(How would I know? How would I, Sir Sidney? Haven’t I already said that there seems to be at least one of everything in this world? There are so many reasons and duties and traditions. For all I knew, maybe only the second brother of the future king could be the intermediary here. Maybe something of the sort was written into the tradition, as much a part of the customs and old deportments of humanity as the rule that brides and grooms aren’t to see each other on the day of the wedding until the ceremony.
(So how would I know, how would I, Sir Sid?
(Because we’re all of us anthropological. We are, we’re all of us anthropological. I don’t care how grounded a person may be, cosseted as a prince like Lawrence or Robin, made over like the only issue of oldest age, like Sarah’s child, Isaac, or hopeless as kids in welfare hotels, the sun comes down every night and there are fearsome things in the dark: smells and hints and clues and sounds of death and worse things after, the horrible, stacked loneliness of men, the abominable godawful odds against anyone’s not only ever managing to make it in the long run, but even so much as managing to just plain cope — the insomniac’s wakeful doubts and all the low blood sugar of the human race.
(So tell me, why wouldn’t there be anthropology, why wouldn’t there be ritual and faith and all the mumbo-jumbo of cultural reinforcement?)
“Of course she will, Prince Robin,” Royal Commoner said pleasantly, “why wouldn’t she? Do as I say?”
“Well,” said Robin, “it isn’t as if I actually spelled things out for her.”
“Oh,” he said. “Oh my.”
“What?”
“Oh dear,” he said. “This is awkward, this is very awkward.”
“What?” I said again.
“For God’s sake, Louise, don’t make such a fuss. You too, Royal Commoner. It’s not painful or anything. That’s what you said, isn’t it?”
“No, of course it isn’t,” he said. “It’s not painful. There are topical anesthetics. Aren’t there topical anesthetics, Mrs. Pfyfe-Philo?”
“Even without them,” the woman said, for it was a woman I’d seen in the doorway, and she was carrying a doctor’s bag. “Well, the tattoo needles barely break the skin. It’s the powerful new dyes they have today that makes the marks.”
“Tattoo needles?”
“You told her nothing?”
“You’re the Royal Commoner, Royal Commoner.”
“Is this what you’re wanting then?” the woman asked me. She held up a cartoon with details from the coat of arms the Royal Peerager had described earlier — a gold mask of tragedy superimposed on a green shamrock.
“Catherine the Great was tattooed,” the Royal Commoner said.
“Catherine the Great already had noble blood.”
“Cher’s tattooed, some of the biggest stars.”
“Cher isn’t engaged to a prince. What is this? What are you handing me? You’re not the Royal Commoner, are you? There’s no such thing, is there?”
“Certainly I’m the Royal Commoner. I am and no other. What do you mean, anyway? You’re not a queen yet, you’re not even a princess. Not yet you’re not. You’ve a lot to learn, Miss Bristol. You have to take my instructions. You think Royals don’t get tattooed? It was a ransom thing. It was in case of Moors and Saracens. So they’d know what they had if princes and princesses, kings and queens, fell into the wrong hands. It was for their own protection. It’s for your own protection, Miss Bristol. Tell her, Prince. Ain’t I right? If I’m lying I’m dying.”
I turned toward Robin. “Show me yours, then,” I challenged.
“Oh, I’m not tattooed.”
“Well, there you are,” I said.
“Where am I? I’m not the King, I’m not his Successor!”
“Please!” said the one who was supposed to be the Royal Commoner impatiently. “The both of you!”
I must say I was more than a little surprised to hear him speak out so boldly to someone who, however far down the line of succession he may have been, was, after all, a prince. Perhaps that’s why what he said next had some claim on me.
“Because it wasn’t me who made the rules. I wasn’t there whenever it was whoever it was said whatever it was had to be had to be. I’ve no say-so in the grand affairs that command history, the long by-and-large of incremental, ad hoc necessity, that piecemeal tinker and rising to social or biologic occasions that are all solutions, adaptations, and evolution ever are. I never seeded the oyster with sand. I was ever too small fry to cause an effect, I mean. What have I to do with the world? It’s the curious meddle, stitch, and thick of things that gets things done. I’m just Royal Commoner, is all. My God, Prince, Miss Bristol, you don’t even know my name. But when a living, breathing oxymoron of a man raised up to oral tradition and the learning of the law comes up and says to you that a tattoo isn’t just, or even primarily, for the pomp and primp and privilege of sailormen in Southampton’s or Marseille’s or New York’s low parlors, why maybe you ought to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“Catherine the Great was too tattooed! Cher is! And what is a tattoo, anyway? Semiotics, all those ultimate passwords of the flesh. Mother riffs, John-Loves-Mary ones, all those scratched affidavits, skin’s deepest language. Flags, semaphore, and the body’s loyalist bunting!”
Oh, how that man could talk!
I’m half hypnotized before he’s done and don’t even see him signal Mrs. Pfyfe-Philo to come forward. I don’t see her open the bag she carries her tools in, don’t see her dip the needle into the pot of green dye, or feel her wash me down with alcohol along the back of my left leg where the knee bends, or rub the topical anesthetic into my skin. I don’t see the thin rubber gloves she’s wearing to keep from catching a dose of AIDS off me in case a drop of my blood leaks into the pores of her skin. Royal Commoner’s still talking away about a mile a minute. You’d think I was his troops at Agincourt and he was King Henry V rallying me, maybe jollying me along so I’d let Mrs. Pfyfe-Philo plant another one on the back of my right leg when she was done with the left. He was right, it is painless. I don’t even feel the damn needle when it starts to go in and out, in and out, like she was some seamstress and the sensitive skin in the back of my knee was no more sentient than cloth.
No. What brought me out of it at last was what had put me into it. I’m listening to this smooth talker and suddenly it occurs that, oral tradition or no oral tradition, something would have had to slip through the cracks. This guy was improvising. He was giving too many reasons. Somewhere in the gloom Robin was smirking.
So, no matter I risked tearing the back of my leg to pieces, I pulled away. I examined myself. It was too dark to see, but later, in the light, I saw that all she’d managed to do was circumscribe the topmost arc in the highest leaf of the shamrock.
(I’d put him off with a quibble. Punning on “sore,” admitting when Larry pressed me that, yes, Robin probably had offended me. Still, strictly speaking, I hadn’t lied to him. I wasn’t sore, just a little numb there where I’d taken the topical. And he had offended me. And, anyway, loophole and sophistry have ever been the mainstays of statesmen, providing them comfort and security, the sense they have to have of their own invulnerability, or they’d never get anything done. “None of woman born,” the witches tell Macbeth that other distant cousin of the Mayfair clan, and “… until great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come. …” And what about the stuff the Oracle fed Oedipus? Softsoap about killing his father and getting it on with his ma, so that all he thought he ever had to do to beat his fate was just get out of town? That’s in the tradition, too, for people so sold on tradition. And, anyway, for all I know maybe I was actually supposed to get that coat-of-arms tattoo. Wouldn’t that be something? I mean wouldn’t that really be something, Sir Sid, if it weren’t a hoax and all I have to show — didn’t I give back the clothes? didn’t I give back the jewels and Denise’s fun furs? — for my brief encounter with the Royals was just this tiny bit of a circle stitched to the back of my knee like a piece of green thread?)