“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
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.