My Mrs. Brown (3 page)

E
XCITEMENT WRECKED MRS. BROWN'S
usually sound sleep. Her mind raced, imagining what splendor she might see at Mrs. Groton's house in the morning, and worrying about what mistakes she might make. What if she broke something delicate during the inventory taking?

I'm as nervous as if I was going to Buckingham Palace, she thought, pulling the bedcovers to her nose. I'm as nervous as if I was going to the White House—not that I'd ever have to worry about that.

At 5:00
A.M.
she gave up the pretense of sleeping, got up, and sat in a wood chair next to her bed. It was still dark outside. Very soon, her neighborhood would come to life, bubbling with voices, some happy, some angry, in English or Spanish mostly now, although, years ago, there was Portuguese, Greek, and when she was a little girl Yiddish.

But right now there was silence, and in the silence there were memories.

Mrs. Brown opened the drawer of her bedside table and put away the framed family photographs she displayed every night before she went to sleep.

Not that anyone ever was in her bedroom except herself, but she kept these photographs in the drawer during the day, resting in the middle of a stack of white cotton handkerchiefs, to protect them from, well, she wasn't entirely sure. Dust? She cleaned too often and there wasn't any. Sunlight? There wasn't much of that in this room either. What was she protecting? She was protecting her treasured photographs from time's most corrosive element: forgetting.

Constants in a room, lamps and tables, for example, and photographs, you can become so used to that most of the time you don't even notice they are there. But her ritual of in and out from the drawer, morning and night, helped Mrs. Brown keep her greatest treasures alive, one treasure in particular.

S
HE HAD HER TEA.
She fed the cat, her marbled black and white companion named Santo.

Having carefully examined her outfit the night before, sewing a stitch or two where she feared a hem could possibly come undone, Mrs. Brown dressed in loose-fitting gray trousers and a brown twinset, sweater and shell, as her generation called these sleeveless wool blouses. Her mother always said that when your clothes are not rich clothes you should buy them or, in Mrs. Brown's case, make them in a larger size. The lack in the quality of the fabric doesn't show as much when the clothing is loose.

She brushed her thick gray hair from the nape of her neck and then backward again from the forehead. Mrs. Brown thought this made her look taller and more distinguished.

She did not wear makeup and used lipstick rarely, and certainly not today, when she did not wish to look anything akin to a tart, not that she ever had or ever could.

She considered that she might try a bit of the floral-scented toilet water Mrs. Fox had given her for Christmas three, actually four years ago. She decided against it. But she would be so embarrassed if her clothes smelt of any cooking she'd done, or any household cleaning products she used, the smells she feared lingered in her house and her clothing. Her solution was to spray just a tiny amount of the rosy scent on a corner of a white handkerchief, shake it, fold it, and bury it in the pocket of her trousers.

Ready now, she opened her front door. Her unpainted face for the world to see; she was met by the briny scent of the river nearby. It was a glorious wintry day in Ashville. So clear, so bright that you thought it improved your eyesight.

Cocooned inside her black three-quarter-length quilted parka, Mrs. Brown began the walk to Mrs. Groton's house, leaving her cluttered neighborhood, where the houses were built right next to each other, then north along Main Street past the shops, town hall, and library, and across the Thompson Green, November gray and leafless but holding the promise of so much color come spring.

Here was the statue of Christopher Columbus the people of Ashville were so proud of. Mrs. Brown always liked to stop and read the poem inscribed on it.

“Brave Admiral, say but one good word:

What shall we do when hope is gone?”

The words leapt like a leaping sword:

“Sail on! Sail on! Sail on! And on!”

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

He gained a world; he gave that world

Its grandest lesson: “On! Sail on!”

Mrs. Brown walked. Crossing Broad Street, she arrived at another green, Franklin Green, named for Benjamin Franklin, surrounded by the finest eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses in Ashville, including, especially, Mrs. Groton's, the largest, and the prettiest of them all.

Mrs. Brown, who would have hated to arrive late, was instead half an hour early. She wasn't quite sure what to do next.

She sat on a bench next to a Revolutionary War cannon. From this perch Mrs. Brown regarded Mrs. Groton's house with great satisfaction, civic pride. After six decades of admiring it, within a matter of minutes she'd be inside.

Although she did not have the benefit of knowing the architectural terms to describe the house, here is what you saw when you looked across Franklin Green: a white clapboard Victorian Italianate villa built in the 1860s, with lavish details, spiraled twisted columns and capitals of the Composite order (a combination of the Ionic and the Corinthian), arched double front doors, molded shelves above the shuttered first-floor windows, and pointed pediments crowning the second-floor windows. It was five bays wide, very spacious, with a wing to the left of the façade that contained a ballroom and butler's pantry, which had been added when Mrs. Groton's great-great-grandmother married a Cabot from Boston. The society wedding was one for the history books.

At 9:25, five minutes before she was expected, at 9:30
A.M.
, Mrs. Brown walked across Franklin Green and, holding her breath, unlatched the gate of the ornate wrought-iron fence, went in, and climbed the three steps onto the entrance porch.

She rang the brass doorbell at the right of the arched double front doors. Mrs. Brown could hear the bell ringing inside the house. It seemed an eternity, but in fact was really just a matter of seconds, and the door opened.

Standing on the other side was a young woman the likes of which Mrs. Brown had never seen, at least not in person. Yes, in the fashion magazines she might look at when business was slow at the beauty parlor, and in the movies back in the day of Grace Kelly. The woman answering the door was tall and blond, skin the color of vanilla ice cream. She towered, and confidently, in impossibly high heels, and was dressed in a lightweight black cashmere turtleneck and a black pencil skirt to the knee with a slight, but decided, flounce behind.

The seamstress in Mrs. Brown was riveted by the well-sewn constraint of this tailored flounce and observed it closely when the young woman turned and walked back into the house, telling her to follow.

“So rude of me not to introduce myself at the door, but it is cold out there today, it is much warmer in the city,” the young woman said, extending her delicate hand to Mrs. Brown. The heavy link bracelet of a large gold watch brushed cold on Mrs. Brown's wrist.

“My name is Rachel Ames and I was Mrs. Groton's assistant until her death and you must be . . .”

God help us, Rachel thought. Who is this slender, little tobacco-gray wren of a sixty-something-year-old woman shaking nervously in the foyer of the great house? She thought she must be the cleaning lady, except she'd met the cleaning lady and this wasn't the woman, was it?

Her day was hectic, and overwhelming. The pressure had been mounting ever since Delphine Staunton, the expert from Lambton's, the posh international auction house, had arrived to conduct the Groton inventory. You know the type? They are arch and ornery, mistrusting, always challenging the authenticity of everything and everyone in the name of getting provenance right. Maybe their jobs depend on such relentless expertise, but it makes them seem sometimes like such snobs.

“Ah, yes,” Rachel said aloud, realizing who this was. “The lady from the thrift shop. Thank you for coming, there is so much for us to do today. May I take your coat, Mrs. . . .?”

“Brown,” Mrs. Brown answered. “Mrs. Brown, but I'm not the lady you mean from the thrift shop . . .”

“You aren't the lady from the thrift shop? Then who are you?” Rachel asked. She was worried she had allowed a stranger into the house.

“I mean,” Mrs. Brown said, her voice quivering.

She was astounded. First by the palatial foyer she found herself in. Then there was the sweeping staircase. All the way up to the second floor the walls were covered in heavy-framed paintings of people as historic looking as the portraits you find on currency.

“Yes, Mrs. Brown?” Rachel said, crossing her arms over her chest.

“I'm just here to help Mrs. Wood; she's the one you will want to be talking to from the thrift shop; she runs the place. Mrs. Wood isn't here yet?”

Rachel smiled kindly, the way well-brought-up people used to and some still do. Rachel intuited Mrs. Brown's nervousness as appreciation for the great house.

“Did you know Mrs. Groton, Mrs. Brown?” she asked, walking deeper into the foyer.

Mrs. Brown followed. She had never seen anything as dazzling as this house. It was stunning, in every sense.

“Mrs. Brown?”

“Ma'am?”

“I wonder, did you know Mrs. Groton?”

Rachel paused in front of a large ancestral portrait of an elegant older lady. She was majestically elongated, her white hair piled softly on her head. She wore a cream-colored chiffon tea dress to the ground. Her hands held three long-stemmed white roses. The woman's eyes were porcelain blue, but melancholy. Their gaze locked with yours.

“I didn't know Mrs. Groton personally, no, ma'am, of course I didn't,” Mrs. Brown said. “Except every summer during the Rose Festival I always made it to the front of the line to watch her walk from this house over to the tent on opening day.”

Rachel listened.

“She was so clean, Miss Ames, I don't think I've ever seen anyone who was so clean. Or so comfortable in her own skin, and so well put together.”

Rachel smiled.

“Who's that, if I may ask?” Mrs. Brown pointed to the portrait.

Rachel explained that it was Mrs. Groton's grandmother painted by an artist named Boldini in 1923. It soon would be hanging at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue.

Rachel entered the dining room. It was as big as a restaurant, with a long mahogany table and twenty-four chairs. French doors opened to Mrs. Groton's topiary and rose gardens.

Standing by the doors, holding a clipboard, was a woman Mrs. Brown found terrifying looking. With a helmet of raven-black hair, here was the aforementioned auction house expert Delphine Staunton.

“As I was saying, Rachel,” Delphine said, with an accent Mrs. Brown could not place, “every woman should be pretty in her own dining room. This is a very French idea,” which she pronounced as “eye-dee,” one that, “my people being French, of course, I agree with. The quality of this furniture, Philadelphia Chippendale, will command huge sales for us, I mean, for the estate, but this, how do you say, WASP decorating, is not very feminine, no? It is too stark, too plain. I doubt Mrs. Groton's looks were ever flattered here in this room.”

Delphine shook her head disapprovingly. “It's not a room that flatters a woman.
Quel dommage,
don't you think? No wonder she preferred the Westchester place. She would have looked better in her dining room there, the glossy green walls, the red silk chairs.”

As the raven-headed auctioneer opined, she crisscrossed the dining room sticking little green dots on the furniture. Or white dots, or no dots. Green meant it was going to Lambton's to be auctioned, white for the pieces of furniture and art bequeathed to museums—the Boldini, for instance, and a jolly New York City street scene by the American impressionist painter Childe Hassam—and everything else, from the copper pots and utensils in the kitchen to the majority of Mrs. Groton's clothes, would be given to the thrift shop, hence Mrs. Brown's and Mrs. Wood's presence, if Mrs. Wood ever bothered to show up. How in the world could she possibly be late today of all days?