Free The Secret of the Nightingale Palace by Dana Sachs

blue stockings became pronounced. Goldie said, “You’d think the management here would maintain some standard.”
    Anna was still thinking, though, about what her grandmother had said. Despite the use of words like “deeply in love” and “devastated,” there was a flatness to Goldie’s account of her first marriage. After so many years, Goldie’s appreciation of Marvin Feld had settled into something rote and offhand. “What about Poppy?” Anna asked. She had heard the Saul and Goldie Rosenthal story so many times that it felt more like legend than true history: Goldie, widowed after the death of her war hero husband, took her fatherless little boy with her when she went shopping for handbags in New York City. Haggling for a purse, she met an ambitious leather goods wholesaler who married her and adopted her child. Goldie and Saul worked hard, invested their money perfectly, and soon had apartments in Palm Beach and New York, Louis Vuitton luggage, and for Goldie, summers in Rome.
    Goldie looked at her blankly. “What about him?”
    Anna suddenly wasn’t sure what she wanted to know. To talk about widowhood would once again draw them back to Ford. She wanted to stay away from that subject. “You remember how you felt about him,” Anna said.
    Goldie looked annoyed, as if Anna were questioning her loyalty in some manner. “I would have died without your Poppy.” She unzipped her pocketbook and began rooting around inside it. “He saved my life.”
    Anna couldn’t help herself. “Did your family approve of the marriage?”
    â€œMy family?” Goldie gave a dry little laugh. “What did they care? If I had died, they would have come to my funeral, but they wouldn’t have paid for flowers or anything. I was absolutely on my own.”
    An image of the young Goldie appeared to Anna then—not the domineering grandmother, but the young widow, vulnerable and full of need. In terms of family support and material comfort, Anna had much more to keep her afloat, but still, she shared with Goldie the experience of profound loss followed by emotional chaos. The grief that had colored her days during Ford’s illness had devolved after his death into something more dull and pervasive, like a low-grade flu that drained her of energy. She wondered what Goldie had done to keep herself intact, and if Goldie had, like Anna, ever suffered from tortured recollections of how the man she’d loved had slipped away.
    If the young Goldie had been sitting across the table from her, Anna would have reached over and taken her hand. They could have formed a support group together, had the timing been right. But the Goldie facing Anna now had long ago left behind such agonies. She found her lipstick and compact, flipped open to the mirror, then began applying a fresh coat of color to her mouth. “I wouldn’t rave about this restaurant,” she said, “but it suited our purpose. We had to eat.”

3
    The Unexpected
    F ord started losing weight in the fall of 2000. He’d gotten a promotion at the University Libraries and ran the Special Collections division. Sometimes Anna would stop by and find him sorting through postcards of Memphis in the 1930s. Other times he seemed to spend entire days in meetings discussing interlibrary loan services and expanded reference hours. In other words, sometimes he loved his job and sometimes he hated it.
    At first they thought that the weight loss came from stress. The state had cut the library’s budget, and now he was doing not only his own work but also that of his former assistant. He came home late at night, tired and irritated. The food lover who had once eaten three large meals a day plus snacks now found himself unable to finish a piece of grilled chicken. “I’m just not hungry,” he told her. He’d go to bed, and she’d stay up watching TV and wondering if he was