The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (5 page)

When Anna reappeared in the dining room, Goldie and Sadie, who had seemed to be deep in conversation, stopped talking. “What?” Anna asked, sitting back down.

But they were focused on their menus now. “I'm getting the roast chicken,” Goldie announced. “It's the most delicious roast chicken you've tasted in your life. And the chickpea fries are out of this world. What are you getting, Sadie?”

As if in surrender, Sadie said, “I'll get the chicken.”

Anna decided on the duck.

“No one eats the duck here,” Goldie said.

Anna had a vision, then, of her grandmother and her “dinner partners” dissing JoJo's duck, dissing the crust on the pecan pie at Swifty's, dissing the Dover sole at La Grenouille. Was this the result of Goldie's life experience, then, an encyclopedic knowledge of culinary failure, not just in New York, but in Palm Beach and London, Paris and Rome? Did eighty-five years of fancy living in the end amount to this?

Anna said, “I'll have the duck.”

“Suit yourself,” Goldie muttered. “But you're going to have to send it back.”

Sadie raised her seltzer. “To all of us together again, and to Nana, because we wouldn't be here if it weren't for you.”

“Well, that's obvious,” Goldie said.

After the adoring Melora took their order, a busboy delivered rolls and crackers, and Goldie announced that JoJo's bread was delicious but would make you fat. She took a small piece herself, then left it on her plate unappraised. “I know you're wondering why I asked Anna to come up here,” she said.

The sisters waited, but Goldie let the anticipation hang in the air for a few more seconds before saying, “I'm proposing that she and I take a trip together.”

Sadie looked nervous. “Where?”

“California. I haven't been to San Francisco since I lived there.”

“I thought you were going to Dubai.”

“Dubai comes later. I fly there from San Francisco, so it works beautifully with my schedule.”

“Maybe the two of you should try having lunch alone together first,” suggested Sadie. “Just to see how you get along.”

“We get along fine!” Goldie insisted.

They each looked to Anna for support, but she stared down at the bread she was buttering. Half of her attention was still focused on the fact that she had left Ford's wedding ring on a sill in JoJo's bathroom. The idea of traveling with Goldie to California was more than she could absorb.

Sadie picked up Anna's wineglass and took a swallow. “I just need a sip,” she said. “It won't be healthy for the baby if I have a heart attack.”

Goldie said, “I thought we'd drive. We'll take my car.” She meant, of course, that Anna would drive. Goldie had never learned that skill herself.

Sadie took another gulp of Anna's wine. “Could this get any crazier?” she asked.

“I have a gorgeous car and it doesn't get nearly enough time on the road. I've decided to let Anna sell it in California—what do I need with a car these days?—and fly back home from there.”

“But why drive out there?” Sadie asked. “Why not fly?” Despite the fact that they had all grown up in Memphis, they shared a nervousness about that great expanse of land between the coasts. Anna had never driven such a distance. Sadie had driven from Boston to Oregon with a Dead Head girlfriend in a dying Mazda, but more than a decade had passed since then. Goldie wouldn't even drive as far as her niece's house in New Jersey.

“You don't understand anything,” Goldie said. “I need two more weeks out of New York.” For nearly fifty years, Goldie had made her permanent residence in Palm Beach, but she refused to spend a single summer there. It wasn't the weather that bothered her—childhood in Memphis had adapted her to heat—but the fact that Palm Beach Society disappeared at the end of each winter. For years, Goldie had disappeared as well. While her husband was still alive, he had happily stayed in Florida, playing golf with buddies and floating lazily around the pool. Goldie, meanwhile, took rooms for two months at the Hotel de la Ville in Rome, where she ordered her fall wardrobe and practiced her Italian. That life continued after Saul died, in 1987, but when she turned eighty, in 2000, she began to spend more time at her apartment in New York, flying north every April and south again in October. She had to be careful, though. If she stayed in New York for longer than six months during a single year, the state would smack her with the tax bill of a New York resident. “I'm still short for this summer,” she said. “That's why I had a meeting with myself and decided on California.”

Sadie looked exasperated. “When you had your meeting with yourself, did you discuss the option of flying there?” she asked. “You'd still be away from New York. You could spend some time in Napa or something.”

A look of revulsion crossed Goldie's face. “You know how I feel about California wines. Besides, I'm carrying art, and you must be cognizant of the fact that you can't carry expensive art through security.” In Goldie's opinion, airline security was a crime syndicate devised to relieve rich people of their valuables.

“Art?” Sadie looked at Anna. In their experience, their grandmother only visited museums when she was invited to a society fund-raiser.

“A very valuable portfolio of Japanese woodblock prints.”

Sadie seemed completely exasperated now. “What are you talking about?”

Goldie looked at Anna. “You know what I'm talking about, don't you? The pictures.”

Anna thought for a moment, and then, as if a figure were becoming clear to her through a haze, she remembered the velvet drawstring bag and the book of pictures inside it. “The Nightingale Palace,” she said, pronouncing the words of a childhood game that, until this moment, she had not even remembered playing.

It all came back to her now, not only the book and the pictures, but Goldie's Palm Beach living room, the delicacy of the teacups, the way the smooth shell of an M&M turned rough as it dissolved on your tongue. When Anna and Sadie were little, their parents took them to see Goldie and Saul in Florida for spring vacation. Anna loved visiting her grandparents, but she hated going to the beach because of the jellyfish, which lay scattered in threatening knots of seaweed all along the shore. Goldie had nothing good to say about the beach, either, and sometimes she let Anna stay home with her. On those mornings, they would play a game of pretend. Anna, as “Mrs. Yves Saint Laurent,” would go to visit Goldie, as “Mrs. Issey Miyake,” at her mansion, “the Nightingale Palace,” which was located in the most fashionable part of Japan. While they sat facing each other across the coffee table in Goldie's living room, Mrs. Issey Miyake would hover over the Sèvres tea set and perform a pretend tea ceremony with pretend tea and real M&Ms. Mrs. Yves Saint Laurent would then come around to the other side of the coffee table, climb into Mrs. Issey Miyake's lap, and carefully open the velvet drawstring bag. Inside lay a wood-bound book full of beautiful pictures. Each time, they looked at every single one.

Anna could remember little of the pictures themselves, but she did remember that she found them much more vivid and stirring than the illustrations in her books back home. She loved that her grandmother would allow her to page through the portfolio herself, run her fingertips across the velvet pouch, look as long as she liked at each image, and stick her nose close to inhale the musty scent of the paper, which Anna found rich and substantial, equating smell, as she did, with her assumption of the artwork's importance in the world. Verbally, Mrs. Issey Miyake and Mrs. Yves Saint Laurent shared their ardor for the artwork, trying to outdo each other with their praise. “Utterly enchanting!” one would exclaim, to which the other would reply, “Absolutely marvelous!” or “Superlatively divine!” On those breathless mornings, Anna imagined herself nearly adult, although she had not yet turned eight.

“I remember,” Anna said. It was strange how, after all these years, the fact of the portfolio came back to her so clearly. With it, too, certain seemingly baffling aspects of her adult personality began to rearrange themselves in a way that made a little more sense. She had always loved art, for example, but hated to talk about it intellectually. And she had dropped her plan to become an oil painter, despite winning awards for her work in college. At the time, Anna had not been able to explain to herself why she had become an illustrator instead, though her public reason (she was intimidated by the competition and wanted to lead a quieter, less stressful life) and her private one (she had fallen in love with Ford by then and felt that illustration would be a better career for someone in Memphis) never seemed complete. Was there something about her early exposure to Goldie's pictures, she wondered, that had inspired her deeper love of storytelling and thus illustration?

“Of course you do!” Goldie said. An expression of tenderness swept across her face, and Anna suddenly saw how painful their estrangement had been for Goldie. Anna did not have time to consider the possibility that she had missed her grandmother as well, however, because Goldie suddenly added, “You'd have to be an idiot if you forgot.”

Just then Melora, in a burst of sugary murmurs, arrived with their appetizers: salad for Sadie, tuna roll for Anna, and for Goldie, a vividly green spring pea soup. “Oh, my,” Goldie said, eyeing her bowl. “If I eat all this, I'll get fat.” Then, turning again to the others, she allowed a look of sadness to sweep across her face. “I had a dear, dear friend when I lived in San Francisco. She was a Japanese girl. Mayumi Nakamura.”

Sadie and Anna stared at each other. Other than a few debonair gay couples and some Italians who made her clothes, Goldie didn't have exotic acquaintances. “We met when I first arrived in San Francisco,” she explained, “in nineteen forty. She decorated the store windows at Feld's. She was a brilliant artist.”

“So she made these pictures?” Anna asked.

Goldie closed her eyes, sighing loudly. “No! She wasn't that kind of artist at all. She designed things. She was singlehandedly responsible for the success of Feld's. People came from all over the world to see her windows.”

“Like the Christmas windows at Barneys?” asked Sadie.

Goldie touched the rim of her soup bowl and carefully lifted a spoonful of the bright liquid to her mouth. “Feld's windows would make Barneys look like Penney's.”

“And?” Sadie asked.

Goldie looked up. “And? What do you mean, ‘And'? And the war came, and they put her away in a camp because she was Japanese.” It seemed to satisfy her, for a change, to lecture to the college graduates about history. “Do you even know about that?”

“Of course,” said Sadie.

“They took a real American citizen and put her in a camp like she was a foreign spy. No better than that.”

“Mata Hari,” said Anna, who was starting to feel suspicious about the prints.

“Her family was extremely elegant and refined. You can't even imagine. Japanese royalty. Most of what I knew at that age I learned from them. Remember,” she said, veering to her own history. “I came from nothing. I dropped out of school after eighth grade. I needed guidance.”

Anna and Sadie were listening closely because the conversation was quite unusual. Goldie seldom strayed from the topics right in front of them—the restaurant, your clothes, what looked good on a menu. “When the announcement came that Mayumi and her family would have to leave their home, she turned to me as her only friend. Could I keep the artwork for her?”

Anna still couldn't conjure any of the images from memory, but she had learned something about Japanese art in college. “Who was the artist?”

“You think I'd remember the names after fifty years? There are two different series. One of landscapes and one of Japanese ladies.”

Sadie pressed forward. “So what happened?”

“What happened? The war happened. I had the pictures. Mayumi went to the camps. Then I married Marvin Feld, he died, I ended up in New York. What a mess!”

“And?” Sadie asked. You had to be careful with Goldie, so Sadie's more important question was implied: Why do you still have that woman's prints? And Anna knew what her sister was thinking: What had Goldie done?

Goldie seemed to understand the implication. “Don't you know what happened to me then? I almost died of poverty. Do I have to remind you of that? I was pregnant with your father. I had to keep my wits about me, save myself and my son. I could have died—like a hobo!—in the street.”

Anna and Sadie gazed at each other. In front of them lay a transgression that dated back half a century already. Goldie had accepted a treasure for safekeeping and never returned it. Anna, to whom the pictures had, long ago, given so much happiness, felt implicated as well. “So you want us to take the artwork back?” she asked.

“Of course,” Goldie asserted.

Though the details of this conversation filled her with concern, Anna felt a sense of excitement as well. The reappearance in her memory of the art, her grandmother's sudden, belated need to return it, and Anna's own sense of complicity stirred something unexpected in her—an awareness of knotty predicaments beyond the saga of her own widowhood. And so, in a burst of enthusiasm that would, over the coming weeks, cause her all manner of consternation, she said, “We have to return it.”

Sadie looked completely agitated now. “Do you even know this woman's still alive?”

Goldie reached under the napkin on her lap, opened her evening bag, and pulled out a newspaper clipping that she had neatly folded in half. “Look at this,” she said with the air of a lawyer presenting irrefutable evidence. It was an advertisement for an auction at Sotheby's, “Treasures of the Nakamura Collection.” Goldie said, “I saw this in the
New York Times
the other morning, and that's how I had my great idea. Nakamura must be her brother—how should I remember his first name?—but I'm sure that's him. He established a big antique house in San Francisco. So when we get out there we'll find him and give it back.” She fell silent, letting the extent of her own cleverness sink in.