Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle (18 page)

“Isabella is a gem herself,” Ethelbald gushed. “She needs no jewels in her tiara.”

The morning after the coronation, Isabella stood before the nation in a recorded address and announced that she was now renouncing
her title, meaning she would henceforth be known again as simply Isabella Cordage.

Wearing the same rough wool that had become her trademark, and with the spiky hair that now looked trendy rather than grotesque,
she explained her reasoning.

“I really should have taken this step two years ago,” she said. “But I could not bring myself to give up the title that was
my sole link to my dear husband. Now, however, I have come to realize my tie to Rafie is stronger than any mere words or name.
My role in the royal family no longer has any constitutional purpose. I will continue to be a part of my in-laws’ private
lives, but I think it will be beneficial to everyone involved if I give up my public role and my title, which Queen Iphigenia
may one day want to bestow upon one of her own children.”

(Iphigenia had specifically asked for that line in an attempt to silence the mounting worry that her lack of anything resembling
a boyfriend meant an end to the direct line of succession, a troubling prospect, as it would mean that one of Prince Louis’s
dreadful granddaughters, specifically the oldest one with the tattoos and French boyfriend, could be the next monarch.)

“To make the transition easier for all involved,” Isabella continued, back on her own agenda, “I will be making a new home
in a remote place, and I ask that I be allowed to live my life there in privacy and peace.”

Iphigenia thought the speech went exceedingly well and was thrilled with Isabella’s delivery of the line about the children.
“She can put on quite a show,” Iphigenia told the ladies-in-waiting. “I will grant her that.” But once again, Iphigenia and
Isabella learned how helpless they were at crafting public perception. The next morning, the headlines read:

MEAN QUEEN GENE BANISHES IZZY TO NOWHERESVILLE

GREEN BAY, U.S.A., READIES FOR NEW ROYAL RESIDENT

I
guess I need to tell you how I learned Ethelbald Candeloro’s secret. I don’t mean to be cruel about this, to harp on his
one awkward truth. But the moment when Ethelbald and I learned each other’s secrets was a fateful one. And so I think any
true accounting of what happened to all of us needs a detailed description of that encounter.

I had followed Isabella during her mysterious exile, and then I followed her home. After I returned, I attended one of the
events that commemorated the king’s death. They were all sad and solemn, of course. But the later ones had an underlying,
shall I say, life to them, which made for politically tricky posturing. You had to appear to enjoy the party without seeming
like you were glad there was an occasion for one.

I saw Isabella enter the building from afar. She was announced, and all eyes turned toward her and her beige suit (dubbed
a “coffee-and-cream-colored confection of refined class” in Ethelbald’s column the next day).

But she did not see me—just another face in navy—until we bumped into each other in the women’s room. She surprised me by
squealing with delight and hugging my neck and complimenting my dress, as if she sincerely liked the color. “You clean up
great,” she said.

I suppose I thought now that we were back in our old world, she would treat me in the old way. But the stress of returning,
of once again being surrounded by so many things and so many eyes and so much excess, had unnerved her. She honestly seemed
happy to see me.

She asked me if I’d had my first good cup of cider yet, and if I had been brushing my teeth all day long, as she had. “I had
forgotten,” she said, “how marvelous clean teeth feel.”

I laughed and said, “Well, at least then you’ll have a hobby in Green Bay. You can brush your teeth all day and night.”

We were slaphappy and silly and feeling unreasonably clean and young. Right then we heard something hit the floor in the stall
closest to us, and then someone cleared her throat. Isabella and I stared at each other, silently and frantically trying to
remember exactly what we had said.

Had I actually said “Green Bay,” or did I say something safe like “your new home”? In that panicky moment, neither of us was
sure.

And then a heavyset, somewhat mannish woman stepped out of the stall and adjusted her strapless black ball gown.

“Well, hello,” Isabella said in her brightest and most engaging voice. “I didn’t realize we had company. I hope we haven’t
been boring you with our nonsensical patter.”

Ethel Bald shook her head shyly, clearly wishing she had not dropped her purse and called attention to herself. “Oh, dear
no, Your Highness,” she said with the sort of awkward curtsy that commoners always offer up. “Were you talking? I was rather
absorbed with a . . . ” Ethel Bald’s voice trailed off at this point as she apparently realized there wasn’t much that she
could claim to be absorbed with in a bathroom stall, especially to a princess. “Um. With a family, eh, issue.” That had probably
seemed like a good line when she started it, but she furrowed her brow in what appeared to be a regretful way when she got
to the word “issue.” Really, the word “issue” has an entirely different connotation when connected with bathroom stalls, doesn’t
it? Or perhaps she was worried that it sounded like some of her family members were still in the stall, because she continued
by saying, “Thinking about it, I mean. The, um, issue, I was thinking of.”

Another furrowed brow. “You know how family is,” she continued, then gamely attempted a smile.

But that was all wrong, and each of the three of us winced, though Isabella tried to hide it. Isabella was, at least supposedly,
still a relatively recent widow and attending a memorial service for her late father-in-law. This is not the sort of circumstance
in which you joke about the trials of putting up with relatives.

“I suppose,” Ethel Bald continued in a misguided attempt to cover up that mistake, “I should just be glad they’re alive.”
She winced again. “Not that I wouldn’t still love them if they were dead.”

For a writer, she could be awfully awkward with words.

“Of course,” said Isabella, trying to put on a chatty persona that would suggest it was perfectly ordinary for her to drag
out conversations with babbling commoners who spontaneously and loudly emerge from bathroom stalls to say inappropriate things.
Isabella needed to gauge who this person was and whether she had overheard anything that threatened Isabella and her not-really-dead
husband. “Where is your family from?” Isabella asked, uncharacteristically ending her sentence with a preposition.

In all her years of sneaking about at royal balls and castle events, Ethel Bald had never faced a grilling like this. She
looked positively panicked. “Um. Well. Here and there,” she said. When Isabella did not leap in to fill the awkward silence,
Ethel Bald made a rookie mistake. The first thing you are taught in journalism school is that you should
never
be the one to fill an awkward silence. You should always let the
other
person rush into the silence. That is how you get your best information.

But Ethel Bald was down on her game. She was nervous, and it showed. She panicked and kept talking, sharing the first thing
that came into her head, which was, unfortunately for her, the truth. (It almost always is—that is precisely the reason journalists
are taught to let the other person fill the silence.) “Mostly, I guess,” Ethel Bald accurately reported, “from America.”

“Oh,” Isabella exclaimed, a bit too enthusiastically, I thought. “I went to school in America! It’s a lovely country, you
know.”

There was another silence, and this time Isabella rushed to fill it. Neither of these women would have made it on
60 Minutes,
I could see that.

“It’s so . . .” Isabella struggled to find the right words. “So casual and, well . . . big! Silly me, I haven’t even introduced
myself. I’m Isabella,” she said, knowing full well that the strange woman was already aware of that. “They call me the Princess
of Gallagher.”

Ethel Bald nodded. “Pleased to meet you.”

“And you are?” Isabella said in the royal way that seems absolutely nonjudgmental but nevertheless embarrasses people for
not having already introduced themselves. “Oh,” Ethel Bald said. “I’m Ethel.” Pause. “It’s an old-fashioned American name,
you know. But I consider myself Bisbanian through and through. Born here. Put myself through school by working in the fig
orchards. Husband is in the royal engineer corps. Last name is Bald.”

Something flashed across her face. Did she wish she hadn’t said that?

Isabella said it was a delight to meet her, and she later told me that we were all clear. “We may need to be paranoid,” she
said. “But we do not need to be so paranoid that we’re worried about the chunky and slightly mannish wives of royal engineers.
Besides, we didn’t say anything that interesting. It’s not like you actually mentioned Green Bay by name.”

But I wondered. For I have a lot in common with Ethel Bald. I know a little about ugly old-fashioned American names, and I
know a little about awkwardly blurting out the truth, and I know the way a journalist holds her eyes when she does not want
to reveal too much of herself to the subjects of her stories. And I thought I had used the words “Green Bay.”

Besides, I caught something that Isabella didn’t. The woman’s name was Ethel Bald.

Then Ethelbald Candeloro broke the Green Bay story. So I knew. I called “him” and told him that I knew his secret. “He” said
that was okay. He had been expecting my call. He’d been rattled by our encounter in the bathroom, so he’d been doing some
research. He was pleased to tell me that he knew my secret as well.

Then he slipped into a dreamy, philosophical voice and told me he was almost glad that someone had found out. He had, for
a long time, wanted to be able to tell someone, and he guessed that someone was me. He wanted to be able to say out loud that
he never meant to do it, but the editor had thought he was a man, and he was afraid if he told the truth, he wouldn’t get
the job.

I said that was well and good. But I told him I wasn’t the least bit glad that someone had learned my secret, and for the
record, I could claim no such innocence. My secret came of a deliberate and conscious act, and I’d do it again if I had to.
I had worked too hard for too long to let something like this humiliate me.

I said I wouldn’t tell his secret, if he would not tell mine. And we agreed not to push each other’s buttons. Until now.

W
hile Ethelbald and I were sharing secrets on the phone, pundits the world over were scrambling to outdo one another with moral
outrage about “Mean Queen Gene” and her decision to banish Isabella to “Nowheresville.”

The American press was a bit kinder. To Green Bay, I mean. Not to Iphigenia, who was immediately seized upon as the villain
by all commentators. But even while waxing on about Mean Gene, the American editorialists saved a bit of venom to take umbrage
at overly harsh criticisms of the princess’s new home, which was not, strictly speaking,
in
Green Bay but was instead in a wooded region just north of there.

Although, make no mistake about it, even the Americans did not approve.

“While Green Bay hardly deserves the ‘Nowheresville’ label applied by European press snobs,” wrote one Detroit columnist,
“it is a bit remote and lacks some of the urban charms that the princess enjoys.”

“She’s not a princess anymore!” Queen Iphigenia whined to her ladies-in-waiting. “That was the whole point.”

The ladies-in-waiting knew that it wasn’t exactly the point. But they were too kind to say so to the new queen. Instead, they
diplomatically tsked and tutted and said it would surely all blow over soon.

For her part, Isabella was terribly disappointed that the news of her location had leaked out already. She was, I suppose,
still heady from her stunning and successful disappearance after the crash. And while she had no intention of going to the
lengths necessary to do that again, she had hoped to keep things under wraps at least until she had quietly moved into the
Green Bay home that Raphael had designed for the two of them.

It was, by royal standards, a small cabin—a mere forty rooms and fifteen thousand square feet. (Raphael had been siphoning
money into a Swiss bank account for several months before the crash, although apparently not enough to build the eighty-room
home he dreamed of.) But the locals undoubtedly still considered it a castle, with its showy architecture, its indoor pool,
and most notably its Biosphere-esque covered interior courtyard, complete with riding court, hiking trail, and the usual mum
garden.

Construction on the project, which Raphael had supervised while wearing flannel shirts and passing himself off as an eccentric
and secretive Vermont billionaire, was not quite finished when Ethelbald Candeloro broke the Green Bay story—a scoop that
seemed inexplicable and mysterious to Isabella at the time and which had not, until this book, been publicly explained.

Isabella’s fear was understandable. She had sacrificed a great deal for this moment. Her title, the life of her beloved adviser,
twenty-four months of adequate dental hygiene. More than that, really. I haven’t even gotten to the big one.

Isabella had, in pursuit of Raphael’s silly dream, spent the past two years living in positively miserable conditions. Most
people, incorrectly assuming Isabella’s gaunt look and sackcloth attire had more to do with fashion than anything else, thought
she must have been living in some lush, well-staffed tropical resort. But it is no exaggeration to say that some prisoners
of war lived better than Isabella did in those years. Her appearance might have shocked and offended the queen, but she had
come dressed exactly as she should have, according to all royal handbooks. She had come to see the queen wearing the best
that she had.