They followed him to a cluster of willow trees surrounding a fishpond. He squatted down on the rocky ledge and pointed at a giant carp the color of a peach blossom, its tail moving through the water like a swath of silk. “She is twenty-five years old,” the baron said. “She arrived last week in a barrel on a boat from Japan.” Goldie stood among the willow trees, staring at the fish, whose color was so different from that of the many orange or orange-and-white carp surrounding it. The idea of transporting this creature across the ocean seemed unbelievably extravagant to a girl from Memphis who owned a single pair of shoes, but it gave her a sense of possibility that made her almost giddy.

  “That fish is older than me!” She laughed.

  “She was swimming through a pond in Japan before we were even born,” Mayumi said. She didn’t share her father’s love of nature, but the age of the fish, and the extent of its travels, mesmerized her, too.

  The baron liked their enthusiasm. “She will live a hundred years,” he told them. “Or longer. She will see your grandchildren, Mayumi.”

  Mayumi smiled, but she didn’t enjoy this kind of talk. She liked the idea of love, but she had little interest in marriage, or raising a family, and she heard her father’s words as a subtle pressure, as if he sensed her misgivings. Goldie, though, found their interactions sweet. If someone had asked what intoxicated her more—the beauty of the garden or the fact that she was talking to a baron in it, she would probably have claimed that the garden “enchanted” her. The truth was, however, that Goldie didn’t have an eye for nature. In her experience, nature was the moody force through which you tried, and usually failed, to grow a few limp beans on a tangle of vines. The tea garden introduced her to a different kind of nature, one that seemed both tame and resplendent, but her early experience had made it hard for her to feel its charms.

  The enchantment came from the Nakamuras themselves. In her forlorn youth, Goldie had dreamed of meeting a prince, but the fantasy served more as an escape from her own circumstances than from any true belief that such a thing could happen. When Rochelle invited her to California, Goldie saw it as an opportunity, not as a magical gift of fortune. She continued, even after starting her new life in San Francisco, to formulate new hopes for her future—a smart, hardworking, handsome husband; a nice house; enough money—but Goldie was also a practical person who focused on the possibilities in front of her and not on foggy notions of things beyond her grasp. In other words, she had never anticipated meeting a royal family, but the fact that she had served to expand her ideas about what was possible.

  “I believe, sir, that you know every leaf in this garden,” Goldie said, trying her best to sound both contemplative and poised.

  The baron appreciated the comment. He liked any acknowledgment of his accomplishment on this piece of land that, many years before, the city of San Francisco had offered him. He squatted down on the path and lifted a handful of gravel, then let it sift slowly back to the ground. “Every pebble, my dear,” he said. “Every pebble.” Goldie recognized the overblown theatricality of the gesture, but it moved her nonetheless. In her own life, older people were sickly, lying in bed and coughing up blood. She had known plenty of young people to be sickly, too. Her mother had begun to cough up blood before she was out of her thirties. The sick and the old had the same dried-out smell of spilled medicine, unwashed clothes, and sugary perfume. Moving from Memphis to San Francisco had made Goldie conscious of her own youth and promise. Now Baron Nakamura showed her that age could be beautiful, too.

  On those afternoons, they sat on the terrace overlooking the garden, amid the almost musical sounds of the stream. The house, a compact structure built of wood and stone, was so well integrated into the geography of the garden that visitors would sometimes unknowingly step up onto the terrace, not understanding that they had entered a private home. Perched on a stool, a porcelain teacup balanced on her knee, Goldie felt like an audience member chosen to sit backstage during a great performance of ballet.

  The baroness, who moved with even more grace than her husband, served them sweet cakes and sugar-coated candies called Drops from the Moon. She was so serene that even a sudden noise—the roar of a truck out on Fulton, a distant baby’s offended scream—wouldn’t ruffle her. She rarely spoke, and when she did her voice never rose above a whisper. In comparison, Goldie felt her own voice to be piercing, her walk jarring, her body sharp, loose, and uncontrolled.

  Mostly, the baron and his wife told stories about Japan. They had both grown up in Takayama, a hill town of narrow lanes and soot-dark houses. They talked of the thousand-year-old gingko tree in an ancient temple, the open hearths that warmed their homes, and visits to hot springs just outside of town. One day they spoke of Mount Fuji, to which they traveled just after their wedding, and their attempt to climb it on an early spring day that unexpectedly turned snowy.

  “I only really began to know my wife,” said the baron, “when we had to hurry back down the mountain together during that snowstorm. I had brought a pair of warm mittens, but she only had thin lace gloves. We held hands and stretched a single mitten around both of them, then walked like that all the way to the bottom. That’s how I think of Mount Fuji.”

  Mayumi, sitting on a stool next to Goldie, had heard this story dozens of times. Sometimes the lace gloves were calfskin. Sometimes the snow was hail. She didn’t doubt the general truth of the tale, but she had tired of it. She tried to catch Goldie’s eye, to share her impatience, but she could see that Goldie found the romance stirring. Goldie had never even heard of Mount Fuji, which surprised Mayumi and reminded her that every childhood takes place in its own tiny universe.

  “There are a dozen haiku poems about every possible view,” Mayumi said, despite her weariness of such topics, “about every possible kind of light.”

  “Or, as our poet Basho wrote”—the baron paused to give the line its full effect—“ ‘Rising mist . . . the day when Mount Fuji can’t even be seen, most intriguing!’ ”

  The baroness added, “On warm nights, I still dream of Mount Fuji.”

  “She does. I hear her sighs,” her husband said, turning his eyes toward the clouds and sighing, too.

  Mayumi stood up then and started taking the tea things back inside. She became irritable when her parents romanticized the past. “They left Japan, didn’t they?” she had once remarked to Goldie. It bothered her, in particular, that her father continued to act as if his lineage mattered here. “He should be known for the garden,” she complained, “not for who his parents were.”

  Goldie didn’t argue, but she believed that lineage mattered quite a lot. A baron remained a baron, even in Golden Gate Park. As much as she felt grateful to live in America, where anybody with gumption could make it, the old hierarchies impressed her. Goldie knew that Mayumi’s parents bestowed their kindness on her, like a king and queen touching the tips of their scepters to a lowly subject’s head, but their condescension didn’t bother her. If the baron spoke to her in a particularly haughty tone (“You wouldn’t understand, my dear,” he might say), she felt pleased that he would speak to her at all. Once, she noticed the baroness watching her with barely masked distaste. Goldie realized that she had been holding her teacup with only one hand, while the baroness and Mayumi cradled theirs gently, making a bowl with their fingers. Instantly, Goldie lifted up her other hand and mimicked their gestures. Mayumi might cringe over her parents’ ways, but Goldie saw the opportunity to learn from them. She knew her place in the social order, and she was determined to make her way up.

  One afternoon, Mayumi invited Goldie to the tea garden for an occasion she would only describe as “very special.” Despite Goldie’s insistent questions, Mayumi refused to reveal any information. Consequently, by the time they arrived at the entrance to the garden, Goldie felt jumpy with anticipation. They walked up the path to the house, and she immediately noticed two things. First, the baroness, who usually wore Western clothes, was standing on the front terrace of the house wearing a formal kimono. The fabric itself was the color of wheat, while a heavy coffee-colored sash secured the garment tightly around her waist. Although the baroness had pulled her hair back in her usual bun, today she had also attached tiny silver ornaments to it.

  The second thing Goldie noticed was the young man sitting on the edge of the terrace, his legs dangling over the side, balancing a cigarette in his mouth and an ashtray on his knee. He was watching Mayumi and Goldie’s approach with curiosity and amusement.

  They stopped in front of him, and Mayumi asked Goldie, “Can you guess who this is?”

  Goldie looked at the young man, then back at Mayumi. When she didn’t respond, Mayumi offered a hint, “Don’t you see the resemblance?” She put her face in profile, closed her eyes, and pointed her nose to the sky. The young man smiled slightly and took a drag on his cigarette.

  Neither Mayumi’s hints nor her posing did anything for Goldie. The truth was, she couldn’t easily distinguish among Japanese people. They all had those thin eyes and that straight black hair. She wouldn’t have asked Mayumi directly, but she did wonder if the Japanese had trouble, sometimes, telling themselves apart.

  When Goldie continued to look blank, Mayumi laughed and took a gentle swipe at her friend’s arm. “Silly! It’s Henry.”

  It took Goldie a moment to connect the sight of this stranger with the image she had developed in her mind of Mayumi’s beloved older brother—from Mayumi’s reckoning the kindest, smartest, most handsome man in the world. Over the months of their friendship, Goldie had often heard about Henry, so often that he had edged his way into her fantasy life, along with a debonair salesman at Feld’s, a well-dressed fellow commuter on the Geary Street bus, and a teller at the bank who spoke with a European accent. Now, seeing Mayumi’s brother for the first time, Goldie felt a stab of disappointment and shock at her own denseness. The man was handsome enough, but she had never visualized—stupid girl!—that Henry would also be Japanese.

  “Come along!” Mayumi said, grabbing Goldie’s hand, pulling her forward and up the stairs onto the terrace. “Henry, this is Goldie!” Mayumi announced, but after all the professed import of the moment, it was an offhand introduction, made by calling back to her brother over her shoulder as she and Goldie moved on. “Goldie, this is Henry.”

  Henry pushed himself down off the side of the terrace, then followed his sister and her friend back up the stairs. For the past three months, he had been living in Los Angeles, training at an import-export company as he made plans to open his own business in San Francisco. He had returned with a head full of profit-margin figures and sales expectations. Two containers of inventory were now following him up the coast by ship. At twenty-two, after four years of college and his months of training with a firm, Henry Nakamura felt that he had returned to San Francisco to finally begin his life.

  The baron appeared on the terrace then. Like his wife, he had dressed in a kimono, though his was much simpler, and he looked less happy wearing it. He stooped down and squatted on a large mat, arranging a ceramic brazier on a low wooden table. “Children, take your places,” he said. “We should go ahead and begin now.”

  “Is this a performance or something?” Goldie whispered to Mayumi.

  Mayumi shook her head. She stepped behind Goldie and guided her friend toward the mat, where she instructed her to sit on her knees with her toes tucked underneath. “It’s a Japanese tradition called tea ceremony,” Mayumi said. “My mother is offering it to Henry because he’s been away for so long. I wanted you to see it.”

  The tea ceremony began with the four “tea guests” sitting in a semicircle facing the table, with Mayumi and Henry in the middle, the baron next to his son, and Goldie on the other side. The baroness, also perched on her knees, faced them from behind the table, checking the progress of the water steaming on the brazier. The idea of a tea ceremony struck Goldie as both interesting and bizarre. She and her family had drunk tea, of course, but there was nothing ceremonial about that. Her family did have its own traditions—the typical Jewish ones, like lighting candles on Friday night (which Goldie’s family had often neglected to do), and the more peculiar ones, like taking turns wiping their mother’s brow, or leaning out over the porch railing at night, watching for the return of their inebriated father. It struck her that Japanese traditions were much more elegant.

  When the water had boiled to the satisfaction of the baroness, she lifted a small ceramic tea bowl, took a square of fabric, and wiped out the interior. Unlike the cups in which the baroness normally served tea—dainty porcelain pieces with chrysanthemums or cherry blossoms on them—this rough-hewn ceramic bowl had a muddy brown glaze with a single swipe of gray running down one side. The baroness treated the heavy object with delicacy, though, slowly measuring out the tea, which was deep green and as fine as confectioner’s sugar. Carefully she ladled boiling water into the tea and began to whisk the liquid. The tea turned frothy. Very slowly, with the cup between her fingers, she rose first onto her toes and then unfolded her knees until she was standing. With tiny steps, she walked over to her son, knelt in front of him, and placed the cup into his hands.

  Henry received the tea silently, only acknowledging the offering with a subtle dip of his head. He rotated the cup in his hands, looking carefully at its markings, then drank it quickly in three swift sips. The baroness rose, returned to her table, and performed the ritual again for each of her guests, first for her husband, then Goldie, then Mayumi.

  Goldie found every movement and gesture so intricate that she felt anxious over her inability to absorb it completely. She had never seen any activity completed with such a perfectly ritualized series of movements. If the Japanese focused so much effort on the simple act of making tea, then it seemed to her that they had elevated the whole breadth of human experience to something artistic and beautiful. This thought dazzled, but also confused her. How was she, as a guest, supposed to behave? Was she doing something wrong? She continually glanced back and forth between the baroness and the other guests beside her. When Mayumi lifted her sweets plate in one hand and her miniature fork in the other, then skewered the bite-size nest of sugary yellow noodles and lifted them to her mouth, Goldie did the same. The confection tasted eggy and strange, like candied spaghetti.

  Mayumi leaned sideways to whisper in Goldie’s ear. “Do you like it?”

  “It’s delicious.” She had never experienced such a mixture of delicacy and earthiness, which is why she praised it so highly, even though she didn’t actually care to try it again.

  Each of the Nakamuras was participating in the ritual in his or her own particular way. The baroness came from a family of candymakers, not aristocrats, and she had never had an opportunity to study the tea ceremony as a girl. Rather, she had taken it up in San Francisco, when a retired chemistry teacher from Osaka began to give lessons to earn extra money. Comparatively speaking, then, the baroness was new to this hobby, and while she was proud of her accomplishment, she also felt uneasy that her husband would see flaws in it. For his part, the baron was only half attentive. He had grown up in a family that practiced such refinements, but he found the entire enterprise dull and useless. Though he tried to look interested, he watched his wife with an impatient awareness that the afternoon was passing quickly and he had three cherry trees near the South Gate that needed pruning. Next to Goldie, Mayumi watched more closely, but she found her mother’s efforts too self-conscious and pretentious. Only Henry, whose travels had renewed his appreciation for his own heritage, shared Goldie’s full pleasure in the ceremony and participated wholeheartedly.

  Just as the baroness was concluding her presentation, the little group on the terrace was interrupted by the sound of people approaching down the path. Something about the tenor of one particular voice alerted the baron to the fact that he had to attend to these new arrivals. He pulled himself quickly, and somewhat overeagerly, off the mat, and gave his wife and fellow guests a superficial wave of apology before darting down the steps to greet the visitors. Mayumi and Henry looked at their mother, who tipped her head with resignation, signaling that the young people should follow the baron down the steps to say hello.

  Mr. Banes, the park superintendent, had arrived unexpectedly. “Nakamura!” he roared, grabbing the baron’s hand. A bearish fellow, Banes was in the midst of offering a running narrative to the cluster of subordinates trailing him. “We planted that line of firs in twenty-seven,” he told them. “Good growth on those beauties.” To Goldie, he sounded like a truck driver delivering beer. She felt that the dream of the tea ceremony had been shattered.

  “You were right about that little maple up by the gate, Nakamura.” The superintendent chewed on a battered-looking cigar, his eyes taking in the details of the garden with the pleasure and ease of someone literate in a language only a few could understand. “And the Moon Bridge is looking damn good, too.” The horseshoe-shaped structure had been installed decades earlier, during the San Francisco Exposition, and the baron had been overseeing its renovation for a month. “Where’d you get that idea of planting the little bonsai beside it?” he asked.

  “Hiroshige,” said the baron.

  “Hiroshige?”

  “One of the most precious Japanese artists.” The baron became teacherly then. “My garden is a series of scenes.” He looked at Mayumi. “What’s that word?”

  “Motifs,” she said.

  “Yes, motifs. Each turn on a path invites a new moment, a new drama. Hiroshige had this same idea about landscape. Often, a tree or even a shrub makes a person feel a particular emotion, so I planted the tree beside the Moon Bridge for the same reason that an artist introduces a new element to a picture—to change the feeling completely.”