The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (34 page)

“What happened?” Anna asked.

Henry was leaning down, peering under the bushes, trying to jostle something free with the tip of his cane. “When they spawn, the male fish become aggressive—not surprising, right? Sometimes the females are pushed into the rocks at the side of the pond. They get cut. It happens all the time. People who
care
about their fish, they have protections for this sort of thing. They line the edges of their ponds with rubber to mitigate the impact. Golden Gate Park, though, doesn't do that. So a few of us have taken matters into our own hands. We're a kind of patrol.”

He had by now managed to get his hands on the object under the bushes, which was covered by a tarp. It was a plastic tub with a backpack inside it. He carried it back to the pond, not even bothering to use his cane now. Then he pulled from the backpack a large towel, some packets of medication, and a pair of thigh-high rubber boots. He looked up at Anna. “You must think I'm thoroughly crazy now.”

“Not really,” Anna said. She was too surprised to think at all, actually. “But you've got to let me help you at least.”

He did. Over the next few minutes, they filled the tub with pond water, wetted the big towel and a wad of other smaller ones, and set up what amounted to a clinic right there on the grass. Anna, who had been expecting to spend the morning discussing Hiroshige and Kunisada with an expert in art and antiques, felt some disappointment that things were not unfolding as she'd hoped. On the other hand, she liked the idea of performing first aid on a wounded fish.

Then Henry sat down on the grass and started taking off his shoes.

Anna looked at the tall rubber boots and at the wobbly rocks that lined the water. Trying for a firm tone, she said, “You're going to have to let me do that.”

He looked up at her. “Do what?”

Anna thought of her grandmother, lying in the suitcase. She thought of Ford in his bed facing the dogwoods, and she knew that she was beyond the point at which she could watch Henry put himself at risk. “I'm going to have to be the one to go into the water.”

Henry stared up at her from where he had seated himself on the grass. He already had one shoe off, but none of these tasks were easy or comfortable for a man in his eighties. “Saving fish isn't your battle,” he told her.

Anna sat down beside him and began to pull off Goldie's heels. She had no interest in discussing the life experiences that had led her to this point, but she knew that she could not allow Henry Nakamura to step into the water. “Actually, it is my battle,” she said.

Somehow, they managed. Anna took off her jacket, rolled her sleeves far past her elbows, pulled on the boots, and tucked the legs of her trousers down into them. Despite these precautions, she had no illusions that the Armani suit would emerge undamaged. Sure enough, as soon as she stepped into the pond, she felt a splash of water crest the top of the boots and run down her leg. She kept walking anyway, making slow progress across the pond. Once she reached the rocky ledge, it took some maneuvering, amid the swirl of suddenly disoriented fish, to find the ailing Miss Cho. Surprisingly, the fish didn't put up a fight, though Anna did have to reach fairly deeply into the water to grasp her. Somehow she managed to haul the fish out of the water, walk it back across and out of the pond, and hold it on the wet towel while Henry spread some kind of salve across the wound. Then, gently, Anna carried the fish back down to the ledge, squatted down, and released her into the water.

As Anna pulled off the boots and rearranged her now-wet clothes, Henry repacked the supplies and prepared to hide the tub back under the tree with the wet towels draped on top of it. “She's awfully pretty,” Anna said, looking down at Miss Cho, who had reassumed her place beneath the rocky overhang.

A couple of tourists, holding hands, ambled by and paused to look down into the koi pond. The now-placid water showed no hint of the disturbance that had taken place only minutes before. “She adored that fish,” Henry said.

Anna looked at him. Was he one of those old people whose attention constantly drifted to the past? “Your wife?” she asked.

Henry threw his head back, laughing. “Oh, dear no. Not my wife. She played bridge. I'm talking about Goldie. She loved Miss Cho.”

As Anna followed Henry back to the teahouse, she tried to imagine the circumstances in which her grandmother would love a fish, even one as beautiful as Miss Cho. Unfortunately, though, Anna could not imagine Goldie in any way at that moment, except in reaction to the state of her Armani suit. Patches of wet fabric clung to Anna's legs. She reeked of pond. Goldie would kill her.

It wasn't until they had returned to the pavilion that Anna, washing her hands at the small sink by the kitchen, realized that she had lost Ford's ring. The days of grasping Bridget's steering wheel in the blazing sun had browned the skin on her hands, except for one newly evident pink strip across her thumb, where the ring used to be.

She must have made some audible gasp of surprise, because Henry, seated at a table at the edge of the pavilion a few feet away, sounded alarmed. “Is everything all right, my dear?”

Anna stared down at her hand and thought of the slimy pond water, the slippery fish, the looseness of the gold band on her thumb. She pictured Ford's ring, slowly falling until it settled into the sand beneath the rocky ledge.

“I lost my ring,” she said. She noticed a curious flatness to her voice, which didn't at all match the tumult inside her. “My husband's wedding ring.”

When she turned from the sink and looked at Henry, his face was filled with concern. “He died,” Anna explained. “My husband, Ford. He died two years ago. I've been wearing his ring.” Her eyes scanned the teahouse, darting from the concrete floor to the wooden eaves to the little rattan chairs around the empty tables. Of course, she didn't see the ring in any of those places. “It's probably back at the pond.” She was halfway across the pavilion already.

“Anna?”

The sound of Henry's voice made her stop. She looked back and saw that he had pulled himself up from his chair. “Why don't you have some tea first? You could use a rest. We could look at the artwork together. If it's possible to find your husband's ring now, I would think we could also find it in half an hour.”

Anna wanted to say that waiting half an hour would do nothing to relieve the anxiety she felt at this moment, but she also noticed that Henry was using his cane for support now. Perhaps he had depleted his reserves saving that fish. She had come here, after all, to meet him. She should at least sit with him for a few minutes before rushing off to dig in the sand at the bottom of the pond. Anna thought of Goldie and how fragile she looked at night, as if every ounce of stamina had been spent in the effort of getting through the day, and she realized that she could not abandon Henry now. “I guess you're right,” she said. She walked back to their table, and they both sat down.

Henry glanced toward the kitchen, from which they could now hear the sounds of activity. “Our tea should be ready soon. It can fortify your search.” When Anna didn't respond, he added, “Your grandmother was always a big fan of Japanese tea.”

Anna remembered the Nightingale Palace, and she told him about the game she and Goldie used to play.

He seemed to like that. “I don't know if she cared more about the tea itself or the ceremony that went with it,” he said. “I do know that your grandmother loved good manners more than anyone I ever met.”

“That's so true.” Despite her anxiety about the ring, Anna began to laugh, surprised that he would remember such a telling detail.

“How is she?” Henry asked. He was still smiling, but his expression had taken on a certain awkward formality, which seemed tender and self-conscious at the same time.

“She's great.” The intensity of Henry's gaze made Anna suddenly protective of Goldie, but she also felt that, after all these years, he deserved some concrete information. “We had some problems when we drove through Indiana, but now she seems as good as new. Her life has been very full.” It wasn't easy to summarize the past sixty years, so she detailed the various milestones—Goldie's husbands, her son, the family's business successes. “My grandfather was kind of a homebody, but my grandmother loves to travel. She still does, after all these years. She's leaving for a cruise out of Dubai tomorrow.”

“Lovely,” said Henry. His attention suddenly shifted to the waitress, to whom he offered a grateful smile for her appearance with the tea tray. Middle-aged and wearing a kimono, the woman tottered toward them on a pair of dangerous-looking wooden sandals, the tea tray in both hands and, over one arm, a wool blanket that she motioned for Anna to take and drape over her clammy body. She must have been a comrade on the fish patrol.

“Thank you, Yukiko,” Henry said. Anna pulled the blanket over her legs, and they both watched as the waitress set a teapot, cups, saucers, and a bowl of rice crackers on the table in front of them. Then she silently went away again.

Henry leaned forward and peeked inside the teapot. “We'll let it steep for a few minutes.”

“I'd like to hear about your family, too,” Anna said. “I'm sure my grandmother will want to know.”

“Of course,” Henry said. He told her that his sister, Mayumi, had opened a boutique dress shop in Los Angeles and that Kim Novak and Audrey Hepburn had been ardent clients. Henry had remained in San Francisco, building his antiques business. These days, though he still went to the office most mornings, his two sons ran the daily operations. He and his wife, Akemi, had been married fifty years, but she had passed away in the 1990s. Since then, he had lived in an apartment on Russian Hill, not far from his boys.

“It's nice that your family lives nearby,” Anna said.

Henry, leaning back in his chair, traced the tip of his cane along the low stone wall that separated the pavilion from the garden beyond. “My sons are devoted and I love them. But, you know, I've always been independent. I traveled so much with my business. Sometimes I'd be in Europe for months, purchasing antiques. I wasn't always attentive to my wife and children. My sons still feel angry sometimes. I wasn't a perfect father.”

This revelation, spoken with a tinge of remorse, surprised Anna, and she felt honored that he would be so candid with her. Still, she took so long to respond that Henry began to laugh. “I'm such an old man, dear,” he told her. “My children often treat me like a child, so you'll have to forgive me for taking the opportunity to have an adult conversation.”

The tea, he decided, had steeped enough. He poured them each a cup, then jiggled the bowl of rice crackers, bringing some of the dried green peas to the surface. “I'm supposed to stay away from salt, but I cheat,” he said, sliding the bowl toward Anna.

She tasted a few. “Delicious.”

Henry said, “You really do have your grandmother's eyes.”

Maybe his interest reflected nothing more than curiosity over similarities between family members, but his gaze was so piercing that Anna had to look away. “My sister and father have the dark circles under their eyes, too,” she said, trying to hide a sudden surge of shame, because Henry was so kind and Goldie had abandoned these people. Was that Anna's responsibility now?

Henry said, “My sister adored Goldie. She loved everything about her.”

It was, finally, this expression of unbounded devotion that gave Anna the impetus to address the issue directly. “I'm really sorry,” she said, mustering the courage to look at him. “I'm sorry that my grandmother just left San Francisco, and I'm sorry that she took your portfolio and disappeared.”

Henry stared at her, trying to piece together what Anna was saying. Then, figuring it out, he raised his hands in the air as if to stop her. “Not at all, dear. You have to understand that the war was going on. That meant everything.” His face now filled with emotion, and it took him a moment to find the words to continue. “Goldie did nothing wrong. Ever. Anyway, we heard bits and pieces over the years. Our friend Eugene Blankenship always kept us posted.”

Anna was stunned. “You knew Mr. Blankenship?” All through her childhood, Mr. Blankenship, the proprietor of a Palm Beach shop called Eugene's, had come by the house whenever the Rosenthal granddaughters came to visit. The very English Mr. Blankenship had never had a family of his own, and he brought odd and wonderful gifts—trains on roller coasters, banana-shaped telephones, picture frames with secret compartments. Sadie later said that it was Eugene Blankenship, rather than any of the Queer Theorists she met at Yale, who convinced her that one could be gay and lead a full, rich life. Mr. Blankenship had died a few months after his one hundred and second birthday.

“Of course,” replied Henry. “We were friends for over fifty years.”

The waitress brought them a plate of sweets—peach-shaped candies surrounded by pale green sugary leaves. A group of elderly men carrying cameras—maybe a photography club?—stood clustered around a maple tree that leaned out over the stream. Henry watched Anna. After a while he said, “Would you tell me about Ford?”

Anna kept her eyes on the photographers by the stream. Under other circumstances, she could not have managed to answer such a question, but something about Henry made her try. “Well, he was a university librarian,” she said. “Super smart. When he was healthy, he probably read ten novels for every one I finished. And he was funny and very kind, too, at least until the end. He got pretty crabby then.”

“People do,” said Henry.

“They do. It's not fair, I guess, to blame him for that, though I often have. Anyway, he was diagnosed with leukemia about five years ago, and then he died the year before last. What else? He loved jazz, which doesn't do a thing for me.”

Henry said, “Jazz doesn't do a thing for me, either.”