The store opened its doors on the very day that a bogus Brinks courier pulled a major theft at the Sears store in St. Davids. Vince and Sue did all the actual work at the store and business was all right at first.
The Christmas season was also pretty good but there were some disturbing signs that the shoppers at Montgomery Mall had not been spending their lives waiting for gimcracks. Still, Vince was well paid and was happy with the arrangement.
When Bill Bradfield had occasion to take time off from school Vince often took over his class. Bill Bradfield would have a lesson plan even for a one-day substitute, a detailed lesson plan complete with a laboriously drawn seating chart. He wanted to control the class even if he wasn’t there.
Vince wished that Bill Bradfield was less serious, and even hinted to the older man that there were things in life that could not be controlled.
* * *
It had been a prosperous holiday season for the Sears, Roebuck store in Neshaminy Mall. The bags containing the receipts were bulging on Saturday afternoon, December 17, 1977. The cash total alone was $137,798.
It was nearly time for Armored Motor Service to make its daily pickup, and the assistant head cashier waited impatiently. Sears was running short of one-dollar bills and silver coins.
At 2:00 P.M. the assistant head cashier was finally handed an identification card by one of her clerks who told her that the courier had arrived. The woman took the couriers identification card to the back office to compare the name with a list of Armored Motor Service couriers on the office wall. For security reasons, the names and signatures of all couriers were posted.
The courier’s name, Albert J. Wharton, checked out with the name on her list, but she decided to use a little more caution because of the August theft at the Sears in St. Davids.
She compared the signature of Albert J. Wharton on the card with the signature of Albert J. Wharton on the posted notice. They had not been written by the same hand.
The assistant head cashier walked out of the back office and examined the uniformed courier. He was fiftyish, a tall man with glasses.
“Did you bring our money?” she asked. “We ordered coins and one-dollar bills to carry us over a few days.”
He shook his head and said, “Had a very heavy demand today. Had to put it on another truck.”
The courier seemed calm and controlled. But the woman had worked at that store for seven years, and the couriers had never needed a second truck.
“Just a few minutes,” she said, and went back to her office.
The armed courier looked at his watch and began to pace outside the cashiers office. A minute passed, then another. Even if the courier heard the call going out over the Sears public address system he probably wouldn’t understand it.
“Eight hundred call for operator thirty-nine,” the voice announced.
It was directed to the store security officer and meant trouble in the cashier’s office.
The cashier would later say, “There was something about his face. It was not a common face.”
That uncommon face was suddenly damp with sweat. The courier looked at his watch once again.
“You can’t go in there!” one of the cashiers yelled from the outer office as the courier suddenly vaulted the half wall and ran toward the inner office where the assistant head cashier awaited the arrival of the Sears security officer.
He slammed into another clerk knocking her to the floor as he burst into the office.
“I want my card!” he warned, stopping before the assistant head cashier. “I don’t have to take this type of treatment! I’ll just go back downstairs and send somebody else up! But I want my card!”
The frightened woman didn’t get a chance to reply and perhaps couldn’t have, as she gaped at that uncommon face. The courier snatched the card from her hand, turned and bolted out.
During his escape, the courier pushed people out of the way and hurtled daringly down the moving steps of the escalator. The courier did not get the money. Not this time.
“The composite police drawing never got the eyes right,” one of the witnesses later complained to police. “There was something about his eyes.”
Things in the Upper Merion crucible had been simmering for three years and were bound to boil over.
The confrontation took place in the teachers’ lounge. According to Sue Myers, she lost her temper and kicked Susan Reinert in the shin. According to Susan Reinert, it was a knee in the thigh coupled with a warning that sounded like “If you care for yourself and your kids you’d better leave Bill alone.”
That afternoon a sobbing Susan Reinert called her therapist and said, “How do I handle something like this with Karen and Michael? I don’t want to scare them, but I think they need to take necessary precautions. What do I tell them? Should I say to beware of any woman who comes up and tells them she knows Mommy from school? I really fear this woman!”
Susan Reinert had stopped seeing Roslyn Weinberger on an individual basis by then, but still telephoned and still attended group therapy. The group was not composed of the kind of people with whom Susan Reinert had shared her life. They were not Great Books advocates, nor English teachers, nor even college graduates necessarily. They were ordinary working folks, and they had lots of advice when Susan Reinert brought them her tale complete with contusions.
One of the group members asked, “How much more are you going to expose yourself to, Susan?”
“Well, I don’t know,” she answered. “You see she works with me and …”
“We’re not talking about her,” another one muttered.
“This guy means you no good,” still another informed her.
“He’s a manipulative son of a bitch!” yet another piped up.
“Whether he does or doesn’t leave the other woman, you can do better than this bullshit!” still another pointed out.
“But I think you have the wrong idea,” Susan Reinert squeaked. “You don’t understand. He really does have lovely qualities. And he’s been with her so long he just doesn’t want to run out on her when she’s so unstable and needy. He’s just waiting for the proper time to get her out of his life!”
Sue Myers wasn’t in such hot shape herself after the fight, not emotionally. It had all come to so little, this life with Bill Bradfield, all the years and sacrifice and patience, all the promises of marriage and children of her own. It had come down to fighting like alley cats in the faculty lounge.
“Susan Reinert pursues me,” Bill Bradfield swore to her. “The woman’s neurotic. She’s looking for a stepfather for her children and somehow she’s chosen me!”
“You’re lying!” Sue Myers said. “Even when you were in New York studying Latin last summer, her number showed up on our phone bill. Why’re you so cruel as to bill those calls to our phone? Do you like to torment me?”
“I don’t see her in the way you think!” he said. “I felt sorry for her. She’s pathetic. Sure, I’ve called her. I’ve given her advice because she begs me for help. My God, I wouldn’t have anything to do with a woman like that, not in the way you imply. She’s not even an adequate teacher. I can’t even stand her absurd politics!”
Sue Myers had heard a good deal on that subject. Her “absurd politics” meant that Susan Reinert was not politically conservative enough to suit Bill Bradfield. Now that Ezra Pound was long dead, his greatest living hero was William F. Buckley, Jr. In fact, he once went to a National Review dinner in a new suit he bought for the occasion.
One afternoon, Sharon Lee, who’d arranged the Great Gatsby party, received a very strange visit in her homeroom from Bill Bradfield. He was visibly distressed. His brow knitted anxiously. His blue eyes ached with concern. Though he had never told a living soul that he’d had any sort of romantic involvement with Susan Reinert, he did admit to Sharon Lee that he was a friend and adviser to the troubled woman. And in that Sharon Lee was Susan Reinert’s close friend, Bill Bradfield wanted her assistance.
“I know I can
trust you to make Susan understand,” he said. “Tell her to stay away from Sue Myers. I’m concerned for her welfare. I fear that Sue Myers is insanely jealous. She might actually do harm to Susan Reinert.” And then he added, “Or even to her children.”
Susan Reinert wondered if any man was worth it all. She made up her mind to tell Bill Bradfield that he had to choose between Sue Myers and herself, and must do it at once. On the other hand, she told her friend and fellow teacher Pat Schnure that Bill Bradfield could not just simply walk away from Sue Myers without properly preparing the way, and that there was a reason for this. It seemed that he’d experienced a great loss in his own life and couldn’t bear to make others suffer loss without easing it as much as possible.
There had been a girl in Annapolis with whom he was desperately in love. She was diagnosed as having terminal cancer. The disease ravaged her quickly and one day when he went to her family home to see if the prognosis was at all hopeful he was told that God had taken her suddenly and mercifully.
By and by, in the throes of despair, he found himself in the place where they’d first kissed. Theirs had not been a sexual love. It was pure and chaste. On the very spot where they’d vowed their fidelity, he experienced a catharsis, he said. He wept as only poets weep. And he was whole again.
This man, Susan Reinert informed her friend, was worth waiting for. He swore that the wait would be a short one.
She dabbed a little more liniment on her bruises and decided to be patient.
5
Mr. Chips
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.
Echoes in the Darkness Page 5
