Echoes in the Darkness

7

For most of his life, Jay Smith had not been all that unattractive. He was six foot two, customarily weighed less than two hundred pounds and carried himself erectly, as befit a military man. He had a good speaking voice and an impressive command of language. But during the months preceding his arrest, a physical change had taken place and it was well documented by news photographs when the educator was in jail trying to raise bail money and facing felony charges leveled by the district attorneys of three counties. There was the Sears theft at the St. Davids store, the attempted theft at the Neshaminy Mall Sears store, the incident of car prowling with loaded guns at the Gateway Shopping Center, the theft of property from the Upper Merion school district, and the possession of contraband drugs. Enough charges to keep Dr. Jay C. Smith in courtrooms for some time to come.

The photographic story was remarkable. He had a high forehead so if there had been additional hair loss it was not noticeable, but he’d gotten heavy and soft and bent, and his face had undergone a coarsening. The Tartar eyes had grown more hooded. The flesh around those eyes collapsed and the sagging lids became reptilian. His heavy dark brows, which always had a tendency to lift cynically, now arched diabolically. Never refined, his wide mouth seemed more fleshy and sagged at the lips from the pull of swollen jowls. And with the added weight and grossening, his weak knobby chin receded noticeably within the folds of his neck.

Now the educator did not merely look dissolute, but extraordinarily sinister. Not a face likely to instill confidence in a jury.

Because of the Quaker influence, the sign at the edge of town reads: WEST CHESTER WELCOMES THEE.

“I could have been president of the United States but I lost the election for mayor of West Chester” is the way John J. O’Brien sized up his brief foray into local politics.

John O’Brien enjoyed trial work, especially criminal law, but thus far his triumphs had been limited to cases such as one involving a hobo who took upon himself the duty of picking up litter in the public park near a lovers’ lane. The litter mostly included discarded underwear and lawyer O’Brien got a kick out of successfully proving that the hobo was an environmentalist, not a voyeur.

A man given to self-deprecating humor, O’Brien was surprised and excited when his divorce client, Mrs. Stephanie Smith, asked him to defend her husband, Dr. Jay Smith, who he knew stood charged with a series of highly publicized crimes.

John O’Brien tilted his round Irish face and his dark brows gave him a pixieish look, when he recalled the request.

“I’m just a small-town lawyer,” O’Brien reminisced, settled in his front-yard rocking chair. The wooden sign suspended over the door of his Victorian office in a residential neighborhood of West Chester said: JOHN J. O’BRIEN, ATTORNEY AT LAW. And below it the word NOTARY had been added, proving that it wasn’t all that easy for a small-town lawyer to make a buck.

“Like everyone else,” the lawyer recalled, “when I first met Stephanie Smith I couldn’t believe she was the wife of a school principal. But she was a decent soul, and I really liked her. She was the kind who always gave you a hug and kiss when coming or going, whether you wanted it or not.”

It seemed that the principal could not get an impartial trial anywhere in the Philadelphia area what with the newspaper coverage of his scandalous secret life. O’Brien wanted at least to win a venue change for the most serious offense, the theft from the St. Davids Sears store, but venue changes were time-consuming.

Stephanie Smith was by then trying to keep her spirits up while her cancer advanced to more critical stages. She still wore her hair teased and sprayed but she’d changed the color to a less garish shade of auburn. And the dying woman even got plastic surgery on her hooked nose during what she knew would be her last year on earth. Possibly the attention of the press was welcomed by Jay Smith’s suffering wife who was in and out of the hospital during short periods of remission.

In the first week of the Jay Smith scandal, she held a press interview and said to reporters, “Hon, you can live with a man for twenty-seven years and not know him. Why, Jay didn’t even let me know he was in jail ’til thirty-six hours after the arrest. I was shocked! I hadn’t seen Jay since Saturday and thought he’d went to army reserves or something. He always would come and go without telling me nothing. It wasn’t unusual not to see him for days at a time.”

Then Stephanie told reporters how she’d met young Jay Smith when he was a student teacher at Chester High School and how, like Jay, she was from a poor local family and how, after they married in 1951, she helped to support him during his university years, and waited and worked while he was overseas in Korea as an army officer.

And despite what lawyer O’Brien advised, during every interview Stephanie gave, there would be lots of potentially damaging tidbits about his “eccentric” ways. She gave reporters what they wanted, but she made it known that she admired her husband.

“He’s such a thinker,” Stephanie Smith said in another interview. “He never talked much around the house but he’d go down to his den and speak into his tape recorder. Hon, he has a wonderful speaking voice! But he always said I didn’t own him and I shouldn’t get involved in his life, and he wanted his privacy. I was always taught that the man is the master of the house and you just accept what he wants.”

Stephanie Smith also let it be known that her husband frequently commented that “the devil will rule the earth.”

The cops said, so what else is new? But the opinion was entered in a public report as a matter of routine.

General John Eisenhower also gave a statement concerning his former colonel: “I think of him often. He was clever and loquacious. He had a terrific sardonic sense of humor. His only eccentricity was his penchant for being a loner. I remember once hinting that we might get together socially for a beer, but he said that the way he lived he had no friends and wanted no friends. I didn’t take offense because I knew he was a busy man and perhaps didn’t have time for such things. He was a free thinker, versed in the classics. He did not join his fellow officers in the mess or at parties.”

The press blitzed Upper Merion, but at first all they could get were some vague statements to the effect that Dr. Jay Smith was a lone wolf who never talked about anything but his work and never mixed socially with colleagues. Despite his years at Upper Merion, some faculty members could not even say for certain if the Smiths had children.

As the fall term was about to begin, Jay Smith was arranging to get out of jail and was composing a few press releases of his own. First, he denied any criminal activity whatsoever, stating that it was preposterous to think he was the bogus courier. Secondly, he theorized that part of his problem was caused by the Upper Merion school administrators who were “out to get him” and inflaming the media.

Some observers might note that from the beginning of his troubles and down through the years, Dr. Jay Smith, on those rare occasions when he would speak, was always more concerned with allegations of sexual perversion than by the very serious felony charges leveled against him.

As to the other public agencies “out to get him,” he had this to say: “The police find a collection of special books that I keep for research. But because they deal with such subjects as sex, homosexuality and bestiality, the police seem preoccupied with them. They see the books on homosexuality and they say, ‘Ah ha! Smiths a homosexual.’ So they ask my wife and she sets them straight and they scratch that one from their list.”

He assured his public that he was planning to publish a book entitled How to Prevent Homosexuality in Your Children.

As to the canine books, he admitted that he was interested in exploring the possibility of training animals as sexual surrogates and that he planned to launch a mail order firm to distribute his findings.

So naturally, all the cops made up gags about Jay Smith’s coming SPCA journal called Loving Your Pet. And Jay Smith’s version of a Ralph Nader-style blockbuster called Consumer’s Guide to Dildos.

But of course the cops couldn’t care less if Jay Smith was bisexual or trisexual or king of the collies. They were interested in the strange little matter of the syringe with the massive dose of drugs, his alibi being that it belonged to his son-in-law Eddie Hunsberger.

Well, where was Edward Hunsberger? And where was his wife, Stephanie, daughter of Jay Smith? They represented Jay Smiths potential alibi for all the drugs found in the basement.

When the cops tried to find the Hunsbergers, they discovered that Eddie and Stephanie had failed to keep an appointment at a methadone clinic back in February. The clinic employees told them that several attempts to contact the recovering addicts at the Smith home had produced no leads, so the counselors feared drug relapse.

One clinic counselor told police that during her last telephone inquiry into the whereabouts of her clients Edward and Stephanie Hunsberger, she’d managed to reach Dr. Jay Smith himself who told her that the young couple would not need further monitoring.

“I’ve gotten them a Placidyl and some real good pot,” he told the startled counselor. “They’re going to de-tox themselves.”

When she recovered from that revelation and told Dr. Smith she didn’t think that was a good idea, he surprised her further by saying, “Thank you for the help you’ve given Stephanie and Eddie. And by the way, I have access to good pot that I got in Trenton. If you’re ever interested.”

When Jay Smith got arrested, he was found to be carrying the social security card of his daughter, Stephanie Hunsberger. And the police discovered that somebody had been forging the name of Edward Hunsberger and Stephanie on several welfare checks that had been sent to the Smith home for six months after the young couple was last seen. The cops didn’t bother trying to prove forgery against Jay Smith because there were enough charges to investigate, but they were really starting to wonder about the Hunsbergers’ disappearance.

The detectives had a theory about the night of his arrest. The local owner of a large supermarket chain owned a van exactly like the one Jay Smith was peeking into. The police wondered if the school principal had been plotting a kidnap.

More than one cop expressed exactly the same sentiment as they tried to piece together a profile of the elusive and mysterious principal of Upper Merion. “For a long time,” a cop said, “that guy was a loose cannon, careening all over the place.”

Shortly after his arrest, while he was in the Chester County Farms Prison trying to arrange bail, he received a letter of sympathy and support from a colleague. And that colleague received a speedy reply from the beleaguered educator. The reply was written in August, 1978, and mailed from the prison farm. The letter from Jay Smith to William Bradfield began:

Dear Bill,

Please cut out the Dr. Smith stuff. Jay or Jack is what friends call me. I prefer “Jack.” I count you as a friend.…

In that letter Jay Smith asked for three books: Moby Dick, Ivanhoe and Warriner’s Grammar. He said that he intended to begin teaching other prisoners if he couldn’t get a bail reduction to gain his freedom.

And while Bill Bradfield and Jay Smith were busy writing letters, Susan Reinert was busy writing a letter about him. It was sent to her therapist and was dated September 3rd.

Dear Ros,

Our former principal, Dr. Smith, has been arrested on robbery charges. The papers have been full of bizarre stories so I’m sure the opening of school will be “interesting.” I always thought he was strange but not criminal.

I have seen Bill. Nothing much different. I still love him. He now says he loves me but there are no more plans for our seeing each other than there have ever been. I have gotten a little more interested in dating others again. Will see what happens.

Love,

Susan

The diary notes of Susan Reinert indicate that she was groping for new determination to change the direction of her hopeless affair with William Bradfield.

In a sad piece of self-analysis she wrote: “Rejection, low self-worth, constant battle. He would rather live with someone who wants to kill me than to live with me.”

By the time school opened, the police noted that all of the crimes for which Jay Smith was charged had occurred on Saturdays when an educator is free. Then they discovered from Dorothy Hunsberger that she had last seen her son Eddie and Jay Smiths daughter Stephanie on a Saturday in February. And it didn’t take long for local journalists to discover that when Edward and Stephanie Hunsberger had disappeared, all of their possessions were left behind in the Jay Smith home. They had vanished from the earth with only the clothes on their backs.

Naturally, it didn’t take long for a reporter to write: “Dr. Smith or Mr. Hyde?”

Vince Valaitis was sorry that Bill Bradfield just wasn’t around much in the fall of 1978. And when he was, he seemed to have lost much of his need for Vince’s humor. Some of it Vince attributed to the failing shop in Montgomery Mall.

Vince and Sue spent lots of time discussing their merchandise, wondering if they should expand into other facets of arts and craft, since the jewelry and pottery and wall hangings weren’t moving at all. There were times when, during his shift at the store, Vince Valaitis would take in only five or ten dollars. Yet Bill Bradfield claimed that the store could not be abandoned as a failure. And to all of little faith, he said there might be a possibility of opening yet another store in Philadelphia, and a third in Exton Mall. Far from giving up, Bill Bradfield believed that they might one day control franchise rights for southeastern Pennsylvania.

The corporation treasurer Vince Valaitis and the corporation secretary Sue Myers would nod their heads and agree with the corporation president, and Sue Myers would whisper privately that if Bill Bradfield’s father had operated Western Electric like this, Pennsylvania would still be reading by candlelight.

Sue rued the day she’d ever helped hatch this get-rich scheme. She hoped that Bill Bradfield would decide to compete with his old man in some other way. And Vince, she figured, better resign himself to the fact that his 5 percent of the business would turn out to be one clay pot and a beaded headband.

Vince was still drawing a manager’s salary so he had no complaints. What Vince missed were the good old times when his friends would invite him up to dinner and he’d have a great meal and go home supremely content from an evening of interesting stimulating talk.

Once when Sue Myers had gone to bed, Bill Bradfield took Vince into his confidence and admitted that in the past he’d been guilty of “womanizing.”

Bill Bradfield implied that he would probably remain celibate to the end of his life, and that the absence of sexual pressure was perhaps the best part of his relationship with Sue Myers. He told Vince that the only true love he’d ever experienced had never been sullied. It involved a girl in Annapolis, who, in this version, did not do her dying like Ali MacGraw in Love Story. This one kicked the bucket in grand style like Merle Oberon in Wuthering Heights. He’d been there at her bedside when she passed on to a better world.

From the very beginning of the 1978 fall term, Bill Bradfield was on the move. Sue Myers had to take time off from school to devote herself to the failing store and was so exhausted she hardly had strength to interrogate him when he’d stay out all night. He looked so tired and his beard was so long and ragged that students said you could toss popcorn at him and it’d stick.

Gone were the days when Vince would watch the man he considered the most brilliant and best-educated teacher he’d ever known playing cutesy-pie with Sue Myers. When Bill Bradfield would try to charm her with his imaginary ostrich named “Elliot Emu.”

He would trot out his feathered pal and in his Elliot Emu voice say, “Are you mad at me?”

And she’d giggle and say, “No, I’m not mad at you. How could I be mad at Elliot Emu!”

When he was home, Bill Bradfield would spend an entire evening doing what he liked best, watching television shows like Laverne amp; Shirley or Mork amp; Mindy. Like Sue Myers, Vince Valaitis had never seen Bill Bradfield reading even one of his five thousand books.

Vince was aware of teachers at Upper Merion who took every opportunity to say that, far from being Upper Merion’s intellectual leader, Bill Bradfield was a fraud. One English teacher, a relative of writer Lionel Trilling, frequently ridiculed him and called him “Busy Whiskers.” Another, a former military man like Jay Smith, openly resented the entire independent study program ramrodded by Bill Bradfield and referred to him as “a bearded despot with a good two-line opening on any subject, but nothing more.”

This teacher complained of what was being done in Bill Bradfields independent study program, and claimed that high grades were automatic while disciplinary matters were ignored.

Still another English teacher, whose husband did in fact know something about Eastern religions, became interested in hearing Bill Bradfield at a party discussing the impact of Confucius on all of Eastern and Western religion.

So the husband put aside his martini and Swedish meatballs and posed a few complex and scholarly questions to Bill Bradfield who instantly looked about as relaxed as a safecracker.

Bill Bradfield stopped talking and scuttled away as if he’d found a maggot in his meatball.

From then on that teacher’s husband was of the opinion that Bill Bradfield’s Confucian epigrams came from the Hong Kong Noodle Company, and Bill Bradfield avoided that man like a vampire avoids sunburn.

Vince Valaitis knew about those dissenters, but he did not, could not believe that Bill Bradfield was anything less than a brilliant, splendidly educated teaching professional. He longed for the conversations, but nowadays his friend was as busy as a piranha.

In October, he told Vince and Sue Myers that he had to make an urgent trip to Annapolis because during the summer Chris Pappas had damaged a sailboat they’d hired. The boat owner was demanding that he personally see to the repair of the mast. The damage took place during a storm, he said, when he and Chris were sailing with “friends,” who of course were Shelly and her pal.

He said that he’d also discovered that their mutual Annapolis friend Rachel had a blue Volkswagen Beetle for sale and he thought he ought to buy it.

He knew very well that Sue Myers was busier than a Gulag gravedigger and could not accompany him on a weekend to Annapolis.

After he’d gone, Sue told Vince that she believed he was going there to be with Rachel.

Vince tried to assure her that she was wrong to fear the ice maiden.

“Bill has no romantic interest in anyone,” he said. And then diplomatically added what he knew to be false: “except you.”

And true to her fashion, Sue nodded wearily and showed no emotion of any kind, keeping it all bottled and buried.

But she said to the young teacher, “You don’t know the half of it. I’m in a lot better position to understand Bill Bradfield and I tell you that he and that woman Rachel are strangely compatible. I think there’s a relationship developing with this one and I don’t know what it means.”

As to Susan Reinert, well, it appeared that she was through being emotionally manhandled. When Bill Bradfield didn’t keep a dinner date at her home, Susan Reinert showed up at Upper Merion the next day with a plastic bag full of leftovers and instructed a student to deliver it to Mr. Bradfield with a message saying, “This is the dinner you failed to get last night.”

Vince got wind of it and decided to become a peacekeeper since things around Upper Merion were straightening themselves out under Jay Smith’s replacement, and intradepartment feuds weren’t needed. He took Susan Reinert aside at school and tried to inform her that Bill Bradfield might merely be signaling his desire to withdraw from his role as adviser to the world of Upper Merion, and that their friend had outside business worries with the art store, and perhaps receiving a pile of leftovers could get on somebody’s nerves.

Vince knew he had to be very careful when talking to Susan Reinert. Once, he’d tried to help by quietly informing her that to think of Bill Bradfield in romantic terms was futile because, confidentially, Bill Bradfield lived with Sue Myers.

Vince got verbally slammed by the former wrestler for that one. Bill Bradfield told him he had a big mouth and he was giving Susan Reinert information about his private life that was none of her business, and any information would only encourage “that pathetic mousy woman” to sit next to him at faculty meetings. And that unless she was ignored she might never stop writing those notes with the disgusting sexual imagery that had caused Sue Myers to pop her cork in the first place.

Still, Vince was a helpful and compassionate soul and eager to please everyone, especially Bill Bradfield, and he had it in his head that he should gently admonish Susan Reinert about having students deliver bags of garbage to a guy she was deluded into thinking cared for her romantically.

He was in the process of trying to explain all this when she said to him, “Vince, I understand how close you are to Bill and to Sue Myers, but I need to know, will you remain my friend?”

And the young teacher answered, “Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because Sue hates me so much.”

“She doesn’t hate you. That’s just not so,” he said.

“She means to see that I’m harmed,” Susan Reinert said, and the tiny woman showed some real fear behind those oversized glasses.

“That’s silly,” Vince said. “Just plain silly.”

“And she means harm to my children!” Susan Reinert said. “And I have that on the best of authority.”

What could Vince Valaitis do about that announcement? Now he was convinced that Bill Bradfield was not exaggerating when he said that Susan Reinert was more than neurotic, that she was absolutely crazy these days, and that Vince simply should avoid her.

As usual, Bill Bradfield found out about Vince’s good intentions and the next time they were alone Vince got it again. And by now, Vince was really worried about his friend because Bill Bradfield was so intense that when he did come home he’d treat an episode of Love Boat like a bomb squad documentary as he lay motionless before the tube.

Bill Bradfield flatly ordered Vince Valaitis to stay completely away from the “demented” woman. And to underscore the depths to which Susan Reinert had sunk, not just psychologically but morally, Bill Bradfield offered the young teacher and Sue Myers a most shocking and irresistible piece of news from an “unimpeachable source.”

Susan Reinert, he told them, was secretly dating none other than old Mr. Hyde himself.

“Jay Smith?” Vince Valaitis said. “I can’t believe it!”

“I can believe it.” Sue Myers smirked. She could always believe anything about her hated rival.

“It’s absolutely true!” Bill Bradfield said. “And soon I’ll be able to tell you how I know.”

And as was his way, Bill Bradfield, when relating a story, no matter how incredible it seemed, always tossed in a little detail, like the alligator shoes.

“I can tell you this,” Bill Bradfield said. “They even have pet names for each other. Jay Smith calls her Tweetie Bird. Can you imagine? Tweetie Bird?”

And while Sue Myers rolled her eyes in revulsion, Vince Valaitis gaped in wonder.

How could she do it? There were all sorts of rumors about Jay Smith’s daughter’s disappearance and that he’d done drugs with her, and rumors of incest, even that he had a mail order business selling penis stiffeners. To Vince Valaitis Jay Smith was evil incarnate.

The young teacher wondered if he’d ever understand the intricacies of sexual attraction. Tweetie Bird. Why, it was almost as revolting as Elliot Emu.