The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (12 page)

One afternoon, Mayumi invited Goldie to the tea garden for an occasion she would only describe as “very special.” Despite Goldie's insistent questions, Mayumi refused to reveal any information. Consequently, by the time they arrived at the entrance to the garden, Goldie felt jumpy with anticipation. They walked up the path to the house, and she immediately noticed two things. First, the baroness, who usually wore Western clothes, was standing on the front terrace of the house wearing a formal kimono. The fabric itself was the color of wheat, while a heavy coffee-colored sash secured the garment tightly around her waist. Although the baroness had pulled her hair back in her usual bun, today she had also attached tiny silver ornaments to it.

The second thing Goldie noticed was the young man sitting on the edge of the terrace, his legs dangling over the side, balancing a cigarette in his mouth and an ashtray on his knee. He was watching Mayumi and Goldie's approach with curiosity and amusement.

They stopped in front of him, and Mayumi asked Goldie, “Can you guess who this is?”

Goldie looked at the young man, then back at Mayumi. When she didn't respond, Mayumi offered a hint, “Don't you see the resemblance?” She put her face in profile, closed her eyes, and pointed her nose to the sky. The young man smiled slightly and took a drag on his cigarette.

Neither Mayumi's hints nor her posing did anything for Goldie. The truth was, she couldn't easily distinguish among Japanese people. They all had those thin eyes and that straight black hair. She wouldn't have asked Mayumi directly, but she did wonder if the Japanese had trouble, sometimes, telling themselves apart.

When Goldie continued to look blank, Mayumi laughed and took a gentle swipe at her friend's arm. “Silly! It's Henry.”

It took Goldie a moment to connect the sight of this stranger with the image she had developed in her mind of Mayumi's beloved older brother—from Mayumi's reckoning the kindest, smartest, most handsome man in the world. Over the months of their friendship, Goldie had often heard about Henry, so often that he had edged his way into her fantasy life, along with a debonair salesman at Feld's, a well-dressed fellow commuter on the Geary Street bus, and a teller at the bank who spoke with a European accent. Now, seeing Mayumi's brother for the first time, Goldie felt a stab of disappointment and shock at her own denseness. The man was handsome enough, but she had never visualized—stupid girl!—that Henry would also be Japanese.

“Come along!” Mayumi said, grabbing Goldie's hand, pulling her forward and up the stairs onto the terrace. “Henry, this is Goldie!” Mayumi announced, but after all the professed import of the moment, it was an offhand introduction, made by calling back to her brother over her shoulder as she and Goldie moved on. “Goldie, this is Henry.”

Henry pushed himself down off the side of the terrace, then followed his sister and her friend back up the stairs. For the past three months, he had been living in Los Angeles, training at an import-export company as he made plans to open his own business in San Francisco. He had returned with a head full of profit-margin figures and sales expectations. Two containers of inventory were now following him up the coast by ship. At twenty-two, after four years of college and his months of training with a firm, Henry Nakamura felt that he had returned to San Francisco to finally begin his life.

The baron appeared on the terrace then. Like his wife, he had dressed in a kimono, though his was much simpler, and he looked less happy wearing it. He stooped down and squatted on a large mat, arranging a ceramic brazier on a low wooden table. “Children, take your places,” he said. “We should go ahead and begin now.”

“Is this a performance or something?” Goldie whispered to Mayumi.

Mayumi shook her head. She stepped behind Goldie and guided her friend toward the mat, where she instructed her to sit on her knees with her toes tucked underneath. “It's a Japanese tradition called tea ceremony,” Mayumi said. “My mother is offering it to Henry because he's been away for so long. I wanted you to see it.”

The tea ceremony began with the four “tea guests” sitting in a semicircle facing the table, with Mayumi and Henry in the middle, the baron next to his son, and Goldie on the other side. The baroness, also perched on her knees, faced them from behind the table, checking the progress of the water steaming on the brazier. The idea of a tea ceremony struck Goldie as both interesting and bizarre. She and her family had drunk tea, of course, but there was nothing ceremonial about that. Her family did have its own traditions—the typical Jewish ones, like lighting candles on Friday night (which Goldie's family had often neglected to do), and the more peculiar ones, like taking turns wiping their mother's brow, or leaning out over the porch railing at night, watching for the return of their inebriated father. It struck her that Japanese traditions were much more elegant.

When the water had boiled to the satisfaction of the baroness, she lifted a small ceramic tea bowl, took a square of fabric, and wiped out the interior. Unlike the cups in which the baroness normally served tea—dainty porcelain pieces with chrysanthemums or cherry blossoms on them—this rough-hewn ceramic bowl had a muddy brown glaze with a single swipe of gray running down one side. The baroness treated the heavy object with delicacy, though, slowly measuring out the tea, which was deep green and as fine as confectioner's sugar. Carefully she ladled boiling water into the tea and began to whisk the liquid. The tea turned frothy. Very slowly, with the cup between her fingers, she rose first onto her toes and then unfolded her knees until she was standing. With tiny steps, she walked over to her son, knelt in front of him, and placed the cup into his hands.

Henry received the tea silently, only acknowledging the offering with a subtle dip of his head. He rotated the cup in his hands, looking carefully at its markings, then drank it quickly in three swift sips. The baroness rose, returned to her table, and performed the ritual again for each of her guests, first for her husband, then Goldie, then Mayumi.

Goldie found every movement and gesture so intricate that she felt anxious over her inability to absorb it completely. She had never seen any activity completed with such a perfectly ritualized series of movements. If the Japanese focused so much effort on the simple act of making tea, then it seemed to her that they had elevated the whole breadth of human experience to something artistic and beautiful. This thought dazzled, but also confused her. How was she, as a guest, supposed to behave? Was she doing something wrong? She continually glanced back and forth between the baroness and the other guests beside her. When Mayumi lifted her sweets plate in one hand and her miniature fork in the other, then skewered the bite-size nest of sugary yellow noodles and lifted them to her mouth, Goldie did the same. The confection tasted eggy and strange, like candied spaghetti.

Mayumi leaned sideways to whisper in Goldie's ear. “Do you like it?”

“It's delicious.” She had never experienced such a mixture of delicacy and earthiness, which is why she praised it so highly, even though she didn't actually care to try it again.

Each of the Nakamuras was participating in the ritual in his or her own particular way. The baroness came from a family of candymakers, not aristocrats, and she had never had an opportunity to study the tea ceremony as a girl. Rather, she had taken it up in San Francisco, when a retired chemistry teacher from Osaka began to give lessons to earn extra money. Comparatively speaking, then, the baroness was new to this hobby, and while she was proud of her accomplishment, she also felt uneasy that her husband would see flaws in it. For his part, the baron was only half attentive. He had grown up in a family that practiced such refinements, but he found the entire enterprise dull and useless. Though he tried to look interested, he watched his wife with an impatient awareness that the afternoon was passing quickly and he had three cherry trees near the South Gate that needed pruning. Next to Goldie, Mayumi watched more closely, but she found her mother's efforts too self-conscious and pretentious. Only Henry, whose travels had renewed his appreciation for his own heritage, shared Goldie's full pleasure in the ceremony and participated wholeheartedly.

Just as the baroness was concluding her presentation, the little group on the terrace was interrupted by the sound of people approaching down the path. Something about the tenor of one particular voice alerted the baron to the fact that he had to attend to these new arrivals. He pulled himself quickly, and somewhat overeagerly, off the mat, and gave his wife and fellow guests a superficial wave of apology before darting down the steps to greet the visitors. Mayumi and Henry looked at their mother, who tipped her head with resignation, signaling that the young people should follow the baron down the steps to say hello.

Mr. Banes, the park superintendent, had arrived unexpectedly. “Nakamura!” he roared, grabbing the baron's hand. A bearish fellow, Banes was in the midst of offering a running narrative to the cluster of subordinates trailing him. “We planted that line of firs in twenty-seven,” he told them. “Good growth on those beauties.” To Goldie, he sounded like a truck driver delivering beer. She felt that the dream of the tea ceremony had been shattered.

“You were right about that little maple up by the gate, Nakamura.” The superintendent chewed on a battered-looking cigar, his eyes taking in the details of the garden with the pleasure and ease of someone literate in a language only a few could understand. “And the Moon Bridge is looking damn good, too.” The horseshoe-shaped structure had been installed decades earlier, during the San Francisco Exposition, and the baron had been overseeing its renovation for a month. “Where'd you get that idea of planting the little bonsai beside it?” he asked.

“Hiroshige,” said the baron.

“Hiroshige?”

“One of the most precious Japanese artists.” The baron became teacherly then. “My garden is a series of scenes.” He looked at Mayumi. “What's that word?”

“Motifs,” she said.

“Yes, motifs. Each turn on a path invites a new moment, a new drama. Hiroshige had this same idea about landscape. Often, a tree or even a shrub makes a person feel a particular emotion, so I planted the tree beside the Moon Bridge for the same reason that an artist introduces a new element to a picture—to change the feeling completely.”

The superintendent puffed on his cigar, which made the air smell like prunes. “A drama?” he asked. “I think of gardens as a series of landscapes. They change, but so slowly that you can't catch it. It's the opposite of drama to me.”

Mayumi's father shook his head. “A different kind of drama. Not drama like a play. Not sword fights!” He laughed, but also seemed concerned that he might be misunderstood. “I'm talking about natural drama. The drama of light, a falling leaf. Do you ever see, at the ocean, the way the wind blows sand?”

“Sure.”

“That kind of drama.”

The superintendent looked mildly interested, as if the baron were describing an intriguing theory that he couldn't quite absorb. “I'll leave the philosophy to you, Baron,” he finally said. “But if you have a problem with your cherries, you let me know. I've got fertilizer up the wazoo.”

The baron looked down the path that led to the beginning of the cherry grove. “I have no problems!” he exclaimed, and his arm swept wide enough to take in not only the grove, but the entire garden, the house, the park, his newly returned son, all of California, the sky, the moon with its sugar-coated droplets, the expanse of the universe, a single leaf, a lonely pebble.

By the time the superintendent left, it was nearly dusk. The baroness had retreated to her room, explaining that she wanted to take some notes on the strengths and weaknesses of her tea ceremony performance. The baron had wandered back toward his cherry trees, anxious to make use of the remaining light. Most days, Goldie would have headed home by now, but Mayumi wasn't ready to let her go. “I want you to see something Henry brought back with him,” she said, pulling at Goldie's hand. “Stay for a few more minutes.”

The two young women sat down on the wicker sofa on the terrace while Henry disappeared inside the house. Kneeling on the mat had made Goldie's muscles feel like rags rung out to dry, so now that she was alone with her friend, she slipped off her shoes and turned her feet in little circles, trying to stretch.

Mayumi leaned over the plate of tea ceremony sweets that the baroness had left on the coffee table. Pointing one by one at the pink pansy-shaped disks, the pale green leaves molded from sugar, and the yellow tangles of sweet spaghetti, she said, “Flowers, new leaves, bird's nests.”

“Remember that chocolate train we saw at See's Candies?” Goldie asked.

Mayumi did remember the chocolate train, but she shook her head, because she wanted Goldie to understand the difference here. “The candies don't have to be exact replicas, like that train. They're meant to introduce the idea of something.” She picked up one of the pink disks and bit into it. The hard sugary shell cracked like an egg, opening to a soft center. “My mother chose these candies to evoke the changing seasons. It's the end of May, so she focused on the moment when spring turns into summer.”

Goldie didn't care about the symbolism so much as the exacting attention that had gone into every detail, from the careful motion with which the baroness whisked the tea to the way the pink and green candies, arranged precisely on a plate, looked like flower blossoms nestled among leaves. “Every little thing was perfect,” she said. Then, seeing Mayumi's brother reemerge onto the terrace, carrying in his arms a velvet bag, she dropped her feet to the ground and, worried that he would see her toes, thrust them back into her shoes.

Henry did not see Goldie's toes, but he did notice her quick maneuver. His sister had always been selective about her friends. Not considering it worthy of her time, she had rarely invited any of them home with her. Now he wondered why Mayumi had felt drawn to this nervous girl, who seemed sweet, but so young and undefined.