Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle

by Beverly Bartlett

  And he loved the one that said: “I am sick and tired of you and your paper trying to push your anti-monarchist agenda on the country. We know full well you were all educated at fancy schools with French teachers and that you all drive Eastern European cars. Get a real job.”

  And he absolutely cherished the letter from an American immigrant who displayed the extreme and inexplicable loyalty to the royal family that only immigrants can muster, and who was angry about a column in which Ethelbald called the king “overly simple and slightly ugly.” The former American had, in addition to a convert’s loyalty to the country, an American’s misunderstanding of the name Ethelbald, which is a fine traditional name given to firstborn Bisbanian sons for hundreds of years, but which, to an American ear, sounds a little like Ethel, the name best associated with chunky, middle-aged sitcom women.

  The letter attacked Ethelbald’s journalistic credentials, his writing style, and his loyalty. It then concluded: “Also, have you heard of facial electrolysis? Read up on it. Judging by your photo, you could use it. You’re the ugliest damn woman I ever saw.”

  Ethelbald laughed for days about that. For months, even. He called up his editor and read it aloud over the phone. He entertained colleagues at the office holiday party. He included it in his memoir. Each time he told the story, he would laugh in a jovial, extravagant, self-deprecating way, a way that a careful, removed observer might describe as being a little too hard. Because, you see, that was the last part of Ethelbald’s secret.

  He was the ugliest damn woman anyone ever saw.

  And he (she?) really was named Ethel.

  She was born Ethel Candeloro, the only daughter of a Bisbanian serviceman and his American wife, a traditional woman who insisted on naming her baby girl after her great-grandmother, no matter how strange the name seemed to Bisbanians.

  Ethel Candeloro changed her name to Ethel Bald upon marriage to George Bald, a mousy but intellectual engineer who thought his wife was beautiful despite her cheap haircuts and lack of makeup. All her friends tried to talk her out of changing her name. “Ethel Bald sounds like you’re a firstborn son,” they would tell her over and over again. But she would say that it didn’t matter, that she was, in some ways, as traditional as her mother had been and would not let occasional awkward confusions stop her from following tried-and-true paths. She had, she said, looked forward to changing her name with marriage ever since she was a schoolgirl, and she was not going to let a few snickers stop her now.

  This made George Bald rather happy. In fact, everything about Ethel made him happy. Love is, after all, blind. So he did not notice that she had a jaw shaped like a crudely cut block, and he did not notice the tepid pool of sweat that sometimes collected on her upper lip on hot days. When George looked at Ethel, all he saw was beauty.

  That is why he told her that she looked absolutely fine on the day when she headed out to interview for a job as royal writer for one of the lesser tabloids, even though she was wearing a rather mannish and somewhat ill-fitting black pantsuit.

  Ethel’s love for George, it must be said, was not so much blind as nearsighted. She had noticed a few of his faults, notably his lack of fashion sense. So she did not completely trust his opinion of her pantsuit. But she foolishly took his advice anyway. She had a bad cold that day and a crick in her neck to boot and didn’t feel like changing. In her heart she had only wanted to be reassured. So when he said she looked fine, she was relieved.

  The editor, who had spent some time on London’s Fleet Street before being brought back home to Bisbania to turn the struggling tabloid around, was hard-pressed on deadline when Ethel Bald arrived, with her froggy throat, stiff neck, swollen eyes, and mannish pantsuit. The editor barely glanced at her and didn’t look at her writing samples at all.

  Instead, he surprised her by saying that she was the leading candidate and that it was “about bloody time a good heterosexual man finally applied for a royal column again.”

  That was the one moment he looked up at her. “You are heterosexual, aren’t you?”

  Ethel Bald was too stunned to think through the ethics of the situation and simply croaked, “Yes.” And then, in a flourish that still surprised her years later when she replayed it all in her mind, she added, “Married, even.”

  “Good, good,” the editor said. “Though you might not want the married part to get out. Better to have the reputation of a playboy. Name again?”

  “Ethel Bald,” she said.

  “Ethelbald what?” the editor snapped. “I’m sick and tired of this one-name crap. Madonna is old news, and so is that fad.”

  “Ethel Bald . . .” She sniffled a little. Her head was full and slow, and her pantsuit was tight and uncomfortable. The thought of trying to explain, of using that raspy voice to go into detail, well, it was too much. Besides, the only reason she was getting the job was because he thought she was a firstborn son. So, by instinct, she reverted to her maiden name, the one she had used for most of her life. “Candeloro,” she said.

  So Ethelbald Candeloro was hired. He launched a satisfying career, working mostly from home and wearing a fake handlebar mustache whenever he posed for the column photo. I suppose by now it goes without saying that Ethel Bald was not a particularly striking woman. But when she peeled off the mustache and gussied herself up in a black strapless ball gown, she was obviously womanly enough that she could mingle at balls with royal guests without anyone suspecting that she was the mustachioed man who so often made the royal family’s life miserable. (George Bald had graduated first in his class from the Royal Academies of Engineering and Other Practical Sciences, which meant he was granted the lifelong title of “royal engineer” and was invited to all the largest castle functions.)

  This was the way that Ethel Bald picked up all sorts of pertinent pieces of gossip and scuttlebutt. Her limited appearances as Ethelbald only added to the mystery of the noted royal watcher and made him seem even more fearsome. How did he accurately describe details of events that he did not appear to attend? How did he know royal secrets whispered only in ladies’ restrooms? He had, the royal family believed, a frightening ability to get to the truth, or at least an approximation of the truth exacting enough for tabloid standards.

  But no matter how dangerous Ethelbald seemed to Iphigenia or Isabella or any other member of the royal family, he was not, as I previously stated, what he seemed. He did know the sorts of things that a middle-aged ballroom dancer could pick up from eavesdropping and a trained eye. But he—I always call him “he” when talking about his professional persona—could not know the secrets of the royal hearts.

  He did not know what Isabella thought of Geoffrey. He did not know what Raphael thought of Isabella. He did not know what Queen Regina thought of her sister, Lady Carissa. He did not know what Iphigenia thought about being queen.

  He was just an ordinary woman, you know. Although a bit more mannish than most and with the exceedingly bad judgment to trust her husband’s opinion of her business wear.

  You, no doubt, wonder how I know Ethelbald’s secret and why I have not told it until now. But that was, you see, the deal. I know his secret. He knows mine. We’ve been locked in this standoff for much of this past century. Mutual assured destruction. It’s like the cold war. Neither of us can push the button without giving up our own secret as well. So I didn’t tell his secret until I was ready to have my secret told.

  Or at least I waited until now. When I am almost ready.

  Chapter 14

  I can’t believe it. Looking back, I see I covered the entire marvelous few years that Geoffrey and Mae lived in the castle with just a chapter and a few anecdotes. When I started this book, I feared that, if anything, I would dwell too much on that time, detailing the antics of two American rubes as they discovered the majesty and mystery of life in Glassidy Castle.

  But I guess time has softened me some. I am more sympathetic than I once was. I look upon those two dears and think they were, after all, just kids, well mean
ing and fun-loving.

  Genia was, of course, still a princess then. She used to cringe and carry on when she’d see Mae sitting by the castle pool, wearing cutoffs and drinking tea—made with tea bags, no less—out of a Kentucky Derby Festival coffee mug. Mae said it was a souvenir of the time her mother went to the Churchill Downs infield and watched War Emblem’s wire-to-wire drive to win the Derby.

  “Is the Lipton an inheritance, too?” Princess Genia would whisper in a nasty way, making the servants snicker.

  But please don’t be too hard on Genia, for she eventually recognized the shallow and snobbish traits that marred her personality. She has tried so hard to make up for it in her old age. Her life was, in its own way, quite difficult. The younger siblings of heirs to the throne always have a tough time. In Great Britain they call them “the spare,” as in the “heir and the spare.” No such vulgarity was uttered about the heirs of Glassidy Castle, partially because no such cute rhyme play worked in the nation’s official language, which had too many consonants to foster the art of playful rhyming among the royal classes—the only ones still speaking the language.

  Still, the heir-and-spare sentiment was obvious enough.

  From the heir’s perspective, the younger siblings have a nice life, getting all the perks that come with royal life but few of the responsibilities. But the spares see it quite differently. They are forced into the public eye for a waiting pattern that they hope never ends. If all goes well, they will live and die exactly as they were born, unused links in the chain of succession. In no other career do you peak at birth. But that is the way for most children of monarchs. They are born second or third or fourth in the line of succession. They might bump up a step when Granddad or Dad dies. But mostly, there are just more children born, so that by the time they’re thirty-five or forty, they’re so far out of the way of the throne that they’re already has-beens. Their only hope is that when they show up at the coronation, the people who woke up early in the Americas to watch the pageantry will be saying things like “Wow, she’s held up well” rather than “Get a look at her, she used to be pretty.”

  The second (and third and fourth) children are left to amuse themselves by chasing love affairs or fine wines, or collecting art. They may take up a charity or two. But at best, their lives are shallow and sad. Perhaps that, as much as anything, was why Princess Genia looked so forlorn at her investiture ball as Isabella danced with the president. It wasn’t just that Isabella, even when resigned to wearing blue, was gorgeous and radiant and glamorous. It was that Isabella, born a mere lady in the most minor house of the national nobility, seemed destined to be queen. Meanwhile, Princess Genia’s greatest moment was to be that night, when she was officially proclaimed the Princess of South Main Street, the customary title for second-borns and thus the title unofficially used for her since birth.

  (This custom, it goes without saying, had always been a sticking point with the Association of North Main Business Owners, and on certain holidays, the definition of South Main was stretched beyond all reason. But the thing about royals is that they don’t run for reelection and don’t need financial gifts, so the North Main shopkeepers could complain forever and it wouldn’t make any difference.)

  The morning after the ball, everything changed for Princess Genia. The princess had a nice apartment in the west wing of the castle. But she had slept that night in her childhood bedroom, where she was awakened at six A.M. by her mother, with the terrible word that the plane was missing and presumed crashed.

  Genia trembled at the news. She tried to focus as she knelt in the castle chapel with her parents, praying for mercy on the frail and beautiful life of her dear brother, the very real human who had, as a child, played with her on the castle lawn, begged her to drill him for hours with flashcards on bird species, and who, as a teen, had teased her about boys, and who had, just the night before, as a dashing young man, danced with her and complimented her and told her that the world was hers now, that she could do anything and be anything.

  “You know, they’re doing amazing things with speech recognition technology,” he said, showing again his mysterious preoccupation with the sciences of human oral communication. “You could get into that, if you wanted.”

  Genia loved her brother. But as she knelt in the chapel, she couldn’t concentrate on his life or his soul or even his endearing little quirks. The only thought that pounded through her head as she contemplated the missing plane was this: Please God, do not let me be queen.

  Later, after the funeral, she allowed herself to cry, and she told her mother that she knew it was a horrible, awful, selfish thing, but she was worried about it nonetheless. Her mother assured her that it was okay, she could tell her anything. Genia sobbed long and hard. “Someday,” she said, blubbering into her handkerchief, “they’ll call me Queen Gene. It sounds so dorky.”

  Her mother, who had stood so stoically at the funeral and walked so tall down the long road to the church, laughed a halting uncertain laugh. Then she cried, and the two women, the queen and the future queen, hugged each other and held on tight.

  As it was, there was no bigger victim in the tragedy than Princess Genia, and not only because she did become Queen Gene in the tabloids when her father died just a couple years later. (She insisted that only “Her Majesty Queen Iphigenia” be used in her presence.)

  But in the days following the crash, the world’s attention focused only on Isabella. The world mistakenly thought it was more tragic to have the apparent queendom stripped from you than to find it bestowed on you. They were wrong.

  Not that it wasn’t an adjustment for Isabella. The wife of the king’s first son is the future queen. The widow of the king’s first son is, well, no one. Oh, she did retain her title. The king and queen made it quite clear that they would always consider Princess Isabella a member of the royal household, and she would always be welcome at family functions and castle events. Princess Genia, somewhat more reluctantly, said that would remain true once she became queen.

  But no one expected Isabella to take them up on it. She was young, beautiful, glamorous. She would eventually want to date, remarry, have children. How could she do that in her dear late husband’s boyhood home?

  It is almost amusing to look back at the coverage in the days immediately following the crash, to see how much of it focused on Isabella and how it seemed the world and the media were mourning not just the death of the young prince, the heir apparent, but also his bride, though she was obviously very much alive.

  The images were unforgettable, and not only because it was the first time she’d worn brown since the engagement. She carried such a sad regal composure as she stood there on the beach in the cropped khaki pants, a snug-fitting pair that had been carefully crafted by the nation’s leading designer to look as if they’d been purchased right off the rack. She wore a similarly simple chocolate corduroy jacket as she greeted rescue workers on the beach, thanking them with quiet, shell-shocked dignity, refusing all sorts of offers of comfort. “Would you like a chair, Your Highness?” “Can I get you some coffee, Your Highness?” “Wouldn’t you like to go back to the castle for some rest, Your Highness?”

  She would shake her head, smile in a wan and hopeful way, and say, “You’re too kind.” The wind tousled her hair as the gray seas rose and fell in angry fits. The photographs were exquisite.

  By contrast, everything Iphigenia did that day was wrong, starting with her clothes: a periwinkle polo shirt and a wrinkled pair of plaid Bermuda shorts. This was a terrible fashion misstep that the tabloids, for the sake of decency, did not mention right away, holding off in an unprecedented show of restraint until the initial shock had passed sometime later that evening. “Leaving aside the issue of polo and its rather lowbrow connections with a certain batch of English cousins,” Ethelbald Candeloro wrote, “what sort of person would wear shorts while her brother’s plane is missing? Especially shorts from Bermuda, where legend has it planes go missing all the time and never wit
h happy endings.”

  Iphigenia also made the grave misstep of, upon being offered a chair, saying “Thank you” and taking it. This was regarded as insensitive by almost all commentators. “I hope Her Highness was comfy while the rescue workers were out in the cold,” Ethelbald said later in the same column. All of Iphigenia’s biographies, I must point out, say that she took the chair on the advice of Hubert, who had that morning taken a new interest in Iphigenia, believing for the first time that she might actually become the next in line to the throne.

  “People do not want to see the future queen standing about as if she were waiting for a royal bus,” he theorized, and so he practically ordered Iphigenia to take a seat when offered one.

  By two P.M. it was obvious even to those with less of a self-interest than Hubert that the plane’s occupants must be dead. But no one could bring themselves to point this out to either princess, both of whom had grown pale as the day wore on and who finally consented to moving to a nearby home when rain started pouring. That walk was the only time that Isabella cried during the entire ordeal. “I just started thinking,” she said, “about Rafie out there treading water in the cold rain.”

  All the top news outlets devoted themselves to nonstop coverage. The main story on all the websites was a running update on the search-and-rescue efforts, and off to the side, there were macabre collections of the news stories produced throughout the prince’s life. “Click here to see the news accounts of his birth.” “Click here to see the archived coverage of his first day in kindergarten.” “Click here to relive the minor scandal that occurred when, as a young teen, he sneaked out and colored his hair bright purple.” PLUM PUTRID! screamed one headline.