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again.
    But this time Sue was heartbroken enough to get out and did-but returned after he begged and promised never to be unfaithful again. Sue was by then in her mid-thirties. She went home feeling like her womb was full of baby rats.
    Hie Reinert affair was something else altogether.
    "By the time I realized he was involved with Susan Reinert, I thought I was getting numb to it," Sue recounted. "But Susan Reinert awakened something in me, or spawned new feelings. I wasn't just so much jealous or brokenhearted, I was outraged)."
    Even when Sue Myers discussed it years later, a diagonal stress line popped across her brow: "I even hated her voice. That screechy whiny voice of hers was like fingernails on a chalkboard. It made me want to scream."
    The little clues were there for her. Sue Myers could always detect provocative Bill Bradfield glances, and more tellingly the return looks he'd receive from women at school.
    "Not her\" she yelled at him one day in the corridor of Upper Merion. "Damn it, not Susan Reinert!"
    "What in the world are you talking about?"
    "She's downright homely, for God's sake!" Sue Myers said, trying to check the tears. "She's got nothing to offer. Nothing!"
    "Get hold of yourself," he told her. "Your imagination's out of control. We'll talk when we get home."
    Sue Myers explained it at a later time by saying, "With the others, with all the others, I could see something in them, something that might've attracted him. But not with Susan Reinert. To me, she was an insult. The final personal insult. Maybe my spirit did go absolutely numb after her, I don't know."
    Sue wanted to believe him when he told her how silly she was to think he would so much as entertain a thought about mousy Susan Reinert. But then Susan Reinert began to penetrate the Great Books "inner circle."
    The Great Books Program, conceived by Mortimer J. Adler, was introduced to Upper Merion by Bill Bradfield. It was a program for self-education in the liberal arts, the concept being that a group of people from the community might educate themselves by meeting twice a month and discussing some two hundred of the Western worlds greatest books. They might all read a selection from Descartes or Aristotle or Voltaire and attempt for two hours to address a question posed by Bill Bradfield posing as Plato. It was seminar oriented and that appealed to Bill Bradfield, who was a seminar group leader.
    The seminar was cost-free and could be accomplished with library books. Bill Bradfield devised a similar program for the advanced students at Upper Merion, and other teachers quickly became sold on it when they saw the kids discussing Rousseau, Kant, Aristotle.
    "Whatever else he was," Sue Myers said, "Bill Bradfield was an inspiring teacher."
    He allowed certain faculty members to become a part of the Great Books inner circle that administered the seminar for the advanced students. But there were some, outside of the circle, who tried to denigrate their accomplishments. One teacher claimed that an advanced student of Greek tutored by Bill Bradfield, and given straight As, was later discovered to know about as much Greek as the delivery boy at Spiro's Deli in Philadelphia.
    Susan Reinert wanted to belong to the Great Books inner circle. Sue Myers wanted to strangle her with her own pantyhose. Sue found herself peering through campus windows, glaring at Susan Reinert with her quick hummingbird eyes.
    One of Bill Bradfields lifelong idiosyncrasies was the need to save things. He'd rathole memos, notes, letters, bills, receipts, many of which Sue Myers would eventually locate and use against him. She sometimes thought that the goofy complexity of his methods and his pack rat collections were designed so that she would catch him. She thought it enhanced the risk and made his conquests sweeter. She wondered if he was building a Bill Bradfield Memorial Library.
    One afternoon she crept by his empty classroom and saw the corner of a letter protruding from the