Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle (9 page)

So if a lovely young starlet and her leading man break up in the midst of a movie, causing massive budget overruns and stiffly
acted love scenes, a dedicated animal rights group might quietly leak word that the relationship ended over a disagreement
about whether, say, the starlet should wear fur slippers to bed—prompting all sorts of gossipy news stories that touch on
animal rights and quote officials from the agency that leaked the completely fabricated story.

Battered Women No More had been looking for the right opportunity to highlight domestic violence. And when Isabella stepped
off that train in the lovely short skirt and those distinctive mismatched stockings, the freethinking PR professional knew
he had found it. He printed up a press release and had it out to the media before the fired castle servants could even cash
in by selling their own stories to the tabloids.

The release was simple and short:

“Battered Women No More wants to thank Her Royal Highness the Princess of Gallagher for helping launch the organization’s
new slogan: ‘If he leaves you black and blue, then sock him with a summons.’ We know the royal family does not normally take
stands on public issues, but one as vital and as uncontroversial as this is surely worth an exception. Lives will no doubt
be saved by the princess’s adoption of this cause.”

In retrospect, the PR agent only wished that he had worked on that slogan a bit, for it sounded awkward to him when repeated
on the newscasts. Still, it was
on
the newscasts, and that was the most important thing. He held his breath and waited for the castle reaction. Privately, Hubert
said, “Hmmm.” Privately, the queen said, “Ummmm.” Privately, the king said, “Sock him with a summons? Shouldn’t a batterer
be arrested outright, not just asked to appear in court at a later date?” Privately, Isabella said, “Huh?”

But publicly, they said . . . nothing. They just let it lie.

So that is how wearing colored socks replaced the earlier custom of wearing a loop of colored ribbon as the preferred way
for celebrities to silently salute favorite causes. Actors accepted awards wearing designer tuxes and red socks to show their
continuing concern about the AIDS crisis. “Sock it to AIDS,” they’d say. Artists protesting the famed African coffee ban wore
cappuccino-colored socks known as “No-doze hose.” Things finally went too far, in my humble opinion, when Bisbanian men—Ethelbald
Candeloro notably among them—started wearing nude nylons to show support for some sort of legislation aimed at protecting
cross-dressers and the transgendered. It was a dreadful campaign idea made all the worse by the complicated slogan “Cross-dressers
have nothing to hide.” It seemed to presume that legislators would understand that nude nylons reveal rather than hide—an
outrageously generous assessment of the hosiery expertise of the male-dominated Bisbanian legislative body.

(I feel compelled to explain that I love cross-dressers and the transgendered as much as everyone else, and I’m sure the legislation
was good government and all that. My quibble is not with the cause but with the medium. It seems to me that the purpose of
these sock statements was to evoke the cause, not to
become
the cause. And why would anyone, transgendered or otherwise, wear nude nylons anyway? It is so completely common. Your hose
should match your shoes. Please.)

Isabella’s sock crisis, you might notice, was resolved without any input from Isabella, who can be credited only with the
wisdom of not denying the lie when it was conveniently told for her. It goes to show you that when things are going badly,
things go badly. And when things are going well, they go spectacularly.

It was, as it turned out, the sock incident that prompted Ethelbald to start thinking about how well things had been going
for the princess, though it took him another several months to acknowledge this change in that famous column—the one that
put such fear into Isabella’s heart. It would have been a tragedy for all of Bisbania if Isabella had let Ethelbald’s column
scare her off. If the apparent reference to Geoffrey had prompted her to take off the headphones and get a grip on herself,
it would have been a tragedy for her, the royal family, even the whole world.

But what happened instead, well, it was mostly a tragedy for me.

O
h dear! I really shouldn’t have said that. Now you’re going to spend the next several chapters worrying about me, when obviously
I’m fine. I’m old, no debate there. Time is quickly running out for me. But I’m alive and well and still enjoying a brisk
walk every day. When it’s all said and done, I’ve had a good life. I’m happy. And I have the princess to thank for much of
it.

But lately, I’ve been in a fatalistic mood. When I’m in such a state, one of my great sources of entertainment is tracing
back the events of a lifetime, determining at what specific point things went wrong or right. It is a pointless exercise.
I know this. Look no further than the day when I, just a young wisp of a thing, turned down a perfectly good editing job at
a small newspaper in middle America. When I look back on that now, I imagine promotions and leapfrogging career moves to larger
and larger papers. I tell myself if I had taken that editing job, I would have been the editor of
The National Times
—Bisbania’s only nontabloid daily newspaper—by the time I was fifty. Instead, all my dreams of news-management glory died
that day. I sputtered and struggled along, doing mediocre but dependable reporting work. I churned out the sort of stories
that pleased my bosses by being on time and easy to read but neither won awards nor changed lives. I never did the big work
of journalism, setting the public agenda, shaping the national conversation. All because I didn’t take that editing job. That’s
what I tell myself. And eventually, of course, I left news altogether.

But on the other hand, I never would have met my dearly departed husband if I had gone off to middle America to edit news.
And what of the work I did do? Not that it compares to editing
The Times.
But I enjoyed it, and I think others did, too. So was the day I said no thanks to that editing job the best day or the worst
day of my life? It was both. It was neither. It’s not worth thinking about.

I can make the same kind of case for the events that unfolded shortly after Isabella tore up Geoffrey’s letter and became
obsessed with covering herself from Ethelbald’s alleged photo hunt. She did three things that week.

First, she sobbed on the shoulder of Princess Iphigenia, who was alternately puzzled, disturbed, and strangely flattered by
the sudden returned weakness in her sister-in-law, whose rocketing career and presumed fertility had made all but meaningless
Genia’s status as second in line to the throne. By the time anything happened to the fit, spry king, it was assumed, Isabella
and Raphael would have a slew of children, all of whom would have stepped in front of Genia, who had so little respect among
the tabloid writers that they had shortened her name yet again to the vulgar French-sounding Princess Gene. (Amazingly, they
weren’t even
trying
to be insulting; they just didn’t care enough to make an extra letter seem worthwhile.)

Second, Isabella dispatched a mystified Secrest to America to hire a discreet private investigator—a saucy, sassy, heavy-smoking
woman with a big tattoo and a licensed semiautomatic—to dig up Jimmy Bennett, the college chum with the worrisome camera.

Finally, Princess Isabella asked Geoffrey and his wife to leave America and move to Bisbania.

It was really inevitable. From the moment that Geoffrey responded to Isabella’s first letter, there was little doubt that
he would someday be safely ensconced in the castle, working at the royal garage and taking smoke breaks by the lapping waters
of the Bisbanian Sea.

Things might have been different if Geoffrey had simply replied with the fawning, gushing sort of note that Isabella was accustomed
to receiving. But two sentences sealed his fate. When Geoffrey suggested listening to the Boss and then passed along his wife’s
encouragement, he assumed—without even realizing it—the role of royal adviser. As of that moment, he was destined to live
at the beck and call of the princess, on the very grounds of the castle. Ethelbald’s frightening column did little more than
hurry him along.

As you might imagine, Geoffrey and his wife were overwhelmed, flattered, and a little put off by Isabella’s request, which
was presented to the young couple by Secrest one drizzly night in a royal houseboat permanently stationed near Martha’s Vineyard.
The deal was, by any standard, fair. Geoffrey was to be paid 172,000 Bisbanian pounds, which even today is a lot of money,
so you can imagine its appeal then. Moreover, Geoffrey was to receive two months of vacation each year, free lodging at the
castle, a generous clothing allowance for both him and his wife—since they would be expected to attend some castle functions—and
any assistance his wife wished or required in finding her own work. For a modest American couple, it was almost unimaginable.
(In fact, it caused a bit of whispering at the castle among more senior staff members who had similar packages and had been
led to believe they were more than mere mechanics.)

But there was something about the tone of the offer that annoyed the soon-to-be-hyphenated Whitehall-Wrights. Geoffrey and
Mae, despite their intense admiration of the princess, and despite the greedy American notion that lots of money and prestige
are the building blocks of happiness, couldn’t help but feel that the presentation of this offer—which Secrest set forth with
a sort of a patriotic call for loyalty and sacrifice—was a bit much. After all, Geoffrey and Mae had no real reason to feel
patriotic about or loyal to the royal family, other than their friendly fondness for its apparent future queen. And they saw
no real reason why their friendly fondness should lead them to sacrifice for the princess any more than the princess should
sacrifice for them. That is, of course, an awfully American way to look at it. Secrest couldn’t see their point at all. She
found herself wishing she’d paid better attention to “American Perspectives and Philosophies” in school. She was sure this
had something to do with the Boston Tea Party. (“You know it’s called that,” she would say whenever the subject came up, “but
they didn’t actually drink tea.”)

But in the end, she had not needed to worry. Because 172,000 pounds won out. Was that the couple’s wisest or worst decision?
The best day or the worst day of their lives? Well, now, as I said, I don’t editorialize until the end. You’ll just have to
draw your own conclusions along the way.

Mae experienced all the happiness and horror that a woman could bear. And Geoffrey had a delightful life. There is no way
to know how different it would have been if they’d said no thanks and returned to their two-bedroom home with the scuffed-up
hardwood floors and horrid robin’s-egg-blue aluminum siding. We know only this: If they had said no, there would have been
nights when they lay awake, looking at the ceiling, fretting that they had chosen the wrong path. They would have been tortured
by regret and sadness.

But as it was, only Mae was tortured. Geoffrey died.

G
eoffrey, who finally acquiesced to his wife’s hyphenation request and officially adopted the Whitehall-Wright surname upon
his immigration to Bisbania, quickly took to life in the castle. He liked the simple pleasures of performing extraordinarily
detailed maintenance on mostly unused cars. (Although given that the royal fleet was, by political necessity, made up entirely
of the unreliable Bisbas, he worked a good deal more then you might expect.)

He marveled at the small office he was accorded in the garage, where he kept window-box herb gardens, spent slow afternoons
shopping on tawdry American websites, and listened to the best imported stereo system on the market—a gift from Her Highness.
On weekends, he took up hobbies that would have been only daydreams in his past life. He learned to weave baskets, pilot small
planes, and tap-dance.

Mae, who was building a career writing steamy, overly complicated, and too heavily plotted novels (under an assumed name,
so as not to embarrass the royal family), often visited him in his office. They would stretch out end-to-end on the handmade
African rugs, bare feet touching bare feet, and stare at the ornate ceiling, planning their next vacation and giggling at
the marvelous turn their life had taken.

Mae spent much of her time, all of her clothing allowance, and no small part of their income on magnificent garments that
always stood out at the various castle functions. She was even once featured in
HELLO!
as one of “ten common women who dress like royals.” That headline caused Hubert no end of grief from Princess Genia, who
complained for months afterward, bristling every time anyone uttered Mae’s name.

“Dress like royals?” she’d say each and every time. “I hear she has a reputation for dressing like royals. I suppose she must
be dressing like the royals of some struggling third-world country where they don’t mind garish jewelry and loud-colored gowns
with”—here she would pause dramatically and lower her voice—“neutral shoes and nude hose.” Her voice would return to normal,
and her tone would brighten. “Because she certainly doesn’t dress like any royals I know.”

But Mae was, at that point at least, oblivious to Iphigenia’s attitude. So the only source of tension in the Whitehall-Wrights’
lives was also the source of all their happiness, and that was Isabella herself. The effortless elegance, the casual classiness,
the spontaneous sensibleness that Isabella projected during the height of her popularity took a lot of work. It took planning.
It took strategizing. It took endless late-night debates, and occasionally, as Mae and Prince Raphael each noticed with a
bit of jealousy and concern, it took a bit of flirtatious persuasion on the part of Geoffrey.

It was Geoffrey who convinced Isabella just before the last holiday season she spent at the castle to go with a series of
velvet gowns, even though all the fashion magazines predicted another year of satin. “You set the trends, Belle,” he said.
“You don’t
follow
them.”