The Low-Down on the Higher-Ups

Even though I have a perfectly good coffee maker, I often go to the nearest Seven-11 to get my daily brew. I justify the extra expense by reminding myself how this daily outing gives me a chance to socialize and to see what's happening in the neighborhood. For a while, a few decades ago, my daily junket to the Seven-11 even provided me with a window onto the wider world. In particular, it became my pipeline into the intimate doings of England's Royal Family. While others were only left to guess about the dynamics of Prince Charles' deteriorating marriage to Princess Di and to the private conversations of other members of the Royal Family - I had the inside dope. There, all the way away in Chicago, I was able to keep my finger on the pulse of the people at Buckingham Palace.

For the better part of a year, I found a young man with a marked Irish accent often presiding at the counter of the Seven-11. After I had become enough of a regular to be on a first-name basis with him, I started to be the recipient of snatches of his personal history. He told me that he had been a member of the elite Coldstream Guards, the unit that had been especially assigned to surround the Royal Family with security. In the course of these duties, he had gotten to be especially close to the Queen Mother, the mother of the long-reigning Queen Elizabeth. Sean told me that the Royals had appreciated his services and still kept in touch with him, even after he had emigrated to the U.S. So he knew exactly what was going on in the Palace at all times.

When he felt he could further trust me, Sean started to give me daily updates on the activities of the Royal Family in camera. He would lean across the counter to tell me the latest, out of earshot of the mere riffraff who patronized the convenience store. I learned that, "The Queen Mum is rather put out with Princess Di. She's not at all happy with Di's incessant dieting. Really, it seems as if the girl has a case of anorexia, and that kind of calling attention to oneself with such problems doesn't sit well with the matriarch. The Queen Mum herself enjoys her kippers, and she believes that every proper young woman should have a good healthy appetite. She doesn't approve of keeping yourself bone thin the way Di is doing. Of course, she can't come out and say as much to Charles or Di. She has to be diplomatic - but between you and me, she's not happy with Di, not happy at all."

Then I heard that "Prince Philip is not the silent partner the press often makes him out to be. I tell you, he rules the roost on the home front. The Queen has to go along with his wishes. You know they put him in charge of some animal protection fund. But the truth is, he only cares about preserving animals so he can hunt them. He went traipsing out and shot a big 12-point stag on the Balmoral south forty today. It made Queen Elizabeth cringe. But what can she do? When it comes right down to it, the Queen is only a woman, and Philip is a man and still the head of the household."

I learned that whenever the Queen Mother had a cold or some other minor health problem, "you won't hear her complain. She believes it's the duty of a Royal to keep up a good front at all times, to be cheerful and always have the people's well-being as her primary concern. She wouldn't think of canceling her appearance at the Museum to see the Elgin Marbles this afternoon. She has to make some statement, some conciliatory statement to the Greeks, since they're complaining again about how Lord Elgin took those statues. She'll never let on when she has a twinge, or let up on her royal duties, no matter what. When she gets a touch of arthritis like she did today, she just has a bit of liniment rubbed on her shoulder, and she goes right on. A real trooper, she is. You wouldn't know she was over eighty, the schedule she keeps."

I heard about a dust-up that had occurred when the Palace cook made a rum cake to be served at a reception honoring Sheikh Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates. Since Muslims are strictly opposed to all alcoholic beverages, the gaff "almost caused an international incident, I can tell you. Cedric, the dessert chef who put that item on the menu, got quite a dressing down. He left the Queen's presence almost in tears."

And so it went, the intimate day-by-day drama of Buckingham Palace unfolded before me for the better part of a year. But then the reports started to taper off. Sean looked more and more down in the dumps. He seemed to have lost his old eagerness to relate the Royal Family's conversations. Sean would often just silently ring up my coffee purchase, without offering even a tidbit of the latest palace contretemps.

Then Sean began to look as if he was declining physically as well as emotionally. It seemed as if he might be losing a dangerous amount of weight. On cold winter mornings, he would be standing there behind the cash register, shivering, more and more just a rattling of bones under his smock. I was tempted to remind him that the Queen Mum wouldn't be pleased with such weight lose - that she would surely advise him to keep up a healthy appetite, to treat himself to some hearty servings of fish and chips. But Sean seemed too removed and mechanical these days to take kindly to such personal remarks.

Then it got worse. One morning I was shocked to see that Sean had a terrible black eye. He didn't try to disguise his sorry state with sunglasses. But he kept his head tucked down in his smock as he rang up my coffee without a word of news from his home front. He looked like a duck tucking its head into its feathers against a wounding world. Just as that black-and-blue started to fade, Sean appeared with a lot of bruising along one arm. He was all-around becoming a mere shadow of his former chipper self.

One day when an older woman was checking me out at the counter, I realized I hadn't seen Sean at all in over a week. On a subsequent visit, I caught the manager's eye and asked him what had happened to Sean. The manager rolled his eyes in exasperation and said he'd had to "let Sean go." He said that Sean had essentially been homeless, living on the streets, getting into fights as he started acting crazier and crazier. In spite of it all, Sean had been performing acceptably as a clerk, and the manager had wanted to give him a chance. But really, it got to be too much. When Sean had started to come in late, looking all beat up, talking so crazy - he really had to be let go.

I never saw Sean again. As the Royal Family went through all the dramatic changes that rocked it during the eighties and nineties - the divorce, death, scandal, marriage, birth - I never knew any more than was reported in the newspapers. I missed my pipeline into the Family's private chambers. I especially wondered what the Queen Mum had really thought about it all, there at the end.

Queen Marlene of Chicago

While I was recently visiting in Canada, I went to a local staging of a play called Queen Millie of Galt. The action is supposedly based on "a true story." Much of it is a flashback to 1919 when the future King, then Edward Prince of Wales, was touring Canada. One day when he is playing hooky from the tedious round of hand-shaking and opening ceremonies on his schedule - he happens upon a young woman tending her garden in the town of Galt in southern Ontario.

Seemingly not recognizing the man who has wandered into her garden, the young woman vents her feisty opinion about the Royal heir, saying she was not interested in rushing into town with all her neighbors to line up to see the Prince. She says she believes the Prince is dull and ineffectual and not worthy of her time or attention.

This frank opinion snag's the Prince's attention because it is so different from the fawning praise he is used to receiving. He eventually reveals his identity to Millicent Milroy and asks her to be his escort for the remainder of his tour in the area. As she gets to know the Prince, Milli's attitude towards him softens. The young couple fall in love, but are denied the right to marry by the Prince's father, King George V. So the two unofficially pledge their troth, just quietly between themselves in Milli's garden, before the Prince is forced to leave and resume his royal duties.

As is famously known, this is the Edward who, over a decade later, abdicated the throne in order to marry commoner and divorcee Wallis Simpson. The play has Milli aging gracefully, but alone, in Galt - never speaking of her association with the Prince. Until her death. Then the town learns that she specified her tombstone have the added legend of:

Wife of King Edward VIII

How much of this is in fact true? It's hard to say. People who grew up in Galt (eventually consolidated with other nearby towns into the municipality of "Cambridge, Ontario") say that they aren't aware of any local tombstone bearing such an inscription. However some of the elders in the town had it passed down to them that the Prince did indeed disappear off the radar a few times during his 1919 visit. Who can say what happened when he took his own version of "A Roman Holiday."

As it was, the play sent me off into several different unscheduled avenues of thought on my own. First I considered how much talent there is in little community theaters and how likely it is that a lot of it will forever remain undiscovered by the larger world. But perhaps that's not a bad thing.

Then I was jogged into remembering some dating advice I heard someone giving years ago, during the days when it was still openly assumed that every female's primary goal was to snag a husband. This dating consultant advised a woman to be critical of some aspect of the man on their first date. This was contrary to a lot of the advice then circulating that limited women to unvarying sweetness, attentiveness, and passivity. No, said this advisor to the lovelorn - a girl should break out into some contrariness in the course of the evening. It's not that any global attacks against a date were recommended. I don't think the consultant would have approved of Milli's all-encompassing condemnation of Edward's personality and accomplishments. These are things a man can hardly correct in any reasonable length of time. Rather, it was suggested that, in order to be an effective husband-hunter, a woman should criticize some detail of her date's presentation of himself that he can readily change. "You have atrocious taste in ties! What is that thing you're wearing? Did you raid a clown's wardrobe trunk?"

This sort of limited assault will make an indelible impression on the man and at the same time it will provoke him into a second date with the woman in order to give him a chance to prove to her that he is capable of making a better showing. He'll be piqued into correcting whatever the woman faulted. So even if the woman isn't very pretty or appealing and might ordinarily not have expected to be asked out on a second date - such a targeted attack should do the trick. But again, it was advised that any criticism should generally only throw down a manageable challenge and not strike at the core of a man's ego.

It seemed to me that such a manipulation probably would work more often than not, at least in prolonging a man's interest in a woman. I never tried the technique myself, feeling sort of superior to playing such games. Perhaps I shouldn't have been so scrupulously averse to gaming. Some historians report that that's indeed the kind of approach Wallis Simpson made when she had her turn at Edward, the most eligible bachelor in the realm. Although she wasn't particularly young or pretty when the two met, it's said that Wallis did speak to the Prince in a perfectly frank, natural way. She might have been a sort of Elaine humorously needling a Jerry Seinfeld. Edward was so struck by this contrast with the usual simpering approval he got - that he eventually abdicated in order to marry this woman he loved.

Mostly though, this play reminded me of an almost forgotten optimism I'd once had about myself becoming wife of the King of England. I thought it possible that a future King had come calling on me.

My brief vision of entering into the Royal Family dates back to the days when Prince Charles was the most eligible bachelor in England - before Princess Di or Camilla. I had been editor of a small journal on economics. In one issue, I'd contributed an essay on urban planning in which I inveighed against the destruction of so much old architecture and of so many ethnic neighborhoods - all to accommodate the most blighting modern urban development projects. Shortly after this issue of my journal "hit the stands," I learned that Prince Charles was championing exactly the same views I had expressed, right down to many of the same details regarding how wide sidewalks should be and how much lawn there should be in neighborhoods in order to encourage urban liveliness. So just on a whim, I sent a copy of this journal issue to Prince Charles.

I really didn't expect to hear any more about it, since the Royal Family is surely deluged with thousands of pieces of mail every day. But lo and behold - a few weeks later, I got an embossed letter from the Palace. It was not from Prince Charles himself, but from a "Lady in Waiting." She wrote that Prince Charles had very much enjoyed and appreciated my comments about the unfortunate trend toward destroying our architectural heritage. She thanked me for sending the journal.

It sounded like more than a mere form letter! Could the Prince have actually read my article? Better still - was there some remote chance that he had recognized we were soul-mates? Well, that last was hardly possible. Still…

Some months passed and it was announced that Prince Charles was coming to the U.S. on tour. He was including Chicago in his itinerary. Interesting, but by that time, I had pretty much drifted back down to earth. So when Charles and his retinue hit Chicago and they announced on the morning news that he was going to spend the day just touring around the City at random, with no set schedule - I didn't think too much of it. I sat in my usual Sunday state of dishabille, bobby pins in my hair, wrapped in an old bathrobe, slumped in front of the TV.

Suddenly - "there came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door." Unlike in Poe's poem though, this rapping became sharper, more insistent. It took on the clarion ring of a royal summons. No one I knew was even remotely likely to be calling at this early hour. Could it be? Was it possible?

I threw myself off the couch, almost falling under the coffee table in my lurching haste. I limped as fast as I could into the bedroom, ripping the bobby pins out of my hair en route, tearing off my bathrobe, hurling dresses to the floor in my attempt to find something presentable to wear. Naturally, the more I frenzied, the more I delayed myself. Buttons flew off, straps broke, my hair fell askew. Grab something else! Get another blouse! Where IS that pleated skirt!?

But the rapping had stopped. Was I too late? Still hoping I might catch him - um, whoever it was - I kept up my efforts to throw myself together. Then, just as I was trying to shimmy into the only laundered chemise I'd been able to grab hold of - I heard a sharp rapping at my BACK door. No one ever came around back! That meant having to negotiate past the gate and its sticky catch. Whoever it was must be really intent on seeing me now - TODAY! It sounded like someone who might only have the one day to spend in Chicago - someone who would be leaving tomorrow - for good! It was him! It was him!

I wrestled into the rest of my shift dress, and still wildly disheveled, I rushed to the back door. I tried to reassure myself - appearances didn't matter between soulmates. I got to the door, and flung it open - just in time to see what looked like a black limousine rolling away from my gate, down the alley. I ran down my garden path, out the gate, and looked beseechingly after the retreating car. But it was too far gone. He'd given up trying to contact the woman with whom he was so in synch on matters of urban renewal. I'd missed him. I'd missed my chance.

I slumped into my living room and threw myself back onto the couch in deeper dishevelment than ever. Well, perhaps just as well. If I were to have become Princess and then Queen, I certainly couldn't sit around the house in my usual sloppy attire. I'd have to be up and about and presentable every waking hour. I'd have to be all-the-time formally dressed, something that's pure torture for me.

Still, there might have been something worthwhile about making the effort. I'd have a platform from which to effect all sorts of change in the world, including promoting those wiser urban design measures that had drawn Prince Charles and me together in the first place. And really, I didn't think there would have been any problem with Prince Charles becoming engaged to me. Ultimately, the only reason the Royal Family had vetoed Wallis Simpson as a wife for that earlier Prince was not that she was American and a commoner. The reason she'd been deemed unsuitable was that she had been twice divorced. So I was in the clear. I congratulated myself on having had the foresight never to have been divorced. Well, I'd never been married. So I really was the eligible maiden of storybook fame. What's more, it occurred to me that I might not really be that much of a commoner either.

During their tour of Europe some years before, my cousins had found our family had a registered coat of arms in Switzerland. My relatives hadn't been allowed to take the original embossed crest papers away, but they'd made copies. I rummaged through the box of family photographs and found one of the copies.

The design of the thing was hardly prepossessing. Our family was represented by a large, uncomely fish leaping out from between two columns of fleur-de-lis. To make the emblem even more absurdist, the fish was wearing a top hat. Well, my Swiss great-grandmother's name had been "Fischer." So perhaps the design was an apt reference to our familial profession. Fishing didn't seem a very regal trade though. Besides, it had been a long time since Switzerland had had a monarchy, so I doubted that the coat of arms could have been bestowed on us for services to the Crown. It was likely more of a vanity coat of arms. Still, a crest is a crest. I definitely would have had it all over Wallis Simpson.

But my bobby pins and peanut butter stained bathrobe had been my undoing. Who knows what might have happened if I had just gotten to the door sooner. I fell into a slough of regret.

A few weeks later on a weekday, a man came through my office door (my office was adjacent to my residential quarters) - very eager to rent space in my building. He said that he operated a chain of day care centers and the City required that all such facilities be in places with full length plate glass windows fronting them (presumably so that nothing untoward could be done to the toddlers outside of the public's line of vision). Since I was one of the few places he'd come across in Chicago that maintained the requisite expanse of windows on my façade, he said he REALLY, REALLY wanted to make a deal. But as we discussed the issue further, I found that renting to this man would mean my having to make a lot of changes to my building, both office and residential sections, in order to conform to the extensive code regulating commercial day care centers. The child-proofing, the insurance, and on and on. It wouldn't be worth it. So I declined his offer.

As he reluctantly started out the door, he turned back to make one final appeal. He said, "You know, I tried to contact you a couple of weeks ago, on a Sunday. I even went around the block and knocked on your back door. This place would have been ideal for one of my centers."

When I stared back unresponsively at him, he concluded that there was no way he could change my mind. So he shrugged and left, closing the door behind him. As I looked out the front window after him, I guessed that he must be very successful with the day care centers he already had operating. He drove off in a long black Cadillac.

I put the copy of my coat of arms back in its box, stored away for keeps. I guess I wasn't destined to claim the title of "Queen Marlene of Chicago."

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