by Mark Helprin
“Don’t you feel vulnerable and guilty?” she asked.
“At times I feel positively unnerved, and sometimes I even dream that my head is rolling away from my body. I hate it when people stare at us the way they do. God only knows what some of them are thinking. But that’s not the point. I feel bad when I kill the fish that we grill, but I do kill them, and we eat them—because they’re delicious, that is our fate, and we are imperfect. Sometimes, in this palace or that, surrounded by the world’s greatest and most wonderful refinements, I wonder what the hell I’m doing there. It wasn’t my choice, such an accident of birth, but, as my father says, steady on. Have the grace to accept a fate that is singular, spectacular, and inexplicable.”
“But aren’t you happy here?” she asked.
“I am.”
“Happier than ever before?”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s stay.”
“What would we do? Where would we live? And if people found out about us they’d want to put us in advertisements.”
“We could buy an estate in Virginia or on the other side, on the coast of . . . what’s that big state that looks like a banana? I could write children’s books or make puppets or something, and you could be a historian.”
“We don’t have the money to do that, and though they gave me a dental degree they neglected to provide a D.Phil. in history.”
“Then we could be dentists.”
“We’d kill our patients.”
“It’s just teeth. It’s not like open-heart surgery.”
“Can you imagine,” Freddy asked, “the screams, the bleeding gums, the lawsuits?”
“I think it would be rather fun.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, and very dramatic. Studying all night and straining to do it right the next day.”
“My idea of freedom is not to be a frantic, desperate, sleep-deprived, fake dentist.”
“I’ve got it!” she said, snapping her fingers and kneeling beside his chair, as she always did when she wanted to convince him of something. She began evenly and sincerely, as if to impress him with the good sense and sobriety of her plan. “We’ll study obsessively for a month or two until our savings run out. It’s all in books, isn’t it? And we can practise on one another.”
“Whatever we do, Fredericka, I don’t think we should practise dentistry on one another. On some poor unwitting peasant, perhaps, but . . . no, not a good idea, not in the least.”
“Why not? We’ve got lots of huge teeth. But here’s the key.”
“What is the key, Fredericka?” Freddy asked dryly.
“The key is, we can set up practice, temporarily, in some out-of-the-way place, some place where no one ever goes, that no one’s ever heard of, in a state that’s never in the news—a backwater where they don’t even have a dentist and wouldn’t know the difference between a real one and a fake one. We’ll stay there until we know how to do it, and then move to a place where we’d like to live, practise normally, and make a lot of money.”
Freddy took his eyes off the river for a moment and looked at her. She was so beautiful. She glowed in the sun like a buttercup. Scanning the river once more, he said, “But Fredericka, I don’t want to be a dentist. I’m supposed to be the king of England.”
“It’s not that different, really, if you think about it.”
He could think of no answer to this, and just blinked.
“And what if it doesn’t work?” she asked. “What if we can’t conquer this country? We’ve been here almost a year, and look.” Again she opened her arms, not, as before, like a cup holding the light of the world. This time, they pointed downward, with the light of the world spilling out.
He glanced at her for as long as he could. “I think you look very fetching in that blouse from Wal-Nut, like a natural-born queen.”
“That may be so, but we’re hardly in a position to turn down a lucrative dental career.”
“We’ve been here only a short time,” he said. “How do you expect two people, thrown naked from an aeroplane, to conquer the richest, most powerful, and most complex country on earth, in just a year?”
“How long will it take?”
“It might take forever and it might happen tomorrow.”
Fredericka scowled, looked at her denim shorts and Wal-Nut blouse, and at Freddy in the canvas chair, clad in frayed khaki shorts, scuffed climbing boots, and a garbageman’s green T-shirt. “What do you mean, ‘it might happen tomorrow’? How could it happen tomorrow? We haven’t even tried.”
“Naturally we haven’t tried. What are we supposed to do, take over the television stations and play ‘God Save the Queen’ instead of wolf-man movies? They wouldn’t even notice. They watch the television not for what they see but as a kind of energy transducer. You can’t conquer a country like this deliberately. You have to wait for the wavelength, and, when it clicks, you get on the wavelength, and it’s done.”
“What wavelength, Freddy?” asked Fredericka, bouncing the plastic bucket on her knee.
“The sex wavelength.”
“The what?”
“Like sex,” he said, “it isn’t a matter of effort. You can’t make it happen, you have to let it happen. Effort impeaches itself. We’ll just wait for the country to submit to our rule, as I’m sure it will.”
Fredericka was astounded. “What gives you your absolutely lunatic self-confidence?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it money?”
“You know that I think money is vulgar.”
“Was it your upbringing?”
“I don’t think so. As you know, my father pretty much convinced me that I was a hippopotamus.”
“Is it all that rot about being descended from William the Conqueror? I’m descended from him, too, and I don’t have your confidence. Besides, what did he ever do?”
“I was born to be king,” Freddy told her, and then went on as if he were instructing her on how to put batteries in a radio. “The road has two destinations, death or my reign, and I simply follow the road that has been laid down.”
“Then what about my dental plan?”
“I didn’t know you had a dental plan.”
“The idea that we be dentists. I’ve always liked to play with the tools when the dentist leaves the room.”
“So have I,” said Freddy. “Once, one of them caught me using his grinding wheel to cut a chevron into my signet ring. Mummy had to knight him.”
“Freddy, dentistry can provide a good living if your destiny is not what you think.”
“Did you read that on a matchbook?”
EVENING WAS ILLUMINED in golden light. The sun lay low on the fields, the air was cool, and the shadows deep. Startled by the barge train’s engines and the blasts of its horns, pheasants and quail would explode from stunted hedgerows or clumps of dead branches, filling the sky with glitter.
“If we become dentists,” Fredericka said, as she had argued throughout the day, “you would know, finally, what it is to live like a normal person.”
“But I do know.”
“That’s just the point. You’ve been either the Prince of Wales or an impoverished spike driver. You haven’t lived a normal life.”
“Yes I have.”
“Of course you haven’t. You do all kinds of things that other people won’t or can’t do, and you don’t even know it.”
“Name one,” said Freddy.
“For example, you’re inside a room and I’m at the door.” She rapped on the deck and, to make sure he understood, said, “Knock knock.”
“Who will be there?” Freddy asked.
“You see?”
“See what?”
“You said, ‘Who will be there?’ ”
“So?”
“No one says that.”
“They don’t?”
“No.”
“What do they say?”
“They say, ‘Who’s there?’ ”
“That’s rid
iculous,” said Freddy. “I’ve always said, ‘Who will be there?’ ”
“It’s incorrect.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“That’s because the only doors you knock on are your family’s, and they all say, ‘Who will be there?’ and no one corrects them or you when you do.”
“Fredericka,” Freddy said as if she were stupid, “one doesn’t really care who’s outside in the hall. Servants or guards are always traipsing about or just standing there. One cares about who will be in the room after you permit them to enter. Thus, who will be there? We’ve always said it.”
“Yes, it probably goes back hundreds of years. But it’s wrong.”
“It’s wrong?” Freddy asked himself. “It’s wrong? ‘Who will be there?’ is wrong?” He laughed. “I’m supposed to say, ‘Who’s there?’ That’s insane.”
“Freddy, you often cannot even make yourself understood, or understand those to whom you speak. It happens all the time—not because anything is wrong with you, really, but because of your peculiar situation.”
“I challenge you to produce an example.”
“The professor.”
To get to the Mississippi, they had hitch-hiked to Davenport, and had at one point been given a ride by a University of Iowa professor in a Volvo station wagon.
“What do you think of the Hawks?” the professor had asked in regard to the university’s football team. But to royal ears unused to his Midwestern speech, he had said, “What do you think of the hogs?”
As they were on their way to Iowa, the prince and princess were not particularly surprised. “To be truthful,” said Freddy diplomatically, “we haven’t actually seen them, though they are world famous.”
“They are?” the professor asked.
“Certainly.”
“Then, you follow them?”
“Follow them? No, we don’t follow them.”
“How do you know about them?”
“I suppose I read about them in the encyclopaedia, or was made to study them in geography.”
“What have they got to do with geography?”
“You know, those little bundles of wheat, and pieces of fruit, and cotton plants, factories, et cetera, that dot maps.”
“What would that have to do with the Hawks?”
“They’re on the maps, too.”
“They’d be amazed to know that,” the professor said. “I know some of them. I’ll tell them.”
“You know some of them?” Freddy asked.
“Yes, and I’ll let them know.”
“What good will that do?”
“It’ll make them happy.”
“If they could understand English.”
“They understand English. They’re all Americans.”
“Indeed,” said Freddy, “but they’re dumb.”
“They may not be . . . Einsteins,” said the professor, “but they’re not dumb. The rules don’t allow it. If they’re not capable of doing college work, they’re not allowed to train.”
Freddy laughed. “Train for what?” he asked. “Being sliced up and wrapped in plastic?”
“They’re not that bad,” the professor said, “though the Indians always whip them.”
“The Indians shouldn’t do that,” Fredericka said. “You’d think that after what the Indians went through they wouldn’t whip anyone.”
“What do you expect the Indians to do?” he asked.
“To face up to the fact,” Freddy said, “that under our direction they thrived, and when we left they were undone.”
“You were an Indian?”
“Of course not,” Freddy protested. “We were not Indians. That’s my point.”
“I don’t understand,” the professor said. “I thought you were fans.”
“Fans?” Freddy asked incredulously. “What kind of fans?”
“Hawk fans,” which sounded to the royals like hog fans.
“Good God, man, that’s what electricity’s for,” Freddy stated.
“So,” the professor asked, “how’s the weather?”
Back on the barge, at evening, Fredericka said, “You see? You haven’t had a real life. You don’t know a thing. You’re a freak.”
“I don’t know a thing? That’s rich coming from someone who thinks that Cervantes is a dip for prawns, and who once told an interviewer that she wanted to be a reader for the deaf. What don’t I know?”
“You don’t know anything about women, for example. When Madame Zeitgeist invited you to name her perfumes—the most expensive in the world—you came up with what? Tuna Salad, Liverwurst, and Delivery Wagon.”
“What was wrong with those?” Freddy asked.
“What was wrong was that, because you are the Prince of Wales, before she went belly-up and died a laughingstock, the poor woman had to use them. And you have no tact, Freddy, no tact at all.”
“I beg your pardon. I have extraordinary tact. I learnt it when dealing with people who wear bones in their noses. We have to keep them in the Empire, and so we must be tactful with them.”
“You mean in New Guinea?”
“I mean in Soho.”
“Freddy, someone with tact would not, at a state dinner, insist upon calling the chief of the French Secret Service ‘Harry Covert.’ ”
“If they hadn’t served them,” Freddy protested, “I wouldn’t have called him that, but the opportunity was too great to pass up.”
“But a hundred times?”
“No one got it, that’s why.”
“The English got it right off. The French would never get it. They thought you were mad, pointing your finger and speaking in Pidgin English at their security chief: ‘You! Harry Covert! You! Harry Covert!’ and so on. Don’t you understand? They thought you spent ten minutes calling him a green bean. The poor man didn’t know what to say.”
“He kept saying, ‘Comment?’ ”
“That’s what they say. It doesn’t mean to repeat it.”
“Yes it does.”
“No, Freddy, it doesn’t. They thought you were insane.”
Freddy grew silent. As they both listened to the ever present roll of the bow wave, she thought he was hurt, but it is harder to hurt someone who has lived his life as a prince than it is to hurt an ordinary person. He was thinking. He was contemplating. In the heart of her criticism, in the adversity of her comment, might lie a prize. For he had learnt not to oppose too quickly, and that wonderful things in this world are often carefully hidden. For example, a map of the Middle East that Her Britannic Majesty’s Stationery Office had sent over for use in a strategical essay he was writing had stood drably and hardly worth notice on an easel next to his writing table. It was the colour of khaki lentil soup and, all in all, quite undistinguished. Then, entirely by chance, he arrived early one morning and for the first time saw the sun on it. In strong light it had taken on a life of its own. It had become the colour of the desert in morning—light yellows that spanned every possibility of yellow from near silver to far beyond gold, almost pale pinks as if from the glow of flowers blooming in the crease of a wadi. It had become a window looking into the desert itself, a portal of which he had been unaware until surprise and accident had brought it to him like an angel that descends a blinding ray.
“Yes,” said Freddy, in his sovereignly, magnanimous tone, surprising Fredericka even though she had been at him in one way or another for hours. “We shall be dentists. Let us find a dreary, forgotten, wind-blown prairie town without a dentist, where no one ever comes and nothing could possibly happen. There we will settle, safe in our anonymity, away from the world, in unbreachable oblivion.”
“THE ALUMINUM-TONGUED ORATOR OF THE PLATTE”
ALTHOUGH NEITHER Freddy nor Fredericka had even a passing interest in American politics, they had parachuted into a nation approaching an election. By June, when they were almost ready to start practising dentistry in Siliphant, Nebraska, Senator Dewey Knott had secured the delegates necessary to claim the nomination o
f the GOP as its standard-bearer (which he unfailingly called the “standard bear”) against the incumbent President Self. This would have made most anyone’s heart rise, but not Dewey Knott’s, for Dewey Knott was forty points behind a president he detested and who mocked him at every opportunity for his famed reticence and indecision. It was Dewey who had famously said, “Indecisiveness is next to Godliness.” How so decent a man who was so indecisive could have become his party’s presumptive nominee was one of the mysteries of democracy, but he did, and the president and his supporters revelled in it.
“Do we bomb Iraq, or Dewey Knott?” the president would ask the assembled faithful, who ate it up with a spoon. “Do we raise taxes, or Dewey Knott? Do we say the Pledge of Allegiance, or Dewey Knott? To be or Knott to be, that is the question,” the president would boom in his Alaskan accent (he had been a beautician in Juneau), a mass of heavily lacquered hair clinging to his head like a hornets’ nest on a gatepost, and horse-like teeth bared in perpetual smile. “America, do we, or Dewey Knott?”
Senator Knott’s advisers were made of such stuff that the debate raging among them, details of which were leaked every day to sexual partners in the media, turned on whether or not to change the senator’s name. It was not merely a binary question, for the faction that favoured the change was split into a camp that wanted to change his first name, a camp that wanted to change his last name, and a camp that wanted to change both. At this stage, a thousand people were working on the campaign, each with a perfect plan for victory. The only one without a plan, or even an inkling of one, was Dewey himself, but he was willing to listen to anyone, and follow each and every recommendation he received, whether or not one contradicted another. In regard to his name, some wanted to keep things familiar, by naming him Huey Knott, but they fell out of favour with him when others pointed out that Huey was too close to Huey in Huey Long. “Look,” the senator had said, “Huey is not only like Huey, it is Huey.”
So he went with this group for a while, until another pointed out that Louis, which is what the Huey rejectionists had proposed, was too much like Louis XIV. “Who the hell was he?” Dewey asked, and when told that he had been the king of France, asked to be briefed. “Not that I want to be king or anything, but I just want to know.”