I had followed Isabella during her mysterious exile, and then I followed her home. After I returned, I attended one of the events that commemorated the king’s death. They were all sad and solemn, of course. But the later ones had an underlying, shall I say, life to them, which made for politically tricky posturing. You had to appear to enjoy the party without seeming like you were glad there was an occasion for one.
I saw Isabella enter the building from afar. She was announced, and all eyes turned toward her and her beige suit (dubbed a “coffee-and-cream-colored confection of refined class” in Ethelbald’s column the next day).
But she did not see me—just another face in navy—until we bumped into each other in the women’s room. She surprised me by squealing with delight and hugging my neck and complimenting my dress, as if she sincerely liked the color. “You clean up great,” she said.
I suppose I thought now that we were back in our old world, she would treat me in the old way. But the stress of returning, of once again being surrounded by so many things and so many eyes and so much excess, had unnerved her. She honestly seemed happy to see me.
She asked me if I’d had my first good cup of cider yet, and if I had been brushing my teeth all day long, as she had. “I had forgotten,” she said, “how marvelous clean teeth feel.”
I laughed and said, “Well, at least then you’ll have a hobby in Green Bay. You can brush your teeth all day and night.”
We were slaphappy and silly and feeling unreasonably clean and young. Right then we heard something hit the floor in the stall closest to us, and then someone cleared her throat. Isabella and I stared at each other, silently and frantically trying to remember exactly what we had said.
Had I actually said “Green Bay,” or did I say something safe like “your new home”? In that panicky moment, neither of us was sure.
And then a heavyset, somewhat mannish woman stepped out of the stall and adjusted her strapless black ball gown.
“Well, hello,” Isabella said in her brightest and most engaging voice. “I didn’t realize we had company. I hope we haven’t been boring you with our nonsensical patter.”
Ethel Bald shook her head shyly, clearly wishing she had not dropped her purse and called attention to herself. “Oh, dear no, Your Highness,” she said with the sort of awkward curtsy that commoners always offer up. “Were you talking? I was rather absorbed with a . . . ” Ethel Bald’s voice trailed off at this point as she apparently realized there wasn’t much that she could claim to be absorbed with in a bathroom stall, especially to a princess. “Um. With a family, eh, issue.” That had probably seemed like a good line when she started it, but she furrowed her brow in what appeared to be a regretful way when she got to the word “issue.” Really, the word “issue” has an entirely different connotation when connected with bathroom stalls, doesn’t it? Or perhaps she was worried that it sounded like some of her family members were still in the stall, because she continued by saying, “Thinking about it, I mean. The, um, issue, I was thinking of.”
Another furrowed brow. “You know how family is,” she continued, then gamely attempted a smile.
But that was all wrong, and each of the three of us winced, though Isabella tried to hide it. Isabella was, at least supposedly, still a relatively recent widow and attending a memorial service for her late father-in-law. This is not the sort of circumstance in which you joke about the trials of putting up with relatives.
“I suppose,” Ethel Bald continued in a misguided attempt to cover up that mistake, “I should just be glad they’re alive.” She winced again. “Not that I wouldn’t still love them if they were dead.”
For a writer, she could be awfully awkward with words.
“Of course,” said Isabella, trying to put on a chatty persona that would suggest it was perfectly ordinary for her to drag out conversations with babbling commoners who spontaneously and loudly emerge from bathroom stalls to say inappropriate things. Isabella needed to gauge who this person was and whether she had overheard anything that threatened Isabella and her not-really-dead husband. “Where is your family from?” Isabella asked, uncharacteristically ending her sentence with a preposition.
In all her years of sneaking about at royal balls and castle events, Ethel Bald had never faced a grilling like this. She looked positively panicked. “Um. Well. Here and there,” she said. When Isabella did not leap in to fill the awkward silence, Ethel Bald made a rookie mistake. The first thing you are taught in journalism school is that you should never be the one to fill an awkward silence. You should always let the other person rush into the silence. That is how you get your best information.
But Ethel Bald was down on her game. She was nervous, and it showed. She panicked and kept talking, sharing the first thing that came into her head, which was, unfortunately for her, the truth. (It almost always is—that is precisely the reason journalists are taught to let the other person fill the silence.) “Mostly, I guess,” Ethel Bald accurately reported, “from America.”
“Oh,” Isabella exclaimed, a bit too enthusiastically, I thought. “I went to school in America! It’s a lovely country, you know.”
There was another silence, and this time Isabella rushed to fill it. Neither of these women would have made it on 60 Minutes, I could see that.
“It’s so . . .” Isabella struggled to find the right words. “So casual and, well . . . big! Silly me, I haven’t even introduced myself. I’m Isabella,” she said, knowing full well that the strange woman was already aware of that. “They call me the Princess of Gallagher.”
Ethel Bald nodded. “Pleased to meet you.”
“And you are?” Isabella said in the royal way that seems absolutely nonjudgmental but nevertheless embarrasses people for not having already introduced themselves. “Oh,” Ethel Bald said. “I’m Ethel.” Pause. “It’s an old-fashioned American name, you know. But I consider myself Bisbanian through and through. Born here. Put myself through school by working in the fig orchards. Husband is in the royal engineer corps. Last name is Bald.”
Something flashed across her face. Did she wish she hadn’t said that?
Isabella said it was a delight to meet her, and she later told me that we were all clear. “We may need to be paranoid,” she said. “But we do not need to be so paranoid that we’re worried about the chunky and slightly mannish wives of royal engineers. Besides, we didn’t say anything that interesting. It’s not like you actually mentioned Green Bay by name.”
But I wondered. For I have a lot in common with Ethel Bald. I know a little about ugly old-fashioned American names, and I know a little about awkwardly blurting out the truth, and I know the way a journalist holds her eyes when she does not want to reveal too much of herself to the subjects of her stories. And I thought I had used the words “Green Bay.”
Besides, I caught something that Isabella didn’t. The woman’s name was Ethel Bald.
Then Ethelbald Candeloro broke the Green Bay story. So I knew. I called “him” and told him that I knew his secret. “He” said that was okay. He had been expecting my call. He’d been rattled by our encounter in the bathroom, so he’d been doing some research. He was pleased to tell me that he knew my secret as well.
Then he slipped into a dreamy, philosophical voice and told me he was almost glad that someone had found out. He had, for a long time, wanted to be able to tell someone, and he guessed that someone was me. He wanted to be able to say out loud that he never meant to do it, but the editor had thought he was a man, and he was afraid if he told the truth, he wouldn’t get the job.
I said that was well and good. But I told him I wasn’t the least bit glad that someone had learned my secret, and for the record, I could claim no such innocence. My secret came of a deliberate and conscious act, and I’d do it again if I had to. I had worked too hard for too long to let something like this humiliate me.
I said I wouldn’t tell his secret, if he would not tell mine. And we agreed not to push each other’s buttons. Until
now.
Chapter 19
While Ethelbald and I were sharing secrets on the phone, pundits the world over were scrambling to outdo one another with moral outrage about “Mean Queen Gene” and her decision to banish Isabella to “Nowheresville.”
The American press was a bit kinder. To Green Bay, I mean. Not to Iphigenia, who was immediately seized upon as the villain by all commentators. But even while waxing on about Mean Gene, the American editorialists saved a bit of venom to take umbrage at overly harsh criticisms of the princess’s new home, which was not, strictly speaking, in Green Bay but was instead in a wooded region just north of there.
Although, make no mistake about it, even the Americans did not approve.
“While Green Bay hardly deserves the ‘Nowheresville’ label applied by European press snobs,” wrote one Detroit columnist, “it is a bit remote and lacks some of the urban charms that the princess enjoys.”
“She’s not a princess anymore!” Queen Iphigenia whined to her ladies-in-waiting. “That was the whole point.”
The ladies-in-waiting knew that it wasn’t exactly the point. But they were too kind to say so to the new queen. Instead, they diplomatically tsked and tutted and said it would surely all blow over soon.
For her part, Isabella was terribly disappointed that the news of her location had leaked out already. She was, I suppose, still heady from her stunning and successful disappearance after the crash. And while she had no intention of going to the lengths necessary to do that again, she had hoped to keep things under wraps at least until she had quietly moved into the Green Bay home that Raphael had designed for the two of them.
It was, by royal standards, a small cabin—a mere forty rooms and fifteen thousand square feet. (Raphael had been siphoning money into a Swiss bank account for several months before the crash, although apparently not enough to build the eighty-room home he dreamed of.) But the locals undoubtedly still considered it a castle, with its showy architecture, its indoor pool, and most notably its Biosphere-esque covered interior courtyard, complete with riding court, hiking trail, and the usual mum garden.
Construction on the project, which Raphael had supervised while wearing flannel shirts and passing himself off as an eccentric and secretive Vermont billionaire, was not quite finished when Ethelbald Candeloro broke the Green Bay story—a scoop that seemed inexplicable and mysterious to Isabella at the time and which had not, until this book, been publicly explained.
Isabella’s fear was understandable. She had sacrificed a great deal for this moment. Her title, the life of her beloved adviser, twenty-four months of adequate dental hygiene. More than that, really. I haven’t even gotten to the big one.
Isabella had, in pursuit of Raphael’s silly dream, spent the past two years living in positively miserable conditions. Most people, incorrectly assuming Isabella’s gaunt look and sackcloth attire had more to do with fashion than anything else, thought she must have been living in some lush, well-staffed tropical resort. But it is no exaggeration to say that some prisoners of war lived better than Isabella did in those years. Her appearance might have shocked and offended the queen, but she had come dressed exactly as she should have, according to all royal handbooks. She had come to see the queen wearing the best that she had.
If the queen, if the world, had any idea how modestly Isabella had lived and dressed while she was away—I don’t know that they ever could have understood it. I’m not sure I understood it, and I was living right there with her almost the whole time, sleeping on the same dirt floors and forgoing manicures just like she was.
So it was understandable that, after all the princess had gone through, she was upset when the location of her new home was reported before the construction was complete and before Raphael was settled into his basement bunker. He had planned to hole up there for several months, long enough so that his flannel-shirt-wearing persona would have softened a bit in the contractors’ minds and would not seem suggestive of the famously dead Bisbanian prince—not even after they learned that the famously widowed Bisbanian princess was “buying” the place and moving in.
Instead, Ethelbald Candeloro’s scoop spread around the world before Isabella could relay a warning to her husband. A news bulletin about her move came over Green Bay radio at perhaps the worst possible moment. Raphael was standing in the cabin’s dining hall, a bit too regally, he thought later, complaining to the electrician about a glare from the secondary chandeliers. The radio announcer launched into the news bulletin, and the electrician turned toward the radio, seeming to listen carefully. The prince gulped but rallied gamely. He said “dang” and “golly” and then allowed that perhaps if the princess was looking for a new home in the area, she would “take this mess of a place off my hands.”
“Assuming,” the prince added with a snort, “she doesn’t mind bad lighting.” He then retreated quickly.
It was a close call, and Isabella was not happy at all when she later heard about it. Actually, she wasn’t happy about a lot of things when she arrived in Green Bay. I don’t mean to imply that she was not appropriately ecstatic to be back with her husband. They were, by all accounts, silly lovebirds in their first few weeks back together. (And when I say “all” accounts, I mean his account and her account, because for the first time in their lives, there was no one else present to watch them.) Rafie fussed over her constantly, urging her to gain back some of the weight she had lost and defying every royal sensibility there is by lovingly brushing her hair. Meanwhile, Isabella doted on her husband in unimaginably common ways, ironing his shirts, no less, and attempting to perfect a spaghetti-sauce recipe he found in a magazine.
Despite her happiness at being with Rafie, she thought he had made some questionable decisions in planning their new home. For example, there were no electrical outlets in Isabella’s makeup and grooming room, forcing her to run an extension cord into the nearby closet. “Just when I was looking forward to an electric toothbrush and a regular blow-dry,” she said.
Worse still, he had chosen, at the suggestion of the construction workers, a Packers color scheme, a look that required various green and gold combinations, none of them particularly pleasing. (In some parts of the world, the city of Green Bay is celebrated—mostly by the color-blind, I fear—for its support of the Packers, a legendary team in American football.) The unfortunate palette was carried into even the mum garden, which was inconveniently placed near the screened-in breakfast area. Have I mentioned that Bisbania mums are somewhat odiferous?
“Really, darling, what were you thinking,” Isabella would say in a regular teasing refrain that grew somewhat less good-natured over the years. “We can’t even have cider and toast out here, much less a full fig-pancake breakfast. I’m sure we’d become quite ill.”
The whole castle made Isabella ill, truth be told. (I mean, obviously. Green and gold?) During the two years of what the press was by then calling her “mysterious first exile,” the princess had developed some rather Spartan sensibilities. Don’t get me wrong. Isabella was definitely ready to return to normal nail maintenance, pressed clothing, and brushed silk. Still, the huge Green Bay home and its garish color scheme made her uncomfortable in a way she could not have predicted before the crash.
Isabella was, however, smart enough to see the reality of her situation. She wanted to be with Rafie. To live with him again required a home so large and well equipped and self-contained that he could hide there for weeks or months or years at a time without leaving. Furthermore, it needed to be well off the beaten path of the worldly and wise and smack dab in the middle of the incurious and dull. Green Bay, she came to see, was perfect.
Oh dear. The Green Bay Chamber of Commerce will no doubt swamp me with complaint letters. But I assure you I mean no offense. I suppose it would be disingenuous to say that I mean the “incurious and dull,” remark as a compliment. But when I say “incurious and dull,” I mean a very specific quality, an outlook born out of honest self-satisfaction. Green Bay is a pla
ce that is happily content with itself.
A city with a less content populace would have been deeply suspicious of the princess’s decision to live within it and would have picked and pried and nagged at her. But it made perfect sense to average Green Bay residents that a beloved princess would choose their city as her home. After all, hadn’t their own great-great-grandfathers made the same choice? They had. And had any of their ancestors in the subsequent generations seen any reason to leave? They had not.
Those big cities with all their urban charms had less free parking, more crime, and fewer professional athletes per capita. If the most famous and photographed woman in the world wanted to move to their city, Green Bay’s reaction was: “What took her so long?”
Ethelbald Candeloro’s scoop may have caught Rafie and Isabella unprepared, but it ended up making no difference. The workers who built Rafie and Isabella’s new home never questioned the identity of the flannel-shirted man who planned the building that the princess moved into. What were they supposed to question, really? Were they supposed to think he was the prince? The prince was dead. Everyone knew that. Besides, that guy was clearly from Vermont.
Incurious, dull, bad with accents.
I stand by my assessment.
Green Bay had one last thing going for it as far as Isabella was concerned: the city’s year-round devotion to the Packers. It wasn’t that the princess cared much about sports. She rarely took in even a real football game and certainly had no interest in the bastardized version that Americans play. Still, she appreciated that Green Bay’s success in football not only served to distract the local populace but also significantly distorted the world’s perception of the place. Oh sure, royal commentators the world over wrote stories about Green Bay’s lack of urban charms, but truthfully, no one—not even Ethelbald Candeloro—thought it was as atrocious as the pundits let on. They thought it was dreadful compared to New York or London or Paris. Well, maybe not dreadful compared to Paris, which Bisbanians detested along with the rest of France. But dreadful compared to anyplace you would actually imagine the princess living. Green Bay seemed, simply, too downscale.
Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle Page 14