Mrs. Brown (you’ve got a lovely daughter): an Outtake
from Stuck on Replay
Twice I remember sitting on the settee in the living room on
a day of celebration, my back to the window, unwitting. A sudden visitation
would change everything. In 1991, I was turning forty-two; my birthday was on a
Sunday, and there I sat, indulged by my family, ready to receive presents. As I
commenced unwrapping my gifts though, the children exclaimed that the sky was
turning black. And indeed it was. This was the grim banner of the Oakland Hills
Firestorm that would destroy so much property in the Bay Area, and too much
life, however statistically insignificant the numbers may have been.
Would the fire reach our home? We were advised that it
might. We spent the rest of the afternoon assembling our precious belongings
and a survival kit, which we placed by the front door. The birthday celebration
was at an end.
They say you can’t go back and retrieve the past. And most
of the victims of the fire moved on, either literally moving to safer, less
forested, less hilly (and also less beautiful) locations, or moving on by
rebuilding on the same spot where their house had burned to the ground, but
rebuilding there in a forward-looking way. What forward-looking meant in the
aftermath of the Oakland Hills Fire was the construction of homes that were
larger than their antecedents. These new homes filled up more space than the
destroyed cottages and bungalows that had graced the hills. The new houses
sometimes reached nearly to the edges of their lots. They were constructed of
concrete and other materials that had the appearance of stone. These homes,
inelegant shelters for the traumatized, were fortress-like and forbidding, their
small, mean windows winking in the sun.
There was one family, though, that lost their home in the
firestorm, yet succeeded in returning to it, and so to the past. How I admired
their handsome house, large but not overbuilt, with its generous picture
window, as I walked up to their door, ready to interview them about hosting a
foreign student. The family consisted of a shy, brainy teen-age boy living with
his grandmother. I didn’t inquire as to the whereabouts of the rest of the
family and they didn’t tell me. What they did tell me, when I remarked on the
lucky chance of their home having been spared––fire can do that, inexplicably
leaping over some houses and burning down others––was that this stately home,
with its wood paneled walls, bay windows, and sunny rooms, was an exact replica
of the house that had burned down. The architect’s plans had been kept in a
locked metal box in the basement. After the fire, the molten tin rendered the
charred, frangible plans unreadable. So they took the plans in the tin box to
the Chemistry Department at UC Berkeley, and had the plans re-hydrated. A modern
miracle! The plans were now readable! Scientists had saved the plans, and
insurance money rebuilt the house.
The second occasion of sitting unwitting on a day of
celebration was Valentine’s Day 2010. Though not black with boiling, billowing
smoke, the sky was heavy with molten clouds, the day cold and uninviting. I sat
at one end of the settee, my husband sat at the other. Our mood was as heavy as
the atmosphere. There wasn’t much to say. Our son had just been admitted to a
storied but autocratic hospital in New York. His episodes of severe apathy and
disorientation that had begun just days before would later be attributed to a reaction to his medication, but we didn’t yet know that. We had thought of going to New York
to visit him, help out, until we learned that we would not be allowed to see
him once arrived. It was not a good Valentine’s Day.
Suddenly, someone rattled the locked front gate. Looking out
the window, I saw the tall figure of our daughter’s former boyfriend. When I
went to the door to tell him she wasn’t there, he handed a large bag over the
gate. The bag contained ten or so books she had loaned him in happier
days––before the break-up. He wouldn’t come in for tea, he said. He just wanted
her to have her books back. We chatted a bit, and I congratulated him on his
recent graduation, which had been achieved against considerable odds.
Not long after this visit, the familiar signs of an earworm
began to surface. Phrase by musical phrase it haunted me hither and yon, until
I began to piece it together. This time it was a familiar song from my teens,
and so clearly identifiable from early on in the game.
Ladies and Gentlemen: Herman’s Hermits! rips the Emcee. At
which point five impossibly young boys, looking gawky and new-minted in their
jackets and trousers, appear on the stage set of a British street on America’s
Ed Sullivan Show. The earworm isn’t “Henry the Eighth,” though that’s a good
song (“I’m ’er eighth old man named ’enery, ’enery the Eighth I am.”) The earworm is “Mrs. Brown you’ve got a
lovely daughter.” This bittersweet lyric was first performed in 1965:
The song is a dramatic monologue, so it’s a one-sided story.
We only hear the boy’s side of things––his thoughts, his feelings. The other
side of the conversation is missing. No, I don’t mean the words spoken by Mrs.
Brown’s lovely daughter. The lovely daughter is off somewhere with her friends.
I’m talking about Mrs. Brown. Did Mrs. B. just stand there, agape, listening? I
don’t think so.
How would the conversation have gone if someone had
included Mrs. Brown’s part in it? Oh, I
know, it wouldn’t have made as good a song. That song has pathos, especially as
performed by the Hermits, grinning at the audience in their unaccustomed
jackets; especially as sung by the sweet-looking kid with the overbite. But
just for the moment, imagine Mrs. Brown. She’s not at the center of the
drama––the boy and the girl are. But she’s the third character in the play,
there for confirmation. Confirmation of what?
Mrs. B. is there to give us a few vital clues about who this girl is.
So imagine Mrs. Brown as I would have done, eager as I was
to exorcize the earworm, had I known that the insistent quality of this
particular haunting was related, somehow, some way, to the meaning that this
long-forgotten song had to my present-day life.
Mrs. Brown you’ve got
a lovely daughter…
Yes. Yes I do.
Girls as sharp as her
are something rare…
(Yes, she’s sharp. That used to
mean ‘smart’ when I was your age: ‘smart’ and
‘cool.’ ) Oh, she’s smart. Did I tell
you she won the fifth grade math prize? Oh, I did?
But it’s sad…
Sad, to be sure.
She doesn’t love me
now…
(Children move on, don’t they?)
She has to follow her path.
She made it clear
enough…
She would––I mean, she has a way of
doing that.
It ain’t no good to
pine…
(No good. No good at all.)
She wants to return
the things I bought her
Tell her she can keep
them just the same
Things have changed…
(They certainly have.) She crosses
the street by herself now. Makes her own lunch...
...she doesn’t love me
now
(Believe me, I know all about it.
First it was her father, then a teacher, then a playmate, girlfriends, and just
when you least expect it––before you’re ready for it, really—the boyfriends.
And then the confidences end. Everything so private all of a sudden. And all
you can think, all you can tell yourself is, like you say, “Things have
changed.”)
She made it clear
enough,
(Yes. Yes. She makes it clear
enough.)
It ain’t no good to
pine
(You won’t change her mind, if
that’s what you’re thinking. Nothing will.)
Walking about, even in
a crowd, well
You’ll pick her out
Yes, she does stand out, doesn’t
she? Especially when she wears heels.
(Mind you
it wasn’t always the case.) Did I ever
tell you about the time
I lost her
at the market? (Huge Marks and Sparks it was.) Oh, did I?
Makes a bloke feel so
proud
Yes, (You two always did make a
nice-looking couple.)
(I guess
looks isn’t everything, poor lad.)
If she finds that I’ve
been round to see you–
Truly. I won’t tell her. (I’ll try
not to.)
Tell her that I’m well
and feeling fine,
(That’s what I’ll say. And she’ll
want to believe me.)
She cares for you, you
know–respects you.
(Not what he wants to hear, of
course.)
Don’t let on…
(Your secret is safe with me.)
Don’t say she’s broke
my heart…
(That’s just between us.)
Love is like that.
(There, now…)
I know her.
(Please…)
She didn’t mean to.
I’d go down on my
knees––
(I know how
you’re feeling, but trust me–)
–It
wouldn’t do any good. Not now.
(Not ever.)
But it’s no use to pine
We know her, don’t we?
She’s honest. Says what she thinks.
And once she makes up her mind…
Mrs. Brown you’ve got
a lovely daughter…
Mrs. Brown you’ve got
a lovely daughter…
(Give it
time. He’ll be all right.)
So nice of
you to come round.
(I won’t
see him again.)
Here is a classic drama, with its bare bones cast of
three––two actually, if you take into account the fact that Lovely Daughter
remains off-stage. Yet it is she that they are talking about. And who is she?
She’s not the girl next door––she’s the one that got away. Even her mother
can’t say where she is, or where she’s going. (Especially her mother.)
There’s always a girl who got away. And when you see her ten
or twenty years later, or a lifetime hence, the question you want to ask her is
always the same, “How far have you been?” When the music has changed from rock
to pop, the songs from sweet lyrics to dark satires, still, the question is the
same. Did you get no further than King’s Cross, or did you get as far as the
Finland Station? Did you live a life more ordinary? Or did your arrival signal
some kind of revolution?
We've got no future, we've got no past
Here today, built to last
In every city, in every nation
From Lake Geneva to the Finland station
(How far have you been?)
Here today, built to last
In every city, in every nation
From Lake Geneva to the Finland station
(How far have you been?)
–– “West End Girls,” Neil Tennant
Sometimes
when a young man loses his girl there’s sour grapes. Literature is full of derisory sequels presenting the exceptional
woman, once lost, as merely ordinary––or worse. And this regardless of how the
affair ends. Thus the protagonist (or the author) reminds himself: she didn’t
get far, after all. At the high end of the literature of love and loss,
Frédéric, hero of Sentimental Education, remarks,
years after his affair with the beautiful Rosannette: “I met [her] in a shop
the other day…She’s the widow of a certain Monsieur Oudry, and she’s become
terribly fat, not to say huge. What a decline! When you recall what a slim
waist she had in the old days.” Just so, Herman Wouk imagines the ambitious
heroine of his middlebrow novel Marjorie
Morningstar at the end of her story as a very ordinary housewife (much as
Tolstoy has Natasha waving a diaper at the end of War and Peace). In popular fiction, independent women often inhabit
the treacherous terrain of Looking for
Mr.Goodbar, eliciting that truism: we
know what happens to girls who stray too far from home.
But
none of this sour grapes business for Lovelorn Boy (let us call him Herman). He
knows Lovely Daughter is out of his league––she’s “sharp” and “rare”––but he
isn’t bitter. And he isn’t afraid of admiring her still. Even in a crowd, she’s
a standout: makes him feel so proud (as though he had something to do with it,
rather like a parent). Does the boy worship her? He says he’d go down on his
knees, if only…But Herman is no troubadour, no proselytizer for Mariolatry.
He’s’ just the boy-next-door, heartbroken to be sure, but toughing it out like
a stalwart.
Herman
might have wandered off to a cliff overlooking the crashing waves of the sea.
There, on a promontory, he might have bethought him to strike a pose: man
against the elements, heartbreak against the drama of nature. But Herman is no
Romantic, as we can see from the fact that, barring any evidence of cliffs, he
takes his heartbreak straight to
Mrs. Brown.
Who
then is Mrs. Brown? We have made her up. The Mrs. Brown we have made up is in
every sense common. No one would bother to disparage Mrs. Brown for being a
housewife or a clerk, for she is, after all, only Mrs. Brown. Nevertheless she
has an aura about her. She is the one boys like Herman confide in. Do they
speak to her because she is kind? Perhaps. More likely the young, with their
heartbreak, speak to her because this common woman has somehow managed to raise
Lovely Daughter. Moreover, she “knows” her daughter, and young people generally.
She
isn’t much use of course, beyond serving as a sounding board. Mrs. Brown has
her own issues, and keeps superimposing them on the dialogue. Sometimes she and
Herman are having two separate conversations. When Herman speaks of crushed
romantic dreams, Mrs. B. mutters something about crossing the street and a
child making her own lunch. At best, what Mrs. B. has to offer is comfort and a
few obscure words of wisdom that sound a lot like clichés: “She has to follow
her path” and “Love is like that.”
More
than a sounding board, that listener, that silent interlocutor, Mrs. Brown, is
a kind of mirror, reflecting back Herman’s sadness at being left behind, but
also his parent-like pride, and the secret of his continuing love and
admiration.
When
the Mrs. Brown earworm came upon me I
didn’t invent a character called Mrs. Brown, or have any thoughts about the
meaning of the song. Why ruin a good song by overthinking it? I had liked
listening to the song once, but the intrusiveness of the earworm was getting on
my nerves. Now I hummed the song, sang it, watched videos of it on YouTube, and
listened to other songs to get rid of it. As usual nothing worked. Then one day
it was gone.
They
say you can’t go back and retrieve the past. The family that re-hydrated their
architectural plans and built a replica of the house that burned down lived in
a copy of the original house. Undoubtedly they lived differently in the replica
house, because of the intervening fire, than they had lived in the first
house––the house that was, till the very end, innocent of disaster. They were
pleased with the new house––proud of it––and rightly so. For a long time, every
new visitor must have been given the tour, shown how one feature was an exact
reproduction of its original counterpart, how another feature made use of newer
materials: different tiles, shorter planks––because builders’ materials change,
handpainted tiles change, trees are cut down sooner. Yet with every new
visitor to the house, with every tour, the family would have the opportunity to
reconsolidate the memory of the original home, making its loss a little less
unfathomable, and less painful.
Our
children, originals all, are also replicas, as are we, of parents and
ancestors. We all wear the family face:
I am the family face
Flesh perishes, I live
on
Projecting trait and
race
Through time to times
anon
And leaping from place
to place
Over oblivion.
The years-heired feature
that can
In curve and voice and
eye
Despise the human span
Of durance – that is I;
The eternal thing in man
That heeds no call to
die.
-
Thomas Hardy
Our
loves, too, are replicas, always, of other loves, of loves nearly perfect and
of loves less perfect. If you are a Romantic, you will spend your life
searching for, or regretting the loss of, the one perfect love. A Platonist,
you will seek your missing half. The one perfect love isn’t the same as the one
that got away. The girl that got away––Lovely Daughter––belongs to the future.
To love her is to let her go, without bitterness or repining. The one perfect
love belongs to the ever-inaccessible past. That is why Romantics are always
disappointed in the loves life has to offer; to a Romantic, love is always a
replica that recalls that absent love: perfectly whole and complete.
If
you are, instead of being a Romantic, a Practitioner of love, you will practice
it. Practice is what Practitioners do.
Prince Charles famously remarked of the announcement of the marriage of
his son William to Kate Middleton, that the couple had certainly had enough
practice. Well, yes. They had. We all practice, as Mrs. Brown said, on parents,
on playmates, on girlfriends and boyfriends, all the while reconsolidating our
memories of the original. What is the original? Is it God? Is it our capacity to
love? No matter. Every love that we meet with, every love we practice, though
it be a replica of perfection, is precious. Love is our perfectly imperfect,
most vital connection to the perfectly imperfect human condition.
So can I get a refill?
Can I get a refill?
Can I get a refill?
Yeah, of your time
Cause you’re intoxicating my mind
Feel like a conversational lush
Cause I don’t know how much is too much, yeah
I feel like the girl at the bar who’s been there too long
Can’t stand up!
Can I get a refill?
Can I get a refill?
Yeah, of your time
Cause you’re intoxicating my mind
Feel like a conversational lush
Cause I don’t know how much is too much, yeah
I feel like the girl at the bar who’s been there too long
Can’t stand up!
––
“Refill,” Elle Varner, Perfectly
Imperfect
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