My Mrs. Brown

by William Norwich

  Francie, however, followed the reporter to the door and was about to e-mail from her phone to the reporter’s the photograph Mrs. Brown took of Florida and Tony last night.

  To Mrs. Brown’s amazement, Bonnie interrupted. She was getting quite fed up with the negative ways of the mean girls in her employ, and it remained in her best interest to be on the right side of Florida Noble. Besides, with Florida’s endorsement of Mrs. Brown, she had begun to see her cleaning lady in a whole new light. Quoting copyright law that may or may not have been correct but sure sounded accurate, Bonnie said that the photograph could not be used without permission of the photographer, Mrs. Brown, and a signed release from Florida Noble.

  Mrs. Brown shook her head no when the reporter asked if it was okay to use the picture.

  Francie was furious. She’d have to do something to retaliate.

  Mrs. Brown, on the other hand, was feeling on top of the world, meaning closer to her dress. Running some errands for Bonnie that afternoon, she decided to pass by Foxbrown & Brothers to see how her investment was doing.

  Stewart Foxbrown hadn’t noticed when Mrs. Brown entered his storefront brokerage. As was his wont, he was lost in his computer playing solitaire. Mrs. Brown cleared her throat. He didn’t hear her. She did so again, and still he did not look up.

  “Mr. Foxbrown,” she said, and startled the broker.

  “Oh, my goodness, Mrs. Brown, how long have you been standing there?” he asked.

  “Just thought I’d pass by and see how my investment is doing?”

  “Hmmm . . . I don’t know . . . I actually haven’t . . .” He switched programs on the computer, then looked up. “What was the name of the stock again? Oh, that’s right, Santo, named for your canary . . .”

  “My cat . . .”

  A pause.

  “Is your cat unwell, Mrs. Brown?”

  “My cat is fine.”

  “How’s your canary?”

  “I don’t have a canary!” Mrs. Brown exclaimed.

  The stockbroker’s bonhomie tumbled. He grimaced. “Well, good thing Santo your cat is doing well because—Maybe you’d better sit down, Mrs. Brown, there’s bad news.” Stewart rose from his seat and went around his desk to clear a chair of golfing magazines so Mrs. Brown could sit. “How do I say this? Oh, Christ, I hate it when this happens . . .”

  “What has happened?”

  “Well,” Stewart said, “your investment in Santo kind of isn’t.”

  “Kind of isn’t?”

  “Hold on,” Mr. Foxbrown said, “let me just look something up here.”

  He fiddled with his computer while Mrs. Brown froze.

  “Now, let’s see here. Yup, blasted! Wow, that was fast, from one week to the next. Seems an investigation has been launched into Santo revolving around trademark and patent infringement and the result is the stock has”—he hesitated before continuing—“gone down, I am afraid.”

  She felt faint. Shame burned inside her. How could I have been so stupid as to invest my money in the stock market? What kind of idiot is run by wishful thinking like this?

  “How down?” Mrs. Brown asked.

  “Let’s see,” Stewart said, putting figures into his calculator. “Your stock is worth right now if you were to sell . . . $179. I’m sorry, Mrs. Brown. It may come back up after the investigation is resolved.”

  “How long will that take?” she asked, thinking maybe a couple of weeks or perhaps as much as a month.

  “Usually in such cases about a year, or two.”

  “What can I do?”

  Stewart Foxbrown shook his head. “There’s nothing you can do, I’m afraid, except wait. I certainly wouldn’t advise selling. And,” he said, returning to his computer solitaire game, “if it is any consolation, think about someone like Warren Buffett or even Donald Trump; they’ve been where you’re at a thousand times and always manage to bounce back. Try to think positive, Mrs. Brown. Courage. What’s that plaque on the Christopher Columbus statue over there in the town green say? ‘Sail on.’ We must when the blue chips are down sail on, sail on. This is what makes America so great.”

  COMING STRAIGHT HOME FROM Bonnie’s, Mrs. Brown knocked on Mrs. Fox’s door. She needed to talk to her best friend Sarah.

  Mrs. Brown was so flustered and upset by losing her investment—so deeply ashamed of having succumbed to such folly—it took what seemed an eternity before she realized that Mrs. Fox was not there but away in Vancouver, and that the light she saw was the pearl-white glow from Alice’s laptop.

  Alice hadn’t heard Mrs. Brown knocking on the door. Instead of correcting papers and preparing her day plan for teaching tomorrow, she was in deep reverie, on her headphones, listening to her music, her favorite orange blossom candle filling the place with just the right amount of fragrant bite and sweet, and answering questions for a “style quiz” posted on a favorite website. Silly but engaging questions that you were supposed to answer with the first thing that came to mind:

  Q. How would your friends describe your style? (Answer: Tomboy chic.)

  Q. What do you wear on a fat day? (A. Baggy black T-shirt.)

  Q. What’s always in your bag? (A. Keys, phone, lighter, piece of rose quartz for good luck.)

  Q. Do you have a beauty secret? (A. Sex. Or, almond oil for winter moisturizer; rose water in summer.)

  Q. If you could change one thing about your appearance, what would it be? (A. Be taller.)

  Q. What style advice do you give your friends if they ask? (Less is more.)

  Q. What’s the most treasured item in your wardrobe? (A. Black motorcycle boots.)

  Q. It’s a hot date night, what do you wear? (A. Black jeans, black tank top, black high-heel strappy sandals or boots depending on the season, black pearl stud in one ear and a white one in the other.)

  Q. If you were stranded on a desert island, what would your essentials be? (A. Music.)

  Q. Yes or no to a nip and a tuck? (A. Ask me in twenty years.)

  Q. If you were the fashion police for the day, what would you ban? (A. The fashion police.)

  Q. What’s your guilty pleasure? (A. Girl bubble baths, music, scented candles.)

  Q. If you could give a dinner party and invite up to twelve people, living or dead, fact or fictional, who would they be? (A. Scout Finch, Cleopatra, Chrissie Hynde, Rihanna, Mother Teresa, Serena Williams, Sean Penn—don’t ask—Stevie Nicks, Donald Duck, Karl Lagerfeld, Lena Dunham, my grandmother . . .)

  Q. What are you proudest of ? (A. Not freaking out in Ashville.)

  Q. What are you least proud of ? (A. Being too judgmental.)

  Q. What would you eat for your last supper? (A. Tuna casserole.)

  Alice’s casserole, it can be noted, went right to Milo’s heart that Saturday night in November, when she made it for him on their second date. Bless his heart, too, because instead of his preppy cords and khakis, he dressed for Alice, a pair of black jeans, motorcycle boots, a black T-shirt, and apparently no underwear, either briefs or boxers. Like a key in a Harley ignition, this roughrider look couldn’t have pleased Alice more. Rural New England life was suddenly filling with big surprises. When she asked Milo where he got those clothes, he answered, with a seductive smile:

  “Always look way in the back of a man’s closet or chest of drawers; you never know what you’ll find.”

  What Milo didn’t mention was that his conservative boarding school teacher’s mufti was in the trunk of his car. He’d changed into this outfit in the bathroom of a Friendly’s restaurant en route so his students and colleagues wouldn’t see him.

  Alice might still be answering the “style quiz” questions if she hadn’t decided it would be funny to take a “selfie” of herself answering the “style quiz” questions, and when she did she saw something that looked like a low-hanging cloud photo bombing her. But it wasn’t a cloud. It was the view of the top of Mrs. Brown’s head through the glass in the front door.

  Mrs. Brown looked awfully upset. Alice had never seen h
er so undone. Mrs. Brown was one of those people, like swans in water, always calm above the surface. But you never see their feet paddling fast to stay afloat.

  “Come in, Mrs. Brown, please come in,” Alice said, holding the door for her landlady. “What’s up? Want some tea? Coffee?”

  Alice led Mrs. Brown to the kitchen. She put the kettle on. The moment Mrs. Brown sat down at the kitchen table, she couldn’t stop the tears from dropping. She told Alice what had become of her speculation in the stock market.

  “I’m a fool, I’m a fool, I’m a fool,” Mrs. Brown said, her elbows on the table, her head low, her hands covering her eyes and her tears. “And what’s worse is that I’m an old fool.”

  Alice didn’t know what to do or say. If Mrs. Brown were one of her contemporaries, or one of her young students, she’d wait for them to finish crying and come up for air. Then she’d tell them everything was going to be okay.

  Alice pulled her kitchen chair as close as she could to Mrs. Brown. She placed her left hand on Mrs. Brown’s back, and her other hand on Mrs. Brown’s hands, and she said:

  “No, Mrs. Brown, you are not. You are not a fool.”

  “I am!”

  “You’re not!”

  And back and forth like this until finally Mrs. Brown caught her breath.

  “We’ll figure this out,” Alice said with a confidence she didn’t recognize. She just knew it was the right thing to say, and to believe.

  “We will?”

  “I promise you that all is well and all will be well. You’ve still got the rent money coming from Florida.”

  “That’s right. I do, don’t I?”

  “Don’t be embarrassed because you lost your investment. It happens to everyone. That’s business. But you will still go to New York, you will get your dress, you’ll find your way there and you’ll find your way home and then you can wear your dress”—she paused—“whenever you want to. You’ll have it.”

  “I will,” said Mrs. Brown, some confidence returning.

  “I can see it now in your closet. The most correct and the most beautiful dress in the world.” Alice was surprised at how uncharacteristically optimistic she was sounding, even more surprised that she was actually beginning to believe it. Maybe the people who lose out in life are those who cling to the belief that something is impossible—rather than believing it’s possible—no matter how extremely unlikely it appears.

  Mrs. Brown exhaled. “You know, Alice, you remind me more and more of your grandmother. You’re just as kind and good as she.” Her eyes filled again with tears, but tears brought by the permeating feeling of appreciation and gratitude, not tears caused by sorrow and regret.

  Mrs. Brown cleared her throat. It seemed that she was going to say something else, perhaps confide a secret thought or two, when the telephone rang.

  “Probably Granny,” Alice said, getting up to answer the phone. “It’s the time of day when she calls.” The fact was that only Mrs. Fox, or a telemarketer, ever called on the landline. Everything else was text or mobile phone.

  When Mrs. Fox heard that Mrs. Brown was right there, she asked to speak to her. Alice passed her the phone and listened as Mrs. Brown repeated what had happened with her speculation in the stock market. In a recent letter, she’d told Mrs. Fox about investing in the stock.

  Mrs. Fox listened carefully. Instead of engaging directly with the problem, she offered something comforting.

  “I think about us, Emilia,” Mrs. Fox began, her voice low and quiet down the phone. “Maybe it’s a generational thing, or geographic? We’re small-town New England girls. We are the quiet, steady types,” Mrs. Fox said. “We’re the shovelers.”

  “You mean ducks, like the ones at the pond?” Mrs. Brown asked.

  Mrs. Fox laughed. “Well, yes, shovelers are a type of duck. But what I mean is shovelers as in shoveling. We’re New England girls just after World War Two. Keeping our mouths shut, never complaining, shoveling through the snow so everyone, not just our families, but everyone in the neighborhood, could get to school, to work, to the library, to church, remember?”

  Mrs. Brown remembered the bleak winters. As hard as they could be, they were also cozy times staying indoors at home.

  “I just wish sometimes, Emilia, well, sometimes you are too quiet,” Mrs. Fox said. “Wouldn’t it help to talk?”

  But she wouldn’t press Mrs. Brown, not tonight, or ever. She was friend, not interlocutor.

  “I guess something will happen; it’ll work out,” Mrs. Brown said, and smiled. “If it is meant to be . . .”

  “It will be,” said Mrs. Fox, finishing her best friend’s sentence. “Everything is going to be okay in the end. And if it’s not okay, it isn’t the end.”

  Mrs. Brown passed the telephone receiver to Alice.

  “Okay, Granny, it’s suppertime here. I’ll rustle something up for Mrs. Brown and me to eat.”

  “Alice, listen to me,” Mrs. Fox said with all the seriousness at her command. “What do I always say? ‘Blood makes you related. Loyalty makes you family.’ Emilia is family. Make sure she doesn’t get too sad. Keep your eye on her. Promise?”

  “Come on, Granny—man . . .” Alice wasn’t in the mood for a lecture. She’d begun to say something about how weird Mrs. Brown could be sometimes, and her grandmother should give Alice a break, that she was doing her best to be a good neighbor, but stopped herself just in time, before she hurt anyone’s feelings. After all, Mrs. Brown was still sitting right there.

  “Yes, yes, I promise you.”

  Besides, Mrs. Brown wasn’t all that weird. She was just left over from the last century.

  “I’m sorry. Yes, I promise. I promise that I will telephone my mother more often,” Alice said, covering so that Mrs. Brown wouldn’t suspect anything insulting had ever been intended.

  “I promise, Granny!”

  LATER THAT EVENING, MRS. Brown sat at her kitchen table mending and sewing some of the pieces from the dry cleaners that she took in to earn extra money.

  She was reinforcing some diamanté buttons on a black silk blouse that belonged to the wife of Ashville’s only orthodontist, but Mrs. Brown’s thoughts were only of this painful day. Thank God she had Alice to go to, and that she was able to talk to Mrs. Fox on the telephone.

  Whatever Mrs. Brown did next about her dress had to be more wisely considered. How?

  “Go forward,” her inner voice told her.

  She put down the sewing, rested her hands in her lap, and closed her eyes. The soothing cliché “where there’s a will, there’s a way” came to her and then morphed into something more visual. “Where there’s a wall, there’s a way.” Mrs. Brown saw herself a little girl standing face-to-face with one of the stone walls you saw almost everywhere in the countryside in New England. Where was the best place to climb over? Where was a secret door? There it is, the gold knob! In her mind’s eye just as she was reaching for the golden object she heard the sound of Santo rushing across the floor to greet Florida Noble.

  Mrs. Brown opened her eyes.

  It was just past 8:30, and Florida apologized if she was disturbing Mrs. Brown—she saw the sewing and mending piled on the kitchen table needing to get done—but would Mrs. Brown mind if she made a cup of tea—she carried her own special blend of curative herb tea in a silk sack in her pocketbook—and would Mrs. Brown care to join her in a cup?

  “The basis of the tea is chamomile with a dab of hops, too; the chamomile rests the nervous system and the hops soothes the stomach,” Florida said. “When I am in Paris there’s a Chinese herbalist I always go see . . . Oh dear, listen to me.”

  Mrs. Brown got up to put on the kettle, but Florida stopped her. “You wait on people all day long.” She ran the water from the tap into the kettle and joined Mrs. Brown at the table. Santo leapt into Florida’s lap.

  “Santo, get down,” Mrs. Brown instructed the cat.

  “Oh, please, it’s okay, let him stay,” Florida said.

  Back in the city, any
city—London, Paris, Milan, but especially New York, where Florida reigned supreme amongst the fashion set—very few people would have ever seen this unvarnished, down-to-earth side of the supermodel.

  While her professional life was often complicated, and Florida had never won any Girl Scout awards for good behavior, her motives in Ashville were simple. Before her grandmother died five years ago, Florida had promised she would make something of herself beyond modeling.

  “The flesh will wither,” her grandmother had said, “but the soul will always grow if you nurture it, Florida.”

  She’d promised her grandmother that she would get her college degree even if it meant giving up lucrative modeling jobs. The more time passed, the worse Florida felt about not keeping her promise. But today, her first official day toward her finals and graduation, she had a sense of peace and satisfaction she hadn’t known in a very long time.

  “My mother’s family are from Jamaica,” Florida told Mrs. Brown as they drank their tea, “and they were all farmers. No one went to college and few even finished high school. My mother could sing and dance quite well. She became something of a showgirl and a celebrity in Kingston. That’s where she met my father, who was a pilot with British Airways. He lived in London. They fell in love.”

  Mrs. Brown looked up from her sewing, stitching the torn inseam on the trousers of a green silk evening suit. “Are your parents in Jamaica or England?” she asked.

  “They never married,” Florida said, studying Mrs. Brown’s face to see if it registered any disapproval.

  It didn’t. It wasn’t Mrs. Brown’s way to sit in judgment. The world was already tough enough. Too many judges and not enough juries. “I’m sure they would have if they could have,” Mrs. Brown said, resting her hands again. They were hurting.

  “I think they would have, too,” Florida said. She fixed her herbal concoction and told Mrs. Brown her story. Her father was not only white, the color, especially of men, her grandmother most mistrusted, but was also married with a wife and four children living in England. Grandmother vehemently disapproved of her daughter having an affair with a married man. Then Florida was born. Her mother went to London to be nearer her father, hoping she could woo him away from his wife.