Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle

by Beverly Bartlett

It was clear that Isabella’s mind was made up. And if she had any second thoughts about it as the pregnancy wore on, I think they were quelled by what happened to Geoffrey. I had lost him, thanks to her and Rafie. After that, how could she offer me this child and then change her mind?

  She never said that, but she must have thought it. Maybe that was part of what she was thinking that night at the campfire when she talked about penance, about what she deserved.

  Conversely, perhaps she did not really feel like she was giving up that much. You could argue that most royal parents have the sort of relationship that Isabella proposed having with her daughter. They provide financial support and occasional babysitting, and that’s about it. Isabella perhaps did not know what she would be losing.

  Because if she had really understood the enormity of it, if she had any true understanding of what this decision would mean, I think it would have killed her, torn her little heart apart. There would have been a lot more scenes like the one at the elementary school when she got all weepy and leaned on Iphigenia for support. There would have been a few late-night phone calls wondering how the baby was doing. There would have been some obvious regret.

  At least there would have been if it had been me in her shoes. But Isabella and I were always made of different stuff.

  I have often thought, over the years, about what sort of mother Isabella would have been. She seems to have excelled at everything she attempted, and why would parenting have been any different?

  But it is different, isn’t it?

  Before Milo came along, I resented it when people told me that until I was a parent myself, I could not understand the love of a parent for a child, couldn’t imagine, for example, how the loss of a child would hurt a parent. I thought that as a reasonable person, I could imagine. But I was a mother for only a few months when I realized that all along, there had been a dimension of the relationship that I had been missing.

  I had understood that children, babies especially, are adorable and sweet and innocent and trusting, and that makes it all the worse when harm comes to them. I understood that you expect them to be your legacy and it hits you hard if they’re not.

  But what I did not understand was the investment—the emotional, physical, and financial investment—that you put into a child. You spend all that time trying to protect this little person. You pick at diaper rash. You do ridiculous coochy-coo dances. You berate yourself for doing something as irresponsible as letting a coin fall from your pocket onto the floor, where a little one might pick it up and decide to taste it. She gets a nasty bump to the head, and you ride in the ambulance and hold her hand and make deals with God. You put so much of yourself into this project, and then to see it cut short by some idiot drunk driver or some incompetent doctor or some stupid, warmongering politician? It prompts a rage that I confess I could not previously imagine.

  Those of you who can imagine that sort of rage may also understand the misgivings I have about what I’ve done here. I have opened up a new world for my beautiful daughter, but I have also exposed her to so much—to photographers with telephoto lenses, to tabloid journalists with sensational appetites, to power-hungry men, to jealous women.

  Isabella knows that better than anyone.

  “Being a princess,” Isabella once said to me, “is like being a bunny caught in one of those inhumane traps. You might survive, but you’ll be a bloody mess.”

  Isabella knows what awaits Milo. That’s the reason that she will be so upset at me for telling this story. It has nothing to do with any of the men in our lives. Her irritation with me will be all about what happened to us two women and the daughter we share. All these decades after Isabella, weepy and miserable and pregnant in the desert sun, cried that no one could know, finally everyone will know.

  Over the years, as Isabella worried about keeping Milo secret, I have been preoccupied with what is arguably the exact opposite question. While she fretted about who would find out, I wondered about who had known all along.

  Did Rafie know? Did he fake his death knowing that he had a child on the way and knowing that child would either have to be raised in hiding or raised away from him?

  I’m not sure.

  More interesting still is this question: Did Geoffrey know?

  I have already allowed that I sometimes fear my husband’s motivations for helping Isabella’s husband give up royal life were less than noble. I sometimes wonder if he thought Isabella might lose interest in Rafie in that situation, that she might decide that if she was going to take up with a commoner, then it might as well be the good-looking, mechanically inclined one who isn’t in hiding all the time.

  But I suppose you realize now, there is more to it than that. I think about the night before the crash, when I saw Isabella and Geoffrey talking on the balcony during the investiture ball. I think about the way he moved his hand along the beading at her waist, about the way they were whispering. I wonder if he knew baby Milo was on the way and if that figured into his plans, explaining his willingness to go along with it all.

  Did Isabella convince him that she did not want her child born into a line of succession that seemed to make every member—from Lady Carissa to Prince Raphael—miserable? Or was it a worse version? Did Geoffrey see Isabella’s ties to the country, the throne, the family, all growing stronger with the birth of a child, making it harder to eventually walk away? Did he think it was his last chance? Did he think she needed to start down the road of walking away from it all before she had a baby that she wanted to give it all to?

  But then what did Geoffrey envision would happen to the baby? Did he think that Isabella would raise the child, consulting Springsteen lyrics when it came time to pick a diaper-rash remedy or to select a preschool? Did Geoffrey, who knew Isabella so well, know that she would do what she did, give the child to me to raise? And did he plan to be at my side when she did it?

  That is the daydream that pulled me through difficult, lonely days for all those many difficult, lonely years: the idea that Geoffrey thought he and I would be raising Milo in a mountainside apartment in Bisbania’s southern working-class suburbs.

  I do not know if that wistful daydream could be related even vaguely to the truth. And you can’t know, either. I am self-aware enough to understand that anyone reading this story will not know what to make of it. I suspect that at best you are withholding judgment. You are wondering when the DNA tests will be in. You are certainly skeptical.

  So, fine. Order the tests and be done with it. There are few things that any of us can know with certainty. But as I said, I was standing there when Isabella pushed and labored and when Milo first appeared in the world. I know perfectly well that Milo is the biological daughter of the Princess of Gallagher, the most famous and most photographed woman in the world. And that alone ought to be enough to secure her place in upstanding Bisbanian society.

  But.

  But though I promised myself that I would reveal here only the things that would benefit my daughter, I find that once I’ve come this far, I can’t stop my truth telling. So I will tell you the one thing that has always bothered me a little and that worries me still.

  Needless to say, I was not there when Milo was conceived, so I have only Isabella’s account of who was involved. I decided long ago to take her at her word, and so I have to this day proceeded under the assumption that the young woman I raised is the natural child of His and Her Royal Highnesses, the Prince and Princess of Gallagher.

  When I look at Milo, I see Isabella’s posture, her regal nose, her fine bones, and her figure, which can tend toward frumpiness but with attention and diligence can achieve a womanly grace that the naturally thin can never hope for. I can imagine that I see the prince, too. I see his handsome ears. (Fortunately for Milo, they work better with a woman’s longer hairstyles.) I think I see his forehead and hear a bit of his laugh.

  But the prince and princess are both fair- and fine-headed. And Milo has dark thick curls. Sometimes I wonder if she could ha
ve inherited them from the Lady Carissa, the raven beauty who would be her great-aunt.

  And on other days, I wonder if she could have inherited them from Geoffrey, who I guess would, in that case, be her father.

  Chapter 29

  I remember seeing a television interview with a philosopher once. The reporter was doing a story about troubling custody cases, elaborate, outlandish situations, some involving surrogate mothers giving birth to their own aunts.

  “Who, then, are the parents?” asked the reporter in an alarmist tone.

  But the philosopher said the answer was simple. The parents are the people who come when the baby cries at night.

  No one doubts that, really. I certainly don’t, having raised a child I did not birth, having known how the simple acts of cleaning dirty bottoms and holding tiny hands while crossing busy streets serve to completely and utterly tie your heart to a child. In this age of genetic manipulation and experimentation, it is amazing that adoption—the oldest form of genetic trickery—still stands as mysterious and powerful. It shows how human will can erase all of science. Adoption is the act that says, “This child is mine. Biology be damned.” And it is so.

  I’m the one who put my hand on Milo’s small chest a thousand times a night to see if she was still breathing. I’m the one who taught her to ride a bike. It was I who agonized about her relationship with that awful guy she dated in high school. I’m the one she called at three A.M. when she had questions about her own child’s colic or fever. For all those reasons, I am Milo’s mother.

  By that definition, she has no father. Which doesn’t seem right. Some would say that she must have a father, but it is only a dad she is missing. And that is a linguistic distinction of some merit. But I think that in Milo’s case, she is missing both. The uncertainty I’ve felt about her parentage has colored, as you might guess, my whole life as a mother.

  Once this story is published, genetic tests—undoubtedly supervised by the royal courts—are inevitable. I have played out the whole scene in my head. I assume that Queen Iphigenia will be tested for the royal family’s DNA, since Raphael is not available. The doctors will come discreetly to the castle for that.

  But neither Milo nor Isabella will be afforded such dignity. Milo will surely be rattled by the extraordinary media presence, the crush of the cameras, the stares of the reporters. But for a moment, at least, they will be treating her gently. Milo will be novel and beautiful and mysterious, and they will marvel that she may be queen. So for that one day, at least, the press will be kind.

  But poor Isabella. I can imagine the rude questions that will be shouted at her, the violent way the reporters will push up against her as she is escorted into the hospital. When I imagine this, I always assume she would wear a brown scarf over her hair and hold her eyes in a downcast manner. “Please,” she would say, “please let me through.”

  It’s a horrible image.

  But what really unnerves me are the test results themselves.

  If those tests find that Isabella lied to me and Geoffrey is the father, it would just kill me. I don’t know how I would continue. I can’t stand to think about it.

  Though it does make a certain kind of sense. I’m sure you’ve thought of that already, realized that it would explain so much if this whole sordid business could have been born, so to speak, of a need to keep the bastard child of an American car mechanic off the throne.

  Wouldn’t that explain Raphael and Isabella’s reactions? What if Isabella gave Milo to me because she thought it would be wrong to ask Raphael to raise Geoffrey’s child? What if Raphael kept such an emotional distance from Milo because he feared, or knew, that she was not really his?

  For those reasons, I fear the tests might show Geoffrey is Milo’s father.

  But if the tests show Geoffrey is not the father? If the tests prove that Isabella told me the truth and my daughter is the biological child of Rafie and thus the legitimate heir to the throne? That is my entire reason for telling this story, to give my daughter the opportunity to be queen. But if the tests prove Rafie is her father, that, too, will disappoint me, break my heart in a way that is harder to explain. I do not, of course, want to have been betrayed by my husband. But if Geoffrey was Milo’s father—as much as I would have hated what it meant all those years ago—I would rather like what it would mean right now. It would mean that I have raised the child of the man I loved. And there would be an honor in that, a privilege I can’t deny. Also, simply enough, I would like to know that a part of him still exists in the world.

  So I lived a dual fantasy. I came to accept a version of events in which my husband’s fidelity to me never faltered, but in which he was the father of the child whom Isabella birthed. Is that so irrational? If I can be Milo’s mother without giving her my genetic material, can’t Geoffrey somehow be her father?

  One night when Milo was old enough to go out alone, I found myself, for the first time in years, at home by myself. I was so lonely, so awfully lonely and sad. And I did something I have never admitted to anyone and that I’m not proud to admit now. I pulled out a box of Geoffrey’s personal effects. I got out his journal. I read it.

  It was the strangest body of work I could imagine, beautiful and elegant. Geoffrey’s humble vocabulary had sometimes masked for me the complexity of his writing, the beauty of his observations. And here he wrote in a lovely and longing way about the beauty of nature and the simple wonder of a finely tuned engine and the poetic mystery that exists in a well-executed hand of poker. He talked about falling in love with Bisbanian horse racing and about the majesty of the Bisbanian skyline.

  During the time he kept this journal, he was advising the world’s most famous woman on every aspect of life, from fashion to royal politics. But he mentioned none of it. And he didn’t mention me. The entire drama of my life centers on my dear husband, who did not see fit to chronicle any of the pertinent details in the lovely journal that he wrote in diligently each night.

  Except for one page, one page that makes my heart clutch. On the night before the plane crash, he wrote only a few lines, lines that I have memorized and seared into my soul.

  “Been happier these last few months than I’d ever hoped to be,” he wrote. “All going to change tomorrow. Don’t know how it will go down. Know this: going to live out my life with the best gal in the world. My dear Belle.”

  Chapter 30

  I’ve always been a little obsessed about names. I tend to go on and on about the issue, chatting for hours about the way people acquire nicknames and drop middle names and combine surnames. People ultimately do choose for themselves what they’re called—I think I’ve mentioned that before—and the choice they make is almost always significant.

  In fact, if I think back to the days in the castle when we were putting the finishing touches on the plot to fake Raphael’s death, the debate I remember most clearly was over the question “Ralph or Raul?”

  The prince thought it should be his choice, and his choice was Ralph. “I must insist,” he said. “It is my name.”

  But Isabella would have none of that nonsense. “Don’t be silly, honey,” she said. “No one chooses his own name! Besides, I can’t fathom calling you Ralph. It sounds positively American.” She paused dramatically and finished with a flourish. “I would gag.”

  Raphael pointed out that sounding American was rather the point.

  Isabella sighed in an overly patient, seemingly bored way. “I know,” she said. “But it’s supposed to sound like modern America. They don’t go for generic names anymore. America is quite cosmopolitan now, even in Green Bay. They like style. They like panache. They like mystery. They like Raul.”

  “Mystery?” Raphael was incredulous. “Isn’t it Spanish? What’s so mysterious about Spain? It’s like France, only with bad shoes.”

  Isabella ignored him. “Ralph is the sort of name they would give a cow,” she said. (The Bisbanian royal family is not fond of cattle, or any other large, thick mammals.) “I might a
s well start calling myself Bessie. Or Daisy or, or, or . . . Mabel.” She spit out that last one with a disgusted snort. But then she looked at me awkwardly and smiled weakly.

  “No offense,” she whispered. “The name Mae is quite smart, couldn’t be less like Mabel. Like a spring day, Mae is.” Her brow furrowed as if that did not sound quite right to her. “Or, you know, a whole spring month.” She smiled with satisfaction at that and then made a gesture toward the clear sky. “Simply lovely.”

  Then she glanced at Raphael in a way that I suspect meant: “Exhibit A.”

  My interest in names got the better of me then. I could keep silent no longer, though it would seem that Rafie’s alias was none of my concern. But I had a sister named Elsie, and I’d seen her put up with cow jokes her whole life. This was a pet cause with me.

  “Cows aren’t really named things like that, you know,” I said.

  The prince and princess both turned to look at me.

  “It’s all propaganda from the butter companies,” I continued, sounding more authoritative than I felt.

  Isabella rolled her eyes and looked off into the distance.

  “Cows are named things like Heifer 527, and most bulls aren’t named anything at all. It’s straight to the butcher block for them.”

  Isabella cleared her throat and looked at her nails. She wasn’t accustomed to commoners talking about butcher blocks. Or arguing with her.

  “And besides,” I said, “those sorts of wholesome, old-fashioned ‘gal’ names—‘British barmaid names,’ they called them—were all the rage for fashionable parents back when we were born.”

  I wished I hadn’t volunteered the British part. Or the bit about barmaids. But it was a trend, dammit. Isabella ought to be able to understand that. I kept blabbering.

  “At least hip parents, parents who studied trends and read books like Beyond Jennifer and Jason.” I feared I was sounding a bit defensive. “It’s only in Bisbania’s royal circles that people think they have to give their daughters ultra-feminine names with an ‘a’ at the end.”