My Mrs. Brown (18 page)

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love.

Where there is injury, pardon.

Where there is doubt, faith.

Where there is despair, hope.

Where there is darkness, light.

Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek

To be consoled as to console;

To be understood as to understand;

To be loved, as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive.

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

“Amen,” Mrs. Brown said aloud, and then noticed that the train conductor was standing over her.

“Goodness, I'm so sorry, I wasn't paying attention,” she said, digging in her pocketbook for the Ziploc with her train ticket.

“Never need to apologize for praying,” the conductor said, “not in America, ma'am.”

In New London, then Old Saybrook, more passengers filled the car. The train barreled down the tracks toward New York City, such a foreign destination for Mrs. Brown but probably for everyone else on the train as familiar as their backyards.

In New Haven, a young woman Mrs. Brown guessed was about nineteen years old sat in the seat next to her, which until then had been empty. She had long wavy brown hair, wore blue jeans with high-heeled black suede pumps, and she carried a canvas bag not unlike Mrs. Brown's from the Ashville Rose Festival except hers said
YALE UNIVERSITY
. In the canvas bag the young woman found her iPad, and turned it on, glassy and bright as a Christmas light.

Mrs. Brown's attention went right to the pull quote on the page of the magazine the young woman was reading on her device. “She never knew what she wanted to be, but she did know the woman she wanted to become . . .”

The young woman noticed Mrs. Brown reading and turned her head and smiled. Mrs. Brown apologized for reading over her shoulder.

“Hey, no problem,” the young woman said.

Mrs. Brown closed her eyes to rest and instead fell asleep. If you had asked her just fifteen minutes ago if she thought she would be able to sleep on the train, or should sleep on a train given security concerns, she would have certainly answered no. But the lulling of the train, the speeding view she saw of Long Island Sound from the window—the relief of being on time and finally on her journey—set her into a deep slumber with dreams in brief fragments: a desert, sands blowing, gray chiffon and dust, a young soldier with a homecoming smile, a flag; browning red and gold autumn leaves, teaberry-colored native Ashville roses on the banks of the fast-moving river . . .

I
T WAS THE MOST
awful, frightening, disturbing smell. How was it that no one else minded?

On the platform at Pennsylvania Station, Mrs. Brown was overcome with the smells, of damp on rust, machine oils, honeyed roasting peanuts, and urine.

But here was the first sign she needed, to Seventh Avenue: this way. Mrs. Brown found her footing in the march toward that exit. She stopped at the sight of an escalator. She hadn't been on one in years. They don't have them in Ashville. They don't need them.

Mrs. Brown stood to the side while everyone else piled onto the escalator with the greatest of ease. Finally, when it was only herself left on the platform, she inched closer to the escalator. She bravely placed her right foot first and then the left and then up she went, heart first. She caught her breath before she would have to attempt getting off the ascending steel trap without stumbling. And mercifully she didn't stumble. She did just fine.

I've got to sit a minute and compose myself, Mrs. Brown thought. There wasn't any place to sit, at least not that she could see. The station was teeming with people crisscrossing in every direction, pulling suitcases on wheels or barking into cell phones, walking and texting, not looking where they were going, holding the other stranger responsible if they collided.

To her left, she was aware of a group of homeless men; everyone else moved in lines of transit, they moved in circles. One of the homeless men was singing, screaming is more accurate, his version of “I'll Be Seeing You.” “I'll find you in the morning sun, and when the night is new. I'll be looking at the moon, but I'll be seeing you,” the song that was written in 1938 by Sammy Fain. How that song brought back memories. It was her father's favorite, and she remembered him singing it to her mother, so long ago. Maybe hearing it, even in this tortured rendition, was some sign of protection for Mrs. Brown?

Instead of exiting on Seventh Avenue as preplanned, Mrs. Brown exited Pennsylvania Station on Eighth. It is an easy mistake to make. Whether it is a highway or a train station or a taxi's on duty/off duty signal, New York isn't famous for its accessible signage. It never was. Just ask any old-timer who remembers how tiny the highway signs for Idlewild Airport (now JFK) were back in the day. You scheduled your travel time to the airport to include missing the exit sign.

Mrs. Brown emerged in the noonday September sun on a baking hot sidewalk with people rushing every which way, the noise of it, the smell of it, from more roasting honey-sweet peanuts at one vendor's stand to the acid odor of fiery beef sizzling at another, curry to the south . . . this was suffocating. Then there was the babble, a ferocious roar she couldn't deny even with the cheeriest, greatest intentions for her day. If you factor in the seeming fact that one out of every three people was smoking a cigarette, exhaling eddies of smoke, then this must be what hell looks like, feels like, smells like, sounds like, if it isn't the real hell itself ?

Maybe she hadn't fallen asleep on the train ride. Maybe she'd died, and here she was entering hell! Wouldn't that be justice for her folly! Mrs. Fox and Alice were right to have worried about her. She needed to sit. She needed to rest. She needed to go home! Mrs. Brown was beginning to panic. She saw a rat, a real rat, not a person, on the sidewalk. It skimmed a lady's leopard-print shoe; Mrs. Brown's heart raced. No benches to sit on? If there are benches in Ashville, how is it possible there are none here? Retreating to the nearest wall, she leaned against it, breathing heavily.

“Ma'am, you all right?”

She hadn't noticed the handsome young police officer standing next to her. When she saw him—his thick, wavy brown hair, square jaw, gray-green eyes, and olive complexion—she was shocked, not just by his protective presence but by how much he reminded her of another young man.

She was startled.

“Lady, you okay?” the officer asked.

There were tears in her eyes. She didn't understand. She must regain composure.

“I've never been to New York before. I just came out of the station and didn't know what to expect. I'd been warned, but even so, I never expected all this.”

The officer studied her. “Ma'am, are you sure you are all right? Maybe I should call an ambulance. What is your name, ma'am?”

“My name is Mrs. Brown and I've come to town.” She heard her own rhyme. “To buy my dress.”

The officer, Officer Pabon his badge said, took out a notepad. “What is your first name?” he asked.

“Mrs.,” Mrs. Brown answered.

The officer smiled. “Christian first name, please. Mary? Nancy? Tiffany?”

Tiffany? There weren't any ladies in Ashville named Tiffany when Mrs. Brown was growing up. “Emilia,” she said, “Emilia Brown from Ashville, Rhode Island.”

“Okay, then. Where are you headed, Mrs. Brown, and do you need help with directions?”

A man wearing a skirt, leather vest, no shirt, combat boots, and his blood-orange-colored dyed hair cut in a dramatic Mohawk rushed past and winked at her. It was the strangest thing.

“It takes all kinds here, which is why I love New York,” the officer said.

Uncharacteristically—Mrs. Brown confiding in a stranger?—she spilled all the details of her trip. She explained to the officer that she was headed to the Oscar de la Renta boutique on Madison Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street; she told him about Mrs. Groton; he'd heard of her and in fact had helped direct traffic on Fifth Avenue the day of her funeral. Mrs. Brown explained to the young officer that she was looking for . . . She opened her handbag and found her handwritten itinerary crumpling by the hour from being examined by the minute, “the M4 bus that goes east on Thirty-second Street and north on Madison Avenue.”

The policeman suggested it might be easier, because traffic was blocked on the East Side due to the summit at the United Nations of all the world's leaders, if she took a bus up Eighth Avenue, through Columbus Circle, and then got out at Sixty-fifth Street and took another bus east, through Central Park, to Madison Avenue, got out there, and walked one block to the boutique.

“If I had a squad car I'd run you up, which we aren't supposed to do, but I'm on foot today,” the officer said. “But let me walk you to the bus,” he said, which he did. A couple of minutes later, however, his radio went off and he was called elsewhere. He apologized for his sudden departure.

“You'll be fine today, Mrs. Brown, and I bet that dress is going to make you look like a million bucks. I hope you wear it someplace really great,” the officer said and took off.

Mrs. Brown stood in silence amidst the noise and city chaos. What was she feeling right now? It takes many nonnative New Yorkers years to describe those first impressions and sensations in the city, this opposing mix, like salt on sugar, of overly crowded and overly lonely.

When the bus finally came and she boarded, there was the challenge of exactly how to use the MetroCard that Alice had gotten for her. Fortunately the unsmiling bus driver put the card into the machine for her, her fare was paid, and her card returned. Mrs. Brown felt momentarily relieved. She even went so far as to take the popular theological leap to imagine that angels were here helping her today. And maybe there were. When a young man stood up and gave her his seat—her unpracticed stance was so wobbly it was making him nervous to think that she would fall—Mrs. Brown's confidence and trust were renewed. She regained her composure. She thanked the stranger and she was no longer feeling so alone. It was like starting her day in New York all over.

Sitting nearby were two medical students, one male, and one female, both in their mid to late twenties; the plastic badges around their necks affirmed their internships at the New York–Presbyterian Hospital. They were returning from a lecture and were discussing an article that, or so Mrs. Brown surmised, had been the subject of a recent class or lecture, and it seemed to be about. . . . Greta Garbo.

Male intern:
Suppose that we began replacing your cells, one by one, with those of Greta Garbo at the age of thirty. Are you agreeable to this? Hypothetically, of course.

Female intern:
Of course. Hypothetically. Okay. Sure. Go on.

Male intern:
At the beginning of the experiment, the recipient of the cells would clearly be you . . .

Female intern:
And at the end?

Male intern:
And at the end it would clearly be Garbo . . .

Female intern:
But what about the middle?

Male intern:
Ah, yes, and what about the middle?

Female intern:
Well?

Male intern:
Well, it seems implausible to suggest that one can draw the line between the two—that any single cell could make all the difference between you and not-you.

Female intern:
Then there is no answer to the question of whether or not the person is me, and yet there is also no mystery involved. We know what happened.

Male intern:
What happened?

Female intern:
A self, it seems, is not all or nothing but the sort of thing that there can be more or less of.

Male intern:
So the question then is, when does a person start to exist? When does a person cease to be?

Female intern:
In the process of zygotes, because that is what we are discussing, although I'm beginning to suspect that perhaps we aren't, in terms of the zygote's cellular self-multiplication, there is no simple answer. It's all a matter of degrees.

Male intern:
But the answer is simple.

Female intern:
Is it?

Male intern:
Yes, it is! Marry me!

Female intern:
Puh-leeeze.

Male intern:
You'll be my Garbo.

Female intern:
I'd rather be alone.

Mrs. Brown smiled. “Bada bing!” the interns said in unison.

“Hey, lady,” the bus driver called to Mrs. Brown, distracting her eavesdropping on this almost romantic comedy. “This is your stop.” She'd asked him to please tell her when they got there.