The Secret of the Nightingale Palace by Dana Sachs Read Free Book Online

understand anything,” Goldie said. “I need two more weeks out of New York.” For nearly fifty years, Goldie had made her permanent residence in Palm Beach, but she refused to spend a single summer there. It wasn’t the weather that bothered her—childhood in Memphis had adapted her to heat—but the fact that Palm Beach Society disappeared at the end of each winter. For years, Goldie had disappeared as well. While her husband was still alive, he had happily stayed in Florida, playing golf with buddies and floating lazily around the pool. Goldie, meanwhile, took rooms for two months at the Hotel de la Ville in Rome, where she ordered her fall wardrobe and practiced her Italian. That life continued after Saul died, in 1987, but when she turned eighty, in 2000, she began to spend more time at her apartment in New York, flying north every April and south again in October. She had to be careful, though. If she stayed in New York for longer than six months during a single year, the state would smack her with the tax bill of a New York resident. “I’m still short for this summer,” she said. “That’s why I had a meeting with myself and decided on California.”
    Sadie looked exasperated. “When you had your meeting with yourself, did you discuss the option of flying there?” she asked. “You’d still be away from New York. You could spend some time in Napa or something.”
    A look of revulsion crossed Goldie’s face. “You know how I feel about California wines. Besides, I’m carrying art, and you must be cognizant of the fact that you can’t carry expensive art through security.” In Goldie’s opinion, airline security was a crime syndicate devised to relieve rich people of their valuables.
    â€œArt?” Sadie looked at Anna. In their experience, their grandmother only visited museums when she was invited to a society fund-raiser.
    â€œA very valuable portfolio of Japanese woodblock prints.”
    Sadie seemed completely exasperated now. “What are you talking about?”
    Goldie looked at Anna. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? The pictures.”
    Anna thought for a moment, and then, as if a figure were becoming clear to her through a haze, she remembered the velvet drawstring bag and the book of pictures inside it. “The Nightingale Palace,” she said, pronouncing the words of a childhood game that, until this moment, she had not even remembered playing.
    It all came back to her now, not only the book and the pictures, but Goldie’s Palm Beach living room, the delicacy of the teacups, the way the smooth shell of an M&M turned rough as it dissolved on your tongue. When Anna and Sadie were little, their parents took them to see Goldie and Saul in Florida for spring vacation. Anna loved visiting her grandparents, but she hated going to the beach because of the jellyfish, which lay scattered in threatening knots of seaweed all along the shore. Goldie had nothing good to say about the beach, either, and sometimes she let Anna stay home with her. On those mornings, they would play a game of pretend. Anna, as “Mrs. Yves Saint Laurent,” would go to visit Goldie, as “Mrs. Issey Miyake,” at her mansion, “the Nightingale Palace,” which was located in the most fashionable part of Japan. While they sat facing each other across the coffee table in Goldie’s living room, Mrs. Issey Miyake would hover over the Sèvres tea set and perform a pretend tea ceremony with pretend tea and real M&Ms. Mrs. Yves Saint Laurent would then come around to the other side of the coffee table, climb into Mrs. Issey Miyake’s lap, and carefully open the velvet drawstring bag. Inside lay a wood-bound book full of beautiful pictures. Each time, they looked at every single one.
    Anna could remember little of the pictures themselves, but she did remember that she found them much more vivid