Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle

by Beverly Bartlett

  So if a lovely young starlet and her leading man break up in the midst of a movie, causing massive budget overruns and stiffly acted love scenes, a dedicated animal rights group might quietly leak word that the relationship ended over a disagreement about whether, say, the starlet should wear fur slippers to bed—prompting all sorts of gossipy news stories that touch on animal rights and quote officials from the agency that leaked the completely fabricated story.

  Battered Women No More had been looking for the right opportunity to highlight domestic violence. And when Isabella stepped off that train in the lovely short skirt and those distinctive mismatched stockings, the freethinking PR professional knew he had found it. He printed up a press release and had it out to the media before the fired castle servants could even cash in by selling their own stories to the tabloids.

  The release was simple and short:

  “Battered Women No More wants to thank Her Royal Highness the Princess of Gallagher for helping launch the organization’s new slogan: ‘If he leaves you black and blue, then sock him with a summons.’ We know the royal family does not normally take stands on public issues, but one as vital and as uncontroversial as this is surely worth an exception. Lives will no doubt be saved by the princess’s adoption of this cause.”

  In retrospect, the PR agent only wished that he had worked on that slogan a bit, for it sounded awkward to him when repeated on the newscasts. Still, it was on the newscasts, and that was the most important thing. He held his breath and waited for the castle reaction. Privately, Hubert said, “Hmmm.” Privately, the queen said, “Ummmm.” Privately, the king said, “Sock him with a summons? Shouldn’t a batterer be arrested outright, not just asked to appear in court at a later date?” Privately, Isabella said, “Huh?”

  But publicly, they said . . . nothing. They just let it lie.

  So that is how wearing colored socks replaced the earlier custom of wearing a loop of colored ribbon as the preferred way for celebrities to silently salute favorite causes. Actors accepted awards wearing designer tuxes and red socks to show their continuing concern about the AIDS crisis. “Sock it to AIDS,” they’d say. Artists protesting the famed African coffee ban wore cappuccino-colored socks known as “No-doze hose.” Things finally went too far, in my humble opinion, when Bisbanian men—Ethelbald Candeloro notably among them—started wearing nude nylons to show support for some sort of legislation aimed at protecting cross-dressers and the transgendered. It was a dreadful campaign idea made all the worse by the complicated slogan “Cross-dressers have nothing to hide.” It seemed to presume that legislators would understand that nude nylons reveal rather than hide—an outrageously generous assessment of the hosiery expertise of the male-dominated Bisbanian legislative body.

  (I feel compelled to explain that I love cross-dressers and the transgendered as much as everyone else, and I’m sure the legislation was good government and all that. My quibble is not with the cause but with the medium. It seems to me that the purpose of these sock statements was to evoke the cause, not to become the cause. And why would anyone, transgendered or otherwise, wear nude nylons anyway? It is so completely common. Your hose should match your shoes. Please.)

  Isabella’s sock crisis, you might notice, was resolved without any input from Isabella, who can be credited only with the wisdom of not denying the lie when it was conveniently told for her. It goes to show you that when things are going badly, things go badly. And when things are going well, they go spectacularly.

  It was, as it turned out, the sock incident that prompted Ethelbald to start thinking about how well things had been going for the princess, though it took him another several months to acknowledge this change in that famous column—the one that put such fear into Isabella’s heart. It would have been a tragedy for all of Bisbania if Isabella had let Ethelbald’s column scare her off. If the apparent reference to Geoffrey had prompted her to take off the headphones and get a grip on herself, it would have been a tragedy for her, the royal family, even the whole world.

  But what happened instead, well, it was mostly a tragedy for me.

  Chapter 10

  Oh dear! I really shouldn’t have said that. Now you’re going to spend the next several chapters worrying about me, when obviously I’m fine. I’m old, no debate there. Time is quickly running out for me. But I’m alive and well and still enjoying a brisk walk every day. When it’s all said and done, I’ve had a good life. I’m happy. And I have the princess to thank for much of it.

  But lately, I’ve been in a fatalistic mood. When I’m in such a state, one of my great sources of entertainment is tracing back the events of a lifetime, determining at what specific point things went wrong or right. It is a pointless exercise. I know this. Look no further than the day when I, just a young wisp of a thing, turned down a perfectly good editing job at a small newspaper in middle America. When I look back on that now, I imagine promotions and leapfrogging career moves to larger and larger papers. I tell myself if I had taken that editing job, I would have been the editor of The National Times—Bisbania’s only nontabloid daily newspaper—by the time I was fifty. Instead, all my dreams of news-management glory died that day. I sputtered and struggled along, doing mediocre but dependable reporting work. I churned out the sort of stories that pleased my bosses by being on time and easy to read but neither won awards nor changed lives. I never did the big work of journalism, setting the public agenda, shaping the national conversation. All because I didn’t take that editing job. That’s what I tell myself. And eventually, of course, I left news altogether.

  But on the other hand, I never would have met my dearly departed husband if I had gone off to middle America to edit news. And what of the work I did do? Not that it compares to editing The Times. But I enjoyed it, and I think others did, too. So was the day I said no thanks to that editing job the best day or the worst day of my life? It was both. It was neither. It’s not worth thinking about.

  I can make the same kind of case for the events that unfolded shortly after Isabella tore up Geoffrey’s letter and became obsessed with covering herself from Ethelbald’s alleged photo hunt. She did three things that week.

  First, she sobbed on the shoulder of Princess Iphigenia, who was alternately puzzled, disturbed, and strangely flattered by the sudden returned weakness in her sister-in-law, whose rocketing career and presumed fertility had made all but meaningless Genia’s status as second in line to the throne. By the time anything happened to the fit, spry king, it was assumed, Isabella and Raphael would have a slew of children, all of whom would have stepped in front of Genia, who had so little respect among the tabloid writers that they had shortened her name yet again to the vulgar French-sounding Princess Gene. (Amazingly, they weren’t even trying to be insulting; they just didn’t care enough to make an extra letter seem worthwhile.)

  Second, Isabella dispatched a mystified Secrest to America to hire a discreet private investigator—a saucy, sassy, heavy-smoking woman with a big tattoo and a licensed semiautomatic—to dig up Jimmy Bennett, the college chum with the worrisome camera.

  Finally, Princess Isabella asked Geoffrey and his wife to leave America and move to Bisbania.

  It was really inevitable. From the moment that Geoffrey responded to Isabella’s first letter, there was little doubt that he would someday be safely ensconced in the castle, working at the royal garage and taking smoke breaks by the lapping waters of the Bisbanian Sea.

  Things might have been different if Geoffrey had simply replied with the fawning, gushing sort of note that Isabella was accustomed to receiving. But two sentences sealed his fate. When Geoffrey suggested listening to the Boss and then passed along his wife’s encouragement, he assumed—without even realizing it—the role of royal adviser. As of that moment, he was destined to live at the beck and call of the princess, on the very grounds of the castle. Ethelbald’s frightening column did little more than hurry him along.

  As you might imagine, Geoffrey and his wife were overwhelmed, fl
attered, and a little put off by Isabella’s request, which was presented to the young couple by Secrest one drizzly night in a royal houseboat permanently stationed near Martha’s Vineyard. The deal was, by any standard, fair. Geoffrey was to be paid 172,000 Bisbanian pounds, which even today is a lot of money, so you can imagine its appeal then. Moreover, Geoffrey was to receive two months of vacation each year, free lodging at the castle, a generous clothing allowance for both him and his wife—since they would be expected to attend some castle functions—and any assistance his wife wished or required in finding her own work. For a modest American couple, it was almost unimaginable. (In fact, it caused a bit of whispering at the castle among more senior staff members who had similar packages and had been led to believe they were more than mere mechanics.)

  But there was something about the tone of the offer that annoyed the soon-to-be-hyphenated Whitehall-Wrights. Geoffrey and Mae, despite their intense admiration of the princess, and despite the greedy American notion that lots of money and prestige are the building blocks of happiness, couldn’t help but feel that the presentation of this offer—which Secrest set forth with a sort of a patriotic call for loyalty and sacrifice—was a bit much. After all, Geoffrey and Mae had no real reason to feel patriotic about or loyal to the royal family, other than their friendly fondness for its apparent future queen. And they saw no real reason why their friendly fondness should lead them to sacrifice for the princess any more than the princess should sacrifice for them. That is, of course, an awfully American way to look at it. Secrest couldn’t see their point at all. She found herself wishing she’d paid better attention to “American Perspectives and Philosophies” in school. She was sure this had something to do with the Boston Tea Party. (“You know it’s called that,” she would say whenever the subject came up, “but they didn’t actually drink tea.”)

  But in the end, she had not needed to worry. Because 172,000 pounds won out. Was that the couple’s wisest or worst decision? The best day or the worst day of their lives? Well, now, as I said, I don’t editorialize until the end. You’ll just have to draw your own conclusions along the way.

  Mae experienced all the happiness and horror that a woman could bear. And Geoffrey had a delightful life. There is no way to know how different it would have been if they’d said no thanks and returned to their two-bedroom home with the scuffed-up hardwood floors and horrid robin’s-egg-blue aluminum siding. We know only this: If they had said no, there would have been nights when they lay awake, looking at the ceiling, fretting that they had chosen the wrong path. They would have been tortured by regret and sadness.

  But as it was, only Mae was tortured. Geoffrey died.

  Chapter 11

  Geoffrey, who finally acquiesced to his wife’s hyphenation request and officially adopted the Whitehall-Wright surname upon his immigration to Bisbania, quickly took to life in the castle. He liked the simple pleasures of performing extraordinarily detailed maintenance on mostly unused cars. (Although given that the royal fleet was, by political necessity, made up entirely of the unreliable Bisbas, he worked a good deal more then you might expect.)

  He marveled at the small office he was accorded in the garage, where he kept window-box herb gardens, spent slow afternoons shopping on tawdry American websites, and listened to the best imported stereo system on the market—a gift from Her Highness. On weekends, he took up hobbies that would have been only daydreams in his past life. He learned to weave baskets, pilot small planes, and tap-dance.

  Mae, who was building a career writing steamy, overly complicated, and too heavily plotted novels (under an assumed name, so as not to embarrass the royal family), often visited him in his office. They would stretch out end-to-end on the handmade African rugs, bare feet touching bare feet, and stare at the ornate ceiling, planning their next vacation and giggling at the marvelous turn their life had taken.

  Mae spent much of her time, all of her clothing allowance, and no small part of their income on magnificent garments that always stood out at the various castle functions. She was even once featured in HELLO! as one of “ten common women who dress like royals.” That headline caused Hubert no end of grief from Princess Genia, who complained for months afterward, bristling every time anyone uttered Mae’s name.

  “Dress like royals?” she’d say each and every time. “I hear she has a reputation for dressing like royals. I suppose she must be dressing like the royals of some struggling third-world country where they don’t mind garish jewelry and loud-colored gowns with”—here she would pause dramatically and lower her voice—“neutral shoes and nude hose.” Her voice would return to normal, and her tone would brighten. “Because she certainly doesn’t dress like any royals I know.”

  But Mae was, at that point at least, oblivious to Iphigenia’s attitude. So the only source of tension in the Whitehall-Wrights’ lives was also the source of all their happiness, and that was Isabella herself. The effortless elegance, the casual classiness, the spontaneous sensibleness that Isabella projected during the height of her popularity took a lot of work. It took planning. It took strategizing. It took endless late-night debates, and occasionally, as Mae and Prince Raphael each noticed with a bit of jealousy and concern, it took a bit of flirtatious persuasion on the part of Geoffrey.

  It was Geoffrey who convinced Isabella just before the last holiday season she spent at the castle to go with a series of velvet gowns, even though all the fashion magazines predicted another year of satin. “You set the trends, Belle,” he said. “You don’t follow them.”

  It was Geoffrey who helped Isabella summon the courage to publicly align herself with the efforts to remove the stigma from what was, in those unenlightened times, called “streetwalkers’ stress.” “Whatcha ’fraid of, Belle?” he’d ask. “Being too kind to the downtrodden?”

  And it was Geoffrey who found that perfect Springsteen line, the one about ascending into a beautiful dawn and meeting a loved one further down life’s highway, that allowed Isabella to so memorably finish her elegy at the televised funeral of the Native American priest turned pop star who had so captured the fancy of the young before dying in a horrible Jacuzzi malfunction.

  Geoffrey’s form of flirtatious persuasion was a miracle to watch.

  “I don’t know,” Isabella would say in that vaguely whiny voice she would use when she grew tired. “I don’t think the people really care how I exercise as long as I don’t get all flabby.”

  Geoffrey would agree, but then he would soar into a beautiful, rambling, seemingly pointless, and yet so pointed monologue. Yes, it was true, he’d say. The sort of exercise she took up didn’t matter. After all, she couldn’t be a fabulous, trendsetting fairy-tale princess in every possible way. If she was fabulous and trendsetting and fairy-tale in many ways, that ought to be enough. So if she was still using a snowboarding simulator when the hottest actresses, the most gorgeous models, and even the dear Princess Gene—who, he would note, had been dubbed Lean Gene recently by the tabloids—had taken up the NASA-inspired bodybuilding program known as Astrofit, that was just fine. “You’ve got it all over them, Belle,” he’d say, not noticing the way Rafie would bristle at the nickname. (The prince would, often enough, visibly shudder, even if he did not actually look up from what he was reading, usually a dry textbook about the effect of mouth cancers on locution or some other aspect of human speech.)

  “You don’t have to worry,” Geoffrey would continue, eyes locked with the princess. “You’re all right.”

  Isabella would purr at the compliments and then set out to ensure that he was correct, taking up the more advanced Astrofit Pro before the week was up.

  Aside from the shuddering, Raphael mostly appeared not to notice the conversations, although he seemed somewhat deliberate in his not noticing. But Mae would sometimes raise her eyebrows or roll her eyes or let her mouth hang open a little. She would stare at Geoffrey in a quizzical way, and she was curious about whether he was consciously manipulating the princess. After conversa
tions like the Astrofit one, and even on the more important matters, like whether the royal family should comment on the prime minister’s embarrassing goat scandal, Mae would sometimes try to ferret out Geoffrey’s real thoughts. But she did not get far. He would utter the same sort of vague observations to her.

  Mae noticed this especially after Geoffrey advised Isabella on how the royal family should handle the funeral of Lady Carissa, the queen’s sister who had been essentially disowned by the family after the called-off engagement many years earlier. Lady Carissa had, in fact, been so well hidden by the royal family after her horrible sweatpants-in-public phase that the newspaper obituaries felt obligated to point out that she had still been alive before recently dying.

  After Isabella consulted Geoffrey, Mae asked her husband point-blank what he thought the princess should do. Geoffrey did not answer her directly. Instead, he mused about one of Springsteen’s less respected albums. “I was tuning in to Lucky Town yesterday,” Geoffrey said. “Man, the critics did not do that CD justice.”

  He paused, looked out the window. “It was awesome. So real, you know, so wild. Like that dude knew how to talk about class. He spoke for us working stiffs and got rich speaking for us. That’s insane, and he knew it. He’s got that great line about how funny it is for a billionaire to wear a poor guy’s shirt.”

  I suppose you have no idea what Geoffrey was talking about. Mae didn’t either, though she probably had an advantage over many of you in that she had at least heard the album—about a thousand times on one long drive to Euro Disney alone.

  But she later learned that based on this “observation” from Geoffrey, Isabella advised Rafie, and Rafie advised the king, and the king made his case to his wife, and the royal family decided to treat the funeral of the long-ignored Carissa as if it were that of a long-suffering and loyal royal servant. She would be a royal woman in a poor woman’s ceremony—and perhaps in a poor woman’s blouse, for all anyone knew. The funerals of servants are not considered public events.