The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (22 page)

Looking up at the universe, Anna thought, “If only . . . if only . . . if only.” If only what? If only she had watched more closely. If only he had told her in actual words that he loved her. If only he had lived, or barring that, if only they could have found solace with each other before he went away.

With a sense that she was pleading now, Anna scanned the stars, searching for the man she'd loved. She reasoned that his wouldn't be a noteworthy star but a smaller one twinkling brightly from some comfortable astronomical position. “What's it like up there?” she whispered. The light from this star, of course, had begun its journey before she and Ford, their parents, Goldie and Saul, Marvin Feld, the nation, maybe even the continent itself existed. How lucky, she told herself, that she and Ford had overlapped in this world at the exact same time. They had loved each other long before the bitterness and scowls set in. And if she could remember that, then their love had lasted. For the first time, Anna began to hope that eventually it could be that emotion—love—that would stay with her.

“What if I had been born in the Middle Ages?” she asked, beginning to cry now. “What if you were George Jetson? We never would have met.”

13

The Love of Your Life

T
hey had almost crossed the country now. In Wyoming Anna discovered that her body had settled so comfortably into the groove of the machine that she understood the allure of long-distance trucking. At some moments she felt that she and Bridget were communicating telepathically. It only took the slightest pressure of her finger on the wheel to make the car respond.

Outside the window, the world changed. The grass became more sparse. At first they saw only the occasional patch of dirt. Then more bare soil and less grass, until finally Anna decided that they had officially left the prairie behind. Was this the Red Desert, which she had read about on the free Internet in the lobby of a recent Hampton Inn? The views were vast and unencumbered. No grass, no trees, just rocks and jagged plateaus in the distance. She found it exhilarating. The bare ground seemed more honest somehow, the earth revealing its truest self. Just beside the road, the color of the dirt was indeed a vibrant red. No,
rust
was more accurate. For a painter, a photographer, a printmaker, even a comic book artist, words didn't matter, though. Anna thought of the range of colors in her comics, the universe of colors in the Japanese prints. There was so much possibility in the palette, while measly
red
tried to accommodate everything from a Valentine's heart the color of blood to the arid landscape of this desert.

“Have you ever seen anything more ugly in your life?” Goldie asked.

At another time, Anna might have responded by saying, “Yes, poverty and despair,” but she was feeling more kindly toward Goldie now, so she tried to be bland and diplomatic. “We see the most beautiful things and we see the most ugly.”

Sometimes Goldie liked to turn philosophical, and she warmed to Anna's comment now. “I know exactly what you're talking about. I've been with the Pope and I've been with Prince Charles and I've been with the garbage man. When I was a little girl, we only ate meat on Friday nights. The rest of the week, dinner was a can of corn with some milk from our cow poured into it. Your Poppy and I had to work like fiends to make it in this world.”

“I love to hear these stories,” Anna said.

Goldie didn't respond for a while. Eventually she said, “It's just such a long time ago.”

“Is it hard to remember?”

“Not at all. I can remember the lace on the hem of every slip I wore back then. And suffering makes you stronger. I'm as strong as an ax.”

Anna considered correcting her. It was
ox,
not
ax,
but
ax
seemed right for Goldie. “You really are,” Anna said.

“Thinking about it makes me tired, though. I'm eighty-five years old, and I need to conserve my energy. I need to focus on my life right now.”

At lunchtime they stopped at a Subway just west of Cheyenne, and Sadie called. “Aunt Rochelle died,” she told Anna. “Can you tell Nana?”

“Okay.” Anna looked at her grandmother, whose attention was focused at that moment on rubbing a Handi Wipes over her fingers before she picked up her chicken sandwich. Goldie had lived with Rochelle many years ago in San Francisco, but the sisters had never gotten along. They probably hadn't spoken in a decade, though the whole family had known that Rochelle was ailing. Anna imagined that it would be difficult, no matter what, to take the news that the last of her nine siblings was gone.

Once they were back on the road, Anna put it simply. “Nana, Sadie gave me some sad news. Aunt Rochelle died.”

Goldie stared out the window toward the plain of southeastern Wyoming. After a while, she said, “I can't believe it.” Her posture didn't change at all. She seemed to be having a reaction that was mostly intellectual. “Someone's around your whole life, and then they're gone. Just like that.”

Anna had once heard a theory that, just as dogs can't speak and horses can't fly, humans, as a species, can't understand the finality of death. “Even when you know someone's going to die,” she said, “it's still baffling.”

Goldie said, “I'm not going to lie to you. I didn't like Rochelle one little bit. She was mean and selfish and she never did a thing in the world for anyone else.”

Anna tried to remember her Great Aunt Rochelle, but she had only a vague image of a pointy-nosed version of Goldie, sitting across a big table from her at a steakhouse somewhere.

“Not that I would ever celebrate the death of another human being,” Goldie said.

Anna loved her own sister so completely that she couldn't understand the ill will between her grandmother and Rochelle. On the other hand, you can't force yourself to like someone. “What was the problem between the two of you?”

“She never felt anything was good enough for her. She griped,” Goldie said. “Once, I took her to a wedding. My very close friend was getting married. I was a guest, and they were very nice—this was in San Francisco—and they let me bring my sister. I wanted to dance and have a glorious time, and Rochelle kept complaining. Nothing was good enough for her. The sandwiches were dry. The cakes were too sweet. I was ready to have the time of my life, but she made it impossible. For me, the entire affair was ruined. I had a miserable time. A horrible time.”

“And it was Rochelle's fault?”

“All Rochelle's fault. Absolutely.”

To Anna, bitching at a wedding seemed like a fairly minor infraction, surely not a thing to hold against a person for a lifetime. “Maybe she was unhappy about something,” Anna suggested.

“You hit the nail on the head. Unhappy about everything.”

A tractor-trailer sped by them, and then Anna had to concentrate on passing a couple of rattling pickup trucks that were driving slower than forty miles an hour. She forgot about her grandmother for a moment. Then Goldie said, “I gave her one of my Christian Dior suits, and that wasn't even enough.”

Then, a while later, “I never celebrate the death of another person.”

And later, “Meanness is in their bones. Like a disease.”

“A mean disease,” Anna said.

“Pure meanness.”

Outside of Rawlins, Naveen called again. “You know,” Goldie told him, “some doctors don't give you the time of day.”

Anna heard only Goldie's half of the conversation, but she tried hard to follow what they were saying. “Of course, they're busy but—doctor, can I be honest here? . . . Well, yes, but I have to be honest. When you're my age, some doctors simply don't care. They're thinking, ‘She's old. Of course she's in pain.' Is that the way to treat another human being? I don't believe it. . . . I appreciate that. . . . Eighty-five years old. . . . Of course, I've seen it all. I've seen it all twice.”

It amazed Anna that these two people could talk for so long—five, ten, fifteen minutes passed—particularly because Goldie, far from being a permanent patient, had only been passing through Indiana. But it was like a marathon of conversation.

“Do you know Memphis? It's in the southern part of the United States. It's a nothing town. . . . Oh, all right then. But how could I get rid of my accent when I don't even hear it myself? Well, then I lived in San Francisco. . . . You expect me to remember the name of the street? How should I know? I lived on a hill. Is that good enough for you? . . . Thank you. I lived in a very nice house on the top floor, with my sister and her family. And then, with my first husband, who was killed in the war, we lived on Nob Hill. Fabulous apartment. Out of this world. We could see almost all the way to China. . . . Then New York, then my second husband and I moved down to Palm Beach, and I've divided my time ever since. . . . No, I haven't been back to San Francisco in—” she looked at Anna. “I'm asking my granddaughter.”

Anna said, “What year?”

“Nineteen forty-four. You figure it out.”

Anna said, “Sixty-one years.”

“Sixty-one years,” Goldie said into the phone. “I loved it. Have you ever felt that way about a place? Just absolutely passionately in love with it? . . . Yes, I've been to Calcutta. . . . No, I didn't have that feeling about Calcutta.”

Anna tried to picture Naveen. Would he have called from the hospital? From his soulless apartment? Would he be wearing that beautiful cotton shirt? Was he standing in his kitchen in his jeans and sandals, pounding spices? What kind of expressions would cross his face as he listened to Goldie? Anna wanted to see him.

“San Francisco was so sophisticated,” Goldie continued. “I worked as a salesgirl at Feld's. Do you know Feld's? . . . Exactly. Even more elegant than Neiman Marcus. Everything I know about style I learned from a Japanese girl who worked there with me, Mayumi Nakamura. And I learned about antiques from her brother, Henry, who taught me something important every single day.”

Henry,
Anna thought.
Henry
Nakamura.

Naveen must have asked a question, because Goldie paused for a moment. Then she said, “Yes, Bergère. It's French. Your mother must have good taste. . . . So I married Marvin Feld, whose family owned the business. He was a war hero. A darling, gorgeous man from one of the best families in San Francisco. The cream of the crop. When I lost him, I thought my life was over.”

At this point, Goldie's tone became firmer, and her words seemed to be consciously directed toward her granddaughter. Anna glanced to her right. Yes, Goldie was staring straight at her. “Life goes on,” Goldie said emphatically. “You pick up the pieces. I suffered the worst broken heart that a girl can suffer. But I'm a survivor. Don't you agree?” Anna stared at the road in front of her, pretending not to be listening. What was Naveen thinking, hearing this lecture?

All the while, Anna prepared for the moment when he would ask to speak with her. She would be calmer this time, though no less firm. They could chat, a bit.

Then Goldie said, “Thanks so much for calling, Doctor. Good-bye, then!”

Anna looked at Goldie. “He didn't have any questions about your health?”

“Of course he did. I told him I'm fine.”

“What about the recipe?”

Goldie had reached down to the floor to pick up her purse. “I guess he forgot.”

Anna acknowledged her disappointment, then tried to talk herself out of it. She had told Naveen that she didn't want to speak to him, so it was natural that he would give up trying to convince her. Still.

Anyway, what was the point of focusing on such feelings? Anna set her attention instead on Goldie's latest revelation “His name,” she said, “is Henry Nakamura!”

Goldie turned to her abruptly. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

“You'd forgotten the first name of the man we're going to see—your friend's brother. The antiques dealer.” As they traveled west, Goldie's memories had become more vivid. In the past, she had never talked about her time in San Francisco. Now she seemed nostalgic for the place.

“So what?” asked Goldie.

“It's just cool that you remembered.”

“There's nothing cool about it,” Goldie snapped. “I just remembered. And I don't know why you keep bringing up this subject. Would you like it if I asked you a thousand questions about the saddest time of your life?”

“Maybe.”

“No, you wouldn't.” Goldie opened her purse, slid the phone inside, then zipped it shut and sat back in the seat, turning her face toward the window as if she actually had an interest in the landscape. “I don't like to talk about the past, and I'm sure you don't, either. People who do that are dull.”

Somewhat wearily, Anna repeated the phrase she had heard her grandmother say a thousand times: “I'm all about the future.”

“That's my motto: All about the future.”

Outside the car the wind seemed to have picked up, and Anna could feel its resistance as she pushed Bridget forward. For a woman who had been widowed twice, Goldie did have a remarkably forward-thinking perspective. When she talked about Marvin Feld at all—and she always called him by his whole name, Marvin Feld; her beloved son was simply Marvin—her descriptions were uniformly adulatory (“darling,” “gorgeous,” “smart,” “brave”), but also vague and wooden (“a fine man, upstanding”). The only description that gave him an actual physicality was Goldie's praise for him as a “fabulous dancer.” Marvin Feld played such a negligible role in Goldie's recollections of the past, in fact, that Anna could remember how once, years ago, Goldie had described herself in San Francisco as “nothing but a piece of dust floating on the wind.” Anna and Sadie had been teenagers then, visiting their grandparents for spring break. Goldie had taken them out for a “ladies' lunch” of gazpacho and shrimp cocktails at the Colony Hotel, and perhaps because Saul had stayed home, she had been willing to indulge in a bit more reminiscence than normal. It was Sadie who picked up on the incongruity of Goldie's remark. “But wasn't San Francisco where you met and married Marvin Feld? I thought that was the place you got to decorate your first apartment.” Perhaps if her granddaughters had still been amenable to Goldie's dictates on fashion, she would have replied more expansively, but the visit had been tense. Anna, for one, had refused to wear any of the clothes from Goldie's wardrobe that their grandmother had laid out on their beds. As a result, Goldie was prone to attack. “What would you know about decorating?” she had asked. “You girls would rather live in a pigsty. You've got the whole world handed to you on a silver platter and you turn up your noses at it.” So much for Marvin Feld.

And what about Saul Rosenthal, Husband Number Two? He had adopted Marvin, Jr., and raised the boy as his own son. Anna and Sadie had never regarded him as anything but their grandfather, just as fully imbedded in their lives as Goldie, more distant but also more solidly benign. Between themselves, Anna, Sadie, and their parents called Goldie and Saul “the Corporation”—“Is the Corporation coming for Passover this year?” “Did you send the Corporation a thank-you note?” The nickname wasn't so much a reference to the Rosenthals' financial successes, which were clearly considerable, as it was to the way in which Goldie and Saul operated as a unit, a pair of savvy business partners who happened also to be married to each other.