Mrs. Brown told Alice all about the lucky occurrences and blessed coincidences that had made the past forty-eight hours not only possible, but also irresistible.
She described everything about the city, from the birds in its trees to the gum on its sidewalks, and told of the wonderful circus of people everywhere, the shock of ending up at a fashion show, her tears when she was told her dress wasn’t in stock, the miracle of seeing Rachel Ames again, her kindness and hospitality, and then all about Mrs. Brown’s matchmaking efforts when Anthony Bruno entered the picture.
“Really, a young Marlon Brando?” Alice said, repeating Mrs. Brown’s description of Anthony.
The dress and jacket hung on their plush hanger over the kitchen door leading to the living room.
“Well, will you try the dress on so I can see it on you, Mrs. Brown?” Alice asked.
She shook her head. “Another night,” Mrs. Brown said.
Alice sighed. “Please, Mrs. Brown!”
Mrs. Brown wasn’t moving.
“It’s not a dress to model,” Mrs. Brown said. “I just want to look at it for a while.”
Finally, too tired to talk more, they agreed to resume tomorrow. They said their good nights.
Mrs. Brown moved the dress to her bedroom door. When she woke up in the morning, just a few hours from now, it would be the first thing she saw.
Her sleep was not simple, or easy. Her dreams were elaborate and colorful, all these tumbling, whirling images. At one point Anthony’s red Mercedes convertible was a stagecoach doubling as a hovercraft making crazy-eight shapes over Manhattan, like a bucking moon in need of a lasso, or a cowboy, maybe both.
At 7:00 A.M.—an hour later than was usual on a workday—she woke up. Here was Santo’s nose to her nose, and there across the room, hanging on the bedroom door, was the prized dress, proof that yesterday was real, not a dream.
Blurry eyed from just a few hours of sleep but eager and energized nonetheless, Mrs. Brown arrived at Bonnie’s and assumed her new role as the second in command in the salon.
It was difficult at first—some of the customers were disinclined to trust the cleaning lady with their hair—but Mrs. Brown, in her quiet, steady, and uncomplaining way, eventually won them over.
“What would Mrs. Groton do?” she’d ask herself whenever she needed guidance and confidence.
When the rest of the things from New York—the shoes, the new handbag, and the cashmere cardigan sweater—arrived, Mrs. Brown unpacked them and found them honored places in her closet. (After a month of keeping the dress displayed on its hanger on her bedroom door, she finally put it in her closet, out of sight but rarely out of mind.)
Rachel Ames telephoned Mrs. Brown several days after her return to Ashville, to make sure she was well and that everything had arrived okay. And also to mention that she had had dinner with Anthony Bruno already twice that week, and was seeing him for dinner that night. She thanked Mrs. Brown for coming up with the idea of giving her keys to Anthony to return, to make sure they connected again.
“What do you mean? I didn’t plan that,” Mrs. Brown said.
“Okay, Mrs. Brown, whatever you say.”
A few weeks later, when Rachel called again, things had advanced from dinners to entire weekends with Anthony. In fact, the day after Thanksgiving they thought it would be fun to come for the weekend, staying at the Ashville Inn, which reopened that fall, and wondered if Mrs. Brown would be free to join them, as their guest, for dinner on the Saturday night.
“With your neighbor Alice, too,” Rachel said. “We’d love to meet her, and her grandmother if she’s back from Vancouver.”
Mrs. Brown was delighted to accept, and Alice was thrilled. But no one, including Mrs. Fox, knew when she’d return to Ashville.
Whenever Mrs. Brown thought of New York or heard it mentioned somewhere, she felt joyful.
She looked forward to seeing her young New York City friends again. And when she heard on the evening news that Oscar de la Renta had died after a long illness—meaning that when he’d been so gracious and debonair with her he was not in good health but bravely soldiering on one day at a time, facing the loss of his life and the work that he so loved—she cried.
ON MOTHER’S DAY, MRS. Brown finally wore her dress.
It was a cool but not cold Sunday afternoon. There were few buds and new leaves, but there was green lawn, sparrows, and forsythia.
Mrs. Brown awakened early, at 5:30 that morning. She made her tea and fed Santo and, taking her teacup back into her bedroom, sat at the edge of her bed and studied the framed photographs on her bedside table. Her parents, long gone, and Mr. Brown. “God rest their souls,” Mrs. Brown whispered. She returned the pictures to the drawer.
For a long while she held one last photograph to her heart. “Happy Mother’s Day,” she said, and kissed it so gently. Then, instead of putting it away with the others, she left it on the table.
Santo finished his meal in the kitchen and sat at her feet, his head cocked, looking up at Mrs. Brown.
“I’m going to wear the dress, Santo, I think today is the right day,” she said.
Mrs. Brown bathed and fixed her hair. She applied her makeup, a very light foundation, a touch of powder, and a tiny bit of mascara. Her lipstick was a light pink matte, barely detectable. She dabbed on a very little bit of the same gardenia scent that Rachel Ames wore. Rachel had given her a small bottle of it to remember her by.
Mrs. Brown took the fine black dress from her closet and hung it on a peg on the back of the bedroom door. She removed her robe, put on her intimate wear, including a new pair of good sheer stockings, and then took the dress from its hanger and stepped into it, a portal to another world, which it was, a different countenance for Mrs. Brown.
As the dress became her, and as she became the dress, Mrs. Brown’s posture straightened. She rose even taller when she stepped into the black pumps that Rachel had selected for her. She debated whether to wear the jacket or the cashmere cardigan sweater and decided on the jacket. She slipped her arms inside its sleeves, her bare arms soothed by the silk lining.
Mrs. Brown was ready. She stood for inspection in her full-length mirror.
She exhaled.
The pleasure she felt was not her vanity, although the tailored black sheath, the handsome jacket with the notched collar and one perfect button, and the high-heeled pumps that flattered her legs all made her look so elegant.
The feeling was composure, a quiet satisfaction, a sense of accomplishment, of purpose and dignity. This fed her heart in ways she could never, nor would ever try to explain, lest someone think she was bragging instead of expressing her deepest gratitude.
In the mirror, Mrs. Brown saw a picture that had been wanting for its ideal frame for a very long time.
She had her mother’s Sunday gloves and a crisp, clean white handkerchief in her pocketbook. Taking one last deep breath, she exhaled, looking into the mirror. Mrs. Brown knelt down and passed her hand over Santo’s furry head, and then she was out the door.
Alice, in her kitchen making the morning coffee, heard Mrs. Brown’s footsteps. Milo was still dozing in her bed, and she woke him. From her living room window, they watched Mrs. Brown walk east toward the village.
“Look,” they said at the same moment, “she’s finally wearing the dress.”
Seeing Mrs. Brown so regal and beautiful? Alice didn’t attempt to stop the tears of gratitude that fell from her eyes, nor could she have even if she had tried.
Milo held Alice in his arms. From his memory of a favorite poem came this, which he whispered:
“We can be still,
So still we start to know
The depth of everything,
So still we hear the stars
Begin to sing. . . .”
Mrs. Brown did not go unnoticed as she passed through the village.
Despite the early hour, and the quiet of Mother’s Day morning, a number of Ashville’s townspeople found themselves at their w
indows, or in their front yards, at the moment when Mrs. Brown walked past.
Those who knew, bowed their heads.
It was twenty minutes to nine. Mrs. Brown walked east, the sun still finding its way into the day. Across Main Street, the village green and rose garden, and past the three oldest churches in Ashville—Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian, where people were arriving for the early services—Mrs. Brown walked.
Past white clapboard and brown shingle houses built in the seventeen and early eighteen hundreds, and past the Catholic church, she was tall. She was purposeful.
At the edge of Ashville village, after walking across the town’s landmark covered bridge, Mrs. Brown came to the cemetery.
She opened the rusty latch on the wrought-iron gate. She entered the graveyard. There was the sharp smell of pine needles and the melancholy scent of damp leaves. The ground was wavering, still wet from morning, but instinctively she knew how to negotiate in high heels, to not sink in, walking on the balls of her feet, gliding like a swan over quicksand.
When she saw the gravestone, she didn’t cave. Like any good mother through the history of time, when her child comes home wounded from a fall, no matter how bloody, she faced the pain and remained fully present. Her heart opened.
The gravestone read:
ROBERT CHRISTOPHER BROWN
LCpl
United States Marine Corps
July 18 1978
January 25 2008
Purple Heart Operation
Iraqi Freedom
Beloved Son
It had started with three deadening raps on her front door, and their echo, knocking, evermore.
The bleak winter night when she got the news, delivered to her by two men in uniform, that Robert, or Robbie as she always called him, had been killed by an IED, an improvised explosive device, in the Anbar province in western Iraq. What could she do? She thanked the soldiers for stopping. She offered them a glass of water.
They declined.
She closed the door.
Mrs. Brown tidied up and then went straight to her bed convinced that she would wake up in the morning and discover, if she even remembered it, that it had all been a dream.
In the morning, it wasn’t a dream.
Within seventy-two hours, the remains of Robert Christopher Brown were returned to the United States.
Robbie could have been buried at Arlington National Cemetery, but Mrs. Brown knew she wouldn’t be able to visit him there whenever she wanted. It was too far away. Instead, there was an honor guard detail for the burial in Ashville, the full military funeral honors, which are provided by law when the family requests them.
The day of the funeral, a convoy bearing Robbie’s coffin traveled to Ashville from the airport in Providence. Rows of mourners had lined the village’s Main Street, not unlike the line she stood in when Mrs. Groton had buried her son, David, so many years ago. Getting into the car the funeral parlor sent for her today, Mrs. Brown remembered the crackling sounds of slow wheels on dry leaves when David’s hearse went by. She saw Mrs. Groton’s gloved hand on the flag on his coffin.
Robbie wasn’t the most popular boy at Ashville High School. He was that boy who couldn’t wait until he was old enough to join the service and see the world, a world that had to be, he’d hoped, an easier, bigger place than here. But the people of Ashville, young and old, turned out to pay their respects to the fallen hero.
It was so bright and sunny that day, it was cruel. A bugler played taps. When the flag that covered Robbie’s coffin was folded and presented to her, Mrs. Brown was numb. She was holding the flag like you would a baby in your arms, looking across the cemetery as the coffin was being lowered into its grave, and seeing tears streaming from Mrs. Fox’s eyes. She wondered why. What could the matter be? And then she remembered.
Mrs. Brown kept the flag in her bedside table along with Robbie’s photograph and the other photographs she displayed every night before she went to sleep.
One Sunday afternoon a few months after the funeral, she was in her kitchen when she heard someone knocking on her front door. She opened the door, and there stood a Marine who said he was Robbie’s best friend in Iraq and had been nearby when he was killed.
The Marine was carrying a perforated vinyl case, and inside was a cat. It was Santo, that cat that Robbie had found and adopted in Iraq. Hadn’t Robbie written to Mrs. Brown about Santo? Indeed, he had. Did Mrs. Brown want the cat? If she didn’t, he’d keep him, although his mother, in New London, where he would be staying for a while, was allergic.
“But I just thought, you know . . . I am so sorry, Mrs. Brown,” he said, tears in his eyes. He had been Robbie’s best friend, he said again.
The moment the soldier opened the case, Santo jumped into Mrs. Brown’s lap as if he’d always been here.
Sunday mornings, even in the deepest snow or heaviest rain, and from the first Sunday after the funeral, Mrs. Brown walked to Robbie’s grave and prayed. When she was finished praying, she would tell Robbie about her week.
Yes, she still believed in God. As she always had, she believed that the purpose of a human’s life was to prove that God exists, and how you did that was by practicing courtesy and kindness in all your affairs, always, no matter your circumstances, hurt, or pain, and through any crisis of faith.
That first year after Robbie was killed, it took all the strength and energy that she could muster, or fake, to get to the cemetery and then back home again. She was always so tired. What is the matter with me, she’d ask herself over and over. Mrs. Fox, who watched closely over her friend and neighbor, thought it was a miracle that Mrs. Brown managed to go to work, never missing a single day.
Then came the afternoon at Mrs. Groton’s when Mrs. Brown saw the dress and jacket that took her breath away, and the idea was born in her. This is what she felt she needed: a dress as strong as armor.
She believed the dress would carry her with dignity and grace specifically on Sundays, when she visited Robbie’s grave. This is what I must wear.
Sometimes she doubted her right to have such a dress. Who did she think she was? The First Lady? Mrs. Groton? The Queen of England? No. She was Robert Christopher Brown’s mother.
Robbie would be comforted, not to mention so very proud, to see his mother here today looking this well.
She liked a Jewish tradition she had heard Bonnie talking about. When you go to a grave, place a stone on it so the departed one will know that you have visited. Before she had entered the graveyard, outside the gate, Mrs. Brown had found a nearly heart-shaped stone she rested now in just the right place.
She faced Robbie’s headstone and looked at it deeply, as if it had eyes. She smoothed the folds of the new black dress. As if he were here now, resting on the sofa at home chatting away after his favorite Sunday breakfast (pancakes, three eggs sunny-side up, and bacon), Mrs. Brown told Robbie the full story of her day, and night, in New York. She laughed and gushed and did not edit a word.
Always on Sundays, memory’s scissors cut sharp at her heart. Always on Sundays came the time to let the tears drop. And they did.
Except now the perfect black dress helped her to remember who she was. Who Robbie was, and the family they were. Like her rod and her staff, the dress gave her the courage to confront the shadows of death. She felt love, and she felt peace, both in shadow and in light, filling her heart.
“If I could have changed the world,” Mrs. Brown said quietly, facing the memory of her son, “I would have stopped all time so you could stay.”
The sun had done all it could do for her today. Mrs. Brown felt a chill. She wrapped her arms around herself and straightened her shoulders for the journey home.
And, yes, she looked divine.
© DOUGLAS FRIEDMAN
WILLIAM NORWICH is a writer and editor and video and television reporter. As a journalist, he has written for Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The New York Observer, and many other publications. He is currently the commissioni
ng editor for fashion and interior design at Phaidon Press. He received an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and is the author of the novel Learning to Drive. He lives in New York City.
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ALSO BY WILLIAM NORWICH
Molly and the Magic Dress
Learning to Drive
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