Henry stood up, trying to muster whatever dignity he had left. Goldie held out her hand to him, and when he took it, her skin felt so cool and soft that he dropped it immediately. He saw a trace of disappointment cross her face, but he could do nothing about her feelings now. “How are you?” he asked. Standing close, he saw that she looked pale, thin, and somewhat shaky. Her dark eyes, always haunting to him, looked almost ghostly now. Mayumi had, not surprisingly and as she had predicted, been “let go” by Feld’s, but she and Goldie had managed to get together a few times for some halfhearted shopping. Henry had heard, therefore, about the appendicitis.

  “I’m just fine,” Goldie replied. “Things are just fine at the store. There’s been some trouble importing silk—”

  “The war,” he said.

  “Oh, yes, of course, the war.” She shrugged, and her voice trailed off. She looked around. Some of Henry’s fellow future internees were leaning against the buildings smoking cigarettes. Others hunched on the piles of their belongings, trying to doze. Many watched with mild interest this awkward exchange between the depressed-looking Japanese man and the lovely, delicate Caucasian woman.

  “I thought I’d come say good-bye,” she said, then quickly added, “to your family.”

  “Mayumi will be glad. And my parents.”

  Goldie bowed her head, nodding. She stared at her feet, idly grinding the toe of her pump into the sidewalk. Henry thought of something then. “Goldie?”

  She looked up at him, her face bereft. “Yes?”

  “The book of prints. Remember it?”

  “Of course.”

  “I have it here with me. Why don’t you take it? You love those pictures.”

  He was trying his best to sound detached, surrounded as they were by more than fifty disconsolate people who had nothing else to do but watch. Why hadn’t he thought of the prints before? She’d have something, at least, to remember him by.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “Would it look strange?”

  He lifted his arms a bit, then let them drop against his sides. He didn’t care what his family thought—he had given up too much for them already—but he didn’t want to do anything to embarrass Goldie. “If they ask, I’ll just tell them you agreed to take care of the portfolio while we’re gone. But it’s yours, really.”

  “All right.” Her face filled with relief and pleasure, which gratified him at first. But then, as all sign of sadness disappeared from her face, the apparent ease of her emotions confounded him.

  “So that’s enough to make you happy?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, is it so important to be happy that you can ignore everything else?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He shrugged. “Some people would rather be honest than happy. Or right than happy. Or rich than happy.”

  “Wouldn’t being rich make you happy?” she asked, and her perfect naïveté made him laugh.

  “Well, not necessarily.”

  It was Goldie’s turn, though, to grow impatient. “Why are you asking me this question?”

  “Is having those prints enough to make you happy and forget about everything else?”

  “Of course it’s not enough. Nothing is enough.”

  As their conversation became more urgent, it became more muted. Unable to hear their words clearly, the bystanders listened with heightened attention. Henry felt grateful that his family, at least, could not see them out here.

  “Some people can bear anything but sadness,” he said. “Heartbreak. Loneliness. Terrible loss. But they ignore it all because they just don’t want to feel sad anymore.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “That’s my observation.”

  “And you?”

  “I think I have a deeper capacity for sadness than you.”

  “What are you trying to tell me, Henry?” She seemed to be angry now, but he couldn’t stop himself. It was almost as if because he couldn’t have her, he had to fight with her instead.

  “It’s not a bad thing,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I think you’ll be feeling better soon. I don’t want to make myself sound pathetic, Goldie, but I won’t.”

  “You won’t what?”

  “Be feeling better.”

  Goldie turned away from him then. She put her hand over her eyes, and he could see that she was trying to compose herself. Along the sidewalk, people were elbowing each other now. Goldie didn’t seem to care, perhaps because she was not the one who would have to live with them at a racetrack for the next few months. But Henry couldn’t blame her, either. He was, after all, the one who had married someone else.

  Goldie finally looked at him again. “You don’t know anything about what I’m feeling,” she said. “You have no idea.”

  She was right. He didn’t. “Forget what I said,” he told her. “I’m upset. I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  Goldie’s expression had hardened, though. Henry felt a surge of panic and contrition. “Maybe we should get the prints?” he asked, desperate not to say good-bye to her on such a note.

  Still scowling, Goldie followed him into the store. The air was fragrant with the smell of rice. “Henry, is that you, son?” his mother called from back in the storeroom. “Come eat.”

  “I’ll be right there,” he answered. He looked at Goldie. “We’ll surprise them,” he whispered. “They don’t know that you’re here.” This last fact, of course, was obvious, but neither Goldie nor Henry was able to think very clearly by then. At that moment Henry cared about nothing but taking her hand and leading her back behind the shelves. The family’s bags lay piled on the floor. He squatted down and dug through a trunk until he found the velvet case that held the prints; then he stood up and set it on a shelf. He could hear his family talking in the kitchen. Goldie was watching him uncertainly. Gently, he nudged her backward until he was pressing her against the wall. He lifted his hand to her face and slowly slid his fingers into her mouth. Her skin was so pale, her lipstick so red. She pressed her mouth together then.

  A great deal had changed since the last time the two of them touched. Henry had begun a dull sexual relationship with his wife. And Goldie, in a private room in Pescadero, had learned that desire had an end result. Now, preparing to say good-bye, maybe forever, Henry’s emotions crystallized into anguish over the difference between what he had and what he wanted. “It should be this,” he told himself, pressing firmly against her. Goldie, who was used to deprivation, felt less a sense of injustice than Henry, but she had a clearer sense of what she needed at that moment. She wanted Henry’s touch to replace, in her mind, the memory of Alan Stevenson’s pawing. That was something, she told herself, that she deserved. And so she took Henry’s hand from her mouth and guided it downward, helping him slip his fingers between her stomach and the waistline of her skirt, then continue down and in between her legs. In other circumstances, he might have been surprised by her directness—in any case, he would have a long sojourn in the desert to consider that—but right now, sliding his fingers inside her, Henry’s conscious thoughts were very simple. He pressed his mouth against her ear. “Goldie,” he whispered, his voice more like breathing than words. She closed her eyes and held him there.

  The bells on the door rattled and they heard someone come inside. Henry pulled away. A man’s voice called into the room in Japanese. Goldie brushed her hair off her face, tucked her blouse into her skirt. Henry, looking flushed, managed to respond to his father. “Dad,” he said, and in what was probably the hardest phrase he would ever have to utter, he put a stop to everything: “Goldie’s here.”

  Later, after she had said good-bye to the family, taken the prints, and gone away, Henry sat out on the sidewalk again, staring at his fingers, which her lips had stained dark red. It was a trick of his imagination, of course, but for a long time afterward he would continue to see the color there. And when he sniffed his fingers, he could still detect her scent.

  For the first month or so after San Francisco’s Japanese citizens were boarded onto buses and driven away, Goldie and Mayumi wrote to each other. The racetrack where the family was initially settled lay only a few miles south of the city, but Mayumi might as well have traveled to Australia considering how long the mail took to reach its destination. Most letters arrived bearing the results of censorship—a stamp saying OPENED BY EXAMINER, a black mark obscuring a sentence or phrase, even, on occasion, a paragraph clipped out entirely.

  The logistical difficulties of their correspondence, however, did not present the greatest challenge. For Goldie, the act of writing to her friend, and knowing that Henry was nearby, stirred emotions she couldn’t always manage. It reminded her of the thirst dreams she sometimes had—always dropping the glass of water before she had a chance to drink. For her part, Mayumi never knew what to say. Although she found it depressing to describe the experience of living with eight thousand people in rows of dusty barracks, she felt equally depressed by the prospect of ignoring her situation. Their letters, then, were stiff and pleasant, full of forced humor that neither found funny.

  Goldie wrote: “I wish that you could have been with me today—I went by La Fleur d’Amour and the SALE they had going was no better than the REGULAR prices they had last month. I said to the salesgirl—‘You must think we’re DAFT’—and then I huffed out!!!! Seriously—their shoes are not worth half that price.”

  Mayumi wrote: “I have taken up needlepoint. We can’t get the prettiest thread here, really, but at least I can create my own designs. I’m making little pillows with tiny birds all over them. Hummingbirds, sparrows, redbirds, and, because of the war and everything, a lot of doves. Henry says I need some cuckoos, but he’s just trying to annoy me. I’ll make two matched sets, a pair for you and a pair for me. We’ll keep them on our sofas, and then when we visit each other we’ll say, ‘What darling little pillows! Wherever did you buy them?’ ”

  Eventually both Goldie and Mayumi found this kind of banter too difficult to maintain. Their correspondence became more and more sporadic until finally, like a stream in a drought, it dried up.

  18

  A Sweet Life

  In her later years, Goldie liked to say that Marvin Feld asked her to marry him on their first date, but their courtship did not actually transpire that quickly. They had, of course, known each other for months, collaborated together on the successful Pioneer perfume Fourth of July promotion, and spent thirteen minutes alone behind the tie counter while Goldie suffered the rupture of an ectopic pregnancy that—though she was prone to exaggeration, she was correct on this one—nearly killed her. By the time she and Marvin spent their first evening alone together, her sense of his role in her life had progressed through a series of clearly defined but unpredictable mutations: handsome prince, friendly acquaintance, lifesaver, trusted friend. Even during his princely period, she never felt the mild tingles of excitement that she had once experienced around Alan Stevenson. Anyone who knew the sequence of events that took place in Goldie’s life during that period might have tried to assess her feelings for Marvin in relation to Henry as well. Goldie, however, never compared the two. “Apples and oranges,” she might have said.

  Anyway, it was sort of a stretch to call that meeting a date at all. Just after her lunch break one day, Marvin approached her in the hat department and asked if they could talk for a while after work. He looked both distracted and disturbed, which gave Goldie cause for concern. “Of course,” she told him. He had held her in his arms while she nearly bled to death. She would do anything in the world for Marvin Feld.

  It was early May, warm and breezy, and they walked down Market Street toward the bay. Goldie had imagined that he would take her for a drink somewhere, but he was so focused on his thoughts that once they headed out of the store, he didn’t seem to give another thought to a destination.

  “You just talk when you’re ready,” Goldie said. “I’m patient. I’ll wait.”

  He lifted his arm and patted her shoulder, but otherwise didn’t respond. Goldie liked walking beside a well-dressed man on a pretty day. The events of the past year had rid her of her marital ambitions, which had not only proved useless but nearly destroyed her, emotionally and physically. Compared with all that, she felt comforted by the idea of spending the rest of her life unmarried, working as a saleslady at Feld’s. The job was stable and secure, and she could imagine a future of promotions. Goldie’s sister Louise had nearly killed herself cleaning houses, but Goldie had discovered that domestic work wasn’t the only option for a smart girl with a sense of style. She could earn her own money, buy her own clothes, and cultivate friendships with respectable people. Before too long, she planned to find herself an apartment, too, and get away from Rochelle. She had come to believe in the possibility of building a satisfying and stable life independent of the whims of men.

  None of that meant, however, that she didn’t enjoy the occasional walk through the city with an elegant friend. And she also enjoyed the suspense of wondering what Marvin wanted to talk with her about. Though the two of them had never formally discussed what happened the day she collapsed behind the counter, she knew that he understood everything and didn’t judge her for it. One morning, visiting her in the hospital, he had looked her in the eye and said, in the manner of a teacher offering instruction, “You had a burst appendix, Goldie. Appendicitis.” Two days hadn’t even passed since she collapsed, and she was still absorbing the fact that a devastating episode in a private room with Alan Stevenson had resulted in swollen breasts, nausea, and ultimately, emergency surgery and a hospital stay. The realization that Marvin knew what had happened filled her with shame—it made her feel naked—but he didn’t seem to regard her any differently. His concern seemed tender, almost brotherly, and nearly made her cry. A few days later, on another visit, he seemed angrier, though angry at the world in general, not at her. “Was it Henry?” he asked, out of the blue. “Was it Henry?” She reacted with heat. “No!” she screamed, and the tone of repulsion in her voice convinced Marvin that she had never thought of Henry in a romantic way at all. In truth, Goldie’s passion came from a determination to exonerate the man she loved and also from the sense of regret that she had begun to experience on the night in Pescadero. As traumatized as she felt by her first experience of sexual intimacy, Goldie was perceptive enough to see that, in another context, it could offer joy. She felt it as an unspeakable loss that she and Henry would never experience that together.

  Goldie loved Marvin for his kindness, then, and for the fact that he could not only forgive a fallen woman but also invite her on a walk. To the extent that he himself seemed troubled now, she resolved to help him if she could.

  They crossed Steuart Street, walked up the Embarcadero toward the Ferry Building, then stopped to look back toward the Bay Bridge, which towered above them now. Other than when she first arrived in California, and the train stopped at the Oakland station, Goldie had never actually crossed the bridge—what was there for her on the other side? She sometimes walked this way during her lunch hour, though, just to look at the way the bridge stretched, like a necklace, across the bay.

  “It must be beautiful up in the Sierras now,” Marvin said. “We used to take the ferry, but now we can get there in a few hours just by crossing the bridge.”

  Goldie was reasonably sure that the Sierras were mountains. “That’s east, isn’t it?” she asked. The sun set in the west, over the Pacific.

  “Yes,” Marvin said. Then, after another moment of silence, he turned to her. “Listen, Goldie. I want to ask you something.” He still seemed bothered, but he was concentrating his attention entirely on her now.

  “Ask me anything,” she said, and she really meant it.

  “I need to get married. It’s time. And you’re a great gal. What do you think?”

  “Me?” she asked. Her past lay so obviously between them that it wasn’t necessary for her to say more than that.

  “Yes, you.” He laughed. He had practical reasons for proposing to her, and he would not allow himself to believe that he was being altruistic. Still, even the best man in the world could not have seen Goldie’s face at that moment without feeling, for an instant at least, like a knight in shining armor.

  Marvin took her hand and led her to a bench. Her whole body was shaking now, but despite her shock, she remained composed enough to wonder if her sweaty hands might put him off. “What is going on here?” she asked.

  “I’m going to be honest with you,” he said. “I’m not going to lie to you, ever.”

  Goldie gazed at him, so completely confused about what was happening that she simply said, “I love you for that.”

  He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close, but kept his gaze turned toward the bay. “I’m a queer,” he said. When Goldie didn’t respond, he turned to look at her, then added, “A homosexual.”

  Goldie had grown used to working her way around the things she didn’t know—the Sierras, mixed drinks, abstract art—but Marvin’s revelation was a mystery that seemed fairly important. “A what?” she asked.

  He sighed. “I was afraid of that.” For the next few minutes, and in as neutral a tone as possible, he did his best to explain the vagaries of sexual orientation. He refrained from specifics about the men he had known, focusing more on the idea that a man could love a man in the same way that another man could love a woman. He tried his best to make himself sound normal, but also emphasized the need to keep this information private. Most importantly, he offered the facts—I’m homosexual; will you marry me?—but let her draw her own conclusions about how they would actually navigate a marriage. Marvin had chosen Goldie based on practicalities and some degree of feeling, too. He needed to find someone attractive enough to make the marriage pleasant, convincing, and more or less acceptable to his parents, but also constrained enough that she would doubt her chances for finding a better mate. With those two issues in mind, Goldie seemed a perfect choice. It helped, too, that she was Jewish, though Marvin suspected that his parents, with their pretensions to aristocracy, might have regarded a marriage to a wealthy gentile as something of a coup. It also helped that Marvin loved her, in his way.