Fred Wattenmaker forgot all about that incident until the fall of 1978, after the entire school was overwhelmed by the arrest of Jay Smith and the scandal surrounding his secret life.
Fred Wattenmaker was surprised when Bill Bradfield approached him at school and said, “Believe me, Fred, I’ve questioned Doctor Smith for hours and hours and there’s no way he did any of the things he’s been accused of doing.”
And Fred Wattenmaker didn’t think too much about that odd little aside except that Bill Bradfield approached him again a month later and said, “I’ve covered everything with Jay Smith and he’s innocent. I’m sure of it except that we can’t cover the theft at the Sears store in St. Davids.”
Fred Wattenmaker thought it was awfully decent of old Bill Bradfield to be trying to help his former principal, but he did seem to be getting rather obsessive about it.
And then in November, Bill Bradfield talked about it yet another time. He asked Fred Wattenmaker to step outside his classroom and he said, “You won’t believe this, but I know where Doctor Smith was when he was supposed to have robbed Sears!”
“That’s fantastic!” said Fred Wattenmaker. “And where was he?”
“We were visiting you in Ocean City!” Bill Bradfield announced. “Remember the note? Well, Doctor Smith was with me. It was the Saturday before Labor Day.”
Fred Wattenmaker said, “But I was there with a house full of people over Labor Day weekend. You must’ve come a week earlier.”
“I forget the date, but anyway, it coincides with the Sears theft.”
“I’ll look for the note,” Fred offered. “That might help.”
“That’s not important,” Bill Bradfield said. “There was no date on the note. It’s not important.”
By the Christmas holidays another former student was privy to the worst-kept secret in Bill Bradfield’s life: that Susan Reinert was the mistress of Jay Smith who was threatening to kill her because “she knows too much.” This time he informed a former pupil of his who was presently a student at St. John’s College on the New Mexico campus.
The young man was home for the holidays when Bill Bradfield told him. It was pretty much as it had been told to Vince Valaitis, Chris Pappas and Sue Myers, but there were variations.
This time Bill Bradfield said that Susan Reinert, if she wasn’t killed by Jay Smith, would no doubt be done away with by somebody she picked up because “she frequents dangerous bars and dates black men.”
“Sometimes,” he told his former pupil, “she seems to have a death wish.”
And Bill Bradfield added that though he was nothing more than a friend who’d tried to help with financial and emotional problems, she had, alas, gone bonkers over him and included him in her will naming him guardian of her children in the event of her death.
Bill Bradfield also mentioned that Susan Reinert had, in her pathetic attempts to ensnare him, made him beneficiary on some insurance policies.
The young man reacted as everyone else had upon hearing all the business about Jay Smith murdering Susan Reinert. He said that the police must be notified, and Bill Bradfield responded as he always had by saying, no, that wouldn’t help at this time.
But Bill Bradfield assured the young man that he would do something. He said he might take Susan to England in the summer to “diffuse” the situation.
It all sounded as loony to the young guy as it did to everyone else, so, like everyone else, he decided not to tell Susan Reinert that a loose cannon out there named Jay C. Smith was threatening her life. Anyway, Bill Bradfields secret seemed to have all the exclusivity of the Democratic National Convention.
There was some strange business involving typewriters that added to the overall confusion of Sue Myers. In their apartment was a red IBM Selectric that Bill Bradfield had bought for her birthday back in 1975, during much happier times. The typewriter had cost $350 and when they went to pick it up in downtown Philly he made her close her eyes while he brought it to the car. That was back in a time when Elliot Emu was still alive. Now, old Elliot was nearly as dead as her libido.
In any case, the IBM was a perfectly good typewriter and they didn’t need another. So she didn’t know what to make of a machine that she found in their attic. It was there along with a tape recorder that she’d never seen before, and when she examined the typewriter she almost cried.
There was a foreign student at Upper Merion, a handicapped boy who had very little speech or motor control. He was twenty-one years old, but Sue always thought of him as a little child.
To say “Hi, Miss Myers” took him thirty seconds of enormous effort. Sue admired the lad enormously.
The school district supplied the student with a special typewriter mounted on a typing stand that he could manage. The machine typed extra-large letters of one size. When the lad’s parents thought he needed more individual attention he was transferred across the hall to the class of Bill Bradfield, along with his machine.
The boy had a great sense of humor and there wasn’t a kid at Upper Merion who was ever less than kind to him. He did everything he was told to do and did it about as well as he could, which was about first-grade level. The teachers gave him straight A’s and because of his straight As he would always be at the academic awards banquets and would always receive a standing ovation.
A terrible thing had happened after the last spring term. The typewriter had been stolen from school. There was no mistaking the machine Sue found in the attic, and she speculated that the tape recorder also belonged to Upper Merion.
She was as furious as she could get, and confronted Bill Bradfield who at first seemed a bit vague. But then he said that he’d bought the typewriter from Jay Smith for $75, and was going to give it to her as a Christmas present to type little merchandise signs for the art store. He said that he didn’t know the machines were stolen.
Sue Myers said the typewriter had been bought by the school for the handicapped boy and that Bill Bradfield knew it and this was too much and he must be absolutely insane to be buying stolen machines from Jay Smith. And then Sue Myers demanded that Bill Bradfield take the typewriter back to the school.
“They’ll think I stole it,” he said.
“Sneak it back in the school,” she said, and then she started crying.
From that day on, she was absolutely certain that Bill Bradfield was meeting with Jay Smith. The typewriter proved it. Soon the machines disappeared from the attic, and Bill Bradfield swore he’d returned them, but the special stand for the typewriter was later found by Vince Valaitis in the basement.
Sue didn’t know why in the name of heaven Bill wanted another typewriter in the first place. She thought a whole lot about mental illness in those days.
Bill Bradfield suddenly wanted to get out of town during the Christmas holidays, the precise time at which he felt Jay Smith went around massacring half the population.
To Sue Myers it made about as much sense as everything else he said. She didn’t question it much. She was just glad to be away from school and the art store and the cold damp weather. She looked forward to heading south. She might even get a suntan.
Vince Valaitis, who was also asked to go along on the trip to Florida, thought that his friend had just about reached his limit because of what was happening with Jay Smith. He was pleased to tag along.
They rented a camper from another teacher and hit the road. But if Sue Myers thought she was going to spend a Christmas vacation without hearing about Jay Smith she was dead wrong.
They weren’t five miles out of Philadelphia before Bill Bradfield said, “If Doctor Smith’s true to form and kills on holidays, there’s nothing I can do about it if I’m in another state, right?”
“You’ve done all you can do,” Vince Valaitis reassured him, while Sue Myers might as well have been stone deaf.
And that was about the best way to deal with it. At the mention of Jay Smith or Susan Reinert, she would let the hum of the engine obliterate human speech. In self-defense she’d
make herself immune to voices.
Vince Valaitis was still partly ascribing the talk of murder to a symptom of Jay Smiths mental disorder. He continued to reassure Bill Bradfield that Jay Smith loved to shock people, and that Bill should try to forget about it, at least during the holidays.
But Bill Bradfield started telling some things that Vince hadn’t heard. For example, he said that Jay Smith claimed to have “hit” more than a few people.
And when Vince asked how many, Bill Bradfield without blinking those brooding blue eyes said, “Two hundred and fifty.”
That did it. Vince Valaitis hoped there’d be lots of room in the funny place for Jay Smith and Bill Bradfield. Maybe they could go to St. Elizabeth’s together and share Ezra Pounds old padded cell.
Whether or not Jay Smith had killed his own daughter and son-in-law, it seemed obvious to Vince that the only guy with two hundred personal hits was Count Dracula.
The more outrageous claims that Jay Smith made (always according to Bill Bradfield) the more Vince was discouraged from telling Susan Reinert or police authorities for fear of looking silly.
The itinerary included Charleston, Atlanta, Orlando, St. Augustine. They got as far as Charleston when the specter of Jay Smith once again hopped aboard the camper. They had gone to a store to buy a sleeping bag when Vince called Bill Bradfields attention to the gun display, and that brought up maybe having to shoot Jay Smith, and the next thing Sue knew Bill Bradfield decided he had to buy a handgun.
Sue got furious at Vince and at Bill Bradfield and at Jay Smith and at Susan Reinert and at Bill Bradfields parents for buying him that toy truck, because as far as she was concerned all this was mostly an attempt to get the new piano his sister got and the attention that went with it instead of that lousy stinking goddamn toy truck!
In a St. Augustine hardware store he made another try at buying a.22 handgun, but he was told he had to be a Florida resident and got turned down. Pretty soon Vince was informed that a gun might not do much good anyway if it came to a showdown with the prince of darkness. Due to his years of army training, Jay Smith could kill with any ordinary household utensil, according to Bill Bradfield.
Despite himself, Vince started to believe again. He envisioned nightmare chases by a potato peeler and a curling iron.
Vince Valaitis went to mass in Orlando and Bill Bradfield accompanied him. When they got to St. Augustine, Vince went to mass again. Bill Bradfield went to a Quaker meeting and to the Catholic mass. Sue said that that made him a Quack-lik.
While in a Catholic church with Vince, Bill Bradfield lit a candle and said, “I pray that no evil will befall Susan Reinert.”
That sort of talk terrified Vince Valaitis, because when you started bringing the Church into this business it had to be true or else sacrilegious. And the fear of God was by far the dominant fear in his life.
Vince and Bill Bradfield had occasion to stay up one night talking. Just when Vince thought he’d heard every possible bit of Jay Smith gossip, Bill Bradfield, with his secret-sharer voice, said, “Vince, Jay Smith told me something else. I can’t vouch for its authenticity. I can only repeat what the man said. Jay Smith knows how Jimmy Hoffa was killed. He was chopped into pieces and dissolved in acid.”
And Vince saw in his mind’s eye several big bottles of nitric acid that Jay Smith had stolen from Upper Merion. And if you took parts of Jay Smiths lunatic talk and joined it to demonstrable events in his weird life, and if you thought about his daughter Stephanie and Eddie Hunsberger …
“Jay Smith knows how to make human beings absolutely disappear,” Bill Bradfield said, his last words on the subject during that holiday trip.
Vince’s nightmares now included ghastly parcels dropped into school Dumpsters to offend and bedevil poor old Norman the janitor.
After they got home, Bill Bradfield managed to see little Shelly during the end of the holidays when she was back from college in California. Shelly was by now pushing nineteen and she told Chris Pappas that Bill Bradfield had promised she only had to wait until graduation when they would be married in a “cathedral in France.” He was going to be financially secure by then and they were going to buy an oceangoing sailboat. The rest of it was open-ended.
According to Shelly’s later statements, she and her intended sometimes went to motels in King of Prussia, but the girl always denied that there was sexual intercourse during the few hours they would spend there. Snuggling and hugging and kissing were implied in Shelly’s statements.
When this devout girl, a Catholic convert through the efforts of Bill Bradfield, later denied sex with Bill Bradfield few witnesses believed her. But the more that became known of Bill Bradfields romantic techniques, the more it was thought to be true. The motel trysts may have been a job for Elliot Emu.
Once when Sue Myers was working at the store, he took Shelly to their apartment. Shelly told her girlfriend that during this visit Bill Bradfield had said, “Someday all this will all be yours.”
As might be expected, Bill Bradfield also told Shelly that Jay Smith was on the loose and threatening to kill Susan Reinert. This time he said that the reason was because Jay Smith had an idea that she was somehow going to interfere with the alibi testimony that Bill Bradfield felt obliged to offer in Jay Smiths upcoming trial. He told Shelly that Jay Smith had admitted that he’d killed a couple of people in King of Prussia, probably prostitutes. But Bill Bradfield still had the moral obligation to testify.
He told Shelly how frightened he was for Susan Reinert, but that he didn’t dare go to the police because Jay Smith’s contacts were everywhere in the police service. Bill Bradfield had to resort to protecting Susan Reinert on his own. He said that he circled the streets around Susan’s home late at night and often rang her on the phone only to hang up in relief when she answered. He prayed for her.
Of course Shelly promised not to breathe a word, and before she returned to college in February they went to motels a couple more times and played with the invisible ostrich or whatever they did.
10
Disciples
The associates of William Bradfield had certain traits in common: they were either especially impressionable, riddled with self-doubts, fearful of the future, or all three. Intimate experience with the opposite sex had been very limited or nonexistent in their lives. None had spent a significant period of life outside a classroom. Sue Myers, Vince Valaitis, Chris Pappas, Shelly, and Susan Reinert were decent trusting people. They were also more vulnerable than bloodroot.
The only one who was in some way different was Rachel, now off at Harvard pursuing a graduate degree, and learning how to look even more like Charlotte Brontë. Her love letters to Bill Bradfield, always mailed to Upper Merion Senior High School, are penned in the tiny precise formal script taught in British boarding schools, though she hailed from the American West.
Dear William:
I thought about you all day yesterday amp; (so far) all day today. Knowing you wouldn’t, but hoping to have you call up. Vaguely nervous with your people so close. I imagine what a confrontation would hold. All nonsense, of course, but inner dialogues haunting me all day. Have been in foul mood upon foul mood. You said something about my new-found interest in political matters. It isn’t. That is, the interest has always been there. The feeling of responsibility. But my notions of what seems sane don’t coincide with anyone’s-well, maybe yours, and that’s why I talk to you about things and the frustrations of never being able to get the kind of information I want. I keep wanting to have you here to say-“That’s why!”
Perhaps you weren’t even here this weekend? That would be strange. You’ve been locked up in my head these days. I miss you horribly. CSEPAHC? Center for the Study of Ezra Pound and His Contemporaries. (see clipping) Stung. Paralyzed. What can be said which will do justice to such a thing??? It’s beyond me. At Yale, yet. They should be ashamed.
I sat here gazing for a minute at the Pound picture. Not thinking about it really, or you. But having my head-t
he whole pan of my mind, my senses-feeling all the parts of your world coming to me through these black and white dots. Because I am so inextricably bound to you and you to the something that is, was, Ezra Pound. My nerves work differently. My heart and breathing speed up whenever I bump against one of the objects of your world. I cherish them all and no one can tamper with them in the least because what’s there that could be tampered with isn’t in the object but in the relation. And there for as long as I hold up my end, it is safe.
I have the control over things at last. The frustrations of not determining my world can ease. And there is peace and calm and quiet. The writing of these letters is an exercise in indulging myself-holding up of my end and revelling in the control and ownership. Generating rewards-exquisite ones-for myself. To end the letters becomes almost impossible. The stopping of the motion and the empty space and the thoughts that continue in my head but cannot go to you bring again the frustration that signals my entry back into the setting of things beyond my control. There is nothing else left to me but to make do with whatever it is that must be done to keep us together. Don’t worry, William. Sometimes I feel as if I surely must be getting wise.
Love me. Think of me. Something MUST be done to get around all the intricacies. I need your hugs.
Those who knew about Rachel were puzzled by the nature of her love affair with Bill Bradfield, Sue Myers in particular. Their relationship seemed as intricate as a DNA blueprint.
The letters that Rachel posted to Bill Bradfield at the school deal mostly with ethereal matters and a conviction that a unique notion of “sanity” is theirs. Sue decided that despite Rachel’s earlier marriage she was the icy Gothic maiden he’d always needed and if you took her picture it would come out sepia.
Echoes in the Darkness Page 11
