Royal Blue Beloved

You grow up with the fiction that you will never become your mother. Then one day, perhaps in a photograph taken in an unscripted moment at a family gathering, leaning close to a young niece as you help her unwrap a new Barbie doll, you spy it: her nose that she was so proud of, that she often made jokes about (“You’ve got a Roman nose—it’s roamin’ all over your face”) has become your nose. For years, you have insisted that yours was less beaky, more ski-jump shaped. Peering closer, holding your breath because the resemblance unnerves you, you notice other mirrorings: there is that same over-radiant grin that clamps down tight over darkened, crooked teeth, that same manic intensity that threatens to erupt from your skull.

Or maybe the moment of genetic truth creeps up more stealthily: a pickpocket in the Christmas season. You are in your local public library, killing time before you pick up your child from school and take him to the dentist, and the magazine you reach for is not the “New York Review of Books” with its analysis of the banking crisis of ’08 but the latest issue of “People”—the Royal Report--featuring the young woman with the shining, orthodontic-perfect teeth, the bed curtains of long, brown hair that descend to a royal blue dress. You grope the pages of the Royal Report. You flip open to more of that wrap dress with the rusching beneath the breasts (it’s by Issa), to that sapphire ring wreathed with diamonds climbing up that tapered fourth finger like an exquisite tropical beetle crawling up the slender branch of a bamboo tree.

You can’t stop yourself; you are a bulimic with a quart of mint chocolate-chip ice cream, you suck up every last detail: how Will popped the question in a mountaintop cabin in Kenya, how the wedding will be held in Westminster Abbey on St. Catherine’s Day in April (“Why April?” you wonder, idly quoting T.S. Eliot, ‘April is the cruelest month’), how Kate wishes she had known Diana, who wore that same sapphire ring thirty years ago when she was a fat-cheeked, nineteen-year-old former nanny.

You remember going through your mother’s things after her death, how you found half a bookcase full of royal-related tomes. There were biographies of Queen Elizabeth (I and II), of Victoria and Albert, Nicholas and Alexandra, Charles and Diana, oversized illustrated histories of the Royal House of Windsor, collectors' editions of “Life” and “People” magazines featuring the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, the funeral and burial of Diana.

The pile of royal titles in your mother’s estate did not surprise you, since you yourself gave her many of these books, for birthday and Christmas gifts. But as you packed up the library in a crate for the local hospice shop, you considered that it was a little like giving chocolate to a diabetic…escaping into the castles of European royalty did not help her become the architect of her own life, the late-life artist she dreamed of becoming...if only she had time.

But how are you, who grew up mooning over Princess Anne in “Life” magazine, Princess Anne in velvet-collared hacking jacket and matching velvet cap bent over a chestnut thoroughbred, Princess Anne in yards of lace, wrapped around her strong-jawed Captain Mark Phillips, how are you different?

You can recall, the way others remember where they were when the Twin Towers fell, what you were doing on July 29, 1981 (deconstructing, with your first husband and another couple in a suburban New Jersey family room, that poignant moment when Diana mixed up Charles’ multiple middle names as she said her vows); whom you were with when you learned that the marriage had been doomed from the moment it began, with Charles in love with Camilla and teenaged Diana nothing but a prized filly to be groomed and whipped by the Windsors (you were between husbands then, and the demise of that fairy tale made you fear no romantic tie was safe); what you were doing on the hot end-of-August day when you learned Diana had met her end speeding through a Paris Tunnel with her lover, Dodi Fayed (having breakfast with your dad, his longtime companion, your second husband and three-year-old son); how you got up at dawn to watch the funeral in Westminster Abbey, how your husband snickered “Celebrity Death!” as you sat in your egg-stained terrycloth robe, weeping as Elton John sang “Candle in the Wind.”

You learn that Kate Middleton will become the first queen in the thousand-year reign of the British monarchy to have earned a college degree (with honors from St. Andrew’s University in Edinburgh, where she met her prince and studied art history), and you consider how your mother, so proud of her own Bachelor of Arts degree from Smith College, would love that detail, how she would say that women really have come a long way, that two hundred years ago our great-great-great grandmothers could not go to college or vote or own property.

You discover that a record television audience is expected to watch Kate & Will’s wedding in Westminster Abbey on St. Catherine’s Day on April 29, 2011, which the United Kingdom has already declared a national holiday. (You google Saint Catherine, and learn that she was born in Siena in 1347, the youngest of 25 children, that half her brothers and sisters died of the Black Death, that Catherine had a vision at aged six of Jesus Christ, that she refused marriage, fasting until she was granted her wish to become a nun--“Build a cell inside your mind, from which you can never flee,” she is meant to have said--that she devoted herself to healing the sick and uniting the warring states of Italy, that her letters are considered some of the greatest works of Tuscan literature).

You pray for Catherine Elizabeth Middleton, that her life with Diana’s first-born son, who was only 15 when he walked behind his mother’s casket, will be joyful, a companionate marriage of equals, that it won’t end in betrayal and divorce, that Kate will teach other women, women like you who are secretly dazzled by her, to claim our extraordinary powers.
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