“Well, yeah,” Ben said, “since you were the Princess of Saxony.” We were nearly to the pneumatic doors now. In ten minutes, we’d be in Sebastian’s car, and thirty minutes after that, I’d be back in the little house in the hills. I tried not to long for that quite so devoutly, but the thought of my own kitchen and my own bed was such a pull. And Joe’s garden. And most of all, Joe’s cello. I’d given away almost all his things, because one can’t live in the past, but the cellowasJoe. An object, but such a beloved one. Even putting my hand on it would be a comfort.
Oh, the tears of old age. Joe had felt almost close enough to touch as I’d stood in the Nuremberg bakery where we’d met, had walked the streets we’d strolled together and eaten at theBiergartenwhere we’d taken so many dinners, during all thosemonths when we couldn’t be married but also couldn’t be alone. We’d eaten very badly and the beer had been weak, but it hadn’t mattered. When Joe had been in my life, I’d never felt alone.
Through the International Arrivals doors, and a crowd of excited people greeting their travelers. Elise, my daughter, was there, and her husband Niles—how kind of them to come, and how unequal I felt to the conversation that would surely ensue! And somebody with a film camera on a tripod, beside a very well-groomed woman with a microphone. There must have been a celebrity on the flight from New York. I hadn’t noticed, but then, I never do. I still sometimes look at those features on red-carpet gowns at the Oscars, but while I can admire many of them, I never recognize the names or faces of the women attached. You may have lived too long when you lose all your cultural landmarks.
That was depressing, and I wasn’t a depressed person. Just a tired one. Life went on just the same whether you enjoyed it or not, so why not enjoy it as much as possible?
“Princess!” the well-coiffed blonde was saying, for some reason. “Princess Marguerite!”
I stopped. So did Ben, obviously, since I still had his arm, and so did Sebastian and Alix. I heard some noise around me, too. “There they are!” somebody was saying. A young boy called out, “Can I have a selfie?”
Oh. He was asking Sebastian, of course. Hewasa celebrity, certainly by American standards—a football player. Thank goodness, I was allowed to be merely an old lady, attempting neatness if not elegance in my travel-ready black trousers and flowing jacket. And, alas, my hideous black walking shoes with their thick soles—“podiatrist approved!”—which may have been even uglier than the Band of German Maidens shoes I’d been wearing when I’d first arrived in this country. It was a contest, though.
The blonde woman surged toward us—it seemed as if half the crowd was surging toward us—and then Sebastian had his body between me and the camera and was saying, “Give us some space, please,” in his firmest and most masterful tone. Not glowering like Mr. Rochester, the object of my girlhood longings, but not entirely unlike him, either.
The woman said, switching tacks as smoothly as she’d applied her makeup, “I’m speaking now to Sebastian Robillard, star kicker for the Portland Devils. He’s here with his fiancée, Alix Glucksburg-Thompkins, the latest Princess of Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein-Sunderburg-Glücksburg, and her grandmother, Princess Marguerite, whom we’ve all come to know so well in the weeks since her tragic and heartwarming story became a social media sensation. They’re just returning from Dresden, where they recovered the famous emerald tiara that Napoleon gave Josephine at their marriage. Have you set a date for the wedding yet, Princess Alix? And will you be wearing the tiara, or does that honor go to your grandmother?”
“What?” Alix looked cross. Also rumpled. Alix, I’m afraid, does not subscribe to my no doubt outmoded travel wardrobe standards, and was wearing yoga pants and a T-shirt, with her hair in a ponytail and no makeup. But then, it had been a long twenty-four hours: Dresden to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to New York, and finally, New York to San Jose, and I was perhaps not as fresh as a daisy myself.
I’d made an inadvertent joke, my tired brain realized. My name, Marguerite, means “Daisy” in French, and that had been my family’s pet name for me. Only after many years had I even changed my legal name back to “Marguerite,” so much had I feared being discovered as a fraud.
Sebastian said, “We haven’t set a date yet, no. Or chosen the wardrobe. We’ll get to it.”
“How do you feel about marrying a princess, especiallynow that you’ve seen her palace?” the reporter asked. “Isn’t that a lot of extra pressure?”
“I’m not marrying the princess,” Sebastian said evenly. “I’m marrying Alix, who doesn’t have a palace anymore and is mostly just a person. Like me.”
“Yeah, see,” Alix said, “that’s not how it works. You have to look at the person across the breakfast table every morning. What, you think I wake up flawlessly, with fascinating yet refined topics of conversation picked out to beguile my soon-to-be-husband? Take a look. I wake up likethis,and life’s too short for all that maintenance anyway. Probably why Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip had separate bedrooms, so she could get some space to put the crown down and just be herself. Luckily, I’m not Queen Elizabeth, so I don’t have to worry about it.”
“And Princess Marguerite?” the reporter asked, seemingly not bothered a bit by Alix’s forthrightness. My granddaughter strenuously objects to being called a princess, but there’s no doubt she’s inherited something from my family all the same. “Will you show us the tiara? Everyone here would love to see it.”
I said, “Surely youhaveseen it. It was filmed, I believe.”
“Well, yes,” the woman said, “but not in person.”
“No, thank you,” I said, as crisply as is possible for an old woman who longs more than anything to lie down for approximately a week. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”
“How about the necklace?” a woman called out from the crowd. “Are you going to find that next?”
“No,” I said. “I sold the necklace long ago. It’s gone.”
“But you’d like to have it back, surely,” the reporter said.
“Perhaps you imagine that my life is all galas and state dinners,” I said. “I assure you it is not. And one does look so conspicuous wearing an emerald parure to the supermarket.”
“But for your granddaughter?” the reporter asked. “Don’t you want to get it back for her?”
“Dude,” Ben burst out, “look at Alix. She’s not exactly tiara territory.”
“Unflattering but true,” Alix said. She had her equilibrium back, because she was laughing a little.
“Really.” That was Elise, my daughter, who, as Alix points out, is by far the most princessy of all of us. “My mother has been traveling for an entire day and night. Thank you for your interest, but we need to be going now. Lead the way, please, Sebastian.” And in a lower voice, to me, “We’ll find a bench outside where you can wait for the car. Honestly, thesepeople.”
Finally, I was standing before the low wooden house among the live oaks and red-barked madrones, and Elise was opening the door. And still talking.
“I had your house cleaned before you came home, Mother. I know, I know, you have a cleaning lady, but I trust Elena more. There’s running a vacuum, and then there’s dusting the baseboards and those upper corners the spiders love so much, especially when you insist on keeping the doors open to the deck. What some of these women think is clean enough! She picked up groceries for you, too, but I thought we’d order out tonight. Thai, I’m thinking. That’s beautifully light after a long trip. Niles, you take care of that, please—nothing too spicy for Mother, remember—and I’ll unpack her things. I assume that Sebastian and Alix are staying in that terrible trailer, and Ben here in the house? Let me show you to the guest room and bath, Ben, and you can have a shower while Sebastian and Alix use the trailer, and Mother, of course, her own bathroom. Are you steady,Mother, after that long trip, or would you prefer my help to shower?”
Alix had both hands on her ponytail, sure sign of temper. I didn’t have a ponytail, or I’d probably have been grabbing it myself. “No,” I said. “No to any of it, thank you. I’ve eaten a great deal on the plane, or rather, the planes. What I most want now is to lie down on my own bed, and perhaps a cup of tea, if you would be so good. It was kind of you to come, and to get the others settled, but I need to be alone now.”
