The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (8 page)

4

The Pictures

A
fter their meal at Kirsten's Diner and the strained conversation that went with it, they returned to their hotel in silence. Goldie's head fell back against the seat as they drove the short distance, but as soon as they arrived, she opened her eyes, got out of the car, and scurried across the parking lot and into the building. Within minutes of returning to the room, she had changed into her nightgown, brushed her teeth, and completed the tender ritual of hanging up her clothes. Now, sitting back against the pillows on her bed, she looked at Anna and asked, “Are you going to sit there like a bump on a log all night?”

Anna was slouched in a chair by the window. She had been trying to build a ring of privacy around herself by reading a
People
magazine. Now, almost like a student unexpectedly singled out in class, she raised her eyes warily. “What?”

“The pictures? Have you completely forgotten about our plan?”

Anna had, in fact, forgotten that she and Goldie had decided to pull out the portfolio after dinner. But Goldie's tone was so harsh and accusatory that Anna had no interest in that now. Not even twelve hours had passed since they left Manhattan, and already she was having trouble remembering why she had decided to come. Something about finding purpose beyond the rut of her own dismal existence. Was that it?

But then Goldie's tone shifted. “I've never shown them to a living soul except for you when you were a little girl,” she said, sounding almost wistful. “It's been years and years since I've even looked at them myself.”

Anna, suddenly touched, stood up, leaving
People
on the table. “Let me get them from the closet,” she said. Earlier that evening, before dinner, Goldie had called in a housekeeper to pull the spreads off their beds and cover the blankets with clean sheets. “I don't even like to think about what's been on those blankets,” she had told the young woman, as if general queasiness would prove the necessity for this extra work. Goldie didn't complain about the room itself, but it disturbed her that they had only one luggage rack. Now Anna stepped around Goldie's second suitcase, which lay open on the floor against a wall, and walked over to the closet. “You never even showed it to Poppy?” she asked. It took two hands to haul the velvet bag up from the floor by Goldie's shoes. Anna carried it over to her bed, and perched on the edge, balancing it in her lap.

“Are you crazy? Have you forgotten him completely? He was a brilliant businessman. I thought you would be cognizant of the fact that he had no interest in art.”

“I guess that's true,” Anna said. When did the word
cognizant
take such a dominant place in her grandmother's vocabulary? Anyway, Goldie was right. Saul Rosenthal was knowledgeable about wine and partial to Italian suits, but Anna had never known him to visit a museum. Goldie, for her part, had famously exquisite taste in clothes and an excellent eye for antiques. Her preferences in art, though, ran toward the sweetly sentimental: portraits of dogs, toddlers cavorting in the sun, doe-eyed girls in pretty dresses. She had spent a good deal of money on her “collections,” as she called them, and so many other wealthy patrons apparently shared her taste in puppies and frilly-clothed children that the work of these artists had increased in value significantly. The effect, of course, was that Goldie considered herself a connoisseur, even if critics derided the work that she purchased.

Readjusting the parcel on her lap, Anna began to open it. “Careful with that,” Goldie said, watching Anna's hands. “Slowly. That's it. Easy. Don't do anything stupid.” Her voice sounded strained, and her breath carried so much nervous tension that Anna wondered if her grandmother's anxiety was actually misplaced guilt for having kept this artwork for so long.

Anna felt some nervousness of her own, a sign of the tension between her memory of the pictures and her awareness that, after all this time, they might disappoint. She had no reason to worry, though. Almost instantly the years slipped away and she forgot everything but the object in her hands. The portfolio was a book, of sorts. It had wooden covers on the front and back, but no binding at the edges. The pages were attached to each other, accordion-like, at the sides, and though the whole thing could have been unfolded to stretch across the room, it made more sense to page through as if it were a book, perusing the pages on one side and then flipping it over to look at the images on the reverse. On one cover, in gold calligraphic writing, were the printed words
The Reverend Maurice M. Castleman, Scenes of Japanese Women.
On the other cover, in the same formal script,
The Reverend Maurice M. Castleman, Scenes of Japanese Life.

“Who is the Reverend Maurice M. Castleman?” Anna asked.

Goldie did not even lift her eyes from the portfolio. “How should I remember? Just open it up.”

Inside each cover lay a piece of yellowed stationery on which the names of the artists and the titles of the artwork had been handwritten. On the side labeled
Scenes of Japanese Life,
someone had written, “Hiroshige, ‘Fifty-three Stations of the Tokkaido Road,' Tata-e Edition (vertical Tokkaido).” The other piece of stationery said, “Kunisada II, ‘The Tale of Genji.' ”

Anna glanced up at Goldie, but her grandmother's eyes had settled on the book, as if she, too, were filled with suspense. “You don't have to pull the whole thing open,” Goldie said. “Just unfold it, a page at a time.” Carefully, Anna began to examine the prints. It was really two different sets of prints, the Hiroshige landscapes on one side and the Kunisada images on the other, the thin paper of each individual print glued along the vertical edges to the ones behind it and beside it, forming the folds of the book. Anna, who had studied Asian art in college, could only vaguely remember the name of Kunisada II, but she had a clear memory of Hiroshige and the influence of his work on Impressionist painters like van Gogh and Monet. It seemed bizarre, and not quite right, to be holding something so precious while sitting on the bed of a Hampton Inn in rural Pennsylvania.

Slowly, Anna paged through the Hiroshige landscapes, a disparate range of turbulent rivers, lonely pine trees, and vast mountain ranges that often included glimpses of the iconic Mount Fuji. She had only been looking for a few minutes before Goldie, impatient, said, “Turn it over and see the other ones.” Anna obliged. On the other side of the book, the Kunisada prints were a different style of art entirely, vivid domestic scenes of elegantly dressed men and women in kimonos. Above the heads of each set of figures hovered a trompe l'oeil fan, decorated in calligraphy and small motifs: a boat, a cherry tree, a burst of wild carnations. Anna loved the oddness of these delicate prints, the whimsy of the ornate fans seemingly floating over the heads of the figures. She did not feel finished with the landscapes, however. When she saw that Goldie had tipped her head against the pillow and closed her eyes, she turned the book over again.

Eventually Anna managed to look through the entire set of Hiroshige landscapes as well as the more intimate illustrations from
The Tale of Genji
. Altogether, there were nearly a hundred prints, and Anna perceived each one with a feeling of intense familiarity and pleasure. Part of her was seven again, Mrs. Yves Saint Laurent curled in the lap of Mrs. Issey Miyake. Another part of her, the adult Anna who worked as an illustrator herself, considered the images within the vast context of art history. A third Anna, the private, grieving one, found herself fascinated by the farmers, fishermen, and teahouse attendants who populated Hiroshige's landscapes. Unlike the well-dressed men and women in
The Tale of Genji
pictures, these tiny figures, struggling against the vast backdrop of mountains, oceans, earth, and sky, somehow reflected the melancholy that had become the dominant feature of Anna's days.

What would Ford have thought of all these pictures? Anna had always felt certain in her judgment about art, even though she lacked conviction in other aspects of life. Ford, in a sense, was Anna's opposite—decisive in general, but quavering when he stood in front of a painting or a sculpture. Before he got sick, the two of them had sometimes gone to the Brooks Museum or the Dixon Gallery, especially when a traveling exhibition came through Memphis. Anna really cared only about work that spoke to her emotionally. After forming an opinion about a piece of art, she would either focus her complete attention on it or walk away. She loved Goya and Vermeer, for example, but Picasso left her cold. Ford, on the other hand, needed to understand why a particular work had received so much acclaim. He would read about the artist before they went to the show, then search out the most famous pieces and stand in front of them, trying to explain to Anna why they were important. As a result, Ford always wanted to slow Anna down. And Anna, though she never expressed this feeling directly, believed her husband was too afraid of art to give any credence to his own taste. Faced with these Japanese prints, and no critical reviews of Hiroshige or Kunisada to back him up, would Ford have been able to recognize their power? She felt a wave of disappointment in him then, followed, predictably, by guilt and a profound wish that she had somehow been a better wife. As a consequence, the artwork struck her as even sadder.

She heard her grandmother's voice then. “My favorite is the one of the man looking at the girl from behind the screen. The fan has cherry blossoms on it, and when the girl sees the man, she looks surprised. She doesn't know what to do about him standing there.”

Anna glanced up at Goldie. “I thought you'd fallen asleep,” she said. She turned the pages of the Kunisada series until she found the cherry blossom picture. The woman, in a deep purple robe decorated with bouquets of red flowers, sat with her back to the man, holding her hands to her chest and glancing at him over her shoulder. Anna held up the book so that Goldie could see. “This one?”

Goldie nodded. “For a while, I'd pull the book out every night. I always spent a long time looking at that poor girl. She made me feel so sad.” Her eyes, maybe from sleepiness, had glazed over and turned rheumy, but her attention remained completely focused. “Isn't that silly?”

“Why didn't you ever show these to anyone else?” asked Anna. It astonished her that something so precious had remained in Goldie's possession for all those years without anyone else knowing. It seemed so out of character. Goldie never held anything back. Why would she keep such a secret? “Did you forget you had them?”

“Of course not. How could I forget?” Goldie had taken the bobby pins out of her bun, and her hair stretched like a gray silk sash down the front of her nightgown. “You're too young to understand. Those pictures came from a very difficult time in my life. I learned to put sad things behind me.”

Anna opened the portfolio randomly and gazed down at one of the Hiroshige images: on the edge of a hillside, a procession of travelers filed through a solitary village at dusk. Through Anna's eyes, the view seemed almost unbearably forlorn.

After a while, she heard her grandmother say, “You think you're going to feel this way forever, but you won't.”

Anna kept her eyes focused on the pictures, worried that at any second she would start to cry. “I don't,” she insisted, but without any real conviction. The truth was that the emotional state that she had experienced immediately following Ford's death—she didn't know what to call it: grief? sorrow? would it help to use a nineteenth-century word like
woe
?—seemed to have evolved into a permanent condition. It didn't help, either, that stuck with her grandmother in this cramped hotel room, Anna was even more vulnerable to Goldie's attacks. She felt as if she were holding the portfolio of her own emotions.

5

A Famously Happy Marriage

S
omewhere in eastern Ohio, Goldie's travel agent called. Goldie had friends all over the world (or Friends All Over the World, as Anna, Sadie, and their parents called them), and her phone rang so often that, in the car, she often sat with her pocketbook in her lap and the phone in her hand on top of it, prepared to receive calls. Anna's father, Marvie, had taught Goldie to use the cell phone years ago, and she loved everything about it, especially the caller ID and the option to press
IGNORE
if she didn't want to answer. She still looked rattled and perplexed every time the phone rang, however. Now, when the notes of “Mack the Knife” blared through the car—the ring tone being the result of Sadie's efforts to program something that echoed the tunes of their grandmother's youth—Goldie managed right away. “Hello?” she said. “Oh, Rhoda. Tell me again about the ship.”

Anna vaguely listened to the conversation—a confirmation of Goldie's seat assignment in Emirates business class and some back-and-forth about a restaurant Rhoda recommended they try in Cleveland. Mostly, though, Goldie wanted to focus on her cruise from Dubai and specifically the ship. Her requirements were inflexible: closet space in her stateroom, elegant people, and edible food, in that order. She didn't care about the itinerary, although she had been collecting suggestions from her friends. “Everyone says I have to see the restaurant with the aquarium in it. You know that one? It's got some kind of Arab name.”

Ohio was flat but green. They crossed over the Cuyahoga River on a bridge that soared so high above the ground that Anna felt like they were traveling in a low-flying plane. In Cleveland, where they stopped for three nights at the Ritz-Carlton, they went sightseeing and got their nails done. Goldie found the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame more delightful than her granddaughter did. “I'm a rock and roller,” she reminded Anna, and after watching concert footage of Aerosmith, announced that she considered the band “out of this world.”

“So you like Steven Tyler?” asked Anna.

“Adore him,” said Goldie, her reaction just vague enough to betray the fact that she didn't connect that name to the lithe-limbed singer they'd just watched prance across a stage.

“And the Beatles?”

On this topic, Goldie showed more certainty. “Fabulous. Wonderful. I always danced to the Beatles in the nightclub of the Hotel de la Ville in Rome.”

In the museum bathroom, they could hear the cheery refrain of a GoGo's hit. Goldie stood at the mirror and watched herself dance, thumbs tucked under her armpits, shoulders swaying. Anna remembered how, when she was a little girl, Goldie would lead her around the living room in Palm Beach, teaching her the Lindy Hop. “You've always been the best dancer around,” Anna said now, feeling generous and full of affection.

Goldie's eyes were shining. “Everybody says that.”

A couple of teenage girls in cutoffs and T-shirts had paused to wash their hands, and now they watched the well-dressed old lady getting down in front of the sinks.

“I've got the beat,” Goldie informed them.

The girls nodded, but they did not seem charmed. Rather, their faces revealed a tinge of dismay, as if a geriatric's passion for rock and roll somehow diminished theirs.

Their reaction did not slip past Goldie. When the bathroom door closed again behind the girls, she caught Anna's eye. “I'd call that two pieces of trash, wouldn't you?”

Goldie's ill will swirled like a toxic vapor through the bathroom. “I didn't see anything wrong with them,” Anna said, trying to deflect it. She tugged her hair out of her ponytail, then pulled it back up again, keeping her eyes on her own reflection so that she didn't have to look at her grandmother's.

But Goldie stared right at her, her anger inflamed by Anna's nonchalance. “That's because you dress like trash yourself,” she said. “How are you ever going to get on with your life?” There was a note of strained desperation in Goldie's voice that, had Anna been able to hear it, might have lessened the nastiness of her words. But given the context, Anna could not hear it.

Rationally, she recognized that Goldie felt insulted by the teenagers. She also knew her grandmother believed that appearance offered a revelation of character—you
can
judge a book by its cover, Goldie would say—so there was a logic, however questionable, to her thinking. If Sadie or their parents had been in the bathroom at that moment, any of them could have concentrated on these facts and gently steered Goldie back to good humor. Anna lacked that skill. Her temper was as quick as her grandmother's, and now, her face hard, she stared at Goldie in the mirror. “So does that make you feel better?” she demanded.

“Does what make me feel better?” Goldie blinked and suddenly seemed to falter.

“Cutting strangers down and being so mean to me.”

It was fortunate, perhaps, that at that moment a woman pushed into the bathroom with a screaming baby in a stroller and a runny-nosed toddler in her arms. The ensuing noise and crowding displaced Anna and Goldie from where they were standing, compelling them to leave the bathroom altogether. The tumult gave Goldie a moment to catch her breath and bolster her defenses, so that by the time Anna opened the door for her, she was able to glide past, sneering, “You're just a Pollyanna. You can only see the good in people.”

“Is that so bad?” asked Anna, trailing her grandmother across the museum lobby. “Is that so bad, Nana?” But Goldie ignored her.

They had planned to buy ice cream sandwiches when they finished at the museum, and they stuck to their plan, even though they were no longer speaking to each other. They sat outside, on chairs overlooking Lake Erie. It was a bright day, but windy, and Goldie pulled her scarf tighter around her neck and buttoned her sweater. Anna, happy to feel the sun on her skin, slid off her sandals and stretched her legs in front of her. The plaza was crowded with fans of rock and roll—moony-eyed couples, a group of bikers in Harley-Davidson leather, and families balancing trays of overpriced burgers while searching for spots at the outdoor tables. Goldie looked around at all the baseball caps and Van Halen T-shirts, crew socks, sneakers, and fanny packs. She must have felt quite superior, Anna imagined, in her Armani.

Anna had not forgotten how, as a child, she had idolized Goldie. For years Anna had considered her grandmother such a perfect embodiment of style and good manners that life with her had seemed as close to royal as one could get. The elegant lady tea parties of Anna's early childhood had been only a part of that mix. In Palm Beach, Goldie let Sadie and Anna try on her clip-on gold hoop earrings and diamond necklaces, or prance in front of the mirror in full-length mink coats that bunched around their little legs, making them look like princesses draped in ermine. It was Goldie who taught them how to put on stockings. It was Goldie who allowed them to eat cold asparagus with their fingers (but required them to eat hot asparagus with a fork and knife, especially if it had Hollandaise sauce on it). It was Goldie who bought them monogrammed thank-you cards when they turned sixteen, insisting that they inscribe them with pretty words like
marvelous
instead of common words like
nice.
In retrospect, Anna could understand how all of these disparate moments of glamour and instruction delighted Goldie as much as it did the girls. How could anything more absolutely confirm the fact that she had made it in the world than her ability to let her granddaughters play with diamonds and furs or to instruct them in the ladylike virtues of manners and poise?

Anna could understand, too, Goldie's disappointment when their relationship soured. Eventually Anna and Sadie reached adolescence and began to shop at Goodwill and St. Vincent de Paul. They turned up their noses at the flowery Laura Ashley dresses that Goldie brought them from London and the beaded leather evening bags she special ordered for them in Rome. They tried to educate her about
vintage fashion,
but she rejected the term completely, declaring, “I suppose you're wearing some stranger's dirty underpants as well.” The situation reached a crisis one spring when Goldie and Saul visited Memphis, and Anna paired a six-hundred-dollar Christian Dior scarf, which Goldie had given her, with pink rubber ankle boots and a 1920s flapper dress missing a strip of fringe at the hem. Anna could still remember the reaction of each member of her family when she walked into Chez Philippe. Marvie's face expressed the dread that accompanies the arrival of long-anticipated bad weather. Carol, whose own taste (much maligned by Goldie) centered on blue jean skirts and the occasional splurge at Ann Taylor, looked sick. Sadie laughed into her napkin. Saul rolled his eyes. And Goldie? She could not have responded with greater fury if Anna had literally slapped her in the face. As Anna's mother later remarked, “You should have just walked in with a megaphone and declared: ‘All that stuff you tried to teach me, Nana? I don't value any of it.' ”

Goldie didn't give Anna another item of clothing until she left for college, by which point Anna had given up Goodwill in favor of the Gap—not exactly high style, but Christina Herrera was wearing jeans from the Gap by then, so even Goldie kept a couple of pairs in her closet. When Anna graduated from Brown, Goldie gave her a cashmere wrap from Yves St. Laurent and a card on which she'd written, “I love you very much. Don't disappoint me this time.” For a while, Anna didn't. And then she met Ford.

Goldie, tiny and hunched over in her wire chair, wiped her mouth on a paper napkin and then folded it neatly and held it in her hand, smoothing down the creases in her trousers. “Let's go,” she said. It was hard to imagine that Goldie was unaffected by the words that had passed between them, but she was excellent at pretending that she didn't care. When they walked back to the car, Goldie went first, her head held high. Anna stayed a few paces behind her.

Somehow they made it through the rest of the afternoon and evening in this same atmosphere of strained silence. They ate dinner in the restaurant that Rhoda the travel agent had recommended, and though the bread was stale, the chicken was dry, and the wine was barely passable, neither of them mentioned it.

At 3:17 in the morning, Goldie decided to express herself right there in their well-appointed room at the Cleveland Ritz-Carlton. Actually, she must have decided some time earlier. It was 3:17 when Anna, pulled from her dreams, finally looked at the clock on the table while her grandmother harangued her from the opposite bed: “ . . . such a bright future in front of you . . . get yourself out of this mess . . . I know a few things about life. . . .” How many long minutes had passed before Anna began to absorb these words?

“What are you talking about?” she finally asked. “Why are you saying this now?” Her voice sounded scared and plaintive, like a child's.

“What do you mean, ‘saying this now'?” Goldie's words were spirited and emphatic. “When else would I say it?”

“Can't we talk in the morning?”

“No. I'm going to tell you right now: You have no sense. My mother had no sense. She married a drunk and ended up raising ten children without a man to back her up. I learned from her stupidity. I tried to make good decisions my whole life, and then you went and married a man with no prospects—”

“Nana!”

“I'm not saying I'm glad he died. Cancer's a sad death and I wouldn't wish it on anybody—but it happened. The question I'm trying to get you to think about is
What next?
Do you plan to sit around and mope for the next fifty years? I've got more sense in my little finger than you've got in your whole college-educated brain, you know that?”

Anna felt as if she were drowning. She concentrated all her attention on the graceful lines of the chandelier above their heads, imagining that its solid frame was a hand reaching down to pull her out of here. “Can't we just go to sleep?” she cried. “Can't we talk in the morning?”

But these entreaties just made things worse. “You never listen,” Goldie said.

“Please, Nana.”

“Are you an idiot?”

“Please!”

They both heard it. Anna's voice had reached a level of despair that even Goldie could not ignore. For a long moment, neither of them said a word. When Goldie did speak again, her tone was softer. “You're so lucky, and you don't even know it,” she said. She still sounded aggrieved, but the words lacked their earlier edge.

Anna said nothing. She stared at the chandelier, counting seconds, holding her breath.

“The whole world's been handed to you on a silver platter,” Goldie said. And then, a couple of minutes later, “You don't even know it,” and, “You don't even know it,” again, some minutes after that. Then silence. Then the soft snores of sleep.

The next morning, they drove out of Cleveland under a bank of grim clouds, the sky the same dull concrete as the road beneath them. Neither Anna nor Goldie mentioned what had happened the night before. Anna wasn't sure if Goldie even remembered, but the air between them seemed even heavier. Nothing felt resolved.

They were extremely polite. “Are you hungry?” Anna asked, somewhere beyond Toledo.

“You're the one doing all the work,” Goldie responded. “I want to do whatever makes you happiest and most comfortable. I'm just a passenger here.”

The day seemed interminable, one county sliding into the next. Eventually it began to rain, a desultory splatter that turned the spindly trees into dull green shadows outside the windows. Everything else was brown and gray except for the billboards imploring them from the side of the highway. Anna tried to find satisfaction in the fact that, mile by mile, they were moving closer to California, but she had no confidence that they would ever actually get there.

Despite the troubles between them, six days had passed since they left New York, and they were comfortable now with life on the road. Anna had grown adept at maneuvering the suitcases in and out of the car (though they both appreciated the bellman, Hiep, who had handled their luggage at the Ritz-Carlton). In odd homage to urban living, the communities of chain hotels along the interstate often included chain restaurants that you could reach simply by crossing a couple of parking lots on foot. As they pulled up that night to the Hampton Inn in Angola, Indiana, they saw an Applebee's just on the other side of a Sizzler and Best Western.