The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (13 page)

He sat on the chair across the coffee table from Mayumi and Goldie. “What did you think of the tea ceremony?” he asked Goldie. He held the bag on his lap, not quite ready to open it.

Goldie sat up straighter and folded her hands primly. “I found it very, very superlative,” she said. “Supremely superlative.”

“Really?” Henry and his sister exchanged a glance.

Goldie nodded, then leaned forward. “I don't understand one thing, though. Your mother has such beautiful china—I've seen it. So why did she use those rough-looking bowls?”

Mayumi watched her brother. She could see that he was assessing her friend. And because he was perfectly capable of being rude, she felt relieved that he was civil. “Well,” he said, “the tea ceremony focuses on simplicity. It elevates the beauty in nature and rejects anything artificial or overly decorative, like my mother's porcelain cups.”

Goldie had never heard that peculiar combination of words before. “Overly decorative?” How could something be
too
beautiful?

“Is that strange to you?” His tone was cooler now.

Goldie didn't miss the shift in Henry's manner, which seemed to underscore the chasm between her own inexperience and God knew how many centuries of Japanese tradition. For a moment she simply stared down at her hands, unsure of how to answer him. Her sense of good fortune at knowing Mayumi was always balanced against a worry that her own substantial failings—ignorance, stupidity, poverty, lack of sophistication—would eventually drive her friend away. Another girl might, at that moment, have folded, cowed by her own insecurity. But Goldie had a strong defense: blind bravery, masked as an unwavering belief in her own opinions. Thus, when she looked up to see the brother and sister gazing at her, she tossed her head and said blithely, “Well, it's just about the silliest thing I ever heard. Why would anyone reject something beautiful?”

Mayumi reached for a bright green sugar leaf and snapped it between her teeth with a satisfying crunch. She and Henry often complained about the snobbishness of their parents, but they could both be scornful, too, of people they considered beneath them. She admired Goldie for fighting back and, rushing in to bolster her friend, said, “I agree. The tea bowls are hideous, and it's pompous to claim otherwise.”

Henry looked at his sister. Mayumi had never liked the tea ceremony, but normally her criticisms were light and her mind distracted. Now, she seemed unusually determined to belittle it. “I hope Mother didn't hear you say that,” he told her. He was teasing, but his words sounded more petulant than he intended.

Mayumi glared at him, then turned to Goldie and said dryly, “Welcome to the Nightingale Palace.”

“The Nightingale Palace?” Goldie's face conveyed such delight over the glamour of the phrase that, to Henry's mind, it hinted at how she would look if, say, Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh had suddenly joined them on the terrace.

“It's just a joke,” he told her. “We made it up.” Normally, he admired his sister for her frankness, but this particular disclosure felt like a betrayal of trust. The term
Nightingale Palace
had developed out of the siblings' mutual frustration over the constraints imposed on them by their parents. Why would Mayumi share such a thing with this stranger?

But Mayumi was irritated with her brother, too, so she made the story even more elaborate. “It's not a joke. Our parents named their home after Ninomaru Palace in Kyoto.” She reached over and squeezed Goldie's hand. “It's very regal and mysterious, don't you think?”

Goldie was beaming now. “It's beautiful,” she said.

Henry sighed, exasperated over his sister's sudden gilding of their lives. “Can we just look at the book?” he asked.

Mayumi curled her bare feet under her on the sofa, then took hold of Goldie's arm and squeezed it, leaning close against her friend. “You'll love this. My mom and dad and I are probably more excited about Henry's new business than he is. He brings home these amazing discoveries and we can't get enough of them.”

“What amazing discoveries?” Goldie asked.

“Antiques. Art. We adore it all, but we're mostly motivated by the lack of them. When our parents left Japan, they could only bring a few suitcases, so Henry and I grew up hearing about all the exquisite things they left behind.”

Something about Mayumi's smile struck Goldie then, and suddenly she did see a resemblance between the Nakamura siblings. They had the same fine line of the jaw, the same delicate mouth, and the same shrewd gaze, although Mayumi's face had a kind of effervescence, while Henry looked more weighed down and sober. They moved in different ways as well. Mayumi, who could be so calm at Feld's, was quick and fluttering, like a bird, around her family. Henry observed more closely, and took his time.

Henry glanced at his watch. It was nearly four thirty. He fought against his restlessness by being even more polite. “Were your parents immigrants, too?” he asked.

Goldie nodded. “From Europe.”

“Did they bring anything precious to this country with them?”

She found this question funny. “I think they felt lucky to get out alive. My mother brought a locket, but it wasn't worth anything. My father brought his tools, which weren't worth anything, either, but they were worth a lot to him.” Goldie could understand her parents leaving their village. They had nothing there, and nothing to lose. But the Nakamuras had been royalty in Japan. Goldie imagined treasured furniture and jewels. “Why did your family come here?” she asked. It didn't make sense.

Out in the garden, a cardinal was weaving through the branches of a miniature maple tree, adding a burst of crimson to the late afternoon light. Mayumi said, “Our parents had more confidence in a future here, and they had too many obligations to their family in Japan.” She glanced at her brother. “What do you think, Henry?”

Henry's eyes rested on the bird, which helped to ease his sense of irritation. He had often wondered about his parents. He said, “America is the place for dreamers. You must have noticed that our father is a dreamer.”

Mayumi gestured toward the bag with her chin. “Show her,” she said.

Henry untied the cord and pulled out an object that looked like a book with wooden covers. It was large and cumbersome, and he had to use both hands to extricate it from the bag and set it on the table between them. He turned the volume so that Goldie and Mayumi, sitting across from him, could read the lines in elaborate gold lettering on the cover:
The Reverend Maurice M. Castleman, Scenes of Japanese Women.
Henry turned the book over. The other side read,
The Reverend Maurice M. Castleman, Scenes of Japanese Life.

“Who is Reverend Castleman?” Goldie asked.

Henry lifted his eyes toward Goldie. “I like to think of a portly older man, sipping his Scotch and looking at these pictures in his cozy library somewhere in the Midwest. You'd think, if you just looked at the cover, that he was the artist, but this was just a souvenir for him. Reverend Castleman traveled to Japan on Admiral Perry's naval expedition in the last century, the one that opened trade routes to Japan. He brought this collection back to the United States.”

“How interesting,” said Goldie, being polite. History bored her, and anxious to catch her bus home, she stared down at the book until, finally, Henry opened it. He began with
Scenes of Japanese Life,
revealing the first image, a landscape of a village by a riverside, narrow wooden boats slipping beneath a bridge.

“These are by the printmaker Hiroshige,” Henry said. “He's the artist my father mentioned to Superintendent Banes. The series is called
Fifty-three Stations of the Tokkaido Road.
”

Henry turned the pages, and Goldie and Mayumi looked at each print. At twenty years of age, Goldie's experience of art was limited to the free calendars from the local dairy that her mother had tacked to the kitchen wall, and to the prints of cats and dogs, sold as a set in a furniture store, that Rochelle had bought to hang beside her new dining room table. Looking down at these pictures, Goldie understood that Mayumi and her brother would be expecting a reaction, but she had no idea what kinds of things a person was supposed to say. She found the pictures pretty enough, but monotonous: a village street with a craggy pine tree looming over it; farmers in empty valleys, planting their fields; a mountain road and people hauling their parcels along it.

“That's Mount Fuji,” said Mayumi, pointing at a distant peak that appeared in the background of many of the images.

Here was something about which Goldie did have an opinion. She leaned in closer, then shook her head decisively. “It's too perfect,” she said. “That's the kind of mountain children draw when they haven't actually seen one.” Goldie had come to this knowledge through recent experience. Her own first glimpse of mountains remained vivid, having only occurred a few months earlier, when she traveled across the country from Tennessee.

The Nakamuras looked at her. “But Fuji really is a perfect mountain,” Mayumi said.

“I don't believe it.” Goldie felt it was important that she take a position, and her experience with mountains gave her enough confidence that, when Henry turned the page to a winter scene, she decided that she was capable of a new observation, “Look at that. Every single tree branch is covered in snow.”

Henry pushed the volume a couple of inches closer, so that Goldie could see it better. “The snow isn't just white,” he said. His finger hovered over the image, drawing her attention to a patch of frozen ground near a bend in a stream. “It goes from almost black, here, to soft gray, and then, up here, the shades go lighter.”

“You're absolutely right,” Goldie said. She felt herself to be responding more appropriately now, and she did find Henry's comments mildly interesting, if hardly worthy of extended discussion. They all three stretched to see, their heads crowded together over the book. “There's not really that much white at all,” Goldie said. “The shades are so varied.”

“Hiroshige designed these images,” Mayumi said. “Other people did the coloring, but we have a sense that he was involved with every detail because the color in his prints is always so luscious.”

Henry began to turn the pages again. Goldie stared down at them. The colors were muted, mostly soft greens and yellows balanced against the pale blue of sky and water. In these landscapes, mountains towered, seas stretched to the horizon, and the humans were tiny hunched-over figures laboring in the distance. Goldie did the best she could to act impressed. “The world seems so huge and lonely,” she said, and then, finally, they reached the end of the book.

Goldie would have been happy to head home at this point. She was hungry now, tired of art, and tired from the effort required to show interest in it. As it turned out, however, she had seen only half of the pictures. By flipping the book, Henry prepared to show her
Scenes of Japanese Women,
the set of pictures on the other side. Goldie's heart sank. She scanned the sky above the tea garden, which was turning darker now. She didn't want to be rude, though. The Nakamuras had gone to such efforts for her.

“These are by Kunisada Two,” Henry explained, offering more detail than Goldie wanted about this strangely named artist and the illustrations he had created from a classical Japanese novel called
The Tale of Genji
. “The Japanese themselves would never have called it
Scenes of Japanese Women.
That's like calling the Sistine Chapel
Scenes of Italy.
It sounds ridiculous.”

Goldie tried to look interested. She could not remember if the bus ran every ten minutes or every fifteen minutes on Fulton Street on Sunday evenings. Worse, that line might have stopped running by this hour, which would force her to make the long trek over to Geary Street in order to catch a different bus. Her hunger and her growing concern about the time distracted her. When Henry finally opened the book, she politely leaned forward again on the sofa, but she was thinking about the Nestlé Crunch bar that lay at the bottom of her handbag.

It took long seconds, then, for Goldie to focus on the first print. When she did, her mind cleared instantly. She forgot the hour, her grumbling stomach, her unlikely chance of catching the bus. And she forgot, too, the clothes she loved, elegant shoes, the hats she admired on wealthy women, fur coats, everything she wanted. Goldie Rubin looked down at this old Japanese print and, for what felt like the first time in her life, she saw something truly beautiful.

“Oh, my,” she whispered, more to herself than to them. Because here were ladies: graceful and demure, cunning, flirtatious, dressed in layers of undulating robes, their hair sculpted to their heads with banquets of ornaments, their fingers long and tapered, their mouths full, their faces beckoning. Each individual robe offered a feast of detail—clusters of goldenrod set against a crimson sky, blossoming peonies, dragonflies, hyacinths amid a field of stars. “The colors,” Goldie murmured as Henry turned the pages, so dazzled was she by the pinks and purples, the yellows and greens and bright, bright blues that her voice trailed off. If someone had asked her to describe her vision of the most beautiful thing in the universe, Goldie believed she would have described the pictures that lay before her now.

Mayumi and Henry watched, astonished by the expression of wonder on Goldie's face. They had never
not
known about art, and perhaps as a result, they experienced it with their intellect, but without much emotion. Goldie's way of looking at these images was entirely different from their own, a fact that Henry realized when he turned to a picture called
Festival of the Cherry Blossoms.
Here, a young woman, poised on a mat behind a blossom-covered screen, clutched her robes to her chest while, from the other side of the screen, a man peered down at her. When Henry looked at a picture like this one, he thought about design and contrast, historical relevance, the artist's eye, the archaic style. Goldie apparently brought none of that to her experience. Instead, she seemed voracious, her eyes darting up and down the page, almost desperate, as if she were hungry and only these images could offer satisfaction.