My Mrs. Brown (22 page)

“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.

A
S 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 rational 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.

A luggage cart with so many Louis Vuitton suitcases of various sizes they could fill a small store was wheeled past by a porter.

“Actually, I'm here to pick up the keys to a car. Not under the happiest of circumstances, however. A great client of my family's died and left me his 1970 Mercedes convertible,” Anthony said. “His lawyer left the keys for me here because the car is in a garage around the corner,” he explained. “It was one hell of a shock when I got that call. Oh, ma'am, excuse me for swearing.”

Mrs. Brown took no offense.

“Hey, why don't you come with me for a ride?” Anthony said, seeing his chance to spend time with Rachel.

He was an enthusiastic fellow most of the time, but this sounded too enthusiastic, even to him. He tried to take the temperature down by acting a bit cooler.

“I mean, excuse me, you know, if you want?”

Mrs. Brown and Rachel exchanged glances, not knowing what to answer.

It wasn't in Anthony's constitution to hide his light for very long. “Or, tonight, even better, we can go to dinner if you like,” he said.

The lobby bustled with people coming and going. An elderly guest in a wheelchair, young newlyweds on their honeymoon, string musicians carrying their instruments to set up in one of the reception rooms for a cocktail party, a nurse escorting to the elevator a woman whose head was wrapped in surgical gauze like a mummy, her nose red, her mouth puffed out, and her eyes black and blue.

This was an upsetting sight for Mrs. Brown, but Rachel explained that the cause was elective, not an accident. “She's had a face-lift of some sort today,” Rachel said. She looked at her watch. “Four thirty. Time to go home after surgery.”

Anthony pitched in. “That's right, ma'am,” he told Mrs. Brown. “This neighborhood is filled with plastic surgery clinics, and if you are on the Upper East Side at this time of day, as many men as there are women, you'll always see people with their heads all wrapped up, looking like mummies, being escorted home or to a hotel . . .”

“Which is where some people prefer to recover for a day or two to not upset their families and loved ones with their frightening bandages. Not that I'd know firsthand—yet.” Rachel laughed. “It's just that I live in the neighborhood.” She paused. “How ridiculous I must sound.” Rachel looked apologetically to Anthony.

Anthony smiled. “You don't sound ridiculous to me.” He'd gone from steed to colt in love, and he was nearly blushing. “We just want you to know, ma'am, that you shouldn't be scared,” he told Mrs. Brown. “That the bandages aren't bad news. They're good news. I think. It's proof of scientific progress.” He laughed. “Or at least a sign of good news for the economy, people are spending their money. So will you ladies honor me and come for a ride in my new car? I mean, my old new car?”

Rachel was surprised when she heard herself saying yes.

“I think it is such a fun idea, especially because Mrs. Brown has never been to New York and what a great way to see everything, from a convertible on a beautiful night.”

“Your first time in New York?” Anthony exclaimed. “We must do this! There's a wonderful new restaurant in Harlem. It is almost impossible to get a table, but we did the flooring, so I think I can swing something.”

Mrs. Brown wondered how to respond. A part of her wanted to explore the city and all its lights and glory. Another part told her that Rachel and Anthony were a love match and just an evening alone together now could lead to wedding bells in their future.

“Thank you so much, but I should stay in tonight. I am tired after a long day, and Rachel has been kind enough to let me spend the night,” Mrs. Brown said. “You two should go, though. You must. I insist.”

But Anthony felt so undeserving of Rachel, and Rachel felt so uncertain about Anthony despite the attraction, that they hemmed and they hawed and said things like “Oh, well, perhaps another night,” and “Oh, yes, it's a busy week. Maybe when things slow down a bit.” Mrs. Brown knew if she didn't change her mind, Rachel and Anthony might never see each other again.

“You've convinced me,” Mrs. Brown said. “I would like nothing better than to see New York with you tonight.”