Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle

by Beverly Bartlett

  Isabella stared at me and crossed her arms. She tossed out the next question the way the king’s attorney might cross-examine a witness. “What is your sister’s name?”

  I sat up straight and said the name with as much pride as I could muster.

  Isabella nodded in a matter-of-fact way. “And didn’t your mother grow up on a dairy farm in Appalachia?”

  Now it was my turn to roll my eyes. Tiny Bisbania would fit a hundred times into the distance that separates western Kentucky from Appalachia, but pointing that out would get me nowhere. Isabella thought there was a world of difference between South Main Street and North Main Street, but was skeptical that there could be any difference at all in opposite ends of a long American state.

  Frankly, from her perspective, there probably isn’t.

  Raphael interrupted at this point and steered, so to speak, the conversation back to Isabella and the possibility of being named Mabel. “You can call yourself ‘Mrs. O’Leary’s bovine,’ for all I care,” he said. He was exercising a bit more backbone now that Isabella had agreed to his royal escape plan. “I like Ralph, and Ralph it shall be.”

  But Isabella convinced him—how, I can’t imagine—to first seek Geoffrey’s advice. “We don’t have to take his advice,” she told Rafie. “It won’t hurt to ask.”

  It did hurt her case, as it turned out. Her trusted adviser surprised and irritated her by siding with Raphael and going with Ralph.

  And yes, I did notice that my husband chose a name for the prince that Isabella said she could not use without gagging.

  Still, I had to agree that it was the correct thing to do. Raphael was absolutely right about names. People ought to be able to choose what they are called. Of all the awful things uttered about Isabella over the years, the most unforgivable, I now believe, was the tabloid insistence on using Izzy, even knowing she despised it.

  But no matter how right Geoffrey’s advice was, it still seemed strange, coming from him. He was notorious for bestowing nicknames, never asking permission, for example, before starting to call some nice young woman who showed up in his garage Belle.

  Although perhaps this habit of nicknaming was just an unthinking reflex that did not reflect his actual name philosophy. After all, he had chosen to change the spelling of his first name and to take his wife’s name in marriage. He had some appreciation for the power of deciding for yourself how you will be addressed.

  So he sided with Ralph. And I was happy for the prince. I agree with Isabella that it was not exactly the most regal of names. It sounded to me like the name of a slightly overweight, suburban minivan driver. But I admired the prince for being able to see something solid and decent and true in it. And you know, there is nothing wrong with slightly overweight, suburban minivan drivers. In fact, they are often quite easy to talk to.

  Once I called for Isabella, and “Ralph” answered the phone. He said she was throwing pottery at the time and couldn’t talk, so he and I started chatting, and we talked for several hours. It was one of those lovely long conversations you have, carrying the phone about your apartment, watering plants, feeding the cat, painting your nails. I almost forgot that I’d never forgiven him for giving up on speech therapy. And I tried to remember if he had been such a fine conversationalist when his name was Raphael.

  At one point, he mentioned Lady Carissa—Aunt Carrie, he called her—and he talked about how spectacularly fond of her he had always been. I agreed that she was an impressive woman.

  “I always wondered why she didn’t marry that count,” I said. “It bothered my friends and me. We couldn’t imagine what all the controversy was about.”

  The prince seemed surprised that I didn’t know. “We never told you?” he said. “I suppose we should have. You’re practically family, having raised Milo and all.”

  Then he told me the whole sordid story, the entire pathetic tale, the complete embarrassing saga. I must say it explained a lot, more than I could have imagined. I was so utterly glad that I had asked.

  I guess it was an icebreaker of sorts for us. I had been declared practically family, and Rafie opened up to me in a way he never had before. He lowered his voice a little and told me he had been sick lately. He said he was sure he’d be okay, but it had made him look back over his life, and he realized the regrets he had were all about me, about the sacrifice I had made and about the child I had raised. “I also still wish I’d put money on the eighty-to-one long shot that won the Ascot ten years ago,” he said. “But never mind that.”

  He said he wanted me to know that it hadn’t been for nothing, that he had lived a life of happiness few people could imagine. “You know Isabella as well as anyone,” he said. “You know that she can be vain and headstrong and impossibly dim and unimaginably exasperating. You can imagine what she was like to live with during that pony-print fad.”

  I chuckled.

  “But I’ve been so happy these past few years,” Rafie said. “Snowed in with my princess, frying cheese curds and arguing over whether we put enough garlic in the pasta sauce.”

  There was a long silence. I didn’t know what to say.

  Finally, Rafie spoke again. “And spaghetti really is as good as they say.”

  We both laughed then.

  He whispered, “Thank you.”

  And that was all he said.

  Oh, all right. He said one more thing. He hinted at that which I was not going to go into. But I suppose I must.

  He said there was something that had always bothered him about Geoffrey, and he said he would like to know the answer before he died. And he was asking the right person, because I knew Geoffrey so well and because I understand that names are almost always significant.

  “Why,” he asked, “did Geoffrey call you by the same name he used for my wife? Why did he call you both Belle?”

  Chapter 31

  I think I’ve set the story straight now. My husband wasn’t a royal mechanic, he was a royal adviser. I wasn’t just a mechanic’s wife but the secret author of modestly successful lowbrow novels. Isabella was not an effortless icon but a highly managed product of my husband and me. Or mostly my husband. The prince did not really die, at least not when everyone thought he did. And I didn’t give birth to the daughter I raised, a girl who was conceived as the legitimate heir to the throne. At least that is what I was told and what I choose to believe on most days.

  I choose to believe that she is the biological child of Isabella and Raphael, even though the princess spent way too much time with my husband and even though she allowed him to run his hand along her pregnant waist in a familiar way on what turned out to be the last night of his life. I believe this even though he wrote in his journal about planning to live out his days with Belle. I was able to maintain this belief because my husband called me Belle also, an oddity that completely mystified Raphael and that I understood only in part and don’t really like to talk about.

  That’s pretty much it. Except for Lady Carissa’s secret, the one she confessed on the night before her wedding and that Raphael shared with me because I was raising his daughter. It is the final piece of the puzzle, and it explains everything. Almost everything, at least.

  Undoubtedly, if Rafie had become king, the truth about Lady Carissa would have been revealed long ago. Despite his many flaws, he was a progressive, fair-minded sort. But she died, as you know, while he was still a prince. Looking back, I wonder if her burial marked the death of all Rafie’s kingly ambitions, because the outing of Lady Carissa’s disability was the one act he would have relished as king.

  Compared to faked deaths and hidden births, this secret is not all that shocking in most circles. But in the particular culture of the Bisbania court, which still conducted all official business in that throaty and consonant-heavy native language of Bisbania, Lady Carissa’s secret was too awful to imagine.

  The count would not dare risk passing it along to his offspring, and the queen, Lady Carissa’s much older sister, feared it would have prevented
her own marriage if the king or his family had learned about it sooner.

  But Regina had already married the future king when Lady Carissa began to learn the native language of Bisbania and her tutors discovered what Raphael described as a “lack of fluidity in her speech.” I had to consult speech pathology textbooks to find the lay term, and here it is: She stuttered.

  Not in English, which she spoke in a lyrical, flawless, public-radio kind of lilt. But in the ugly, challenging native language of her home country, she could not smoothly say, despite months of desperate practice, even the few words she would have needed to utter aloud at her wedding.

  The night before the ceremony, she told her fiancé, with whom she had always spoken English. She had hoped, surely, that the count would strike a blow for progress and insist the wedding be conducted in English. Instead, he broke off the engagement altogether. Which, as I think I noted before, forced embarrassing explanations to five kings and four queens. Or was it the other way around? I can’t really remember. It has been such a long time ago.

  Little Rafie was so horrified by this story that he vowed to dedicate himself to the study of speech handicaps, a vow that would have—if things had been just a little different—led to a satisfying and successful career.

  So that was Lady Carissa’s secret. And now I suppose you want to know mine.

  Rafie died without knowing. I ended our phone call without answering him. That was my punishment, I suppose. It was the judgment I delivered to him for surviving a plane crash that killed the man I loved. And for, in my mind, wasting the opportunity that death gave him.

  But though I like to think of myself as not answering him out of spite, the truth is that I couldn’t answer him. I did not really know myself why Geoffrey used the same nickname for Isabella and me.

  This oddity, this shared nickname, was the one thing that I clung to, the only thing that got me through the journal entry that I found when I shamefully searched through Geoffrey’s personal effects. “My dear Belle.” He could have meant me. Must have meant me. Surely meant me. That is what I told myself.

  But the entire time we lived in the castle, I did not ask Geoffrey why he would choose the same nickname for the two women he spent the most time with. I suppose I was afraid to.

  Geoffrey was a man of mystery. I don’t think any of us ever understood him, and I can’t begin to guess his rationale. Did he call us by the same name because he saw something similar in both of us? Was it a grand and meaningful gesture? Or if it was just a simple, unimaginative, lazy shortening of our names? I guess that is the question about Geoffrey. Did the things he said mean anything? Or were we all just reading too much into them? The only difference is that this involves the very fabric of my heart, not the lyrics of “Pink Cadillac.”

  Oh, and did you catch that? Did you see what I slipped into that last paragraph? You may not realize it, but I’ve now told you my darkest secret. This is the secret that Ethel Bald knew. She did not know that Raphael was still alive. She did not know that Geoffrey was trying to help him fake his death. She did not know Milo is the heir apparent to the throne. How could she?

  She was just a reporter, remember. She did not know the secrets of people’s hearts. She knew only the things that she overheard in bathrooms and noticed while scooping up caviar and found by searching public records.

  After our encounter in the bathroom that day—the day she got the Green Bay scoop—she worried about the quizzical, suspicious way I had looked at her. She searched immigration records first and then looked into houses bought and cars leased. So by the time I called to tell her that I knew her secret, she already knew mine. It may not seem that shocking in most circles. But it would have destroyed me in the eyes of my snobby Bisbanian friends, the sort of people who dislike cows and believe all girls should have dainty names that end in “a.”

  “A lazy shortening of our names.” That is the line that perhaps you caught.

  I don’t know why, in a psychological sense, Geoffrey would call me by a nickname that he had previously used for another woman. But I do know in a technical sense why he gave me the nickname Belle.

  He called me that because, on the day of my birth, when the nurse asked my parents what I would be called, they recycled a moniker previously given a favorite milk cow. It was not Mae, the name Isabella reluctantly likened to a spring day.

  No. The name on my birth certificate is Mabel.

  Chapter 32

  I suppose you remember the funeral of Isabella’s father, the Earl of Cordage. It made quite a splash at the time, marking as it did Isabella’s first trip back to Bisbania after accepting the seldom-awarded Nobel Prize of Speech Pathology.

  “I hadn’t even realized there was a Nobel Prize of Speech Pathology,” Ethelbald Candeloro wrote, still gushing as much as ever despite being positively ancient. “But if I had, I would have predicted long ago that Isabella would win it.”

  Isabella felt terrible about the prize, of course. She had submitted her husband’s work to several medical journals as a tribute to him shortly after his death. The real death, I mean. She had always been so proud of what she called “Rafie’s little papers,” and she thought the journal editors would be interested. (I think it also assuaged her guilt for having redecorated shortly after Rafie’s death, covering forty rooms of green and gold with soothing and tasteful pastels. “It’s as if I’m painting right over his memory,” she had said in a melancholy way. “But it does look so much better.”)

  The journal editors were indeed interested in the articles, to which Isabella had signed her own name. She had little choice about that, because the work had clearly been done years after the world thought her husband died.

  Once published, the articles became the talk of speech pathologists everywhere, and the next thing you knew, she was accepting all sorts of awards, modestly crediting her late husband as her inspiration and creating a mini-sensation by suggesting that singing Springsteen’s rat-a-tat early lyrics could be soothing to those suffering from pathologies of oral communication. “There is hardly a situation in life,” she said, “that can’t be improved by ‘The E Street Shuffle.’” No one questioned that Isabella wrote the articles. After all, why couldn’t she fit in a little speech pathology training between her Thai classes and welding work?

  Isabella called me several times during the Nobel Prize- nomination process, crying from mortification and guilt. But I just laughed and told her to rest easy. I could not think of a more fitting end to the entire ridiculous saga.

  At any rate, the Nobel publicity had only just begun to abate when Isabella’s father died. She returned to Bisbania for the funeral, wearing an elegant suit of such deep brown that you would swear it was black. (The press called it “brackish.”)

  Isabella’s nephew, the son of Lady Fiona and the heir to his grandfather’s minor title, gave a lovely eulogy. He called his grandfather a descendant of heroes and the father of legends.

  Isabella had cried at that. And so did Lady Fiona, though I suspect for different reasons entirely.

  They had never been close, that family. So few noble families are. Fiona and Isabella palled around enough when they were young, but I suspect Isabella never shared a single secret with the lady—didn’t admit that she befriended a mechanic, much less nursed a crush and shared a kiss. And by the time she was off faking deaths and giving away babies, they barely talked at all.

  Isabella’s mother was a cold, standoffish woman, a commoner who somehow thought that she had married beneath herself by wedding an earl and who thought Isabella had married further down the tree still.

  Sometimes when I think about that, I suspect that Isabella’s family life explains what she needed from Geoffrey. Maybe he was the brother she never had.

  After Fiona’s son spoke, Fiona sang a slow and haunting song, and then Isabella slowly walked up to the front of the mourners and said, “I don’t know about being the father to legends. But he was a good father to me.”

 
Then she sat back down.

  I don’t think it was true, judging by how little she spoke of him, how rarely she visited, how infrequently she called. But it was the absolutely right thing to say. I saw Secrest, seated in a back row with her husband and son, nod approvingly.

  That was the moment featured on all the websites the next day, and it made people all over the country cry. A lot of people called their parents that night.

  This is why we need princesses, you know. We need to know that other people suffer, though they have more money than we do and more servants. We need to see them at funerals, and we need to hear about their divorces. If they gain weight along the way, so much the better.

  We need to watch them bear sadness and get their hearts broken, and we need them to dress well while they do it. We need them to always pick the right words.

  We need to be able to salute their style.

  People might argue about the definitive photo of Isabella. She looked radiant after her wedding, of course, and that is a logical choice. But some argue for the eerie photos of her standing on the stormy beach in those cropped pants. Others remember her shoveling snow or working in the forge. A few mean souls are sure to nominate the “thar she blows” photo. Fair enough. I suppose it is, in its own way, as good a candidate as any.

  But I remember one photo that most people paid little attention to. It is a photo from Isabella’s father’s funeral. She is standing with all her usual poise and polish, and there is a line of mourners waiting to offer condolences. The line is beautiful. All those lovely faces, Bisbanians of all races and classes and ages. And in the front of the line is a slim, raven-haired woman with a regal nose and a snug but conservative black dress.

  There is a single tear running down Isabella’s face, and Milo is wiping it away.

  Why is Isabella crying? That is what I ask myself when I look at that photo. Is she crying for the father she has just lost? Or for the daughter she lost all those years ago?