by Suzy Vitello
Dad reaches over me and pushes the heavy Volvo door open from inside. “Princess,” he says, “your chambers await.”
I unbuckle and step out of the car, and find myself surrounded by giant oaks. Outbuildings, a barn, sheds. Machinery, and the too-green of June grass. Early summer in Oregon, all the dampness, the soil smell … I can’t believe I’m less than ten miles from my urban paradise. This old place might as well be Appalachia.
I follow Dad to a crooked porch at the back of the house. A homemade screen door framed in rotted wood creaks open, and out pops The Girlfriend. “Liz!” she says, opening her arms wide, wide, wide so her knobby nipples press against her hemp T-shirt, two emoticons coming at me.
I look at Dad. Really?
He levels one of his pleading looks, eyebrows up, mouth puckered; it says, Hey, do this for me, just this once?
I squeeze my eyes shut, turn my head so my chin won’t nestle into her chest, and, clutching my food diary tight in one hand, I let her hug me.
“I have been so looking forward to meeting the Princess of the Pearl,” she says.
My secret nickname? No, he didn’t.
“Dad,” I say, “thanks a lot.”
“Welcome,” says The Girlfriend, breaking the hug and holding open the rusty screen door for me, “to our home.”
The kitchen smells of rotting vegetables. My eyes have a hard time adjusting to the weak, yellow light that glows from a single bare bulb. Dad and The Girlfriend follow me into the house. “It’s nice,” I say, practicing perfect presence. Being polite. Regimen instead of ritual. I will not count the possible steps from kitchen to living room. I will not count my heartbeats.
“I know you’re eager to move your things into the spare room,” says my father’s girlfriend, smoothing a strand of pale wheat hair that has escaped her numerous bobby pins, “but let’s have tea first. Get acquainted?”
A cat bounds up and rubs against my leg, leaving a small patch of white fur on the side of my calf. I back up quick.
It’s important, Lizbeth, that you do the exercises we talk about. That you find out that the consequences of touching doorknobs, soil, the hair of a cat, that those activities will not cause you harm.
“It’s only cat hair, Liz,” Dad says, using his special-needs voice.
The hairy slime of it, the furry bits, crawl up and inside me, but I count them back down. Brush the white hairs off. “Yeah, I know,” I say, and I take four breaths of exactly the same amount of air. I look around the room, refocus.
It’s one of those cool June days. Oregon is famous for them—summer mornings that press a chill into your lungs and raise goose bumps on your arms. The Girlfriend is evidently warm enough for a midriff-baring top and short shorts. She wears tattered sandals, and her feet are dry and cracked.
“So, tea then?” she repeats, cutting into my trance.
“I like coffee,” I say. “But whatever you have will be fine.”
The kitchen is not quite big enough for a table but has one in it anyway, and it’s been set with chipped, hand-painted crockery in neon colors. Bright green, dark pink. Orange. Dad’s girlfriend hums a little tune and snatches up a teapot, a vintage one that looks like something the Queen of England might serve her guests from. I look around for evidence of an espresso machine, or at least a French press. Doorless wood shelves crammed with ceramic and glass and herbs reveal not one bean of coffee, and the closest Starbucks is miles away.
“It’s our favorite type of rooibos,” says The Girlfriend. “African honeybush. But I have some lemon myrtle I could brew up if you’d prefer. Goes very nicely with my gluten-free muffins.”
“Honeybush will be fine,” I force myself to say.
Dad pulls an uncomfortable woven chair back for me, and I plunk down in front of a platter of crumbly muffins that seem held together with humungous berries. Had they been washed, those berries?
I place the ingestion log beside my salmon-colored plate, and the ridged leather and swirly gold designs stare back at me, as though Dr. Greta herself has loaned it eyes. I will need to record the non-eating of the muffin. And how I feel about not eating it. Guilty, I will write. Angry, maybe. Certainly, anxious. I feel for my pill bottle again. My iPod. One hour, then I’ll be able to plug into Die Meistersinger or Die Walküre with its brave warrior-maiden overture.
The Girlfriend tinkles tea into cups, and Dad says, “Now I’m complete. Got my two girls, a fresh pot of tea. What else could a man want?” Then he winks at us in a way that makes my stomach feel like a million moths just hatched in it.
Chapter Four
I could not wait to return to the comfortable, worn splendor of our summer castle, “Possi,” where my two beloved ponies, Psyche and Cupid, were allowed to wander among the roses at will. Where the dogs roamed freely inside the house and out. Where my days began as the sun warmed the tops of the trees and ended when I decided it was time to return indoors.
As our carriage made its way back from the archduchess’s summer castle on the lake, the cage of canaries on my lap imprinted deep grooves into my legs. We bumped along the roads, and dust settled between our teeth, but I did not complain once, unlike my sister and little brother, Gackl. Bored, my tiny brother slumped forward, napping the last few hours. Nené and Mummi were animated, discussing the possibilities of bringing a French tutor to Munich come fall; Mummi wanted to begin preparing Nené for her possible role as Empress Helene as soon as possible, even though, as far as I could discern, Emperor Franz Joseph had barely looked her way during the entire holiday. They’d arrived the second day we were there, all those archdukes, but we hardly saw them. “Military duties,” my aunt explained, but I caught glimpses of them eating pheasant and drinking ale with their tutors. One of them winked at me as I attempted to sneak out the kitchen door with turnips for the horses.
On the whole ride home my governess, Baroness Wilhelmine, remained tight-lipped. She hated summers, and our home in Possi—where she had far less control. It upset her digestion. Despite the blanket that Wilhelmine made me keep over my birds, the canaries sang unceasingly. Once we neared our summer castle’s four towers, my clever birds knew we were close, and the shrillness in their little voices increased to the point that the long-suffering governess put both hands to her ears as though a cannon had gone off on the seat beside her.
Mummi, sensing the itch in me to immediately head into my enchanted forest, turned my way. “Sisi,” she said, “if your father happens to be home, do not even think about disappearing into the woods. We will have a respectable supper and catch him up on all the news.”
I nodded, even though my heart dropped at the thought of sitting through a stuffy meal while Nené and Mummi went on and on and on with speculation and detail and, to my mind, complete fantasy that our Nené—or Helene, as we were now instructed to refer to her—would soon become the bride of our cousin, Franz Joseph. However, a bargain was a bargain, and I swore that I would not sneak off.
As soon as the carriage lurched to its stop in front of our castle, I scrambled out, trying my best to do so like a lady. With my lips pursed and my back straight, I handed my birds to the footman. I walked slowly away for a full minute before breaking into a run toward the stable. Several of the hounds ambled along beside me, running up to sniff the bird smell and bark at the odor the spaniels had left on my skirts. The hounds and the spaniels were not good friends, and Mummi usually had to carry her little beasts through the courtyard, lest the big male pounce upon one of them, driving itself into the poor little dog’s backside in its display of dominance.
“Return before the quarter hour,” yelled Mummi behind me as I ran.
It had been a gray day and, in fact, it had rained all week, so when I reached my ponies’ stall, I found their legs caked with mud. Immediately I grabbed the currying tools and inched up next to them. My hands still ached a little from the scratches, but as always, the brushes and combs shaped perfectly to my palms as I circled fi
rst Psyche’s coat and then Cupid’s. They nuzzled me, smearing half-eaten hay and mouth slime all over my pinafore. I was relieved to be home. I was ever so tired of fretting over every rip and wrinkle and stain. Should Papa be home, indeed, I would steal him for a ride later, an invitation he would not refuse me. He had little patience for woman-talk, as he called it, and everyone knew what he thought of his sister-in-law, the archduchess.
It felt so good to be touching my animals, scraping them clean, smelling their familiar smells. Papa shared in my enthusiasm. Alas, had I been born a male child, perhaps I should enjoy my time with the horses without scrutiny.
“You do nothing to instruct these children of yours. They are as wild as the gypsies you sire in town,” Mummi would cry when she was at the end of her rope with us. “Elisabeth is a lady, and you mustn’t let her act like such a hooligan.”
Mummi was correct that Papa didn’t have much use for formal lessons (he often stated that pretty girls had no need for boring facts), but he was strict on two accounts. We must learn to ride well, and we must learn to move as if we had angels with wings upon our feet.
Dirt flew off my ponies and whirled around me. Sun pushed its way through the cloud and into the cracks of the stall, and the dust filled up the beams of sunlight. Why couldn’t Mummi and the others understand how good, how real, this felt? The smell of the horses, the leather of the saddles nearby, the piles of rotting dung … this was my life. I sighed with the knowledge that already, I was reneging on my promise to be more ladylike.
The hard roundness of a curry brush in my hand was as solid a thing as there ever was in the world. And Nené—Helene—would soon give this all up. Not that my sister enjoyed the barn a smidgen the same as I. She was more given to the domestic arts. No one could set a vase of flowers as well as she. Her embroidery was masterful. And she was learning appropriate verse for the drawing room. Goethe and Schiller, mostly.
Papa was fond of verse stemming from the revolutionaries. He had a particular love for Heine, and when we rode he’d recite:
A mistress stood by the sea
sighing long and anxiously.
She was so deeply stirred
By the setting sun
My Fräulein. Be gay,
This is an old play;
ahead of you it sets
And from behind it returns.
This, Papa let me know, was irony. Irony was important in this life, he said. Without it, days were drudgery and thoughts were recycled. “Don’t settle for what they tell you must do,” he cautioned. “Think beyond the shadow that’s following you.”
Once, Papa had stolen me for a ride through the entire countryside. We’d dressed in disguise and borrowed horses from a neighboring farm so we wouldn’t be identified by the crest pressed into our own saddlery. Through the English Garden we’d ridden, through the forest and to the summer beer gardens, where we’d heard fiddlers and the gay sound of tambourines.
Papa smiled when I asked if we might join the troupe. “By all means, little one.” He laughed.
I wore my hair braided around my head like a peasant girl. Papa donned a gypsy cape that went all the way to his knee, and strapped a zither to his back. He issued me brass handbells, and atop a pony I stood, ringing the bells as Papa plucked his instrument. Patrons flocked from the beer gardens, gathering about us. From their pockets they tossed copper coins at our horses’ hoofs. I climbed down, bowed and picked the florins up off the ground then settled them into the pockets of my dirndl.
On our way back to town, Papa exclaimed, “Sisi, had you and I not been princely born, we’d have made our way in the circus.”
Oh, how I’d missed him these past weeks. How I’d longed to hear his whistle from the adjoining apartment, where Mummi banished him most of the time as punishment for his antics.
I was lost in yet another daydream where I was a circus rider, standing atop my dappled pony on one toe, when Mummi herself strode into the barn—a rare sight, to be sure. “Elisabeth Wittelsbach,” she shouted. “What am I to do with you?”
Her eyes seared into the green smear on my sleeve, the smudges of filth which were no doubt coloring my cheeks. She carried baby Sophie, who she had not seen for several weeks. My little sister seemed at odds with the stranger, her mother, who held her as though she were a bag of grain. Clearly, Mummi was past the point where she enjoyed cooing, jostling, and caressing infants.
I reached out of the stall to chuck the baby under the chin, but Mummi lurched back, recoiling from my dirty hand. “You’ll need to stop at the well and fetch more water. You won’t be sitting at the table covered in grime.”
My mother’s face was twisted up and angry, and her voice barely a movement from sobs. There was more here than my usual unkemptness. I placed the horse brush on the ledge, wiped my hands off on a leather cloth that hung near the stall door, and moved out of the stall to where she stood, a furious quake of a woman.
“Mummi, what is it?”
She burst into tears so suddenly, I snatched baby Sophie from her, lest the child drop from her arms.
“Mummi?”
My mother looked the way she did after hearing bad gossip about Papa. When someone in the village spied a child with Papa’s enormous green eyes and long neck, for instance. Or when one of us children had been seen talking to herself like a lunatic. But there was an additional layer of fear this time. Her reluctance to disclose what caused her face to look ghostly had me afraid as well.
“If I could give you any wisdom at all, Sisi,” she finally began, “it would be to do as my sisters wisely did, rather than be stuck like your poor mother, married to a jester, while the men in my own family slowly lose their minds over tarts and witches.”
Baby Sophie pulled at my hair and then reached for the mane of my piebald, Cupid. I knew who Mummi was talking about; I didn’t even need to ask. For several months we’d all been worried what might happen if Lola Montez managed to find her way back to Munich, back to Mummi’s and the archduchess’s older brother, King Ludwig, whose soft heart and wandering eye could never resist a beautiful woman.
Mummi beat her fists against the splintery wood of the stall, causing my ponies to pull their heads out of their hay and Sophie to laugh and clap her hands. “Cook was at market today, and talk is that she’s come back, that dancer.”
Lola’s portrait hung in Uncle Ludwig’s Gallery of Beauties, her seductress gaze right next to the determined glare of my aunt, the archduchess. A courtesan beside a queen. As regal as my aunt was, the notorious heartbreaker was alluring. Lola’s enchanting deep blue eyes, set in china skin and framed by ebony hair, were bewitching to men and women alike. Lola had become my aged uncle’s obsession, causing him to go mad with desire, abdicating his responsibilities as king in favor of what Mummi surmised was “carnal pleasure a man of his age should forego.”
Oh, how our house in Munich on Ludwigstrasse had burst with Mummi’s tears and rage a few months back. “How could he throw away all his respect, his popularity with the Bavarian people over that wicked enchantress?”
But soon thereafter, life looked as though it would return, once again, to normal; Lola had been escorted out of the country by an angry mob and warned never to return. Slowly, my Uncle Ludwig sank into a profound depression. He’d claimed the people whose lives he’d enriched had betrayed him. They’d thrown rocks at the apartment where he’d kept his beguiling mistress. They’d threatened to pull the skin from her lovely bones, all because she’d stirred things up, taken control of the kingdom, while my smitten uncle had sat in a lovesick stupor.
Mummi had heard him lament, “After all I’ve done, they took away the one reason I had to live. To really live.”
He’d canonized her, made her a countess, to no avail. Lola must go, chanted the crowds. But, now, rumor had it, she’d returned. Some reported seeing her in the wood, dressed as a gypsy. Some said that they’d seen her at the summer ball, hovering on the outside
of the dance floor, her gown made of swan feathers. She was a shape-shifter, Lola was. Enchanted. Dangerous.
Here in the stable, while my mother lamented, baby Sophie waved bye-bye as Mummi covered her face with her hands. I hugged baby Sophie closer to me, feeling her plump baby’s arms wrap around my neck.
“This is the reason I want you girls to marry out of this circus,” Mummi cried. “When all of Bavaria can turn upside down due to an old man’s folly, nobody is safe. The Wittelsbach name is in jeopardy, our pedigree sullied, and it is only a matter of time before you and Nené both will be as easy to marry off as one-eyed crows.”
What I did not share with Mummi was that it all seemed so romantic to me. How a man could fall so deeply in love that nothing else mattered. Not the silly laws, nor the arguing over where a country border should go, or even who should wear what hat when. Who cared about what time a beer garden should shut down for the night when real tears and passions and hearts were involved? And Lola herself was a mystery. Nobody seemed to really know exactly whence she hailed. Some said Ireland, some India. But she claimed to be from Spain. Which was where she’d learned to dance, Uncle Ludwig had told us. “She dances as though her feet are not even on the ground,” he’d boasted when Papa had inquired.
“Well, dear brother-in-law,” Papa had muttered, “that’s probably important, given that you can barely hold yourself up, much less a dance partner.”
As I recalled this, I held baby Sophie as though we ourselves were waltzing, twirling round while the baby giggled and kicked her chubby legs against my pinafore.
“Elisabeth, you must give up this dream world you favor,” Mummi lamented, tearing her hands away from her tear-stained face and grabbing Sophie back from me, “and learn to conduct yourself like a future queen.” Little Sophie was too young, thank goodness, to understand what her mother said next. “For if you insist on living in a bubble cloud, you’ll end up no better off than me. Stuck in a marriage with a dolt and tied to a nest of wild, selfish children who don’t know enough to come in out of the rain.”