The references to cloven hooves and leathery wings and sulfurous odors really took off when Vincent Valaitis and another teacher happened to see Dr. Jay coming out of his little hideaway late one afternoon. There were already plenty of rumors about him hanging upside-down and making piles of guano for the janitor, but this was too much.
A radiator leak was causing a cloud of steam to gather at the feet of the principal who was dressed in his black suit, and was busy wrapping his black raincoat around himself like a cloak.
It was too Gothic, especially for an imaginative lad like Vince who had a taste for fantasy and science fiction and horror stories. There was Dr. Jay, a tall figure in a black cloak stepping out of a mist with the eyes of a goat. Only one thought was possible: what in hell is this guy, really?
Vince thought he had the answer. He turned to his friend and in his most excited Dungeons and Dragons whisper said, “Now I know who he is. Alive and well in Upper Merion. That, my friend, is the prince of darkness!”
Some of the whispered gags grew a bit urgent when one night a mysterious fire almost burned down an entire wing of the school. They never learned the source of that blaze. Vince and others offered a theory, only half in jest: given whose principality this was, could the fire have been caused by spontaneous combustion?
3
Those who didn’t know her very well joked that she’d been created by Nathanael West, and she did indeed resemble a pen pal in Miss Lonelyhearts. But a psychotherapist and good friend of Susan Reinert’s took pains to refute the image.
“Susan was not,” the psychologist said, “in spite of her appearance or what others say, mousy or passive. She was quiet and reserved, but strong.”
Still, the word “mousy” couldn’t be avoided in any discussion about Susan Reinert. She had a high-pitched voice, and squeaked like a rodent when she got excited.
Susan Reinert was thirty-three years old when William Bradfield and Sue Myers were settling in their apartment near Phoenixville, and Jay Smith was enjoying his new title of “doctor.”
Susan was even more petite than Sue Myers, and was definitely not attractive. She wore oversized glasses with dark plastic rims, an effect that accentuated a large blunted nose. Her lower lip protruded, pushed out by big gapped incisors. Her dark hair was always worn in short sensible styles. Her clothes were conservative and sensible. She was a quiet, sensible English teacher at Upper Merion Senior High School, but she was a woman living in a liberated era in a most liberated school wondering what was missing in her life.
Susan’s marriage had been unsatisfactory for quite a while, and if she never wrote a letter to Ann Landers, she did write painfully and intimately to herself. She began keeping a secret diary, and it was full of loneliness, confusion, guilt and regret:
To use sensitivity jargon I’m going to try to get in touch with my feelings. I feel like I’m losing my mind. I need help and I can’t find it. I don’t know what I want to do!
Susan Reinert was trapped between duty and uncertain desire at a time when American women were attacking every male bastion from the firehouse to the boxing ring.
In that same diary she asked and answered various questions:
Why do I keep plugging away at this marriage? Answer: Because I’m afraid it’s the only one I’ll ever have, and if I cannot live with Ken, who really is not all that bad, then there must be something wrong with me.
In the early years of their marriage, Ken Reinert had served as a navigator on a B-52 bomber, and his bride lived with him at air force bases. Susan and Ken had a baby girl and a year later a boy. It was not a particularly easy life with two babies, but they were busy and young and didn’t mind.
The former air force captain later said of those times, “There was a lot of killing in Vietnam and I know I caused some of it, but I honestly can’t say I hated my tour of duty. It wasn’t like being a marine and risking your life in some rice paddy. Up there in that B-52, I was, well, just so far above the killing. I have to say death didn’t mean a lot to me then. But when I was finished I wanted to settle down somewhere and live quietly and watch my children grow and never think of killing, not ever again.”
All her life Susan had revered her father, William Gallagher. Some of her intimates wondered if any man could live up to her father’s image. Prior to his untimely death, William Gallagher had run a small-town newspaper in western Pennsylvania where Susan grew up with her older brother, Pat. Their mother had been a schoolteacher, and young Susan had been the kind of girl who always knew where she was going. It was a natural and inevitable progression from the Future Teachers of America to a masters degree at Pennsylvania State University. She hadn’t given serious thought to any other profession.
Upper Merion was one of the wealthiest school districts in Pennsylvania with the advantage of being a suburb of Philadelphia. It wasn’t that the students were as affluent as those in the nearby Main Line prep schools and academies, but the district had an excellent tax base and there were prosperous business interests within the Upper Merion boundaries. It seemed like a good place to teach, and it was only a short drive to their home on The Main Line.
It was a very active time for the young Reinert family. The growing children and Susan’s duties in the English department kept her extremely busy, and Ken got himself a good position with a Philadelphia bank.
The kids were a happy surprise. Though no one had ever called Susan Reinert pretty, her kids were very handsome. They were also bright and active-and polite, which was to be expected. The Reinert grandparents, who lived thirty minutes away, couldn’t get enough of their grandchildren. This family had every right to believe that life would be orderly, quiet, predictable.
Impending middle age didn’t do Bill Bradfield any harm in the mid-1970’s. He stood tall and vigorous, his powerful chest and shoulders without a sag. His hair remained coppery and his brooding blue eyes glowed as boyishly as ever when the mood was upon him.
Sue Myers served and obeyed and taught her classes and kept her secret about being his live-in companion. He pretended to be residing in Downingtown with his parents, if anyone inquired. Bill Bradfield had more secrets than the Politburo.
Under the laissez faire administration of Dr. Jay Smith, a teacher like Bill Bradfield could take the bit in his teeth. Soon, he was not just teaching English but had small groups of advanced-placement students dabbling in Latin and Greek. In fact, he stopped referring to himself as an English teacher. When asked, he would say, “I’m a teacher of English, Latin and Greek.”
To Susan Reinert he was Byronesque. She didn’t know what to believe about the many rumors of romantic trysts with other teachers, but she simply could not bring herself to believe the more insidious gossip about “involvement” with a few of his gifted students.
Susan Reinert felt that a man like this would always be the target of jealous gossipmongers. His way with students and teachers was wholesome, she believed. He touched people with his hands as well as his inquisitive probing mind because he was an affectionate man, a natural man.
Meanwhile, the diary entries of Susan Reinert were growing more troubled. “Where does responsibility enter? I don’t seem to be convinced that it’s right to do something just because I want to. I’m so tired of crying.”
One day in 1974, a colleague named Sharon Lee and some other teachers got into a friendly dispute with Bill Bradfield about the value of American literature.