Echoes in the Darkness (2 page)

Sue Myers alwaysbelieved 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 feet 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 poets 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.

The highlight of the journey was to have been an audience with the Master, if they could arrange it. But at the first stop, London, they got the horrendous news: Ezra Pound had died in Venice, literally in the arms of his mistress.

Bill Bradfield went off alone to make grief noises. When he returned he could only say, "A fellow poet has died!"

And that death set the stage for a maniacal tour of the sacred places. The disciple wanted relics. The four of them-Bill Bradfield, Sue Myers, and the two boys-careened around the Continent in a rented Volkswagen bus while he hungered to see every site where the bard had so much as walked.

They rattled into Rapallo where Pound had been arrested at the close of World War II for treasonable collaboration with the Fascists. They tracked down a former friend of the poet who still lived in the same house she had occupied as a child when she was Pounds neighbor. The woman couldn't speak English but managed to understand Bill Bradfield's Spanish.

She revealed to him a treasure trove. Her house was filled with books by and about Pound, and photos, and memorabilia. It was a day of joy!

They found a prison compound near Pisa and visited Ezra Pounds former cellblock as other pilgrims visit Lourdes. Bill Bradfield clipped a piece of the barbed wire that encircled the now defunct compound and treated that snippet like a sliver from the True Cross.

They met and lunched with the man who owned the property where the camp had been. Bill Bradfield assured him that his land would be very valuable, after Ezra Pound attained his rightful place in the world of letters. He advised the man to build a grand monument, a tribute to the poet.

But the simple Italian said, "My roses are a tribute. It is enough."

Venice, of course, was a challenge. They went to every lodging, every restaurant, every bar that Ezra Pound had frequented.

She really worried in Austria, when they got to the very doors of a castle occupied by the poet's daughter. But by now, Bill Bradfield had lost some of his heat. His blue eyes weren't quite as bright, and after some urging, he agreed that Pound's daughter wasn't likely to receive two Pennsylvania schoolteachers and a couple of kids, even if he could convince her that he had known her old man back in Washington.

Sue Myers was thirty-two years old by then, and felt fifty when they finally arrived at a tiny Austrian town mentioned in

The Cantos. The Austrian town had prospered during the Great Depression when its mayor had created and issued his own money. He dated the currency and decreed that it would depreciate in value each and every week it was not used; therefore, the money circulated and people traded vigorously for it.

Ezra Pound had immortalized the town as a tribute to Mussolini and he'd made the grandiose generalization that what worked on the village level could work on a national level. Indeed, on a global level.

At the entrance to the village there was a little bridge bearing a plaque written in German. Sue Myers was finally able to contribute something to the intellectual business at hand. She'd studied German in college and could translate.

Bill Bradfield was excited to discover that the plaque was a testimonial to the mayor whose economic brainstorm had saved the village. The daughter of the mayor was still alive, and thrilled him even further by giving him pieces of the old money to add to his collection of Pound memorabilia. She also graciously showed them her father's library and it was just as Ezra Pound had described it! She even had an old photo of the poet holding a neighbors baby.

Well, that was about it. He had the rusty barbed wire, the dated money, and several other relics. Sue Myers had anemia and frazzled nerves and was being driven nuts by his bored teenagers.

She'd fought with the older boy relentlessly for ten months. The younger had a crush on her and that was almost as bad. Whenever they'd arrive in a new town, she'd slip them some lire or francs or pesetas and tell them to get lost until it was time to move on.

Bill Bradfield, after concocting the elaborate cover story to explain Sue Myers to his sons, had stuck to it. He was always reassuring them that she was nothing more than a colleague from the English department who happened to be going to Europe, and that they'd pooled their bucks. For a time the boys wanted to believe that two grownups could share the sleeping quarters in the Volkswagen bus while they slept outside in a tent.

Unfortunately, the younger sons crush on Sue didn't wane, and one day he found some birth control pills in her luggage. A year's supply. He felt betrayed. Finally, he caught them in bed together in Granada, Spain.

"The boy never forgave me," Sue recounted. "I've heard Bill Bradfield reminisce about every slight he'd suffered in his lifetime. He remembered every toy he didn't get as a child. The Bradfields don't forgive."

And then she made a discovery: Bill Bradfield had letters awaiting him at various destinations. Letters from several women. After finding and reading them she knew that he'd been encouraging them all along the way.

She was heartbroken. There had been other affairs during their years together, but she thought that somehow when they returned from Europe it would be different.

"I hated springtime," she always said. "He'd get so active."

Sue Myers was certain she'd have a mental breakdown if she didn't get home to the States. But now she knew that he'd be as active as before with all the cryptic notes, and a secret post office box, and ringing phones that went dead when she answered.

She vowed to get out. She wanted to be married and have children. Her kiddie clock was ticking in her ears.

As always, he begged forgiveness and made new promises. This time he pointed out that since he was a poet like Ezra Pound, his affairs were simply "grist" for his poetry. Upon their return from Europe, he proved his sincerity by moving into an apartment with her.

It seemed like a step closer to marriage. But Sue Myers later came to realize that she was pretty bad at basic math. In their years together he'd written just three poems, but he'd had thirteen relatively serious affairs, one poem for every 4.33 rounds of gristing.

Chapter
2

Prince of Darkness

She'd heard that the new principal had arrived at Upper Merion Senior High School, but where the devil was he? And who was the tall army officer roaming around the corridors in full uniform?

Ida Micucci had a whole lot of questions that went unanswered during the first days of Jay C. Smiths tenure at Upper Merion, though one of them got answered pretty last. The tall army officer was the new principal. Jay Smith was a staff officer in the U.S. Army Reserve, but why he felt he needed to wear his uniform to school on his first day was a mystery. It was probably the most innocuous of all the mysteries that would trouble the principals secretary from that day until her retirement.

It took a full week for the new principal to walk into her office and introduce himself.

"You've never seen such a pair of eyes in all your life," she said often. "There was no feeling in them. You might think you've known a few people with cold fish eyes, but not like his."

They were not fish eyes. They were eyes that newspaper editors in later years loved to isolate for effect. They were referred to as "reptilian," but that was not correct either.

Jay Smith was tall, middle-aged, with receding dark hair, a weak knobby chin and a rubbery sensual mouth. He was not an attractive man. Some thought that Jay Smith looked like an obscene phone call.

Ida Micucci hated to admit that his eyes scared her, but then she was too busy disliking Jay Smith to be all that scared. For starters, no one could ever find the guy. He'd come to school and enter his office and vanish. When he'd eventually reappear after people went looking all over campus for him, he'd never apologize. He'd simply enter the office and tend to his paperwork. By late afternoon he'd lock his office door and refuse to come out.

Ida Micucci was annoyed from the start. She knew that sometimes a school principal had private business that needed closed doors, but Jay Smith would lock his door nearly every day as a matter of policy. He did not want to be disturbed unless it was urgent.

Being several years older than her new boss, Ida felt it was up to her to put this principal in his place. She gave it a try from time to time ana was just about the only one at Upper Merion who ever did. For one thing, she'd turn him (town when he came around with army paperwork that needed typing. He was going for colonel then with a good shot at becoming a general before he retired.

She'd say, "No, I'm far too busy to do the army's work." And he'd simple turn and walk quietly away.

It became apparent though that neither Ida nor anyone else was going to put him in his place. He had a quick mind and a sharp tongue and wouldn't hesitate to draw blood if he was crossed.

He could speed-read and remember whole chunks of books. He virtually memorized the yearbook, and astonished students by addressing them by name. He loved using arcane words on troublesome faculty members when they bothered him with petty problems.