This Stream of Dreams (Mirella, Rashid and Adam Book 2) (15 page)

Harsh lines appeared suddenly across Lili’s face, her eyes
seemed to harden. Very slowly and deliberately she placed the Jacobean glass on the table in front of her.

“And I suppose you think that’s extraordinary? Princess Eirene will tell us that it’s fate or some such nonsense. And I will tell you poppycock. It’s coincidence, Mirella. I simply no longer understand you. Sentimentality, multimillionairess, a wife who acts more like a harlot, wealth, opulence, power — a great deal of power — a manipulator of men. I don’t know you.”

Lili stood up and walked away from her daughter, to survey her from the fireplace.

“I look at you now, she continued, “and you are more like my mother every day. My mother, the center of everyone’s world. She had that ability, always to make herself the center for everyone she came in contact with. Everyone loved her, wanted her, even now long after her death she is adored, revered — and for what? Being a cunning old whore, that’s what. A selfish, self-centered old whore who destroyed my father, had not a shred of maternal instinct, and who still reaches out from the grave to touch us all, makes us love her, admire her, respect her. Yes, even me, and I hate myself for it. I loved her, but she was always a mystery to me. I never understood her, never.”

An embarrassing hush filled the room when Lili stopped talking. There were tears of frustration in her eyes, and no one quite knew what to do about the angry, unhappy woman. In a more controlled voice, but one still filled with anger and bitterness, she spoke to her daughter. “Mirella, we never knew her. Not really. We only knew that part of herself she wanted us to know. In time her foreign ways, and even the fact that she destroyed one of Boston’s favored blue bloods, were accepted. But that was mainly because your paternal grandfather was related to both the Cabots and the Wessons of Massachusetts. You have no idea what it is to be just barely accepted in society. To have buried a past. All those years of living down her vile past and her scandals. And what for? After a lifetime of making the world forget the origins of Inje Wesson-Cabot, to have you turn your back on me and embrace her ancestors and their wealth, emulate all that she was, love her. You are closer to her even in death than you have ever been to me in life.”

Mirella wanted very much to go to her mother, put her
arms around her, but she knew better. Lili was proud, and pity was not what she was looking for. Mirella knew instinctively that the best thing to do was nothing.

“A sip of Tokay,” Lili went on, “its bouquet, even its color are enough to raise passions of one sort or another in all of us about my mother, so I made no excuse for my outburst. This oddly beautiful room, with its bad interior décor, that is more like a sort of spontaneous stage setting, even this reminds me of her. I love it, but I don’t understand it. I keep getting the distinct feeling of being thrown back in time, to her and her world, the world that my only daughter is being sucked into, a place and a life foreign to me. And, much as I hate it, there is nothing I can do about it. I suppose that’s what you would call fate, Princess.”

“Yes, I think I would say that was fate, Mrs. Wingfield,” answered the princess.

The Princess Eirene rose from the settee and picked up her glass and Lili’s as well. Mirella saw the two eunuchs at the far side of the room spring to attention and take a few steps toward her. The princess stopped them with a word, went to Lili and handed her the tiny goblet of Tokay. For one moment these two women from contrasting worlds and different generations looked into each other’s eyes, and were locked together in one world and peace. Lili took a sip of the famed Tokay and sighed. The extraordinary Princess Eirene said, as she put her arm around Lili’s waist, “You have answered my question. You do believe that fate governs your life. You must, inasmuch as you have allowed it to do so all your life. But it needn’t have been that way. Fate is like a great glorious wave: if one rolls with it one can have the ride of a lifetime and master it. You are very like your mother in looks and some mannerisms, but most unlike her in dealing with fate. She was a grand master at dealing with it, and to judge by the little I have seen of her, your daughter is learning to deal with it better every day.

“Come sit with me, Lili. I hope you will allow me to call you by your Christian name and you must call me Eirene. Perhaps together we can lay a ghost and that will allow you to love Inje, yourself, and your daughter. For, after all is said and done, she was a most extraordinary woman, and the daughter of a clever and gifted woman.

“Your mother embodied the end of an era, as I embody the
end of an era, as my bodyguards do. We were the last children of the court of the Ottoman Empire, all the splendor, cruelty, and intrigue that goes with a system rotten to the core. You would have to have known the life Inje led in the harem to have really known her and feel compassion for her. Clearly, and sadly for you, she never allowed you to know about that, or anything of her life before she married your father. I can understand her reasons. She had led a life which proper Bostonians would have hanged her for, which her husband’s ancestors would have burned her at the stake for. She was very clever at deceiving you all, allowing rumor to make up a past for her. Yes, I can understand what she did, understand even your conflict about your mother, but it doesn’t make it right. If she had not blocked out her life and abandoned her past before she arrived in America, I doubt that you would deal with her so harshly.”

The two women sat down together. Deena watched them in amazement, fascinated by Lili’s outburst, enthralled by the power the princess exercised over everyone in the room through her unique charm and beauty, and not least by her experience in the game of life and love, which shone in her face, her body, the way she moved, her every gesture. A formidably feminine woman.

Deena was drawn to her by the aura of decadence around her respectability. The princess had to be one of the most accomplished seducers of all time to have won Lili over. And, clearly, she had. More, Deena wanted the princess to tell more about Mirella’s Nama Inje, and their life in Turkey.

She longed to hear the princess tell of life and love at court. For here was a woman, the first Deena had met, who she knew she would be able to talk to openly about her sexual desires, her fantasies, and the one night of her life when she had abjectly surrendered to eros in the arms of Brindley. And she knew the princess would not only understand but rejoice for her.

Here, now, in this room, Deena was aware that all the women there could reveal themselves, without embarrassment and even with a degree of love for each other, as sisters under the skin — each of them delicately subject to the charm of the Princess Eirene.

Deena thought of the harem, and the long hours the women must have spent together talking among themselves
of love and sex, desire and power, the bond they had shared as victims and women. Her eyes roamed pensively over the women in the room, and she realized there was nothing about their being together that was vaguely like girl-talk, American-adult style. And the princess was a woman of the harem, the sort of woman Deena had always pitied for being treated like a thing, a chattel, a receptacle used by men.

Deena felt it no less deplorable now, but understood it better, having submitted again and again, almost to the point of masochism, with Brindley. It was intriguing, and unimaginable, that Mirella’s grandmother and the princess had been part of that world.

The way things were shaping up in Deena’s and Mirella’s lives, it had come as somewhat of a shock to Deena that Mirella was indeed the truly free spirit of the two. That, except for her night with Brindley, she had been ashamed of her desires, her wants, her needs. And not only sexually but emotionally as well. She had been merely aping the sexually liberated woman all her life. Mirella had always given herself to the tide of things, sometimes resistant but never for long. In the months since Mirella inherited, Deena understood, as no one else did, that they were not changes in Mirella that made her different but a welling-up of something deep within her being that allowed her to flow with the tide of events, to crest the waves of her experience now.

The princess must have sensed in Mirella the coursing of the blood that flowed from Inje through the maternal side of Mirella’s family. Surely Mirella’s relationships with Adam and Rashid must have reminded the princess that this was not just another American heiress. And she might have warmed to the idea that the female line of the extraordinary Oujie family was not broken.

Then it all snapped into place for Deena: how important Mirella must be for the princess and Adam and Rashid, who enjoyed a lifestyle that was dying out. They had found another human being who was rightfully a part of the world they could not let go of. In her the past was not dead. Mirella, a direct descendant of the famed Kadin Roxellana Oujie, the great-grandmother she inherited the legacy from, was the closest they would ever get to having a rightful heir to their Turkish splendor and decadence. She was their empress.

Deena was deeply touched to think that the princess had
taken it upon herself to help Mirella and Lili by tending the wounds that had emotionally distanced mother from daughter, and had scarred Lili’s relation with her own mother. Before the hateful Lili left the house that day, her life would be richer, her pain less, and her love for her mother and her daughter without conflict.

Deena would have liked to have shared in such a process of healing, but she felt compelled to extricate herself from revelations that could be embarrassing to Lili. It would have been quite different if Lili liked Deena, but Deena knew that was not so. Lili despised her, and had never made any secret of doing so for the twenty-five years she and Mirella had been friends. To hear Lili’s family secrets could not possibly help their relationship; and so Deena reluctantly took a last sip of the Yquem.

“Much as I would like to stay and learn more about the lives you and Mrs. Wesson-Cabot lived in the last days of the Ottoman Empire, I think it best if I leave.” Deena rose.

“I knew it. I knew it would be you who would prod this conversation on. Always the one to push an issue, to exploit a situation, to interfere. The outsider trying to find a place inside. Well, I don’t suppose you can do anything about it. It’s in your people’s blood. Jewish blood. Oh, do sit down, Deena. After twenty-five years of devoted friendship with my daughter, you have pushed your way into being part of my family. I suppose you have earned the right to stay, and learn that my maternal side of the family is probably as common as yours ever was. What must you be thinking? ‘That snob Boston socialite is about to get her comeuppance.’ ”

“No. I was thinking, ‘Get stuffed, Mrs. Wingfield.’ ”

Lili stared right through Deena.

With that, Deena went to the princess and the two women embraced and said good-bye. While Deena reached out to Muhsine and said her farewells, Mirella asked her to stay and apologized yet again, as she had for so many years, for her mother’s behavior toward Deena.

“Don’t, Mirella, please don’t make excuses for your mother. We both know she has a viper’s tongue. I’ve learned to live with that, and the disdain she has always shown me. I’ve had to endure her when she tries genuinely to like me. And believe me, that is far more upsetting and excruciating for both of us.”

Then she turned to Lili and said, “You know, Mrs. Wingfield, you are a miserable creature, but I have to give you your due. You’re not always wrong. I never realized until just now that I did want to be part of your family. It never occurred to me that I had to belong to it, that living on the fringe of it was not enough for me, and was too much for you. I guess we both have been struck by a moment of truth. We just had our souls vacuumed.”

“Some exit, huh, Mirr?” said a not unhappy, smiling Deena as she slipped her arm through Mirella’s and the two women walked from the room.

“Not bad,” Mirella answered.

“I bet the princess would have done better. You will tell me all when next we meet, won’t you?”

“Of course, every word. Tonight on the plane. You are coming with us. Oh, please don’t say no.”

“Can’t help it. No.”

“Then you’ll meet us in Istanbul?”

“Don’t know, that depends.”

“On what?”

“This.”

And walking down the stairs arms linked with Mirella, Deena reached into one of the pockets on the skirt of her dress and handed Mirella a note written on a piece of foolscap torn in half and folded over once. Mirella read:

The two women stopped midway down the staircase and threw arms around each other, their joy bursting and bubbling. They kissed and laughed, and for Deena, who had been holding back her happiness since she read the note, it all was suddenly very real. She felt weak-kneed, and drew Mirella down so that the two women sat midway down the staircase.

“Shush, shush,” she whispered. “Not so loud. I think we should keep this quiet. Well, sort of quiet between us. At least until I talk to Brindley.” Then they burst out laughing like schoolgirls.

“How? When? I had no idea. Why did you keep it a secret?”

“Why did I keep it a secret? That was simple, I didn’t know, hadn’t a clue. Not until this afternoon in your kitchen when Moses told me Brindley was coming to lunch. Suddenly the penny dropped. And what is so extraordinary is that when it did, I realized not that I was in love with him, but that we were in love with each other. Until that moment I thought that the night we spent together was the greatest one-night stand of my life, and that was it. The way we both behaved the day after, and when I dropped him off at the airport, seemed to confirm it. Never heard from him again, not once, until this note. Nor did I expect to, I might add. When did we fall in love? I suppose that night. Haven’t really talked to you about that night, but this isn’t the moment to go into that.