The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (10 page)

In any case, the drawings in front of Anna now weren't
Shaina Bright,
and that felt like victory. Anna had no obligation to tell a comprehensive story here. She did not have to draw Goldie calling Ford “Porky Pig” and “Elmer Fudd,” while at the same time claiming that he was a charming gold digger capable of making off with the family wealth. And she didn't have to draw herself responding with equal heat, accusing Goldie of being a “social climber” and “snitty”—which sounded close enough to
shitty
to convey that idea as well. Perhaps most importantly, she did not have to re-create the substance of the exchange, which passed in the few brief seconds before Anna finally walked out the door. Anyway, the argument wasn't all that different from what had just occurred upstairs at the Hampton Inn, except that Goldie was harping on some new issues now, and Anna's sense of her future had altered completely.

Anna remembered how, after the fight in New York, the family machinery had lurched into gear. Her father had worked the phones with the determined optimism of a diplomat mediating the rift between two warring nations. Her mother had tried to cajole Goldie, while using psychology with Anna, imploring her to relent by acknowledging that Goldie really was a bully. Sadie was less forceful, but her reaction hurt the worst. “Nana's totally out of line,” she said, “but you're just as stubborn as she is.” Ultimately, the urging of the family had no effect, and Anna proved her sister right by refusing to see her grandmother for the next five years.

Why did that moment in Goldie's apartment matter now anyway? So much time had passed. It mattered, though, and not because the fight with Goldie had been so final and dramatic. No, there was another reason, which Anna had never confessed to anyone. The episode in Goldie's apartment had undermined Anna's confidence in her feelings for Ford. As resolutely as Anna had resisted Goldie's criticisms, they had a noticeable effect anyway, causing her to be more seriously bothered by things that she wished she could ignore. Anna could easily dismiss the comprehensive charges that Ford was “beneath” her, for example, but she did begin to feel disturbed by smaller things that showed a lack of refinement, like the way he held his knife and fork. It embarrassed her that, standing in a room of Impressionist paintings at the Met, he pronounced the name of the French artist Cor-bett instead of Courbet. On the other hand (and this had nothing to do with Goldie's complaints), Anna also began to worry that he might be too brainy for her. He brought Marcel Proust home from the library and he actually read it. He liked to argue about philosophy, which Anna couldn't bear. She found Ford's jazz albums unbearable, too. Did they have enough in common? What would they talk about when they got old? After the weekend in New York, Anna lived with a niggling worry that she and Ford were not, in fact, quite right for each other. The anxious fights that began soon after led to more mundane conflicts about daily life: Whose turn was it to wash the dishes? Who forgot to water the plants? They married anyway, because they loved each other still. Didn't everybody fight? When she did, finally, walk down the aisle, it wasn't so much from certainty in their union as from resolve not to break up.

Anna gazed at the sketches in front of her. The act of drawing always gave her joy, but now, for the first time in so long, she could also find real satisfaction in what she had accomplished. These three panels were nothing like Hiroshige (or at least no one would ever discern the influence of one on the other), but his work had helped her to rediscover, in some small way, the expressive quality she felt she'd lost. Unwilling to put the drawings away, she fiddled for a while, adding some sheen to the coffee table here, more ruffles to Goldie's scarf there. To Anna, the catastrophe of the visit to Goldie's apartment did not feel remote. In all other aspects, her recollections of her husband were growing hazier every day. And yet, for better or worse, she could still see him so clearly, stiff backed on the chair, his pants sliding down his butt. Why did that memory, of all memories, have to remain clear?

Up at the front desk of the Hampton Inn, a new group—all flip-flops and soccer balls and teenagers with skateboards—had just arrived in a muddled flurry of noise and action, dragging Anna back into the present and reminding her that even if Goldie had fallen asleep, she was sure to wake up early and ferocious, like a screaming infant. For another minute, she idly watched the new guests check in, corral their kids, and make their way to the elevators. Her body felt tired from the day's drive, but she also felt more centered and content than she could remember feeling for years. The act of drawing the scene of that awful afternoon had forced her to recall it, but it also gave her the blessing of distance from it.

Anna stood up, stretched her achy body, and put away her drawing materials and the prints. She remembered a condolence card that a distant cousin, Mindy Steinberg, had sent after Ford's funeral. The cousin, a granddaughter of Goldie's sister Rochelle, had lost her own husband in a car accident a few years earlier. “You have a choice here,” Mindy wrote. “You can be sad or you can be happy. BE HAPPY.” Anna had only met Mindy once or twice (Rochelle and Goldie never got along). The advice, which Anna took as kindhearted, also seemed naive. She sent Mindy a printed acknowledgment card, but she did not respond to the message directly. Now she reconsidered Mindy's words. She remembered, too, how once, on a whim, she had asked Goldie the secret of her busy social life. “Make your own party,” Goldie had answered. “Call people. Never wait for them to call you.”
Would that really work?

The clock on the wall above the microwave showed that it was nearly midnight. Anna picked up her things and hurried upstairs, focusing all her energy on the hope that Goldie was sleeping, which would spare Anna another altercation.

On the third floor, the elevator opened onto a general commotion in the hallway, testifying to the fact that the hotel's new guests had taken rooms on her floor. The teenagers were kicking a soccer ball down the hall, while one of the mothers yelled at them to be quiet. Anna caught the mother's eye and grinned sympathetically. She wanted to demonstrate that she could be an easygoing neighbor (if only to distinguish herself from her more rigid grandmother). She pulled her key card from her pocket and pushed past them, worried now. If the noise woke Goldie, then the two of them would have to deal with each other again that night.

Goldie wasn't asleep. As Anna discovered as soon as she walked through the door, Goldie wasn't even in bed. The lights were on, too.

“Nana?” Anna stepped inside.

“Anna?” The voice came from a hidden corner of the room. It sounded strained, and wrong. “What took you so long?”

It took Anna a moment to find her grandmother, who lay on the floor by the window, tangled inside one of her suitcases with the standing floor lamp on top of her. “I fell,” Goldie cried. It looked as if she had stumbled, grabbed at the lamp for support, then crashed into the suitcase, bringing the lamp down with her. Anna squatted down. Goldie's left leg was pinned beneath her body, her knee wedged inside, and her peculiar position, combined with the fallen floor lamp on top of her, had made her unable to pull herself up. Somehow she had cut her arm, too. The bleeding had stopped, but dried blood had smeared across her face and hands. She looked at Anna, her face as pinched and pale as that of a terrified child. “Where were you?”

Anna felt the weight of a thousand mistakes on her shoulders—every little way she'd erred with Ford—but she forced herself to concentrate on what she had to do right now. Hadn't she read somewhere that moving a person with a spinal injury could result in paralysis? She pulled the floor lamp off Goldie, but she didn't try to get her out of the suitcase. “I'm calling an ambulance,” she said.

Goldie's eyes fluttered, then closed. Her breathing slowed. “You're—” she murmured, seemingly too exhausted to keep talking.

It took Anna a moment to punch in the right numbers on the phone because she had to dial out of the hotel before she could reach 911. “We're at Hampton Inn, Room 318,” she said. “Hurry!”

She ran to the door and propped it open, then rushed back to squat on the floor next to her grandmother. “It's okay, Nana,” she whispered. “I'm not leaving. I'm staying right here.” She held Goldie's hand, trying to keep the sound of panic out of her voice. Goldie's eyes remained closed, as if it were all she could do to concentrate on her breathing. The pain seemed to intensify, then lessen, over and over again. Goldie's hand would relax in Anna's, then suddenly grip her fingers tightly. During those long moments, Goldie's breathing almost stopped. Then, at last, her fingers would relax and she would begin to breathe again. “This happened before,” she said. “I almost died.”

“You're not going to die this time, Nana,” Anna said.

She gently ran her finger across Goldie's cheek, brushing off the dried blood, and found herself proposing her little deals with God again.
Please, please, please.
She didn't have the gall to ask for much. Couldn't Anna be the one to feel the pain this time? Why was it always someone else?

The ambulance seemed to take hours to arrive. She tried to keep Goldie conscious. “It's okay. You're going to be fine,” she said, though that seemed impossible now.

Goldie opened her eyes. Her breathing was shallow. “I almost died last time,” she said.

“You're not going to die,” said Anna.

Finally they heard the siren down below. A moment later two paramedics in blue uniforms came through the door, first a tall guy with a moustache and then a woman in her fifties with a long blond braid, carrying a leather case. “Hey. I'm Robin. What's the problem?” she asked.

“My grandmother,” said Anna, looking up at them. “She fell.” She stood up and moved out of the way.

Instantly the paramedics squatted at Goldie's side, asking questions. “Ma'am, can you talk to me?” the woman asked. She looked at Anna. “What's her name?”

“Goldie. Goldie Rosenthal.”

“Mrs. Rosenthal? Goldie, I'm going to need you to talk to me.”

Goldie's lips moved slightly, but her eyes didn't open. The paramedic felt for her pulse. “We're going to have to get you out of this thing, but you might have fractures and we don't want to hurt you more,” she said. “We'll lift the whole suitcase onto the bed, then we'll move you onto the stretcher. It might hurt for just a second.” Anna saw Goldie's mouth pucker in fear, but her eyes didn't open. The other paramedic left the room. Within a few seconds, he rolled the stretcher inside. As Anna watched, they lifted Goldie to the bed while still inside the suitcase. Then they gently moved her out of the suitcase and onto the stretcher. The act of unknotting her body seemed to inflict whole new waves of pain, and Goldie began to scream.

“She's eighty-five!” Anna yelled at them.

“Ma'am, we're doing the best we can,” grunted Robin.

Once she was on the stretcher, Goldie stopped moving. She seemed to have turned inward, as if she were concentrating entirely on the effort of getting through each moment as it passed.

“Can't you help her with the pain?” Anna asked.

Robin glanced up at her colleague. “Let's give her Dilaudid,” she said.

The guy with the moustache opened the case and prepared an IV, hanging the plastic bag of medication on a hook attached to a bar above the stretcher. Robin rolled up Goldie's nightgown sleeve and slid the needle in, then attached the catheter. It all happened so quickly that Goldie hardly seemed to notice. She didn't even wince when the needle penetrated her skin.

“We're going to take her on in now,” said Robin. “ It's Cameron Memorial Hospital. You can meet us there.” And then they wheeled Goldie out the door.

“I don't want to leave her! Can't I ride with you?” Anna called after them, but the room was empty now. She ran to the doorway and saw them disappear on their way to the elevators. Up and down the hall, other guests of the hotel—she saw some of the soccer players from a few rooms down—had opened their doors to watch. Anna turned back into her own room and shut the door behind her. Her entire body was shaking, and she sat on the bed and began to cry. It really seemed that there wasn't a person in the world who was safe with her.

Part Two

6

Salesgirl

I
n the spring of 1940, Goldie Rubin traveled alone by train from Memphis to San Francisco. She was twenty years old, on her first journey, and because she could not afford to buy a berth, she spent the entire five-day trip on the observation deck, having stashed her suitcase in one of the sleeping cars. At first she subsisted on the cheese and bread she'd brought from home. When that ran out, she bought one sandwich a day, and only at station snack bars, where the prices were cheaper than on the train. She cut the sandwiches into quarters: one for breakfast, one for lunch, one for dinner, and one for emergencies.

Sometimes, too, she would amble through the club car in between seatings and scavenge bread. Despite her poverty, she dressed smartly. Her mother had taught her to buy one very good thing and supplement the rest of her wardrobe with less expensive accessories. She had a very good wool coat, for example. When she wore it, people didn't seem to notice that her dress had faded, that the leather on her shoes was cracked and thin, or that her hats were merely scraps of beautiful fabric that she tacked and darted into interesting shapes and pinned to the top of her head. During that brief ten minutes between the early and late service, she hoped that the waiters might mistake her for an actual patron, or perhaps, she thought, they were too busy to notice a young woman snatching leftover dinner rolls off the tables. In fact, nothing slipped by the railroad staff. They'd seen all the tricks and scams, from freeloaders hiding in the toilets to the furtive trysts that took place late at night behind the flimsy curtains of the cheaper berths. They noticed Goldie, of course, but she was young and pretty and they sympathized with her situation. When the dining car waiters saw her approach, they turned their backs a little, just to give her a chance.

By the time Goldie made it to California, where her married sister, Rochelle, met her at the station, she had grown weak and ill. Rochelle's first thought, upon seeing the pale-faced Goldie totter from the train, was to regret that she'd invited her to come live with her in San Francisco. Rochelle had two young children and a traveling-salesman husband who left on Monday morning and didn't return until Friday night. She had invited Goldie to live with her family in the expectation that Goldie would help around the house and provide her with some companionship. She didn't want another responsibility on top of the ones she already had. Fortunately for both of them, a big meal of brisket and potatoes revived Goldie quickly. She might have seemed on the edge of starvation, but she was also young and healthy, so she recovered amazingly well. Within a week she had found a job at Feld's Department Store. Dozens of young women had applied for the position, but Goldie impressed the manager, Mr. Blankenship, with her sense of style and her previous experience as a clerk in the hat department at Lowenstein's in Memphis. She was hired at the decent salary of twelve dollars a week, and she quickly earned a raise.

Goldie wasn't a beauty in the way that film stars of the day were beautiful, with their fair complexions, angelic smiles, and easy grace. Goldie had olive skin, thick brown hair, and dark circles around her deep-set eyes that gave her the haunted look of a waif in a silent movie. Her body, though, was elegant and curvy, her eyes bright, her expression quick, her mouth full of sultry charm. The thing about Goldie that most impressed her customers at Feld's, however, was the fact that she had an almost magical way with clothes. No matter what she put on, it looked like something out of
Harper's Bazaar
. The simplest shirt or the slimmest, plainest skirt had the look of Paris couture as soon as she slid them onto her body. The wealthy San Francisco matrons who shopped in the store recognized that quality in Goldie and wanted it for themselves. During her first week, posted in millinery, she sold seventeen hats.

It took Goldie longer than that, though, to make friends. She was younger than her colleagues, with less experience, too, and they resented that she sold merchandise so easily, and that she so greatly impressed Mr. Blankenship. So Goldie ate her lunch alone. It wasn't until Mayumi Nakamura began to work at Feld's, in April, that Goldie made a friend. Unlike Goldie, Mayumi wasn't hired as a salesgirl. She had taken design classes at the Academy of Art College, and Mr. Blankenship hired her to create the store window displays. When they pulled the paper down from Mayumi's first window, Goldie thought it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Mayumi had created an ocean scene in the tiny six-by-eight-foot space. The walls and floor were aquamarine, speckled with different shades of green. Growing up from the corner, a giant coral sculpture, carved from foam and sponge, stretched like an undersea tree toward the surface. Cut-out fish of all shapes and colors—feathery purple, shiny silver, and striped in orange and yellow—hung from the ceiling. In the midst of all this, a mannequin had been reborn as a mermaid, twisting in the current, her shimmering tail making a joyous flip through the water. Only one piece of Feld's merchandise was on display in this entire scene. It was the flower-link sapphire necklace that glimmered on the mermaid's neck.

Until then, store displays had followed a model of crowding every window with as much merchandise as possible. The more you put in the window, the better chance you had of attracting customers with at least one product they might like enough to come inside and buy. Mayumi's windows were never meant to sell particular objects (though the necklace was extraordinary, it was meant to accessorize the mermaid more than anything else). Rather, Mayumi's window sold an idea of beauty and happiness that would draw people inside to choose merchandise that might satisfy their own desire for beauty and happiness.

For Goldie, Mayumi's window served as a revelation that beauty was not a quality within a particular object, but a more generalized attribute to strive for throughout life. She began to wonder about the existence of ideas greater and grander than she could yet understand, and she began to consider new possibilities for her own future. Looking at the mermaid, for example, did not kindle a desire for underwater exploration, but it did make dreams that once seemed impossible—like traveling to Paris or Rome—just a little less remote. Goldie began, then, to keep an eye on Mayumi and plotted ways to talk with her.

Mayumi, though, was difficult to know. She didn't work regular hours but would instead show up when she felt like it, perform her magic on the windows, and leave. During the time she spent in the store, she worked with serious concentration, but her movements were languid and she never seemed anxious or even concerned. Often Mayumi would simply stop whatever she was doing and sit there, on the floor or wherever she happened to be, staring into space. Did all artists work in such a dreamy way? Goldie had never met an artist before, so she couldn't know.

Goldie also noticed that Mayumi didn't act like other people. In Goldie's experience, normal conversations followed certain cues. You might say, “How are you?” and the other person would respond, “Fine, thank you. And you?” Mayumi didn't care about those cues. If someone asked, “How are you?” Mayumi might reply, “I'm thinking of Florence all the time. I need to see the Uffizi Gallery.” Or she'd say, “I think I can find a shade of red that is also black. Or black that is also red,” and then she would laugh at herself because she knew she sounded silly. Goldie liked that laughter, too.

And finally, Mayumi was attractive in a way that struck Goldie as completely new. In Goldie's experience, women attracted men by using certain predictable, and fairly conventional, methods. One girl might be pretty and sweet. Another had curves in all the right places. Another might be flashy and somewhat dangerous.
Prettiness,
to Goldie, always amounted to the ability to buy the right clothes to fit that year's fashion. If you had money, you bought silk. If you didn't have money, you bought cotton or wool and kept it clean and neat. The rules were fairly simple.

In Mayumi, Goldie identified a new kind of attractiveness. Later, when it became more of a religion for her, Goldie would call it “refinement.” But in 1940, she had not yet heard the word. Other women layered fabrics in showy, predictable ways—blouse tucked into skirt, matching jacket, coordinated heels and stockings, a hat and a pair of gloves. Mayumi rejected these conventions. She might pair, for example, simple black wool trousers with a lacy ivory shirt. Often she didn't even wear a hat but would instead pull her long hair into a bun and don large hoop earrings as a sort of balance.

People less attuned to fashion would have seen Mayumi, said, “She looks good,” and left it at that. Goldie observed more carefully, however, and was able to see the particular sophistication with which Mayumi dressed. While others might have observed Mayumi in a green crepe dress and thought, “That's beautiful,” Goldie could see that the dress was beautiful for one specific reason—a twist in the pleat of the skirt that captured and accentuated the narrow line of Mayumi's waist. As Goldie increasingly admired Mayumi for her ability to create her own style, she also began to think that she could learn from her.

Mayumi took more time to notice Goldie. What Goldie saw as a dreamy aloofness actually stemmed from nearly constant inspiration and glee. Mayumi had spent months convincing her parents to let her get a job. Once they finally did, and she found her position at Feld's, she went into a frenzy of creative activity. She had always loved making things. Now, the windows offered an outlet for every idea in her head. If Goldie was a girl adrift, Mayumi was a girl set free.

It took several weeks, then, for Mayumi to begin to notice anything beyond the paint cans and fabric and tissue paper surrounding her. And then, like someone emerging from a fog, everything around her clarified, and there was Goldie, standing in the doorway, watching her.

At first the two talked while Mayumi worked, Goldie spending her lunch break on a stool just outside the platform of the window, while Mayumi, in her apron and canvas slippers, applied wallpaper or worked on some trompe l'oeil effect on a back wall. “Who is your favorite designer?” Goldie asked. She had become partial to Elsa Schiaparelli, but worried sometimes that her designs were too fussy.

“Mainbocher,” said Mayumi. She looked over to see Goldie's reaction, which, as expected, was one of surprise and dismay.

“But he doesn't even show his fashions,” Goldie said. The designer, who had a studio in Paris, only allowed a small coterie of people to view, and buy, his clothes.

“It doesn't matter,” said Mayumi. “I can look at photographs of his clients and learn from him.”

“But what do you learn?”

“All that matters is elegance,” Mayumi said. She was creating a scene of lovers at sunset, and she wasn't happy with the color pink she'd chosen for the walls. She dipped her paintbrush into the bucket of white paint and started to apply a thin topcoat to mute the intensity of
SPRING ROSE
.

“Not beauty?”

“Not beauty. You can have beauty without elegance, but you can't have elegance without beauty.”

Goldie thought about this one. Mayumi was right. Goldie had seen a lot of beautiful trashy-looking girls. And she thought of the elegant women who occasionally came into the shop. Fate might not have given these women any natural good looks. To be honest, some of them were downright homely. But if they were elegant, they became beautiful. Wallis Simpson, for example, was nothing to look at but had become one of the most admired and attractive women in the world. Goldie knew that she herself was pretty enough, but she decided then that she wanted to be elegant even more.

 

When Goldie thought back on her childhood, even the periods of joy were laced with sadness. She was only thirteen when her mother died, and though she could recollect random images of her early life in Memphis—the creaky porch of her house, the chicken coop by the shed, the greasy smell of Friday's matzo ball soup—she could feel her memories of her mother growing dimmer as every year went by. The most vivid one came from a summer day when they held a party. The Jewish families in the area knew each other well, and that day many of them gathered in the dusty backyard of Goldie's house on Bullington Avenue, a shoddy, narrow street that, to Goldie's eyes, led nowhere in both directions. Goldie, the youngest of ten children, must have been about eight or nine then. Only the four youngest, all girls, remained at home, and none of them considered summer a vacation. The time away from school meant that they had to work to earn the family extra money. Posie sewed. Eleanor cleaned a neighbor's apartment. Rochelle collected bottles. Goldie went from house to house selling the eggs she collected from the family's hens.

Early that morning she woke to find her mother, Libke, in the kitchen making strudel. In retrospect, she didn't remember the occasion, but imagined that it must have been a very special day. The sight of her mother cooking at all surprised her. Libke's illness meant that she seldom had the energy to get out of bed, much less cook anything. More often, Posie or Eleanor would throw something together on the stove, and Goldie, Libke's favorite, would carry in soup to her mother on a special wooden tray. This morning, though, Libke had put on a dress and an apron, and she stood at the kitchen counter like any other mother, making strudel.

All afternoon, people came over, not just friends and neighbors, but the six older children, too, with their husbands and wives and babies. There were also cousins who took the streetcar from the Pinch, a larger Jewish neighborhood on the other side of town. The children played at the back of the yard. The adults spoke Yiddish, which Goldie couldn't understand. The men and women teased each other, and the men told jokes while drinking beer and eating awful-smelling cheese and a smoked fish that stank like rotten eggs. Late in the day, when the air was still hot but the sun had dipped behind the house next door, they sat in chairs pulled out into the yard. Goldie's mother stretched across a blanket on the ground, her head and shoulders propped on pillows, and Goldie fanned her. Libke had taken off her apron, revealing her best dress, a pale blue belted cotton with a lace collar and white silk rose pinned just above her right breast. Her hair hung down in little ringlets that Eleanor had helped her curl, and she wore pink rouge and Fragrance of Paris. All across the yard, the guests reclined on chairs and blankets in groups of three or four, some sitting only a few feet away from Goldie's mother. Each man tried to be cleverer than all the others. Goldie noticed that as they told their jokes, they glanced at Libke, assessing her reaction. For as long as Goldie could remember, the men had called her mother “the Queen of Bullington Avenue,” and they continued to do so even now, when she lay with a damp hand towel spread across her forehead. She didn't say a word, but if the joke was funny, you could see her mouth ease very slightly into a smile. Goldie fanned her. Libke's fingers swept across the tufts of grass at the edge of the blanket. The men told their jokes. Eventually, of course, lying on the grass became too difficult. It was Louise, the eldest of the siblings, who finally helped Libke into the house when the coughing started. Louise had never married, but everyone, even the brothers, did what she said. Now she told Goldie to stay outside, so Goldie lingered on the edge of the porch. Even there, she heard the violent sounds of her mother coughing into the old rags that they washed every day but that still retained the stains of blood. Outside, the joking stopped and the men turned to whiskey. Someone, Goldie couldn't remember who, passed the strudel. She had no memory at all of her father being there, though he must have been.