The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (16 page)

The campaign demanded an immense amount of work, which meant that Goldie spent little time actually out on the showroom floor. Instead, she filled her days consulting with Mayumi, ordering and purchasing supplies, reporting back to Marvin, appeasing the petulant Rochelle at home, and most importantly, arriving at work every morning looking both fashionable and, despite her lack of sleep, well rested. Goldie found all this activity stimulating in a way that was new to her. Her memories of childhood included few moments of joy or abandon. Even here in San Francisco, her energy remained focused on her ultimate goal of finding the right man to marry. As a consequence, despite a busy social schedule, she didn't actually have much fun. Putting together the Pioneer display led Goldie to discover that she had skills and talents she had never recognized. She could help to devise and execute a complicated plan; she could work tirelessly without losing heart; she had a practical side that helped her distinguish between what was possible and what was not; she got along well with other people. And to top it all off, she loved the whole process.

They did have some technical problems, the most serious of which revolved around the challenge of making the swing in the third window actually look as if it was flying through the air. This effect demanded engineering skills beyond the capability of either Mayumi or Goldie. Consequently, the night before the windows would be revealed, they enlisted Marvin, and even Henry, to help construct an elaborate system of hooks and fishing wire that, in the end, created the illusion of defied gravity. “I feel like we're putting on a show!” Goldie exclaimed happily as all four of them congregated in the small space of the window. She remembered seeing a film in which a group of teenagers had taken over a rural barn to produce a musical review.

“Thank God the newspaper doesn't have a critic for window displays,” said Marvin, who was standing on a ladder, anxiously appraising the papier-mâché sun he had just attached to the ceiling. Though he cared nothing for the perfume, he was quite worried that any little glitch would undermine his effort to establish his competency in the eyes of his parents.

The four of them had been working in the lovers' window for the past two hours. They had painted the walls a cottony blue, and bright green artificial grass now covered three-quarters of the floor. Mayumi worked ahead of Goldie, cutting the turf into squares and pressing them neatly into place. Goldie followed, securing tiny silk wildflowers into the flooring with hidden thumbtacks. In the doorway, Henry sat on a folding chair with wire and pliers, the swing upside down on his lap.

Goldie said, “If this were a movie, I'd want to play the Myrna Loy character, like in
The Thin Man
.” She looked over at Mayumi. “Who are you?”

Mayumi didn't bother to look up from the grass she was cutting. “I don't exactly look like any of those girls,” she reminded Goldie.

Henry said, “She'd have to play the vamp.”

Goldie pushed another flower into the lawn. “You're not a vamp,” she said. “You're more like the girl next door.”

“You can't be the girl next door and be Japanese,” Henry replied. He stopped what he was doing to look at Goldie. It continually surprised him that a girl could be so bright and at the same time so obtuse.

But Goldie barreled forward. “I forget that Mayumi is Japanese,” she insisted. “There's nothing at all about her that's Japanese. That's just silly.”

Henry picked up his pliers again. “Rose-colored glasses,” he muttered.

“Honestly!” Goldie exclaimed.

“Honestly, Goldie,” Henry replied, more firmly. “Everyone doesn't see things the way you do.”

Goldie remembered Marvin then, above them on the ladder. “Do you care?” she asked. On some level, she was aware that, in her plan to snare the son of the owner of Feld's, she was asking a pertinent question. Would he, as a Jew, marry a Jew himself, or would he consider a Jew beneath him? She needed to know if she had any hope of success with him. At least that's what she told herself. Oddly, though, Goldie often forgot about Marvin altogether. Now, for example, her attention focused on Henry. She needed him to respect what she was saying and to understand that she was right and he was wrong. People could forget about heritage, or race, or money. “It's the person,” she asserted, “not the background.”

Marvin, who was securing the last piece of wire to a hidden nail, agreed with Goldie. “Those divisions are old-fashioned,” he said. Despite his experience in a war with a very clear enemy, he prided himself on being able to judge each person as an individual. “This is nineteen forty-one. Our parents might care, but we're more modern than they are.” On the whole, though, Marvin was more focused on the technical problems with the window than on this conversation. Leaning back a couple of inches to get a better look at the sun, he asked, “Do you think it's straight? Does it look a little crooked?”

Mayumi, making calculations for the next set of grass squares on a piece of scratch paper, wasn't listening to any of them. Henry glanced up. “It's fine,” he said, but he couldn't focus on the sun. “Each person comes from a particular background,” he told Goldie. “You can't separate yourself from that.”

“Of course you can,” she insisted. She had no intention of getting personal here, but her own life offered proof of her contention. Otherwise, how would a poor girl from Memphis end up spending the evening with the children of a Japanese baron and the son of the owner of a famous department store?

Henry became exasperated. “Don't you see what's going on in the world?” he asked. “People are killing each other over race. Look at what the Germans are doing to the Jews. Look at the Japanese and the Chinese. You want to just ignore that?”

Goldie looked at Henry. He seemed so serious, and she couldn't very well shrug off the destruction taking place around the world. But did the bloodshed in Asia and Europe mean that people couldn't be happy together right here? “If a German walked in here right now, do you think he'd try to kill me?” she asked.

Henry closed his eyes for a moment. He couldn't argue with Goldie in any conventional way because she never used conventional tactics. When he opened his eyes, he saw that she was looking at him quite seriously, her eyes wide open and waiting. She really wanted him to answer her.

“I don't know,” he sighed. “I don't think so.”

“The Japanese and Germans are allies,” she said. “The Germans hate the Jews. Do the Japanese hate the Jews?” At this moment, two Jews and two Japanese were peacefully occupying one very small space.

Henry scowled. Goldie was so simplistic.

“Do they?” she asked. “Do they?”

“No!” he finally responded, feeling completely annoyed. “How should I know? I don't hate the Jews,” and the admission seemed so suddenly personal and irrelevant to his larger contention that he looked down at the swing in his lap and turned his focus to it entirely.

Mayumi, who hadn't even been listening, jumped in suddenly, her satisfaction over the look of the window translating into an overall delight. “I love Jews,” she said, picking up Goldie's hand and kissing it.

“That's very flattering,” Marvin sighed, “but we'll be here all night and this window will still be a disaster.”

At that moment, the store manager, Mr. Blankenship, opened the small wooden door that connected the display window to the store itself, and stepped inside. An Englishman, he was middle-aged, slight in stature, and so formal and well mannered that everyone, even the Feld family themselves, found him intimidating. “I'd like to see what you've accomplished after all the time you've spent in here,” he said. His voice was soft, his words inconsequential. What mattered was not what he said when he walked in the door, but what he said after he'd looked around. More than anyone else involved with Feld's, Mr. Blankenship served as the arbiter of what would sell and what would not. For a long moment, he allowed his eyes to move over every detail, from the tiny flowers that Goldie had attached to the floor to the sun shining brightly now from the upper corner. Mayumi and her team of helpers waited.

Finally Mr. Blankenship turned, opened the little door, and ducked his head again to go out, but not before offering his assessment in words that were almost too flat and uninflected to be audible. “It will do,” he told them.

The next morning, Mr. Blankenship proved himself correct, if perhaps guilty of understatement. The butcher paper that covered the windows came down to wild applause. People stopped on the street to look, pointing at the scenes and discussing their construction with all the serious attention that Goldie had seen among art aficionados at the museum in Golden Gate Park. At the perfume counter, Herbert Feld himself—that lover of architecture—had constructed a Pioneer display on an elaborate steel-and-wire contraption that Henry, whispering in Goldie's ear, described as “a covered wagon done in the style of the Eiffel Tower.”

They sold more Pioneer that day than they had sold in the perfume's entire existence, and though Marvin had ordered ten additional cases, they quickly ran out. Inside the store, a team of salesgirls served free lemonade from punch bowls and passed around plates of sugar cookies with red, white, and blue icing. Within a couple of hours, the air for several blocks up and down Market Street would reek with the scent of lazy afternoons, prairie grass, and wild rose.

It was Herbert Feld, enjoying the role of magnanimous employer, who came up with the idea of rewarding the young people for a job well done. “Marvin,” he said, “take these kids out for an afternoon on the yacht, why don't you?”

Marvin, suddenly feeling awkward, looked at the others on his team. “Is that something that would even interest you?” he asked.

Goldie had kept herself free for the evening in hopes that an invitation might be forthcoming, but she had never dreamed that she might go out on a yacht. She looked at Mayumi, who looked at her brother. Henry glanced at his watch. “What time were you thinking?” he asked.

Herbert Feld's attention had wandered toward a couple of businessmen who seemed to be admiring his covered wagon. “Take the rest of the day off, girls!” he said, already moving across the showroom floor.

Goldie had never taken a boat ride in her life, though she didn't admit it. Over the past few weeks, she had carefully measured out her revelations about her background. If Marvin Feld did turn out to seriously consider her for marriage, he would have to know that she came from nothing. On the other hand, she didn't want her poverty to put him off so completely that he would never take her seriously as a potential bride. Thus she had presented herself to him as a “southern gal who grew up on the farm,” while at the same time frequently mentioning how much she had learned about fashion and good taste from her very elegant mother. When Marvin invited them out on his yacht, then, she simply replied, “That sounds lovely.”

The sailboat was moored in a marina a mile or two east of the Golden Gate Bridge. Gingerly, Mayumi and Goldie, who were still in their heels, followed Marvin and Henry along the main pier and down another smaller one until they reached the boat. Goldie had imagined a boat like the ones she had seen in photographs of the duke and duchess of Windsor, who seemed to spend a lot of time drinking champagne on yachts in the Bahamas. This boat, which Marvin called a “sloop,” was a simpler craft, far too small for any kind of royal party, but Goldie was still impressed. It was about twenty feet long, with cushion-covered benches lining the deck and a cabin with three round windows in it. On the back of the boat, painted in a swirling cursive, was the name
Bella Vista.

From where they stood on the pier, Goldie could see not only the Golden Gate Bridge, but also the Marin Headlands, Alcatraz Island, and a huge swath of the city stretching across the hills behind them. “I could stay right here,” she sighed, “and be happy.” She did not want to admit that the idea of boarding the boat was making her nervous. She didn't see a gangplank. How would she climb on?

The others were already in motion. Marvin grabbed a rope, pulled the boat toward them, and made a graceful leap aboard. Then he tugged on another rope to bring the craft toward the pier. “Careful now,” he said. Slowly, the boat moved closer. Henry stepped across and landed easily on the deck, then turned around, took his sister's hand, and helped her on board. He waited for Goldie.

Goldie pulled her sweater tighter around her shoulders. The sky was bright, but the wind blew hard, knocking the ropes against the mast. Out on the bay, would she feel even colder?

Marvin, squatting on the ground with the ropes, looked up at her. Goldie's nervousness reminded him of his own good fortune—how many young people grew up sailing on a family yacht?—which in turn gave an added gentleness to his encouragement. “Don't worry, Goldie. We've got blankets on board.”

Mayumi, who had quickly gotten her footing, eagerly strode up and down the deck before ducking into the cabin and disappearing. A moment later, she reappeared. “The blankets are
fur
!” she said.

Henry and Marvin waited. Goldie looked at Marvin. This was a moment when he might reach his hand out and grasp her fingers, but he had to hold the ropes tightly to keep the boat from drifting.

“Your turn, Goldie,” Henry said.

By pulling hard, Marvin could bring the boat to within inches of the pier, but just as quickly it would tip against the surge of a wave and drift away again. At some moments the gap between the boat and the pier would widen to a foot. Goldie looked down warily. The bay itself was a steely gray, but the water here looked black. “I can't swim,” she said.

Marvin was patient, but holding the boat steadily against the pier put a strain on his arms. Henry said, “Goldie, first pull your shoes off. Then take my hand.”