Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle (4 page)

And when, in happier days, Reggie’s clothing budget was printed and criticized, we sympathized, having known firsthand a boyfriend’s
raised eyebrow, a father’s terse words at expensive clothes—as well as we also knew their disappointment with women who did
not dress prettily. (Consider the reaction to Lady Carissa in sweats.)

Things have improved since then. But it used to be, even in my lifetime, even after things had already improved, that a woman
could not win. And Regina’s struggle to win took place on a global stage.

We wondered about the rumors of her affair with her chauffeur, and we gossiped into the night about her battles with the Queen
Mother, and we saw in her life a giant reflection of our own, the life we had lived and the one that still lay before us.
Disappointments and joys and in-laws and friends. Her life was just like ours, only lived on a grander scale, one that gave
the mundane things—clothes, shopping, and in-law problems—a dramatic edge. Let our boyfriends talk about hockey and soccer;
we were talking about the game of life.

Then Isabella came along, and Isabella was so much better.

Those of us who believe in princesses are often laughed at. But I believe the world needs princesses and dukes and queens
and kings. We need people who glitter and shine and make a room silent with their entrance. We need them the same way we need
ice cream and soccer and music and stories. Oh, how we need stories.

And though the world didn’t know it until now, Isabella’s story—the sad one that you know so well and the grand one that is
only now being revealed—began with Geoffrey.

W
hat? You’ve never heard of Geoffrey? You’ve spent your whole life, it seems, reading about everything that the princess ate
or wore or did, but you’re still unaware of the man who consumed Isabella’s thoughts on those wistful, lonely nights when
she lay awake wondering what on earth she had gotten herself into?

(I guess that proves my agent, Frederick, wrong when he said there was nothing new I could possibly reveal about the Princess
of Gallagher!)

Geoffrey Whitehall-Wright, né Jeff Wright, was a friend, perhaps ever so slightly more than a friend, whom Isabella had met
in America. The first time she mentioned him to Raphael, the prince assumed Geoffrey was a former classmate from Yale. Isabella
did not initially correct this assumption.

He was actually the man who fixed her car. Well,
checked
her car. You know, looking for bombs and wear and tear and bugs. The castle insisted on such inspections for all friends
of the prince, and although Isabella sometimes vaguely wondered what would happen if she simply refused to show up for her
weekly appointments, it never seemed worth the bother. Once she got to know Geoffrey, whom she had selected out of the phone
book because his family shop was near her dorm, she actually came to look forward to visiting the garage.

Isabella’s reluctance to reveal that Geoffrey was what Raphael’s friends would call her “car man” had nothing to do with concerns
about class snobbery or her upper-crust reputation. It was perhaps more sinister than that. She liked having a secret. She
liked having a secret from Rafie, and she liked having a secret from the castle advisers. She liked having a secret from the
whole world.

After the “thar she blows” photo and what she deemed as Rafie’s unsympathetic reaction to it, she thought about Geoffrey more
and more and finally decided to write to him. She did so—that time and the many times that followed—by going through an elaborate
ruse. She would plead insomnia and wander the castle restlessly, chatting with the night guards and making quite a fuss about
her inability to sleep. Finally, she would wander into the castle gift shop and slip the envelope—return address simply “Belle”—into
the Royal Mail drop, which was established so that castle tourists could send postcards to friends for free.

(This was the reason that Isabella was the surprisingly passionate advocate of removing security cameras from the gift shop.
“If I can’t trust the people not to steal from me,” she said dramatically, “then I’m quite sure I can’t be their queen.” This
was the sort of thing that made Sir Hubert throw up his hands, roll his eyes, and curse the castle retirement system, which
was so lucrative that it made it virtually impossible for any sane person to walk away from a senior job. “If it weren’t for
the royal pension, I’d be happily selling shoes!” he’d exclaim each night to his wife, who would smile weakly and say, “I
know, dear,” even though she herself rather liked Isabella.)

The first time Geoffrey received a note, he couldn’t believe his eyes. He had walked down his long gravel driveway to get
the mail. Thumbing through it in a disinterested way, noting the bills and the junk and so forth, he then saw a personal letter,
which was rare even in those days. He noticed the elegant penmanship and thought,
Nah, can’t be.
Then he saw “Belle,” and he knew.

He rubbed his fingers over the ink and was almost scared to open the envelope. In any other circumstance, Geoffrey would have
been thrilled, would have ripped the letter open, eager to hear what had become of his long-lost friend. But in this case,
he
knew
what had become of her. How could anyone not know what had happened to Isabella Cordage?

Geoffrey, who liked eavesdropping on his wife when she gossiped with friends about celebrities, had heard a good deal about
the engagement of the Prince of Gallagher before he realized whom the prince was marrying. He had heard the name Isabella,
of course, but he had not thought to connect it with the former customer he had always called Belle. Then one day he saw his
old friend smiling on the cover of
People
magazine, under a headline that said
RAFIE PICKS A PRINCESS
, and he realized. He was so incredulous that his mouth was still hanging open when his wife returned from work several hours
later.

“This princess,” he said, pointing to a magazine. “Or at least she’s going to be a princess. This Isabella they’re talking
about. She’s an ol’ buddy of mine.”

“Buddy?” his wife said, clearly expecting a punch line.

“I took care of her car,” he said.

“
You
did?” his wife asked, speaking slowly, almost as if she were talking to the insane. She snorted. “I suppose you made her
hot cider, too.”

But the truth became apparent to Mae Whitehall, who had not yet convinced her husband of the wisdom of combining their names.
(The change from Jeffrey to Geoffrey is a bit more complicated and, as you might imagine, involves various vanities and pretensions,
none of which seems pertinent here.) Once Mae became convinced, she told all her friends. Word reached a local television
station, where, in the final days before the wedding, reporters were desperate to find fresh human-interest angles on the
woman they insisted on calling their “American princess.”

But when a producer from the station called, Geoffrey denied it all. For at that moment, he realized it would be wrong to
talk publicly about Isabella. On some level that he couldn’t explain, he knew that Isabella’s life was no longer hers and
that it was unseemly for him to offer up to the public some little piece of it that she’d managed to keep to herself.

“We were buds,” he explained to Mae. “She’d bring her car in each week, and I checked the tires and brakes. It seemed ridiculous,
but all those Yale kids were nuts about security. She always brought her books in, but she never studied much. We just talked.
‘Solved the world’s problems,’ we liked to say. She’d never heard of the Boss. Can you imagine that?”

Mae humored her husband with a surprised look, but really, she could imagine it. The Boss was an old nickname for Bruce Springsteen,
a rock artist of much critical and commercial success. Mae had certainly heard of the Boss, but she was not surprised that
Isabella had not. Mae was, after all, a born-and-bred Kentucky girl with rockin’ dairy-farmer parents. She was not a noble
lady from a distant and isolated land. “The boss of what?” would be the expected reaction from Bisbanian royalty, Mae supposed.

“I loaned her some CDs,” Geoffrey continued. “And we’d talk about them some. She’d warm up peach cider in the break room.
Put some sort of foreign spice in it.” He paused. “That was good cider.”

He ambled over to the refrigerator and started rummaging around in it while still talking. “Tell the news all that? It wouldn’t
be right. Maybe I’m kidding myself. She’s a lady. I’m a mechanic. But I think we’re friends. I don’t talk about her on the
news. It’s like that Springsteen song where the lawman lets his brother escape. It’s about loyalty.”

Mae did not see how it was like that, exactly, but she had gotten used to her husband’s strange habit of referencing the works
of Springsteen as if they were Scripture, so she did not argue.

But even without the “big” story of a local mechanic’s ties to the soon-to-be princess, the coverage of the royal wedding
was exhaustive. Stories about the wedding preparations—the ice sculpture of the royal shield; the mild controversy over Isabella’s
decision to use hothouse tulips rather than native, in-season but somewhat odiferous Bisbanian mums; the security details—were
on the front pages, even in America. Old professors were quoted saying flattering but vague things about her years at Yale
(“I remember her as being, um, always there,” said one professor. “And her work was generally well punctuated and perfectly
adequate”). All the late-night comedians had some fun with the way that three American hairstylists each claimed to have held
weekly appointments with Isabella, though her hair had in those days been long and straight and appeared to receive professional
attention on more of a quarterly basis.

During all these stories, they ran video of Isabella—shopping with the bridesmaids, cutting ribbons at building projects for
nonprofit agencies, planting mums in a community garden, and swearing, somewhat awkwardly, that if she ever got married again,
she’d choose mums for her bouquet. “They’re my second favorite,” she said.

She was everywhere. (And so was Secrest, who was constantly being interviewed about the cake plans and the reception menu
and was more than once quoted saying that she could not comment on the dress, other than to promise that Isabella would look
amazing in it.)

Geoffrey watched the wedding broadcast and listened to his wife explain who all the various dignitaries were as the crowned
prince of this, the heir to that throne, the Queen Mother, blah, blah, blah, filed into the church. Mae got positively misty-eyed
at the gown, while Geoffrey only smiled approvingly at the embroidery around the wrists and neckline. “Detailing,” he said,
with a nod. “That works on cars, too, but I would have picked a color with less contrast.”

When the happy royal couple emerged from the church and that ray of sunshine hit them and they looked up, Geoffrey’s wife
thought that Isabella looked blessed and radiant. But Geoffrey, he thought she looked kind of tired.

“Look at her eyes,” he said. “It doesn’t look like she slept.”

He thought about writing to her, sending a gift, maybe. But he never did. He never could think of the right thing to say,
and he couldn’t imagine the right gift for a future queen. So he lapsed into an odd feeling of conspiracy. He watched the
princess on television and read about her in newspapers and asked his wife endless questions about the machinations of royal
life.

“Why is she the Princess of Gallagher if she’s going to be the Queen of Bisbania?” he asked Mae over and over again. But no
matter how clearly Mae tried to explain it, he never seemed to grasp why it would be customary in the tiny city-state of Bisbania
to give the next in line to the throne (and, by extension, his wife) the title of the city’s northernmost neighborhood, a
chic conglomeration of overpriced boutiques, antique bookstores, and gift shops that specialized in herbal soaps and jewelry.

“It’s the same in Great Britain,” Mae would explain impatiently. “You know. The Prince of Wales becomes the King of England.”

But Geoffrey would just shake his head and ask, “Then who’s the King of Wales?”

Mae would sigh in an exasperated way and wander out of the room.

But whatever Isabella’s title, and whatever the customs of Bisbanian royals, Geoffrey knew enough to see that she had become
an important and sought-after celebrity, the sort of person who understands privacy only as a memory. One of his wife’s food
magazines published an argument that the princess was eating too much refined sugar, complete with photos of every plate she
had been served at a public banquet in the last six months. And all the newspapers reported the arrest of a computer hacker
who had traced the princess’s keystrokes and found what was officially described as “personal correspondence” but which was
widely rumored to involve Isabella’s e-mailed exchange with the royal doctor about yeast infections.

So when Geoffrey saw what Isabella’s life had become, he felt somehow like her secret champion, her valiant savior, the one
guy in the whole world who wouldn’t make a buck off her. He was faithfully keeping silent. Although when things got bad for
her—with all the “dizzy” headlines and the nose-spray photo—he began to wonder if the news that she had often shared cider
with a mechanic would make much of a worldwide impression.

And then he got her first letter. He stood in the driveway, running his finger over the ink, not quite believing that it could
really be. Inside was elegant stationery; at the top was a curvy abstract rendering that he would later learn represented
Bisbania’s national bird.
So,
he thought,
I didn’t dream this or make it up. I meant something to the princess.

He did not know exactly what he feared. Did he fear she would cheapen his restraint by thanking him for his silence? Worse,
by offering to pay him for it? Did he fear that she would appear to remember him only faintly or too well?