It took Goldie longer than that, though, to make friends. She was younger than her colleagues, with less experience, too, and they resented that she sold merchandise so easily, and that she so greatly impressed Mr. Blankenship. So Goldie ate her lunch alone. It wasn’t until Mayumi Nakamura began to work at Feld’s, in April, that Goldie made a friend. Unlike Goldie, Mayumi wasn’t hired as a salesgirl. She had taken design classes at the Academy of Art College, and Mr. Blankenship hired her to create the store window displays. When they pulled the paper down from Mayumi’s first window, Goldie thought it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Mayumi had created an ocean scene in the tiny six-by-eight-foot space. The walls and floor were aquamarine, speckled with different shades of green. Growing up from the corner, a giant coral sculpture, carved from foam and sponge, stretched like an undersea tree toward the surface. Cut-out fish of all shapes and colors—feathery purple, shiny silver, and striped in orange and yellow—hung from the ceiling. In the midst of all this, a mannequin had been reborn as a mermaid, twisting in the current, her shimmering tail making a joyous flip through the water. Only one piece of Feld’s merchandise was on display in this entire scene. It was the flower-link sapphire necklace that glimmered on the mermaid’s neck.

  Until then, store displays had followed a model of crowding every window with as much merchandise as possible. The more you put in the window, the better chance you had of attracting customers with at least one product they might like enough to come inside and buy. Mayumi’s windows were never meant to sell particular objects (though the necklace was extraordinary, it was meant to accessorize the mermaid more than anything else). Rather, Mayumi’s window sold an idea of beauty and happiness that would draw people inside to choose merchandise that might satisfy their own desire for beauty and happiness.

  For Goldie, Mayumi’s window served as a revelation that beauty was not a quality within a particular object, but a more generalized attribute to strive for throughout life. She began to wonder about the existence of ideas greater and grander than she could yet understand, and she began to consider new possibilities for her own future. Looking at the mermaid, for example, did not kindle a desire for underwater exploration, but it did make dreams that once seemed impossible—like traveling to Paris or Rome—just a little less remote. Goldie began, then, to keep an eye on Mayumi and plotted ways to talk with her.

  Mayumi, though, was difficult to know. She didn’t work regular hours but would instead show up when she felt like it, perform her magic on the windows, and leave. During the time she spent in the store, she worked with serious concentration, but her movements were languid and she never seemed anxious or even concerned. Often Mayumi would simply stop whatever she was doing and sit there, on the floor or wherever she happened to be, staring into space. Did all artists work in such a dreamy way? Goldie had never met an artist before, so she couldn’t know.

  Goldie also noticed that Mayumi didn’t act like other people. In Goldie’s experience, normal conversations followed certain cues. You might say, “How are you?” and the other person would respond, “Fine, thank you. And you?” Mayumi didn’t care about those cues. If someone asked, “How are you?” Mayumi might reply, “I’m thinking of Florence all the time. I need to see the Uffizi Gallery.” Or she’d say, “I think I can find a shade of red that is also black. Or black that is also red,” and then she would laugh at herself because she knew she sounded silly. Goldie liked that laughter, too.

  And finally, Mayumi was attractive in a way that struck Goldie as completely new. In Goldie’s experience, women attracted men by using certain predictable, and fairly conventional, methods. One girl might be pretty and sweet. Another had curves in all the right places. Another might be flashy and somewhat dangerous. Prettiness, to Goldie, always amounted to the ability to buy the right clothes to fit that year’s fashion. If you had money, you bought silk. If you didn’t have money, you bought cotton or wool and kept it clean and neat. The rules were fairly simple.

  In Mayumi, Goldie identified a new kind of attractiveness. Later, when it became more of a religion for her, Goldie would call it “refinement.” But in 1940, she had not yet heard the word. Other women layered fabrics in showy, predictable ways—blouse tucked into skirt, matching jacket, coordinated heels and stockings, a hat and a pair of gloves. Mayumi rejected these conventions. She might pair, for example, simple black wool trousers with a lacy ivory shirt. Often she didn’t even wear a hat but would instead pull her long hair into a bun and don large hoop earrings as a sort of balance.

  People less attuned to fashion would have seen Mayumi, said, “She looks good,” and left it at that. Goldie observed more carefully, however, and was able to see the particular sophistication with which Mayumi dressed. While others might have observed Mayumi in a green crepe dress and thought, “That’s beautiful,” Goldie could see that the dress was beautiful for one specific reason—a twist in the pleat of the skirt that captured and accentuated the narrow line of Mayumi’s waist. As Goldie increasingly admired Mayumi for her ability to create her own style, she also began to think that she could learn from her.

  Mayumi took more time to notice Goldie. What Goldie saw as a dreamy aloofness actually stemmed from nearly constant inspiration and glee. Mayumi had spent months convincing her parents to let her get a job. Once they finally did, and she found her position at Feld’s, she went into a frenzy of creative activity. She had always loved making things. Now, the windows offered an outlet for every idea in her head. If Goldie was a girl adrift, Mayumi was a girl set free.

  It took several weeks, then, for Mayumi to begin to notice anything beyond the paint cans and fabric and tissue paper surrounding her. And then, like someone emerging from a fog, everything around her clarified, and there was Goldie, standing in the doorway, watching her.

  At first the two talked while Mayumi worked, Goldie spending her lunch break on a stool just outside the platform of the window, while Mayumi, in her apron and canvas slippers, applied wallpaper or worked on some trompe l’oeil effect on a back wall. “Who is your favorite designer?” Goldie asked. She had become partial to Elsa Schiaparelli, but worried sometimes that her designs were too fussy.

  “Mainbocher,” said Mayumi. She looked over to see Goldie’s reaction, which, as expected, was one of surprise and dismay.

  “But he doesn’t even show his fashions,” Goldie said. The designer, who had a studio in Paris, only allowed a small coterie of people to view, and buy, his clothes.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Mayumi. “I can look at photographs of his clients and learn from him.”

  “But what do you learn?”

  “All that matters is elegance,” Mayumi said. She was creating a scene of lovers at sunset, and she wasn’t happy with the color pink she’d chosen for the walls. She dipped her paintbrush into the bucket of white paint and started to apply a thin topcoat to mute the intensity of SPRING ROSE.

  “Not beauty?”

  “Not beauty. You can have beauty without elegance, but you can’t have elegance without beauty.”

  Goldie thought about this one. Mayumi was right. Goldie had seen a lot of beautiful trashy-looking girls. And she thought of the elegant women who occasionally came into the shop. Fate might not have given these women any natural good looks. To be honest, some of them were downright homely. But if they were elegant, they became beautiful. Wallis Simpson, for example, was nothing to look at but had become one of the most admired and attractive women in the world. Goldie knew that she herself was pretty enough, but she decided then that she wanted to be elegant even more.

  When Goldie thought back on her childhood, even the periods of joy were laced with sadness. She was only thirteen when her mother died, and though she could recollect random images of her early life in Memphis—the creaky porch of her house, the chicken coop by the shed, the greasy smell of Friday’s matzo ball soup—she could feel her memories of her mother growing dimmer as every year went by. The most vivid one came from a summer day when they held a party. The Jewish families in the area knew each other well, and that day many of them gathered in the dusty backyard of Goldie’s house on Bullington Avenue, a shoddy, narrow street that, to Goldie’s eyes, led nowhere in both directions. Goldie, the youngest of ten children, must have been about eight or nine then. Only the four youngest, all girls, remained at home, and none of them considered summer a vacation. The time away from school meant that they had to work to earn the family extra money. Posie sewed. Eleanor cleaned a neighbor’s apartment. Rochelle collected bottles. Goldie went from house to house selling the eggs she collected from the family’s hens.

  Early that morning she woke to find her mother, Libke, in the kitchen making strudel. In retrospect, she didn’t remember the occasion, but imagined that it must have been a very special day. The sight of her mother cooking at all surprised her. Libke’s illness meant that she seldom had the energy to get out of bed, much less cook anything. More often, Posie or Eleanor would throw something together on the stove, and Goldie, Libke’s favorite, would carry in soup to her mother on a special wooden tray. This morning, though, Libke had put on a dress and an apron, and she stood at the kitchen counter like any other mother, making strudel.

  All afternoon, people came over, not just friends and neighbors, but the six older children, too, with their husbands and wives and babies. There were also cousins who took the streetcar from the Pinch, a larger Jewish neighborhood on the other side of town. The children played at the back of the yard. The adults spoke Yiddish, which Goldie couldn’t understand. The men and women teased each other, and the men told jokes while drinking beer and eating awful-smelling cheese and a smoked fish that stank like rotten eggs. Late in the day, when the air was still hot but the sun had dipped behind the house next door, they sat in chairs pulled out into the yard. Goldie’s mother stretched across a blanket on the ground, her head and shoulders propped on pillows, and Goldie fanned her. Libke had taken off her apron, revealing her best dress, a pale blue belted cotton with a lace collar and white silk rose pinned just above her right breast. Her hair hung down in little ringlets that Eleanor had helped her curl, and she wore pink rouge and Fragrance of Paris. All across the yard, the guests reclined on chairs and blankets in groups of three or four, some sitting only a few feet away from Goldie’s mother. Each man tried to be cleverer than all the others. Goldie noticed that as they told their jokes, they glanced at Libke, assessing her reaction. For as long as Goldie could remember, the men had called her mother “the Queen of Bullington Avenue,” and they continued to do so even now, when she lay with a damp hand towel spread across her forehead. She didn’t say a word, but if the joke was funny, you could see her mouth ease very slightly into a smile. Goldie fanned her. Libke’s fingers swept across the tufts of grass at the edge of the blanket. The men told their jokes. Eventually, of course, lying on the grass became too difficult. It was Louise, the eldest of the siblings, who finally helped Libke into the house when the coughing started. Louise had never married, but everyone, even the brothers, did what she said. Now she told Goldie to stay outside, so Goldie lingered on the edge of the porch. Even there, she heard the violent sounds of her mother coughing into the old rags that they washed every day but that still retained the stains of blood. Outside, the joking stopped and the men turned to whiskey. Someone, Goldie couldn’t remember who, passed the strudel. She had no memory at all of her father being there, though he must have been.

  Mayumi came from a different world entirely. Her father had been born in the town of Takayama, in Gifu Prefecture in Japan. As a distant cousin of the imperial family, he enjoyed certain privileges as a child. He had visited the palace of the emperor and played with the emperor’s children there. His mother had been trained in the exacting rituals of the tea ceremony, and his father had studied with the prince himself. The family had a beautiful home full of art and antiques. Mayumi’s father, though, spent most of his childhood in the gardens. He wasn’t interested in the family rituals. He loved the quiet of the outdoors, and most particularly he loved to watch things grow.

  His parents, though, expected something more of him. They imagined that he would marry within the imperial succession. He was smart enough, and talented, too, but he shied away from the gatherings at which he would have met such people. Instead, he stayed home, worked in his garden, and when he finally began to notice women, he fell in love with a neighbor girl who came from no lineage whatsoever. They married and decided to leave Japan, where history threatened to suffocate them and where the imbalance in their backgrounds seemed likely to trouble them forever. A few months after the wedding, they immigrated to the United States.

  When Goldie discovered that her new friend was the daughter of a baron, she could hardly contain her joy. According to Mayumi, Japan had a line of royalty that dated back farther than England’s. Goldie had had no idea. Nobody taught Japanese history in grade schools in Memphis, and Goldie’s education had stopped there.

  “You’re nearly a princess,” Goldie said. She was sitting on a stool by the windows during her lunch break, trying to keep the crumbs of her sandwich from getting caught in the fine weave of her skirt.

  Mayumi was painting a backdrop in vertical stripes of purple and yellow. “It doesn’t even mean anything in this country,” she pointed out. Mayumi wasn’t blind to her heritage, but she honestly couldn’t see how it affected her current situation. “I’m no different than you here.”

  Goldie disagreed. “Your parents left everything behind to come to America, and my parents left nothing behind to come to America,” she said.

  “What does that mean?” Mayumi asked.

  “My parents had nothing. When my mother arrived here, she had the hat on her head. My father had the shoes on his feet.”

  “And they made their fortune nonetheless,” said Mayumi, who still believed in the American dream.

  “No. They were born with nothing and they never made any more than that. They had ten children and an ugly patch of land on the outskirts of Memphis.”

  “Where did your parents come from?” Mayumi asked.

  “Russia or Spain. Someplace like that.” Goldie knew that they had traveled through Spain on their journey to the United States. Her sister Rochelle liked to say that they came from Spain, and Rochelle had even tried to study Spanish once, as if she were trying to rediscover their long-lost birth tongue. Goldie didn’t quite believe it. The only thing she knew for sure was the way the scratchy weeds had tortured her feet in their yard in Memphis.

  “I’m about the future,” Goldie said.

  “I’m about the future, too,” said Mayumi. They smiled at each other, because their roots were so different, but they had flowered very much the same.

  Often, after work, Goldie and Mayumi would take the bus to the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. Mayumi’s father, Hiroshi, had created the garden for the city of San Francisco, and when Goldie met them, the family lived in a slope-roofed house on the grounds, surrounded by maple trees and pines.

  Out in the avenues, the sky would fill with great banks of fog, and even in the late spring the girls bundled themselves in sweaters and scarves to keep warm. Goldie, new to town and easily disoriented, always felt lost. Mayumi knew every shortcut home. As soon as they got off the bus on Fulton Street, she would bound down a narrow path and disappear into the woods with Goldie right behind her. Both girls knew that the mud and dirt would ruin their shoes, so a few feet in from the road they would hide behind a bush and, leaning on each other for balance, slip off their heels and stockings before running, barefoot, the rest of the way through the trees.

  It was a sign of how much she had come to trust Mayumi that Goldie took off her shoes at all. Goldie’s feet were the one relic of poverty that she had not been able to put behind her. She had been born with extremely wide feet, and a childhood of wearing her sisters’ narrow, hand-me-down shoes had deformed her toes, leaving them knotted together like a braid. It wasn’t until she was fourteen years old that she finally earned enough money to buy a pair of shoes that fit. By then it was too late, though. The damage was permanent.

  The first time Mayumi saw Goldie’s feet, she agreed that they were ugly, but she was practical about it. “Just don’t wear open-toed shoes.”

  “I would never wear open-toed shoes. Are you bananas?” Goldie said, but she was worried. “What about when I get married, though?”

  Despite Mayumi’s dreaminess, she had a practical side that gave Goldie comfort. “Just keep your shoes on. By the time you’re married, he’s going to be so crazy for you that you could have fur on your feet and he’d think it was beautiful.”

  Despite her ugly toes, Goldie could walk for miles without complaint. She never had trouble keeping up with Mayumi, and by the time they entered the tea garden gates she was always happy to plop down on the grass by the Moon Bridge and dip her feet in the stream. She loved the way the current lifted the dirt from her toes, swirled it into little pinwheels, then carried it away. The wooden Moon Bridge made Goldie feel that she was stepping back to a time when people fought with swords. If the pleasures seemed childish, particularly for a twenty-year-old woman, it was only because her own childhood had never allowed for such abandon, and consequently, she felt entitled to it.

  Once they reached the garden, Goldie and Mayumi could quickly find Baron Nakamura in his overalls pruning one of his shrubs, or prowling amid the cherry trees, which needed constant care. As soon as he saw them, he would wave them over, then usher them up one path or down another, expecting them to care as much about each new bud and shoot as he did.

  “Girls,” he said one day, “Goldie must see our excellent development.” He was small and solid. His mustache, waxed at the tips, looked like quotes around his features, which were as sharp and angular as letters chiseled in a marble frieze. Goldie could not forget that he was a baron, and she loved the quaintly formal rhythms of his accent. He might have dressed like any gardener, but to Goldie he seemed royal.