Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle (23 page)

So despite her rough start at the camp, Isabella was quite popular by the time she left, and her send-off from Kenya was marked
with as much fanfare, in the camp’s own way, as her return to the castle generated back at home. There were hugs and tears,
and Jeb sang a little song. Isabella worked the crowd with all her old regal flare, conveying to each camp member that he
or she was surely the one who would be missed the most.

I remember Isabella gave Milo at least seven goodbye kisses. As she bent to kiss the child, I remember thinking not only that
Isabella still had her regal posture, but if any of us had a camera, we could prove again why photographers love her. She
never looked so beautiful as when she was miserable. And she did seem miserable as she kissed Milo and wished us all farewell.

Milo was oblivious to the sadness, concentrating on giving an adorable baby wave and asking an adorable baby sentence: “Where
go? Where go?”

I answered with the absolute truth, using familial words that my little baby had not heard before and wouldn’t hear again
and could not possibly remember.

“She’s going to see your grandparents in a castle,” I said. “And then she’s going to live with your daddy.”

S
o that, I guess, is the one thing you did not see coming. My child is the heir to the throne. My child’s father is His Royal
Highness the Prince of Gallagher. By all rights, I should hold the title last held by ol’ Reggie herself. May she rest in
peace. I should be the Queen Mother.

But I suppose such a title would never be given the likes of me, a tawdry American scribbler who was once married to castle
help. That is fine. I do not desire the title nor the respect and certainly not the fame. I have always felt uncomfortable
being the center of attention—at a graduation dinner, a surprise birthday party, a farewell gathering in the office on the
last day of a job. At showers, I always felt sorry for the bride or the expectant mother, never envying the moment in the
spotlight even as I envied the stage of life that had brought them to the moment. Though I didn’t need to worry about the
latter, as there were no baby showers for me, of course.

I did receive a few gifts, however. Isabella herself sewed a surprisingly soft camel-hair baby blanket while we were at the
camp. “You can’t wrap a baby in the scratchy stuff we wear,” she said. And when I eventually returned to Bisbania, she set
me up with a high-end Italian stroller, the same model that Isabella’s sister, Lady Fiona, had famously used for her son and
was always bragging about in interviews for parenting magazines. “She’s very particular, my sister,” Isabella said. “So this
stroller must really be the bee’s knees.”

But it was Lady Fiona’s nanny, not the lady herself, who took Isabella’s nephew on walks, and I’m sure the nanny struggled
as much as I did to maneuver the luxurious, yacht-sized stroller on the narrow, crowded sidewalks of Gallagher. I needed a
lighter, more nimble baby mover, if I needed anything at all. After all, Milo was old enough to get around by herself most
of the time. The stroller gift, in other words, made me feel awkward and uncomfortable on many different levels.

You’re not surprised about my discomfort, I’m sure. And knowing all that you do, you will also not be surprised that the most
difficult episode in my relationship with Isabella involved a rivalry over a man. You
may
be surprised to learn that the man in question was neither her husband nor mine.

The episode took place about three years after those eventful months in which Geoffrey died and Raphael’s daughter was born.
It occurred during a summer trip that little Milo and I made to visit Isabella and Rafie in Green Bay.

As you know, most of Princess Isabella’s iconic reputation was made during the so-called Green Bay years. People older than
I used to compare this phenomenon to Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, who made the jump from run-of-the-mill celebrity to international
icon only when she had lost her obvious claim to fame and attempted, or at least gave the appearance of attempting, to live
an ordinary life.

In the same way, Isabella’s life as a princess seems now to a lot of people like so much backstory. Now, when most people
think of Isabella, they picture a wiry, dignified-looking woman wearing somber brown clothes—or, in the words of the fashion
writers, “molasses and oatmeal-colored” clothes—and living out a (relatively) modest life in the Wisconsin woods.

But she lived that modest life with so much gusto! She was an active, dynamic, perpetual-motion machine. All those photos
of Isabella plowing in the community garden or taking library classes on the latest in wiring your home for wireless home
management made an impression on people. She took up golf and learned to yodel in the fine tradition of American cowboys.
(“I suppose the alpine yodeling style is good for the Europeans,” she famously said to
Yodeling Monthly,
building up to what I believe was a calculated compliment to her new continent. “But no one belts it out like a buckaroo.”)

At first Raphael was a bit puzzled by Isabella’s lengthy list of pursuits. Hadn’t they planned to while away their time cuddling
on the sofa and putzing around the house? But by the time Isabella’s interest had turned to blacksmithing and she had built
her own forge, Raphael had grown rather proud of her mushrooming interests and skills. He marveled that his wife could, even
while living miles away from a major media market and even after officially giving up her royal title, still influence people
the globe over. Women around the world, you see, were admiring how the princess looked in her blacksmithing goggles and saying,
“Oh, all right, maybe I should at least take a needlework class.”

In that sense, Isabella became a new sort of icon, the sort that women would look to for inspiration when going through a
midlife crisis. And not just the sort of crisis solved by heading off to the gym. That least of all. Women with grown children
would suddenly take up painting. Or ballet. Or start learning to cook Thai dishes. Or—why not?—speak Thai.

The press was happy to give Isabella all the credit for this self-improvement fad. In one column, Ethelbald Candeloro called
her “the princess who launched a thousand hobbies.”

I was, in my own way, as surprised as Rafie was. All in all, Isabella had been a mopey and depressing presence during our
time in Africa. But reuniting with Rafie seemed to do wonders for her mood. (Wearing more comfortable clothes probably didn’t
hurt, either.) She really did hit her stride there in America. And she did it all without any advice from the Boss. (At least
as far as I know, although I suppose she could have searched the lyrics herself in a pinch.)

Maybe she was energized by the crowds that had greeted her while she was attending the king’s funeral and Iphigenia’s coronation
events. Or perhaps her newfound energy came, simply, from eating again. I wondered sometimes if she was trying to fill up
her new life, to make sure she didn’t waste a moment of the time that Geoffrey had died to give her. Or did her remarkable
pursuit of broadened horizons reflect something darker than that? Was she trying hard to stay busy, too busy to think about
what she had lost? Was she trying to fill an aching void?

I don’t know. But I do know that her hobbies would have been her own little secret if not for the work of Joplin Hughes, a
photographer of little experience and less reputation who arrived in Green Bay soon after Isabella did.

Joplin possessed no historical perspective on the royal family and displayed no particular fondness for the princess. His
interest was only in making a little money, just enough, perhaps, to pay off his student loans and invest in better photographic
equipment.

He ended up doing a good bit better than that, happily earning an upper-middle-class living in a lower-middle-class kind of
town by documenting Isabella’s manic series of hobbies and her more ordinary exploits: trips to the grocery, that teary episode
involving her futile efforts to chip away ice from her mailbox, the rather infamous outing in a shorter-in-back-than-she-realized
“sandy-colored” miniskirt. The European tabloids snapped up those sorts of photos regularly and at a fair price, though thankfully
not so fair as to attract more aggressive competitors.

I say “thankfully” because Joplin’s lack of aggressive ambition is the only reason that his presence did not spell disaster
for the princess and the not really dead prince who shared her home. Joplin was a singularly nonconfrontational, unquestioning
type. He played by gentlemanly rules. If Isabella stepped out the front door, if she jogged on public pathways, if she dared
enter a retail establishment, she would be photographed. But he never tried to get a glimpse of her interior courtyard. He
was too lazy to note that she seemed to be buying at least twice as many groceries as a woman her size would eat. He did not
waste time wondering about the shadowy figure whom he sometimes saw peering from an attic window. (“Probably a guard,” Joplin
said to me once. “Or maybe a ghost. That pilot who killed her husband probably comes back to bug her now.”)

In short, Joplin did not really care about Isabella. He didn’t care about the themes of her life, and he didn’t care about
what she did or didn’t do, as long as she continued to look fabulous while she did it. Or close enough to fabulous that he
could, with a little digital manipulation, help her along. (So if you were one of the millions of women who
were
driven to the gym by that sandy-colored-miniskirt photo, rest assured that while Isabella looked, in my humble opinion, perfectly
presentable in that miniskirt, she did not look quite as
wow
as she did in the famous photo.)

I don’t know if Isabella ever realized the help she was getting in this regard. She officially reacted to Joplin’s latest
photographs with a bored “When will he go away?” sigh, but I often noticed a certain satisfaction in her voice. “Really, you
know, he shouldn’t shoot me from behind so much,” she said during a phone chat not long after a rather attractive shot of
her snowshoeing in a cute “mushroom-colored” ski suit that showed off all her assets and sparked one completely inappropriate
headline.

“It’s just so unnecessary,” Isabella said, trying to sound displeased. “It’s not like it’s hard to get me to turn around.
A simple ‘Yoo-hoo, miss’ will usually do it. I’m quite approachable, you know. That’s always been written about me. ‘Very
approachable.’ Ethelbald Candeloro said that in one of the first stories about me. The engagement story, wasn’t it?”

I didn’t answer, but I was smiling. Apparently, despite her protestations to the contrary, she had missed the fawning attention
of her old life while in Africa. At least that was my read on the situation. If an inappropriate but flattering headline could
get her this worked up, she must be like the rest of us in our middle age, wondering occasionally if we are lovely, thankful
to get a hint that we are.

“I guess I shouldn’t complain,” she said, not seeming to notice my silence. “It’s a nice enough photo—not like that ghastly
one they printed of Genia’s backside a few months ago. Do you think she works out at all anymore?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Hmmm.” She pretended to consider things for a moment. “Still, you’d think if this Joplin fellow is going to make so much
money off me, he’d at least flag me down once, just to properly introduce himself.”

But I was the only one of the two of us who really got to know Joplin.

It was during that summer visit, which, as I said, was a little awkward from day one. I felt uncomfortable about having Milo
around Isabella. And Rafie, too, for that matter. But the prince and princess seemed oblivious to my discomfort and took turns
making over Milo in the extravagantly kind but distracted and vague way that childless couples so often display around children.

“So she’s walking now,” Rafie said, as if this were remarkable for a three-year-old. “Look at her go! So sure on her feet!
I’m sure she’ll become a football star.”

“It’s called soccer here, dear,” Isabella replied. “And it’s a dreadful way to make a living, running around the world in
badly tailored shorts. Milo wouldn’t stand for that at all. She has quite the sense of style, you know.” Isabella addressed
that last comment to me, as if I would not have already noticed.

“I saw Milo dressing a doll the other day,” she continued. “She put green and pink together in a way that would have knocked
Candeloro dead. Simply stunning. And she’s bright, too. Have you seen the way she watches television?”

I cringed and glanced at Rafie. I was afraid he would disapprove, despite his own growing interest in televised entertainment.

Isabella didn’t notice my reaction. “Yesterday,” she went on, “Milo was watching that show—what’s it called?
Blue’s Clues
? Highly educational.” She turned to Rafie to add, “We should get something like that started in Bisbania.”

There was a moment of stilted silence, as there always was when Isabella would accidentally suggest a royal pursuit for the
couple, apparently having forgotten that Rafie was “dead” and she was no longer a princess.

“Well, of course she’s bright,” Rafie said, breaking the silence. “How could she not be?”

Another awkward silence. He had surely started to say, “Look at who her parents are.” Isn’t that what people say? But Milo’s
parentage was not a subject any of the three of us wanted to broach as we sat together, each tortured by some guilty knowledge
or proud suspicion. Or was it proud knowledge and guilty suspicion? Some of both, I suppose.

“Aren’t you worried that Milo’s not talking enough?” I asked finally, changing the subject. But Rafie gave a dismissive wave
and flipped on a game. His lack of interest in Milo’s language skills surprised me, given his obsession with speech development
and given that the only active parental interest he had taken in his daughter was to insist that she learn the difficult official
Bisbanian language, which was useless to anyone not in the nobility of that country.