“Bradfields never forget,” Sue Myers said. “Bill grew to be a very unforgiving man.”
Bill Bradfield stood six feet three inches tall and weighed two hundred pounds, with a chest and shoulders he’d developed as a college wrestler. He had brooding blue eyes, shaded by overhanging eyebrows that often caught bronze highlights when he cocked his head in a dreamy pose. His gaze was so intense it could transfix, so his blue eyes were variously described as “poetic,” “icy” or “hypnotic,” depending upon his moods.
He had coppery blond hair and in the early days of their relationship, a romantic D. H. Lawrence beard that could look like a clump of seaweed when he was in his “active” phase.
His active phase, according to Sue Myers, took place in the spring. “The juices would flow,” she said, and he’d become about as predictable as a Chinese earthquake.
Sue Myers was more than a foot shorter than her secret lover and weighed a little over a hundred pounds. She was a brunette with a small mouth and grayish teeth and dark self-conscious eyes that darted like a pair of hummingbirds.
She was not a dreamer. Sue Myers was a practical woman who knew her limitations and couldn’t believe that she was being chosen by (it would become an Upper Merion cliché) the most “charismatic” teacher in the district. She was only modestly attractive, but Bill Bradfield had never been known to pursue beautiful women. In the true Romantic spirit, he said that he sought “the beauty of the soul.”
One of the first things anyone ever learned about Bill Bradfield was that he was crazy about Ezra Pound. Early in their love affair he told Sue Myers how it had happened.
Unable to get his academic bearings in his undergraduate days at Haverford, Bill Bradfield read a book that altered the course of his life. It was ABC of Reading, by Ezra Pound. Like all of the poet’s work, it was obscure, arcane, filled with Greek, Latin and classical allusion. The young man didn’t understand the book but was deeply moved by it.
He learned that Ezra Pound was still confined at St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital in Washington, D.C., having barely escaped a charge of treason for lending support to Benito Mussolini. Before Pound was released, Bill Bradfield visited him and managed to ingratiate himself. He ran errands and visited the Library of Congress on Pounds behalf. He was, in a sense, on the scene when Pound wrote his most famous work within the walls of the asylum. While Ezra Pound was studying Confucius and writing The Cantos, Bill Bradfield wanted to help his master escape and to hide the poet in the Bradfield attic.
Sue Myers was never certain how the undergraduates plans ran aground, but the upshot was that Bill Bradfield returned to Haverford inspired to complete his undergraduate and graduate degrees and pursue a life of contemplation and poetry. Though born and raised a Quaker, he was, through Pound’s influence, deeply interested in Catholicism and the writings of Thomas Aquinas. From then on, when asked his religion, he would say, “I’m a Quaker-Confucian-Catholic.”
Sue Myers always believed that he would never have chosen her if she hadn’t been a virgin. Bill Bradfield always spoke of chastity, and celibacy was one of the things he admired most about the Roman Catholic clergy.
In later years, she would often say, “The fact of the matter is, Bill Bradfield would have been much happier as a monk.”
But he was far from monkish back in those days. Sue Myers had to endure many other women but he would always vow to repent. And she would forgive.
“When he talked of love to me,” she recalled, “I felt I was the only person in the universe for him. When he’d hold me, I was convinced of it beyond all doubt.”
Alas, there were several other teachers at Upper Merion equally convinced. Bill Bradfield sought the soul of one of them but had settled for her body when her husband found out about it and warned Bill to desist at once.
The next thing the husband knew, the former college wrestler came crashing through his front door and chased him down the hall while the wife, wrapped in a towel, stood screaming. According to the police report, Bill Bradfield punched the husband twenty times, breaking his nose, thereby adding injury to insult, as he bellowed, “Never interfere with me again!”
He was charged with aggravated assault and battery, but charges were dropped after he agreed to turn over $500 in bail money for the victim’s medical expenses.
Sue Myers heard all the stories, but she wanted this man. She intended to marry him and have children with him. So they talked of living together, but he had one little caveat: their arrangement would have to remain secret. She said she’d consider it.
There was a very good reason for the secrecy, he told her. The school district might charge them with moral turpitude if it was found they were living together out of wedlock.
And when she suggested that they could easily eliminate that problem, he had a lot of complex and confusing reasons why marriage could not take place. Not yet.
In the first place, he confessed, he was already “sort of married.” Twice. And he had children by both ladies. It seems that he’d met Fran in college, and being young and inexperienced, he decided to live with her, a daring decision at that time. There wasn’t sufficient thought given by either of them, he had to admit in retrospect. There had been other things occupying him: a martyred poet locked in an asylum, for instance. Anyway, they had two boys, Martin and William, born a year apart. When the boys were five or six, Fran left. (He was very vague about this part.) And then along came Muriel.
She wasn’t as pretty as Fran, and of course she wasn’t his intellectual equal. She was tall and thin and had a long angular face. Not a great housekeeper either, but she was a born mother, and his two lads needed a mother. He and Muriel struck a bargain and entered into a living arrangement. Another “common-law” marriage, so to speak. Part of the agreement required that he sire another child for Muriel. She wanted to bear a child with “his looks and brains.” So David was born.
All of the kids lived with Muriel in a house he owned in Chester County. He saw to their support, but he still wasn’t actually married, he said. But it was his nature to be “spiritually married,” joined by conscience until the boys were old enough to make their own way. So he asked Sue Myers to be patient and remain a secret lover until a better time.
Sue Myers was nothing if not patient. Not many people ever knew they were lovers. He always claimed they were “close friends.” It took an extraordinary capacity for secrecy to pull this off over the years. It took an extraordinary capacity for obedience on the part of his half-pint Sancho Panza.
The most memorable time in their life together, Sue Myers would later say, the year that marked a profound change in their relationship, was the sabbatical year of 1972–1973 when they finally realized their dream. They began a pilgrimage to Europe to see all the sacred places of Ezra Pound.
Sue Myers had tried to prepare for the intellectual onslaught by studying The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner, but to her the poet’s work was about as lucid as a polygraph chart. She was informed at the last minute that he had decided to bring along his two eldest sons, now restless teenagers. And she had to promise not to make a single slip in word or deed by revealing to his sons that she was anything more than another faculty member who happened to be traveling to the same places. By then, they had only been lovers for eight years.