Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle

by Beverly Bartlett

  For all our faults, Isabella and I were civilized, refined, soft-spoken, and modest women. But both of us had in the past few weeks lashed out at this rather vacant and dim photographer. We had attacked him without provocation and with very little point. We had ignored the normal protocols and pleasantries and assumed the worst in this guy who was bringing out the worst in us. And I went on a couple of dates with him and drove Isabella mad with envy.

  None of this has much to do with Joplin, though I guess we both liked his lanky schoolboy frame and disarming smile. For reasons that someone with a psych degree would be better capable of exploring, Joplin was just the stand-in, the person on whom Isabella and I projected all our unspoken rivalries, worries, and longings. Really, he—as a person—meant nothing to me.

  Although I did not realize that at the time, while I spent the rest of the evening and no small part of the early morning with him. Those few hours were a delight that cannot be reproduced in the telling. He complained about what the cold weather does to his camera equipment and compared the ins and outs of photographing stripes, plaid, or polka dots. It sounds boring, put like that. But anything is interesting if you’re interested in it.

  Joplin’s interest was contagious. It was the most stimulating conversation I’d had in a very long time. Then, in the early morning, he talked mostly about the dimple in my left cheek.

  I found that conversation more stimulating still.

  When I returned to Isabella’s house, I went to look in on sleeping Milo and stared at her sweet face and told myself that I was in no position to take up with a much younger American man, a journalist, no less. And that I really must pull myself together. Sternly, I lectured myself. And as I stroked Milo’s hair, I was filled with resolve.

  I really think that if things had been different, my resolve would have held. But that became a moot point, so to, uh, speak.

  Because the next day, in a twist that is fitting for the soap opera that is my life, Joplin was injured in a motorcycle accident, a horrible wreck that stole what had frankly been his already limited way with words and, as is so often the case with head injuries, much of his memory of the events of the previous few weeks.

  He never showed any sign of recognizing me again.

  Though when he learned to talk again, his first word was “pleasably,” according to the volunteer who handled much of his treatment at the Green Bay Clinic of Speech.

  The accident did not at all alter his eye for photography and thus caused only a short pause in his career. He later dedicated one of his best-selling photography books, Princess in Brown Plaid, to that hardworking volunteer- speech-therapist aide. “To my friend Ralph,” the dedication read. “He has not the degree but the heart of a speech pathologist.”

  Chapter 27

  Perhaps now is the right time to tell you what I really think of my daughter’s father, the former prince and the wannabe speech pathologist.

  Mothers have been known to have rather complicated feelings about the fathers of their children. So maybe you’re not surprised that I remain even now conflicted about the prince.

  In those last few months in the castle, as Geoffrey and Isabella were spending more and more time hanging out with the bust of Michelangelo and plotting plane crashes, Rafie and I grew closer, too. We sometimes exchanged looks when Isabella punched Geoffrey’s arm in a familiar way or when Geoffrey batted his eyes at the princess.

  We exchanged a lot of looks, particularly during a protracted discussion about what Geoffrey should be wearing when he was found treading water after the crash. Isabella was thumbing through paramilitary catalogs, giggling and carrying on. “Oh, Geoff, you’d look fantastic in this,” she said, pointing to a futuristic paratrooper ensemble. “I’m sure the tabs would go completely gaga. They’d be waxing on about your heroic self so much, they’d forget all about poor ol’ Rafie and his so-called death.”

  She turned to Raphael then, offered a breezy smile, and said, “No offense, dear.”

  Raphael returned the smile weakly, then cleared his throat and argued modestly that Geoffrey and he were supposed to be flying off for a day of fishing, not launching an air invasion of France. “We don’t want Geoffrey to seem suspiciously styled,” he said.

  “Hmm,” Isabella said. “I suppose not. But it is always important to look nice.”

  She and Geoffrey eventually settled on a khaki-colored cargo-pant outfit that looked suitably rugged in a completely unsuspicious “royal outing to the lodge” way.

  Meanwhile, Raphael and I settled into a comfortable companionship, an unspoken alliance. The prince and I never spoke of our mutual discomfort about our spouses’ relationship, but that shared irritation gave us a launching point, I believe. The prince started asking me more and more about my writing, and I asked him about the latest advances in the treatment of pathologies of speech. I came to be rather fond of him in those days. I often felt invisible when I was around Isabella and Geoffrey, but when Rafie would arrive, I felt noticed again. “What do you think, Mae?” he’d ask. Just a simple question like that, just the use of my name, would thrill me. I came to love spending time with the prince.

  But since then? I’ve already told you that I sometimes wonder if he somehow planned for my husband to die. And I’ve already admitted that he never took an active interest in his daughter. Oh, sure, he gushed and complimented and gave her expensive toys. But he never helped with a single parenting decision, never even acknowledged aloud to me that he was her father until decades had passed and the work was all done.

  Obviously, he is not my hero.

  But this may surprise you. The single biggest disappointment I have about Rafie involves neither my husband nor my daughter, at least not directly. When I think of Rafie, I just feel profound sadness for his failed professional ambitions.

  Everything we went through—Geoffrey’s death, Isabella’s sacrifices, Iphigenia’s woes—and what became of it all? What did Rafie ever accomplish?

  He never became a licensed speech pathologist. He did little more than finish a few University of Phoenix online courses that he registered for under the name Ralph Milopadre. And he never pursued any other legitimate profession.

  He reportedly was an outstanding success as a volunteer speech therapist aide, taking on Joplin’s case especially, but also excitedly reporting to me his progress with a stuttering boy and a lisping girl. Isabella said she had never seen him so passionate about getting up each morning or so eager to apply himself to a field of study.

  “You know the way Geoffrey looked when he was tearing a Bisba apart?” Isabella asked me once. “That cute way he’d squint his eyes? And those little crinkles that would appear on his forehead? When Rafie tries to evaluate the communication skills of an autistic child, he looks just like that.”

  But Princess in Brown Plaid, with Joplin’s kind dedication, marked the end of Rafie’s “career.” Isabella announced his decision to me casually by phone, and she claimed to view it as the wise and prudent move of a man in hiding. “That dedication was a wake-up call,” she said. “He can’t keep working with the public like that.”

  Her voice had an edge to it that I wasn’t used to. She sounded almost bitter. I think she took this personally. Joplin had ruined her husband’s life. I think that’s the way she saw it.

  I suggested the worst was over, that since Raphael had successfully bluffed his way through a relationship with Joplin, the most likely person on earth to expose the prince to the world, then he had nothing to fear from tongue-tied schoolchildren. I pointed out the possibilities of telecommuting, combined with video-image manipulation. Raphael could work with aphasia patients via the Internet while posing as an old woman. “If it’s not possible now, it will be any day,” I said.

  But Isabella just sighed in a resigned way. “You’re always so optimistic, Mae.”

  After the Joplin fiasco, Rafie whiled away the rest of his life reading journal articles on the anatomy of the tongue and throat and writing schol
arly papers that he never submitted for publication. Isabella, who edited those documents with touching care and devotion, said they were impressively researched and astonishingly insightful, uncovering, for example, the role accents play in regional sports rivalries or criticizing the lack of speech defects in the world of children’s television. “You know those things are one long celebration of diversity,” she said, “but there’s not a lisp in sight!” She paused and thought for a moment. “Or, I suppose, in earshot.”

  Isabella was exceptionally proud of one of Rafie’s longer essays, which was entitled “Stammering Toward Bethlehem: The Role of Holiday Pageants in Exacerbating Childhood Speaking Disorders.”

  “It’s perfectly ingenious,” Isabella would say. “And it just breaks my heart, the way he slaves over these things, knowing he’ll never get the glory he deserves, that the world will never see them. It’s so . . .” She struggled for the right word and finally settled on one. “It’s so unfair.”

  My own feelings were less generous. What a waste. That’s how it always seemed to me. Writing papers no one reads? Writing papers based on his careful viewing of televised sports, Nickelodeon, and the cable-access reruns of local church Christmas pageants? What a stupid waste. I thought Rafie was cowardly. Or at least selfish.

  You see, I had bought into the prince’s dream. I had believed on that morning when he and Geoffrey climbed into the royal plane that we were doing something noble and rebellious and somehow right. I remember watching Rafie walk onto the runway, his hair blowing handsomely in the wind, his eyes glorious with excitement. I thought he was on his way to doing great things in speech therapy, that he would help stroke victims and head injury survivors and maybe forever end the mispronunciation of the word “nuclear.”

  In a more general way, I thought we were striking a blow for everyone everywhere who wanted to put one over on the establishment, who wanted to disappoint their families, who believed they would be better off if they weren’t so well off.

  After all that, how could Rafie let himself be so easily intimidated? How could he give up on the actual practice of speech pathology? And how could Isabella feel sorry for him for doing so?

  I am a reasonable person. Even then I could see why Joplin’s dedication gave Rafie and Isabella a moment of pause. I understood there were risks to seizing Rafie’s dream. But I thought it was too late to worry about that. I had lost Geoffrey. I didn’t want to hear about risk.

  I thought Geoffrey had given up his life for something more than Rafie’s ability to write unpublished papers about the English language as experienced through television. The only thing more pathetic than Rafie’s “work,” I thought, was Isabella’s tender defense of it and her delusional belief that her husband was a put-upon victim of circumstance rather than an extraordinarily lucky child of fortune.

  I suppose I have said too much. I’ll go back later and delete most of this, I’m sure. It wouldn’t do at all for Milo to read all those hateful words about her now dearly departed father, even if he never did anything to claim his parentage beyond using her name for online speech pathology courses and in volunteer work that he quickly quit. And insisting that she learn the useless language peculiar to her biological family. To Milo, I always try to preserve a happy story, a simple indication that her father had great potential but world events conspired to hold him back.

  That was, I guess, Isabella’s take on things. And now that I’ve had a few decades to sleep on it, I can admit that it’s true. Mostly true. Arguably true. Not, at least, completely false.

  Now I can look back and see that it was a crazy dream. How could he hide from the world and work in the world at the same time? It seemed possible in theory, when we were all sitting around Michelangelo’s bust and drinking exotic cider blends. But I guess I can understand now how impossible it seemed to him when he actually stood at the front door with his book bag of speech therapy texts.

  Maybe his reluctance wasn’t laziness or sloth. Maybe he was just scared. Maybe he was afraid to venture out in the world as an ordinary man, scared to go to school and be graded, scared to take a job and be judged on his merits, scared even to send off his research to a journal and see what happened, scared to no longer be called “Your Highness.” He never had Isabella’s bravado. Maybe her early days as a princess had toughened her up. She could sign up for a class in flower arranging and not care if her teacher judged her centerpieces as utterly ordinary. She could teach herself to whittle and not be embarrassed by a few nicks on her hands. After you’ve been publicly called “Dizzy Izzy,” after your nose spray has been documented on the front page of newspapers, you are immune to embarrassment.

  But Raphael’s ego was not as stout. Maybe he feared he could never live up to the lofty goals that Isabella and I had for him, that his papers would not prove to be perfectly ingenious, and that he wouldn’t really help anyone at all. Maybe he was frightened of letting Isabella or me down. Or Geoffrey.

  It took me a while to see it that way, to feel sympathy for Rafie. But Isabella felt sorry for Rafie right from the beginning.

  “Poor Rafie,” she’d say. “Poor Rafie.” She never noticed me roll my eyes and cringe and bristle at her words. “Poor, poor Rafie,” Isabella would say. “All he wanted was to hold my hand when I was giving birth to Milo.”

  Chapter 28

  Had I not mentioned that?

  I’ve gone on and on about His Royal Highness the Prince of Gallagher being Milo’s biological father. But it occurs to me now that I did not mention the name of her biological mother. It’s not something I like to think about. And I have obviously not been in the habit of discussing it.

  Isabella gave birth to Milo while we were at Jeb’s camp, and so it was I who was there during the princess’s labor, holding her hand and mopping her brow and counting her breaths and telling her when to push. It was a frightening time. It was a long, difficult labor, and there was no doctor at the camp and no way to quickly get to a hospital—not that Isabella would consider going anyway.

  “No one can know,” she would say, sounding as pathetic as the most pitiful pregnant thirteen-year-old. “No one can know.”

  When I look back on it now, I get so, so angry with Isabella. How dare she put Milo through all that? How dare she risk so much for so many of us?

  But in fairness, I’m glad that she didn’t simply fly off to Paris and use the best birthing centers in the world and tell everyone that she was pregnant and thus negate the blow to the royal family that we thought we had delivered. For Raphael and Isabella could not escape royal life while raising the heir to the throne, even if the prince was doing it holed up somewhere with a long beard and sunglasses. As long as Isabella was the known mother to the heir, the family’s life would be tied to the ups and downs of the royal calendar, with the flurry of activities around the racing season and the quiet that came only after the last day when parliament met.

  Isabella said she did not know she was pregnant when we launched the faked plane crash, and if she had known, she would have called off the whole thing. “Obviously,” she would say, although it never was at all obvious to me.

  Given that Milo was born six months after the crash and weighed nine pounds at birth, I found it hard to believe that Isabella did not know, though she could be awfully absentminded at times and easily distracted to boot. The timing of Isabella’s pregnancy lines up almost exactly with Secrest’s departure on her own maternity leave, a fact that to this day fills me with astonishment and wonder. Could it be that Secrest left no one in charge of the royal birth control pill? And that Isabella, unaccustomed to having to look after herself, never noticed? Is it possible that my daughter was conceived simply because of a lack of efficiency among the castle staff?

  I never asked. For one thing, in those days I had trouble getting a word in edgewise with Isabella.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said to me over and over again on the night I finally guessed that she was pregnant. Despite the meager ration
s of the camp, she’d been gaining weight, and I had noticed her hair was looking exceptionally full and healthy (hormones).

  I hugged her then and reassured her. And I told her we’d figure something out. But she came to me the next day, sounding more confident than ever.

  “You’ll raise the baby, Mae,” she said. “It’s the only option that makes sense. We’ll use the camp’s baptismal records, such as they are.”

  (Camp record keeping was, as you might imagine, ridiculously minimalist. Jeb was not big on file cabinets.)

  “You’ll be listed as the mother,” she continued. “No formal adoption will be necessary. Rafie and I will pay the bills, of course. Whatever you need. Money’s no object.” She paused a moment. “And we’d love to babysit now and then.” She looked at her feet modestly and added, “If you’ll let us.”

  She then forced a smile and threw up her hands with what I perceived to be feigned bravado. “Voilà!” she said. “Problem solved.”

  She wiped her right eye discreetly.

  Looking back on it, I realize she never even asked me if I was willing.

  Why did Isabella do it?

  She wanted to protect the child from the rigors of royal life, she said. And she wanted to live in solitude with Rafie and cut her ties to the royal family, something she couldn’t do while raising the heir to the throne. It’s one thing to hide Raphael from the world, but a child would need to go to school, to ride roller coasters, to keep playdates. Isabella could hide a husband but not a child.

  A sacrifice was in order. And later, during one of the endless discussions in which Isabella explained her decision again and again, she even quoted lyrics from the Springsteen song “Spare Parts,” in which an unwed mother hocks an engagement ring to support her child. To me, the song’s story line seemed to argue for almost exactly the opposite course of action. But I did not point this out.