Once settled John began looking for work - something he hadn't expected to do quite so soon. He applied at Boston's Emmanuel College, a four-year Catholic liberal arts college founded by the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur that at the time was for women only - much like the atmosphere at Winona five years before. John Murphy, who first taught with Bellairs in Winona and would again the next year at Merrimack College, was surprised at this decision because of the Winona similarities but, never the less, Bellairs accepted the $8000 per year assignment as a part-time instructor of English, teaching four sections of freshman composition. The assignment would be shorter than expected, as Bellairs would be associated with the college for only the 1968-69 school year. It's hard to say why his tenure was so short but only a scant amount of people remember him from those years. He was certainly not his happiest there, especially being around nuns and Priscilla notes John always believed he was fired after someone actually read St. Fidgeta.
Lis Carey echoes those same sentiments: she met the author at an area event and struck up a conversation with him only to discover they shared the Emmanuel College experience, she graduating a few years after Bellairs' tenure.
"He hated it there; he thought the school in general and the English department in particular was filled with strange, rigid, incomprehensible people. I was a history major, still in touch with the chairman of the department, and called him up and asked him if he remembered John Bellairs. He said, 'Yes, I remember him! Very nice man, but somehow he didn't seem happy in the English department. What's he doing now?' When told he was writing fantasy, he responded, 'Those that can't teach, do....'" Carey recalls the first time she read The Face in the Frost and still believes that some parts of it are from her old college, seen in the "spook-house mirror through which he experienced it."
Teaching, however, still paid the bills and Bellairs attempted it again the following school year at Merrimack College, the small private college in North Andover. Merrimack was also a Catholic college, founded by Augustinians in 1947, but, unlike past experiences with St. Teresa and Emmanuel Colleges, it was a coed institution with only a small percentage of the faculty actively religious.
Bellairs had been eyeing Merrimack due to the fact John Murphy had been teaching there since 1965 and it was to Murphy that Bellairs expressed his teaching interests. Murphy says he encouraged Bellairs to apply but secretly hoped he would not. "While John could be a fine teacher if he got interested enough in his students, he was perhaps too brilliant to be tolerant of the limitations of enough of them." John's eventual acceptance was possibly thanks to the influence of a senior professor that was taken with his St. Fidgeta article and pressured to have John hired after he gave a reading on campus.
One of his teaching colleagues, John Gordon, says "first-year ABD [all but dissertation] instructors were pretty routinely put in the salt mines. I taught four courses a semester, twenty-five students per section, a paper a week, for a grand total of $8500." Bellairs taught two freshmen composition sections and two junior Renaissance Literature sections. Up until the early 1990s the English Department was housed on the third floor of O'Reilly Hall, making it the possible location of Bellairs' classes, though Gordon vaguely recalls that his own teaching may have taken him to more than one building.
Murphy relates that over time Bellairs grew increasingly careless with teaching, becoming absorbed in his writing. "John was a ham in the classroom at Merrimack, somewhat influenced by his acting in the theater productions back in Winona," Murphy says, "and therefore he was more interested in entertaining students then grading papers. By the time of his second year review, the handwriting was on the wall: students were complaining (although a handful supported John for his brilliance - or easy grades) and papers had gone uncorrected and usually graded A."
With a lot of serious and dedicated teachers at Merrimack, Murphy explains that when the students complained, the administration took a vote and John was gone. Murphy abstained from the vote and Bellairs was expectedly unhappy, storming angrily around campus and reportedly swearing at everyone in the English department. He even went as far to drum up support from a few students in his defense.
Fortunately, notes Murphy, the semester was over and final exams had started. Unfortunately, Priscilla adds, the outburst resulted in him being ostracized by the faculty and earning a schedule that kept him on campus for most of the day for the spring semester.
If anything, Murphy, who left the college in 1984 after eventually serving as department chair, felt this was ultimately good for John, forcing him to take a serious look at his life and his true desire in writing.
In May 1970, with John's disdain for the 40 mile commute to Merrimack College, where he expected to be working for a number of more years, and the birth of their son Frank eight months before, the family moved north to a duplex in Haverhill. Located in one of the nicer residential areas, Priscilla described their half of the house as spacious and with its own bit of history: "the house across the street had once been owned by Louis B. Mayer. I think it reminded both John and me of the houses and towns we'd grown up in."
The following year both John and Priscilla began applying for jobs in the Haverhill area but by that September, John became a house-husband, which Priscilla described as full-time care for their two-year-old son, lots of dishwashing, and writing every day.
