Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“You’re not a tourist then,” he said, chatting me up like any young man any young girl.

I saw what was up, I knew what was what. “This isn’t some droit du seigneur thing, is it, Your Peerage?”

“I hate that,” said the Prince.

“What do you hate?”

“All those awful ‘Your This’ and ‘Your That’ jokes. Calling me ‘Highness,’ calling me ‘Wilshire.’ ‘M’lud.’ Calling me ‘Sire.’ Calling me ‘Peerage.’ Having a prince on. She was right, though, that dreadful woman. I am ‘symbolic-like,’ I have no real power. It’s almost the start of the next century. People have had it with Royals. They’re starting to agitate for reforms. We can’t say we blame them.”

He suddenly seemed boyish, he suddenly seemed shy.

“Say, you’re not one of those Let’s-Trade-Places sort of princes, are you?”

“What if I were?”

“Well, I should be very sorry to know it, My Lord Grace,” I said, teasing him.

(Flirting! I was actually flirting! Not only for the first time in years, but with someone whose power, symbolic or not, was as real to me, or to my outraged class-conscious blood, as it might have been not so many centuries before when he could have shut me up in the tower, or had me beheaded, or made me his strumpet. Am I getting warm, Sir Sid?)

“Lawrence! My name is Lawrence, and if someone doesn’t call me by it soon, I shall go over the wall!”

“ ‘Up the wall,’” I corrected.

“Over it, by God bl-dy f--ing he-l! Over it!”

“Oh, Prince,” I said, by which I meant speak to me, make yourself clear, help me to understand.

“Well you would do,” he said as if reading my mind, “if you spent any only three days filling the appointments on the Court Calendar. Any only three? Any only two. One!

“I’m young. Not yet thirty. It isn’t that I’m bored— though I’m bored — so much as exhausted. And these tours are the worst. I put on a good show, I give them a run for their money. Well, you saw! It would kill a normal man, what I do. I’m like a trained athlete. But there’s just so much even a trained athlete can take. During the Season I put in a half hour at a Ball, then rush on to the next. And the next. And the next. I mingle and mingle and mingle. And always with some aide-de-camp or plenipotentiary two decades older than myself at my ear and whispering the names of those I must greet as if they were state secrets. What I need is someone at the other ear giving me the names of all those plenipotentiaries and aides-de-camp. Well, you saw. I called him ‘Colin.’ My equerry. That wasn’t Colin. Colin is heavier.

“But these tours are exhausting. They take it out of one.

“Hither’d in America forty miles in a motorcade to watch two innings of a ballgame, and yon’d to take one course at a banquet.

“And all the time working out our rehearsed idiosyncrasies. Well, you saw. One young prince was famous for trying to perfect a steam-powered perambulator most of his adult years. And there was another, this royal was owed a permanent crown for a back tooth. When she died the monarch who succeeded her insisted the work be completed by the dentist. I understand the poor man had to pry the dead queen’s jaws open in order to replace the temporary with the permanent crown. He delayed his mother’s burial for thirty-five hours until the dentist who’d been working on her could make good on the crown.”

“How mean, how awful for the dentist.”

“Not really. The fellow got a ‘By Appointment to HBM’ plaque out of it and the new king earned a reputation for being frugal.

“So you see. It isn’t so easy being in my position.”

“There’s lots have it worse.”

“Are there? Do they? Oh, I hope so!”

Sunday, January 19, 1992

How We Got Engaged

“Lord Mayor Miniver, My Lord and Lady Lewes. Anthony Fitz-Sunday, Right Honorable MP from the Lothian Chain. Miss Bristol, honored guests, loyal subjects, and welcome friends. We would be remiss if we did not take the opportunity today to tell you how very, very glad it makes us feel to be home. Even though till this morning we had never set foot on your beautiful island, Cape Henry, or, indeed, as much as glimpsed the Lothians on the horizon like so many gray serpents at the bottom of a spyglass.

“We were ‘too young’ to accompany His Royal Highness, our father, when he visited these islands with Her Royal Highness, our mother, in the sixties, or to accompany them on their second tour when they returned in the seventies, by which time we were engaged in our training at the Royal Naval Colleges at Dartmouth and Greenwich. For the reason we did not come with them on His and Her Royal Highnesses’ yacht on its famous round-the-world cruise in the sixties was not, as the story that was put out at the time had it, that we were ‘too young,’ but that, even at five, when most children that age have already become jaded by the roundabout and demand to be taken on thrill rides at Battersea Park that might put off men and women four and five times older, we had not yet found our sea legs. Now it will not do, of course, for a future King of England not to find his sea legs. After all, what is it they say—‘Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves …’?

“But our theme is coming home, pride, gladness, the almost physical release one feels in finding oneself in the bosom of one’s kind, within, as it were, all the warming fires of consanguine blood, all the …

“Pardon us. We are no metaphysical prince and the last thing on our mind today is speculation, let alone attempting to fit such speculation to a lofty rhetoric. Henceforth, we shall endeavor to banish from our speech that which as merely Prince we had only arrogated anyway— the royal, we mean, pronoun, and address you properly, with ‘I,’ with ‘me,’ with ‘my’ …”

And I, though I was close enough to him to have heard his words — in a front-row seat, actually — even without benefit of the various microphones on the lectern before him that fed the words into the public-address and other equipment, one mike, I guessed, for radio, one for TV, another perhaps for the local archives, and still one more for the high-resolution Minicam machinery used by the crew that traveled with him in order to prepare a documentary on

Lawrence for French TV— all the time thinking: Miss

Bristol? Miss Bristol? and parsing the eloquent syntax of the name’s placement between the Right Honorable MP from the Lothian chain and all those loyal subjects, honored guests, and welcome friends.

“… and because I do not feel symbolic here in what is neither protectorate nor commonwealth, republic nor state, hegemony nor league nor loose association. Not confederation or jurisdiction, not even this, well, not Canada, with— Their Majesty’s faces on the money or no — all its pretensions to home rule, but only, quite simply, this honest-to-God home, a place which actually has its own MP— this vestige and outpost, this geographical quirk, like an outbuilding, say, as accessory as Northern Ireland or Wales. …”

Thinking, Miss Bristol, Miss Bristol?

“… where I am not just passive witness, watching the ritual dances, accepting the flowers, the grayish leis of rotting bones and teeth, hearing the tuneless, gibberish chants to the arrhythmic, asyndeton claps on human skin and heads like the pat-down hand search of someone suspicious picked out of a line filing through Customs. But home, at home, taking my ease, feeling at ease, and laying this wreath at the tomb of Captain Spears-Henry out of ordinary common courtesy, not ceremoniously, but rather like a guest bringing a bottle of table wine to his hostess at a dinner party.”