Three Continents (21 page)

Since the Rawul and his party would soon be shifting their
base of operation to London, they wanted to prepare for the transfer of the properties to the organization. This was not yet possible in the case of the house on the Island, for though almost a year had passed since Grandfather's death, his estate was nowhere near settlement; and besides, Michael and I were still under twenty-one. As for Propinquity, Lindsay had changed her mind. “They're all here anyway,” she said, “so what difference would it make?” “And if tomorrow you take it in your head to turn them out?” Michael argued with her. “But I don't want to do that,” she replied, her eyes stretched wide in innocent surprise. There was no point arguing with Lindsay; she always had her reasons for doing what she felt like from day to day. She was the most pragmatic person anyone ever knew, and in this as in every other way the exact opposite of Michael, who acted only on principle.

Crishi surprised me by asking me: “Have you told Sonya yet? About us?” When I said no,
he
was surprised: “Don't you think she'd like to know?” He was right. Sonya was the first person to react as people are expected to when told about a marriage. And more—if it is possible to overreact on such a topic, she did it. But that was her nature. She had to hang up on me when I first told her because she was so overcome; but she was back on the line within moments, and after that throughout the day. At night she went to consult a psychic friend of hers, like herself of Russian origin, and very late the same night she called again, trying to suppress her excitement and not to promise too much: but it seemed the friend had had some wonderful intuitions, and wanted more details of the exact date and time of Crishi's and my birth. Crishi knew his to the second—did he really, or did he make it up? He certainly didn't blink while he gave it (the year would have made him twenty-six, which was not what Anna later published). Lindsay vacillated about the hour of my birth—she couldn't remember if it was day or night and didn't want to be reminded—“Can you imagine the state I was in, with two of you?” Jean said “Poor pet.” But finally, with some suggestions from Crishi, a definite time was agreed upon and Sonya went back to her friend and called again with an ecstatic result of the matching of our two horoscopes.

S
ONYA insisted that the wedding should be at her house in the city. She said Grandfather would have wanted it, and we must not deny her that privilege. The only person to protest was the Rawul, who wanted to have it at Propinquity. Our news turned out to be a complete surprise to him, and like Sonya, he was overcome: Those two were the only ones, besides myself, who were 100 percent enthusiastic and affirmative. The Rawul flushed with pleasure; he kissed me, clumsily—in fact, he missed and kissed the air. It was shyness that made him clumsy; although a public figure, he was personally a very shy man. He saw our union as a symbol of the synthesis that was the heart of his movement. It was everything, he said, he could have dreamed of and desired; he went on and on, and Crishi looked distinctly bored, though because it was the Rawul he sat through it patiently. The Rawul was the only person of whom Crishi was respectful—his relationship with the Rani was quite different, and he could be as impatient with her as with others; but never with the Rawul. The Rawul was the first person to inquire about the form of the wedding ceremony. I had assumed, and I guess Sonya and Lindsay and everyone else had too, that someone from St. Thomas's would come and perform it at Sonya's house; but the Rawul said that, just as this union was symbolic of his newly forged movement, so its mode of expression would have to be emancipated from all outworn forms. He himself, he decided, would officiate—which
was all wrong, he smiled, from every point of view, for he was neither a Christian priest nor a Brahmin (he was of the warrior caste) and therefore unqualified to perform any kind of ceremony. No matter, he exclaimed; what he—what we all—were there for was to break every rule and make our own.

Crishi asked me “What about clothes?”

“What clothes?”

“Yours. I told you I'm not marrying a boy. You'd better get some.”

He always surprised me. He had taken no interest in the whole thing—didn't care where it was, when it was, even, I sometimes felt, whether it was. But here he was worrying about what I was going to wear and telling me to get a trousseau. I was thrilled—not that I cared about getting clothes, but that he should care.

Manton and Barbara flew back from Spain for the wedding. It is strange the way, once a wedding is decided on, everyone gets excited about the event itself and forgets or suppresses other feelings. If Manton did have other feelings, he said nothing about them but was pleased and proud to be the father of the bride. As for Barbara—the one person who really disliked Crishi—she so adored the idea of a wedding that the actual protagonists didn't matter; or was it that for her, once a person was a bridegroom, he became automatically good? It was Barbara who took me shopping for the clothes Crishi wanted me to have. She enjoyed it tremendously, and I did too—not the actual trying on and buying but to be
with her in these mirrored cubicles with little velvet chairs, surrounded by billows of all the clothes she was choosing for me. She went especially overboard on nightgowns and lingerie, neither of which I ever wore, and drowned me in frothy pastel silk things more suitable to her soft fair form than my thin hard one. Once I said “He thinks I'm too skinny.” It was the only personal thing I said, about him and me, though Barbara and I were talking constantly—that was what I liked about going shopping with her, all those hours of talking shut up together in the little cubicles with her helping me to dress and undress and studying the effect from all sides. I guess it was like girlfriends are supposed to be with each other, only I had never had one I was intimate with; Barbara was my first. She talked a lot about Manton and herself—she was only twenty-two and everyone said how dumb she was, a real dumb blonde, and it was how she thought of herself too, but she seemed to me quite wise. She said what she appreciated most about Manton was that he was a real person—I stared a bit at that, for it was not the first thing I would have said about him. But Barbara said I would understand what she meant if I knew the sort of people among whom she had grown up—her mother's crowd, including her mother herself, who had been nothing apart from their public success, and when that failed them, they ceased to exist in each other's eyes and in their own. But Manton was always, whatever happened to him from outside, Manton: himself.

The Rani assumed responsibility for my wedding dress. As the Rawul was devising his own ceremony, so the Rani devised her own version of a bridal dress for me. It wasn't Oriental and it wasn't Occidental, it wasn't anything you could characterize, but it was very gorgeous. The material was a South Indian silk with alternating panels of a heavy brocade and was to be worn over white satin trousers gathered at the ankles. It was supposed to fit over the bosom and at the waist, but since I have this tendency to go straight down, it had to be taken in at the one place and out at the other. The Rani herself fitted it on me—it embarrassed me to have this royal woman turn herself into my dressmaker, but she seemed to think nothing of it and worked with professional skill. She didn't talk to me while she was doing this—she couldn't; she had pins in her mouth. When I glanced down at her, I saw that around these pins the lines of her face were very set. She looked as if she were holding herself in, her emotions in, for fear of something in her giving way. The Rani was unhappy. Well, it had nothing to do with me, and I couldn't help her. So we did this—the fitting of my wedding dress—in complete silence, both of us concentrating for all we were worth on the task in hand.

“Render unto Caesar,” said the Rawul with a smile, after we had been to City Hall and had everything legally done and signed. But of course the real wedding was in Sonya's
house. It was a strange mixture—as was the house itself. Most of the furniture from 1898 was still there, and though there had been many additions and alterations over the years, until Sonya moved in these had all reflected the same tribal taste carried over several generations. Now Sonya's taste prevailed, and it was not good but very expressive of her personality. That was why Grandfather, himself so austere, had happily lived in this ormolu-and-pearl bower, which she had created and had choked up with her lifetime collection of hideous art objects from various continents. Year by year she added to them: Whenever some large package arrived for her, Grandfather had learned to steel himself to the unpacking of one more gilded team of horses carrying a lampshade, or elephant with stomach sliding open for cigars.

The guests assembled in this house for my wedding were very different from previous Wishwell wedding guests. The last couple to have had their marriage reception there were Manton and Lindsay, and their photographs still showed quite a number of Wishwells, including Aunt Harriet, who nowadays attended only funerals. The Wishwells present at my wedding were Michael and I; Manton; and I guess Lindsay could be counted too, although she had reverted to her maiden name and was there with Jean and Else Schwamm. As usual, our party was completely swamped in numbers and prominence by the Rawul's. The followers had been brought from Propinquity, with only two left behind for security reasons, and there were some I hadn't seen before from the New York chapter—which I hadn't known existed. But for once it wasn't the Rawul's party who stole the show, or gave the tone to the occasion, it was Sonya. Just as she had made this house her own, so she did the wedding. All her friends came; I had seen many of them before, for they were often there for card parties and séances, but never so many together. Some of them were very, very old, like the one they called the Princess—they said she was of the Yugoslavian royal house though she had lived mostly in Basel and Paris before settling in New York. By now she wasn't anything except this very ancient, very wizened figure, almost bald, propped up in a wheelchair by her nurse, both of them in white sneakers. I'm sure she had no idea what was going on but her friends were
very pleased that she had come. Sonya rushed up to her and kissed her on the lips and also kissed the nurse, and all the friends did the same.

Besides the Princess, European aristocracy was represented by a German baroness who had been a skating champion and taken part in the Olympics of fifty years ago, and an Italian countess who had been first a fashion designer and then a Buddhist nun before returning to the world and taking an apartment on Madison and Seventy-third. There was Sonya's Russian friend, the one who had asked for the horoscopes, hinted to be the illegitimate granddaughter of a grand duke, and Sonya's best friend, an American called Dorothy, who was the widow of a very big Hollywood producer. All these ladies, except the Princess, whom her nurse had dressed in a simple checked cotton frock, were there in their outsize jewels and glittery gowns from famous designers of previous decades. Altogether these guests gave an impression of previous decades—especially Dorothy, who seemed to incorporate a different age, with her fabulous clothes and jewels matching her highly volatile manner. But they were all—again except the Princess, who was, as it were, switched off—very highly charged, in spite of their age, and tremendously excited to be at a wedding. And Sonya had seen to it that it was a real wedding—her favorite florist had stifled everything under banks of flowers, her favorite caterer was in attendance with a cohort of waiters already rushing around in white gloves, and a string quartet sat on the landing playing Mendelssohn.

The ceremony took place in the principal drawing room. It had been transformed by the followers, who had removed every bit of furniture, down to Sonya's last set of wise monkeys; they had taken down her hangings, and while they couldn't do anything about her rose damask walls, they had given them a neutral tint with some ugly lighting. On one wall the American flag hung alongside the Rawul's, and in between them the Rawul himself in a tinted photographic portrait. Up to that point—that is, walls, flags, and leader's portrait—the room had been institutionalized; but the floor glowed with a Persian carpet, full of flowering creepers, birds, and tigers, and there was a scattering of smaller rugs blooming
with tiny flowers. White sheets had been spread for the guests to sit on and bolsters for them to lean against. Most of these guests were certainly not used to sitting on the floor, and for some of them it must have been very hard to get their old legs into position, but they managed it, and it added to their excitement. Only the Princess was allowed to remain in her chair, which had been wheeled to the front, almost level with where Crishi and I sat facing the Rawul.

The Rawul was sitting on a special little rug of his own under the flags and his portrait. The ceremony he had devised wasn't that different from his evening talks at Propinquity. He said the same sort of things about the transcending of East and West to bring them into a higher synthesis; only here he saw the actual realization of that synthesis in the joining together of Crishi of the East and Harriet of the West: so that our marriage was not only a personal but also an historic celebration. I could hear Sonya sigh out a breathless “Beautiful,” and another wave of murmurs emanating from Sonya's friends, who had never heard the Rawul's evening lectures. I, who had heard them, tried to be reverent, but I was too excited to listen properly; and I was nervous because Crishi beside me was getting definitely fidgety. Crishi never cared to sit still for very long, and I suspected his mind was wandering ahead to the arrangements after the ceremony, for though they weren't his responsibility, he did tend to take charge. So I could feel him wishing the Rawul would hurry—only the Rawul was not to be hurried on such an occasion, and especially not with this new audience in their gowns and jewels hanging on his every word.