The wives? Elsie was intrigued to hear women, presumably women who’d been through what they’d been through, discussed like this.
“Like that Harbinger woman. She genuinelyisan idiot.”
“Who’s that?” Elsie dared to ask.
“Do you not remember?” Margot blew out smoke. “She flat-outrefusedto believe her husband was a killer. She launched an actual campaign to protest his innocence, told the press the cops had got the wrong guy.”
“Well, what’s so wrong with that?” Elsie glanced between them, unsure of what she’d missed. “She was being supportive.”
“He ended up taking a plea deal,” Margot said bluntly, “to avoid the chair. He admitted to twenty-five murders. Twenty-five! He used to make her call him on an intercom if she wanted to enter the garage.”
“But if she didn’t know—”
“She found a bloodstained mattress at their house!” Margot screeched.
“No, it wasn’t a bloodstained mattress,” Beverley countered. “It was no carpets. He’d had the carpets taken up.”
“That’s right”—Margot pointed at Beverley enthusiastically—“because he’d killed a load of women on their best carpet.”
“Oh.” Elsie felt foolish.
“That’s not even a smoking gun, is it? That’s a gun held to your head while someone says,Just in case you hadn’t noticed, honey, I get a kick outta killing people on your shag pile.”
“I heard she got a letter from one of the victims’ mothers, empathizing with her.” Beverley seemed to know what to say to calm Margot, Elsie noticed, to distract, to steer the conversation in a different way when things got heated. “She was deceived,” Bev continued. “She genuinely thought he was a good man, not a monster.”
Monster. It was an interesting term. Elsie was never sure that it fit for Albert, either, although she supposed there were plenty of peoplewho would level the term at him, and not just because he killed those girls.
It was in a high school classroom that she had first met him. He was standing beside the chalkboard; she was straight backed at her desk in the front row. She heard some of the other girls snicker. His sweater-vest had soup stains on it and his stomach slightly overhung the waistband of his trousers, but something in his eyes intrigued Elsie—the steady gaze, the expression that told her he knew the girls were laughing at him but he would never trouble himself to care.
He had taught English literature, Elsie’s favorite subject, and she found herself even more attentive in his classes than she had been in others. She was excited, she realized, for him to know what she was capable of, to know that her mind was suited to the subject, that she had a way with words.
So when he tossed her first graded essay on her desk and she saw a largeCscrawled across it, she found herself reeling from shock.I think you can do better,he’d written below. So she found herself with one goal: to get an A from Albert Moss. It became her sole focus; it consumed her, and she tweaked her essays every week in the hope that he’d finally be satisfied, that she would impress him.
D. See me,the next paper read.
There was no way she’d got a D. She’d never got a D in her life.
“You didn’t get a D,” he’d said with a wry grin when she hung back after class. “I just wanted the opportunity to talk with you properly.” Elsie had glowed as if a furnace had been lit inside her.
From that day on, she always hung back after English literature.
They’d discuss Ernest Hemingway, Dylan Thomas, Zora Neale Hurston. “You see,” he said one day, leaning toward her so the hairs on her arm lifted as if each one were reaching for him, “everyone else might call you odd, but forget them. This is why you’re special. Your brain is remarkable, Elsie.”
Remarkable. Elsie had clung to the word and rolled it around like a precious marble. She tried to ignore what he’d said about others finding her odd. She’d certainly never got that impression herself, but he must see what’s going on in that classroom better than she could.
He brought her a book one day, held it out to her.
“It makes me think of you,” he’d said. He seemed flustered as he stepped in closer; Elsie noticed the raggedness of his breathing. She took the paperback and turned the cover over.Lady Chatterley’s Lover. She knew the book. Knew it had been banned. Knew just what sort of content it contained. There was a small part of her then that wanted to hand it back, to leave the room. But here was someone who saw her for who she really was, what her mind could achieve, when everyone else, she was now sure, saw her as out of place. He reached his hand toward her and brushed the skin of her cheek. “My English rose,” he whispered.
“Not all women who are duped are stupid,” Beverley concluded in her argument with Margot. “Think about ten years ago. Women were treated very differently then, seen and not heard.”
“You think it’s any different now?” Margot asked. “The way we’re supposed to behave?”
“I don’t know.” Beverley flopped back in her chair. “But in the fifties, women weren’tsupposed”—she raised her fingers in quotation marks—“to ask what their husbands were getting up to. Therefore, they were easier to dupe.”
“And now? What’s their excuse?”
“I truly think some of themchoosenot to see what their husbands are capable of, even if it’s a subconscious decision.”
