My Mrs. Brown

by William Norwich

  Rachel explained that after finishing helping to settle Mrs. Groton’s estate she’d gone to work for Oscar de la Renta. She knelt down so they were on the same level and took Mrs. Brown’s hands in hers as if they were old friends.

  And by this time tomorrow they would be.

  THE TWO WOMEN, ONE old, and one young, sat talking in the store’s elegant dressing room.

  “Haven’t you ever stayed awake at night wanting something and shivering from the shame of wanting it so much and fearing you’d never have it?”

  The question touched Rachel’s heart. “How did you know? How could you tell?”

  Having seen how close Mrs. Brown was to collapse, Rachel had taken swift action. Her smartphone blazing, she dialed and e-mailed until she tracked down Mrs. Brown’s dress at the Oscar de la Renta boutique in Beverly Hills. Rachel organized for the store manager there to send overnight to New York one dress size eight and another size ten, one of which would fit Mrs. Brown.

  Rachel promised Mrs. Brown that the dresses would be here by noon, one at the latest. She did not say that she, and at her own expense—she didn’t want to embarrass Mrs. Brown—was actually having one of the young staffers at the Beverly Hills boutique fly with the dresses on the next Delta flight and bring them to the store himself. Except for possible weather delays, there would be no margin for error.

  The only things that shock anymore are random acts of kindness. In this regard Rachel Ames liked to be shocking. Doing good deeds in a dirty world renewed her. Rachel would treat Mrs. Brown as kindly as anyone ever had, if not more so.

  “But I can’t stay overnight in New York,” Mrs. Brown had said. Anticipating that Mrs. Brown’s worries would include the high cost of a New York hotel, let alone the frightening prospect of being alone in this strange monster of a city, Rachel invited Mrs. Brown to stay the night at her apartment just a few blocks away.

  “I have a guest room that needs a guest,” Rachel said.

  Rachel’s office would take care of changing Mrs. Brown’s train reservations so she could leave Pennsylvania Station at the same time tomorrow night, with her dress safe and secure in her hands.

  Mrs. Brown hesitated. Could she really accept Rachel’s hospitality? And she was worried. “But my job, I’ve got to go to work tomorrow.”

  “Is there anyone who can fill in for you?” Rachel asked. “Or can’t you just call and say you are taking a personal day?”

  Mrs. Brown wondered. She shook her head no.

  Compared to Mrs. Brown, Rachel enjoyed so many privileges and a charmed life. She felt exceedingly grateful.

  “Are you sure, Mrs. Brown? Won’t you stay?”

  Mrs. Brown thought more about it. “I’ll do it. I’ll stay. I have to. Thank you so much, Rachel, thank you so much,” she said, though she was still uneasy about her decision. “I’d really like to go home with my dress. I’ll telephone my neighbor who is taking care of my cat. She’ll be so worried about where I am, what happened to me. You might have to get on the phone so she knows I’ve not been kidnapped by pirates . . .”

  Rachel laughed.

  “And I’ll let my boss know, too, although I’m not looking forward to that call.”

  Once Rachel Ames had showered kindness on Mrs. Brown, the salespeople at the Oscar de la Renta boutique relaxed and gladly did the same. As for Rachel herself, there were many other things she could and should be doing this afternoon—it was Fashion Week, after all—but she could get to them later in the day or early evening. Besides, every once in a while it is a good idea to let your assistant fill in for you. It gives her, or him, an opportunity to mature and to learn and, at the same time, reminds your assistant why you have the big job and he or she doesn’t—yet.

  Rachel proposed that they continue their conversation over a cup of tea or coffee, maybe something to eat, at the Plaza Athénée hotel nearby on East Sixty-fourth Street.

  Walking with Rachel down Madison Avenue, through this glamorous casbah, Mrs. Brown wondered what people thought, if they noticed them and thought about them at all. Such an unlikely duo: one woman who looked like she’d risen from the pages of a glittering fashion magazine and the other like someone who had never read one. Could they be mistaken for mother and daughter?

  Arriving at the Plaza Athénée, Mrs. Brown marveled at the elegant good order of the place. Rachel led the way to her favorite corner table in the handsomely appointed bar/tea area of the hotel’s restaurant. It was decorated in the Anglo-French style, with wood-paneled walls and thick velvet banquettes. Small recessed pink lightbulbs above each table cast a warm glow. The room was filled with well-dressed ladies and affluent-looking gentlemen of assorted ages, sizes, and nationalities.

  “I do understand wanting a dress and fixating on it, saving for it. I think the desire for something feminine and beautiful binds all women together,” Rachel said. “But what I do not understand is why this particular dress, Mrs. Brown?”

  Mrs. Brown smiled.

  Rachel continued. “I mean, for sure it is exquisitely tailored and chic and appropriate but”—she paused—“why not something more colorful, lighter, more feminine and more silky or frilly? Something most women in this day and age would say was the ideal feminine dress? Like a gown you’d wear on the red carpet, you know, something that you wouldn’t wear to work. Or to church, to a funeral, to a board meeting, the sorts of places where Mrs. Groton always wore her suit? This is such a stately sort of dress, highly functional and useful, but not glam.”

  “Glam?” Mrs. Brown asked.

  “Sorry, that’s fashion-speak for glamorous.” Rachel laughed. “Some fashion people use the word ‘fabulous.’ ” She paused again, concerned that she sounded like a silly snob or a drag queen or worse, just so deeply superficial.

  Mrs. Brown tried to explain. She would confide things to Rachel like you might to someone you’ve just met on a plane. Something about the anonymity of New York City empowered her. What you say here will not be judged, and it will not be repeated, or even if it is, it’s of no consequence because no one knows you. The women Mrs. Brown worked for at the salon weren’t interested—were they?—in anything she had to say. Mrs. Fox was a great friend, her best friend, and Alice was her new friend, but in the name of friendship, respecting each other’s privacy and boundaries, much was left unsaid, too much perhaps sometimes.

  “The feminine clothes you are talking about are party dresses, dresses for making a woman feel young and pretty,” Mrs. Brown said, speaking slowly, holding the delicate Plaza Athénée teacup in the palms of her hands, feeling its warming comfort. “For me”—her voice caught—“for me,” she continued, “what I think is feminine is . . .” Her voice drifted off.

  “It’s okay,” Rachel said, “take your time.”

  “When we were inventorying Mrs. Groton’s things and I saw her perfect black dress, this dress I’ve come for today, a dress I’d seen Mrs. Groton wear to functions in Ashville, the Rose Festival, the opening of the new hospital wing, in so many of her photographs in the Ashville newspapers . . . when you told me more about this style, and how most all the First Ladies in the past thirty years had a version of it in their wardrobes, I was overcome by the need for a dress like that of my own. I know it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I don’t know that it doesn’t make any sense, Mrs. Brown. I think maybe I’m beginning to understand how much sense it does make,” Rachel said.

  “Then when you gave me that book, Mrs. ’Arris Goes to Paris, well, I never read such a story,” Mrs. Brown said. “It really put this idea in my head. Did you read it?”

  Rachel shook her head. She hadn’t.

  “This Mrs. ’Arris isn’t so different from me, you know. Only the times she lived in were different. It was right after World War Two. The war had drained the world of all joy and color. Everything was rubble. Bombs, blackouts, rationing, everything had been an everlasting mess, and for too many years. Then one day Mrs. ’Arris discovers this bouquet, that’s what t
he dress looked like to her, a huge bouquet of flowers. She sees the most beautiful dress hanging in one of her clients’ closets. She reads the label. Christian Dior. What’s that? She doesn’t know, but never mind. She vows right there and then that no matter how much it will cost, or how long it takes her to save the money, that she will have a Christian Dior dress, too. And even if she never actually wore the dress—where was a cleaning lady going to wear such a fancy thing?—she wanted, like every woman, rich or poor, to live with something that beautiful and hopeful in her closet before she died . . .”

  Her voice quieted. “Because the war was over. Everyone, including a cleaning lady, deserved beautiful feminine things to look at again.”

  A waiter brought a plate of tea sandwiches to their table. Rachel had insisted Mrs. Brown eat something.

  “Although it was a very, as you would say, ‘glam’ dress, this Dior dress that Mrs. ’Arris wanted, a red-carpet dress, the story kept reminding me of the dress I’d seen in Mrs. Groton’s closet,” Mrs. Brown explained. “Maybe it wasn’t typically feminine, in fact it’s the total opposite of Mrs. ’Arris’s dress, but it’s so womanly and so, well, it’s strong. Tailored. Organized. Purposeful. What’s the word I’m looking for?”

  “Dutiful,” Rachel suggested.

  “Yes. Dutiful,” Mrs. Brown said. She liked that word. “And I have a duty to perform, something I very much need—I want—to do.”

  Mrs. Brown seemed distant suddenly, as if she was seeing someone, something, in another room.

  “I never went into business,” Mrs. Brown said, back to telling Rachel her story. “I never went to college. After Mr. Brown died, I went to work. Spending my whole life cleaning up and sorting things out for other people. Most recently I’m working at Bonnie’s salon, where the women act like girls, mean girls sometimes, but mostly silly girls.”

  “And hurtful, I’d imagine,” said Rachel.

  Mrs. Brown nodded in agreement. “Yes, they do hurt my feelings, a lot, but they don’t deserve to be talked about in such a nice place as the Plaza Athénée.”

  When she was young, Mrs. Brown had always worn something pretty and feminine to church dances. Her mother made her dresses. “I started making my own clothes when I was first married to Mr. Brown. Once a month our church had proper dances for the young marrieds, they don’t anymore, and that is when I would gussy up, pleasing Mr. Brown. Oh, I remember a little blue and white polka dot number made with Egyptian cotton, a kind of a shirtdress with a belted waist and full skirt . . .” She felt sad thinking back. “Absent friends and absent family”—she smiled, trying to lighten things up—“not much we can do, is there?”

  “No, there isn’t,” Rachel said. “You never . . .” But some instinct stopped her from asking Mrs. Brown if she had any children. “You never wanted to go to college?” she asked instead.

  “Oh, sure I did. I thought about going to college a lot,” Mrs. Brown said. “But as the years went on, as I got older, as . . . as things happened as they do in life . . .” She shrugged her shoulders. “I never got there. Maybe it’s not too late? I finally got myself to New York. Then what’s next? Harvard? Or Yale?”

  They both laughed. “You know, the women I always found myself admiring, including how they dressed, weren’t the movie stars and starlets, but always the women who went to college and then into business, or did important charities, like Mrs. Groton. Women who, I don’t know, acted like grown-ups when all the other adults were acting like children. Good, orderly, strong, confident . . . dutiful women. That’s what I think femininity is.”

  It didn’t seem the right time or place for Rachel to offer Mrs. Brown the fashion worldview that the frilly baby dolls, the streetwalkers, the leathers, the torn-butterfly and the peekaboo styles—and everything Cinderella at the ball—were expressions of a contemporary, post–feminist era celebration of sexuality and liberation.

  “Ever since that day when I saw Mrs. Groton’s suit dress, I knew I had to have one in my closet. I’ll respect it, you see. And,” said Mrs. Brown, her voice now a whisper, “and it will respect me.”

  Rachel realized that for Mrs. Brown, and for so many women at her income level, just scraping by with few if any luxuries, the experience of fine tailoring and everything it represents, not some trendy or sexy number, could be transforming.

  Trendy and teenager styles were everywhere, but fine tailoring? It was the luxury that was out of reach, except for the affluent. Such elitism saddened Rachel. Normally she was so proud to be a part of the fashion industry. Did it really intend to diminish, and sometimes infantilize, women with low incomes and advancing years who didn’t fit the profile of the perfect, glossy, well-off customers for their brands?

  Why shouldn’t Mrs. Brown own a suit dress like Mrs. Groton’s?

  Rachel assured Mrs. Brown that she understood completely. “In the novel, does Mrs. ’Arris get her dress?” she asked.

  “She sure does,” said Mrs. Brown, not mentioning that she hadn’t actually finished reading the book just in case anything happened at the end that might undermine her determination to make this trip to New York.

  With a graceful flourish of her right hand pantomiming signing an imaginary slip of paper, Rachel Ames indicated to the waiter that she would like the check.

  “And so you shall have your dress, too,” she promised Mrs. Brown.

  AS RACHEL AND MRS. Brown were leaving the hotel, a man Mrs. Brown thought was the spitting image of a young Marlon Brando rushed into the lobby and turned a sharp right.

  But just as he turned toward the reception area—it is an intimately sized lobby, nothing cavernous like the Hilton hotel—his heart felt like it took off on a rapturous flight: Rachel Ames. He had seen her before, and it was alarm and delight, desire and reverence, all exploding together: a deep crush.

  But as quickly as his heart rose when he saw her, it fell. Even though he ran his family’s prosperous flooring business, the go-to firm for most of New York’s top decorators and interior designers, he and Rachel occupied separate worlds. Even if he spoke to her, the possibility of a friendship, or more, developing between them was unlikely.

  Hers was the Ivy League world of rarefied, white-collar financiers—the “one percent,” as they’ve been dubbed. His world was more blue-collar. He was a man who worked with his hands, well, managed a team of others who worked with their hands; it had been quite some time since Anthony Bruno installed his family’s flooring on a daily basis himself. But when there was a problem, mosaics and a perfect fit, for instance, he’d pitch right in.

  The point was, other than wishing Rachel a good day when he saw her—her apartment was across the hall from a big job his company had done not long ago—he’d never attempted a conversation.

  Part of that was New York’s fault. In apartment buildings like Rachel’s, Anthony and his men had to take the service elevator. You didn’t mingle with the residents. If you did, the prickly ones always complained about it to the building’s management, the management would chastise the decorator or contractor who had hired you, and then you were in trouble. Ask a resident out on a date? You’d never lay flooring in this building again.

  But Anthony remembered one special morning. He was supervising his workers in the foyer of the aforementioned apartment. The front door was open because of some problem with the marble floor they were setting. Into the shared space, Rachel opened her front door. She was going to work, heading to the elevator, and he’d never forget it: she wore high, thin black heels, a tight navy blue skirt to the middle of her knees, and a crisp, white cotton blouse with just a hint of cleavage. Her skin was like the softest rose, her perfume just a hint of gardenia.

  What Anthony didn’t know was that he did not go unnoticed or forgotten. He was wearing pretty much what he was wearing now: a white shirt and a pair of khakis. When Rachel opened her front door that morning, she certainly wasn’t expecting this on her way to work: the joy that flashes in you where intuition lives. Then your rationa
l mind—or is it just your mother’s voice in your head?—tells you to look for something wrong, to curb your enthusiasm, act a lady. Marry well.

  But you couldn’t miss the sparks between Rachel and Anthony this afternoon. Mrs. Brown certainly had noticed. The delight in Anthony’s eyes and the smile on his face beamed across the lobby. Catching this energy, Rachel paused for a long moment and looked. Like a gazelle might when it encounters a potential mate, Rachel rose in stature, high at the shoulders. But then, her arms crossed her chest as if to protect her heart.

  Mrs. Brown’s motherly instinct was to promptly effect some exchange between the two young people.

  “A friend of yours?” Mrs. Brown asked.

  “No, not really,” Rachel answered.

  Anthony couldn’t hear what Rachel was saying, but she was looking at him, and moving her lips, so he, thinking positively, imagined that she was saying something nice in his direction.

  He crossed the lobby like a knight in summer khaki, his hand out to shake Rachel’s.

  “Anthony Bruno,” he said.

  Her mother always told her that it is the lady’s place to extend her hand first, not the man’s. Never mind. Rachel took Anthony’s hand in hers. It was a good, strong handshake, warm and trustworthy, muscular, a couple of calluses, not fleshy or clammy.

  “I am Rachel Ames, and this is . . . Oh, goodness, Mrs. Brown, I don’t know your first name.”

  “Emilia Brown,” she said, and extended her hand to Anthony.

  “I remember you from . . .” Rachel and Anthony said at the same time. They laughed nervously.

  “My family owns a flooring company. We had a job in the apartment across the hall from you.”

  She wasn’t sure what to say. “Are you doing some work here in the hotel?” Rachel asked. When she was nervous, which she was, she could sound like a real ice princess.