PHotoGraPH by CassIE butlEr tIMPy
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. b
Dana Sachs
Currently reading: Bobcat and Other Stories by Rebecca Lee. Funny, beautiful and brilliant. Perennial favorite book: I hate to say it because it’s so predictable, but, really, anything by Jane Austen. Favorite new author: Holly Goddard Jones, a Greensboro writer whose new novel, The Next Time You See Me, is mysterious, creepy, and totally compelling. Literary guilty pleasure: I just read my first P.G. Wodehouse — The Adventures of Sally — and it was like eating a chocolate truffle in the form of words. So delicious. Where do you plan to get away this summer to read? Budapest! I’m doing research for a new novel and that’s drawing me to books about World War II and classical music. Quintessential summer read: Anything by Nancy Mitford is pure pleasure.
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The Secret of the Nightingale Palace, published by HarperCollins Publishers in 2013, is excerpted by permission of HarperCollins. Wilmington author Dana Sachs has also penned The House on Dream Street: Memoir of an American Woman in Vietnam; If You Lived Here: A Novel; and The Life We Were Given: Operation Babylift, International Adoption, and the Children of War in Vietnam.
The Ar t & Soul of Wilmington
July 2013 •
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