It was left unsaid with whom she’d be occupied. The children were ordered by their mother never to discuss the man who would one day be their stepfather, but sometimes Pat couldn’t resist trying to draw out a kernel of gossip.
“I’d ask something about Bill Bradfield and the kids’d just look at each other,” Pat Schnure explained. “And I’d say, ‘Oh, come on. It’s okay!’ ”
The children never mentioned Bill Bradfield when they visited their father, nor to the Reinert grandparents, but Pat Schnure, well, she was their mother’s friend.
“I like him okay,” Michael told Pat. “He’s teaching me how to wrestle.”
But Karen said, “I think he’s kind of weird. I make him pancakes for breakfast and he says it’s great. Michael makes him a sandwich and he says that’s great. It’s all great. I mean, nobody eats a sandwich with pancakes. Shouldn’t someone tell the truth and say he doesn’t want a sandwich with pancakes? Sometimes I don’t think he’s an honest person.”
There was a large pond by the country road and it attracted squadrons of Canadian geese, some of whom stayed year-round. Karen thought they were beautiful, so large and sleek with heads and wing tips like sapphire. These wild honkers were mostly unmolested and didn’t panic at the approach of humans. They’d swivel their ebony heads for a wary look, but fly only when commanded by their leader. But when they flew there was a roar of wings like a hundred heavy banners snapping in the bright brittle air.
The children found the honkers exciting. It was fun to watch their precision flight in exact formation. It was thrilling when a young honker would get rebellious and break from the squadron for no better reason than to shatter the silence on the pond with a rifle crack of wings. Simply to cry out and fly. Any child could understand the impulse.
But on the ground, that was another story. Karen would just as soon sit on the grass a safe distance away and watch her braver brother try to tempt the honkers with food.
Karen was even more wary of garter snakes and frogs, but as a result of her exposure to country life there near Downingtown she wrote some whimsical verse. Beneath the picture of a golden Egyptian slave bracelet that she’d clipped from a magazine, the sixth-grader wrote:
Oh, snake, you’re so gold.
I wonder if you’re ever cold,
Scaly or slimy.
Please don’t climb me!
Her poem to a Downingtown bullfrog revealed more about her own contemplative nature:
Froggy, Froggy
Why are you so green?
I wonder. And dream.
They were very easy children to manage and the Schnures hated to see them go home. When Susan Reinert would arrive for the kids she and Pat took strolls together. As the end of term approached it was just about impossible to discuss anything but the impending wedding.
Susan Reinert told her friend that she hoped that a query she’d sent regarding a teaching position in England would be favorably received. She smiled when she told Pat that she’d included Jay Smith’s letter of recommendation, trusting that his notoriety hadn’t spread clear across the Atlantic.
They speculated that anything he’d stolen was long spent on lawyers, and paying for his wife’s illness. And that he was reportedly living on welfare and food stamps while facing a prison term. But on such a night it wasn’t easy to talk about a man who, as Susan Reinert reported, had always “made her skin crawl” when he so much as entered the same room at school.
It was far more pleasant to talk about the wonders to be seen in Europe, while American crickets sang cheerily by the pond in the maidenhead fern. At night it was spectacularly beautiful out there with tree shadows like black satin, and buttery light shining from the barn and the springhouse. Shadows on the moon were only made by the coming and going of migratory birds.
And beautiful wild flowers like bloodroot grew wherever they chose in this fertile country, but were too delicate to survive the touch of a single human being, or so said folklore, and William Bradfield.
14
Woman? Oh, woman is a consummate rage, but dead, or asleep, she pleases.
Take her. She has two excellent seasons.
— EZRA POUND
On the day in June that Susan Reinerts last insurance policy was being readied for delivery to her home in Ardmore, Bill Bradfield took a drive to Cape May, New Jersey, to book rooms for himself and three companions for the coming weekend. He drove to the shore by way of downtown Philadelphia where he made a stop at the kind of hotel where guests hope that night screams are only coming from overly theatrical hookers.
It was later learned that the Harvard graduate student had been staying in that hotel for a month. Rachel’s room was registered to “Mr. and Mrs. William Bradfield.” One would think that with nearly $30,000 in cash lying around, Bill Bradfield might have booked a better hotel.
But it could have been that the old hotel had its own ghost or a body entombed in a wall, or something else to pique a Gothic taste and compensate for an occasional flea or cockroach. In any case, she accompanied him on the drive to the shore that summer day. Bill Bradfield booked two rooms at the Heirloom Apartments and returned home by way of downtown Philly to deposit Rachel back on the mean streets until further notice.
When Sue Myers was told that she was going to the shore for the weekend she was happy about it, but wondered why he’d gone to the trouble of driving to the shore to book rooms. Ordinarily they just took pot luck when they got there. Naturally, she suspected shenanigans, figuring maybe he’d gone to the shore and maybe he hadn’t. Sue Myers guessed that little Shelly was probably home from college.
It appeared that Susan Reinert was mistaken if she thought Bill Bradfield was going to England that summer. In fact, the only one going to England was Sue Myers who intended to take a course in Shakespeare at Oxford.
Bill Bradfield had his summer all set. He and Chris Pappas were enrolled in the summer program at St. John’s College in Santa Fe. And Rachel was going along as a helpmate.
The first day of class at St. John’s was to be Monday, June 25th. The plan was that Bill Bradfield and Chris would fly down on Friday, June 22nd. Chris Pappas bought himself a plane ticket.
“Why are you going to the shore, Bill?” Chris found himself asking a few days before their scheduled flight to Santa Fe.
“I need the recreation before starting classes at St. John’s,” Bill Bradfield said. “A weekend at the shore might do you some good too.”
“I want to leave for Santa Fe on Friday and get over my jet lag,” Chris argued.
“I need you to come to the shore on Friday,” Bill Bradfield said. “I have a feeling Doctor Smith’s going to finally make his assault on Susan Reinert this weekend. Monday he’ll be sentenced on the weapons and drug charges and this’ll be his last chance. If it happens I want to be able to account for my whereabouts. I need you to help provide my alibi.”
“But Bill,” Chris pleaded, “if you want an alibi why not fly with me to Santa Fe on Friday? We’d be two thousand miles away from here!”
“Well,” Bill Bradfield said, “well, there’s another reason I have to be here. Doctor Smith’s attorney may call me with orders to report to court on Monday to be a character witness at the sentencing.”
That explanation had all the symmetry of melanoma, since seeing Jay Smith get more not less jail time had been their professed goal all along. But by now, Chris Pappas was lost in Bill Bradfields maze. The young Greek just wanted out before a minotaur got him.