The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (7 page)

The Goth waitress arrived with their milk shakes and dinners. Goldie looked at the girl with an expression of complete distaste, then she pulled her milk shake close, put her mouth to the straw, took a sip, and said, “This is delicious.”

“You're not a snob about food,” Anna observed.

Goldie looked up, her mouth pinched and sour. “A snob about food? I'm not a snob about anything.”

Anna said nothing.

“You think I'm a snob about something?”

Suddenly scratches appeared on the polish of the day. Anna took two more sips of her shake, then concentrated on the meatloaf in front of her. “This is good, too. When we walked in, I thought this place would be a waste of time.”

“Why did you call me a snob?” Goldie demanded.

Anna knew that she should hold herself back. Goldie had offered her such a tantalizing invitation, however. “You were a snob toward Ford,” she finally said. “You hated him.”

It took a few seconds for Goldie to absorb this comment. “Hated him? I didn't hate him,” she finally said, as if Ford hadn't deserved such intensity of feeling. “He wasn't right for you.”

“Why wasn't he right for me?” Anna's own complicated feelings toward her husband receded into the background. She had to defend her choice in men.

Goldie took a bite of her liver, chewed, and swallowed before she said another word. “He trapped you in Memphis. You were young and too stupid to understand that you could find a better match.”

“You don't know what you're talking about,” Anna said.

Goldie ignored that comment. She kept her eyes on her plate, wrapping a piece of onion around her fork as if it were a strand of spaghetti. “The point is that you have your future to think about now,” she said. “There's a whole world out here. You can get out of Memphis if you want.”

Anna almost had to laugh at the breathtaking consistency of Goldie's opinions. As a young woman she had clawed her way out of Memphis, and ever since she had regarded her hometown as a place of misery and defeat. When her only child, Marvie—only Goldie called him Marvin—visited some cousins after college, fell in love with a Memphis girl, then decided to marry her and settle in the city, Goldie nearly boycotted the wedding (though eventually Anna's mother, Carol, had won her over with a mix of canny obsequiousness and actual affection). Later, Goldie pinned her hopes on her granddaughters. After Sadie and Anna both got into good colleges in New England, Goldie celebrated not because of the impact on their education but because she imagined them leaving Memphis for good. And then Anna had fallen for a Memphis man and married him.

Anna knew she couldn't fight a loathing that stretched back a lifetime, and she knew there was no point in rehashing the old argument about Ford, but she did see an opening here, a possibility of mutual understanding. After all, Goldie had been married twice herself, and widowed twice as well. Couldn't she remember that? “You know it's not easy getting over a loss like that,” Anna said. “You understand love. You remember how you felt about Poppy and Marvin Feld.”

Goldie looked up from her plate. The shift in topic momentarily threw her, but she recovered soon enough. “Who could forget them?” she asked, her tone seeming to imply that her husbands merited remembrance, while Anna's did not. “Marvin Feld was a gorgeous man from an outstanding family. I had nothing back then. We were deeply in love, and I was lucky to get him. I was devastated when he died.”

At another time Anna might have been offended by Goldie's undisguised dismissal of Ford, but the obviousness of her tactic just made her look silly. Across the restaurant, a toddler screamed and they both turned to look. Goldie didn't mind children in restaurants, but she expected them to behave like adults. This child was tossing French fries across the room, and as their waitress bent to pick the food off the floor, the artful rips in her neon blue stockings became pronounced. Goldie said, “You'd think the management here would maintain some standard.”

Anna was still thinking, though, about what her grandmother had said. Despite the use of words like “deeply in love” and “devastated,” there was a flatness to Goldie's account of her first marriage. After so many years, Goldie's appreciation of Marvin Feld had settled into something rote and offhand. “What about Poppy?” Anna asked. She had heard the Saul and Goldie Rosenthal story so many times that it felt more like legend than true history: Goldie, widowed after the death of her war hero husband, took her fatherless little boy with her when she went shopping for handbags in New York City. Haggling for a purse, she met an ambitious leather goods wholesaler who married her and adopted her child. Goldie and Saul worked hard, invested their money perfectly, and soon had apartments in Palm Beach and New York, Louis Vuitton luggage, and for Goldie, summers in Rome.

Goldie looked at her blankly. “What about him?”

Anna suddenly wasn't sure what she wanted to know. To talk about widowhood would once again draw them back to Ford. She wanted to stay away from that subject. “You remember how you felt about him,” Anna said.

Goldie looked annoyed, as if Anna were questioning her loyalty in some manner. “I would have died without your Poppy.” She unzipped her pocketbook and began rooting around inside it. “He saved my life.”

Anna couldn't help herself. “Did your family approve of the marriage?”

“My family?” Goldie gave a dry little laugh. “What did they care? If I had died, they would have come to my funeral, but they wouldn't have paid for flowers or anything. I was absolutely on my own.”

An image of the young Goldie appeared to Anna then—not the domineering grandmother, but the young widow, vulnerable and full of need. In terms of family support and material comfort, Anna had much more to keep her afloat, but still, she shared with Goldie the experience of profound loss followed by emotional chaos. The grief that had colored her days during Ford's illness had devolved after his death into something more dull and pervasive, like a low-grade flu that drained her of energy. She wondered what Goldie had done to keep herself intact, and if Goldie had, like Anna, ever suffered from tortured recollections of how the man she'd loved had slipped away.

If the young Goldie had been sitting across the table from her, Anna would have reached over and taken her hand. They could have formed a support group together, had the timing been right. But the Goldie facing Anna now had long ago left behind such agonies. She found her lipstick and compact, flipped open to the mirror, then began applying a fresh coat of color to her mouth. “I wouldn't rave about this restaurant,” she said, “but it suited our purpose. We had to eat.”

3

The Unexpected

F
ord started losing weight in the fall of 2000. He'd gotten a promotion at the University Libraries and ran the Special Collections division. Sometimes Anna would stop by and find him sorting through postcards of Memphis in the 1930s. Other times he seemed to spend entire days in meetings discussing interlibrary loan services and expanded reference hours. In other words, sometimes he loved his job and sometimes he hated it.

At first they thought that the weight loss came from stress. The state had cut the library's budget, and now he was doing not only his own work but also that of his former assistant. He came home late at night, tired and irritated. The food lover who had once eaten three large meals a day plus snacks now found himself unable to finish a piece of grilled chicken. “I'm just not hungry,” he told her. He'd go to bed, and she'd stay up watching TV and wondering if he was depressed. When she did finally get in bed with him, Ford was sleeping so soundly that her own movements on the mattress never woke him.

“I think you might have mono,” she told him. On weekends he would sleep for fifteen or sixteen hours at a stretch, and simply climbing the stairs to their porch seemed to wear him out. “You should go see Dr. Snider.”

“I get a checkup every year,” he told her. “I'm fine.”

They had not been getting along for months, and sniping had become their natural way of interacting with each other. “Whatever,” Anna replied.

So they waited, but in March the nosebleeds started. Usually they happened at the end of the day, when he was especially tired. Then he got one during a staff meeting at the library. He was giving a presentation about reorganizing the archive on the King assassination. The provost, who had a particular interest in Dr. King, was at the meeting, which made the silence especially awkward while Ford fished in his pocket for Kleenex. Eventually he had to leave the room, and though he managed to stop the bleeding and get back to his presentation within a few minutes, he had lost his concentration, and the bloodstains on his shirt embarrassed him. That afternoon he made an appointment with their doctor. “Can I come?” Anna asked.

“I'm not a kid, Anna.”

“I have to know that you'll ask the right questions.”

“Fine. Then come.”

They visited their general practitioner, Susan Snider, on the day that their first daffodil bloomed that spring. “Hey, Ford,” Dr. Snider said, barreling through the door of the examining room. She was a tall, solid woman whom Anna had known in high school and who had gone on to play volleyball for the U.S. Olympic Team. Today it took Dr. Snider a second to notice Anna in a corner of the room. Once she did, Anna saw in her face the quick deduction that the “fatigue” Ford had described to the nurse on the phone might be something more complicated. “Hey there, Anna,” she said gently.

Anna managed a cheerful “Hey,” but both she and the doctor were looking at Ford.

He sat on the examining table, a patient's smock pulled around his naked body. Eventually Anna would grow used to the look of exasperation on his face. Now, he sighed and cocked his head toward Anna. “She's worrying,” he said. “She wanted to be here.” Though the words sounded annoyed, his tone was so full of unexpected affection that it took Anna a moment to come up with a reply.

When she did, she tried to sound relaxed and easy. “I know. I'm a pain.” She stared at her husband, suddenly awash in love for him.

The doctor sat down on a wheeled stool, opened her laptop, and held it on her knees, scanning the screen. “Looks to me like you're due for a regular checkup in about a month,” she said, absently rolling her stool back and forth across the floor. “What's up?”

Ford shrugged. “It's really nothing. I'm just tired a lot.”

“A lot of stress at work?”

“It's terrible,” Ford said emphatically, as if to convince them of the cause for his malaise. “I'm at the University Libraries. Cutbacks. You know.”

The doctor stood up and set her computer on the counter. “Just let me check a few things.” She did the usual examination, half talking to them, half concentrating on what she was doing. Ears, throat, heart, and lungs. Then she held Ford's arm to check his pulse. “What's that bruise?” she asked.

They all looked at the inside of Ford's arm. “I don't know,” he said, turning to Anna. “Do you know how I got that?”

It was a large bruise, the kind of thing that could only come from a fairly painful injury, but she, too, had to shake her head. She hadn't even noticed it. “Is it new?” she asked.

“I don't know.” Ford looked as mystified as she was.

The doctor didn't say much then, but she became more focused. She found more bruises, one behind Ford's leg, another on his back. Ford said, “Are you thinking she beats me?” He was grinning, but Anna could see that he was becoming concerned. She tried to laugh.

The doctor smiled, then asked Ford, “Any other problems? Changes in your sleeping patterns? Your diet?”

“I've been sleeping a lot.”

“Like what's ‘a lot'?”

Ford looked at Anna. His exhaustion had created a distance between them. He went to sleep so early and woke so late that they never talked in bed these days, seldom talked at all. Now, though, she could see that he wanted her close. She couldn't, of course, know it at the time, but the look on his face at that moment, his sudden and frank expression of need, marked a shift in their relationship. With that one simple glance between them, Anna slipped right into her new role as caregiver, though it would be weeks before either of them understood that.

“Well,” she told the doctor, “like on Friday night, he came home and went to bed at around eight, and then he slept until noon. He did the same thing on Saturday night. Could it be mono, maybe?” Now she suddenly wanted mono, because the bruises scared her.

“And diet?”

Ford kept his eyes on his wife. She said, “He's lost some weight.”

“Anything else unusual?” the doctor asked.

Ford shook his head. “I think that's it.” But when he saw Anna staring at him intently, he asked, “What?”

“The nosebleeds?” There had been a couple of occasions in recent weeks when Ford had grown furious over Anna's nagging about his health. She did her best, then, to sound gentle and uncertain, like an imbecile making random connections.

In retrospect, though, she would have preferred his anger, because the fear on his face at that moment nearly broke her heart. “Do you think that's related?” he asked.

“I'm just wondering,” she said vaguely. Had Ford never considered these questions? Had he failed to notice that these days he always spit out blood when he brushed his teeth?

The doctor kept her attention focused on her computer, into which she was putting her notes. “This is all very helpful,” she told them.

In the end, Dr. Snider ordered a range of blood tests and asked them to come back the next day. There was a comfort to the fact that they would have some answers very soon, but the urgency added a new reason for concern. Didn't lab tests usually take longer? In any case, Dr. Snider offered nothing in the form of hypotheses. “Do you have any ideas?” Anna asked.

“Oh, there are a lot of possibilities,” she told them, offhand now. “Don't worry.” She looked at Ford. “You need to get some rest, obviously. I'm not saying you should skip work, but I'd like you to take it easy until we get to the bottom of this.”

Both of their mothers went with them to Dr. Snider's office the next day. Anna's mother, who drove, tried to offer cheerful commentary on everything from the possibility of rain to the opening of a new Whole Foods near her house. When no one responded, though, her voice eventually trailed off. Ford's mom was catatonic. Once they arrived at Dr. Snider's office, the mothers stayed in the waiting room while Ford and Anna filed through the door and into the maze of examining rooms and offices. This time Ford didn't have to strip off his clothes. The nurse led them into the doctor's empty office, where they sat in chairs in front of her desk and stared at pictures of her kids. The night before, Anna had asked Ford if he'd like to talk. “Why speculate?” he'd replied, before heading off to bed. Now, in the doctor's office, Anna felt like she was crossing an ocean just to reach over and take his hand.

After about ten minutes, they heard the doctor in the hall. She was laughing with a nurse about a basketball game they had both watched on TV the night before. Anna let go of Ford's hand because she could feel herself shaking and she didn't want him to sense it. Briefly, she began to talk to God. She wasn't making deals exactly. She was simply saying, “Please, please, please.” It seemed, at that instant, that her entire life had been leading up to this one moment, in these two chairs, in front of this desk.

Dr. Snider walked in. “How are you two doing?” she asked.

“Fine,” said Ford.

“Fine,” said Anna.

“Are those your mothers out there?” They nodded. The doctor said, “That's very sweet.”

Ford said, “I think we need to know what's going on.”

Now, Anna's entire body had begun to shake. She sat on her hands and tried to breathe deeply.
Please, please, please
.

Susan Snider moved some papers around on her desk, not looking up at them for such a long time that Anna realized she wasn't actually searching for anything. She was merely trying to choose her words. “I'm not going to be cagey about this,” she said. “Your blood counts concern me. Your white blood count is highly elevated and your platelets are extremely low.”

They waited. Ford, clearly trying to control his impatience, said, “That doesn't mean anything to us. We're not doctors.”

“You're severely anemic,” she told him.

“Anemia?” asked Ford.

Anna felt that she could breathe again. “Anemia,” she repeated, like it was a silly punch line to a morbid joke. Didn't people take iron pills for that?

As soon as the word came out of her mouth, though, she saw by the expression on the doctor's face that they had misunderstood.

“Anemia may be a symptom of something more serious,” Dr. Snider explained. She picked up a pen on her desk and wrote something on a pad of paper, then tore it out and handed it to Ford. “I'd like to make you an appointment with an excellent oncologist, Dr. Stephen Tran. He's over at UT.”

“An oncologist?” Anna felt herself sliding down in the chair.

“I'm concerned that it's leukemia,” Dr. Snider said.

Ford said nothing. Anna wanted to scream, but she pushed her hands into her knees and bit her lip instead. “How can you know something like that?” she demanded. “All you did was take some blood.”

Dr. Snider rolled the pen back and forth on her desk. “This is not a diagnosis. My job is to recognize the symptoms and send you to a specialist.”

The consultation continued for a few more minutes. They could not have accused Susan Snider of wrapping up too quickly and sending them on their way. But there was, and always would be, a chasm between the information doctors had and the information patients needed. Because the most important questions were ones that Dr. Snider could not answer, and neither could the bright and conscientious Dr. Tran, or the various other specialists they would meet along their way: How could such a thing have happened? How long would Ford live? And as Ford would demand to know in his darkest, most searching moments, Why me?

Eventually they stood up and Dr. Snider walked them to the door. She put her hand on Ford's shoulder. “We're going to do the best we can for you,” she said.

Anna looked at her husband. Had he become paler and more fragile in just the last few minutes?