Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle (20 page)

That was the way of the world in those days. So Jeb’s thoughts, when posted on an anti-clutter website, hit a nerve. He spoke
to people. He changed them.

A movement began, and that movement thrived. So we are now living in spare and enlightened times and have been for a few decades.
Simplicity did become the next big thing. But whenever anyone writes about this change, it is Isabella, not Jeb, whom they
use as their example. They point to her self-imposed exiles from Glassidy Castle and her eventual decision to dress mostly
in desert hues. (Expensively designed and carefully tailored desert hues, for the most part, but still.) That’s why Isabella’s
face graces the covers of all those “faces of the century” books that are coming out these days. She represents the “changing
values of our times,” at least according to the editors, who invariably slap Isabella’s youthful face (they always use a photo
from her youth) on the cover of an otherwise dreary collection of ponderous essays about important but ugly and badly dressed
men.

I suspect they do this for cynical reasons (Isabella sells books). But they are partially right. People have, on the whole,
come to emulate Isabella’s solid colors, clean lines, uncluttered shelves, empty drawers. You could argue that it’s just fashion,
subject to change as soon as the next magazines are out. But I think, I hope, that it is also a bit more than that. Maybe
people truly have discovered, as Jeb did there in the desert, the peace that comes with living simply. They have cleaned out
their collections, purged unused files, whittled down their wardrobes to a few simple, classic, well-made, and easily interchanged
pieces. In the process, maybe, they have found a similar simplifying of their outlook. They have become less greedy and more
gracious, less harried and more humble, less proud and more patient. The change is permanent. As it was for Isabella and Jeb
and me.

Or maybe not. In a few years, we may be collecting cows again.

I don’t know. And I can assure you that Isabella does not, either. I love her like a sister, like an icon, like a friend.
But she is not, I am telling you, a great thinker. This is a woman who needed the advice of Bruce Springsteen lyrics to pick
out a ball gown. Thank goodness she was not in charge of national security.

Perhaps that is the nature of icons. They sum up their times so well not because they deliberately set out to do so, but because
if there is any truth to the idea that epochs have moods, then some famous people living in that time are bound to match the
mood. And the ones who do so the best are the ones who do so obliviously.

But Jeb, dear Jeb,
was
a great thinker, a careful and deliberate man. His philosophy of life may have been influenced by his broken heart and wounded
pride, but it was not casual or oblivious. Soon after his thoughts were posted on the Web, he was being joined in the desert
by a steady stream of lively converts, all of whom sold off their barnyard cookie jars, pared their names down to one syllable,
lived on a simple diet of corn mash, and wore sackcloth. Usually, they would return home after a half-dozen years or so and
become examples of peace to their neighbors and friends.

I suppose you’ve figured out by now that one of them stayed for just two years and returned to become an example of peace
for the entire world. She came in with the longest name but was known by the least personal name of any of Jeb’s guests. Her
Royal Highness the Princess of Gallagher, Isabella Cordage, was—during her time in the desert—known simply as Her.

I
sabella told me she couldn’t sleep her first night back from Africa. She felt so ill at ease being in the castle again. The
bed was nice, that was true enough. When her head sank into the down pillow, she wondered for a moment if she had slept at
all during the previous two years. She vowed then that she would never, ever go back to the desert.

But all the stuff? All the piles of decorative pillows and the canopy and the forty-eight original oil paintings that seemed
to cover every inch of the room and the vase of twenty-four “whispery pink” tulips and an assortment of handy items on the
bedside table, from the magnifying glass and the tissues, to the crystal pitcher of water and matching goblet, to the alarm
clock and the manicure kit and Queen Regina’s recent autobiography,
For the Sake of Country: One Woman’s Story.

Isabella reported, with uncharacteristic hyperbole, that she had looked around the room and “freaked out.”

That was, I suppose, my first sign that her years with Jeb had truly affected Isabella, had awakened in her a sincere desire
to live simply, at least relatively.

Most of Jeb’s followers were skeptical of her. Perhaps the skepticism goes without saying. “She’s got a palace full of knickknacks
waiting for her at home,” the others would whisper while collecting water from the well. “What did she give up?”

I, too, initially assumed Isabella’s interest in Jeb’s camp was purely practical. We were sophisticated women of the world,
the princess and I. We weren’t fooled by Jeb. We knew his crusade to put self-storage companies out of business had nothing
to do with the Zen-like peace of a minimalist lifestyle. And I suppose he knew that the princess and I wanted to live at his
camp for reasons that had nothing to do with him.

Isabella needed a place to stay until the dust settled. A place without cameras or phones or people interested in selling
stories to the tabloids and making lots of money. Jeb’s camp and Jeb’s followers, with their vows of poverty and lack of phone
service, suited her purpose perfectly.

She did little during her first weeks at the camp to suggest that she was a true convert. Her usual royal reserve—the prized
ability to hide any public displeasure and to feign interest and enthusiasm for any task—faltered in the desert. Perhaps if
Geoffrey had not died during the attempt to fake Rafie’s death, Isabella would have pulled it off better. Perhaps she was
distracted by grief. Whatever the reasons, she stumbled early on in the camp. Once she embarrassed herself at dinner by absentmindedly
asking for salt (which Jeb considered an unnecessarily fancy spice). Twice, when making sandals, she caused a camp scandal
by rejecting the gathered reeds for being the wrong shade to accompany the camp’s wool garments.

Not long after we arrived, the members of the camp sat around the fire and shared accounts of their newfound love of minimalism.
Predictable stuff, really. One woman talked about how, in her old life, she had been chronically irritated and unhappy with
her small kitchen, which provided inadequate storage for her souvenir mugs. “I wasted time longing for a bigger house, lusting
after expensive kitchens in designer catalogs,” she said. “Why didn’t I just throw out some of those ugly mugs?”

Meanwhile, a man sobbed as he talked about how the pursuit of worldly wealth had taken him away from his kids. “I kept buying
them toys,” he said. “I wish I’d just played with them.”

I was eyeing the crowd nervously. “I came here because the princess told me to,” didn’t seem to be the right answer.

Isabella’s turn came first. She stared silently into the fire for a moment. It had been only a few weeks since the crash.
She was not yet herself again. “I had a lot back home,” she finally whispered. “Most of it was rather lovely. I enjoyed it.”

The others were shifting nervously. This was not the sort of thing you were supposed to say. Even I knew that, and I wasn’t
myself yet, either.

“But I don’t deserve nice things,” she said. She shivered, nodded. “This is my penance.”

Her words did not go over well at all. Jeb’s followers didn’t believe in giving up things as self-punishment. They believed
in giving up things because things were not worth having. The crowd mumbled, grumbled, harrumphed, and splintered into shocked
and angry clusters after Isabella’s answer. People talked about it for weeks afterward.

“What’s she doing here?” they’d ask. Occasionally, some of the more hotheaded members of the camp would suggest that Jeb had
been paid in some way to hide Isabella, and despite all his talk of giving up worldly belongings, he had a cell phone buried
in his hut and a castle waiting for him somewhere. But I don’t think any of them believed that, not as the decades passed
and Jeb stayed in the desert. As time wore on, they had to ask themselves this: If Jeb has a castle waiting for him, why doesn’t
he go to it?

I confess I came to respect and admire Jeb, despite his tenuous hold on reality. I came to think of him as a good, even holy,
man. I suppose it’s inevitable that if you spend years following a set of principles, even if you do so for cynical and self-serving
reasons, something of the truth of those principles—assuming there is at least a modicum of truth—will rub off on you. Maybe
Jeb found that the truth in his message—“less is more,” basically—somehow sanctified him as time wore on. Apparently, Isabella
did, too.

Isabella eventually stopped talking about simplicity as punishment. I think she, like the woman at the campfire with the formerly
crowded cupboard, actually came to enjoy a less cluttered life, one that could be supported without a castle staff. In Bisbania,
for example, she had two full-time shoe clerks who maintained, repaired, and rotated her shoe collection. By the time she
got to Green Bay, she was happy with one small closet full of shoes, which she supervised herself. “You wouldn’t believe how
nice it is,” she told me once, “to just walk in, grab some brown pumps, and be out the door.”

(A fine argument for neutral shoes, perhaps, but this is not as frightfully common as it sounds. Remember, please, that in
Isabella’s case, brown always matched her outfit. It’s not as if she was throwing on some tan sandals with a burgundy print
skirt and calling it “good enough.”)

In fact, after we left Kenya, Isabella refused to talk about the camp in anything other than fiercely nostalgic ways. She
would not critically analyze Jeb’s message or his lifestyle. She never let on that she knew he was crazy as a loon. She utterly
ignored my feeble attempts to make light of the difficult time we had there.

I would joke about the inability to engage in proper dental care. “A few more months, and our teeth would have looked like
the royal dogs’,” I’d say.

I would joke about the lack of hot water and antiperspirant. “It was like living in the Dark Ages,” I’d say. “Or maybe France.”

I would expect an appreciative giggle but got nothing. Maybe a bored sigh. Then she would launch into a glowing monologue
about the peace of the African desert or a sour complaint about the overabundance of collectibles that filled her own country
and all of Europe and especially America. “There is,” she told me during one of our frequent phone conversations, “this utterly
outrageous pony-print fad going on here.” (I was back in Bisbania, and Isabella seemed to enjoy regaling me with this sort
of bemusing American atrocity.)

“I went shopping yesterday,” she said, “and there was a display in which an
entire room
was styled with pony print: sofa, rug, lamp shades.”

I chuckled at the horror of it.

“Curtains,” she continued, “pillows, tissue holders! It looked like some sort of pony slaughterhouse!”

She sighed then and chuckled a little herself. Then she asked the question that she asked too often for my taste. She asked
the question that always killed the laughter.

“Oh, Mae,” she said. “What do you suppose Geoffrey would have thought about that?”

I
think I need Frederick’s help. I look back now and realize I’ve given up my identity. I had planned to keep it secret until
closer to the end. But I confess that my plans for this story are all unraveling. I’m having trouble keeping the threads of
this tale straight.

Frederick had cautioned me. He reminded me that my last novel had taken a bit of work. “You’re not a spring chicken anymore,”
he said, laughing as if he had invented the cliché. He predicted that this story would be long, and “if you’ve really got
those bombshells you’re promising, it’s bound to be complicated as well.

“Frankly,” he said, “I’m not sure you’re up to it.”

I scoffed. I protested. I called my dearest friends and ranted about the injustice of it all. But now here I am, messing things
up, slipping my name in when I had planned not to. I suppose I should go back and rewrite that last passage. But instead,
I think I will just go ahead and admit that I am Mae Whitehall-Wright, Geoffrey’s widow and perhaps the only woman Isabella
ever befriended who did, in a period of foolish youthfulness, sometimes wear neutral shoes.

Perhaps you had already suspected as much. Secrest could, no doubt, tell a good story herself, and Ethel Bald knows things
that she never wrote. I suppose Iphigenia could have written, if so motivated, a rollicking account of the last century of
royal life. But none of those stories is this story. You had probably come to realize that only Isabella and Mae could know
the things I know, and once you narrowed it down to those choices, then it has to be Mae, doesn’t it? I guess there is no
point in trying to hide it anymore. For though this is the story of Isabella, it is clearly not Isabella’s story.

There are too many parts of herself that she kept closed off, even to me, though I think she was as open with me as she was
with anyone. Except, of course, with her husband. And probably with Geoffrey. And possibly, for all I know, with Jeb as well.
So I guess I should say she was as open with me as any other living person, since you know what happened to Geoffrey. And
Rafie and Jeb are dead now, too. They passed away on the same day a few years back, on opposite sides of the world. They were
old men, and long sick to boot. The timing of their deaths was one of those extraordinary coincidences that life sometimes
offers up. Even I can’t invent a conspiracy theory for it, but perhaps that just indicates that I’m sick unto death of conspiracy
theories.