The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (29 page)

If Goldie wasn't happy, exactly, she was very satisfied with this new life. She no longer had to sleep on Rochelle's couch or worry about money. To her surprise, though, she quickly found that being in the apartment all the time made her bored and edgy. Marvin suggested that she plan a party, but Goldie only dreamed of one perfect party—in the tea garden in Golden Gate Park—and that idea had lost its luster with the removal of the Nakamura family to the desert. Within a month of their wedding, she had drifted back to Feld's. It was not appropriate for the daughter-in-law of the owner to act like a salesgirl, so Goldie rambled. Sometimes she would go into the millinery department and fluff the hats. Other times she folded sweaters. At first her former colleagues kept their distance, but they soon saw that the young Mrs. Feld could be just as friendly as the old Miss Rubin. She considered herself an employer now, and in that role she worked hard and lavished praise. The only change that she insisted upon (and this was through Marvin and thus indirect) was to make sure that Feld's got rid of Alan Stevenson as quickly and discreetly as possible. That change took place within the first week.

More than anything else, Goldie wanted to learn. The person who could teach her the most was not her father-in-law or Marvin (neither of whom, truth be told, cared about the day-to-day running of the business), but Mr. Blankenship.

“You're the one who keeps Feld's Feld's,” she told him, following him into the elevator one day not long after her reappearance.

They rode together to the third floor. Mr. Blankenship hadn't complained about her return to the store, but he had made no effort to welcome her, either. Throughout the ride up, he held his hands behind his back and stared at the door. “There's no need to flatter me, Mrs. Feld,” he said.

“I'm not flattering you, Mr. Blankenship,” Goldie responded. “It's the simple truth.” When other people addressed her now, she loved the sound of “Mrs. Feld,” but with Mr. Blankenship, she felt that she needed a few years to grow into it. There wasn't much to be done about that, though. He had never called her Goldie, and she couldn't very well go back to “Miss Rubin” now.

The elevator door opened, and he stepped out into the warehouse. It was a dim, cavernous space, lit mostly by the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the front of the building, filled with pallets of packing crates, furniture, boxes labeled
FRAGILE
and
BILL RECIPIENT
and
THIS SIDE UP
. Goldie would have liked to stop in front of each box and have him tell her everything about its contents, but there was no time for that now. He turned a corner and disappeared. She trotted after him, feeling more like a puppy than the new bride of the son of the owner of the store.

Mr. Blankenship ducked into his office, leaving the door open wide enough that he didn't seem rude, but not wide enough to look inviting. None of his sales staff had ever married into the family before, and Goldie's new standing presented a challenge he did not feel keen to address. For one thing, he had his suspicions about the nature of that marriage. Did she know what she was getting into? Could it last? But more pressing, how would he define his own relationship to her now? If she insisted on being on the premises, who was the boss?

He liked the girl very much. Over the period of her employment, he had come to consider her one of his “standout staff” and, like a teacher who feels invested in the future of his most promising students, had watched with optimism to see what she would make of her life. He had felt proud of her and had taken her success as a testament to his ability to find, among the dozens of sales applicants he met every year, those individuals who could bring to the floor both personal refinement and a talent for “moving the merchandise”—though he was not so uncouth as to utter such a phrase out loud. He talked, instead, about “helping our customers locate the items that satisfy their heart's desires.” When he used such language, most applicants looked confused. He hired the ones who didn't.

Goldie, of course, had never seemed confused. Though her application had contained the disconcerting information that she had only completed the eighth grade, he immediately recognized certain qualities in her that would make her a fine salesgirl. She was avid to learn and, despite her lack of education, demonstrated a quickness with numbers when he administered a test. She was also good-looking, which was a particular asset given the store's clientele. And then there was that indefinable quality that made its presence known during interviews, not through the things that the applicants said but through how they held themselves, how they talked, what they wore. Goldie, Mr. Blankenship remembered, had appeared in a simple wool skirt and a white cotton blouse. Such items were hardly the height of fashion, and it was clear, of course, that she had very little money. But Mr. Blankenship met young women applicants for sales positions nearly every week. None of them had money, and most addressed that fact by purchasing cheaply made and often gaudy items that mimicked elegant style about as successfully as a rhinestone mimicked diamonds. Goldie's clothes were simpler but, he could see at a glance, of excellent quality—purchased, he guessed, with great deliberation at a secondhand store in the city. The cloth was thin and worn but finely tailored, well pressed, and immaculate. Here was a girl, he had discerned, who had good sense about style and could learn even more.

Goldie poked her head through the door. “Can I just say something?” she asked.

He looked up from his desk. At this time of the morning, the sunlight flooded the room at an angle, illuminating the dust whirling in from the warehouse in a way he found distasteful. “Go ahead.” He let her see him glance at his watch.

She hesitated to come inside. “I admire you so much,” she said. When he didn't respond, she added, “So, so, so, so much.”

He had to smile. He twirled a paper clip between his fingers, but kept his eye on her, waiting for her to continue.

“Ever since I came here, I've wanted you to respect what I do. I've tried really hard. I mean I don't imagine that you're going to think of me as a brain or anything. But I want you to respect me.”

His continued silence threw her off. “Am I making any kind of sense at all?” she asked.

“Go on,” he said.

“Just because I'm not working here anymore doesn't mean I can't be helpful. I can do a lot. You can give me any job and I will do it.”

“Sweeping the warehouse?” His voice carried a note of challenge, but she could see that he was taking her seriously now.

“Can I wear the maintenance uniform? I wouldn't want to get my clothes dirty.”

“We could arrange that.”

“Then yes. Of course. Certainly. I'll scrub the floors.”

He could see that she was serious, and he was impressed, though he had no intention of having her scrub the floors. “But why?” he asked. “You are a woman of leisure now. You can go have lunch with the ladies. Have fun.”

She sighed as if he didn't understand her at all. “I'm not interested in having lunch with ladies, Mr. Blankenship. This is my future. I really, truly believe that I love this place as much as you do. I love every single thing about it. I don't just mean the cashmere sweaters or the necklaces. I love the display cases and the marble floors”—he didn't seem convinced, so she gestured toward the warehouse behind her—“and those cardboard boxes, too.” Then she looked directly at him. “There's a war going on, Mr. Blankenship. Honestly, I don't see Marvin or his father doing an awful lot to make sure this place survives, so I have to do what I can. If the business fails, I go straight to the bottom again. I drown.”

He laughed a little, but her words unsettled him. “I don't imagine that your situation would really be so dire as that.”

She responded quietly. “It feels that way. If you've been poor before, you feel it.”

Mr. Blankenship couldn't argue. His own circumstances hardly compared to the Felds', but he came from a comfortable village in Leicestershire. His father had worked in a bank. He had never actually known hunger, at least not in the way that he suspected Goldie had. Among the Feld family, only Goldie truly understood the threat of failure. Certainly Marvin had no idea. The boy had a fine education and he exhibited talent enough to excel in his profession, but he seemed content to while away his time on pet projects like model ships and unnecessary inventions. Marvin's father was even worse, claiming a love of architecture and science when really he spent most of his time skiing in Tahoe or sailing on their yacht. Mrs. Feld came from a wealthy Philadelphia family—money marrying money, that one—so she had never experienced hardship, either. She had more common sense than her husband, but she considered it demeaning to involve herself in the store's affairs. Among them all, only Goldie really cared, and she had the ambition and focus to make things happen.

“Perhaps you're right.”

“I just need you to take me under your wing,” she said.

He gazed at her. He had never in his life seen a face that was at the same time so powerful and so forlorn. It almost frightened him.

Over the course of the next year, then, there was no one with whom Goldie spent more time than Mr. Blankenship. He was never her confidant, certainly not in the sense that Mayumi had been, or for a time Henry, or even Marvin when he was around. But he became her companion. They spent their days together at Feld's. In the evenings, he often dropped by to keep her company over a cup of tea. Every so often they would leave the store early on a Saturday afternoon and visit the antique shops of North Beach, not so much to buy things as to engage in discussions about what made one object “a thing of quality” and another object “unworthy.”

“Is Mr. Blankenship a homosexual, too?” Goldie asked Marvin one night over dinner. They had walked down the hill to a steakhouse called Bill's Place. Early in their marriage they had discovered, through trial and error (an undercooked chicken, a burned steak, a soggy cherry pie), that Goldie hated cooking and would never really learn. They had addressed the problem quite happily by eating out every night. Later, when she looked back on her marriage to Marvin, she realized that it was those evenings spent talking by candlelight that she had loved best. Her memories of that time almost made her believe her own stories of romance.

“Blankenship?” Marvin fingered his Scotch. He had no proof about Blankenship. He had never seen the man at any of the places he frequented around town, but like Goldie he had a hunch the man was queer. Marvin prided himself on his discretion, however. As a rule, he never speculated or revealed secrets about other men. He didn't want anyone talking about him, so he didn't go talking about other people, either. On the other hand, he could see that Blankenship meant a great deal to his wife. Perhaps Goldie needed to know for a reason. “What makes you think that?” Marvin asked.

“He's not married.” Marvin's tutoring had led Goldie to reassess several of the men she had known—a boy in school who played with dolls, a cousin who had left Memphis to become a dancer in New York—and she had come to suspect that
lifelong bachelor
was just another term for
queer.

“Some people just aren't interested in that sort of thing,” Marvin said. “Taste this Green Goddess.” He stabbed at the lettuce with his fork and lifted it to Goldie's lips. The thought crossed his mind, with some satisfaction, that anyone watching them from another table would believe them in love. It was a satisfying period in Marvin's life as well.

Goldie took the bite of salad and, waving her hand over her mouth, made a face of disgust. “Marvin, anchovy!”

“I couldn't taste it,” he said, offering her a glass of water. “I'm so sorry, darling. I thought you wouldn't taste it, either.”

Goldie took a gulp of water and then a bite of bread. Despite the terrible flavor in her mouth, she wasn't going to let the subject of this conversation get away from her. “You told me that wasn't true yourself,” she said.

“What?”

“That people aren't interested in that sort of thing. You said everyone's interested in that sort of thing.”

She had brought them back to a difficult subject. During those days, Goldie and Marvin were as kind to each other as they could be, and Marvin tried diligently to answer the questions that popped up regularly as his wife navigated this new, confusing phase of her life. From the perspective of his own predicament, it helped him to assert the normalcy of sexual feeling of any kind. Doing so made him feel less strange and alone. On the other hand, how could he insist that everyone felt desire and, at the same time, pay very little attention to the desires of his wife? Goldie was a beautiful young woman. He had no doubt that she felt passion, too. They had been married now for two months, and he had married her intending to have a sexual relationship with her, if not every night, then at least with enough regularity that their marriage could seem normal. But for the first few weeks after their wedding, he had relied on excuses—bad colds, headaches, fatigue—and it helped, of course, that he spent many evenings out of the house entirely, often not returning until midnight or later, by which time he had already sated his own desire and Goldie had fallen asleep. His failure to “complete the deal,” as he put it to himself, caused him to chastise himself by day and spend more and more time away at night.

Finally, with a sense that he had to pull himself together or risk destroying his marriage, he had made a trip to the library. There he found enough information on women's reproductive cycles that, along with some regular sleuthing among Goldie's underwear at home, he could get a sense of her rhythm. The entire enterprise felt despicable to him. By now, though, he was determined. He made a careful counting of days, judged the ones during which she would be most fertile, and finally, as they approached the second month of their marriage, he got into bed with her, turned out the light, and somehow managed to maintain an erection long enough to complete the act. Afterward, he sobbed from shame and relief. Goldie sobbed, too, though he was too overcome by his own emotions to ask her why.