The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (32 page)

For those few weeks, the correspondence with Mayumi served as a kind of balance to the stress created by the rest of her life. She loved writing carefree descriptions of goings-on at the store, her aching muscles and blossoming belly, her efforts to find shoes for her feet, which, always oddly shaped, were now also swollen. But this renewed contact had a way of throwing her off as well, because the letters connected her with Henry, too, and she soon needed more from them than they could provide. She would hurry home in the afternoons simply to check the post. When she did receive a letter from Mayumi, she would tear it open, skimming the contents for a capital
H,
and if she didn't find one, she would often cry. The twelve letters Goldie received from Mayumi during that period carried exactly five more mentions of the man she loved: “My father works in the kitchens and Henry works in the wood shop”; “My mother, Akemi, and I have all had colds, but Henry and my father are healthy”; “Henry borrowed
The Grapes of Wrath
and we've all been reading it. It's a sad book, but we like it”; “Henry eats all the apples”; and “Henry is the only one of us who doesn't nap.” It was both more information and less information than she could bear.

Still, Goldie might have continued the correspondence anyway, if the disaster had not occurred. Goldie had not paid attention to the reports from Europe, and the fact that Marvin was over there made her even less inclined to read the newspapers now. “I just try to put it out of my mind,” she told Rochelle, who often peppered their discussions with comments like “Things are really bad over there.”

“I'm sure he's fine,” Goldie always responded, though of course she wasn't. “He's not shooting a gun or anything,” she liked to remind Rochelle. “He's on a boat.”

“I'd be a wreck if I were you,” Rochelle would reply.

The attack on the Italian port city of Bari took place on December 2, but the events were mired in so much secrecy and confusion that Goldie knew nothing about it until January 5. That day, Mr. Blankenship had planned to complete their accounting of the holiday sales, and by eight thirty in the morning they were already sitting together at the small table in his office. While he read through the numbers, Goldie recorded them in their accounting book. They only paused if one of them wanted to discuss a particular item that had sold well, or one that hadn't.

“I think we can go up thirty percent on our orders for the felt hats,” Mr. Blankenship said with satisfaction. It was a source of continual annoyance to him when newspaper articles equated economizing with patriotism, even to the point of recommending that people refurbish their own hats. He was pleased, then, to find that Feld's customers, at least, had ignored such advice and invested in new ones.

Goldie drew a little star in the accounting book, which was her way of taking notice of a promising set of sales figures, but then she winced as she tried to readjust herself in her seat. In Mr. Blankenship's opinion a woman who was five months pregnant had no business walking down a steep hill in high heels every morning, but he felt it inappropriate to discuss such intimate matters with Goldie. He pulled a bottle from his desk drawer and, as had become their habit, handed her a couple of aspirin, which Goldie swallowed with her tea before making a couple of other notes about hat orders in her book.

At ten forty-five, the inventory clerk, Mr. Maxwell, knocked on the door and peered into the office. “Uh, there's someone here to see Mrs. Feld, sir.”

Mr. Blankenship and Goldie looked up. “Send them in,” Goldie said. She seldom had visitors, at home or at the store, and she felt a flush of heat as the thought flashed through her mind that Marvin had returned to surprise her. It had been weeks since she had received a letter. Part of her had worried, and part of her had decided that he was on his way home.

A handsome sailor, in formal uniform, walked into the room. Goldie and Mr. Blankenship both stood up. Goldie had heard about these men, and because she experienced a nearly constant anxiety about her husband, she knew immediately why he had come. It took Mr. Blankenship a moment longer.

“Please go,” Goldie said. “You're not needed here.”

“Mrs. Feld, could I speak with you a moment?” the sailor asked.

Goldie felt herself break inside. “I have no business with you,” she insisted.

She never heard Mr. Blankenship move, but she felt him standing beside her. He took her hand. He turned to the sailor, and the steadiness in his voice kept Goldie from crumbling. “Give us a moment,” he said. He stepped over to the little cherry cabinet in the corner and poured a brandy for Goldie. She watched him, concentrating on this image of normal human activity.

Across the room, the sailor stood motionless, his solid, handsome face a piece of marble. He stared straight ahead.

Mr. Blankenship handed the glass to Goldie. She drank it, then he poured her another. Her eyes settled on their visitor. “Give the sailor one,” she said.

The young man shifted his eyes to Mr. Blankenship. “No, sir. Thank you, sir,” he said.

Goldie said, “Take it.”

The sailor looked at Mr. Blankenship, uncertain. Mr. Blankenship opened the decanter, poured a brandy for the sailor, and handed it to him. “Take it,” he said.

The young man took the brandy and swallowed it in a single gulp. “Thank you, sir,” he said. He still couldn't look at Goldie. “Thank you, ma'am,” he said.

“How many of these have you done?” she asked.

“I'd rather not say, ma'am.”

“How many, sailor?” she wanted to know.

“A few dozen, ma'am.”

“Does it ever bother you that you're alive and they aren't, sailor?”

He shifted on his feet. His gaze remained focused on the far wall. “Every day, ma'am.”

“I'll have another brandy, Mr. Blankenship,” Goldie said.

He poured her another and she drank it. Then she looked at the sailor. “Go ahead,” she said.

 

It wasn't until decades later, when her granddaughter Sadie happened to read about it while puttering around on the Internet one day, that Goldie learned about the connection between the SS
John Harvey
and the mustard gas disaster at Bari. For the first time, she heard that Marvin's ship had been secretly carrying chemical weapons and that the German attack on the port had caused the ship to explode, sending a wave of poisonous fumes across the city, killing as many as a thousand people. For her family, the information helped to fill out the mythic story of Marvin Feld, the father and grandfather they had never known, the charming war hero who had died too young and whose parents had never accepted the fact that their son had fallen in love with a penniless girl from Memphis. Goldie had never made a secret of her first marriage, though she chose not to mention Marvin's homosexuality, preferring instead to concoct an image of newlyweds who looked like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Sometimes, after a glass of wine or two, she would describe the romantic dinners the two had shared at a spot called Bill's Place, or the way he squeezed orange juice for her in their cozy apartment on the hill, or the day they fell in love, curled up together in the cabin of his parents' yacht, staring up through the porthole at Alcatraz. The information about Bari disturbed Goldie, of course, but she didn't find it “interesting” at all. Where was dear Marvin when the ship exploded? Had he felt any pain? Was it over quickly?

“It's too sad,” she said, waving away the stack of pages that Sadie had printed out and offered to her to read. “I suffered enough from that already.”

And she had. Two weeks after she received the news of her husband's death, her in-laws sent a notarized letter to Goldie. She had known the Felds for years already and knew how much they adored their only child. She could imagine the extent of their grief, and from the depths of her own despair, she felt for them. The letter, however, showed no hint of emotion. Rather, it informed her in the most legalistic language of “the financial dispensation” she could expect should she “agree to certain non-negotiable conditions.” As Goldie knew already, Marvin had taken the time to update his will in New York, and that document left everything to his wife and their child. As heir to the Feld fortune, however, he did not actually have a lot of money of his own. Marvin's own estate contained about ten thousand dollars, hardly enough to pay her expenses for the next few years, much less provide for the future. The Feld's proposition, therefore, was something that Goldie had to consider seriously. In return for her promise to leave San Francisco and “permanently refrain from making any more appeals to their generosity,” they agreed to deposit into her account one hundred thousand dollars, which they assumed would be sufficient to maintain the quality of life for both “Mrs. Goldie Rubin Feld and her child.”

Goldie, of course, found the offer insulting. “
Her
child? What do they mean by
her
child?” she asked Mr. Blankenship. In Goldie's state of grief and confusion, she had lost her formality with her former boss. Mr. Blankenship didn't mind. The Felds' behavior infuriated him as well. In his opinion, Marvin had done everything that a homosexual man could do to satisfy the expectations of his parents. And now the Felds were punishing Goldie? Mr. Blankenship was so angry that he had accepted a longtime offer from Emporium-Capwell and planned to give notice the following week.

“Ignore the snub, my dear,” he told her. She had, since receiving the letter, stopped appearing at Feld's. Most evenings, now, the two of them sat in the living room of her apartment, discussing Goldie's options. “You can't fight them,” he said. He would, in truth, have liked to see her try it. He was an orderly and proper person, but he wasn't above getting satisfaction from observing a just revenge. On the other hand, he could see, in practical terms, that Goldie needed to accept the offer. “What about Memphis?” he said, trying to focus on the future, not the past.

Goldie shook her head miserably. “I'd rather die.”

“Atlanta? That's also in the South.”

Goldie rolled her eyes. “What a backwater.”

“Would you like to stay in California? Should I suggest Los Angeles?”

Goldie shook her head. “I want to get as far away as possible.”

“New York?”

Goldie considered this option. “My sister Eleanor lives in New Jersey, not far from Manhattan. She's been good to me.”

“There you have it, then,” said Mr. Blankenship. It gave him comfort to solve problems.

“But I can't live with her.”

Mr. Blankenship squeezed her hand. He had a clearer sense of the purchasing power of one hundred thousand dollars than Goldie had. “Darling,” he told her. “You don't have to.”

And that was how, less than six weeks after hearing the news of Marvin's death, Goldie Feld, almost seven months pregnant, boarded a train for New York City.

February 22, 1944—San Francisco

Dearest Mayumi,

Everything bad has happened. Marvin was killed in the war. I have to leave San Francisco before I have my baby. Don't WORRY about me. I'll be FINE. Please know that I think of you often with the deepest WISH that you can go home soon. Please give my warmest regards to your mother and father and Akemi. And Henry.

With all my love, Goldie

She never consciously intended that letter to be her last, but something shifted in her mind as her train rumbled east toward New York City. This time Goldie traveled in comfort. She had a fine set of luggage (same style as Marvin's, though maroon) and her own private roomette. Four years earlier, traveling west, she had subsisted on sandwich quarters and the hunks of bread she could grab surreptitiously while striding through the dining car. Now she had her own bed and sofa, private toilet, writing table, and plenty of money to buy herself meals. But Goldie had traveled west with hope, and she was traveling east without it. For most of the journey she stared out the window, watching the landscape shift from forested mountains, to desert, to prairie, to rolling hills, and then cities. She kept her hand on her belly then, following, too, the journeys of the baby—her single companion now—stirring inside her. A whole new life. And it was with a growing sense that she had to make something of that life—her baby's and her own—that she resolved to leave her sadness behind and turn her face completely toward the future. This effort demanded all her resources, and it took the entire journey to coalesce. By the time the train arrived in New York City, however, Goldie Rubin Feld was ready. Somehow, through the force of her will, the past had grown smaller and smaller in her mind until, finally, it disappeared.

Part Five

19

Henry Nakamura

A
nna and Goldie approached San Francisco at dusk, driving in across the Bay Bridge and descending into the city like airplane copilots coming in for a landing. Nothing could ever render Goldie entirely speechless, but the change in the city after sixty years made her pause much longer than usual. The elegant skyscrapers she remembered from her youth were now lost among dozens of boxy high-rises that resembled one another in uniform dullness. “I simply can't believe my eyes,” she said. Then, after a moment, she pointed to a small hill on the edge of downtown. “There's that pretty tower, though.”

“Coit Tower,” said Anna, who, having lived in the city for a few months after college, was experiencing her own nostalgia now.

“I climbed it once.”

“Me, too.”

By the time they arrived at the Hotel Senseki, it was after six o'clock. Despite their Japantown location, Goldie announced, “I'm not eating any Japanese food.” She was too tired to venture far from the hotel, though, so they ended up going down to the East Meets West Steakhouse on the lower level, where she could get a rib eye and Anna could order sushi.

“I can't stand raw fish,” Goldie said, looking with suspicion at her granddaughter's dinner. The design of the restaurant twisted the basic surf and turf theme into a kind of postmodern Kabuki, with woodblock prints of cows in kimonos and long-lashed koi hiding coquettishly behind open fans.

“Did you ever try it?”

“Of course not. I'm not a caveman.”

Anna had always found it interesting to watch her grandmother cultivate a cosmopolitan air while remaining, in so many ways, the poor Jewish girl from Memphis. She would not eat pork or shellfish, even though she refused any attempts to connect her taste in food to her religion. She had no appreciation for music, unless you could dance to it. Despite her extensive knowledge of fine antiques, she kept a collection of Japanese ceramic good luck cats (the kind you see in every sushi bar) in a shadow box in her bathroom.

The waiter came to the table and looked down at Goldie's plate with concern. “Was the steak all right?” he asked.

Goldie was tired, but not too tired to enjoy the attention. She put her hand on the edge of the plate and looked up at the waiter, a long-limbed young man with a tiny ruby stud in each ear. “At first it seemed a little too well done, but I really didn't want to send it back,” she told him, “and then I cut into it and it was perfect. Pink and perfect.”

He didn't seem convinced, because she'd eaten so little. “Be honest. You can send it back if you like.”

This was the kind of service Goldie loved. “I'm always honest,” she assured him. “I just can't eat much. When I'm in New York, I take my leftovers back to the doorman.”

The waiter still hovered. “You sound like you're from the South.”

“We're two Memphis girls,” Goldie said, drawing out the vowels even more excessively than usual. Despite her aversion to her hometown, she liked the attention she drew with her accent.

“I'm from Little Rock.”

“Just down the road,” Goldie exclaimed, as if they'd discovered they were neighbors. Then she said, “You're a sweet boy. What's your name?”

“Milt.”

“Milt, let me tell you. I haven't been in San Francisco in thirty years.” She looked at Anna. “Is it thirty years?”

“Something like that.” Anna smiled. More than sixty, actually, but did it matter?

“Thirty years,” Goldie continued. “So it's something of a shock for me. A shock. I used to visit Japantown back then, and the shops were filled with things you'd never seen in your life. I tell you it was like going to the Orient.”

Milt hugged his order pad. “Now it's all sushi bars and boutiques selling Japanese comic books and ceramics.” He gazed down at Goldie as if she were the only person in the room, even though the restaurant was very crowded.

Goldie threw up her hands in mock exasperation. “I don't know a thing about it now! I have no idea, because we just got here this afternoon. But still, I'm cognizant of the fact that this is not the same city that I loved thirty years ago.”

“You might love it,” Milt offered.

“Love it? I'm going to adore it. I'm going to be wild about it, Milt.” She looked at Anna, reached over, and squeezed her hand. “We made it!”

The look on Goldie's face—such a mix of joy and surprise and relief—made Anna laugh with pleasure, because she was relishing the same emotions. For so many years, she realized, she had focused on the things that drove her and her grandmother apart. Anna had not been wrong to wear a flapper dress or to marry Ford, but she could see now that those decisions had undermined Goldie's sense of security in some fundamental way. Each person becomes trapped by the experiences that form them, and Goldie's well-being depended on adherence to the values and behaviors that had helped her to survive. This realization did not compel Anna to think differently about the choices she had made—wasn't she governed by her own life experiences?—but it did stir within her a greater compassion for her grandmother.

Milt squatted down so that he was eye level with Goldie. “Can I just tell you that I work here six nights a week, and as you can see, we get a pretty sophisticated crowd—”

“I know that,” Goldie cut in. “We're staying upstairs, and we were dying of hunger and exhaustion so we came down. This is marvelous.”

“What I mean is, you're the most elegant person I've seen in a long time. You don't look like you're exhausted. You look like someone in
Vogue
. A lot of people buy expensive clothes, but they don't know how to wear them.”

Goldie, who had been too tired to change clothes, still had on the black-and-white polka dot silk Yves Saint Laurent blouse she'd been wearing all day, and she did look better than anyone else in the restaurant. “I could tell you some stories, Milt,” she said reaching out to pat his arm. “And let me give you a fashion tip.”

The waiter leaned in closer.

“According to Gianfranco Ferre, you can mix a lot of colors you never would have thought of mixing. Try navy with dark brown. You wouldn't think so, but it works.”

“Really?” Anna asked. This was news to her.

“Style takes imagination,” said Milt, turning his attention to Goldie's blouse. “Speaking of which, I love those polka dots.”

“People are scared to wear polka dots. But they make an outfit.”

Milt said, “Most people couldn't pull it off.”

Goldie looked humble and pleased, and certainly what he said had made her happy. She worked hard to keep up her appearance and refused to go out with even a smudge on her shoe. But still, the attention no longer mattered. She took his hand and squeezed it. “You are a sweet young man, Milt.”

“I'm studying fashion.” He turned his head and looked around the room. “Shoot. I have to get back to work.” He added quietly in Goldie's ear, “I could sit here all night and talk with you, but I'd lose my job.”

Goldie laughed. “We could sit here all night and talk to you, but I'll die right here if I don't get to bed. We'll just take the check, Milt.”

“He's sweet,” said Anna, when they were alone again.

Goldie opened her compact and checked her lipstick. “Don't turn your nose up at anybody. You can learn from a hobo on the street.”

Anna rested her cheek on her palm and looked at her grandmother with wonder. “I'll keep that in mind,” she said.

When Milt returned with the check, he carried a large plate of cookies. “I stole them from the pastry chef,” he whispered. He looked at Anna and smiled. This was the first time they'd really acknowledged each other. “How are you two related?” he asked.

“She's my grandmother,” Anna replied, experiencing a feeling of pride the possibility of which she would have absolutely rejected a few weeks earlier.

Goldie's cell phone rang a minute or two after they returned to the room. They were expecting a call from Sadie, who was supposed to have learned the gender of her baby that day. Goldie was in the bathroom, so Anna picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“Anna?” She recognized Naveen's voice immediately, and with that recognition came a sudden destabilization, as if she were no longer grounded to the carpet.

“Oh, hey.”

“Is your grandmother okay?” Anna found the anxiety in his voice unexpectedly touching.

“She's fine. I just picked up the phone for her. We got to San Francisco this afternoon.”

“That's good to hear.”

If Goldie's time in the bathroom afforded Anna and Naveen any opportunity to speak honestly at last, they squandered it by engaging in such a long period of silence that Goldie reappeared without their having exchanged another word. “Well,” Anna said, “I guess she's here right now.” She handed Goldie the phone, ignoring the sense of loss that washed over her as she did it. “It's Dr. Choudary.”

Goldie took the phone, sat down in a chair, and lifted it to her ear. “You really are an excellent doctor,” she said. After a pause, she added, “I know exactly what you're saying. Blood clots are a dangerous thing, and I have every intention of getting up and walking around the airplane. Even if I'd rather be sleeping, I'm going to drag myself up and practically walk across the Pacific by myself. Blood clots can kill you. I'm cognizant of that fact.”

Anna sat on the edge of the bed pretending to read through a brochure about shopping in the Japan Center, but she was actually listening to Goldie's conversation with Naveen. From his perspective, Anna's refusal to engage with him probably seemed skittish and silly. She considered herself prudent, though. The fact was that they had only known each other for a day. They had watched a movie, eaten dinner together, had sex. What did that prove about either one of them? Or both of them together? To Anna's thinking, it proved the value of the one-night stand. It had been fun, and important to her own process of healing, and it was also uncomplicated. It left them free from pain, unencumbered. Naveen could not ignore the value of that. Simply put, Anna did not want to suffer.

When Goldie's conversation finally concluded, she snapped shut the phone and set it back on the table. “I'm not even going to wash my teeth,” she said. She looked so exhausted that Anna helped her get out of her clothes, then found her peach nightgown and let it slowly flutter down over her grandmother's head while Goldie held up her arms.

“Go to sleep now,” Anna said.

“What are you going to do?”

Anna glanced at the clock. For once, she really didn't feel like drawing. “I think I'll go for a walk.”

“Walk? Where are you going to walk? I don't want to be worrying about you. I'm dead here.”

“We're next to a mall,” Anna reminded her grandmother. The Senseki sat at one end of the Japan Center, she explained, showing Goldie the shopping brochure, which said that the stores stayed open until 10
P.M
. Anna could remember wandering through Japantown years ago, and she suddenly felt the urge to look again at the heavy iron teapots, sushi sets, and silk kimonos she remembered loving then. Maybe she'd even find a store that sold
manga
. Aside from the few minutes when Naveen's call had thrown her off, their arrival in San Francisco had given her a new sense of possibility, a buoyancy, even though she was having trouble tracing that feeling back to any particular cause. She just felt happy. “Please don't worry.”

Goldie sat on the edge of the bed, brushing her hair out. “I was all alone in this city. I managed. You'll manage. But I would have killed to have somebody worry about me the way I worry about you.”

Anna sat down next to her grandmother and put her hand on Goldie's knee. “I'll stay here if you like, Nana. I really don't care.”

Goldie lay down and let Anna pull the covers over her. “What am I going to do?” she asked, her eyes already beginning to close. “I leave in two days, and then I'm in Dubai and you're all alone again. You could be walking around town at 3
A.M
. and I wouldn't know it.”

“I guess you have to trust me.”

“I trust you, darling. You go on and do whatever it is that you have to do.”

It took a couple of minutes for Anna to leave the room, because Sadie finally called to inform them that Goldie's first great-grandchild would be a girl and that Sadie and Diane planned to name her Dakota Rose. After that, Goldie and Anna had to spend a few minutes discussing the merits of this name. (Anna thought it was pretty; Goldie, who had shown surprising restraint during the actual call, said, “If they wanted to name their child after a state, why not call her ‘New Hampshire'?”). By the time Anna had found her backpack and cell phone and put on her shoes, Goldie was curled up with her hands clasped below her chin, like a sleeping baby.

Anna picked up the napkin full of Milt's cookies. He had given them many more than she and Goldie could eat together, more than Anna, unrestrained by her grandmother's scrutiny, could even eat on her own. As she looked down at them—ginger lace cookies, biscotti, sugar cookies dipped in chocolate—a surge of romantic feeling welled inside her and she suddenly wanted to share them with Naveen. She wasn't willing to ask herself the obvious question: Had she been wrong to cut him off? Instead, she simply wondered: If she could wander alone through the city with him, where would they go?

Anna had pocketed the cookies and was about to walk out the door when the sound of movement in the bed made her turn around. Goldie, her face pale in the light from the lamp, was gazing at her. “I love you, darling,” she said. “You take such good care of me.”

Anna grinned. “I love you, too,” she said, before shutting the door behind her.