Echoes in the Darkness (3 page)

One of those troublesome faculty members was Bill Bradfield, whom Ida liked as much as she disliked Jay Smith. Ida thought that Bill Bradfield was handsome and manly and she liked the way he'd come in and give her a hug and a smile and a cheery hello.

Sometimes Bill Bradfield as teachers' representative had occasion to start ragging the principal about a teacher who'd received an unsatisfactory notice and thought it unfair.

Jay Smith would simply fix him quietly with those eyes and say something like "I find your reasoning a bit periphrastic."

Bill Bradfield would have to scamper for a dictionary, thereby leaving Jay Smith to do his customary vanishing act.

One semester the principal gave Ida an unsatisfactory notice and she marched straight into his office and told him that she'd never received an unsatisfactory notice in her entire career and she was not about to take one without an explanation, a written explanation.

Jay Smith sat there and stared vacantly with those eyes and nodded and wrote his explanation. The report indicated that by bringing in candy every day and putting it on her desk, Ida Micucci was encouraging teachers to loiter around the principal's office. And furthermore, Ida Micucci was attracting "bugs and other vermin."

That did it. Jay C. Smith had a very angry senior secretary on his hands. And one day he called her in and apologized for the report. And not just a few times. He apologized every time he happened to glance at the candy jar. She thought he was going to spend the remaining years of her career apologizing.

He'd be handing her something to type six months after the bugs-and-vermin report, and he'd suddenly say, "Please forgive me, Ida."

Put he never apologized to another soul for anything. And pretty soon, he got tired of dumping words like "sesquipedalian" on his unfortunate faculty. He started inventing words for the likes of Bill Bradfield when he dared to match wits with Jay Smith.

Once when the teachers' representative came reeling out of Jay Smith's office unable to find a word like "ransmigrifold" in any dictionary, the principal sat and chuckled mirthlessly and finally had to share his secret.

"I'm inventing words for them, Ida," he informed his secretary. "Those pseudo-intellectuals need the exercise that I provide."

Jay Smith would bring his trash to work. Nobody could believe it at first, but it was so. He'd bring bags of trash from home and transfer it from his car to the school Dumpsters. Even the custodians were asking what the hell was going on! Didn't they have garbage pickup in his neighborhood?

And that wasn't all that the custodians were wondering about. They noticed him hanging around school at night when everyone else had gone home. Late at night. Once, a janitor saw the principal strolling out of his office on the way to the lavatory. It wouldn't have caused concern except that Jay Smith was wearing nothing but underwear.

Then there was the matter of his meeting and greeting prospective teachers. One of them was a new member of the English department, a young woman, recently widowed.

Jay Smith had a full, smooth speaking voice and always enunciated crisply. His most dulcet tone was reserved for attractive women.

"Do you use Warriner's Grammar?" he asked the young widow as she squirmed a bit. Many women reported feeling that his eyes were always asking lewd questions.

"Yes, I do," she answered, just as his phone rang.

"One moment, my dear," he said and picked up the telephone.

And the teacher started wishing for silver bullets because he was transformed!

"This is Colonel lay C. Smith," he snarled. "And we will bivouac at oh five hundred, do you understand?"

Bang went the telephone and just that fast the wolfman disappeared.

It was a velvet frog who said, "Yes, my dear, its a very good grammar book and I'm delighted to see that you think so."

And there was the "stress" question. Every teacher at Upper Merion, new or old, had to get used to the fact that Jay Smith seemed to have a perverse need to shock.

For example, he'd sometimes gravely ask a prospective teacher what kind of birth control she used, as though her diaphragm was at least as important as Upper Merion's football schedule.

To the user of Warriner's Grammar, he said, "As a young widow, perhaps you could tell me how you handle your sex life."

She answered, "Discreetly," and the chill in her voice made him conclude the interview.

He dealt with male teachers in a similar fashion. To a new English teacher named Vincent Valaitis who had the face (and the worldliness) of a Vienna choirboy, Jay Smith said, "Young man, just remember one thing, English literature is nothing more than fucking and sucking."

The twenty-fbur-year-old teacher thanked the principal for the insight and got the job.

A change took place at Upper Merion Senior High School. It was gradual at first and then it gained momentum as the years passed. It became clear to the faculty that their principal would let them run their classrooms pretty much as they wished. This meant that traditions like a dress code went out the window for students and for some teachers.

Faculty members like Bill Bradfield came to class in down vests and jogging shoes. And without a dress code Bill Bradfield grew his beard into a John Brown Raiding Harpers Ferry model. His mustache hung over his mouth so long and ragged that Sue Myers practically needed a machete for a kiss.

And the kisses were coining less frequently since their return from Europe.

Jay Smith eventually took a sabbatical to complete work on his doc torate in education at Temple University. But whether he was present or on sabbatical, the principal was ever the subject of gossip.

For example, there were the "open mike" episodes so called because Jay Smith would, when in a garrulous mood, deliver messages to the students over the public address system. The students loved it, particularly after he returned from Temple University as Doctor Jay Smith. The messages got longer, more rambling, and sometimes wiped out the first period.

He would say things like "This is your principal speaking. There is a new regulation for gym clothes. You may wear yellow bottoms and blue tops. [Long pause.) Or you may wear blue bottoms and yellow tops. I trust that this will please authoritarians in the faculty and not displease libertarians. But I have one caveat: in the winter it shall be the duty erf each and every student to be encased in warm underwear."

Dr. Smith hated to be troubled by picayunish disciplinary problems. Once, the-widow-who-handled-sex-discreetly stormed into his office to complain about some students who were racing cars up and down the parking lot, and tossing Frisbees around the corridors, and sunbathing on the roofs of their cars with ghetto blasters turned loud enough to shatter her zircons.

And Dr. Smith's response? "I have no time for overreacting menopausal women, my dear."

When she retired from Upper Merion and had time to reflect, Ida Micucci could only picture lay Smith in a black suit. The same black suit, she thought at first. But she eventually came to realize that it u)asnt the same black suit because sometimes his sleeves would be two inches shorter than at other times. When Ida could bear it no longer she said, "Where in the world do you get those black suits? They don't fit!"

He iust slid those eyeballs in her direction and showed her a grin like an ice pick, and said, "You may not believe this, Ida, but I get all my clothes at die Salvation Army."

She relieved it all right. But despite his secondhand rags, he was clean. Was he ever. The man would wash his hands fifteen times a day. He ran to the john so often that Ida thought he had a bad bladder until male faculty members reported that he'd only wash his hands. Around the faculty dining room they said that Dr. Jay Smith washed his hands more than Dr. Kildare.

Dr. Smith seldom fraternized with faculty or staff on or off campus, but once a year he might show up at a soiree. One of these was a party given at the home of a teacher who'd been taking belly dancing. She was pretty good, and after everyone had enough to drink she slipped into her harem costume for a little demonstration.

Fueled by martinis, all the male teachers started clapping, and when the music started she came slinking in. Two of the younger female teachers happened to be standing in front of Jay Smith when the belly dancer permitted the men to slip dollars bills inside her costume as she shimmied.

Jay Smith moved close enough behind the young women for them to feel his hot breath on the napes of their necks and asked, "What does one do when a portion of one's anatomy gets hard?"

And the young teachers started gulping their drinks and

{'abbering inanely to each other ana pretended not to have leard, afraid to turn around and see a pair of eyes that looked like the eves of a . . .

They all had trouble describing the eyes of their principal. "Amphibian" came to mind, but that wasn't precisely correct either.

There were constant cryptic phone calls and messages from women to Jay Smith, and that was just one of the many things bothering his secretary. Worse than that were the chemical odors in his office. Ida got so that she'd creep in after his solitary closed-door session in the late afternoon and she'd smell something medicinal, something chemical.

And when he went out he always looked as though he'd been asleep. His black suit would be more rumpled than usual and his hooded eyes seemed to have a glaze on them.

Ida's husband finally said he was getting sick and tired of hearing all the crazy stories. He got so he was accusing her of being crazy.

"Would you like to meet the wife of a school principal?" Ida asked her husband. "A man with a doctorate? A colonel in the army reserve? Well take a little drive down to the dry cleaner's where she works, and take a gander."

Many a male customer took a gander at Stephanie Smith when she had her back turned. What they'd see was s voluptuous woman in hot pants and white plastic boots, with dyed hair teased and sprayed to the point of fracture. From behind, Dolly Parton. From the front, a hook-nosed hag from Macbeth.

But she was kind and sweet and friendly. Ida Micucci, after she got over the shock, really liked Stephanie Smith.

Stephanie called everybody "hon." She was several years older than her husband, and like him had grown up poor in West Chester. She'd worked very hard all her life and helped put Jay Smith through college. It took about three minutes to

S;et to know her intimately, and from then she was all heart and oyalty.

If Jay Smith was about as forthcoming as Pravda, his wife Stephanie delivered more gossip than the National Enquirer. She was constantly threatening to leave her husband, or doing it and returning home when she had a change of heart. Ana she'd give anyone the blow-by-blow whether it was wanted or not.

"Take a look, hon!" she said to Ida one day before the secretary could escape from the dry cleaner's.

"Oh, I can't look at private letters!" Ida protested, but curiosity drew her toward the documents that Stephanie was holding.

"He always keeps his basement apartment locked," Stephanie confided. "He won't let nobody down there. Not me and not our daughters. But I broke in!"

Ida read a few paragraphs of Jay Smith's "love letters" reportedly to be sent to a professors wife at a nearby college. They were all about collies and Dobermans. Nothing that would have shocked the Marquis de Sade, but Ida Micucci got queasy.

"Please, Stephanie, I already know more about your husband than I want to know!" she said, rushing out of the cleaners.

Ida not only liked and pitied Stephanie, but she also pitied Jay Smiths daughters. The elder was named Stephanie for her mother, and the younger was called Sheri. They were both troubled girls, and for a time, young Stephanie was a student at Upper Merion. Ida talked often to her.

It was common knowledge that young Stephanie was a drug user, and as time passed, she dropped out of school and was rumored to be involved in prostitution to support a heroin addiction. Jay Smiths was not a happy family.

Young Stephanie caused her parents so many problems that Ida wanted to pity the principal himself, but he was a hard man to pity. Sometimes she wanted to join him in the faculty dining room where he sat alone, his face nearly in his plate, holding a fork as though it were a dagger. He'd stab at his food and shove it begrudgingly into his rubbery mouth as though it were eat or die. Ida Micucci decided she could never pity Jay Smith.

On another of her trips to the dry cleaners, Ida again begged Stephanie Smith to stop the onslaught of bizarre information concerning her principal. She didn't want to hear any more about Dr. Jays theories on animal husbandry. Then it became clear what Dr. Jay Smiths eyes resembled! Not fish, not reptiles though the eyes were very lightly lashed and a bit hooded. But at certain times, in his more sardonic moments, when the eyebrows lifted to form two perfect S's across his high forehead-in those moments the irises slid back and she noticed that his eyes were Tartar, and tilted. And if you simply elongated the pupils, gave them a vertical squeeze in your imagination, it was abundantly clear that Dr. Jay C. Smith had the eyes of a goat\

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.