Echoes in the Darkness

5

Sue Myers often worried that Bill Bradfield would never see himself as half the success in academia that his father had been in the world of business. Yet she found him to be talented as well as inspiring. True, he was sometimes erratic, always eccentric, frequently late or absent while doing a dozen other things unrelated to his job, but that ability to inspire was a gift, she believed.

But their sex life was diminishing even more. He was so often away on conferences, or seminars, or lectures, or various other outings that she frequently found herself alone, listening to the kiddie clock running down.

Added to this was a brand-new worry for a frugal, mature, sensible schoolteacher. She was facing something she hadn’t given a serious thought to in her entire working life. Sue Myers faced the possibility of financial disaster in the Terra Art store.

Bill Bradfield, who had hardly set foot in the store while she was working two jobs, told her that she was silly to worry so soon. He said that he would never risk their economic future. It just takes businesses a while to get going, he assured her, and the art store was her idea, after all.

She wondered if this dangerous refusal to bail out now was some sort of unconscious attempt to score a little victory in the world of commerce. To prove something to the old man who still doled out money to his son on special occasions.

Sue Myers always thought that instead of loving his parents as he claimed, Bill Bradfield hated them. It gave her night sweats because it seemed to relate to the real danger of financial ruin for both of them. On top of all this were recurring fantasies that at this very moment as she lay suffering, he might be in the bed of Susan Reinert. Yet he swore that he couldn’t bear the woman, and in that he seemed truthful. She was sure that he actually despised Susan Reinert no matter what he did with her.

Before Sue had started growing numb trying to understand and anticipate the moves of Bill Bradfield she used to wonder about his feelings toward women in general. He had once told her a strange story about his friend Tom, a drama critic who’d lived with him and his first common-law wife, Fran.

Bill Bradfield had decided that his common-law affair with Fran should come to an end and so he persuaded Tom to attempt a seduction of Fran. If Tom could manage to get Fran in bed, Bill Bradfield was going to take some pictures with a hidden camera and force Fran to leave the relationship quietly. It was a strange and disturbing story, particularly since Tom the seducer was homosexual.

Bill Bradfield’s most extravagant need was for that oceangoing sailboat, but Sue had long since believed that to be just another symptom of the child in him that had originally attracted her and was making her crazy. As she now had to face impending middle age without an economic safety net, she started tallying up the emotional debits and credits. His inconsistency revealed itself in every facet of life.

One of their ears was a Volkswagen. He had decided that he was going to take care of the VW to save money. He couldn’t replace a light bulb yet he bought a full set of expensive metric tools. He never turned a bolt.

There was the world’s most expensive tennis racquet that never played a single match. And a set of Latin grammars he had to buy because he thought their friend and neighbor Vince Valaitis should learn Latin. They were never opened.

He had five thousand books in that apartment, and more stored away in the attic. Most had never been opened.

“I seldom saw him read,” remembered Sue Myers. “And I mean during our entire time together.”

Then there was the piano. Sue Myers was able to trace that one to his childhood. It seemed that his family had sent his sister to the Peabody Conservatory to study music. Young Bill Bradfield got jealous and decided that he too had musical talents. He was positive that his parents would buy him a piano for his birthday. What did he get? A toy truck.

Now a $3,000 Stieff piano was sitting in the living room of their apartment. Bill Bradfield called it proudly a “Southern Steinway,” and said it had antique quality. He had lessons for a while. He said it took him back to the good old days in the Haverford College glee club. He was determined to learn to play.

One day the music stopped and he never touched the piano again. That’s the way it was for Sue Myers with Bill Bradfield: either symphony or silence and nothing in between.

As she lay alone in her bed and thought about all this and faced the prospect of financial ruin, it suddenly occurred to her: That old piano in the living room had cost more than her car! She had to cough up three thousand bucks because when he was a little boy his old man had bought him a goddamn toy truck!

And while Sue Myers was facing a bleak economic future and a worse emotional future, Susan Reinert was doing her own sort of tallying. Bill Bradfield had never told a single person that he had so much as dated Susan Reinert.

And so Susan Reinert began engaging in a curious exercise. In addition to diary entries to herself, she began writing letters to him, most of which were never mailed.

The references in the letters made it clear that they were meant to be read, and were read, but it seems that most were read during his visits to her home. It was a curious ritual: writing ones thoughts as they occur, as one waits, unable to meet or talk on the telephone. Then when they did meet, to have him read and discuss the letters. It was curious but consistent with the obsessions of the man who needed documentation of everything.

There were letters filled with her frustration over his inability to appreciate her as a professional, and of being deliberately misunderstood, letters full of self-pity.

To accuse me of judging your religious search as palaver ranks as one of your cruelest remarks. And regarding the department chairman, you have always undervalued me as a professional. You would, I presume, turn down my name immediately, firmly and finally, not letting it get to the stage of nomination.

You never praise me except for my body and cooking. I’m not as simple as you might think. If I were, I might be content to let one day a month, or one day a summer be enough. It’s not. Being with you only makes me want to be with you more-to have our separations be the natural ones required for our separate selves, not the lonely ones imposed by you. I can’t turn myself off for five years. I’m not apologizing for that. I wish the intensity of the hurt didn’t match the intensity of the passion, but I accept that next to God, Karen and Michael, you are the center of my life. Somewhere I became deluded into believing I was that important to you.

I can’t make you love me. I guess you’re used to being loved by women. No man except my father has ever loved me for very long. I’ll stop trying. If you ever decide that spending time with me is worth making some changes, let me know. I’ll try to keep from drying up.

She frequently threatened to break off their relationship, and would, but after a short while she’d relent.

The literary allusions for his mind were always coupled with appeals to his belly.

Visions of Prufrock, your hair, my dark private place, Andrew Marvell, nuns, come drifting in. Saturday I felt an integral part of you! Treat yourself to a nice dinner, please. Plan on roast lamb ratatouille when you return here. You can help me pay the phone bill later.

Meanwhile back in the principality, the old prince of darkness was letting the school go to hell. An “open class” policy was unofficially instituted at Upper Merion, hence student absences often went unreported.

When a guidance counselor complained to Jay Smith that this didn’t seem to be the way to run a school, Dr. Jay replied, “You should consider getting out of education. There’re other ways to make money, you know.”

When the surprised guidance counselor asked to what ways Dr. Smith was referring, the principal arched those brows and showed him a grin like an eel and said that he knew a guy who made some nice pocket change by running ads in the local newspaper offering to silence guns. Then he laughed and left the guidance counselor gaping.

Jay Smith was more entrepreneurial than Henry Ford. To another dissatisfied staff member he said, “You don’t need this job anyway. You live on a farm, don’t you? You should raise dogs. Men can never sexually satisfy a woman. If animals can help the blind they can be surrogate sex partners.”

Jay Smith’s “open mike” monologues to the students were becoming more frequent, less coherent. The kids loved to bait Dr. Jay by sending questions to the principal’s office. Sometimes he could ramble on through two periods.

And by now, the principal’s secretary was getting to know more about his family than she ever wanted to know. Ida Micucci knew that his eldest daughter Stephanie was a strung-out junkie, living at various times with other addicts in the area. The young woman was in and out of rehabilitation programs. She would often call her father, but end up telling Ida how much she needed money.

Sometimes she’d come into the office to get money from her father, money she said was to be spent at fashionable beauty salons in Valley Forge, but which probably went up her nose or into her arm. And if her father wasn’t there, the young woman would sit and complain to Ida that while her husband Edward Hunsberger was locked up for his own narcotics addiction, Jay Smith was trying to push her into a relationship with someone else. She asked if Ida had any influence with her father.

And of course Ida would have to say that God Himself had no influence with Jay C. Smith, and the secretary’s heart would ache for the poor girl. She felt even more pity for his other daughter Sheri, a sweet but deeply troubled youngster. She wished that Sheri would get out of that house and go to live with one of her uncles.

And so it went. Ida would take all the strange phone calls from strange women, and watch Jay Smith in his black suit go to wash his hands twenty times a day, and smell the strange chemical smells in his office after he left. Moreover, people were reporting thefts from their desks lately. There was a thief about, but Ida figured a desk burglar was small potatoes around here.

Then, despite all her attempts not to be drawn into the troubled life of her boss, Ida learned that the entire Smith household was disintegrating. As if the addiction of young Stephanie and her husband Eddie wasn’t trouble enough, Jay Smith’s wife discovered she had terminal cancer.

So Ida Micucci went on trying to pity her boss. And in his own strange way he sometimes surprised her pleasantly.

Once, Ida happened to tell Jay Smith that she liked stuffed cabbage. Two days later when she got home from work, Ida discovered a vat of stuffed cabbage on her front porch, enough to feed the Philadelphia Eagles.

When holidays came, she’d discover presents in her car. No notes, no acknowledgments necessary.

At times like these when he was weathering such tragedy, she truly wanted to pity him. But whenever she tried to commiserate for the elder Stephanie’s illness or young Stephanie’s drug problems, she’d search his eyes for signs of sadness or pain. She never saw anything but Pan leading a nymph to perdition. He was a very hard man to pity.

Susan Reinert occasionally brought her children Karen and Michael to the principal’s office when she had a late class. Jay Smith didn’t like the idea. One day after they left Ida said to him, “Boy, if all kids were only as nice and polite as those two!”

He slid his eyes in her direction and said, “I don’t like teachers bringing their damn kids around school. We’re not here to babysit.”

“You’d have to like those kids,” Ida Micucci retorted.

“I don’t like any kids,” Jay Smith replied.

And because Ida was the only one who ever tried to get in the last word with Dr. Jay Smith, she said, “How can you be a school principal and not like kids?”

He turned and went silently back to his office and closed the door.

During the tenure of Jay Smith, Ida discovered that she was losing respect for teachers in general.

“They could all see what was happening to our school,” she said later. “They were so scared for their jobs they said nothing. I’ll never feel the same about the profession after my experience working for Jay Smith.”

And though it wasn’t her place to administer discipline, one day Ida got sick and tired of all the cowards she perceived them to be. She stormed into Jay Smiths office and said, “Do you know that there’re students smoking dope in the parking lot? Are you going to do something about this or not?”

And Jay Smith sat back in his chair and folded his arms and slid his eyes onto her, and with a look of amusement said, “What do you want me to do with them, Ida? Kill them?”

The elder daughter of Jay Smith wrote a very troubled letter to a former boyfriend that winter, a letter that ended up in the hands of local police. In the letter, young Stephanie expressed an irrational fear of her father. She had come to believe that her father had somehow induced the rapid growing cancer in the stomach, intestines and lymph nodes of her mother. The terrified young woman concluded that perhaps her mother’s illness had been induced through toxic substances in her food.

The letter said in part, “So much cancer in such a short period? No way. I’m afraid I’ll kill myself if anything else happens!”

And then there occurred the strangest event of all in the legend of Dr. Jay Smith. Young Stephanie and her husband Eddie happened to stop at the home of his parents, Pete and Dorothy Hunsberger in North Wales. The Hunsbergers, like the Smiths, had suffered a lot because of the addiction of Eddie, their only child. Eddie was a handsome young fellow and an avid reader. His parents knew he had potential. The Hunsbergers had never stopped hoping that perhaps he could conquer the addiction, and Eddie seemed to be making some strides in rehabilitation this time. The reason he came to them that Saturday in February, 1978, was to complete his income tax return.

Their son customarily visited once a week. The last words that Dorothy Hunsberger ever heard him utter were “We’ll be back a little later.”

He and young Stephanie walked out the door and were never seen again. Except by Jay Smith.

After weeks of frantic inquiries, Dorothy Hunsberger told police that Eddies father-in-law, Dr. Jay C. Smith, was the last person to see the couple.

Jay Smith had told Dorothy Hunsberger that the young people had suddenly decided to head out for California because Eddie discovered there was a warrant out for his arrest, a warrant for writing forged drug prescriptions.

“But I’ve checked with federal, state and local authorities!” Dorothy Hunsberger told police. “There aren’t any warrants for Eddie.”

The last message she ever got from Jay Smith regarding their children was given during a phone call near the end of that school term. He said, “Well, the kids are finally in California.”

The last she ever heard on the subject from the wife of Jay Smith came in a terrifying phone call that she at first chalked up to delirium from cancer drugs.

The elder Stephanie said to Mrs. Hunsberger, “Oh, my God, I hope Jay didn’t do them in!”

* * *

Ida Micucci thought her prayers had been answered. The school received word at the last faculty meeting of 1978 that Dr. Jay Smith was leaving the principals office for a position in the Upper Merion administration building. That’s what they heard publicly. Privately, there were rumors that the district administrators had gotten wind of some of the shoplifting complaints that local merchants and police hadn’t kept totally quiet.

At that last faculty meeting, Bill Bradfield arose and gave Dr. Smith a glowing testimonial. He spoke extemporaneously for five minutes. And he organized a retirement dinner.

While Sue Myers and Vince Valaitis and Susan Reinert and Ida Micucci and almost everybody else around the school were feeling relief, Bill Bradfield was comparing Jay Smith to Albert Schweitzer. When Bill Bradfield got through, you’d think that Upper Merion’s foremost expert on poodles in your waterbed was beloved. It was a reprise of Goodbye Mr. Chips.

One of the people ever so grateful to see him go was Pat Schnure, Susan Reinert’s closest friend in the English department. Pat was tall and willowy with dark hair and turquoise-blue eyes. Bill Bradfield had once made a minor pass at her, but she was far too pretty for his efforts. When Pat had occasion to drive her principal home one day she felt his eyes slide over her like a steamy wet cloak.

He said things like “Pat, it’s not easy being a fellow like me in the company of a beauty like you. You see, I’m aware that I’m not attractive, but it doesn’t mean I don’t have needs.”

Trying not to jam the gas pedal through the floor, Pat said, “Gee, wasn’t that a swell lunch?” and anything else that popped into her head to change the subject.

“Tell me, Pat,” he said, “do you like to have your body relaxed? Through massage for instance?”

She started shaking a little, but then he said, “You know, there are other ways to make money. You could have a second career if you wished.”

And as she was getting ready to say, “Gosh, thanks, Doctor Smith, but I’d make a lousy masseuse,” he totally surprised her by saying, “You should consider a security job. I see you as a very fine security officer. What do you think of that?”