Joseph Wambaugh - Echoes in the Darkness

“He’d come up to within inches of you,” a colleague later reported. “He was tall and big and he’d intimidate you with those piercing blue eyes. He was so intense he could sometimes be spooky.”

So the evening went pretty much as expected, with Bill Bradfield spooking some and charming others.

Whether Bill Bradfield was a truly gifted teacher with an ability to inspire, as some argued, or a glib and clever scholastic hustler, as others maintained, he had a decided effect on his hostess, Susan Reinert.

She was seen hanging on every word he uttered that evening, and, as always, Bill Bradfield uttered plenty of them. She confided to a friend that this guy was truly a Renaissance man.

And there was poor Ken Reinert already getting puffy beneath the eyes even though he was at least a decade younger than Bill Bradfield. Ken almost never read poetry. He didn’t know a damn thing about Ezra Pound. He liked to watch television.

Sharon Lee, the teacher who had proposed the Gatsby debate, was single and attractive. Susan Reinert was married and unattractive. Bill Bradfield never stalked attractive women. One of his more critical colleagues said that Bill Bradfield could smell insecurity and loneliness the way a pig smells truffles.

Late that evening when most of the guests had gone and Ken Reinert was in bed, Sharon Lee was in the kitchen getting an ashtray. When she returned a bit too quietly she found Bill Bradfield leaning over the chair of Susan Reinert and whispering softly in what she would later describe as “an intimate position.”

Sharon Lee coughed discreetly and Bill Bradfield jumped up and returned to his chair.

An already shaky marriage was reeling. These two teachers had forgotten American literature and The Great Gatsby . This looked more like a Main Line replay of plodding Charles against worldly Rodolphe, with Susan Reinert, of course, Madame Bovary.

Susan soon began seeing a psychologist named Roslyn Weinberger, who provided emotional support. But the marriage was finished. Susan herself described that frantic school year in a diary entry:

Sunday, November 17th. What a year this has been. First Kens accusations of unfaithfulness, requests for divorce, bad scenes in bed, stormy silences (plus my contribution to problem by fear of revealing true feelings), then Mothers serious illness. Finally growing attraction to Bill and accepting Sharon’s suggestion to see Ros as could no longer cope. A year of crisis.

Finally told Ken that children and I would leave. He then decided he would go but fought it all the way. He calls in a.m., p.m., and tells me he can’t cope.

Have gotten sterner about his not calling or coming over but hardly a day goes by without my hearing from him at least once. Yesterday he asked same question: Was he competing with Bill? Did I love Bill? What was extent of contact with Bill?

Susan Reinert confessed to one intimate friend that she was now the secret lover of Bill Bradfield, and that within five years, after he was emotionally and financially secure, they would be man and wife. He had a secret “five-year plan” for both of them, she said. But the children were suffering from the family rupture, and their mother was only too aware of their pain:

One good thing, Karen and Michael have been to Ros and will go again. Although Karen’s temper tantrums and refusals to go to dance class and Michaels crying have increased, they seem to be handling situation. Teachers say everything O.K. with them at school. Other crisis: Ken discovered note to Bill. Still don’t know what he thinks he knows. Told him what Ros advises regarding nature of relationship and need to grow. It’s taking its toll on me.

As the school year neared an end, Susan Reinert wrote Bill Bradfield of her feelings:

May 2d. It’s been one year since I left Ken, taking Karen and Michael with me. Some things are better. The divorce is over. K amp; M are more relaxed. Some of my anxiety is gone, but I’m not happy. I don’t have what I want nor does it seem likely I will get it. I feel very isolated. Missing you and resenting restriction caused by Sue Myers. And by you.

The apartment that Sue Myers shared with Bill Bradfield suited him very well. It was in a colonial-mansion-cum-apartment-house, a fine old building with columns in front and dark shutters.

He still maintained a cordial relationship with his “common-law” wife Muriel and his youngest son who lived on his property in Chester County. Sue Myers estimated that he saw them once every three or four months.

Sue Myers knew by now that the “purging” he said he’d received from their Ezra Pound pilgrimage had not changed him. There were still the odd-hour phone calls and hangups, still the notes and other evidence she’d pick from his pockets when he was asleep.

The romantic affair that wounded Sue the most involved a former teacher who said she was leaving the school district to pursue advanced degrees. During one of Sue’s night-prowling raids she found a letter from the woman that had been addressed to herself at his secret post office box. It was a Bill Bradfield ruse Sue would come to learn only too well.

Reading it, Sue was devastated to discover that the woman had gone off to give birth to his baby. Sue confronted him, in tears. He confessed, and begged forgiveness once again.

But this time Sue was heartbroken enough to get out and did-but returned after he begged and promised never to be unfaithful again. Sue was by then in her mid-thirties. She went home feeling like her womb was full of baby rats.

The Reinert affair was something else altogether.

“By the time I realized he was involved with Susan Reinert, I thought I was getting numb to it,” Sue recounted. “But Susan Reinert awakened something in me, or spawned new feelings. I wasn’t just so much jealous or brokenhearted, I was outraged !”

Even when Sue Myers discussed it years later, a diagonal stress line popped across her brow: “I even hated her voice. That screechy whiny voice of hers was like fingernails on a chalkboard. It made me want to scream. ”

The little clues were there for her. Sue Myers could always detect provocative Bill Bradfield glances, and more tellingly the return looks he’d receive from women at school.

“Not her !” she yelled at him one day in the corridor of Upper Merion. “Damn it, not Susan Reinert!”

“What in the world are you talking about?”

“She’s downright homely, for God’s sake!” Sue Myers said, trying to check the tears. “She’s got nothing to offer. Nothing! ”

“Get hold of yourself,” he told her. “Your imaginations out of control. We’ll talk when we get home.”

Sue Myers explained it at a later time by saying, “With the others, with all the others, I could see something in them, something that might’ve attracted him. But not with Susan Reinert. To me, she was an insult . The final personal insult. Maybe my spirit did go absolutely numb after her, I don’t know.”

Sue wanted to believe him when he told her how silly she was to think he would so much as entertain a thought about mousy Susan Reinert. But then Susan Reinert began to penetrate the Great Books “inner circle.”

The Great Books Program, conceived by Mortimer J. Adler, was introduced to Upper Merion by Bill Bradfield. It was a program for self-education in the liberal arts, the concept being that a group of people from the community might educate themselves by meeting twice a month and discussing some two hundred of the Western worlds greatest books. They might all read a selection from Descartes or Aristotle or Voltaire and attempt for two hours to address a question posed by Bill Bradfield posing as Plato. It was seminar oriented and that appealed to Bill Bradfield, who was a seminar group leader.