By the time school opened, the police noted that all of the crimes for which Jay Smith was charged had occurred on Saturdays when an educator is free. Then they discovered from Dorothy Hunsberger that she had last seen her son Eddie and Jay Smiths daughter Stephanie on a Saturday in February. And it didn’t take long for local journalists to discover that when Edward and Stephanie Hunsberger had disappeared, all of their possessions were left behind in the Jay Smith home. They had vanished from the earth with only the clothes on their backs.
Naturally, it didn’t take long for a reporter to write: “Dr. Smith or Mr. Hyde?”
Vince Valaitis was sorry that Bill Bradfield just wasn’t around much in the fall of 1978. And when he was, he seemed to have lost much of his need for Vince’s humor. Some of it Vince attributed to the failing shop in Montgomery Mall.
Vince and Sue spent lots of time discussing their merchandise, wondering if they should expand into other facets of arts and craft, since the jewelry and pottery and wall hangings weren’t moving at all. There were times when, during his shift at the store, Vince Valaitis would take in only five or ten dollars. Yet Bill Bradfield claimed that the store could not be abandoned as a failure. And to all of little faith, he said there might be a possibility of opening yet another store in Philadelphia, and a third in Exton Mall. Far from giving up, Bill Bradfield believed that they might one day control franchise rights for southeastern Pennsylvania.
The corporation treasurer Vince Valaitis and the corporation secretary Sue Myers would nod their heads and agree with the corporation president, and Sue Myers would whisper privately that if Bill Bradfield’s father had operated Western Electric like this, Pennsylvania would still be reading by candlelight.
Sue rued the day she’d ever helped hatch this get-rich scheme. She hoped that Bill Bradfield would decide to compete with his old man in some other way. And Vince, she figured, better resign himself to the fact that his 5 percent of the business would turn out to be one clay pot and a beaded headband.
Vince was still drawing a manager’s salary so he had no complaints. What Vince missed were the good old times when his friends would invite him up to dinner and he’d have a great meal and go home supremely content from an evening of interesting stimulating talk.
Once when Sue Myers had gone to bed, Bill Bradfield took Vince into his confidence and admitted that in the past he’d been guilty of “womanizing.”
Bill Bradfield implied that he would probably remain celibate to the end of his life, and that the absence of sexual pressure was perhaps the best part of his relationship with Sue Myers. He told Vince that the only true love he’d ever experienced had never been sullied. It involved a girl in Annapolis, who, in this version, did not do her dying like Ali MacGraw in Love Story. This one kicked the bucket in grand style like Merle Oberon in Wuthering Heights. He’d been there at her bedside when she passed on to a better world.
From the very beginning of the 1978 fall term, Bill Bradfield was on the move. Sue Myers had to take time off from school to devote herself to the failing store and was so exhausted she hardly had strength to interrogate him when he’d stay out all night. He looked so tired and his beard was so long and ragged that students said you could toss popcorn at him and it’d stick.
Gone were the days when Vince would watch the man he considered the most brilliant and best-educated teacher he’d ever known playing cutesy-pie with Sue Myers. When Bill Bradfield would try to charm her with his imaginary ostrich named “Elliot Emu.”
He would trot out his feathered pal and in his Elliot Emu voice say, “Are you mad at me?”
And she’d giggle and say, “No, I’m not mad at you. How could I be mad at Elliot Emu!”
When he was home, Bill Bradfield would spend an entire evening doing what he liked best, watching television shows like Laverne amp; Shirley or Mork amp; Mindy. Like Sue Myers, Vince Valaitis had never seen Bill Bradfield reading even one of his five thousand books.
Vince was aware of teachers at Upper Merion who took every opportunity to say that, far from being Upper Merion’s intellectual leader, Bill Bradfield was a fraud. One English teacher, a relative of writer Lionel Trilling, frequently ridiculed him and called him “Busy Whiskers.” Another, a former military man like Jay Smith, openly resented the entire independent study program ramrodded by Bill Bradfield and referred to him as “a bearded despot with a good two-line opening on any subject, but nothing more.”
This teacher complained of what was being done in Bill Bradfields independent study program, and claimed that high grades were automatic while disciplinary matters were ignored.
Still another English teacher, whose husband did in fact know something about Eastern religions, became interested in hearing Bill Bradfield at a party discussing the impact of Confucius on all of Eastern and Western religion.
So the husband put aside his martini and Swedish meatballs and posed a few complex and scholarly questions to Bill Bradfield who instantly looked about as relaxed as a safecracker.
Bill Bradfield stopped talking and scuttled away as if he’d found a maggot in his meatball.
From then on that teacher’s husband was of the opinion that Bill Bradfield’s Confucian epigrams came from the Hong Kong Noodle Company, and Bill Bradfield avoided that man like a vampire avoids sunburn.
Vince Valaitis knew about those dissenters, but he did not, could not believe that Bill Bradfield was anything less than a brilliant, splendidly educated teaching professional. He longed for the conversations, but nowadays his friend was as busy as a piranha.
In October, he told Vince and Sue Myers that he had to make an urgent trip to Annapolis because during the summer Chris Pappas had damaged a sailboat they’d hired. The boat owner was demanding that he personally see to the repair of the mast. The damage took place during a storm, he said, when he and Chris were sailing with “friends,” who of course were Shelly and her pal.
He said that he’d also discovered that their mutual Annapolis friend Rachel had a blue Volkswagen Beetle for sale and he thought he ought to buy it.
He knew very well that Sue Myers was busier than a Gulag gravedigger and could not accompany him on a weekend to Annapolis.
After he’d gone, Sue told Vince that she believed he was going there to be with Rachel.
Vince tried to assure her that she was wrong to fear the ice maiden.
“Bill has no romantic interest in anyone,” he said. And then diplomatically added what he knew to be false: “except you.”
And true to her fashion, Sue nodded wearily and showed no emotion of any kind, keeping it all bottled and buried.
But she said to the young teacher, “You don’t know the half of it. I’m in a lot better position to understand Bill Bradfield and I tell you that he and that woman Rachel are strangely compatible. I think there’s a relationship developing with this one and I don’t know what it means.”
As to Susan Reinert, well, it appeared that she was through being emotionally manhandled. When Bill Bradfield didn’t keep a dinner date at her home, Susan Reinert showed up at Upper Merion the next day with a plastic bag full of leftovers and instructed a student to deliver it to Mr. Bradfield with a message saying, “This is the dinner you failed to get last night.”
Vince got wind of it and decided to become a peacekeeper since things around Upper Merion were straightening themselves out under Jay Smith’s replacement, and intradepartment feuds weren’t needed. He took Susan Reinert aside at school and tried to inform her that Bill Bradfield might merely be signaling his desire to withdraw from his role as adviser to the world of Upper Merion, and that their friend had outside business worries with the art store, and perhaps receiving a pile of leftovers could get on somebody’s nerves.