This Stream of Dreams (Mirella, Rashid and Adam Book 2) (3 page)

Oo
’s and
ah
’s broke from the crisp line of uniformed hotel maids. “Her gown is beautiful,” one said.

“Magnificent,” corrected the Oceanside’s housekeeper. “I’ve know her and her family since she was a little girl. One of the finest families in Massachusetts. Some say eccentric. No money but real society. What
I
say is that money isn’t everything. You see that man? That’s her father, very famous is Maxim Wesson Wingfield. A charming man, always has a kind word for me. You would never know he’s a famous philosopher. World-renowned, they say. People from all over go to see him at the family estate, Wingfield Park.”

“A real gentleman. And so is Mr. Weinbaum, his right-hand man,” said Nathaniel Weeks, the manager of Oceanside’s garages. “That’s Mr. Weinbaum over there. Fixes everything for the Wingfields. Always lets me have the run of
the estate, lets me help with the antique cars — those are only just a few of ’em. They must have fifty or more. Always been in the family, those cars. The Wingfields never throw anything out. I respect the Wingfields for that.” None of the girls was really listening. They were too engrossed with the glamour of the occasion.

“Look at her hat. Isn’t it gorgeous, Mary? I’ve never seen anything like it. And with real flowers pinned to it. Now that’s class,” said one chambermaid to another.

“And real horsehair, very fashionable in the thirties. Mrs. Astor used to wear hats like that. She even gave me one of her very own at the end of the season one year. It must be coming back into fashion,” said the ancient head laundress.

Mirella reached up, removed her hat, and tossed it to Deena, saying, “Catch the bride’s bouquet,” and Deena did.

“Oh, lord, will my mother be happy to hear I caught this! The last thing she said to me before I left New York was, ‘Deeny, for God’s sake reach up, reach out — use your elbows if you have to — but for God’s sake catch the bouquet. It’s true, you know, that saying: if you catch the bouquet, it’s your turn next up the aisle. It happened to Merna Pinsky’s Sylvia. And if it could happen to her, it could happen to you. Make an effort, Deeny, make an effort.’ ”

Mirella, who was trying to loosen her wedding veil and slip it off her shoulders and up over her head, broke into laughter, as did Adam, and even Rashid, who had come up behind Deena and put his arm around her. Brindley smiled. He didn’t quite understand it all, but suddenly he began to laugh too. Deena always made him laugh. Moses and Muhsine came to Mirella’s aid and gathered up the train of veiling. While they were busy fussing over Mirella, Deena walked up to her and placed the hat back into Mirella’s hands.

“Here, Mirella, wear it at least until you cut the wedding cake. Just make sure you don’t throw it again to someone else. My mother would never forgive you.”

Mirella pinned her hat in place, Adam slipped his arm around her and shivered with excitement as he caressed her bare back. She was drawn to him with the same warmth and thrill she always felt whenever she was near him. Most of the guests were assembled in Oceanside’s great hall, Lalique angel-stemmed champagne glasses charged and in their
hands, waiting to toast the bride and groom when they entered.

“Have a happy life,” called down Kate and Trixi, two of the spa’s twenty junior vegetable cooks.

Mirella and Adam heard them and looked up: they smiled and waved. The balconies rang with the applause the regular staff gave them.

Mirella kept looking up at the Oceanside’s bewildering ad hoc amalgam of tiled roof pitches, towers and verandas, turrets and cupolas. A weather-beaten wood palace somewhat like a child’s fabulous sand castle, the palace of every romantic fairy tale.

When Mirella turned her attention back to Adam there were tears of emotion in her eyes. He tilted her chin up, “Hey, what’s this?” raising her hand and kissing it.

She gave a deep sigh, blinked back her tears, and smiled. “I feel happier now than those waves dancing from the depths out there. Walking up the stairs into Oceanside with you will complete so many of my childhood dreams. Just now, they suddenly came rushing back to me.

“Oceanside was my dream castle, my play castle. It represented gaiety and was exciting and dramatic, even mysterious, and always full of beautiful wealthy people wearing the latest clothes. People I equated with romance, intrigue, love, who, when they were not here were traveling to far and exotic places, doing glamorous heroic things. Oh, how I wanted to be one of them.

“Because we live so closely by, during the season Oceanside was my second home. My family were the ‘day people,’ who used it like a country club, and my dream was to be a guest, a resident, to sleep a whole night here and have breakfast in bed.

“From the age of five, I used to play ‘let’s pretend’ games about Oceanside. As an adolescent I played romantic ‘let’s-pretend’ games and wished that we were not the cash-poor, property-rich, intellectual, eccentric arm of the family. I longed for lots of new pretty ball gowns, to replace the elegant family hand-me-downs I was obliged to wear. I believed that if I had them they would make me beautiful, and the prince who lived in the dream castle would come and take me to the ball. But it never happened, and he never came, and
so I abandoned my dreams, wiped them out of my mind, and settled for those that were possible.”

Adam placed his arm around her shoulder and together they walked slowly toward the wide, curved wooden steps leading to the open veranda and the entrance. They were followed by their wedding attendants, Rashid, Deena, and Brindley, who were walking arm in arm together, amid the ringing of their own laughter.

“How strange the mind is,” Mirella continued, “I’d forgotten those fantasies for so many years, and they have come back to me, just when at last I am going into Oceanside to a grand reception, a ball, in honor of us, with all my dreams fulfilled, and much more.”

Adam was extremely touched by what she told him. It was the sweetness, the innocence of Mirella the child, and her fantasies: the confession that she longed so passionately for them to come true, and that, when they hadn’t, she gave them up and began making compromises, something he had never done. Aware of the nostalgic ache in her voice during the telling of her little story, he was now pained by it. He hurt for all the years they had not found each other, and he had not set her free. Now he would spend the remainder of his life loving her and giving her the world.

Mirella took her last awed look at the fairy-tale-castle façade of Oceanside with the eyes of a child, and then turned to her husband. Adam felt he was seeing the anguish of past unfulfilled dreams slip from her face, and the happy, passionate woman he knew so well come to the fore.

He gathered her in his arms, crushed her hard against him, and kissed her lustily. He could feel her fire, imagine her body under the white lace wedding gown dissolve like molten gold into his, feel her passion explode into the familiar tremors of ecstasy, and hear an almost imperceptible whimper of release.

The sound of the sea, and the distant music of Artie Shaw’s sweet clarinet over his newest big band, and the voice of Peggy Lee singing “As Time Goes By” mingled with the applause, laughter, and teasing from those above on the balconies. Mirella opened her eyes. She was still in Adam’s arms, and from over his shoulder she could see Rashid watching her. Despite the deep and profound love and ruttishness she felt for her husband, something within her silently, invisibly reached out. She sensed a mad desire to
touch Rashid, to be sexually enslaved once again by the dark devilish man. She blinked and it passed, but her mind and heart recorded for the first time that she and Rashid shared a kind of love that she was far from rid of.

3

S
ince the day it had opened in the summer of 1893, Oceanside had beguiled all who had been privileged to enter. Its mellow luxury, reminiscent of Edwardian society at its most elegant and genteel, was modified by a delightful seaside informality. Nearly a hundred years later on Mirella’s wedding day, the ambience was still the same.

The oakwood paneling of Oceanside’s main rooms on the ground floor was as opulent as the furnishings, as grand as its arched and faceted ceilings, as spectacular as the view of sand and sea through its myriad windows. Soon the hundred breakfast guests would be seated in the extraordinary round-ended dining room; later, nine hundred guests would assemble to dance and dine in the Ballroom and the Tango room where Artie Shaw was playing his great rendition of the forties hit “Frenesi.”

Now these rooms were not so much transformed into Gardens of Eden by the abundance of greenery and flowers filling them as they were decorated to enhance the contradictory elements that gave Oceanside its character. And these contradictory elements, oddly enough, imposed a light-hearted gaiety, an ease, on the ostentation and elegance of Mirella and Adam’s wedding reception. It inspired a happy, lazy, holiday mood in the hundred guests who were invited to the church and the noonday breakfast, while doing nothing to discourage their posing and preening.

When Adam and Mirella walked from the midday heat and the bright sunshine into the cool, shady hall they were greeted by a ringing chorus of good wishes and a shower of white flower petals — jasmine and rose, lily of the valley, apple blossom, carnation, honeysuckle, heather, and thousands of baby orchids. Mirella and Adam were soon separated by their guests’ toasts and embraces.

Even Ralph Werfel was now swept up by the incredible style of this joyous occasion. When he shook Adam’s hand there was a tear in his eye, and a tremor of emotion in his voice as he said, “This day has been a long time coming for you, Adam, and I hope your marriage brings you all the happiness you deserve.”

He and Adam exchanged one of those hugs that men allow themselves when they’re happy for each other before Ralph slithered away into the crowd. It was only when Adam, while being kissed on the cheek by one of the female guests, was wiping the palm of his hand with his white linen handkerchief that he realized he was trying to rid himself of the touch of Ralph’s cold, clammy hand. For the first time in all the years Adam had known and worked with Ralph, he found him suddenly repulsive, but he was too happy to linger on that thought and it vanished from his mind even before he replaced his handkerchief in his pocket.

When the fifty white-coated waiters finally stopped refilling glasses with Bollinger “Special Cuvée 1969 champagne, and began to usher the wedding party into the Dining Room, Mirella and Adam came together again and were surrounded by his family. There were his children — Joshua, Zhara, Alamya, Memett, and Alice — Alamya’s mother, Giuliana, a Venetian countess, and Memett’s mother, Aysha, a young Turkish courtesan. There were several beautiful young girls, all now former mistresses of Adam who, he had explained to Mirella, were part of his household, and all considered to be his immediate family. The realization that these were
her
children now,
her
immediate family now, just as much as they were Adam’s, shocked Mirella.

She always had thought of Adam as a big man, a solid man, but she suddenly saw him as a powerfully loving man, a giant of a man. She saw she had taken him on not only with his unconventional family, but with all that living with a colossus and a rare human being might entail.

The mother of Joshua, Adam’s eldest son, was the only other woman Adam had married. He had divorced her soon after Joshua’s sister, Zhara, had been born, and she was not included in the immediate family. Joshua now put his arm around Mirella and hugged her.

“Do I see just a hint of concern about taking on our clan? We children, Marlo and Giuliana, Aysha, and the other ladies
of the yali household call ourselves a clan, you know. Not having second thoughts, are you?”

“Well, maybe just a little concern, Josh. You are a formidable group to take on. But certainly no second thoughts. Frankly, I’m still so dazzled by your father’s courtship, I haven’t had much of a chance to think about you all, until this minute, When I realized the clan is my family now. Take you, for example,” she said as she snapped her fingers, “in you I have a most attractive and intelligent twenty-five-year-old son. It feels wonderful, exciting even — but strange. I know you all live separate lives away from Adam; that there are rooms for each of you in his house, the Peramabahçe Palace —”

“Correction,” Josh interrupted. “Not
his
house;
our
house is what you must say now. I hope you don’t mind my correcting you, but ever since we were all summoned to Istanbul to meet you, although it was only for one day, we’ve taken you to our hearts as Father’s choice as wife, the newest member of our clan, the female head of the family. There’s never been one before you. We’ve always been a closely bound family, loving and devoted to each other while loving and admiring Papa. We delight in the life he has chosen for himself, as well as the one he gives us, so we’ve never really missed his not having a wife. Now that Papa has selected you to stand by his side, we’re all happy for him and for you, too, and for ourselves as well. We want to love you the way Papa does. So don’t feel strange. Welcome to the family. And now may I kiss the bride?”

Mirella was touched by Josh’s sensitivity and grateful for his kind words. When he bent and kissed her on the lips, he had a similar warmth and appeal to that of Adam. Mirella knew instinctively that, in time, she would love him because he was every inch his father’s son, love them all because they were a part of Adam.

“Yes, Mirella, welcome to the clan, Zhara said. “You’re brave to take us all on. You’re the loveliest bride I ever saw, and Papa looks so young and handsome, and happier and different than I can ever remember. I do hope you will love us, all of us. We already love you for making our papa so happy.” Then Zhara kissed Mirella.

Rashid was standing on the fringe of the Corey clan with Deena and Brindley. One of the waiters approached him and
announced that the wedding guests were seated and waiting for the bride and groom. Adam heard him, went to Mirella and took her hand.

“Well,” he said, “shall we go in alone, darling, or as a family, since all the clan is here? Well, almost all the clan is gathered; Marlo is missing. I can’t understand it. She said she would be here.”

The disappointment on Adam’s face surprised Mirella, even slightly worried her, since Marlo was the only member of the immediate family whom she had not yet met. Mirella had a gut instinct that here was the woman, possibly the only other woman, who had ever got as close to Adam as she had. She felt not jealousy but rivalry — then put it out of her mind at once, because she knew she could not cope with even the thought. And besides, she was too happy.

Marlo was Marlo Channing, a world-famous war photographer, mother of Adam’s youngest child, the seven-year-old Alice. And, Mirella knew from her first visit in Istanbul to the yali that Marlo was adored by all the children and women of Adam’s household. That time, too, Marlo had announced she would be there, flying in from somewhere in the African bush where she was covering the side of the rebels in a Nigerian uprising against the current regime, to meet Adam’s wife-to-be. They had all waited impatiently well into the night for her to arrive. Mirella remembered, as time wore on, how they had talked about her with such enthusiasm, love, and even adoration. Now, slipping her arm through Adam’s, and taking Alice’s hand in hers, Mirella announced, “This is my wedding breakfast, and I’m famished.”

A chorus of “This is
our
wedding breakfast” rose up from the clan, led by Adam and Josh, “and
we
are famished too.” It was followed by bursts of laughter and chatter, and a loving kiss from Adam. The children playfully pushed Adam and Mirella forward to follow Rashid, Deena, and Brindley to breakfast.

The dining room was enchanting. From the dome plunged great swags of fresh white lilacs entwined with lime-green foliage and fashioned into large bows pinned to the walls ten feet above the floor. Dozens of delicate, clear glass bird cages, filled with white cooing doves, hung on varying lengths of vines braided with white daisies. They filled the ceiling, glistening above the guests like a giant crystal aviary.

One large table circled the room, forming a ring of snowy damask. The antique French silver, rare Gallé crystal goblets, and Meissen dinner service that had been made especially for one of the more refined of the Baltic kings were all wrested from the store of family treasures at Mirella’s home, Wingfield Park.

Silver pedestal salvers punctuated the center of the table every ten feet or so. Each salver held a tall slender cone of dark, rich chocolate mousse rising from a bed of fresh lilies of the valley and trailing small white roses with just a hint of pale peach color to them. The cones were covered in whipped cream and decoratively frosted with sugar-icing lilies of the valley, blooming round and round up the sides; lovebirds of blown sugar perched on the tops. The wedding cakes were based on — but were not at all like — the traditional Scandinavian “ring cakes” made by piling up rings, in diminishing circumference, of almond-paste dough, and were related more to the intricate
pièces montées
perfected by the famous and unsurpassed eighteenth-century chef Antonin Carême.

The small, heavily scented white roses trailed off the salvers prettily and were arranged in abundance, in twists and turns down the table’s center from one silver-pedestaled wedding cake to another and around the table, and hence around the room.

On a raised circular platform in the center of the ring of table, and directly under the center of the dome and the crystal aviary, sat a musician at a seventeenth-century harpsichord of satinwood decorated with exquisite floral painting. A flautist stood and a viola player sat in front of intricately carved music stands of the same period, decorated with white satin bows and streamers, and bunches of fresh, sweet-scented lilies of the valley.

The concert of chamber music chosen by Lili was from the court of King Louis XIV of France: François Couperin’s
Air Contrafugue, Concert Royal No. 2
. It was perfection; its grace and sweetness not cloying, but utterly charming.

They dined, served by an army of liveried French waiters, one waiter standing behind every second high-backed chair, on soufflé amalatta, filled with the finest shiny black beads of beluga caviar; lobster in aspic, dressed in a foamy yellow saffron sauce; lychee sorbet. A perfectly chilled Bâtard-Montrachet
1971, a top white burgundy as rich in flavor as a dry white wine can be, accompanied these courses.

Scotch woodcock, poached in a cream and anchovy sauce and served with spinach croquettes, followed by artichoke and avocado salad, dressed in a lemon and raspberry vinaigrette; mango and lime sorbet (to clear the palate once more); and finally, for dessert, the chocolate mousse wedding cake. The game birds in their cream sauce were served with an outstandingly fine and rare Bordeaux, a treasure of a wine whose bouquet resembled violets and raspberries, and color that of liquid rubies and dark amethysts, the monumental 1945 Château Mouton-Rothschild. No other wines were served with the salad or the dessert: sacrilege to drink anything after the Mouton-Rothschild claret.

At one point during the meal, Adam looked around the wedding-ring table and his eyes lingered for a moment on Rashid and Lili, who were seated next to each other. They had done Mirella and him proud — extravagantly and most elegantly proud. The beauty, detail, and quality of everything they planned for this day were unsurpassable.

Adam knew it was Rashid who was the driving force and inspiration behind the wedding reception. He and Mirella had done little about their wedding except decide to exchange their marital vows in a simple ceremony, in one of God’s houses. They had chosen the Old World white Protestant spired church, not only because Mirella’s paternal ancestors had founded the church, but because it was a symbol of the visible heritage they wanted to add to. What pleased them more was that the white clapboard church still carried an air of meager but sincere anarchy.

It was an original symbol of man’s fight for religious freedom; of being pure in heart; of the kind of America, the New World, that to this day represents New England on calendars and Christmas cards. For Mirella and Adam, whose religious faith had drifted from Puritanism through a Protestantism which faded into Unitarianism, and who had abandoned that and every religious “ism” long ago for freedom to live and believe as they chose, there could have been no better site.

Adam, with his gaze still on Rashid, smiled to himself when he thought of the disappointment in Rashid’s face when
they had told him they wanted to be married in the simple white church on the small-town New England green.

Rashid had tried every sort of persuasion to entice them to a wedding in Istanbul’s St. Sophia. Or, he had offered, they could be wed in the Basilica San Marco, in Venice. When, time after time, they would not give in to his wishes, he gave way, reduced his aspirations for them, and suggested St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, and, with slightly downcast eyes, Sir Christopher Wren’s St. James Piccadilly. Somewhat annoyed with them for rejecting even those noble buildings, he conceded, if it was a small place of worship they desired, there was always the Madeleine in Paris. His Oriental mind simply could not understand that what they wanted was to make their vows to each other in a place restrained in adornment, a place whose spirit promised nothing but to allow their essential selves freedom to bathe in the inner light of one of God’s houses. When Rashid did at last accept their choice and their guest list, there had been nothing more for them to do. Rashid simply took command of their wedding.

Adam was aware that he and Mirella never alluded between themselves to Rashid’s determination to be involved so completely in their wedding plans; nor to this being the first of many ways they would allow Rashid to take his place as the third person in their life together.