My Mrs. Brown (24 page)

Mrs. Brown remembered seeing photographs of the Queen in her carriage, as well as in her limousine. Even in the warmer months, the monarch kept a blanket on her lap and over her knees. She must be susceptible to the cold, Mrs. Brown assumed. We all feel it more easily when we are older. (Fact is, the blanket is so that paparazzi do not capture any unladylike portion of royal leg or thigh.)

Horns, buses, taxis, adrenaline, bright lights, and a violet-blue September sky, it was a glorious night for a drive in the city. Mrs. Brown caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror. Hardly her own greatest admirer, she liked what she saw. Mrs. Brown thought she'd never looked better than she did tonight.

Rachel turned around to Mrs. Brown and mouthed the words “our hair.” She, too, had brought an Hermès scarf that had belonged to her grandmother. She tied it over her hair to hold it in place in the convertible. Mrs. Brown did the same.

Anthony described the route he had planned. He would drive east to the FDR Drive because it offered a terrific view of Manhattan from the vantage point of the East River, and then he'd drive southwest to catch the last of the sunset from the Financial District—did Mrs. Brown want to see where the World Trade Center had stood? She did—and then they would drive up to Times Square, and then up Eighth Avenue through Columbus Circle, and up Central Park West and Frederick Douglass Boulevard to the Great Blue Heron on 125th Street, where they had an 8:30 reservation.

After dinner, they'd drive down Fifth Avenue. Mrs. Brown had to see the Metropolitan Museum, “lit up at night, it looks like a huge white lion asleep,” Anthony said, and then home by midnight if that wasn't too late?

“When we were kids, my father would take us for walks along the East River. We'd look for the seagulls,” Anthony said, steering toward the East River now. “My father told us that New York City seagulls aren't just flying when they fly, they're also dancing. Man, did he love New York. When we got a little older, we realized most of the seagulls he was talking about were pigeons. We never asked him if he knew the difference. We didn't want to hurt his feelings.”

The convertible raced along the FDR. There was a crescent moon over Manhattan. You could smell the briny river air mixing with Rachel's gardenia perfume. Riding in the convertible, Mrs. Brown felt exhilarated, light as the wind, younger and more unburdened than she had in many years.

Over the roaring chorus of wind and traffic, Anthony told stories about growing up here, about his family, his youth, and some of his best memories.

“It's so weird, but like your father, who said the seagulls were dancing, and the pigeons, our father told us something very similar,” Rachel said. “We'd go to the beach on Long Island. He'd tell us that the sand was always dancing and that we should watch its dance, and if we were lucky enough to be asked by the sand to dance with it, we must.”

Rachel pictured her father's smiling face but sad blue eyes. “ ‘It asked me, it asked me,' we'd cry out, absolutely delighted. We'd do these mad gyrations dancing with the sand until we were exhausted.”

Rachel fell quiet, embarrassed to remember something so personal aloud.

Anthony imagined what Rachel must have looked like as a little girl. He wanted to reach across the white leather bucket seats and take her hand in his. Maybe later, he hoped. Maybe later.

For now, he told himself, keep both hands on the steering wheel and just drive, man, just drive.

T
HE DAY FINALLY CAME
for Mrs. Brown to take possession of her dress. Or at least she hoped it had finally come.

“You want to teach yourself to see good things coming, Emilia,” her mother used to say. “Because God is always on the road ahead, sewing a tapestry of life for us.”

Well, if the road last night wasn't godly, it certainly was divine. What a wonderful evening it had been on the town with Rachel and Anthony, and even though it had been decades since she had slept in a bed other than her own, to her surprise she had fallen right asleep when she got back to Rachel's just after 11:00
P.M.

Floating this morning in what had to be the most comfortable bed in the world, in Rachel's guest room, Mrs. Brown barely recognized her life! One day she was a woman who walks everywhere she goes in her Rhode Island town; last night she was zooming around Manhattan in a red Mercedes convertible.

They'd driven through Chinatown and Little Italy, Tribeca and SoHo, the West Village and Chelsea to West Forty-second Street. She'd never forget the density of people in New York, especially Times Square. The tall office buildings lit up like giants.

Over and up Eighth Avenue, then a loop around Columbus Circle, with its sparkling fountains—the horses and carriages were from a fairy tale—and up Central Park West, with its glorious apartment buildings and majestic Museum of Natural History. Then to dinner at the Great Blue Heron on 125th, where if everyone wasn't a movie star or a princess, they sure looked like one.

And the food: she ate crab cakes, oysters with ginger, country ham, chickpea dumplings, Creole red grits, and a spiced chocolate cake with rhubarb and brandied cherry vanilla sauce. Mrs. Brown, generally a teetotaler, even had a glass, a glass and a half to be exact, of a French rosé wine.

It was just as they were raising their glasses to toast each other that Delphine Staunton, all in black-layered summer cashmeres and bold scarlet lipstick, lurched over to their table.

This, Rachel knew, could be trouble. But before Delphine could get anything even approaching a nasty or snobbish word out, Rachel spoke first.

“Delphine, cheers, to your health,” she said.

“To me?” Delphine asked. “Why?”

“We saw you coming,” Rachel said.

Good manners make the best offense. Rachel had to act fast to stop Delphine from saying something hurtful to Mrs. Brown. Why is it some people's natures to always be disagreeable, unless they want something from you? So Rachel toasted Delphine's good health. What could Delphine do but thank her and respond with the best French bonhomie she was capable of ?

As Delphine babbled a few words of thanks, Rachel courteously interrupted her.

“Isn't that Terry Killen the Third, the billionaire's son, just coming into the restaurant? You know his father just died, and I understand he's trying to figure out which auction house should deal with the estate. Delphine,” Rachel said, “get right over there and say hello!”

Poof. Delphine was gone. And all Mrs. Brown thought of it was how nice it was to see someone she recognized in New York.

Now there was a knock on the guest room door. Rachel entered carrying a breakfast tray.

“Breakfast in bed for all my honored guests from Ash-ville,” she said, carefully setting the legs of the tray over Mrs. Brown's lap.

A white linen napkin, a white rose in a crystal vase, a blue and white porcelain pot of coffee, a small bowl of sugar, a tiny pitcher of milk, fresh fruit salad, and a warm morning glory muffin greeted Mrs. Brown.

“How many guests have you had from Ashville?”

“Only you, Mrs. Brown, and I hope you will come back,” Rachel said.

What could bring Mrs. Brown back to New York? Rachel and Anthony's wedding would.

“He's nice,” Mrs. Brown said.

“Who?” Rachel asked.

“Who? Your Anthony, that's who.”

“My Anthony? I don't think so, not mine,” Rachel said, dismissing the idea of anything serious between herself and Anthony Bruno.

But Mrs. Brown wasn't having it.

“Where's your coffee, dearie?” she asked Rachel. “Sit with me while I enjoy this delicious breakfast.”

Rachel left the room and returned with a mug of black coffee and both her BlackBerry and her iPhone. She sat in the cabbage-rose-chintz-covered Queen Anne chair across from Mrs. Brown's bed, and without makeup, her hair down and not yet brushed, barefoot and wearing a white tank top and faded blue jeans, she looked more like a fresh-faced college freshman than a big-city fashion executive.

“Last night you and Anthony got along quite nicely,” Mrs. Brown said, and sipped her coffee. “He's a good man, Rachel, and they're hard to find. He's handsome, he loves and respects his family, and I imagine he makes a good living the way he described those fancy floors he puts in all these palatial apartments. What's so wrong with that?”

Rachel looked sad. “It's complicated. Really it is.”

Before Mrs. Brown could inquire further, Rachel was saved from explaining exactly what was so complicated by the bell, or ping to be more exact, of her BlackBerry.

She read the message and smiled.

“They're here.
Brava! Bravi!
The two dresses have arrived at Kennedy Airport,” she said. “They will be at the boutique by ten. It is a little after eight thirty now, and I am going to get dressed and work from my laptop here at home. Why don't you just take it easy? At ten or a little after we can walk down to the boutique. It's a lovely morning for a walk. You can try on the dresses and make your selection depending on which size fits you best.”

When Rachel left, Mrs. Brown lay back in bed.

She closed her eyes and imagined what it would feel like when she finally saw the dress. Yet as wonderful as she expected the satisfaction of it to be, there was something else, a bittersweet feeling, the kind many feel after a personal victory of some sort. The dream is complete. What's next?

In the twenty-fours since she got to New York City, her fear of this place—once so foreign and overwhelming to her—had disappeared almost entirely. Thanks to Rachel's generosity, and also the other people who had helped her yesterday, she'd discovered that the city wasn't a forbidding kingdom, a roaring hungry lion waiting to eat her alive. It was a series of villages connected by a common thread of decency.

Just as in Ashville, here were mostly good people trying to live with some measure of dignity and grace. Not always succeeding, but always trying.

When she finally had her dress today, September 11, it would be time to leave, and she would miss this happy, muddled, difficult, glorious place.

Last night, when they had stopped to pay respects at the World Trade Center, in the everlasting sorrow of the place she also saw a state of grace. Gazing into the two thirty-foot waterfalls that seemed to drop into darkness in the footprints where the Twin Towers once stood, Mrs. Brown had felt—how should she describe it?—this presence in absence.

Instead of feeling separate, she felt she belonged. In loss, interlaced with others. No longer just someone tacked on to the tapestry called Life.

B
Y 10:30 THAT MORNING,
Mrs. Brown was center stage at Oscar de la Renta. She was their phoenix rising.

The dressing room glittered with wall-around mirrors. Rachel sat in a chair busily tapping away on her telephones. It was Fashion Week, as you know, and she was “multitasking” she told Mrs. Brown as they awaited the arrival of Rachel's young assistant Daniel, who was bringing the dresses from the airport, one size eight and one size ten.

Ah, Daniel. If he were an oil portrait in a gilded frame the title would be
The Afternoon of a Faun.
A mop of dark-brown hair, wading pools of gray eyes with feathery lashes; wearing a white shirt and moss-green slim-fitting linen trousers cuffed above his ankles, no socks, and wing-tipped beige suede English brogues . . . Daniel entered. Not since Cleopatra was carried to Julius Caesar in a rug had there been such devotion to presentation. Daniel held the two garment bags as if the dresses were made of the finest glass. The sort that anything less than a positive thought might shatter.

Rachel knew it was highly unlikely that either dress would fit Mrs. Brown without alteration. Despite so much to do in the workroom during Fashion Week, thanks to Rachel one of Oscar's best seamstresses would work exclusively on Mrs. Brown's dress so she could make her train back to Ashville. The seamstress stood at attention, waiting.