Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

My Waterman seemed quite content, even louche, out of his element, constantly lighting and relighting his sodden pipe, and pouring a stream out of a figured urn into the blackening marsh. Fish occasionally stuck their heads out of the water to stare at him, as they will sometimes do for sick men.

The ladies had known of each other since childhood, but heretofore had seen one another only from a distance. Through the turn of the century, the Cannonian royal family had left their wooden palace at Umfallo to vacation at Semper Vero for the summer, as the nether-reaches of our acreage were still technically part of the royal hunting grounds. It had been the decision of Zanäia’s father, King Peveny, to live as the people do for the best part of the summer, for it was well-known that rough as a peasant’s life might be, they invariably looked out upon beauty, even while locked in a starving carnal embrace. Every member of the court changed into peasant clothes for the season, living in elegant Turkish tents and small portable cottages brought in by oxen. Princess Zanäia herself resided in a small gabled treehouse, a portion of whose parlor still remained in the crotch of a huge beech, which could bear the weight of her many surreptitious nightly visitors, though by now the view had lost much of its charm. But the court kept its distance from the gentry, suspicious of any intercourse with the upper middle classes, and as the gentry themselves of course felt morally superior to the aristocrats, they got along quite well. To underline the simplicity of the royal summer, a large scaffolding had been erected between the trees, suggesting some kind of pagan sacrificial platform, and around this stood supercilious servants in frock coats, each standing with a flaming taper by a satin footstool. There were as well some large and rather unconvincing life-sized dolls, impaled on tritons for Scythian effect, as the royalty liked nothing so much as to remind themselves that they, too, had once been classified as barbarians. This mise-en-scène was framed with long wafts of diaphanous silk trailing down from the beeches, making a kind of osmotic proscenium. It was as if they could only accept the view if it were made commonplace while you were looking out and pornographic while you were looking in, creating a kind of allegory, though suggestive of what it was hard to say, except that the traditional invasion route had been turned into a kind of slow-motion debauche , particularized by large potted plants, beautiful young city boys, angelic peasant girls, petards, and Vaseline.

King Peveny himself was a strange man, given to visiting exhibitions in Cannonia about foreign lands, then writing speeches giving the impression he had actually traveled there. Once, when bouncing his darling, curly-haired Zanäia on his knee, he had looked at her sideways, saying, “You know my sweet, if you were in a brothel, you are not the one I’d pick.” In their most recent hysterical quest for a ruler, the Astingi had sent out feelers to all the royal houses, magnates, and grofs without privilege, even unmarried daughters of the higher nobles. But nothing remotely like a prince would consider them, except one Grof Peveny, “Falconer of the Hereditary lands,” who, tired of hunting rats in Poland, was enticed by the promise to take unlimited Cannonian forest pig from horseback. But despite the unprecedented game potential, he reluctantly withheld his candidacy for a time, as he perceived the ancient hermit kingdom to be a troubled place. Yet times were such for the minor nobility that he was finally forced to accept the regency. So in 1875, Grof Peveny moved his loyal retainers, sporting chums, knockneed horses, and scruffy dogs to the wooden castle with no stairway and a leaking roof at Umfallo, where to polite applause, and with only a single assassination threat, he summed up his feelings in his acceptance speech: “My people are neither handsome nor gay, meseems. They are neglected, superstitious, and ignorant. But they are indescribably picturesque, and I have learned to love them.” And then they all stood round and sang the new national anthem, a reorchestrated Astingi revel.

Over the creation of thy beauty,

There is a mist of tears

Oh my poor strange land

How long have I kept watch with thee. .

Princess Zanäia and Count Zich had been heavy petters of a sort since thirteen, and the Count had been credited as her lover, an improbable distinction. Each of them liked nothing better than to take the Eroica Express anywhere. That famous train was twice as long as any in Europe, its double-hinged steam engine running wildly as if in terror of itself, hauling its notorious Cannonian first-class sleeping coaches, in which all the bedrooms were adjoined by secret inner doors, and each car in turn bracketed by ornate buffet and smoking carriages. Theirs were intermittent and compensatory attentions in later life, consoling one another with infinite tenderness and solicitude during those intervals when the other had driven away another lover, due to a gross instability and selfishness which they knew better than to practice on each other. It was noted in Father’s daybook that had they been joined in matrimony and publicly practiced the management science and cosseting they adopted when the other was most forlorn, they might have shrewdly ruled the Central Empires, and entirely sidestepped the horrific detour of the twentieth century.

The two women regarded each other evenly. It was the first time they had been this close. The Princess was in remarkably good fettle, Mother thought initially. Her skin was ivory with no crowsfeet or créche at the neck, but as her slip settled about her wet body, Mother noticed the Princess was a veritable web of scar tissue, sutured expertly to be sure, as if one had taken a vellum map of Cannonia at its greatest extent in the Middle Ages and superimposed upon it the late-nineteenth-century railway system. There was a much-repaired main spur across the bridge of her nose, crescents beneath each ear and jowl, trunk-lines beneath the breasts, and a strange, serpentine freight-changing yard at an angle to her navel.

They spoke of surgeries, their mutual fear of microbes and loathing of physicians, not to mention the men who you have to teach to comb their hair and eat with a fork, and who then deceive you. “Marriage is an entombment,” the Princess whispered hoarsely, carrying out the general line of argument she had begun, “but my husband is the only man who will love me to the death.”

Mother refused to be drawn into this. “My husband brought me out of childhood without pain,” she said. “He freed me from the gods of the riverbanks. I can never forget that. And in all relationships, everyone enjoys in different ways, and different times, the position of the master.”

“But what, my dear, do you like about him?”

Ainoha thought this over for some time. “Well, he remembers what he reads.”

“You can’t say so!” the Princess exclaimed.

“And he makes no claim on feelings he doesn’t feel.”

“ Extrordinaire !”

“Yes, and there’s this: he suffers over real things.”

The Princess appeared downcast as she studied her faux-tigerish nails, registering the boredom of a triangle player in a symphony.

“But isn’t it odd,” she blurted, “how resentments start to build even the very first day?”

“My only regret is that there was no one to steal him from,” Ainoha averred. “That would have made it perfect! In any event,” she went on, depetalizing a daisy, “the problem is neither of the marriage yoke nor one of equality. The issue is how to be superior, or so I’ve always thought.”

“How well you put it,” the Princess laughed, her absentminded expression dissolving for a moment.