The Rug Maker's Daughter
Summary
In the lambent half-light of a Constantinople that never quite existed, silken threads of tradition entangle a prodigy of the loom—Demetra—whose fingertips can coax roses out of wool and whose ankles jingle with the ghost-notes of forbidden dances. Enter Bob Van Buren, Yankee engineer of destinies, barging through the bazaar like a runaway stanza, scattering brigands the way a maestro scatters arpeggios. One heroic parry and the air itself contracts: two women—aristocrat and duenna—breathe America in the space between heartbeats. What follows is no mere courtship but a cartography of yearning: every glance redraws borders, every whisper rewrites treaties while her father, pasha of pocketed empires, plots to staple her future to the crimson silks of Osman’s harem. Bob’s desperation ferments into a midnight elopement, visas stitched into a carpet-roll, dreams booked aboard a P. & O. steamer that lists toward liberty—until the black-lipped vizier of jealousy has the groom-to-be sack-bagged into a Bosporus dungeon. Months slither past; Demetra, believing love devoured by rats and brine, escapes on the very berth intended for two, crossing an ocean of salt tears only to find Manhattan another labyrinth. Osman arrives like a sandstorm in patent-leather shoes, cornering her in a brown-stone cul-de-sac where minarets are made of cast iron and muezzins speak in real-estate brochures. Just as a second imam lifts the matrimonial yoke above her bowed head, the door explodes—Bob, skeletal yet phosphorescent with purpose, crashes the ceremony, brandishing freedom like a scimitar forged of skyscrapers. The final reel dissolves in June roses, Presbyterian lace, and the hush of a mother who learns that sons, like rugs, can be unraveled and re-knotted stronger than before.
Synopsis
Bob Van Buren's rescue of an upper-class Turkish girl and her duenna in Constantinople when they are waylaid by robbers paves the way for a romance between them. The romance progresses rapidly despite the hullabaloo raised by Demetra's father and by the Turk fiancé he is trying to force upon her; but the very thought of a girl, so highly educated, so gifted with needle and loom, so famously graceful as a dancer ending up in a harem instead of a respectable home, drives Bob Van Buren to desperation. At length he persuades Demetra to elope with him to America, where Demetra could be married at his mother's in New York. Getting wind of it, the malicious Osman hires a band of ruffians who make away with Bob Van Buren on the very eve of departure. With her young American mysteriously vanished, and the day of her now-all-the-more-odious wedding to Osman drawing near, Demetra can stand it no longer, and taking her duenna, flees to a cousin's in New York on the P. and O. boat on which Bob had reserved sailings. Osman pursues the little refugee, corners her in New York, and with oriental cunning sets a trap into which Demetra walks blindly. Having her in his toils again Osman summons a second Turkish priest and is just forcing Demetra to her knees before him when the door bursts open and in rushes Bob Van Buren, who had finally escaped the dungeon in Constantinople to which he had been consigned. He routes Osman and takes Demetra to his mother's. Mrs. Van Buren suggested that the lovers wait until September, but their hearts were set on June. And so, as you may very well imagine, June it was.
