The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (33 page)

The next morning, they argued. Anna had decided to call Nakamura Imports as soon as the office opened, but at breakfast Goldie announced, “I'm just going to relax in San Francisco. I'm not doing anything else.” They were seated at a table by the window in the hotel restaurant. Outside on Post Street, the rush hour traffic sounded like a band warming up to parade downtown.

“What are you talking about?” Anna asked.

“I'm resting up before my cruise. I'll just enjoy this pretty hotel.”

“But we drove all the way out here to return the prints.”

Goldie was concentrating on buttering a slice of toast. “Do you want me to collapse on my cruise because I'm so exhausted?” she asked. “I arranged to bring them out here. Now you take over. Do you expect me to do everything in this family?”

Anna stared at her grandmother, who did not look exhausted at all. The devotion Anna had developed for the prints made her feel even more indebted to their rightful owners, and now she experienced a spasm of hurt on behalf of the long-lost Nakamuras. “Why are you acting this way?” she demanded. “Don't you want to see your friends?”

Goldie poured some milk over her Raisin Bran, then stirred it around. “Haven't you heard the phrase ‘water under the bridge'? And anyway, I'm tired.”

Anna leaned back, crossing her arms and trying generally to look as irritated as possible. “I can't believe I drove you all the way out here for this,” she said, but Goldie merely took a bite of toast, looking up at Anna with the sweetest smile.

Back in their room, Anna picked up the phone to call Nakamura Imports. She was still irritated with her grandmother, but as Goldie showed no signs of budging, Anna equated her responsibility to that of a German descendant with a cache of stolen Nazi art. She had to return the portfolio herself. “I shouldn't be the one to do this,” she muttered, but Goldie, filing her nails on a chair by the window, ignored her.

After a few rings, a receptionist answered. “Nakamura Imports.”

“Hello,” Anna said. “My name is Anna Rosenthal. I've got kind of a complicated situation here.”

“What can I help you with?” The man sounded bored, but willing to listen.

“A really long time ago,” she began, “like in the nineteen forties, my grandmother lived in San Francisco and she was friends with the Nakamura family.”

Goldie seemed to have found a snag in the nail on her thumb. She held it up to the light from the window, then went at it again like some elderly woodsman sawing away at a very tiny tree.

“Yes?” the man replied, waiting.

“Well, she has some art that I think belongs to them and—”

“Hold, please.”

A moment later, she heard a different voice, this one gravelly but alert. “Hello? Henry Nakamura here.”

Though Anna had known, logically, that the man himself might pick up the phone, the sound of an actual person confounded her. She felt as if Rumplestiltskin or Peter Pan had suddenly come on the line. “Hello,” she stammered. “My name is Anna Rosenthal. I have a kind of strange reason for calling.”

“Anna Rosenthal?”

“Years and years ago, during the war, my grandmother Goldie Rosenthal—I mean, Goldie Feld, or Goldie Rubin—might have known you.” He didn't respond. Anna added hurriedly, “I think she was friends with your wife.”

Goldie looked up. “Not his wife. His
sister
!”

“My sister,” Henry Nakamura said. “Not my wife.”

“Sorry! Your sister. I'm sorry. So you remember?”

“Yes, of course.” After a moment, he said, “She was a nice girl from Memphis.”

Goldie had returned her focus to her nails now, but Anna could see, by the frequency with which Goldie looked up, that she was more interested in this conversation than she cared to admit. “Yes, that's right, from Memphis,” Anna said. “I'm calling because she has some art that she'd like to return to your sister.”

Henry Nakamura said, “My sister died a few years ago.”

“Oh, dear. I'm so sorry.”

“We miss her. But she was eighty and ill, so it was the right time.”

“I see.” Goldie was staring at Anna now, and Anna mouthed the words “She died” while holding her hand over the receiver. Goldie absorbed this information with a solemn nod but didn't seem surprised. In her world, people died quite regularly.

“My grandmother thought so highly of her,” Anna told Henry Nakamura. What did Anna know? It sounded nice, though.

“She was a—I think the term you'd use today is
free spirit
. We all thought the world of her.”

“I'm sure,” said Anna. In the silence that followed, she remembered the pictures. “Could I maybe bring the portfolio by? We're in San Francisco.”

“I suppose so,” he said. He seemed to be considering the situation. After another pause, he said, “Why don't you meet me at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park? I go there often, and you might enjoy seeing the place yourself. Could you come to the tea pavilion tomorrow at about nine o'clock?”

“Um. Let me see.” Anna thought that perhaps the novelty of the setting might serve as some enticement. Covering the mouthpiece again with her hand, she said to Goldie, “He wants us to meet him at the Japanese Tea Garden.”

But Goldie seemed to have returned her attention to her nails. “You're free,” she said. “You go.”

Anna could have thrown a pillow at her grandmother at that moment. To Henry Nakamura, she said, “I'm not sure if my grandmother will be able to join us. She's very tired from our travels, so it may just be me.”

Henry Nakamura took a moment to answer. “That's fine,” he said. Anna could hear some feeling in his voice, but she couldn't decipher it at all.

 

Just before nine the next morning, Anna walked through the ornately carved entrance to the Japanese Tea Garden. As she began to climb the stairs to the tea pavilion inside, the sight of the little wooden chairs and tables scattered haphazardly under the eaves made her wonder if the place had even opened yet. Then she saw the old man, white haired and gently waving his hand, wearing a sport jacket, sunglasses, and a beret. He was sitting on a chair in a corner overlooking the stream, a knobby cane balanced between his knees. It wasn't until she had made her way across the floor and finally stopped in front of him that his mouth slowly eased into a smile.

“Mr. Nakamura?” she asked.

“Call me Henry,” he said. It took him a moment to pull himself up, but once he did he stood solidly in front of her, full of good cheer. He held out his hand. “I would have known you anywhere,” he told her. “You look just like your grandmother.”

Anna laughed, pulling at the cuffs on her jacket. “That's probably because I'm wearing all her clothes.” This morning, for the first time in years, Anna had let Goldie pick out an outfit for her to wear. She had on a dark green Armani pantsuit, Hermes scarf, and pair of hand-sewn Italian leather heels. Because Goldie's feet were half a size larger and extra wide around the toes, Anna had to walk with her toes pinched hard against the bottom of the shoes to keep herself from tripping out of them. “She wanted me to make a good impression.”

Henry was gazing most intently, though, at Anna's face. He didn't say anything, and in the awkwardness that followed, she remembered the portfolio under her arm. “These are your pictures,” she said, holding up the velvet case. It felt like a victory to finally hand them over to their rightful owner.

But Henry gave the portfolio only a perfunctory glance. “Oh, yes,” he said. He took the parcel from her arms and set it on a table. “Shall we take a walk?” he asked.

Anna looked at the artwork. The entire garden was deserted, but she had just driven all the way across the country to return the prints to him. She didn't want to risk losing them to some thief in a park. “Is it safe?” she asked.

“Don't worry at all.” He had already started across the tearoom and merely paused to call over his shoulder, “The waitress just stepped away for a minute. She'll keep an eye on it for us.”

Anna trailed Henry back down the stairs and along a path that followed a stream. “We'll take a walk, drink some tea,” he said. The morning was overcast, and though the fog had lifted, the garden seemed empty, the only other movement coming from a pair of birds darting between the lacy leaves of a maple tree. Henry moved easily here, and though he gripped his cane, he seemed to rely on it more to point at things than to keep his balance. After a couple of minutes, they reached a wooden structure shaped like an upside down U, which spanned the stream at a branch of the path.

“What do you think of that?” he asked.

“Is it supposed to be a bridge?”

He laughed. “It
is
a bridge. We call it the Moon Bridge.” He looked at her more seriously then. “Did your grandmother tell you that my family used to live in the tea garden?”

Anna shook her head. “She's told me very little.”

Some flash of feeling—was it hurt? nostalgia?—passed across the old man's face and then, just as quickly, disappeared. With the tip of his cane, he motioned back along the path in the direction from which they had come. “The pavilion, where you and I just met, stands on the footprint of the house I grew up in.”

“I had no idea,” Anna said. She had visited the tea garden during the brief few months after college that she lived in San Francisco, but Goldie had never mentioned having once had friends who lived there.

Henry leaned against the railing of the bridge, its wood worn smooth from years of use. “I liked to race over this bridge when I was a boy. My sister, Mayumi, would hold the stopwatch right here,” he pointed with the tip of his cane to a small patch of grass surrounding a weathered-looking bonsai. “I had to make it over and back in fifteen seconds.”

“Could you do it?”

He sighed. “Well, yes, but ultimately I had no chance for complete success. If I managed it in fifteen seconds, I had to do it again in fourteen seconds. And so on, until I failed.”

“It's so disheartening,” Anna said.

“Let's call it excellent training for later in life.” He turned again toward the bridge, which despite its elegant line was ponderous and imposing. “It's not very convenient, is it?”

“Not at all.”

“But the shape creates a reflection on the water that makes a perfect circle. Like the moon.”

Anna said, “It's kind of lovely when you think of it like that.”

They wandered farther into the garden, along paths that led past gnarled cherry trees that, Henry told her, had been trained into their shapes through years of careful attention. His family had been forced to leave when the Japanese were sent to internment camps during World War II, and they didn't return to San Francisco until 1945. Though the Nakamuras never lived inside the park again, Henry's father remained as caretaker until the end of his life. Henry made it clear to Anna that he was not a horticulturalist himself, but he had a vast knowledge of the place and displayed the kind of weary affection that people often have for beloved family members who are also overwhelmingly needy. “I walk along these paths,” he told her, “and see the results of a hundred-year war against weeds.”

Eventually they reached a small pond shaded by willow trees. From here, they could look down on a dozen or so koi, bright bursts of orange and white, fluttering through the water. A few of the fish were motionless under rocks, their heads hidden, their tails rhythmically beating the current in the only sign of life. “Do you see the eggs?” Henry asked. With the tip of his cane, he pointed to clusters of tiny white spheres floating in the water. “They're spawning. It's fortunate that you're here right now, because we only see this phenomenon as the weather turns warmer.”

Anna squatted to look more closely. “The eggs look like pearls.”

Henry walked around to the other side of the pond. “I'm searching for Miss Cho,” he said, peering down into the water.

“They all have names?”

“I only know Miss Cho. Miss Butterfly. My father shipped her here in a barrel not long before the war. She was already twenty-five years old when she arrived. What does that make her now?”

Anna stood up and followed him to the other side of the pond. “More than ninety,” she told him, though she suspected by the look on his face that he knew the fish's age already.

Henry resumed his study of the water. “She's usually easy to spot.” When he didn't see her, he stepped out onto a set of jutting rocks so that he could get a better view of the deeper part of the pond.

Anna walked closer to where he was standing on the ledge. Here, the rocks seemed less stable, and his position struck her as precarious for a man in his eighties. When he leaned out to get a different angle, Anna resisted the urge to hold him.

“Oh, dear,” Henry said after a while. “I was worried that this might happen.”

“What?”

“That's Miss Cho, over there under that rock. She has a gash on her side.”

Anna saw her now. The fish was slightly larger than the others, but it was her coloring, and not her size, that was most distinctive. The other fish were either orange or white, while a few white fish had large patches of orange spreading along their sides. Alone among all of them, Miss Cho was a perfect blend of both these colors, the effect of which created an almost translucent shade of peach. And there, on her side, Anna saw the bright red wound, perhaps half an inch thick and six inches long. “Oh, no,” she said.

Henry was already walking away from the pond toward a cluster of bushes beyond the willows. “I can't tell you how often I've had to do this,” he grumbled to Anna who tagged along behind. “The park is understaffed. Consequently, they forget to check the pond when the fish are spawning. It happens every year. I call and write letters, but they simply don't do it.”