The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (27 page)

17

Empty Shelves

B
y February 1942, President Roosevelt had ordered all Japanese Americans out of the regions along the Pacific Coast. People of Japanese descent, most of whom were U.S. citizens, were told to pack up their things and report to receiving centers, from which they would later be relocated to more permanent quarters in internment camps. The Nakamura family congregated on the morning of February twenty-fourth on Post Street between Buchanan and Sutter. Henry and his new wife arrived by taxi with his mother and Mayumi. They had three trunks between them, plus a couple of duffels full of sheets, towels, and other dull but necessary household items, which took up an infuriating amount of space. Henry's father had remained at the house in Golden Gate Park for another hour or so. He had been wandering through the gardens all night. “I see no need to rush,” he said. By that evening, they would be living in temporary housing at the Tanforan Racetrack, just outside the city. “We will have nothing to do when we get there, in any case.”

Henry didn't argue with his father. He merely instructed him to meet the rest of the family at Uncle Aki's store, extracting a promise that the old man would show up. Henry could imagine his father now, moving slowly through the garden, taking time at each bed to offer a silent good-bye.

The rest of the family dragged their things inside the store and piled them against the wall. The shop, once so full of goods, was now nearly empty. It represented a bitter success for Uncle Aki, who had managed to winnow down his inventory so completely that he could leave behind only bare shelves instead of the vast array of items on which he had invested his entire fortune. “I've got money in my pocket,” he said grimly, “but it doesn't come close to covering what I spent to buy the goods.” The price slashing in Japantown had been so drastic over the past few weeks that even non-Japanese had begun to shop in their stores, attracted, finally, by the bargains.

“I had one lady in here looking at the kimonos,” said Uncle Aki. “Why would she even want a kimono? But she looked so happy. ‘These prices are indecent!' she exclaimed. She would never have shopped in a Japanese store if it had actually cost her money.”

Henry ran his fingers across the top of an empty shelf. As always, it was free of dust and grime. Even when Uncle Aki was leaving the place, closing his shop perhaps forever, he had spent the last evening cleaning. Henry understood. He had left his office on Market Street in pristine condition, too.

“This is ridiculous,” Henry muttered, but no one wanted to talk about what was happening, including him. They simply moved through the tasks of packing up and leaving.

The women went back into the storeroom with Uncle Aki to make some food. How long would they have to wait before they could again cook their own rice in their own kitchens? According to the government announcements, they would be piled into buses and taken to the racetrack on the outskirts of San Francisco, where they would live for the months it took for their “permanent” quarters to be completed in the desert. Henry walked out onto the sidewalk and sat down on the bench near his uncle's storefront. All up and down the street now, people were getting out of cabs and filing out of trucks and cars, parcels and bags in their arms. Henry had heard that the old horse stalls at Tanforan had been converted to barracks. Would he and his fellow Japanese be expected to drink out of pails and eat dried corn and the occasional apple?

About that time, Henry saw Goldie coming toward him up the street. She was wearing red heels and a slim fitted skirt with a matching jacket and white blouse. She looked so pretty and fresh that it seemed completely obvious that he could never have married her. How long would a woman like that survive in some barracks in the desert? How could she have sacrificed that much for him? As she approached, he realized that she didn't see him on the bench. He slumped deeper into his seat, hoping to let her pass. She had come to see Mayumi anyway. It would be better if she and Henry didn't talk.

But Goldie spotted him. There had been a time when she found Japanese faces indistinguishable, but that time had long since passed. Even with his unbrushed hair and wrinkled clothes, he stood out for her amid the jumble of other harried, disheveled-looking people on that sidewalk, just as he would stand out for her amid all the thousands of Japanese who were now congregating up and down the coast, preparing to be sent away. “Well, hello there!” she called, giving her voice the same easy enthusiasm it would carry if she had run into a friend shopping in Union Square. “I almost didn't see you.”

Henry stood up, trying to muster whatever dignity he had left. Goldie held out her hand to him, and when he took it, her skin felt so cool and soft that he dropped it immediately. He saw a trace of disappointment cross her face, but he could do nothing about her feelings now. “How are you?” he asked. Standing close, he saw that she looked pale, thin, and somewhat shaky. Her dark eyes, always haunting to him, looked almost ghostly now. Mayumi had, not surprisingly and as she had predicted, been “let go” by Feld's, but she and Goldie had managed to get together a few times for some halfhearted shopping. Henry had heard, therefore, about the appendicitis.

“I'm just fine,” Goldie replied. “Things are just fine at the store. There's been some trouble importing silk—”

“The war,” he said.

“Oh, yes, of course, the war.” She shrugged, and her voice trailed off. She looked around. Some of Henry's fellow future internees were leaning against the buildings smoking cigarettes. Others hunched on the piles of their belongings, trying to doze. Many watched with mild interest this awkward exchange between the depressed-looking Japanese man and the lovely, delicate Caucasian woman.

“I thought I'd come say good-bye,” she said, then quickly added, “to your family.”

“Mayumi will be glad. And my parents.”

Goldie bowed her head, nodding. She stared at her feet, idly grinding the toe of her pump into the sidewalk. Henry thought of something then. “Goldie?”

She looked up at him, her face bereft. “Yes?”

“The book of prints. Remember it?”

“Of course.”

“I have it here with me. Why don't you take it? You love those pictures.”

He was trying his best to sound detached, surrounded as they were by more than fifty disconsolate people who had nothing else to do but watch. Why hadn't he thought of the prints before? She'd have something, at least, to remember him by.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “Would it look strange?”

He lifted his arms a bit, then let them drop against his sides. He didn't care what his family thought—he had given up too much for them already—but he didn't want to do anything to embarrass Goldie. “If they ask, I'll just tell them you agreed to take care of the portfolio while we're gone. But it's yours, really.”

“All right.” Her face filled with relief and pleasure, which gratified him at first. But then, as all sign of sadness disappeared from her face, the apparent ease of her emotions confounded him.

“So that's enough to make you happy?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, is it so important to be happy that you can ignore everything else?”

“What are you talking about?”

He shrugged. “Some people would rather be honest than happy. Or right than happy. Or rich than happy.”

“Wouldn't being rich make you happy?” she asked, and her perfect naïveté made him laugh.

“Well, not necessarily.”

It was Goldie's turn, though, to grow impatient. “Why are you asking me this question?”

“Is having those prints enough to make you happy and forget about everything else?”

“Of course it's not enough. Nothing is enough.”

As their conversation became more urgent, it became more muted. Unable to hear their words clearly, the bystanders listened with heightened attention. Henry felt grateful that his family, at least, could not see them out here.

“Some people can bear anything but sadness,” he said. “Heartbreak. Loneliness. Terrible loss. But they ignore it all because they just don't want to feel sad anymore.”

“Is that what you think?”

“That's my observation.”

“And you?”

“I think I have a deeper capacity for sadness than you.”

“What are you trying to tell me, Henry?” She seemed to be angry now, but he couldn't stop himself. It was almost as if because he couldn't have her, he had to fight with her instead.

“It's not a bad thing,” he said.

“What?”

“I think you'll be feeling better soon. I don't want to make myself sound pathetic, Goldie, but I won't.”

“You won't what?”

“Be feeling better.”

Goldie turned away from him then. She put her hand over her eyes, and he could see that she was trying to compose herself. Along the sidewalk, people were elbowing each other now. Goldie didn't seem to care, perhaps because she was not the one who would have to live with them at a racetrack for the next few months. But Henry couldn't blame her, either. He was, after all, the one who had married someone else.

Goldie finally looked at him again. “You don't know anything about what I'm feeling,” she said. “You have no idea.”

She was right. He didn't. “Forget what I said,” he told her. “I'm upset. I don't know what I'm talking about.”

Goldie's expression had hardened, though. Henry felt a surge of panic and contrition. “Maybe we should get the prints?” he asked, desperate not to say good-bye to her on such a note.

Still scowling, Goldie followed him into the store. The air was fragrant with the smell of rice. “Henry, is that you, son?” his mother called from back in the storeroom. “Come eat.”

“I'll be right there,” he answered. He looked at Goldie. “We'll surprise them,” he whispered. “They don't know that you're here.” This last fact, of course, was obvious, but neither Goldie nor Henry was able to think very clearly by then. At that moment Henry cared about nothing but taking her hand and leading her back behind the shelves. The family's bags lay piled on the floor. He squatted down and dug through a trunk until he found the velvet case that held the prints; then he stood up and set it on a shelf. He could hear his family talking in the kitchen. Goldie was watching him uncertainly. Gently, he nudged her backward until he was pressing her against the wall. He lifted his hand to her face and slowly slid his fingers into her mouth. Her skin was so pale, her lipstick so red. She pressed her mouth together then.

A great deal had changed since the last time the two of them touched. Henry had begun a dull sexual relationship with his wife. And Goldie, in a private room in Pescadero, had learned that desire had an end result. Now, preparing to say good-bye, maybe forever, Henry's emotions crystallized into anguish over the difference between what he had and what he wanted. “It should be
this,
” he told himself, pressing firmly against her. Goldie, who was used to deprivation, felt less a sense of injustice than Henry, but she had a clearer sense of what she needed at that moment. She wanted Henry's touch to replace, in her mind, the memory of Alan Stevenson's pawing. That was something, she told herself, that she deserved. And so she took Henry's hand from her mouth and guided it downward, helping him slip his fingers between her stomach and the waistline of her skirt, then continue down and in between her legs. In other circumstances, he might have been surprised by her directness—in any case, he would have a long sojourn in the desert to consider that—but right now, sliding his fingers inside her, Henry's conscious thoughts were very simple. He pressed his mouth against her ear. “Goldie,” he whispered, his voice more like breathing than words. She closed her eyes and held him there.

The bells on the door rattled and they heard someone come inside. Henry pulled away. A man's voice called into the room in Japanese. Goldie brushed her hair off her face, tucked her blouse into her skirt. Henry, looking flushed, managed to respond to his father. “Dad,” he said, and in what was probably the hardest phrase he would ever have to utter, he put a stop to everything: “Goldie's here.”

Later, after she had said good-bye to the family, taken the prints, and gone away, Henry sat out on the sidewalk again, staring at his fingers, which her lips had stained dark red. It was a trick of his imagination, of course, but for a long time afterward he would continue to see the color there. And when he sniffed his fingers, he could still detect her scent.

 

For the first month or so after San Francisco's Japanese citizens were boarded onto buses and driven away, Goldie and Mayumi wrote to each other. The racetrack where the family was initially settled lay only a few miles south of the city, but Mayumi might as well have traveled to Australia considering how long the mail took to reach its destination. Most letters arrived bearing the results of censorship—a stamp saying
OPENED BY EXAMINER
, a black mark obscuring a sentence or phrase, even, on occasion, a paragraph clipped out entirely.

The logistical difficulties of their correspondence, however, did not present the greatest challenge. For Goldie, the act of writing to her friend, and knowing that Henry was nearby, stirred emotions she couldn't always manage. It reminded her of the thirst dreams she sometimes had—always dropping the glass of water before she had a chance to drink. For her part, Mayumi never knew what to say. Although she found it depressing to describe the experience of living with eight thousand people in rows of dusty barracks, she felt equally depressed by the prospect of ignoring her situation. Their letters, then, were stiff and pleasant, full of forced humor that neither found funny.

Goldie wrote: “I wish that you could have been with me today—I went by La Fleur d'Amour and the SALE they had going was no better than the REGULAR prices they had last month. I said to the salesgirl—‘You must think we're DAFT'—and then I huffed out!!!! Seriously—their shoes are not worth half that price.”