The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire

by C. M. Mayo

  After dancing, breathless and flushed, fanning herself (and hoping the elegance of her Alençon lace fan would be noticed; it was comme il faut), Alice would make her way to the supper-buffet. At the end of her fifth ball, an Annapolis middy she had danced with twice before came up behind her.

  “Miss Green?”

  His Adam’s apple seemed to have a life of its own. He simply stood there, breathing. His face, which could not be said to be that of a Romeo, was beaded with sweat. His name had quite gone out of her head.

  “Miss Green, would you do me the honor of dancing this waltz?”

  She had blisters on both heels. As it was, it would be a supreme effort not to be seen limping on her way back to the table where her sisters and their beaux were waiting for her. Already, she had turned down three would-be gallants. She decided to be freezingly polite: “No thank you, I’m quite tired.” She turned back to the cavalcade of cakes and petit fours and puddings.

  “Miss Green?” This specimen was a barnacle of tenacity.

  She finished serving herself a slice of the apricot sponge gâteau. Someone jostled her from the left. She let out a peeved sigh.

  “Miss Green,” he insisted, “may I call on you at Rosedale?”

  She almost blurted, yes, but—isn’t it better just to be honest?—she said, “No.”

  The poor boy looked as if he had taken a cannonball in the gut. She was sorry. But not really.

  Oh, the clod-footed boys. The ones with pimples on their necks and sweaty gloves. Annapolis middies, low-down-the-totem-pole army types, law clerks, a dry goods merchant’s son . . . Why were these the ones who asked to put their names on her dance card? As Alice danced the mazurkas and quadrilles and waltzes, the air would grow uncomfortably warm, the whalebones in her corset would rub under her arms, the pins in her hair come loose, and her too-small slippers would rub her heels raw—for this?

  And it provoked her to tears that other girls lived right in the thick of the social scene: in Lafayette Square, or on Pennsylvania Avenue, or Georgetown, whilst she and her sisters had to make the miles-long slog back up the dark road to Rosedale. In inclement weather, this was a cruelty to the horses, her mother would sigh.

  The following winter, the night before the opening of the season, it snowed. Under a bright sun, the snow melted. By midday, came the report, the road from Rosedale into the city and all of Pennsylvania Avenue had become a rutted mess of mud. Which is why Alice almost decided not to go to the White House levée.

  “What a bother,” she said sourly, from the hall doorway.

  Mrs. Green adjusted the pins in one of Alice’s older sisters’ coiffure. “Are you certain you don’t want to go?”

  “Per-fect-ly,” Alice said. She was in her riding outfit, though she had stayed inside to eat cookies and play the piano.

  “Oh, come on, Alice, it will be gay,” her sister said, applying more powder to a shiny forehead.

  Alice, slouching into the door frame, put a hand on her hip and rolled her eyes.

  “Oh, Alice,” her mother said. “If you don’t go, we will all be talking about it, and you will just have to sit there staring at your oatmeal, Miss Glum.”

  Alice wrinkled her face.

  “Go on,” her mother said, shooing her out with the hairbrush, “Get dressed.”

  So Alice did go to that White House levée, and in her emerald green, her grandmother’s rope of pearls around her swan-like neck, and a camellia in her hair. With her sisters and mother, she joined the throng that snaked from the foyer into the reception room. They greeted President and Mrs. Pierce, and then moved into the East Room. Anyone and everyone but outright vagabonds and Negroes, it seemed, had crowded in: there by the window, têteà-tête, were Senators Jefferson and Slidell; an elfin gentleman in a plug-hat and his frumpy wife, admiring the chandelier; His Excellency the Baron de Bodisco, Mrs. Tayloe and Mrs. Riggs and Mrs. Lee, and her daughter in the fleeciest of gowns and a wreath of white rosebuds. There was the usual slew of middies and army boys, and also, gawkers of which the most rustic were those congressmen from the West (one could spot them from a country mile, and their wives in such gauche and badly made clothes).

  Leaving their mother with Mrs. Tayloe, Alice and her sisters pushed through the crowd. They moved slowly, yet somehow, she became separated from the others. For a time she wandered, shyly fanning herself. In the Green Room, the air greeted her with a freshness that hinted of long-off spring, for it was filled with a veritable forest of palm trees and ferns and staggering bouquets of hothouse blossoms that camouflaged there, a pair of très distingué gentlemen, and there, what she supposed were junior Senate clerks, and chittering away on a green and gold sofa, their wives. No one paid her the least attention, not even the waiter who bumped her and caused her to drop her fan. No gentleman stepped forward to pick it up; she had to retrieve it herself, no small feat whilst encased in crinolines. As she waded through the crowds from room to room, she was beginning to feel angry—yes, that was it. Why should she play the ghost before all these nobodies, not worth a glance from Miss Alice Green of Rosedale? She swiped a glass of punch off the next tray that came floating by; she sipped it, found it too sour, and poured the rest into a potted fern.

  She had just about fixed her mind on going back outside to wait out this annoying party in the carriage, when, nearing the door, she was stopped in her tracks by an excrescence of attar of roses. Its source was known to her: an acquaintance, a new member of their parish, Madame Almonte, wife of the as-yet-to-be-seen Mexican ambassador. It seemed the poor lady had found no one to talk to either (had she just been looking out the window?). Her tired old face, at the sight of Alice, dropped its mask of anxious decorum.

  “Meez Green!” she said in her atrociously accented English, which nonetheless came out with the authority of a headmistress. “I introduce you.” Gripping Alice firmly by the arm, Madame Almonte steered her into the crowd, around the punch bowl, and with a push at the small of her back, right in between two gentlemen. Madame Almonte tugged the older man, who had the top-heavy aspect of a pestle, on the sleeve.

  “I introduce you! Meez Green.” Then, to Alice, she said, “His Excellency General Juan Almonte.”

  From beneath heavy dark brows, two obsidian eyes now fixed themselves upon Miss Green, in nonchalant appraisal. A shade swarthier than his wife, this hawk-nosed gentleman had unmistakably Indian features, though these were compensated by side-burns well along in the process of turning a distinguished silver. He wore full court dress with gold braid (the buttons straining somewhat down his middle). He bowed deeply (the fringe on his epaulettes swinging) and, with expert grace, kissed her hand.

  General Almonte: Alice had heard (she forgot where) that Mexico’s ambassador had been in the Alamo with Santa Anna. He had a powerful charisma and what seemed to Alice a most peculiar sense of humor: for no reason she could fathom, he gave her a lopsided smile and then winked at his wife.

  Still gripping Alice’s arm, Madame Almonte turned to the younger gentleman who had been conversing with the general. “Meez Green, you know our legation’s secretary?”

  There before her, also in full court dress, stood Mr. Iturbide. They recognized each other from church, but it happened that they had not yet been formally introduced.

  Alice, demurely, offered her hand and curtsied. “Enchantée,” she said, as Mr. Iturbide’s mustache brushed the back of her glove.

  Mr. Iturbide wore the most attractive and unusual fragrance; it had (was that it?) a hint of vanilla and lime. As all Georgetown knew, Mr. Iturbide was one of the sons of Mexico’s George Washington, as it were. Unlike General Washington, however, General Iturbide had set himself up as emperor. His brief reign ended with his abdication, exile to Europe, and when he, soon after, very improvidently returned to Mexico, his execution before a firing squad. It was under the protection of the Holy Roman Church that his widow and her children had come to Washington, to live on Georgetown’s Holy Hill, near the Jesuit College and Visita
tion Convent. Though the Iturbides could have, they did not use their royal titles. Having arrived here as a small boy, Mr. Iturbide spoke English just like a Yankee, and he looked, with his pallor, his sad eyes, raven-black hair, and broad and thoughtful forehead, the very twin of Edgar Allan Poe. Though, unlike the famous writer, the debonair Mr. Iturbide gave no indication of being anything other than an exemplar of rectitude.

  It was, as the French say, a coup de foudre.

  “He is too old for you,” her mother warned.

  Alice’s youngest brother scrunched his nose. “A greaser!”

  “I remember his mother,” a sister said. “Before Madame de Iturbide decamped for Philadelphia, she rented that nasty little house on N Street. Her entire purpose in life, it seemed, was to stir up intrigues at Visitation Convent.”

  Her brother George snorted. “Madame de Iturbide has the disposition of a goat.”

  They were sitting around the dinner table. Aunt Sally, the cook, set down a steaming bowl of chowder. “’T ain’t no she-goat nuther.”

  With that, the table went silent until Aunt Sally disappeared into the kitchen. Then everyone but Alice broke out laughing.

  “Oh,” said another sister, rolling her eyes, “her mustache!”

  “Talk about his” said George.

  Mrs. Green, who had been about to serve the first bowl of chowder, set down both the bowl and the ladle. “That mustache,” she said, “is the sort worn by Kentucky hog drivers.”

  Alice, her eyes glittering with indignation, stood up. From the doorway, she cried, “You’re all just jealous!” She flew up the stairs.

  Miss Alice Green would not be budged: Mr. Iturbide was the beau for her. He was so handsome, sensitive as a poet, well read, he had been to New York, London, Paris, Italy, Havana, and Texas, too. And his handwriting, so frank, so elegant, however did he learn such penmanship?

  “The priests always said, ask yourself, ‘Can the pope read it?’”

  That sent her into peals of laughter.

  By springtime, several times a week, Mr. Iturbide came all the way up the hill to Rosedale to call on her. With a wary Mrs. Green chaperoning, they went to hear the Marine Band play, and one time, they took a buggy out to see Great Falls.

  Angel, properly pronounced Ahn-hel, was his Christian name, but his family and friends called him Angelo, which was Italian.

  Angelo stirred his coffee with a stick of cinnamon, wasn’t that fascinating? Angelo drank Madeira wine, he smoked Cuban cigars, he had a piping of silver on his ruffled shirtsleeve cuffs. Such panache! And he was very brave.

  They were picnicking at Mount Vernon, tossing leftover breadcrumbs to the gulls, when Alice made the little question that had been tugging at the corner of her mind. Not so long ago, her country and his had been at war. As she had been too young to be reading newspapers at that time she had not understood, nor cared since, to learn the whys and wherefores of it. (Her older sister had caught a glimpse of the war’s hero, General Winfield Scott, at a White House levée; she had thought him “very wrinkly.”) Now, anyone who had eyes to see colored pictures knew that Santa Anna, the “Napoleon of the West,” had the smarter uniform, not that boring old navy blue. Santa Anna may have lost the war, but the Mexicans’ leader did not just have epaulettes and a couple of rows of brass buttons, he had a crimson coat ablaze with the most arabesque gold embroidery!

  Alice tossed her last handful of breadcrumbs at the gulls. “Why,” she finally asked, “did you not go and fight in the Mexican conflict?”

  “Santa Anna was my father’s enemy.”

  “So?”

  “If I’d shown myself in Mexico, he would have gone straight for me.”

  The meaning of this washed like a great wave into Alice’s mind; as it receded, she was left with a sparkling new appreciation of her beau. She nodded sagely. “You stayed here to avoid assassination.”

  Angelo was lying on his side, propped on one elbow. He looked at her strangely and then gave her a wry smile. “I suppose one could see it that way.”

  For a time they were silent. Mrs. Green was napping in the buggy, parked in the cooling shade of an oak tree. There were others picnicking on this same lawn, but none close enough to overhear. A flock of geese was feeding near the water’s edge. The breeze pulled at the strings of Alice’s bonnet.

  And then Angelo told her how it had been for him, that he had been heartsick with grief and shame, not so much that his country had been invaded but that the Mexican army had been so incompetent in its defense. “They were a gang of barbarians. Santa Anna is a creature out of a cesspit.”

  “And General Almonte?” Alice asked, because she remembered, hadn’t the ambassador been at the Alamo with Santa Anna?

  “Oh.” Angelo twisted his mouth. “He’s alright.”

  Angelo’s family had been granted generous pensions by the Mexican government, he went on, but during the war years and for some time afterward, these pensions were not paid. It was bitterly hard for his mother. To save his pennies, he himself had had to go live in the country. For news of the war, every day that the Senate was in session, Angelo would cross the bridge over Rock Creek and walk the several miles up the gravel of Pennsylvania Avenue to the Hill, to sit in the gallery. When Mr. Thomas Corwin of Ohio spoke, one wanted to be sure to hear every word! Angelo did not say where he was going, but his landlady had suspected he was up to something. “Your shoes are wearing out,” she’d said. “And you’ve got the appetite of a hippopotamus.”

  Alice laughed. She plucked a grape.

  Angelo went on, “I would receive messages in Spanish that said, Watch your back. Be careful. I did not know what it meant, or who was sending them.”

  “You were in mortal danger!”

  “Maybe . . .” He was watching a schooner glide by. Ducks bobbed in its wake. “I only wanted to know what was going on, but I could not show any concern about the war, because then people would think I knew something.”

  “Now that Santa Anna has gone into exile, will you return to your country?”

  His gaze met hers. He looked all of a sudden very pale. He came up from his elbow, and he reached over and took her hand. “Miss Green—” he began.

  “Yes,” she interrupted. “I will go with you.”

  Mrs. Green was less than overjoyed. She had not yet fixed upon any particular beau for Alice, but of the four or five candidates she would have considered desirable additions to the family, all were at least ten years younger than Mr. Iturbide, and from old Virginia or Maryland families. His mother, Mrs. Green well knew from her acquaintance with Madame de Iturbide at church, would be a chafing rock around any daughter-in-law’s neck.

  Soon after Mr. Iturbide’s proposal, an ominous cloud descended. One of his older sisters, a self-important spinster, came down from Philadelphia to meet Alice. After that, silence. A most disquieting signal was that Madame de Iturbide neither invited Mrs. Green and her daughter to visit her in Philadelphia nor volunteered to visit them at Rosedale. Indeed, neither lady initiated a correspondence. Most distressing to Mrs. Green was that, as a Mexican diplomat, Mr. Iturbide’s income was precarious, and he would sooner or later take his bride to Mexico, a completely unsuitable country. Nonetheless, when she realized her warnings were falling on deaf ears, as she did not want the responsibility of having broken her daughter’s heart Mrs. Green reluctantly gave her consent to the union. She was not one to flog a dead horse. Her final words on the subject were these: “Be careful what you wish, my bright and beautiful meteor; for you are likely to get it.”

  The wedding mass was held in the front parlor at Rosedale. Eyebrow-raising as it may have been, protocol dictated that the very swarthy His Excellency General Almonte be the guest of honor. Members of the Iturbide family did not attend.

  Angelo let his wife and her family believe that his mother had been suddenly indisposed. But that night, he confessed the brutal fact of the matter: his mother had forbidden even the mention of Alice’s existence in her presen
ce. In Madame de Iturbide’s way of thinking, her sons were destined to marry into Mexican or even Spanish aristocracy. At the very least, a handsome dowry should have been provided for the sons of Mexico’s emperor. And, after all, her father, Don Isidro Huarte y Arrivillaga, a Spanish nobleman from Pamplona, was one of the richest men of New Spain. As for the Iturbides, they were descended from the Basque nobility.

  “Does she not know of my family?” Alice meant, above all, her maternal grandfather, General Uriah Forrest, and her great-grandfather George Plater III, the Tidewater tobacco planter and sixth governor of Maryland.

  Angelo had heard about these so-called Tidewater aristocrats. His mother would have called it “Bilgewater.” With strong arms, he pulled his wife close. “Darling, it is her misfortune, not yours.”

  Ever after, Alice pretended she did not care. But the fact was, she was mortified to the quick.

  Having taken leave of his mother in Philadelphia, a gloomy errand, Angelo then took his wife to his country, where she could not speak the language and did not comprehend the customs; and the poverty and filth, just as his mother had predicted, shocked her to tears; and the food, as much as the bullfights, upset her digestion; and the high altitude left her breathless. Why, just going up stairs made her dizzy. She frequently complained that it seemed to her these Mexicans were barking at her! She pined for her own people, who, as she said, would tell you exactly what they thought about things, who would not dally with the truth, twist it and stretch it like so much taffy, and certainly not embellish simple anecdotes with outré inventions. “Why, I could serve roast polecat and your amigos would tell me to my face it was delicious!” What especially exasperated her was when Mariqueta, their maid, deliberately used slang she could not understand. And the Indian bands in the street! Horns, drums, pot lids, rattles, fiddles fit for firewood! “How can a body get a wink with that unholy din, and right outside the window!” Those rascals would pull the bell and ask for money, their object being to induce one to bribe them to take their racket elsewhere!