Chapter 12
I never did get back to Jimmy Bennett, did I? I’m getting old, you know. I sometimes lose threads of conversations. I go off on tangents. I ramble and wander. Then, several pages later, I realize I just left you wondering about the elusive Mr. Bennett, while a saucy, big-boned, husky-voiced detective roamed the streets of Green Bay, Wisconsin, looking for an unhappy Yale graduate. I can’t do that, can I?
I told myself I would not fall into the traditional trappings of royal biographies in this account of Isabella’s life. Those books—“those damn books,” as Secrest always referred to them—are all predictable enough. They draw a picture of royal life in which the reigning monarch always desired the throne—longed for it with an aching, pathetic intensity and schemed for it to a degree both embarrassing and indecent. Or else he or she never really cared to be the monarch; it simply didn’t make much difference one way or another.
The purpose of such books is always to buck conventional wisdom, by showing that the royal subject was either completely underappreciated or entirely overrated. The conventions of the genre demand that every prince and princess, every king and queen, be terribly put upon by the bullies who make up the castle help, a group of universally out-of-touch and stubbornly overformal advisers who insist on doing everything exactly wrong. To be able to enjoy a royal biography, you must be able to believe that crowned rulers, with their inherited titles and inherited wealth, with their lives of constant indulgence and ever present help, are always more in touch with the common people than the castle workers who clean the royal toilets, cook the regal meals, and study questions of protocol and politics for a living.
So, hemmed in by this stifling state of affairs, the royals (at least the ones who merit books about their lives) are forced to turn for advice to all sorts of unlikely sources, tarot-card readers or dream interpreters or, you know, Rasputin. And often, like the wives of presidents and prime ministers, they enjoy an occasional enema. You don’t understand it. I don’t understand it. No normal person understands it. But apparently, if you wore a crown and ate a lot of dreadful chicken dinners, you, too, would enjoy regular colonic irrigation. Such is the beauty regimen of the glamorous.
The narrators tell all this in, depending on their agenda, either a sympathetic, apologetic tone or a scolding, disapproving voice, and it turns out that the narrators themselves are always terribly crucial to every turn of events, which usually spin on seemingly mundane details. Did the princess’s staff cook mistakenly use a cream sauce when the lactose-intolerant prime minister came to lunch? That, then, must surely explain why hemlines went down that year and why the economy collapsed soon after. Oh, if the cook had only listened to the narrator, the whole thing would have been avoided!
The exception to all of this, I suppose, are the biographies of the Russian royals, who were mostly slaughtered in the Russian Revolution, except for the ones who, according to the books about them, miraculously escaped but tragically could not prove their identities. I guess if you’ve got a story filled with people who may or may not be dead, you don’t need to dwell as much on problems with luncheon menus. Although I’m pretty sure I once read a biography that claimed the czarina received frequent enemas from Rasputin and was terribly embarrassed by an overcooked leg of lamb at a state dinner. Also, supposedly, she was a man. Those books play by different rules.
And I will, too. Not by the Russian rules. But by different rules than those generally applied to contemporary royal biographies. Nevertheless, I suppose I ought to follow some of the basic conventions of good storytelling. So if I start to tell you about Jimmy Bennett, then I eventually ought to get back to him and put that part of the story to rest—not that an old narrator like me likes to use phrases such as “put to rest,” bringing to mind, as it does, all sorts of ugly end-of-life musings.
Secrest was, as I said, in charge of the search for Jimmy Bennett, and she talked to the detective almost every week, though she milked these conversations into daily reports for Isabella. I happen to know that Secrest was very concerned about the whole situation. She wasn’t sure exactly what Isabella hoped to accomplish. Secrest didn’t know, at least not yet, about Isabella and Geoffrey’s kiss, and so she wasn’t sure what danger Jimmy Bennett presented to Isabella. The only theory she could come up with was the obvious one. She thought that Bennett himself was an old love interest of some degree or another. And given that it was Ethelbald Candeloro’s column that had set Isabella off, Secrest feared he was a love interest of the leather-clad, motorcycle-riding variety. This, she reasoned, could not be good.
If the detective found him, Isabella had authorized only minimal action. The detective was supposed to watch him, complete a report, and keep her distance while Isabella considered the options. But from where Secrest sat, there were no good options. If Bennett was the long-haired boyfriend—Secrest constantly assured herself that there was no need to imagine words like “lover”—contacting the former classmate would only serve as the confirmation that Ethelbald Candeloro might be waiting on.
And if Bennett hadn’t gone to the gossip columnist? Secrest worried that contacting him might just give him the idea that he could. The last thing Secrest wanted was for the person whom she sometimes referred to as “this Geoffrey fellow” to get involved in the decision. “I hate to think what the lyrics to ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ would do for this situation,” Secrest would say, barely suppressing a smirk to Isabella, who usually ignored her.
In a sense, Secrest usually ignored Isabella. For while Isabella was dying for news, eager for any tidbit, Secrest passed on to the private investigator a nonchalant attitude, a spirit of what you might even describe as indifference. The investigator would call and wax apologetic for not making more progress and ask for more money or for permission to try a new lead, and Secrest would manage to be encouraging to the point of being discouraging. “Don’t worry so much,” she’d say. “Take your time. It’s very important that we move slowly on this.”
Secrest told me all of that a few hours after Geoffrey’s funeral. She and I had slipped out to the Garden of Engineering to get away from the stifling grief inside, though slipping outside didn’t really help, because the whole country was awash in grief. Not for Geoffrey, of course. But for the future king.
Standing on the patio, we could see the castle courtyard, with the lowered flags and black-draped windows. If we looked to the west, down the hillside, we could see the darkened, eerily still city below. All the theaters, restaurants, and other entertainment facilities were closed for a period of national mourning. Litter left over from the processional that morning fluttered in the empty street. It was a respectful sort of litter. Wadded-up tissues, spent subway passes, a map here, a commemorative pamphlet there. No soft-drink cans. No hot-dog wrappers. A happy crowd might leave that sort of rubbish, but this crowd had merely shed some of its sadness. A torn tabloid cover with a black-and-white picture of Rafie was fluttering along the cobblestones of the courtyard. OUR LOST PRINCE, it said.
In the distance, a marquee sign said, WE MOURN RAFIE. In smaller letters, it said, AND HIS PILOT.
Those were the sort of obligatory references made to Geoffrey. People would add his name to convince themselves that they valued life equally, that they didn’t place a prince above a pilot. Smug women stood up in churches all over the country to ask for prayers for Geoffrey’s family. “We must remember he died, too,” they would say. They were right, I suppose. Mae—who vacillated between numbness and violent weeping—certainly needed prayers. But I suspect the women who were standing up in churches to say so were a little too proud of themselves for pointing this out to their fellow worshippers. I suppose I shouldn’t say that, because I wasn’t spending a lot of time in churches in those days and don’t have much firsthand knowledge. It’s just that I’ve always observed that when someone stands up in church and asks that prayers be offered for world peace or homelessness or the disease of the week, they often seem a bit proud of themselves.
“You people are just hoping that the service ends in time to get home for the football match,” they seem to be saying. “But I have world events on my mind.”
Or humble servants doubling as pilots. Either one.
Perhaps I’m too cynical, but that’s the way I read things.
I was thinking about all of that on the patio as Secrest stood silently next to me, flicking her hands the way ex-smokers do sometimes in situations that call for a cigarette. She leaned for a moment on the Michelangelo bust and then, seeming to remember how such casual touching of the bust always bugged Geoffrey, moved away.
Secrest had never really liked Geoffrey. That had been obvious. But he was dead now, and she apparently felt the need to make up for that, to draw a connection between the two of them, to share in the mourning. Maybe motherhood had softened her up after all. She started with familiar territory.
“Those damn books,” she said. “Read those royal tell-alls—and who doesn’t these days?—and you get the impression that every dumb thing a prince or princess has ever done was because of the castle help.”
I sighed.
She squinted into the distance. “Did the queen order a cheeseburger at a kosher restaurant? Did the earl start wearing pinstripes a season too early? Did their majesties go and have themselves an ugly, stupid child? Well, then it must be the maidservant’s fault somehow.” Her voice was bitter, but then softened a bit. “Or, you know, the mechanic’s.”
She swallowed hard, looked out over the square. “They’re all about exaggerated crises and manufactured drama, those things,” she said. “You read them and think that an ill-chosen ball gown or a photograph with an unfortunate nasal shadow was all that mattered in the world.
“No one ever writes our story. I’ll tell you that much. They don’t write about how we curtsy ourselves silly and whisper during transatlantic phone calls with trashy American detectives to keep the college flames secret. Or how we miss our son’s primary school graduation because Her Highness has some sort of hat emergency.”
If I hadn’t been so sad and tired, I would have smiled at that. Her son was under four months old, and she was already worrying about missing his primary school graduation.
Secrest lowered her voice. “Or sock crisis.” She looked down at her black skirt, flicked a bit of lint off it. “No one writes about how we have to just straighten our backs and steel our nerves when the tabs come out, because if the news isn’t good, they’re sure to blame us. If some grand duke gets caught urinating on the Princess Grace Memorial Rosebush, it can’t be his own fault. That’s for sure. He must have been given some ‘bad advice.’
“And now,” she said, “look at what happened to Geoffrey.” She paused respectfully and looked at me, then the ground.
I nodded but didn’t meet her eyes. I didn’t want to go into all this. I just kept looking off in the distance.
“I didn’t want him to move to the castle,” she said, sounding old and bone-tired. “I thought it was a bad idea. I kept my eye on him, that’s for sure. I let him know if he was spending too much time with the princess alone. If he was flaunting his influence too much. If he wasn’t spending enough time with the cars. I wasn’t shy, you know that.”
She looked at me again. I said nothing, and that seemed enough.
“I was right, of course.” She nodded as if to affirm this to herself. “But I suppose I could have been kinder to him. It wasn’t ever personal, you know? It wasn’t his fault. I was just trying to protect the princess. Do you think he understood that?” She turned to me. Tears streamed down her face.
I thought, What difference does it make now? I thought, How could he possibly have understood that? I thought, When did it become my job to make you feel better?
I said, “He probably understood.”
And then I changed the subject. I asked her how she finally found Jimmy Bennett.
Chapter 13
Ethelbald Candeloro is not what he seems. I planned to avoid telling you that. I’m not in the habit of hurting the innocent, and Ethelbald truly is an innocent in all this. He is absolutely critical to almost every turn of events in this story, but still ultimately a bystander. Everything he wrote, everything he said, everything he caused to happen or not to happen—it was all accidental. He was not trying to save lives or ruin souls. He did not know the havoc he created until years later, and he could hardly believe it then. He was just trying to do his job, trying to please the bosses and keep the raises coming.
He could not have imagined how his words would come to haunt Isabella. Arguably as naive as Isabella herself, he did not dare flatter himself by thinking the princess would care one way or another what he thought of her clothes or her vacation choices or her college boyfriends. He could not fathom that anything he wrote really affected the royal family, and he would have been even more hard-pressed to imagine that his words had jerked a simple American couple out of their ordinary lives and taken them on a magnificent and fateful ride.
He was just trying to pay the bills. At least that is the way he would have put it. He had, after all, a leased Bisba convertible, the deluxe model, and a hefty mortgage on a penthouse spread in one of the most built-up and prestigious corners of Bisbania’s Highlands neighborhood, which was nestled in the mountainous foothills and overlooked the sea. (Not all that far from Lady Carissa’s home, actually—a constant source of worriment to the queen right up until the lady’s death.) Rumor had it that he shared that penthouse with a steady stream of lovely young women who had expensive tastes.
But the rumor wasn’t true. That is part of his secret. Though not the worst of it. Or perhaps I should not use “worst,” an obviously value-laden word. Because the secret is not really shameful, at least not in my opinion. But I suppose any secret, if big enough and kept long enough, eventually becomes shameful. For example, there is absolutely nothing wrong with holding an office-administration degree from the seaside campus of Bisbania Community College, though it does have a party-hearty reputation compared to the more “serious” South Main Street campus. But to hold such a degree and to tell people that you have a master’s in journalism from the College of Peter and Catherine the Greats, and to further describe that school as “the William and Mary of South America”? That is shameful. Especially when no such school even exists. And now you know another part of Ethelbald’s secret, though that is still not what I will describe as “the worst”—a judgmental phrasing I am using only for lack of a better word, you understand. (And please don’t pretend to be surprised that the tabloid editors didn’t check out his résumé.)
Regardless, his dedication to his work wasn’t about the debt or the fine living. Let’s be honest. Few people work hard for such things. There are exceptions, I’m sure, but most people who want fine living are not willing to work for it. Ask yourself this: What is fine about a life of hard work? So if you see a well-paid parliamentary lobbyist or an extravagantly successful stockbroker who tells people—his wife most of all—that he works eighty-hour weeks and he gives up the vacations and he stays indoors on nice days to pay for the home and the car and the catered parties and the imported, monogrammed sheets, be skeptical. This is not a person who would be a missionary if only it paid better. He likes the work. On some level, he loves what he does. He enjoys the job or he enjoys the prestige or he enjoys the excuse to be away from his wife and children. No one, at least no one who is observant and aware and awake, works through a spring day for penthouse money. That is something you do for groceries or something you do for love. No “extra” is worth it.
At least that is the case, I will argue, with Ethelbald. He didn’t care about the Bisba and the penthouse. He enjoyed them. Who wouldn’t? But he did not dish dirt on the royal family in order to live better. His motivation was good old-fashioned professional pride. It was his job to dish dirt, so he served it up as regularly as he could. I suppose he possessed a little of that Bisbanian work ethic that the Chamber of Commerce was always touting in efforts to att
ract new industry.
He rather enjoyed, simply enough, having the opportunity to comment on the ups and downs of the royal family. That’s all. In some basic, uncomplicated way, he found the task pleasant and even interesting. He meant no harm. Not even when he called the queen names. Not even when he questioned the parentage of the king’s brother.
Somehow, Ethelbald did not see such comments as truly personal. He figured the royal family knew that, that they understood it was part of the bargain. You don’t get to be queen without having someone pointing out that your ankles are thick and that your son is rather dim. You can’t be the brother to the king and not expect people to comment on the way you resemble the bodyguard who was once assigned to your mother. In some vague and idiotic way, Ethelbald actually thought the royal family must enjoy such gossip, the way he enjoyed really nasty hate mail.
And he did enjoy hate mail. Nothing pleased him like getting notes from readers who questioned his intelligence, his qualifications, or his logic. Journalists, see, are not like normal people. We—and I use “we” because once a journalist, always a journalist—ask tough questions and second-guess everything and always ask for proof. No one gets a free ride with us. And true to the way we treat others, we develop a tough skin ourselves. So when you write a newspaper reporter a letter that says, “You are biased and wrong and pathetic and ugly,” the reporter is not hurt. Instead, she passes the letter around to colleagues and laughs and posts it on the wall next to her desk and figures that if she hadn’t angered someone, then she hadn’t done her job. We’re an odd lot.
So when Ethelbald, who had a lively style of writing that tended to agitate people and encourage them to fire off responses, would get a good hate letter, it would make his day. The more incoherently they babbled, the better.
He liked the one that said: “You sniveley little bastard commie. How dare you criticize the royal ankles of Her Majesty the Queen? I’d like to see your ankles. Thicker than a Clydesdale’s I’m guessing. I can tell by looking at that jowl in your photograph that you’d need thick ankles to hold up that thick head of yours.”
Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle Page 9