The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (4 page)

“Well, hello,” Goldie said. The words sounded friendly enough, but Anna saw the range of emotions flash across her grandmother's face—joy followed by a recollection of the chill between them, followed by wariness. She assessed Anna, then opened the door wider.

“How are you?” asked Anna. They kissed formally, like acquaintances at a charity ball.

“Fine. I remember that jacket.” Goldie looked at her granddaughter. “It's a Gautier I got in Paris.”

“That's right.” Anna had found the long-forgotten jacket in a closet in her front hall. All the other clothes she had gotten from Goldie—the sweaters from Bergdorf, the brassy alligator belts, the leather skirts—had been packed into boxes in the attic by Ford, probably out of spite toward Goldie. Anyway, they did take up a lot of space, and Anna had never worn them.

Goldie surveyed her granddaughter. “You didn't get fat,” she remarked.

Anna refused to respond, though she felt a measurable relief (Goldie's accusations about weight could have the effect of nuclear missiles when deployed at certain moments). Instead she drifted, focusing on the peach chintz pattern on the sofa, the tassels dangling from the cabinet doors, and the neatly stacked copies of
Architectural Digest,
each one marked at a certain page by an Italian leather bookmark. Anna had not grown up in this kind of opulence herself. Her parents had simple tastes. They joined book clubs and covered their sofas in flannel and chenille. As a child, though, Anna had been fascinated by Goldie's possessions, and the two shared a love of beauty that had drawn them together for years. Sometime between discovering the Sex Pistols in high school and reading
The Communist Manifesto
in college, however, Anna's tastes had changed. She had come to consider Goldie both bourgeois and overbearing.

“There's not even a pillow that's different in here,” Anna said. She picked up one of the trio of Japanese netsuke that had sat on her grandmother's coffee table for as long as she could remember: an ivory dancer in a kimono; a pair of puppies, tumbling over each other; a carved-wood apricot with three dainty leaves.

“A pillow?” asked Goldie, somehow offended. “How about a pencil? How about a piece of string? The room has been perfect for twenty-five years. Why should I change it now?” It shouldn't have surprised Anna that the place hadn't changed. An elderly widow caused very little wear and tear, especially when she spent half the year in Palm Beach. And Goldie was especially careful, too. Her sofa had enormous overstuffed silk pillows on it, each of which she kept firm and perfectly creased by employing a karate chop across the spine whenever it threatened to droop. The artificial flowers on her coffee table, a delicate arrangement of pinks and peaches and yellows, looked authentic—dusted regularly, Anna guessed, by BiBi, the Dominican maid that the hotel assigned to the apartment. Even the fake ficus in the corner looked thriving and real, just as it had looked thriving and real the last time Anna had visited this apartment five years earlier.

With some sense that she was bolstering her courage, Anna finally turned her attention to the portrait of Goldie that hung on the wall. Goldie's second husband, Saul Rosenthal, had commissioned the painting on the occasion of their tenth wedding anniversary. Goldie must have been in her late thirties then. In the painting her face retained the freshness of youth, but it also revealed early signs of that steeliness around the eyes that would become her most dominant feature. After only a few seconds, Anna had to look away, not because the portrait reminded her of her grandmother's uglier traits (though it did), but because she remembered that Ford had looked at Goldie's portrait and seen so much of Anna there.

Anna felt her grandmother's eyes following her across the room. Finally, Goldie insisted on attention. “Did I get fat?” she wanted to know.

Anna turned and looked at Goldie. “No, you didn't get fat.”

Apparently satisfied, Goldie lowered herself into a chair. “As soon as that late sister of yours gets here, we can go have our dinner.” Anna had arrived exactly on time, which meant that Sadie was now lagging by two minutes.

The phone rang, and with an exasperated tip of the head, Goldie motioned for Anna to go answer it. “That'll be your sister.”

Anna picked up the phone that sat by the chaise in the corner. “Hello?”

“I'm stuck in a cab on First Avenue,” Sadie said. “Let me just meet you at JoJo.”

“Tell her to forget it. Just forget it. Don't come.” Goldie stared at Anna, but spoke to Sadie directly.

“She's stuck in traffic. She'll meet us at the restaurant.”

Goldie stood up, walked over to the bench by the wall, and picked up her evening bag and jacket. “Honestly,” she muttered. “That girl will be late for her own funeral.”

Sadie apparently heard the word
funeral
through the phone line. “Goddamn it,” she said. “Can't she have a little tact?”

Anna had to laugh. “Sadie!” she said. After two years, did her sister really consider her as fragile as that?

All this passed in the course of a few seconds, with Anna still on the phone, Goldie mumbling to herself, and Sadie no doubt staring at her watch in the back of a cab somewhere downtown, wishing that a light would change. “Just hurry,” Anna told her.

Anna and Goldie walked down the hallway toward the elevator. In the past, Anna had taken care with her grandmother, walking with a hand on her arm to help her balance. She wasn't willing to do that now, but she remained slightly behind, ready to catch Goldie in the event that some snag in the carpet might cause her to fall. Anna did not experience the intense dislike, or even resentment, she might have expected to feel toward Goldie, but she felt no warmth, either. Mostly she savored the sense of relief that seemed to have swept through her body since she'd arrived in New York. Within that context, Goldie's reappearance in Anna's life seemed almost incidental. When they arrived at the bank of elevators, Goldie sat down in an armchair and smoothed out the creases in her trousers. Anna pressed the
DOWN
button, then stood in front of the mirror, pulling a piece of hair off her face and resecuring her barrette.

 

They were seated at Goldie's regular table at JoJo, upstairs by the window, when Sadie arrived. “I should have just taken the subway,” she said, giving her sister a breathless hug and her grandmother a hurried kiss before dropping into her seat. Anna had not yet seen her sister pregnant, and even though Sadie wasn't exactly showing yet, her small, wiry body did look more substantial. Tonight she was wearing a coffee-colored belted suede shirtdress, the kind of outfit one sees on women lunching at Barney's but not on comic book publishers who operate out of Williamsburg lofts. In other words, it was a hand-me-down from Goldie. The dress fit Sadie well, especially with her newly abundant figure, and she had accessorized just the way her grandmother liked, with a big beaded “statement” necklace, a Pierre Deux scarf, and her hair pulled back into a French twist. If the strain of getting to the Upper East Side from Brooklyn in Friday evening traffic gave her a look that was less sophistication and more exasperation, she rallied surprisingly well. She had no sooner unfolded her napkin than she leaned across the table to take a keen look at the beads around Goldie's neck. “Those are fantastic,” she said.

The compliment mollified Goldie. “I bought these in Shanghai, and I put them on you when you wore that black Karl Lagerfeld jacket,” she said, running a finger along one of the strands. “How could you not remember? They're worth two thousand dollars, at least.”

Sadie sighed. Anna patted her sister's knee under the table. “Of course I remember,” Sadie said, her smile only slightly strained. She looked around the restaurant and said, “I could really use a seltzer.”

“You think I would forget to order drinks?” Goldie raised a finger to catch the attention of their server.

A moment later the woman arrived at their table. Blond and leggy in a short black dress, she squatted down to face Goldie eye to eye. “What can I get you, sweetie pie?”

“Melora, darling, bring us a bottle of that Gewürztraminer I like,” Goldie said. “And this one's pregnant, so she'll just have seltzer. And water for all of us, mine without ice.”

Melora flashed her big blank smile at them. “Wonderful! And you like tap water, not bottled, right?”

Goldie smiled contentedly. As if to point out the contrast between the server and her family, she said, “You know me so well. I'm not going to spend my money on bottled water when I can get Mr. Bloomberg's water for free.”

Anna hadn't been to JoJo in five years, but she remembered Melora. She remembered the comment about the water, though it had been “Mr. Giuliani's water” then. She remembered her last meal here, too, in this salon of twinkling chandeliers, velvet-upholstered chairs, a celebrity owner, and a famous molten chocolate cake. The last time she was here, she and Ford had recently become engaged. They came north so that he could meet Goldie, but the weekend had gone badly. It was Ford's first visit to New York City, and the provinciality of this Memphis boy offended Goldie and, in truth, embarrassed Anna a little, too. During that trip, Goldie took them to restaurants she called “the most exclusive in New York.” Anna didn't know if that assessment was accurate or not, but with each meal Anna grew more irritable, Goldie more haughty, and Ford more frantic and insecure. Though they chatted aimlessly, the real conversation was communicated without words. Every move Goldie made telegraphed her incredulity to Anna: “You plan to marry a
librarian
who doesn't even own a proper suit?” Ford, who could be charming with friends, proved himself incapable of even looking Goldie in the eye. Anna noticed for the first time that her fiancé held his knife in his fist, and she found herself galled by the fact that instead of just confessing his ignorance of certain dishes on a menu, he flailed around and made ridiculous choices. At La Grenouille, he had ordered “potage” as a first course and followed that with lamb stew.

Anna stood up. “Excuse me,” she said. Whenever she felt stifled by the grand excess of these Upper East Side dining rooms, she made for the toilets. She appreciated their imperfection, the fact that they were uniformly tiny and grim, and the managements' strained attempts to spruce them up with fancy lotions and candles. She locked the door and splashed water on her face, wondering why she couldn't feel calmer now. Not only had seeing Goldie transported her back to the disastrous weekend with Ford, but it also pulled at her muddle of feelings about their marriage in general. Anna always tried to tell herself that she had done her very best for Ford. For the duration of his illness, she had functioned responsibly, managing his decline with the balance of composure and resolve for which observers—imagining they couldn't do the same themselves—continually commended her. Anna became expert at handling insurance claims, at convincing doctors to communicate with each other, at updating the family Listserv with clear-sighted and sometimes even witty news of her husband's condition. The whole family had behaved with sensitivity, stepping in with support, stepping away to give them privacy. They all passed around a tattered copy of
Dying Well,
and they tried to convince themselves that they could somehow find peace in this experience.

By the time they reached those last few days of Ford's life, the family was primed like actors on opening night, and still they faltered. In the kitchen, they huddled over old pizza and the cakes that acquaintances left at the doorstep. In the bedrooms, they tried to nap. In the dining room, two weeks' worth of the Sunday
Times
sat scattered across the table, only fitfully perused. And there in the living room lay Ford, gray and bloated in some places, raw and bony in others, stretched out on the hospice bed, facing the dogwoods. By this point he alternated between unconsciousness and rage, making the thoughtful placement of the bed seem like a measly consolation for what he had to endure. Whoever was sitting beside him, holding his hand, would have to face the truth then. There wasn't any beauty here. No peace, either.

Anna didn't want to think about injustice, but she couldn't help it. Not just the trauma of the illness itself, or the years that Ford would never spend on this planet, the restaurant menus he would never try to decipher, the novels he would never read, the cities he would never visit, the music he would never hear, the children he would never help conceive, or raise, or love for even a single second. There was more. The dull, relentless queasiness of chemo, the sour sting and pull of shots, the nastiness of food, which felt like betrayal by an old and trusted friend. None of this surprised them, though. Even the oncologists handing out their thoughtful little primers mentioned the daily “challenges” that made Ford and Anna's tragedy so perfectly mundane. No, it was that one unexpected final indignity, which grew in size until it dominated all their interactions with each other, that hurt the worst. They had to live with all that loss and, at the same time, feel the bond between them break apart as well.

Anna pumped some lotion onto her hand. The label said E
VENING
J
ASMINE
, but it smelled like cookie dough. She smoothed it into her skin anyway, staring down at Ford's ring on her thumb. Then she slipped it off. Why not now? Couldn't this trip to New York mark
the
transition? In the candlelight, the simple gold band twinkled in a friendly, less oppressive way. Anna held it over the open toilet, but even in that moment of desperation she could recognize the sordidness of dropping it in. She closed the toilet seat, slipped off her shoes, and stepped up on it. From here, she could look out a small window onto an air shaft at the back of the building. Anna reached up and slid her hand along the sill. It was wide and dusty, with peeling paint and the stringy remains of spiderwebs. Gently she tucked the ring into a corner on the outside of the sill. She couldn't see it, but she could feel it there. Then she stepped down off the toilet and put her shoes back on.