Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle

by Beverly Bartlett

  But it would all be a ruse. He and Isabella still wouldn’t truly be an ordinary couple. There wouldn’t be any richer or poorer or better or worse. “Oh, I suppose one of us could get sick,” he said. “But we’ve got the best health care money can buy, and that’s the best health care there is.

  “It’s not that I think Isabella married me just to be queen or anything,” he went on. “But until recently, even I couldn’t separate myself from the king I am to become, so how could she have made such a distinction? I don’t want Isabella to be married to His Royal Highness the Prince of Gallagher. I want her to marry Ralph Gallagher, a workingman, a bird-watcher, a speech pathologist.”

  Rafie thought about abdicating, but there were already republican rumblings in the Senate, and he feared that the movement needed only a final push, such as the abdication of an heir—especially an abdication inspired by nothing more dramatic than a desire to go to speech pathology school. It is one thing to walk away from your own destiny to be king. But to ruin the royal gig for your whole family? That was too much.

  He thought about getting involved in some sort of scandal that would force him out of the line of succession, but in researching the family history, he concluded that such an unprecedented scandal would surely have to involve a multiple homicide. That didn’t seem quite right.

  “The only way out of being king,” he said with a sigh, “is to die.”

  And that was when the idea of faking his death came about. It was a grand, romantic plan. Rafie was especially proud of his decision to stage his death the morning after Princess Iphigenia’s investiture ball, figuring the nation would be so gaga over the young, beautiful princess that they would love the notion of her being tragically propelled onto the throne, and the monarchy would be more beloved and stronger than ever. (He did not seem to worry what it would mean for Princess Iphigenia to be tragically propelled to the throne, or to ask himself what it would mean to her modest ambition to publish a children’s version of WEAR!)

  Isabella sometimes grew frustrated with Rafie’s constant ruminating on the subject. “Is our life together so bad?” she would say. “Are you so miserable?” Coveting middle-class life is, she argued, unbecoming for a prince. “Just as unbecoming as it would be for a middle-class man to go about wishing he lived in a castle. If you have enough,” she said, “you should be grateful for what you have. And you have a lot to be thankful for. You have a lovely home.”

  The prince rolled his eyes. “Dad makes all the decorating decisions,” he said in what might legitimately be described as a whine. “I had to beg for permission to put up a football poster in my office. My office! And he only relented because it was a commissioned, one-of-a-kind, impressionistic watercolor on handmade paper. That’s not even a poster! It’s original art!”

  “You have satisfying work,” Isabella said, continuing with her list of blessings as if Raphael had not spoken. “You get to visit deserving projects, give attention to worthwhile charities, shed light on the important issues of the day.”

  “Yesterday,” said the prince with a bored sigh, “I watched schoolchildren perform an ode to figs and attended a ribbon cutting for a cat museum.”

  “You meet interesting people,” Isabella said. “You get to travel.”

  The prince shook his head sadly. “Next week I’m scheduled to tour a sewer project with the prime minister’s wife, an awful woman who is always showing off her tawdry French manicures and insisting that the royal flight attendants bring powdered creamer for her tea.” He exhaled slowly. “She likes to talk about her surgeries.”

  “You don’t appreciate how nice it is to have a staff,” said Isabella. (She had cleaned her own toilet in college, and she had not forgotten it.) “You don’t even throw away your own toenail clippings. You just leave them on the bedside table for the maid. I’m sure I don’t know what would happen if we didn’t have a maid. We’d be drowning in royal toenail clippings.”

  “I said I didn’t want to be king,” Raphael said. “Who said anything about not having a maid?”

  “And what about your family?” Isabella asked. “You’ll never talk to them again? Never see them again? Your parents’ funerals? Your sister’s coronation? All the happiness and sadness of their lives . . . all the happiness and sadness of your life . . . how can you not share that?”

  “I’ll share it with you,” Raphael would say.

  That was how the conversations went. The prince spent a year trying to convince Isabella of the plan. What a wonderful, romantic year it was for the two of them! He courted her then in a very unprincelike way, making dinner, giving her foot massages, winning stuffed animals for her at boardwalk carnivals, growing her favorite herbs in a small garden that he stole away from the professional gardeners. Leering at her, if Burger Boy is to be believed, at White Castle drive-through windows.

  Isabella was charmed. (Maybe not by the leering part, but generally.) And so it was because of her love of Rafie—and, I think, because of another reason—that she agreed to the silly, extravagant plan. But to her everlasting relief and shame, she refused one part of the plan: She refused to fake her death as well.

  “As if I could jump out of a plane!” she would say whenever Rafie and Geoffrey urged it as the most logical course of action. “Into cold water, of all things! All the columnists laughed their heads off at me when I climbed into that stupid old tank for the veterans’ parade. Now I’m going to act like some sort of special unit military force? You can’t be serious!”

  And so in the late-night strategy sessions, the Gallaghers and the Whitehall-Wrights came to believe that only Rafie needed to fake his death, that Isabella would, as the widowed princess, soon lose her panache. The world’s eye would turn to Princess Genia and would be content for Isabella to occasionally appear at royal family functions, such as the annual racing ball. Rafie even convinced himself that this was an ideal setup, because it would give her an opportunity to have intimate chats with the royal family and keep him supplied with the gossip and news he would otherwise surely miss.

  It was, as you must realize, a horribly naive notion. Isabella lost none of her panache and, if anything, became even more famous and sought-after. Perhaps things would have gone differently if Geoffrey had not died. But it seems, in retrospect, inevitable that the widowed princess would continue to be the subject of much interest and scrutiny. It is hard to imagine that Geoffrey, Mae, Rafie, and Isabella really thought she could sneak off to America and live quietly with Rafie.

  But that is exactly what they thought. The only subject of debate had been over how to fake the death. Mae had urged a simple plan, and the plan was simply this. Geoffrey and Rafie would take off on an unscheduled predawn run to the royal lodge on the Selbar Isles for a “spontaneous” day of fishing. Geoffrey knew a spot where low-level flying was considered quite dangerous. Rafie would bail out. Geoffrey would put the plane on automatic pilot, on a course to fly into the gray cliffs, and then bail out himself.

  Rafie would swim to Lady Fiona’s seaside compound—which was closed for renovations but always open to the royal family—and would be drinking kiwi cider in the hot tub by the time it became clear that the plane had crashed and Geoffrey was found clinging to his seat cushion.

  Geoffrey would send the rescuers off in the wrong direction, with a fanciful tale of the prince trying to swim for help. In the days that followed, as scuba divers, trained dolphins, swimming dogs, and more than a few reporters in wet suits would try in vain to at least recover the body, Rafie would be slipping out of the country, taking a small boat to Turkey. He would hide there for a few weeks and, with the aid of a fake passport that he had obtained during a long-forgotten presentation on passport forgery by the head of homeland security, Rafie would emigrate to a rural part of the United States. There he would wait for Isabella while preparing applications to online speech pathology programs and building a mansion with an interior courtyard in a remote and forested area near a small midwestern city.


  Rafie’s belief in this plan was unwavering. Mae would say, “Do you really think it could work?” And he would say, “I know it will.”

  Isabella’s part was even simpler. She would stay in Bisbania for a few weeks to attend the funeral and pack her rather voluminous bags. Then she would ask for her privacy and retreat into hiding. Her first hiding place would be half a world away from Rafie, but she would join him once she was reasonably certain that the world had accepted Rafie’s death and the market had dropped for pictures of the royal widow.

  “It’ll give you time to grow that beard, dear,” she would say with a laugh. As it turned out, it gave him more than enough time for that.

  Despite her doubts, Mae liked the plan’s relative simplicity. (You may be thinking it sounds complicated, but consider the options. How would you fake a death? Would you care to attempt to orchestrate a train crash? Ask yourself this: How do you lose a body in a car accident? Would you try to fake a hospital death? With all those witnesses? Many of whom have medical training! Impossible!)

  Still, Mae was gravely concerned that a plane crash would leave Geoffrey under a cloud of suspicion from which he would never emerge. After all, surviving a plane crash that kills the heir to the throne—especially when the heir’s body is never found—is not the sort of event that seals your place in upstanding society. And Mae, in spite of her humble origins and neutral shoes, grew more and more concerned about upstanding society with each day she spent in the castle. She had taken classes aimed at expanding her vocabulary. She had carefully studied the habits and customs of the more senior servants and the more accessible royals. She had come to appreciate being able to throw around names (or even just her address) to get what she wanted in stores and restaurants. “Oh,” she would say when calling the nation’s finest restaurants, “you’re not taking reservations for Friday night? Well, if you change your mind, please call me at Glassidy Castle.”

  Mae did not want to give all that up. She didn’t want to move out of the castle, although she supposed she could hang on to a little minor celebrity if she could just be grandfathered in on the castle invitation lists. And she certainly didn’t want Geoffrey to go to prison. Even given that Isabella would remain as a source of protection for Geoffrey, the plane-crash plan seemed fraught with peril. “What if they ask him to take a lie-detector test?” Mae asked. “He’ll fail! Then what?”

  But Geoffrey was game. Rafie was game. Isabella was game. Mae, the sole holdout, couldn’t withstand the pressure. It’s unfathomable, looking back, that four worldly, sophisticated, decent people hatched and enacted such an evil, dangerous, and stupid plot. Rafie, I believe, thought he had no choice. The royal cage is a cage only of the mind. But a cage of the mind is the strongest cage there is. Rafie did not believe that he could escape his destiny to be king except through death. Royals can do anything, but they somehow don’t realize they can do the one thing that almost all the rest of us started doing as toddlers: disappoint our parents. Rafie’s decision was one of desperation.

  Isabella? I’m not sure I understand her motivation even now. I think she wanted to make her husband happy. She wanted to prove that she did not need the glamour and the glitz of royal life.

  And Mae? Mae was just weak-willed and too optimistic. She lined up all her reasons against the plan and then said, basically, “Ah well, it will probably work out okay.”

  But what about Geoffrey? He was the one with the most to lose, and he did lose the most. The risk he was taking was the most senseless, given that he had nothing to gain from the plan, not privacy nor happiness nor money nor love.

  If the plan had gone as envisioned, he would have lost the life he so enjoyed. He surely would have lost his royal mechanic’s job and the lucrative pay. And he would have lost the daily companionship of Isabella and Rafie. Geoffrey’s act can only be explained as the generous act of friendship.

  I guess.

  But sometimes when I’m in a dark and foul mood, when I have lost my optimistic spirit, when I entertain demons that make me think ill of people and suspect that no one is generous and good, sometimes in those moments, I remember the last time I saw Geoffrey and Isabella together. It was moments after they danced at Princess Iphigenia’s investiture ball. They slipped out onto a balcony and believed themselves alone.

  Geoffrey said, “If you go through with this, you know, there’s no going back. You can’t decide a year from now or a decade from now that it was a big mistake.”

  Isabella just smiled, rolled her eyes toward the tiara she was wearing, and shrugged.

  Geoffrey put his hand on her cheek. “It’s not just that, babe,” he said. “Not just the queen thing. If you do this, you can’t ever leave Rafie. He’ll be dependent on you. He’ll have given up everything for you. You’ll be more married than ever. You can’t back out of that, either.”

  “I’m not going to back out of that,” she said.

  They just stared at each other for a moment or two. He nodded. “Okay, then.”

  She touched his face and leaned forward and whispered something I could not hear. He rubbed his hand along the beading on the waist of her peacock-blue dress, and I felt something pass between them that I did not understand.

  Many times since then, I’ve wondered if the words I heard Geoffrey speak that night were true. If he really thought that Isabella would be more married than ever, or if he secretly dreamed of what Rafie must have feared. I wondered if he thought that Isabella, for all her apparent ambivalence about royal life, had not merely married a crown. Did Geoffrey think he was helping Rafie and Isabella be together? Or did he hope that he was pulling them apart?

  We do not know. Geoffrey took his motivations and the secrets of his heart with him into the icy, stormy sea. Rafie was never able to explain what had gone wrong to Isabella or Mae, and he also never adequately explained the long delay between the crash and the moment when Isabella finally received a call from Lady Fiona’s phone.

  “The plan was going just spick-spack when I bailed,” Rafie said. “Dear Geoffrey, I can’t imagine what happened.”

  Rafie would later tell the women that it took him a little over two hours to reach Fiona’s home—an hour longer than they had planned—in part because he had to stay hidden on the rocky beach for a good half hour while some of Fiona’s neighbors came out to watch the search planes. He was supposed to call Isabella immediately upon reaching the home, but he was so exhausted that he just collapsed on the sofa and napped. Or so he said.

  Isabella clucked sympathetically and stroked his hair, but Mae noticed a faraway look in the princess’s eyes and wondered if she had thought the same thing that Mae had. When Rafie had first broached the sea-crash plan, Geoffrey had opined that the people would never be satisfied if they did not find Rafie’s body. Rafie had dismissed Geoffrey’s concern.

  Mae wondered, had Rafie been confident all along that there would be a body?

  She could not know. She knew only that when Isabella held the American widow’s face between her royal hands there in the home of Lady Carissa’s acquaintance and said that she could demand a full investigation and that everything would come to light and that whatever that would mean is whatever that would mean, Mae made a split-second judgment that she sometimes regretted.

  She said, “No, for then Geoffrey would have died in vain.”

  Chapter 17

  It’s done now. Isn’t it? I look down at my hands, and I see that I am shaking. It has been four days since I wrote the last chapter. I haven’t slept well since. Secrets are hard to keep, but I am learning now that they are sometimes harder to tell. I don’t even know you, but I have spilled to you my worst knowledge, the memories I have held in my heart even while shielding them from my mind for all these many long years. I have hinted to you the darkest suspicions of my soul. I wonder now if that is right. Or if I am just a tired old woman who has had too much time to think.

  Rafie was a good man. I know not one bad thing about him, other than perhaps he us
ed poor judgment in finding a way to get out of the family business. He was exceedingly kind to Mae in the years following the accident. “There, there,” he would say whenever she got weepy. He would pat her arm, hand her a tissue. He would repeat himself as long as he needed to, because he understood that there was no way to elaborate. “There, there,” he would say. “There, there.”

  He offered, in other words, only the good and simple kindness that you would expect of any decent human being. He did not seem motivated by guilt or shame.

  In fact, he was kind enough to her even beforehand.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have said as much as I did. But in the past four days, I have gone over and over the last chapter, and I cannot decide what I would cut. The story that I am telling is important and needs to be understood in all its appropriate context. I cannot presume to know what detail or suspicion or fear was insignificant. So I guess I must include it all.

  Besides, I fear that writing it down is, in and of itself, going beyond where I can turn back. I have, if only while moving my lips silently as I lean over my keyboard, voiced the unspeakable truth, the unbearable suspicions. Deleting them now would make no difference. They have escaped my heart. They are loose in the world. I cannot get them back.

  That is, at least, how I feel.

  The castle’s official mourning lasted one year. During that time, the queen and Princess Iphigenia always wore somber colors. The annual racing ball was suspended, and official banquets did not serve dessert—though after the first few months, the kitchen staff was able to slip in a final fruit course, which was often seasoned a bit with sugar and butter and sometimes cooked with a bit of flour. You know, sort of like cake.