  I RECENTLY REDISCOVERED MY youth. It made me sneeze.

  It lay unremembered at the top of a tall bookcase: fifteen vintage Hardy Boys novels by Franklin W. Dixon. In getting them down, I took a faceful of dust and beetle carapaces.

  I carried the books to my favorite rocking chair, beside my favorite lamp, and reverently broke them open to revisit the literature that had inspired in me a lifelong love of language. The pages were as thick as a shirt collar and ochered with age. They smelled the way old books smell, faintly perfumed, quaintly mysterious, like the lining of Great-Grandma’s alligator handbag out in the steamer trunk. I began to read.

  Pretty soon a new smell entered the room.

  The Hardy Boys stank.

  When a group of literati last month published a list of the hundred greatest English-language novels of the twentieth century, lionizing Ulysses and The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises, I was privately disappointed they had not included The Missing Chums. I remembered The Missing Chums as the pinnacle of human achievement, a meticulously crafted work of American fiction in which Frank and Joe Hardy, the sons of famed sleuth Fenton Hardy, braved choppy seas and grizzled thugs to rescue their kidnapped friends. I had first read it in a backyard hammock strung between sycamore trees during the summer of my twelfth year.

  Now, through my bifocals, I again confronted The Missing Chums. Here is how it begins:

  “You certainly ought to have a dandy trip.”

  “I’ll say we will, Frank! We sure wish you could come along!”

  Frank Hardy grinned ruefully and shook his head.…

  “Just think of it!” said Chet Morton, the other speaker. “A whole week motorboating along the coast. We’re the lucky boys, eh, Biff?”

  “You bet we’re lucky!”

  “It won’t be the same without the Hardy Boys,” returned Chet.

  Dispiritedly, I leafed through other volumes. They all read the same. The dialogue is as wooden as an Eberhard Faber, the characters as thin as a sneer, the plots as forced as a laugh at the boss’s joke, the style as overwrought as this sentence. Adjectives are flogged to within an inch of their lives: “Frank was electrified with astonishment.” Drama is milked dry, until the teat is sore and bleeding: “The Hardy boys were tense with a realization of their peril.” Seventeen words seldom suffice when seventy-one will do: “Mrs. Hardy viewed their passion for detective work with considerable apprehension, preferring that they plan to go to a university and direct their energies toward entering one of the professions; but the success of the lads had been so marked in the cases on which they had been engaged that she had by now almost resigned herself to seeing them destined for careers as private detectives when they should grow older.”

  Physical descriptions are so perfunctory that the characters practically disappear. In fifteen volumes, we learn little more than this about sixteen-year-old Frank: He is dark-haired. And this about fifteen-year-old Joe: He is blond.

  These may be the worst books ever written.

  I felt betrayed. Or, as Franklin W. Dixon might have said: I thought to myself, “Golly,” assailed as I was in that moment by a dismayingly uncomfortable feeling that I had been jolted with an unfairness that was profoundly extreme.

  Thomas Wolfe warned: You can’t go home again.

  But shouldn’t you be able to saunter past the old neighborhood without throwing up?

  The Hardy Boys are still published—all the old titles and dozens of new ones. They sell by the millions, still troweling gluey prose into the brains of America’s preadolescent boys.

  It is too late for me, but what of them?

  I felt I had to do something. But what?

  Writing is an exercise in power. You wield the words, shape events. You are God. You can make anything happen. You are bound by no laws but your own.

  And so I decided to find Franklin W. Dixon. And kill him.

  DRAT. HE’S ALREADY dead.

  In one sense, Franklin W. Dixon never existed. Franklin W. Dixon was a “house name,” owned by a company called the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which created and published the original Hardy Boys. From 1927 through 1946, each Hardy Boys book was secretly written by a man named Leslie McFarlane. I found myself, quite literally, chasing a ghost.

  I caught up with him on the telephone, in the person of the ghostwriter’s daughter, Norah Perez of Youngstown, New York. Perez is an accomplished novelist. Her father died in 1977.

  Recently, Perez leafed through some old Hardy Boys books. “I was almost shocked,” she said with a laugh. “I thought, Omigod. They are not great.”

  So her father was a hack?

  “My father,” she said, “was a literate, sophisticated, erudite man.”

  He was?

  He loved Dickens, she said. “He was a great Joycean.”

  He was?

  “He corresponded with F. Scott Fitzgerald. He had aspirations to be that kind of writer.”

  She
seemed uncertain where to go with this. Finally: “He hated the Hardy Boys.”

  It turns out the story of the Hardy Boys—call it their Final Chapter—isn’t about the worst writer who ever lived, not by a long shot. It is about a good writer who wrote some bad books, and if you wonder why that happened, as I did, then you are likely not very old and not very wise. Sometimes homely things are done for the best reasons in the world, and thus achieve a beauty of their own.

  LESLIE MCFARLANE KEPT voluminous diaries. His family has them. He wrote in fountain pen, in elegant strokes that squirreled up a little when he was touched by despair or drink. In these diaries, “The Hardy Boys” is seldom mentioned by name, as though he cannot bear to speak it aloud. He calls the books “the juveniles.” At the time, McFarlane was living in northern Ontario with a wife and infant children, attempting to make a living as a freelance fiction writer.

  November 12, 1932: “Not a nickel in the world and nothing in sight. Am simply desperate with anxiety. . . . What’s to become of us this winter? I don’t know. It looks black.”

  January 23, 1933: “Worked at the juvenile book. The plot is so ridiculous that I am constantly held up trying to work a little logic into it. Even fairy tales should be logical.”

  January 26, 1933: “Whacked away at the accursed book.”

  June 9, 1933: “Tried to get at the juvenile again today but the ghastly job appalls me.”

  January 26, 1934: “Stratemeyer sent along the advance so I was able to pay part of the grocery bill and get a load of dry wood.”

  Finally: “Stratemeyer wants me to do another book. . . . I always said I would never do another of the cursed things but the offer always comes when we need cash. I said I would do it but asked for more than $85, a disgraceful price for 45,000 words.”

  He got no raise.

  He did the book.

  And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another.

  “WRITING IS EASY,” said the author Gene Fowler. “All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”