Joseph Wambaugh - Echoes in the Darkness

Dr. Smith hated to be troubled by picayunish disciplinary problems. Once, the-widow-who-handled-sex-discreetly stormed into his office to complain about some students who were racing cars up and down the parking lot, and tossing Frisbees around the corridors, and sunbathing on the roofs of their cars with ghetto blasters turned loud enough to shatter her zircons.

And Dr. Smiths response? “I have no time for overreacting menopausal women, my dear.”

When she retired from Upper Merion and had time to reflect, Ida Micucci could only picture Jay Smith in a black suit. The same black suit, she thought at first. But she eventually came to realize that it wasn’t the same black suit because sometimes his sleeves would be two inches shorter than at other times. When Ida could bear it no longer she said, “Where in the world do you get those black suits? They don’t fit!”

He just slid those eyeballs in her direction and showed her a grin like an ice pick, and said, “You may not believe this, Ida, but I get all my clothes at the Salvation Army.”

She believed it all right. But despite his secondhand rags, he was clean. Was he ever . The man would wash his hands fifteen times a day. He ran to the john so often that Ida thought he had a bad bladder until male faculty members reported that he’d only wash his hands. Around the faculty dining room they said that Dr. Jay Smith washed his hands more than Dr. Kildare.

Dr. Smith seldom fraternized with faculty or staff on or off campus, but once a year he might show up at a soiree. One of these was a party given at the home of a teacher who’d been taking belly dancing. She was pretty good, and after everyone had enough to drink she slipped into her harem costume for a little demonstration.

Fueled by martinis, all the male teachers started clapping, and when the music started she came slinking in. Two of the younger female teachers happened to be standing in front of Jay Smith when the belly dancer permitted the men to slip dollars bills inside her costume as she shimmied.

Jay Smith moved close enough behind the young women for them to feel his hot breath on the napes of their necks and asked, “What does one do when a portion of one’s anatomy gets hard ?”

And the young teachers started gulping their drinks and jabbering inanely to each other and pretended not to have heard, afraid to turn around and see a pair of eyes that looked like the eyes of a …

They all had trouble describing the eyes of their principal. “Amphibian” came to mind, but that wasn’t precisely correct either.

There were constant cryptic phone calls and messages from women to Jay Smith, and that was just one of the many things bothering his secretary. Worse than that were the chemical odors in his office. Ida got so that she’d creep in after his solitary closed-door session in the late afternoon and she’d smell something medicinal, something chemical.

And when he went out he always looked as though he’d been asleep. His black suit would be more rumpled than usual and his hooded eyes seemed to have a glaze on them.

Ida’s husband finally said he was getting sick and tired of hearing all the crazy stories. He got so he was accusing her of being crazy.

“Would you like to meet the wife of a school principal?” Ida asked her husband. “A man with a doctorate? A colonel in the army reserve? We’ll take a little drive down to the dry cleaner’s where she works, and take a gander.”

Many a male customer took a gander at Stephanie Smith when she had her back turned. What they’d see was a voluptuous woman in hot pants and white plastic boots, with dyed hair teased and sprayed to the point of fracture. From behind, Dolly Parton. From the front, a hook-nosed hag from Macbeth .

But she was kind and sweet and friendly. Ida Micucci, after she got over the shock, really liked Stephanie Smith.

Stephanie called everybody “hon.” She was several years older than her husband, and like him had grown up poor in West Chester. She’d worked very hard all her life and helped put Jay Smith through college. It took about three minutes to get to know her intimately, and from then she was all heart and loyalty.

If Jay Smith was about as forthcoming as Pravda , his wife Stephanie delivered more gossip than the National Enquirer . She was constantly threatening to leave her husband, or doing it and returning home when she had a change of heart. And she’d give anyone the blow-by-blow whether it was wanted or not.

“Take a look, hon!” she said to Ida one day before the secretary could escape from the dry cleaners.

“Oh, I can’t look at private letters!” Ida protested, but curiosity drew her toward the documents that Stephanie was holding.

“He always keeps his basement apartment locked,” Stephanie confided. “He won’t let nobody down there. Not me and not our daughters. But I broke in!”

Ida read a few paragraphs of Jay Smiths “love letters” reportedly to be sent to a professors wife at a nearby college. They were all about collies and Dobermans. Nothing that would have shocked the Marquis de Sade, but Ida Micucci got queasy.

“ Please , Stephanie, I already know more about your husband than I want to know!” she said, rushing out of the cleaner’s.

Ida not only liked and pitied Stephanie, but she also pitied Jay Smith’s daughters. The elder was named Stephanie for her mother, and the younger was called Sheri. They were both troubled girls, and for a time, young Stephanie was a student at Upper Merion. Ida talked often to her.

It was common knowledge that young Stephanie was a drug user, and as time passed, she dropped out of school and was rumored to be involved in prostitution to support a heroin addiction. Jay Smith’s was not a happy family.

Young Stephanie caused her parents so many problems that Ida wanted to pity the principal himself, but he was a hard man to pity. Sometimes she wanted to join him in the faculty dining room where he sat alone, his face nearly in his plate, holding a fork as though it were a dagger. He’d stab at his food and shove it begrudgingly into his rubbery mouth as though it were eat or die. Ida Micucci decided she could never pity Jay Smith.

On another of her trips to the dry cleaners, Ida again begged Stephanie Smith to stop the onslaught of bizarre information concerning her principal. She didn’t want to hear any more about Dr. Jay’s theories on animal husbandry. Then it became clear what Dr. Jay Smith’s eyes resembled! Not fish, not reptiles though the eyes were very lightly lashed and a bit hooded. But at certain times, in his more sardonic moments, when the eyebrows lifted to form two perfect S’s across his high forehead-in those moments the irises slid back and she noticed that his eyes were Tartar, and tilted. And if you simply elongated the pupils, gave them a vertical squeeze in your imagination, it was abundantly clear that Dr. Jay C. Smith had the eyes of a goat !

The references to cloven hooves and leathery wings and sulfurous odors really took off when Vincent Valaitis and another teacher happened to see Dr. Jay coming out of his little hideaway late one afternoon. There were already plenty of rumors about him hanging upside-down and making piles of guano for the janitor, but this was too much.

A radiator leak was causing a cloud of steam to gather at the feet of the principal who was dressed in his black suit, and was busy wrapping his black raincoat around himself like a cloak.

It was too Gothic, especially for an imaginative lad like Vince who had a taste for fantasy and science fiction and horror stories. There was Dr. Jay, a tall figure in a black cloak stepping out of a mist with the eyes of a goat. Only one thought was possible: what in hell is this guy, really?