Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle (2 page)

(I assure you that truly was the horse’s name. For all my faults, I’m not so silly and pedestrian as to make up far-fetched
but insignificant details like that. Not that a name is ever completely insignificant. You can tell so much about people by
what they chose to be called. And people do choose for themselves, ultimately. Your mother might call you Araminta, but you
can introduce yourself as Minty or Ara or Tiny or—why not?—Scooter. You have a choice, and the choice you make reveals much
about you. But a horse, of course, has no choice at all, and the name he is given does not, to the dismay of amateur bettors
anywhere, have any impact on his racing ability. So the name Apology Accepted was, as I said, completely insignificant.)

After Isabella’s apology, everything went on much the same as before. If anything, her friendship with Raphael warmed a bit.
Isabella was always the prince’s first choice when he needed a partner in a card game. And it was always a sweet relief to
be seated next to her at state dinners, which would often happen if there was no visiting royalty who needed tending. Isabella
was the only woman Raphael knew who didn’t start looking around the room in a distracted way when he shared his thoughts on
the ethics of using drug therapy for lisping problems in children. (The mechanics of speech were an interest of his.) And
she had a wonderful little wiggle in her waltz that he admired on the dance floor. At the racetrack, she shouted and yelped
in a lusty manner when her horse was headed toward the finish, so unlike most of Bisbania’s noblewomen, who would merely clap
their hands in a patty-cake fashion: fingers pointed straight upward and palms tapping together in an unenthusiastic, robotic
motion. Once he believed that he even heard Isabella call out, “Move it, nag face,” as her horse headed down the stretch.
But when he asked her to repeat herself, she claimed to have been clearing her throat. “I have a bit of a cold,” she said.

Isabella was a delight.

So no one should be surprised that Raphael found himself smitten when Isabella returned home after studying at Yale, an American
school where she picked up some appalling Americanisms as well as a master’s degree in art history and a preference for lower-cut
blouses. Gone was any teenage brittleness, and they quickly fell into a routine of riding and tennis and conversations that
lasted a bit longer than average in receiving lines at holiday banquets.

Then one day Raphael’s valet, Vreeland, mentioned while selecting the prince’s wardrobe that Edwina, the crowned princess
of the Selbar Isles, was growing into quite a young woman, and the prince suddenly realized what had happened.

It was all over. Without so much as a kiss or any event that you could call a date, without consulting his parents or Vreeland
or any of the assorted advisers who had chosen his school and his major and even his hobbies, Raphael had chosen a wife. And
she was not Edwina, the crowned princess of the Selbar Isles. She was Isabella.

Raphael acted upon this decision with all of his characteristic impulsiveness and insensitivity, failing to appear for a snorkeling
date with Edwina the very next morning by explaining that he was busy selecting mushy poetry to send to Isabella. Obviously,
this not only crushed Edwina’s fragile ego but also angered her father, King of the Selbar Isles and Beaches, and thus caused
endless grief for King Philippe. In fact, the missed snorkeling date is the
real
reason behind that year’s devastating Bisbania-Selbar Isles waterway dispute, the one that stranded fishing boats, tourist
ferries, and, rather famously, a certain former U.S. president in the company of an attractive young woman (not his wife).

But none of that mattered to Raphael, who argued to his father that if Edwina was going to be as sensitive as all that, she
would have made a horrible Bisbanian queen anyway. Isabella, he suggested, would have handled a canceled date with far more
panache, though he did not plan on testing the matter. For Raphael did not even once stand Isabella up, though their relationship
did have the usual peaks and valleys.

There are some biographies out there that will get into all the nitty-gritty of the courtship, that will tell you about their
first kiss and their first argument. These biographies will tell you exactly how many times Isabella considered moving back
to America and how many times Raphael thought that Bisbania was perhaps ready for a bachelor king.

But I don’t want to tell that story, and you don’t want to hear it. They were just two young kids dating. They had, in the
parlance of the time, “issues.” Who cares? If you want that story, you can get plenty of it at your local junior college.
Just go sit in the cafeteria and ask some woman how her boyfriend is. You’ll hear enough, and it will be no different from
this.

Here is all you need to know: They dated for two years. He hinted at his intentions. She expressed reservations. He persevered.
His parents were concerned because Isabella could be a bit of a handful, but they could hardly complain, given that they had
included her in the circle of suitable young women since the beginning. (“She was supposed to be the one who made the others
look good,” Queen Regina hissed to her husband when they recognized what was going on.)

Finally, they went for that walk in the gardens of Glassidy Castle, and Raphael put his question to Isabella in a simple,
straightforward way. “Please, Isabella,” he started. Then, in a calculated attempt to use less formal language, he finished
with “Won’t you marry me?” Isabella said yes. They held a press conference. And when some silly young reporter asked her if
she was ready for the royal family, she threw back her head, laughed, and said, “Maybe the question is: ‘Are they ready for
me?’”

The media would play that bit a million times over the years, and it became a standard piece of her story. But that only goes
to show you the power people have when they’re the ones editing your video. You could point to that remark and say it meant
something, but you just as easily could point to the moment earlier, when someone asked how she felt and she said: “Humbled,
really. All I want is to be a good wife and someday a good queen.”

Did either comment really mean anything?

We’ll see. As I said, I don’t editorialize until the end.

The announcement was a big hit and got a good deal of world attention. Ever since the troubles in the House of Windsor, the
world rejoices when a seemingly mature, suitable woman becomes engaged to a prince. (Even if it’s just the Prince of Gallagher,
the heir to a mere slip of a throne, the kingship of a tiny city-nation so snugly nestled between the Bisbanian Sea and the
southernmost Alps that, for many centuries, it could be reached only by foolhardy climbers and expert seamen.)

To help with the wedding preparations, the castle immediately assigned Isabella a maidservant, a middle-aged woman named Secrest
who had recently inherited the job from her mother. (The famously lucrative royal pension plan meant that castle positions
were often handed from one generation to another, assuming the family had the appropriate work ethic and skill at keeping
secrets.)

Isabella, in a meaningless burst of egalitarianism, insisted that Secrest’s job title be changed from maidservant to “royal
associate.” The formal proclamation, signed by the princess in what now seems a youthful, carefree hand, incorrectly lists
Secrest’s name as Secresta.

But neither the name nor the title made much difference to Secrest, who did not get a raise or even a noticeable increase
in respect with the “promotion.” The change did, however, make the appropriate splash in the tabloids—and the more serious
media. Conventional wisdom suggested that using nonservile titles like “royal associate” demonstrated Isabella’s thoroughly
modern spirit. “I’ll associate with this royal any day,” Ethelbald Candeloro wrote in the gushing style typical of the media
during the engagement.

So the world celebrated. Stamps were issued. Plates were created. Oh, you remember the whole thing, I’m sure. And if you’re
not old enough to remember—which, silly me, I guess most of you aren’t (it’s been so long ago!)—then just think about one
of the other recent weddings, and you’ve got the idea. They’re all the same, really.

Isabella wore white, of course. But she made a bit of a splash by having some color woven into the silk gown. The neckline
was embroidered with a royal blue pattern of tulips, a tribute to some Dutch blood on her mother’s side. Around the wrists
and hem, the tulips were red.

It was stunning. You forget now how stunning and bold and beautiful it was. It was copied so much later that it became sort
of cliché. Another great idea spoiled by mass production. But isn’t that always the way?

Having a Yalie step into line to the throne especially thrilled people in the Americas, who were always up for a good royal
wedding. Reporters came from both sides of the Atlantic and the Far East as well. The ceremony was conducted in Bisbania’s
ugly, guttural official language, which had long ago been abandoned for English by everyone other than the royal family and
even by the royals in all nonceremonial occasions. Isabella—it can now be told—had some trouble with a few of the words, because
of the slight American accent she had picked up. But luckily, Raphael, with his interest in speech disorders and defects,
was able to work with her beforehand. In the weeks leading up to the wedding, the young couple practiced into the scandalously
wee hours of the morning.

But no one other than the royal family cared about the words. The world’s favorite moment came when the young couple stepped
out of the church doors and a burst of sunlight broke through the cloud cover and shone on them like a spotlight. They were
glancing upward and laughing. They looked absolutely blessed.

That picture must have been reprinted a million times. When I look at it, I always study the prince’s happy face and try to
figure out what he was thinking. Was he thinking:
Ah, the people love her and she is sensible and sane and pleasant company and I’ve done my duty by selecting an able queen
?

That was, more or less, the line he gave his parents, and so we cannot, without accusing him of lying, think he did not believe
it. But I wonder, as I look at that smile, if maybe he wasn’t feeling a bit mischievous. If he didn’t, on some level, know
what he’d let himself in for. If he didn’t think he’d gone and done it, pulled a fast one on everyone.

And her eyes? Have you ever really looked at her eyes in that picture? Her face betrays only rapture, but there is something
frail about her eyes.

Later, when the tabloids turned on her and all the biographies were written, much was made of how Her Royal Highness reportedly
wept into her pillow the night before her wedding. So maybe it is only tiredness I see.

But I think far too much was made of the weeping. For neither the tears nor the nightmares—she reported later that she dreamed
that night of flashbulbs, thousands of blinding flashbulbs—meant that she did not want to marry the prince.

She did want to marry him. He was a good and gentle man. He was handsome and he made her laugh. They did so love to spend
time together. They thought it was great fun to whisper wildly inappropriate remarks at solemnly formal occasions. They both
loved to read and liked to talk about their favorite authors. Watching a movie together while cuddled on the sofa during the
rare Friday night that didn’t involve state functions was just . . . heaven.

The prince made her happy.

But that was only a fortunate happenstance, a fringe benefit. It was what Isabella’s American classmates would sometimes refer
to as “gravy,” a vulgar phrasing that Isabella rather liked for its raw American feel. I’ve spent more time than I care to
admit in America, and though my agent says that you can tell it in my writing—especially when I get excited or tired—I simply
can’t abide this idiom. It is so like those hardy pioneers to mix animal fat with flour and consider it something wonderful
enough to use as a metaphor for good things. Loving the prince was just gravy. (Or, if you’re thinking in terms more appropriate
to a proper Bisbanian woman, loving the prince was just a good fig relish.)

For as the wedding approached, Isabella came to realize on her own what someone really should have told her during all those
years when she and the other suitable playmates were being lined up before the prince, pushed into his receiving lines, urged
to dance, flirt, and spend time with him.

She came to realize there was no way she could decline an invitation to be queen. Perhaps you dispute that. Lots of people
certainly do. Many insist that they would, in a second, turn it down. They echo Isabella’s own words at that infamous ball,
comparing a man with a crown to a man with a disease.

But for a woman of Isabella’s age, in the era that Isabella lived, raised the way she was raised, saying “no thanks” was not
possible. It was like winning the lottery. You know the jackpot can destroy a family, turn friends into wolves, and leave
your life empty and directionless. You know that. But if your number comes up, you can’t just throw the ticket away. You can’t
tell lightning to strike somewhere else.

So, at the moment when Isabella ventured down the path that leads through the gardens of Glassidy Castle, she might as well
have already been walking down the aisle of St. Luke’s Cathedral in that breathtaking dress. Her fate was sealed. She would
be queen.

Except, of course, she never was.

I
know, I know. The youngest of you probably want me to drop all this ancient history and just explain the mysteries that surrounded
the princess after she became wrinkly and stooped with age. Others of you, I know, would rather I cut straight to the single
tragedy of her life, the events of that tempestuous day on the beach shortly after her fifth wedding anniversary.

And some of you want more about the wedding itself, want me to rehash all the details about how many thousands of people watched,
to recapture some of the editorials that praised the union, to wax on about how Raphael and Isabella were each escorted to
the altar by their parents without comment, finally killing the appalling custom of “giving away the bride.”