The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (11 page)

 

Mayumi came from a different world entirely. Her father had been born in the town of Takayama, in Gifu Prefecture in Japan. As a distant cousin of the imperial family, he enjoyed certain privileges as a child. He had visited the palace of the emperor and played with the emperor's children there. His mother had been trained in the exacting rituals of the tea ceremony, and his father had studied with the prince himself. The family had a beautiful home full of art and antiques. Mayumi's father, though, spent most of his childhood in the gardens. He wasn't interested in the family rituals. He loved the quiet of the outdoors, and most particularly he loved to watch things grow.

His parents, though, expected something more of him. They imagined that he would marry within the imperial succession. He was smart enough, and talented, too, but he shied away from the gatherings at which he would have met such people. Instead, he stayed home, worked in his garden, and when he finally began to notice women, he fell in love with a neighbor girl who came from no lineage whatsoever. They married and decided to leave Japan, where history threatened to suffocate them and where the imbalance in their backgrounds seemed likely to trouble them forever. A few months after the wedding, they immigrated to the United States.

When Goldie discovered that her new friend was the daughter of a baron, she could hardly contain her joy. According to Mayumi, Japan had a line of royalty that dated back farther than England's. Goldie had had no idea. Nobody taught Japanese history in grade schools in Memphis, and Goldie's education had stopped there.

“You're nearly a princess,” Goldie said. She was sitting on a stool by the windows during her lunch break, trying to keep the crumbs of her sandwich from getting caught in the fine weave of her skirt.

Mayumi was painting a backdrop in vertical stripes of purple and yellow. “It doesn't even mean anything in this country,” she pointed out. Mayumi wasn't blind to her heritage, but she honestly couldn't see how it affected her current situation. “I'm no different than you here.”

Goldie disagreed. “Your parents left everything behind to come to America, and my parents left nothing behind to come to America,” she said.

“What does that mean?” Mayumi asked.

“My parents had nothing. When my mother arrived here, she had the hat on her head. My father had the shoes on his feet.”

“And they made their fortune nonetheless,” said Mayumi, who still believed in the American dream.

“No. They were born with nothing and they never made any more than that. They had ten children and an ugly patch of land on the outskirts of Memphis.”

“Where did your parents come from?” Mayumi asked.

“Russia or Spain. Someplace like that.” Goldie knew that they had traveled through Spain on their journey to the United States. Her sister Rochelle liked to say that they came from Spain, and Rochelle had even tried to study Spanish once, as if she were trying to rediscover their long-lost birth tongue. Goldie didn't quite believe it. The only thing she knew for sure was the way the scratchy weeds had tortured her feet in their yard in Memphis.

“I'm about the future,” Goldie said.

“I'm about the future, too,” said Mayumi. They smiled at each other, because their roots were so different, but they had flowered very much the same.

 

Often, after work, Goldie and Mayumi would take the bus to the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. Mayumi's father, Hiroshi, had created the garden for the city of San Francisco, and when Goldie met them, the family lived in a slope-roofed house on the grounds, surrounded by maple trees and pines.

Out in the avenues, the sky would fill with great banks of fog, and even in the late spring the girls bundled themselves in sweaters and scarves to keep warm. Goldie, new to town and easily disoriented, always felt lost. Mayumi knew every shortcut home. As soon as they got off the bus on Fulton Street, she would bound down a narrow path and disappear into the woods with Goldie right behind her. Both girls knew that the mud and dirt would ruin their shoes, so a few feet in from the road they would hide behind a bush and, leaning on each other for balance, slip off their heels and stockings before running, barefoot, the rest of the way through the trees.

It was a sign of how much she had come to trust Mayumi that Goldie took off her shoes at all. Goldie's feet were the one relic of poverty that she had not been able to put behind her. She had been born with extremely wide feet, and a childhood of wearing her sisters' narrow, hand-me-down shoes had deformed her toes, leaving them knotted together like a braid. It wasn't until she was fourteen years old that she finally earned enough money to buy a pair of shoes that fit. By then it was too late, though. The damage was permanent.

The first time Mayumi saw Goldie's feet, she agreed that they were ugly, but she was practical about it. “Just don't wear open-toed shoes.”

“I would never wear open-toed shoes. Are you bananas?” Goldie said, but she was worried. “What about when I get married, though?”

Despite Mayumi's dreaminess, she had a practical side that gave Goldie comfort. “Just keep your shoes on. By the time you're married, he's going to be so crazy for you that you could have fur on your feet and he'd think it was beautiful.”

Despite her ugly toes, Goldie could walk for miles without complaint. She never had trouble keeping up with Mayumi, and by the time they entered the tea garden gates she was always happy to plop down on the grass by the Moon Bridge and dip her feet in the stream. She loved the way the current lifted the dirt from her toes, swirled it into little pinwheels, then carried it away. The wooden Moon Bridge made Goldie feel that she was stepping back to a time when people fought with swords. If the pleasures seemed childish, particularly for a twenty-year-old woman, it was only because her own childhood had never allowed for such abandon, and consequently, she felt entitled to it.

Once they reached the garden, Goldie and Mayumi could quickly find Baron Nakamura in his overalls pruning one of his shrubs, or prowling amid the cherry trees, which needed constant care. As soon as he saw them, he would wave them over, then usher them up one path or down another, expecting them to care as much about each new bud and shoot as he did.

“Girls,” he said one day, “Goldie must see our excellent development.” He was small and solid. His mustache, waxed at the tips, looked like quotes around his features, which were as sharp and angular as letters chiseled in a marble frieze. Goldie could not forget that he was a baron, and she loved the quaintly formal rhythms of his accent. He might have dressed like any gardener, but to Goldie he seemed royal.

They followed him to a cluster of willow trees surrounding a fishpond. He squatted down on the rocky ledge and pointed at a giant carp the color of a peach blossom, its tail moving through the water like a swath of silk. “She is twenty-five years old,” the baron said. “She arrived last week in a barrel on a boat from Japan.” Goldie stood among the willow trees, staring at the fish, whose color was so different from that of the many orange or orange-and-white carp surrounding it. The idea of transporting this creature across the ocean seemed unbelievably extravagant to a girl from Memphis who owned a single pair of shoes, but it gave her a sense of possibility that made her almost giddy.

“That fish is older than me!” She laughed.

“She was swimming through a pond in Japan before we were even born,” Mayumi said. She didn't share her father's love of nature, but the age of the fish, and the extent of its travels, mesmerized her, too.

The baron liked their enthusiasm. “She will live a hundred years,” he told them. “Or longer. She will see your grandchildren, Mayumi.”

Mayumi smiled, but she didn't enjoy this kind of talk. She liked the idea of love, but she had little interest in marriage, or raising a family, and she heard her father's words as a subtle pressure, as if he sensed her misgivings. Goldie, though, found their interactions sweet. If someone had asked what intoxicated her more—the beauty of the garden or the fact that she was talking to a
baron
in it, she would probably have claimed that the garden “enchanted” her. The truth was, however, that Goldie didn't have an eye for nature. In her experience, nature was the moody force through which you tried, and usually failed, to grow a few limp beans on a tangle of vines. The tea garden introduced her to a different kind of nature, one that seemed both tame and resplendent, but her early experience had made it hard for her to feel its charms.

The enchantment came from the Nakamuras themselves. In her forlorn youth, Goldie had dreamed of meeting a prince, but the fantasy served more as an escape from her own circumstances than from any true belief that such a thing could happen. When Rochelle invited her to California, Goldie saw it as an opportunity, not as a magical gift of fortune. She continued, even after starting her new life in San Francisco, to formulate new hopes for her future—a smart, hardworking, handsome husband; a nice house; enough money—but Goldie was also a practical person who focused on the possibilities in front of her and not on foggy notions of things beyond her grasp. In other words, she had never anticipated meeting a royal family, but the fact that she had served to expand her ideas about what was possible.

“I believe, sir, that you know every leaf in this garden,” Goldie said, trying her best to sound both contemplative and poised.

The baron appreciated the comment. He liked any acknowledgment of his accomplishment on this piece of land that, many years before, the city of San Francisco had offered him. He squatted down on the path and lifted a handful of gravel, then let it sift slowly back to the ground. “Every pebble, my dear,” he said. “Every pebble.” Goldie recognized the overblown theatricality of the gesture, but it moved her nonetheless. In her own life, older people were sickly, lying in bed and coughing up blood. She had known plenty of young people to be sickly, too. Her mother had begun to cough up blood before she was out of her thirties. The sick and the old had the same dried-out smell of spilled medicine, unwashed clothes, and sugary perfume. Moving from Memphis to San Francisco had made Goldie conscious of her own youth and promise. Now Baron Nakamura showed her that age could be beautiful, too.

On those afternoons, they sat on the terrace overlooking the garden, amid the almost musical sounds of the stream. The house, a compact structure built of wood and stone, was so well integrated into the geography of the garden that visitors would sometimes unknowingly step up onto the terrace, not understanding that they had entered a private home. Perched on a stool, a porcelain teacup balanced on her knee, Goldie felt like an audience member chosen to sit backstage during a great performance of ballet.

The baroness, who moved with even more grace than her husband, served them sweet cakes and sugar-coated candies called Drops from the Moon. She was so serene that even a sudden noise—the roar of a truck out on Fulton, a distant baby's offended scream—wouldn't ruffle her. She rarely spoke, and when she did her voice never rose above a whisper. In comparison, Goldie felt her own voice to be piercing, her walk jarring, her body sharp, loose, and uncontrolled.

Mostly, the baron and his wife told stories about Japan. They had both grown up in Takayama, a hill town of narrow lanes and soot-dark houses. They talked of the thousand-year-old gingko tree in an ancient temple, the open hearths that warmed their homes, and visits to hot springs just outside of town. One day they spoke of Mount Fuji, to which they traveled just after their wedding, and their attempt to climb it on an early spring day that unexpectedly turned snowy.

“I only really began to know my wife,” said the baron, “when we had to hurry back down the mountain together during that snowstorm. I had brought a pair of warm mittens, but she only had thin lace gloves. We held hands and stretched a single mitten around both of them, then walked like that all the way to the bottom. That's how I think of Mount Fuji.”

Mayumi, sitting on a stool next to Goldie, had heard this story dozens of times. Sometimes the lace gloves were calfskin. Sometimes the snow was hail. She didn't doubt the general truth of the tale, but she had tired of it. She tried to catch Goldie's eye, to share her impatience, but she could see that Goldie found the romance stirring. Goldie had never even heard of Mount Fuji, which surprised Mayumi and reminded her that every childhood takes place in its own tiny universe.

“There are a dozen haiku poems about every possible view,” Mayumi said, despite her weariness of such topics, “about every possible kind of light.”

“Or, as our poet Basho wrote”—the baron paused to give the line its full effect—“ ‘Rising mist . . . the day when Mount Fuji can't even be seen, most intriguing!' ”

The baroness added, “On warm nights, I still dream of Mount Fuji.”

“She does. I hear her sighs,” her husband said, turning his eyes toward the clouds and sighing, too.

Mayumi stood up then and started taking the tea things back inside. She became irritable when her parents romanticized the past. “They left Japan, didn't they?” she had once remarked to Goldie. It bothered her, in particular, that her father continued to act as if his lineage mattered here. “He should be known for the garden,” she complained, “not for who his parents were.”

Goldie didn't argue, but she believed that lineage mattered quite a lot. A baron remained a baron, even in Golden Gate Park. As much as she felt grateful to live in America, where anybody with gumption could make it, the old hierarchies impressed her. Goldie knew that Mayumi's parents
bestowed
their kindness on her, like a king and queen touching the tips of their scepters to a lowly subject's head, but their condescension didn't bother her. If the baron spoke to her in a particularly haughty tone (“You wouldn't understand, my dear,” he might say), she felt pleased that he would speak to her at all. Once, she noticed the baroness watching her with barely masked distaste. Goldie realized that she had been holding her teacup with only one hand, while the baroness and Mayumi cradled theirs gently, making a bowl with their fingers. Instantly, Goldie lifted up her other hand and mimicked their gestures. Mayumi might cringe over her parents' ways, but Goldie saw the opportunity to learn from them. She knew her place in the social order, and she was determined to make her way up.