Echoes in the Darkness Read online

  “Please, Stephanie, I already know more about your husband than I want to know!” she said, rushing out of the cleaner’s.

  Ida not only liked and pitied Stephanie, but she also pitied Jay Smith’s daughters. The elder was named Stephanie for her mother, and the younger was called Sheri. They were both troubled girls, and for a time, young Stephanie was a student at Upper Merion. Ida talked often to her.

  It was common knowledge that young Stephanie was a drug user, and as time passed, she dropped out of school and was rumored to be involved in prostitution to support a heroin addiction. Jay Smith’s was not a happy family.

  Young Stephanie caused her parents so many problems that Ida wanted to pity the principal himself, but he was a hard man to pity. Sometimes she wanted to join him in the faculty dining room where he sat alone, his face nearly in his plate, holding a fork as though it were a dagger. He’d stab at his food and shove it begrudgingly into his rubbery mouth as though it were eat or die. Ida Micucci decided she could never pity Jay Smith.

  On another of her trips to the dry cleaners, Ida again begged Stephanie Smith to stop the onslaught of bizarre information concerning her principal. She didn’t want to hear any more about Dr. Jay’s theories on animal husbandry. Then it became clear what Dr. Jay Smith’s eyes resembled! Not fish, not reptiles though the eyes were very lightly lashed and a bit hooded. But at certain times, in his more sardonic moments, when the eyebrows lifted to form two perfect S’s across his high forehead-in those moments the irises slid back and she noticed that his eyes were Tartar, and tilted. And if you simply elongated the pupils, gave them a vertical squeeze in your imagination, it was abundantly clear that Dr. Jay C. Smith had the eyes of a goat!

  The references to cloven hooves and leathery wings and sulfurous odors really took off when Vincent Valaitis and another teacher happened to see Dr. Jay coming out of his little hideaway late one afternoon. There were already plenty of rumors about him hanging upside-down and making piles of guano for the janitor, but this was too much.

  A radiator leak was causing a cloud of steam to gather at the feet of the principal who was dressed in his black suit, and was busy wrapping his black raincoat around himself like a cloak.

  It was too Gothic, especially for an imaginative lad like Vince who had a taste for fantasy and science fiction and horror stories. There was Dr. Jay, a tall figure in a black cloak stepping out of a mist with the eyes of a goat. Only one thought was possible: what in hell is this guy, really?

  Vince thought he had the answer. He turned to his friend and in his most excited Dungeons and Dragons whisper said, “Now I know who he is. Alive and well in Upper Merion. That, my friend, is the prince of darkness!”

  Some of the whispered gags grew a bit urgent when one night a mysterious fire almost burned down an entire wing of the school. They never learned the source of that blaze. Vince and others offered a theory, only half in jest: given whose principality this was, could the fire have been caused by spontaneous combustion?

  3

  Renaissance

  Those who didn’t know her very well joked that she’d been created by Nathanael West, and she did indeed resemble a pen pal in Miss Lonelyhearts. But a psychotherapist and good friend of Susan Reinert’s took pains to refute the image.

  “Susan was not,” the psychologist said, “in spite of her appearance or what others say, mousy or passive. She was quiet and reserved, but strong.”

  Still, the word “mousy” couldn’t be avoided in any discussion about Susan Reinert. She had a high-pitched voice, and squeaked like a rodent when she got excited.

  Susan Reinert was thirty-three years old when William Bradfield and Sue Myers were settling in their apartment near Phoenixville, and Jay Smith was enjoying his new title of “doctor.”

  Susan was even more petite than Sue Myers, and was definitely not attractive. She wore oversized glasses with dark plastic rims, an effect that accentuated a large blunted nose. Her lower lip protruded, pushed out by big gapped incisors. Her dark hair was always worn in short sensible styles. Her clothes were conservative and sensible. She was a quiet, sensible English teacher at Upper Merion Senior High School, but she was a woman living in a liberated era in a most liberated school wondering what was missing in her life.

  Susan’s marriage had been unsatisfactory for quite a while, and if she never wrote a letter to Ann Landers, she did write painfully and intimately to herself. She began keeping a secret diary, and it was full of loneliness, confusion, guilt and regret:

  To use sensitivity jargon I’m going to try to get in touch with my feelings. I feel like I’m losing my mind. I need help and I can’t find it. I don’t know what I want to do!

  Susan Reinert was trapped between duty and uncertain desire at a time when American women were attacking every male bastion from the firehouse to the boxing ring.

  In that same diary she asked and answered various questions:

  Why do I keep plugging away at this marriage? Answer: Because I’m afraid it’s the only one I’ll ever have, and if I cannot live with Ken, who really is not all that bad, then there must be something wrong with me.

  In the early years of their marriage, Ken Reinert had served as a navigator on a B-52 bomber, and his bride lived with him at air force bases. Susan and Ken had a baby girl and a year later a boy. It was not a particularly easy life with two babies, but they were busy and young and didn’t mind.

  The former air force captain later said of those times, “There was a lot of killing in Vietnam and I know I caused some of it, but I honestly can’t say I hated my tour of duty. It wasn’t like being a marine and risking your life in some rice paddy. Up there in that B-52, I was, well, just so far above the killing. I have to say death didn’t mean a lot to me then. But when I was finished I wanted to settle down somewhere and live quietly and watch my children grow and never think of killing, not ever again.”

  All her life Susan had revered her father, William Gallagher. Some of her intimates wondered if any man could live up to her father’s image. Prior to his untimely death, William Gallagher had run a small-town newspaper in western Pennsylvania where Susan grew up with her older brother, Pat. Their mother had been a schoolteacher, and young Susan had been the kind of girl who always knew where she was going. It was a natural and inevitable progression from the Future Teachers of America to a masters degree at Pennsylvania State University. She hadn’t given serious thought to any other profession.

  Upper Merion was one of the wealthiest school districts in Pennsylvania with the advantage of being a suburb of Philadelphia. It wasn’t that the students were as affluent as those in the nearby Main Line prep schools and academies, but the district had an excellent tax base and there were prosperous business interests within the Upper Merion boundaries. It seemed like a good place to teach, and it was only a short drive to their home on The Main Line.

  It was a very active time for the young Reinert family. The growing children and Susan’s duties in the English department kept her extremely busy, and Ken got himself a good position with a Philadelphia bank.

  The kids were a happy surprise. Though no one had ever called Susan Reinert pretty, her kids were very handsome. They were also bright and active-and polite, which was to be expected. The Reinert grandparents, who lived thirty minutes away, couldn’t get enough of their grandchildren. This family had every right to believe that life would be orderly, quiet, predictable.

  Impending middle age didn’t do Bill Bradfield any harm in the mid-1970’s. He stood tall and vigorous, his powerful chest and shoulders without a sag. His hair remained coppery and his brooding blue eyes glowed as boyishly as ever when the mood was upon him.

  Sue Myers served and obeyed and taught her classes and kept her secret about being his live-in companion. He pretended to be residing in Downingtown with his parents, if anyone inquired. Bill Bradfield had more secrets than the Politburo.

  Under the laissez faire administration of Dr. Jay Smith, a teacher like
Bill Bradfield could take the bit in his teeth. Soon, he was not just teaching English but had small groups of advanced-placement students dabbling in Latin and Greek. In fact, he stopped referring to himself as an English teacher. When asked, he would say, “I’m a teacher of English, Latin and Greek.”

  To Susan Reinert he was Byronesque. She didn’t know what to believe about the many rumors of romantic trysts with other teachers, but she simply could not bring herself to believe the more insidious gossip about “involvement” with a few of his gifted students.

  Susan Reinert felt that a man like this would always be the target of jealous gossipmongers. His way with students and teachers was wholesome, she believed. He touched people with his hands as well as his inquisitive probing mind because he was an affectionate man, a natural man.

  Meanwhile, the diary entries of Susan Reinert were growing more troubled. “Where does responsibility enter? I don’t seem to be convinced that it’s right to do something just because I want to. I’m so tired of crying.”

  One day in 1974, a colleague named Sharon Lee and some other teachers got into a friendly dispute with Bill Bradfield about the value of American literature.

  “It’s all second rate,” he maintained. “One page of Homer is worth the whole of it.”

  When Sharon Lee objected, Bill Bradfield said, “Pick a book from your list. Any book.”

  “Okay, The Great Gatsby.”

  “Let’s meet and discuss The Great Gatsby,” Bill Bradfield challenged.

  Susan Reinert volunteered to host the literary shoot-out in her home.

  It wasn’t all that serious an event, as it turned out. Everyone had drinks. There was some literary jargon and critical theory tossed around and Bill Bradfield bashed American literature. No one later remembered much about what Bill Bradfield had to say on the subject, though they never forgot the way he’d said it.

  “He’d come up to within inches of you,” a colleague later reported. “He was tall and big and he’d intimidate you with those piercing blue eyes. He was so intense he could sometimes be spooky.”

  So the evening went pretty much as expected, with Bill Bradfield spooking some and charming others.

  Whether Bill Bradfield was a truly gifted teacher with an ability to inspire, as some argued, or a glib and clever scholastic hustler, as others maintained, he had a decided effect on his hostess, Susan Reinert.

  She was seen hanging on every word he uttered that evening, and, as always, Bill Bradfield uttered plenty of them. She confided to a friend that this guy was truly a Renaissance man.

  And there was poor Ken Reinert already getting puffy beneath the eyes even though he was at least a decade younger than Bill Bradfield. Ken almost never read poetry. He didn’t know a damn thing about Ezra Pound. He liked to watch television.

  Sharon Lee, the teacher who had proposed the Gatsby debate, was single and attractive. Susan Reinert was married and unattractive. Bill Bradfield never stalked attractive women. One of his more critical colleagues said that Bill Bradfield could smell insecurity and loneliness the way a pig smells truffles.

  Late that evening when most of the guests had gone and Ken Reinert was in bed, Sharon Lee was in the kitchen getting an ashtray. When she returned a bit too quietly she found Bill Bradfield leaning over the chair of Susan Reinert and whispering softly in what she would later describe as “an intimate position.”

  Sharon Lee coughed discreetly and Bill Bradfield jumped up and returned to his chair.

  An already shaky marriage was reeling. These two teachers had forgotten American literature and The Great Gatsby. This looked more like a Main Line replay of plodding Charles against worldly Rodolphe, with Susan Reinert, of course, Madame Bovary.

  Susan soon began seeing a psychologist named Roslyn Weinberger, who provided emotional support. But the marriage was finished. Susan herself described that frantic school year in a diary entry:

  Sunday, November 17th. What a year this has been. First Kens accusations of unfaithfulness, requests for divorce, bad scenes in bed, stormy silences (plus my contribution to problem by fear of revealing true feelings), then Mothers serious illness. Finally growing attraction to Bill and accepting Sharon’s suggestion to see Ros as could no longer cope. A year of crisis.

  Finally told Ken that children and I would leave. He then decided he would go but fought it all the way. He calls in a.m., p.m., and tells me he can’t cope.

  Have gotten sterner about his not calling or coming over but hardly a day goes by without my hearing from him at least once. Yesterday he asked same question: Was he competing with Bill? Did I love Bill? What was extent of contact with Bill?

  Susan Reinert confessed to one intimate friend that she was now the secret lover of Bill Bradfield, and that within five years, after he was emotionally and financially secure, they would be man and wife. He had a secret “five-year plan” for both of them, she said. But the children were suffering from the family rupture, and their mother was only too aware of their pain:

  One good thing, Karen and Michael have been to Ros and will go again. Although Karen’s temper tantrums and refusals to go to dance class and Michaels crying have increased, they seem to be handling situation. Teachers say everything O.K. with them at school. Other crisis: Ken discovered note to Bill. Still don’t know what he thinks he knows. Told him what Ros advises regarding nature of relationship and need to grow. It’s taking its toll on me.

  As the school year neared an end, Susan Reinert wrote Bill Bradfield of her feelings:

  May 2d. It’s been one year since I left Ken, taking Karen and Michael with me. Some things are better. The divorce is over. K amp; M are more relaxed. Some of my anxiety is gone, but I’m not happy. I don’t have what I want nor does it seem likely I will get it. I feel very isolated. Missing you and resenting restriction caused by Sue Myers. And by you.

  The apartment that Sue Myers shared with Bill Bradfield suited him very well. It was in a colonial-mansion-cum-apartment-house, a fine old building with columns in front and dark shutters.

  He still maintained a cordial relationship with his “common-law” wife Muriel and his youngest son who lived on his property in Chester County. Sue Myers estimated that he saw them once every three or four months.

  Sue Myers knew by now that the “purging” he said he’d received from their Ezra Pound pilgrimage had not changed him. There were still the odd-hour phone calls and hangups, still the notes and other evidence she’d pick from his pockets when he was asleep.

  The romantic affair that wounded Sue the most involved a former teacher who said she was leaving the school district to pursue advanced degrees. During one of Sue’s night-prowling raids she found a letter from the woman that had been addressed to herself at his secret post office box. It was a Bill Bradfield ruse Sue would come to learn only too well.

  Reading it, Sue was devastated to discover that the woman had gone off to give birth to his baby. Sue confronted him, in tears. He confessed, and begged forgiveness once again.

  But this time Sue was heartbroken enough to get out and did-but returned after he begged and promised never to be unfaithful again. Sue was by then in her mid-thirties. She went home feeling like her womb was full of baby rats.

  The Reinert affair was something else altogether.

  “By the time I realized he was involved with Susan Reinert, I thought I was getting numb to it,” Sue recounted. “But Susan Reinert awakened something in me, or spawned new feelings. I wasn’t just so much jealous or brokenhearted, I was outraged!”

  Even when Sue Myers discussed it years later, a diagonal stress line popped across her brow: “I even hated her voice. That screechy whiny voice of hers was like fingernails on a chalkboard. It made me want to scream.”

  The little clues were there for her. Sue Myers could always detect provocative Bill Bradfield glances, and more tellingly the return looks he’d receive from women at school.

  “Not her!” she yelled at him one day in the corridor of Upper M
erion. “Damn it, not Susan Reinert!”

  “What in the world are you talking about?”

  “She’s downright homely, for God’s sake!” Sue Myers said, trying to check the tears. “She’s got nothing to offer. Nothing!”

  “Get hold of yourself,” he told her. “Your imaginations out of control. We’ll talk when we get home.”

  Sue Myers explained it at a later time by saying, “With the others, with all the others, I could see something in them, something that might’ve attracted him. But not with Susan Reinert. To me, she was an insult. The final personal insult. Maybe my spirit did go absolutely numb after her, I don’t know.”

  Sue wanted to believe him when he told her how silly she was to think he would so much as entertain a thought about mousy Susan Reinert. But then Susan Reinert began to penetrate the Great Books “inner circle.”

  The Great Books Program, conceived by Mortimer J. Adler, was introduced to Upper Merion by Bill Bradfield. It was a program for self-education in the liberal arts, the concept being that a group of people from the community might educate themselves by meeting twice a month and discussing some two hundred of the Western worlds greatest books. They might all read a selection from Descartes or Aristotle or Voltaire and attempt for two hours to address a question posed by Bill Bradfield posing as Plato. It was seminar oriented and that appealed to Bill Bradfield, who was a seminar group leader.

  The seminar was cost-free and could be accomplished with library books. Bill Bradfield devised a similar program for the advanced students at Upper Merion, and other teachers quickly became sold on it when they saw the kids discussing Rousseau, Kant, Aristotle.

  “Whatever else he was,” Sue Myers said, “Bill Bradfield was an inspiring teacher.”

  He allowed certain faculty members to become a part of the Great Books inner circle that administered the seminar for the advanced students. But there were some, outside of the circle, who tried to denigrate their accomplishments. One teacher claimed that an advanced student of Greek tutored by Bill Bradfield, and given straight A’s, was later discovered to know about as much Greek as the delivery boy at Spiro’s Deli in Philadelphia.