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

and stirring than the illustrations in her books back home. She loved that her grandmother would allow her to page through the portfolio herself, run her fingertips across the velvet pouch, look as long as she liked at each image, and stick her nose close to inhale the musty scent of the paper, which Anna found rich and substantial, equating smell, as she did, with her assumption of the artwork’s importance in the world. Verbally, Mrs. Issey Miyake and Mrs. Yves Saint Laurent shared their ardor for the artwork, trying to outdo each other with their praise. “Utterly enchanting!” one would exclaim, to which the other would reply, “Absolutely marvelous!” or “Superlatively divine!” On those breathless mornings, Anna imagined herself nearly adult, although she had not yet turned eight.
    â€œI remember,” Anna said. It was strange how, after all these years, the fact of the portfolio came back to her so clearly. With it, too, certain seemingly baffling aspects of her adult personality began to rearrange themselves in a way that made a little more sense. She had always loved art, for example, but hated to talk about it intellectually. And she had dropped her plan to become an oil painter, despite winning awards for her work in college. At the time, Anna had not been able to explain to herself why she had become an illustrator instead, though her public reason (she was intimidated by the competition and wanted to lead a quieter, less stressful life) and her private one (she had fallen in love with Ford by then and felt that illustration would be a better career for someone in Memphis) never seemed complete. Was there something about her early exposure to Goldie’s pictures, she wondered, that had inspired her deeper love of storytelling and thus illustration?
    â€œOf course you do!” Goldie said. An expression of tenderness swept across her face, and Anna suddenly saw how painful their estrangement had been for Goldie. Anna did not have time to consider the possibility that she had missed her grandmother as well, however, because Goldie suddenly added, “You’d have to be an idiot if you forgot.”
    Just then Melora, in a burst of sugary murmurs, arrived with their appetizers: salad for Sadie, tuna roll for Anna, and for Goldie, a vividly green spring pea soup. “Oh, my,” Goldie said, eyeing her bowl. “If I eat all this, I’ll get fat.” Then, turning again to the others, she allowed a look of sadness to sweep across her face. “I had a dear, dear friend when I lived in San Francisco. She was a Japanese girl. Mayumi Nakamura.”
    Sadie and Anna stared at each other. Other than a few debonair gay couples and some Italians who made her clothes, Goldie didn’t have exotic acquaintances. “We met when I first arrived in San Francisco,” she explained, “in nineteen forty. She decorated the store windows at Feld’s. She was a brilliant artist.”
    â€œSo she made these pictures?” Anna asked.
    Goldie closed her eyes, sighing loudly. “No! She wasn’t that kind of artist at all. She designed things. She was singlehandedly responsible for the success of Feld’s. People came from all over the world to see her windows.”
    â€œLike the Christmas windows at Barneys?” asked Sadie.
    Goldie touched the rim of her soup bowl and carefully lifted a spoonful of the bright liquid to her mouth. “Feld’s windows would make Barneys look like Penney’s.”
    â€œAnd?” Sadie asked.
    Goldie looked up. “And? What do you mean, ‘And’? And the war came, and they put her away in a camp because she was Japanese.” It seemed to satisfy her, for a change, to lecture to the college graduates about history. “Do you even know about that?”
    â€œOf course,” said Sadie.
    â€œThey took a real American citizen and put her in a camp like she was a foreign spy. No better than