The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (17 page)

Goldie would rather have jumped in the water than pull off her shoes in front of these men, but she could hardly explain that to Henry or Marvin. Instead she stood frozen, watching the rocking boat. After a moment, it eased in closer. “Now!” Marvin said. Goldie reached out and took Henry's hand. Her left foot stepped off the pier and landed firmly on the deck. Instantly her other foot followed. “Oh, my goodness,” she gasped. “I made it!” She looked down and laughed when she saw how hard she'd been gripping Henry's hand.

They sailed east toward Oakland. Marvin, who was the only one who knew how to sail, put Henry on the tiller for a couple of minutes so that he could duck down the steps and scrounge up some drinks. He came back with a tray of glasses, a flask of rum, and some bottles of Coca-Cola. “Sorry I don't have more to offer,” he said. “My mother usually stocks the galley better.”

“But this is divine,” Goldie responded, employing an adjective that felt particularly aristocratic. She and Mayumi each accepted a cola. While the young men sat near the rudder, the girls huddled together on the cushioned bench, curled under the fur blankets, the existence of which Goldie planned to emphasize when she described her afternoon to Rochelle.

The whole city of San Francisco lay in front of them. Marvin pointed out famous sites: the Fairmont Hotel, the Bay Bridge, Coit Tower alone on the top of Telegraph Hill. Except for the time that she had climbed that hill, Goldie had never seen such a view. “The city makes more sense from here,” she said. “I can see how things relate to each other.”

“Henry and I live way over that way,” said Mayumi, tossing her hand through the air as if she were trying to lob a ball toward the tea garden in Golden Gate Park.

“Where do you live, Marvin?” Goldie asked. She had yet to think of Marvin when she lay in bed contemplating her future, but she expected that she would tonight. Knowing the location of his home might help to better illuminate him in her imagination.

“Up that way.” He gestured vaguely toward a hill just west of downtown. “And my parents live farther in that direction.” He was too modest to be specific, but Mayumi and Henry understood that he was pointing to two exclusive neighborhoods: Nob Hill and Pacific Heights.

“Where do I live?” Goldie asked.

Henry pointed up toward Marvin's parents' part of town. “You live that way, but down the hill on the other side.”

“My sister Rochelle calls it ‘Pacific Lows,' ” Goldie told them.

Marvin Feld watched Goldie. She seemed so alive and fresh, so open to the world. He envied her ability to joke about her situation. In his own life, he felt uncomfortable about the fact that he had been born into wealth. Except for his military service, of which he was very proud, he felt he had done nothing of value with his life. As a result, he was self-conscious and at the same time annoyed at himself for caring about such things. Why couldn't he be more easygoing? Why couldn't he laugh at himself, like Goldie did?

Mayumi saw the look on Marvin's face and glanced at Henry, who had noticed, too. Riding home on the bus the night before, Mayumi had said, “He's going to fall in love with her.” Henry had disputed it. He didn't have any evidence to prove his sister wrong, but he had argued with her anyway. Now he couldn't miss the expression of admiration in Marvin's face. Mayumi gazed at her brother with satisfaction. “See?” she seemed to be saying. “I told you.”

Henry, irritated, ignored his sister. “Well, look over there!” he said, his tone perhaps a bit more impassioned than he intended. “Now that's an embarrassing address.” After passing the big piers of Fisherman's Wharf and the Embarcadero, they had veered north to loop around Alcatraz. Henry pointed toward the island, which had thousands of sea birds soaring over it.

Goldie sat up straighter. She had heard of the famous prison but of course had never seen it so close. “That's where the gangsters live?” she asked.

“Machine Gun Kelly's in there,” said Henry, who felt the need to dominate the conversation now.

“Oh!” said Goldie. “He comes from Memphis, too.”

Mayumi lit up. “Really? Have you heard anything juicy about him?”

Goldie put a note of drama into her voice. “I can remember when I was about thirteen or fourteen years old. That's when they captured him. The papers had so many stories about it. He was visiting a friend, and the police surrounded the house. They had an enormous bloody shoot-out.” She raised a hand to shield her eyes from the sun, then looked up toward the forbidding buildings stretched across the rock. “Now, here I am. Hello, Machine Gun!” she called, waving gaily.

Goldie was nearly as happy as she could be, but the swing around Alcatraz had put them into choppy waters. Mayumi began to look queasy. Goldie put her hand on Mayumi's cheek. “You're pale,” she said.

“I think,” said Mayumi, shakily standing up, “that I'm going to lie down in the cabin.”

Henry and Goldie jumped up to take Mayumi's arms. “Should we head back?” Goldie asked.

Mayumi shook her head. “Absolutely not,” she told them. “I'd have to be dying.”

Downstairs, the space was divided into a couple of tiny bedrooms and the main cabin, which contained the kitchen area. Goldie felt a flash of disappointment over the less than opulent interior. The fabric on the seat cushions was a simple blue-and-white nautical stripe. The table was built into the wall, and the only lighting came from a row of simple sconces. Goldie had only just begun her ascent from poverty, so she had not developed an ability to read the subtler signs of great wealth—handcrafted woodwork, cotton slipcovers imported from London, antique brass fixtures purchased off the Cunard
Franconia
when it had been converted into a troop ship a few years earlier. Still, she reminded herself as she held Mayumi's arm, they were sailing on a
yacht
.

Henry and Goldie helped Mayumi onto one of the bunks, then spread a blanket over her. Henry found a wastebasket in the galley and put it next to Mayumi, “just in case.” Then they closed the door behind them.

“Look!” Goldie said. From the cushion-covered bench, they could peer out through the porthole at Alcatraz. She paused there, curled up on her knees, and looked out toward the island. “It's a whole different perspective from here,” she said.

Henry sat down beside her. For weeks, clusters of unfocused feelings had been fluttering through his head, and the conversation up on deck had suddenly caused them to coalesce. He felt as if his vision, once so fuzzy, had become absolutely clear. From this angle, the prison looked even more oppressive. “Sometimes the prisoners try to escape,” he said. “They know they'll probably die trying, but they'd rather die than stay there.”

For a long moment, neither of them said a word. Goldie imagined those angry, lonely men, up on that rock, behind those bars. “What do you suppose they think about when they're in there?” she asked.

He said, “Freedom. Love.”

“They think about love?” Goldie's face nearly touched the glass.

Henry, too, pressed closer. “They're human. All humans think about love.”

They think about love? For what seemed her entire life, Goldie had plotted incessantly about her future, her prospects, the material comforts that she needed from the world, but she had never thought about love. And so it was at this moment, in the expensive simplicity of the cabin of Marvin Feld's family yacht, that for the first time Goldie Rubin considered love. And it was here, too, that she knew the answer to a question she hadn't even thought to ask: Henry? Henry. The adjustment was surprisingly simple. An observer could have attributed it to the boat rising on the crest of a wave, or maybe it was something else. Indisputably, Goldie shifted the angle of her head and Henry shifted his. Their cheeks touched. At that moment, on that finely upholstered bench, the Japanese San Franciscan and the Memphis Jew froze, their warm cheeks against each other. Behind the door on the spacious bunk, Mayumi Nakamura had fallen asleep. Up on deck, Marvin Feld closed his eyes, felt the sun on his forehead, and thought of someone he'd met in Europe. Down below, Henry's hand moved up Goldie's back, slipped into her hair, and slowly turned her head toward his. They kissed.

Part Three

9

Not a Place to Die

C
ameron Memorial Community Hospital occupied a prominent spot in downtown Angola, Indiana, a Middle American mini-metropolis of red brick and antiques, Civil War statuary, and Wal-Mart. In architectural style, the hospital echoed the bland modernity of the Hampton Inns that Goldie and Anna had been staying in so regularly since they left New York, which might explain why Anna was sleeping so soundly on the waiting room sofa when, sometime in the night, a doctor had to wake her up.

“Ms. Rosenthal?” he asked.

She opened her eyes, remembered that her grandmother had fallen into a suitcase, and immediately sat up. “Sorry,” she said. Beside her on the couch lay the scattered sketches that she had completed, in a frantic spasm of creativity, earlier in the night. Now she shuffled them together and folded them into a pile, which she stuck beneath her leg while straightening her skirt. Was it almost morning? Outside the window the sky had turned a deep violet. Hours earlier, emergency room doctors had taken X-rays, which hadn't revealed any fractures, but they had decided to check Goldie into the hospital anyway. Anna's father had been on the phone with her off and on the whole night, and he recognized that her panic, combined with her guilt about the earlier argument with Goldie, was making it hard for her to function at all. Finally, at about 3
A.M
., he had counseled her to leave the hospital, drive around the block a couple of times, then come back. Somehow the change of setting had helped. When she came back inside, she completed a few more drawings before lying down on the waiting room couch and falling asleep.

This doctor was a dark-skinned Indian man, maybe in his forties, with glasses and a buzz cut. He looked down at her, his eyes tired, his expression blank. “I'm Dr. Choudary,” he said. “I'm the hospitalist taking over your grandmother's case.”

The indirectness of his phrasing—her grandmother's “case” instead of simply her grandmother—made Anna's stomach tighten. Had something terrible happened over the past couple of hours? Anna dug into her skirt pocket for her cell phone. “Can you just wait? I need to call my dad. Shit. Where's my phone?”

“No, it's okay. Her condition is not life threatening,” he told her, but though this information clearly relieved her, she remained determined to find her phone. The doctor sat down on the sofa beside her, letting his head fall back and closing his eyes.

Now, with a feeling that she was holding up a busy man, Anna fumbled even more fruitlessly through her purse. She hadn't been inside an emergency room since the last time Ford became dehydrated. Even though only a couple of years had passed, she had lost her competency in medical surroundings. She had once been good at it. Over the course of his illness, she had become so acutely attuned to his condition that she could know by the look in his eyes and the color of his skin that she needed to get him to the hospital. Back then, she could help him to the car, grab herself a book and a snack and her sketchbook, and have them settled in at the Methodist emergency room within twenty minutes. Now, she couldn't even find her phone. “I'm sorry,” she muttered. “I'm so out of it.”

The doctor opened his eyes like someone waking from a nap. He saw that she was ready to listen. “It's not a problem,” he said, sitting up. “We have phones.” He looked through the notes on his clipboard. “She's lucky that she doesn't have any fractures, but we have some concern that she may have developed a condition called rhabdomyolysis, which is the deterioration of skeletal muscle.”

“From falling?”

“Not so much from falling as from lying in one position for so long, unable to move. The muscles break down, and in a very short time myoglobin is released into the blood. We're watching to see how the kidneys handle it because there's a potential for some damage there.”

From the opposite wall, a picture of a giant sunflower smiley face stared out at Anna, its expression full of recrimination. “She was sitting there for hours,” she said.

“I'm sure it was terrifying for her.”

Anna's gaze dropped to the floor. All night she had been creeping around the fact of Goldie's trauma, moving closer, then veering away from it.

Perhaps the doctor sensed her guilt, because he quickly added, “She's not in pain now, and I haven't seen evidence of any serious problem. I just want to keep her here another day to conduct more tests. Given her age, it's best to be careful.”

For the first time, Anna considered the possibility that the situation might not be as dire as she had thought. “It seemed so terrible,” she said, as much to herself as to him.

“She'll be sore, but assuming we don't find anything serious, she should be fine.”

Anna realized now that she had fully expected Goldie to die here. Once people reached their eighties, the slightest injury seemed to rocket them toward death. “I'm having a hard time processing this,” she told him. “It's a miracle.”

The doctor considered this assertion, then shook his head. “You could call it that, but she's in generally excellent health. I'd call it a lesson in the results of taking good care of oneself.”

Anna began to relax. She leaned back against the couch and asked, “Where are you from?”

“Queens, New York. What about you?”

“Memphis.”

He shook his head and pressed on. “No,” he said. “Where are you
really
from, you know?”

She laughed, realizing that a dark-skinned man in rural Indiana must have people pressing him about his ethnic roots every day. “I guess maybe Eastern Europe.”

“Yeah, you look like a European.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I bet it drives you crazy when people ask you that.”

She loved the Indian nod—a slight tipping of the head, as unconcerned as a shrug—but this doctor nodded just like she did. He put his pen back into the pocket of his jacket and said, “I've more or less grown used to it.”

Then he stood up, glancing at his watch, and became harried in the way that doctors usually did after the first few minutes. “Well, Ms. Rosenthal,” he said, “we'll keep her here another night for observation, and if all goes well, you can be on your way.”

Anna watched him go. She thought of Goldie, and then she thought of Ford, wishing that her husband had received such an optimistic prognosis. Medicine progressed so unevenly.

 

“It's a miracle,” Goldie said into the telephone, reclining against the pillows in her hospital bed. “A Mir. A. Cle.” The sun had come up fully now, and Anna had found her telephone on the floor of the car. Now they were talking to Anna's father in Memphis. “I was extremely lucky. I could have died, you know. I got up for water, felt dizzy, and the next thing I know I'm on the floor, stuck inside a suitcase.” Goldie fingered the tray that held her breakfast. The room smelled of scrambled eggs and ammonia. The coffee in its plastic cup looked like a thin broth. “I don't have any fractures, just a Band-Aid on my arm. They're doing some tests and they gave me some Tylenol and I feel like a million bucks. Can you believe it?” She paused, listening to Anna's father, then responded to a question. “Vile. Absolutely vile. But it won't hurt me to diet for a couple of days. Here, talk to Anna.”

Goldie held out the phone. “Hey,” Anna said to her father.

“Crisis averted,” he announced.

“Well, not exactly,” she said, looking around the hospital room. Goldie's face was pale, her skin almost translucent. “It's not like we missed the turnoff but still found the right road.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Goldie. She was sipping some orange juice through a straw.

“But she's going to be fine, right?” asked Anna's father. Not for the first time, Anna considered how lucky she was that Goldie was her grandparent, not her parent. Marvie, who had become quite successful in his law practice, had spent his entire adult life trying to appease his mother's disappointment over his failure to leave Memphis, take up residence in a “world-class city,” and just generally live a more prominent life. Anna could hear the effect of that disappointment in the peculiar mix of anxiety and optimism that crept into Marvie's voice whenever he spoke of his mother. “She fell into a suitcase,” he said now. “But she's going to be fine, right?”

“Probably,” Anna said, realizing that she needed to soothe him. “Don't worry, Dad. We're trying to get her up on her feet.”

“Tell him I'm trying to get up on my feet,” Goldie said.

“We're waiting for the physical therapist to come. They'll see how she does.”

“I'm ready to get out of here,” Goldie announced, loudly enough that her son would hear her. “You could die in a place like this.”

Anna's father seemed relieved. “Call me after the physical therapist comes by,” he said.

After Anna hung up, Goldie said, “The pain was unbearable. Un. Bear. Able. You've never been through childbirth, but this was worse than childbirth. I was asking God to let me die.”

Anna felt the muscles in her throat knot up, and she blinked to keep from crying. “I'm so sorry,” she said.

Goldie took her hand. “Darling. It's not your fault. I live alone. This could have happened to me in New York and I would have been stuck there all night. You saved me.” She seemed to have forgotten their argument completely.

Anna pulled a Kleenex out of a box on Goldie's bedside table and blew her nose. “You don't have suitcases on the floor in New York. I was so stupid.”

“I was stupid,” Goldie said, smoothing down the paper napkin on her chest. “Get over it. Anyway, I want to get out of here now. It's hospitals that will kill you.” She took a bite of toast. “I'm not planning to die in a hospital, but if I did, it's not going to be—what's this place called?”

“Cameron Memorial.”

“Cameron Memorial. I wouldn't die here.”

Anna tossed the tissue into the trash. “Do you have an idea of a better hospital? Something more appropriate?”

Goldie held up her piece of toast, looking at it skeptically. “Memorial Sloan-Kettering.”

“Isn't that a cancer center?” Anna had heard about it often enough during Ford's treatment, but she'd never been there.

“I don't know what it is. How should I know? But my friends built a wing there. Did I tell you that? Not a
bench,
but a
wing
. If you're going to die in a hospital, it should be a prominent one.”

“I guess,” Anna said. Ford hadn't died in a hospital. He died in their little bungalow on Waynoka Avenue.

Goldie set down her toast and tried to readjust herself on the pillows. Anna took her arm to help her. “Be careful,” she said. “Don't wear yourself out.”

“Don't boss me around. If I want to wear myself out, I'll wear myself out.” Satisfied with her new position on the bed, Goldie brushed some crumbs off her hospital gown. “Mayo Clinic. Now you wouldn't be embarrassed about dying there.”

“Can we change the subject?”

“What's wrong with talking about this subject? I can talk about whatever I want. I'm eighty-five.”

After another few minutes, Goldie dozed off. When she woke, she was still thinking about hospitals. “You assume I know nothing because I've been so healthy,” she told Anna, “but I almost died once. An ambulance had to come get me then, too. I know more than you think.”

Anna had been curled in the squeaky fake leather armchair, paging through a months-old copy of
Entertainment Weekly
she'd found in the waiting room. She had completely forgotten that the night before Goldie had mentioned another experience with an ambulance. “What happened?” she asked.

“Hand me some water,” Goldie said. Anna got up, poured some ice water out of a pitcher, and gave the cup to Goldie, who took a few sips through the straw. “I feel so thirsty in here,” she muttered.

Anna said, “It's good to drink.”

Goldie let her head ease back onto the pillow. “I hadn't even lived yet and I almost died. I was twenty years old, almost bled to death.”

“How come you never told me?”

Goldie let her fingers flutter through the air. “Why talk about it?”

Anna sat back down. She had to handle this conversation carefully. If she asked the wrong question, or seemed too avidly nosy, her grandmother would shut down completely. “Were you in an accident?” she asked, casually paging through the magazine.

“Ha! Accidentally getting involved with the wrong man.”

“Oh.”

“I could have died. He drugged my ginger ale. Next thing I knew, well, a few weeks later I'm in a hospital bed, my stomach cut open and needles coming out of my arms. Could have died.”

“From drugging your ginger ale?”

Goldie looked at her, exasperated. “Don't you understand anything? He drugged my ginger ale. Got me pregnant. I was so young I barely understood a thing. Then I started bleeding at work. I collapsed—
collapsed!
—behind the tie display. Then I had to have surgery, and I almost died in the hospital.” She paused for a moment, then apparently decided that the story offered the type of lesson she was determined to impart. “That's why I worry about you so much. I don't want you to suffer like I did.”

Anna had no interest in Goldie's advice, but she was deeply curious about her history. Somehow she kept her eyes on the magazine and was able to ask, as nonchalantly as someone inquiring about the weather, “Who was it?”

“I want your life to be better than mine was.”

Anna looked up. “Have I heard his name?”

She should have known that her grandmother could not be distracted into saying more than she intended. An expression of annoyance crossed her face as she seemed to realize that Anna just wanted details. “How should I remember?” she asked, then picked up the television remote, squinted down at the buttons, and said, “Come on. It's time for
Judge Judy
.”