Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“He’d already broken with one tradition when he withdrew from Rome,” the man said, still restrained but rushing now, doing with rapid pacing what before he had done with calm, “why would he want to break with another one?”

Then, suddenly, he pulled another technique from his quiver, assumed yet another style, closer to what the King’s had been when the Prince and I first came in, gesticulating wildly, playing for laughs.

“He was ahead of his time, don’t you know. Oh yes. Didn’t ’alf ‘old with axes, ’e didn’t. Not ’im. Not ’enry. Haxes was sharp and wulgar. All that spilled blood? That were Royal blood!” And stage whispered, “’e anticipated hinterregnums, rewolutions— ’e hanticipated ’angings!

“Oh yes, one of my predecessors introduced the Windsor knot to make it a bit more comfortable around the royal neck of one of them Tudors or Stuarts or Windsors or May- fairs. Just in the event, don’t you know!” he said, the last sentence delivered as if it were some famous, uproarious tag line. And sure enough the King was red-faced, almost hacking up his laughter. Even Charlotte was grinning.

There were other jolly incumbents. One came up to me, bubbling with inside information, tricks of the trade.

“You know those royal orders monarchs sometimes wear? Those broad, colorful bands of cloth that pass down diagonally over a king’s or queen’s right shoulder like the supporting straps on Sam Browne belts? Well, if the color scheme isn’t carefully coordinated or the order clashes too severely with the rest of the costume, it could throw off the entire occasion. That’s why our kings and queens have always had art directors.”

“You’re the royal art director?”

“No, I’m in a related field. Monarchical medallions can be very heavy. Well, they aren’t shields made out of tin, are they? Often they’re heavy enough to tear a fabric apart, so the fabric has to be reinforced to support patches to fix to the cloth of ceremonial gear — your designer dresses, your gowns and robes and uniforms — to support the weight of those medallions. That’s what I do, I’m Royal Fashion Engineer.”

And another who said he was Royal Taster and credited his astonishing slimness to the fact that he had to keep his palate clear in order to distinguish among the flavors of the various poisons that had, over the years, been used in attempted regicides. He felt, he said, he owed it to his sovereign to partake, at most, of one or two spoonfuls of royal soup, a bite of meat, a sip of wine, a nibble of bread. I was reminded of Lawrence working his symbolic presence during the Season’s Balls and dinners and, now I noticed it, of Their Majesties’ own trim, fit figures.

“Ahh,” I said, “that explains it. They owe them to their diminished dinners.”

Royal Taster smiled. “Just so,” he said, exactly as if he knew to what I referred.

Royal Peerager spoke to me. He told me, rather too pointedly, I thought, that it was his job to watch out for pretenders. The Mayfairs, he said, could be traced back to Lear and Macbeth.

He would have gone on — I was interested enough despite a fear of the silly starting to take hold in me — but just then some new personage, burdened by several parcels, burst upon the scene.

“There you are!” King George said.

“And high time, I would have thought,” Charlotte scolded. “You knew I especially wanted you to meet your brother’s new fiancée.”

“As if ever he had an old one, Mother dear,” said Princess Denise.

(For that’s who it was, another ingenue for what might turn out to be — I hadn’t met Princess Mary yet — an entire company of ingenues. She’d changed in the two years or better since I’d last been in England. I suppose her picture had been in the papers plenty of times but the truth is I had enough on my mind in those days not to have noticed. Well, not actually the truth, Sid. What the truth actually is is that I consciously tried to avoid what was going on at home, to the point that I wouldn’t even go to an English film or watch Masterpiece Theater on the telly — which I’d started to call TV — and had stopped drinking tea. So the last thing I needed was to keep up with the British fascination with the prurient goings-on of its more hereditary characters, pushing aside as much as I could of the silly gossip that surrounds one — surrounds? embraces — in both countries like climate. Maybe America was the wrong place to go. Perhaps I should have chosen somewhere less civilized, some hot, plague-ridden African place, where I might have comforted dying children and futilely brushed away flies from their faces that the children themselves were too weak to brush off and probably didn’t even notice for all that the flies crawled across the huge, swollen surfaces of the very eyes they didn’t even seem capable of shutting. So why would I? What did I need it, Sir Sid?)

I hardly recognized her, though how much could a seventeen-year-old girl, now a twenty-year-old young woman, have changed in two years? There was something slightly askew and off-plumb about her appearance, and as soon as she burst into speech as she’d burst into the room (as one is said to “burst into song,” from a standing position as it were— like some instantaneous, transitionless transformation or sea change or jump cut in the pictures), I thought I knew what it was. It was as if she’d undergone some powerful, personal Damascene rearrangement— a persona inversion of the seventeen-year-old, almost womanly creature I vaguely remembered from photographs I’d seen in the papers over two years before into the twentyish, pretty, oh- so-girlish young thing before me — before me? practically all over me — now.

Although she was got up as a sort of latter-day flapper— fringe swayed at the bottom of her too-short skirt like the fringed, beaded dividers that separated backrooms in the décor of thirites-era movies, or plays set somewhere in the Orient, from the low taverns and bars on the ground floors of whorehouses, places where sailors are shanghai’d or slipped Mickey Finns — with dark, wide eyes immensely open and sketched in with eyebrow pencil, and her red, fire- engine mouth had been painted into a pout at once as cynical and cute as someone about to cry, this flapper- cum-ingenue seemed hyperactive as a kid at a slumber party.

“Why, Larry, she’s adorable! You’re adorable, Louise! Isn’t she adorable, Father? Isn’t she adorable, Mother? You’ll make just the most brilliant Princess, Louise. No wonder even an old pooh like Larry lost his heart. Well, I should think so . Here, sweetheart, here are some things I bought you. (That’s why I was late, Charlotte dear. So there!) I just guessed at your sizes, but don’t fret if nothing fits. We won’t even bother to return it, we’ll just give the stuff away to our servants or those absolutely smashing Mounted Horse Guards in Whitehall to offer to Oxfam. Then we can go shopping for all new things!”

As she spoke she produced one exotic garment after another from her various boxes and bundles. I recognized the names of boutiques all along the Kings Road, some so chic I’d supposed they’d shut up shop years ago. I couldn’t have told you the function of some of this garb or, had the Princess not held a few of the pieces against me, have identified more than the general area of the body they were supposed to cover. Of the material of which they were made I could have told you nothing, only that much of it must have been experimental.

“Oh, Louise,” she said, “you look quite fabulous in that!”

She was enjoying herself and, to be frank, I was too. Despite the public character of our performance, I felt comfortable, somnolent, spoiled and at ease as a teen having a makeover.