Echoes in the Darkness

3

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 Merion. “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.

Susan Reinert wanted to belong to the Great Books inner circle. Sue Myers wanted to strangle her with her own pantyhose. Sue found herself peering through campus windows, glaring at Susan Reinert with her quick hummingbird eyes.

One of Bill Bradfield’s lifelong idiosyncrasies was the need to save things. He’d rathole memos, notes, letters, bills, receipts, many of which Sue Myers would eventually locate and use against him. She sometimes thought that the goofy complexity of his methods and his pack rat collections were designed so that she would catch him. She thought it enhanced the risk and made his conquests sweeter. She wondered if he was building a Bill Bradfield Memorial Library.

One afternoon she crept by his empty classroom and saw the corner of a letter protruding from the pages of a book. Sue peeked around the corridor, and seeing that all was quiet, sneaked in and read the letter-and found herself gasping. She later described the note as “obscene” and said she’d never heard a woman describe portions of her body in such a way. She reeled back to her homeroom.

A letter by Susan Reinert would later surface that was either the one Sue read or a version of same:

It’s eight o’clock. I’d like to go to bed so I could turn off my head and body. I am miserable. I didn’t hear from you for so long I actually lost most of my physical desire for you for the only time I can remember. But your visit with certain promises rekindles it, damn it. All day today I kept hearing you say that it’s not as bad for you. That you can go for days putting me out of your mind! That you have no chance to call me! Knowing that you don’t suffer like this is maddening. By now I’m very short tempered. I yell at Karen and Michael and I hurt like hell.

This morning I awoke with aching pubic area and erect nipples as usual. My breasts yearned to brush up against your chest. My legs wanted to curve over yours. My arms wanted to be around you with my hand rubbing you, tracing your face, touching your hair. My wetness desires to cover your penis, and rub up and down against you, to pulsate with delight as we move together. Enough writing. Writing it down isn’t working. I want you more not less, and I’m more upset at that.

Sue Myers staked out Susan Reinert’s homeroom. When Susan arrived, Sue Myers took her aside and whispered through clenched little teeth, “You bitch! You whore! You leave Bill Bradfield alone or I’ll … I’ll make public the contents of your filthy note!”

Now one might think that a grownup schoolteacher wouldn’t get in a tizzy if Upper Merion discovered that she woke up with hard nipples and a yen for a Renaissance man. But Susan Reinert had a terrible fear that her former husband would seize any pretext to take her children away from her. The fear was unreasonable. Their relationship was affable. Ken had remarried and had never offered such a suggestion, but still it was preying on Susan’s mind. Perhaps someone had planted the obsessive idea. Someone she trusted.

At about the same time that Susan Reinert was writing to Bill Bradfield, the prince of darkness was composing a love letter of his own. And Stephanie Smith, the wife of Dr. Jay, was almost as snoopy as Sue Myers. One evening when Jay Smith was not at home Stephanie managed to break into the locked basement apartment again and this time found a swingers’ magazine with a certain page clipped. The swinging couple on that page were offering to share themselves with any other congenial couple who might write to their post office box. The man in the picture was wearing briefs and had his back to the camera. When Stephanie saw it, she was convinced the swinger in the picture was her husband.

She also found a letter and showed it to her best pal at the dry cleaners.

The friend nodded and clucked sympathetically when Stephanie said, “I work my buns off so he can get a doctorate degree! Where’s he wanna work? Sodom and Gomorrah?”

Lovewoman,

We’ve been working, loving, fucking, and smoking for over a year now and I thought on your graduation a status report is in order. As we agreed, our relationship is sexual. I love your blowjobs and get red hot seeing my cock in your mouth and my cum-you call it lovejuice-seeping from your lips and you licking up each drop.

Your lovecock, forever

P.S. Got some special cocoa butter cream for your asshole so it won’t be sore.

Jay Smith just loved to talk dirty. In another letter he wrote:

No matter what we’ve done, I still love your blowjobs the best, and get red hot looking in the mirror watching my cock go in and out of your precious lips. When my juice drips down your chin and you lick it up and in that sweet Southern accent say, “Good to the last drop,” I throb about ten extra times.

Even though I got your ass virginity and we’ll do some fistfucking this summer (Where did you get the idea of fistfucking?) I prefer your mouth to your cunt or your asshole.

We share sex only with ourselves. No two-timing. I don’t count our spouses, but nobody else. I’m not like your husband so if you fuck around on me I’ll beat your ass instead of fucking it. Really!

Now to some areas we disagree on. Marriage. I still don’t want to marry you even tho I love you more than any woman (my love for my wife is special so it doesn’t count). I like being with you even when it’s not fuck-suck. But you still tend to fib a little and like to practice deception.

I’ll raise this issue again: your husband. We should level with him. Even if you say he’s a mommas boy, he should accept the situation. You told him about you and your brother and he still married you. Incidentally, if you go down South, don’t go out alone with your brother. Your lust for him is not healthy. Tongue kissing sneaked into open bussing is okay, but if you dress up to cock-tease him you’re going to get him hard again and have to suck it off again or at least jerk it off. Don’t do it even if it gets you off big.

Your husband forgave you once. I won’t. No brother sex. Period. Your husband accepts your stupid flirtations. The past indicates he could accept our fuck-suck. He might even join us in our work. Think it over again. I want to meet him. I don’t mind sharing your pussynality with him so why can’t we be open? My wife will accept it if it’s open. From the way you describe his fucking we could help him. Don’t spread your legs so wide and keep them high. It makes your cunt tighter, also … Shit, that’s his problem for now. But we should include him in. Soon. Don’t needle him. Love him good. Keep his balls empty. Well, that’s a long report, but I thought I’d review some highlights. Let’s take vacation days next week or so.

I love you. Always will.

Your lovecock, forever

Stephanie Smith jumped right out of her disco boots and dressed like an aggrieved wife and ran to a divorce lawyer. She was really steamed because “lovewoman” was the wife of a college professor and had always been described by Jay as a perfect lady.

Stephanie wasn’t the only storm on Jay Smith’s horizon. It seemed that he had a few compulsive habits. The local township police had been called on more than one occasion when a merchant spotted Dr. Jay shoplifting merchandise. Because he was a prominent educator, the shopkeepers on each occasion had decided not to prosecute, and the police had kept it quiet.

There’s some evidence that the U.S. Army Reserve Command got the reports because Colonel Jay Smith took an early retirement before he could fulfill his life’s ambition of becoming a general.

When Stephanie Smith started making those visits to the divorce lawyer, she had lots to say about her husband, and she didn’t restrict her tales to her attorney. She told her friend down at the dry cleaner’s that Jay Smith owned a devil costume and some weird dildos.

When that information became public, Jay Smith claimed the costume was a Chinese waiter’s getup, but Stephanie knew they don’t wear horns and a tail when they stir-fry your wontons.

So pretty soon, a lot of folks were hearing rumors that the old prince of darkness must be some special kind of party animal! As it turns out, they didn’t know the half of it.