“Tell me, Pat,” he said, “do you like to have your body relaxed? Through massage for instance?”
She started shaking a little, but then he said, “You know, there are other ways to make money. You could have a second career if you wished.”
And as she was getting ready to say, “Gosh, thanks, Doctor Smith, but I’d make a lousy masseuse,” he totally surprised her by saying, “You should consider a security job. I see you as a very fine security officer. What do you think of that?”
6
As the school year of 1977–1978 and the tenure of Dr. Jay C. Smith drew to a close at Upper Merion, there were a lot of plans being made by Bill Bradfield and his friends. Vince Valaitis had become gradually aware of a lessening of contact with Bill Bradfield while he and Sue Myers tried to keep the Terra Art store from bankruptcy.
When he did see Bill Bradfield, the older man was always complaining about having been wrong to take on the responsibility of “helping” fellow teacher Susan Reinert, who he said was constantly bothering him for advice or money loans.
“She’s so pathetic and needy,” he told Vince Valaitis, “I can’t bring myself to just ignore her, but I wish she’d leave Upper Merion and go away.”
Vince was by then twenty-six years old, and not as frequently mistaken for one of the students. But most of the faculty still found the young teacher refreshing and fun. A couple of minutes into one of his excited monologues on horror flicks and the other grownups felt like taking him to a monster movie and feeding him jelly beans.
He was the kind of guileless young guy who wasn’t ashamed to say, “Sure I’ve had a sheltered life but it was a nice shelter.”
Vince Valaitis was so loyal that he’d kept his sandbox pals from kindergarten. Vince could make you worry that with a checkbook in his pocket he might someday meet a guy with an honest face and a pinkie ring selling timeshares in Atlantic City. People just wanted to protect Vince. He looked more vulnerable than Liza Minnelli.
At one of the end-of-terms soirees, Susan Rienert, who’d had a drink or two, sat at Vince’s feet and put her arms around his knees and told him how good-looking he was, which of course was true, and how much she liked him, and of course everybody liked him.
But Vince got nervous about the pass and reported it to Bill Bradfield who said it only went to prove what he’d been saying all along, that Susan Rienert was a frustrated neurotic who would jump into bed with any man in order to find a husband.
Vince knew that Susan Reinert did not always have an easy time of it financially and once when she was hard pressed he gave her money to buy Michael a cub scout uniform. But Bill Bradfield warned his young friend to stay away from that sex-starved creature, even though he knew that Vince Valaitis had a sex life like Saint Francis of Assisi. Warning him to stay away from Susan Reinert for fear of being ravished made little sense, unless viewed as a tendency of Bill Bradfields to keep certain people apart, for reasons of his own.
Another of Bill Bradfields coterie was a young fellow a year older than Vince. Bill Bradfield had seen a great deal of Christopher Pappas over the years, but he usually arranged it so that Vince Valaitis and Sue Myers were not part of his social life with Chris.
Chris was not as easy to get to know as Vince Valaitis, but in his own way, he was another young man who some thought needed protection. Chris was of medium height, sturdily built, and looked Sicilian, though he wasn’t. He was soft-spoken, unassertive, and was a very introspective young fellow. His parents were Greek-American and proud to have forebears in the country that had produced Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. His father was an assertive, self-taught house builder with clever hands and a perfectionist’s temperament. Chris spent his life trying and failing, or so he perceived his father-son relationship.
He’d been a student at Upper Merion, and along with his brother had wrestled on the team that Bill Bradfield helped to coach. When he graduated from high school in 1968 he was an unhappy lad, insecure, plagued with self-doubts. He was good with his hands but would never be as good as his father, and more than clever hands was expected from him.
His grades and test scores were too low for the local colleges and universities, but Chris heard that Kansas State University wasn’t so competitive. He applied, got accepted, and in his words “went to college just to be going.” He majored in political science because he had to major in something. His first year was disastrous, but in his second he took a course in philosophy. At first it had to do simply with being Greek, but soon it changed his life. He stayed at Kansas State for five years, and probably owed his degree to classes in philosophy.
“Philosophical ideas had an impact on me,” he said. “At last I realized that it was possible to figure things out.”
As long as he could remember, he’d seen himself as a disappointment to his father. He’d been a very slow reader all his life and believed himself to be slow in every way. His grasp of philosophical concepts started to persuade him that perhaps he wasn’t totally inadequate, but he was by no means a confident young man even after he graduated and returned to visit old friends and teachers at Upper Merion.
He began driving a school bus for the township, and was still looking for direction when Bill Bradfield urged that he enter Cabrini College and work toward a teaching certificate. His former teacher also encouraged Chris to sit in on his Great Books Program to see what advanced students could accomplish given the proper motivation.
Chris Pappas listened and pondered and followed Bill Bradfield’s advice. He did attend Cabrini as well as St. John’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He got the certificate and returned to Upper Merion as a substitute teacher and also taught kids with learning disabilities and emotional problems. He was a good choice for a job that required compassion.
During the year that he was a substitute teacher, Chris Pappas became very close to Bill Bradfield.
“You remind me of myself when I was your age,” Bill Bradfield told him. “We’re similar, you and I. We’ve both had to deal with overpowering fathers who believed the only right way to do things was their way. We’ve always felt very little sense of accomplishment in our fathers’ eyes, haven’t we?”
Chris confessed that he’d been such a worrier all his life that he’d developed a stomach ulcer at the age of ten. Now the scholar of Upper Merion began telling him that he had a superior mind, and that one way to prove something to the ghosts of one’s childhood is to prove something to oneself. Bill Bradfield demonstrated that the way to achieve self-satisfaction and self-esteem is through duty and service. Chris trusted Bill Bradfield to guide him.
Chris Pappas was as decent and likable as Vince Valaitis, and, in his own way, even more vulnerable. He listened attentively whenever Bill Bradfield extolled the teachings of Thomas Aquinas and pointed out to him that Catholicism proved that one is not enslaved by obedience to higher authority; one is set fee by it.
At the time Chris had a friend named Jenny who was several years younger, but he and Jenny were no more than friends. And Jenny had a best friend named Shelly who was eighteen years old and one of Bill Bradfields gifted students. Shelly was a sturdy industrious girl who reminded Chris of a flouncing Pennsylvania German milkmaid, bursting with energy and opinions and a need for approval.
Soon, Shelly started wearing a Greek sailors cap like the one Bill Bradfield wore. And after listening to Bill Bradfield on Catholicism, Shelly became convinced that she should begin taking instruction to convert. It wasn’t long until Sue Myers was peeking out of her classroom window watching Bill Bradfield greeting the girl with a kiss. For a teacher, that could be a dangerous little maneuver on any high school campus, even one with the laissez faire policies of Dr. Jay Smith.