Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle Read online

  But my belief in princesses relates to my belief in good stories. It seems, for whatever reason, that every time you create a princess, you create a start to a good story. I guess it’s because, not to put too fine a point on it, women’s lives are more interesting than men’s. Oh sure, if you review historic events, you’ll find that men have, more often than not, played key roles. But day in and day out, women have been where it’s happening. They’ve been giving birth and nursing the dying and debating the symbolism of name changes at weddings. Men, meanwhile, have been collecting paychecks and dabbling in office politics. Ho. Hum.

  That is a gross stereotype, but I’m sure you see my point.

  When a prince marries a less noble woman, which princes often do, the prince is always baffled that the crowds love the princess more, line up to see her, give her flowers, gush, and carry on. Meanwhile, the prince himself—the heir to the throne, no less!—is almost ignored. But it only makes sense. People look at the young princess and wonder, “How will she do? Will she bring out the good in her husband? Will she bear an heir and raise that child to be good and kind? Will she keep our fashion industry humming and give us a bit of spring on gray winter days? Will she inspire us?”

  For the prince, they say, “Stick with dark suits, stay out of trouble till your dad dies, and please, try not to cheat on the pretty young thing.”

  I’m not saying it’s right. But that’s the way it is.

  You may wonder, as you continue through this story, who I am. You may ask how I know the things I know: the secrets of the castle. You may question my motives for revealing all that I am about to reveal. But I think when the story is done, you will understand. You will see that everything I have documented here, I know either firsthand or from long, detailed, soul-searching conversations with others who know it firsthand. But more important, when this story is done, you will understand what exactly it is that I owe Isabella and what she owes me. You will see why I must write this story while I’m still alive to write it.

  For in the end, the story is not completely Isabella’s. Cruel as it is, princesses do belong, a little, to all of us. As a child, I was raised on fairy tales. Although, even as old as I am, I was raised on the less troubling modern versions, not the ones in which women are forever getting their feet lopped off and practically killing one another for a shot at the prince. Despite a fair diet of glass slippers and ornate coaches and magic spells, I didn’t realize how much I loved princesses until adulthood, when my women friends and I, young and consumed by our careers, would gather for weekends at fancy hotels. We would splurge on expensive wine and sit in hot tubs and agonize about our futures and our pasts. We were surprised at how often the conversation would turn to the royal family.

  Back then we talked mostly about Queen Regina, whom we had started following in her days as Princess Reggie. Our male friends assumed that we liked her clothes and her style, and she was rather something, and her clothes did interest us. Remember when she made red polka dots all the rage? My, my, I had this one dress that . . . Well, I’m getting off track again. Suffice it to say that the highest compliment a smart suit could draw was the simple “very Reggie.”

  But mostly, we were interested in her story. We wondered if she really loved the king. And did it break her heart when Rafie was a child and would dream of being an astronaut or a firefighter or a software designer or some other decent profession and she had to murmur softly, “Silly boy, you’ll be king, of course.” Did she mind terribly that even her father’s funeral was not private? Or did she no longer notice the cameras?

  And what of her much younger sister, the glamorous Lady Carissa, whose engagement to a Bisbanian count was called off on the very eve of the wedding, requiring embarrassing explanations to four kings and five queens, all of whom had traveled to the Selbar Isles for the occasion? What was the secret that Carissa revealed to her fiancé on the night before her wedding? And does it haunt the queen to this day? Does it explain why Raphael was never once publicly seen, nor even privately photographed, with his aunt, who was herself photographed quite a lot for the next several years, until she started putting on a bit of weight and took to wearing sweatpants in public?

  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.

  Chapter 4

  What? 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.<
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  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?

  No, I think what he feared was that in some way, his life would be different after he opened that letter. Not obviously and not immediately. But slowly, over time, he might get swept up into a story that he wasn’t ready for, had not requested.