From A Prince of a fellow

One

The Prince Appears

I am a frizzy-haired, washed-out princess looking for a prince. Some ordinary prince on a limping horse, to carry me off to his leaking, rented castle, to share his beans and salt pork and lie beside him in his bed. No one special; after all, I am nothing fancy. At thirty I have never established residence with a man, and those I have rubbed bellies with have been no better than I was willing to settle for. Concerned as I am with reality, I don’t get my hopes too high; just a third son of a minor king.

Which search is the reason I had this morning in my radio station still another prospect, this one a writer down from Connecticut, here on a grant at the historic J. Frank Dobie Ranch. Which meant that for shelter he got an old farmhouse and for inspiration a field, a creek, and a view of the neighbor’s cows.

I love to interview writers, as they are not fettered by facts. Thrusting characters and parrying plots spin from their fingers onto the yellow pad as slickly as spider webs. Silently inside their heads herds thunder and doors slam with a reverberation that we in the world of sound can only envy. Each time I coax a writer to open his vocal cords on my show I expect sudden magic; expect verbal rabbits snatched from the top hat of his subconscious.

Of course, I am habitually disappointed. Last year’s Dobie Fellow, hungrily surfacing from under Los Angeles’ thick sky, had spent six months staring through the barb-wire fence at the milling livestock, his vocabulary locked in constipation. On the air, so full of his oneness with the land and its manure, he had had the opposite problem. I purposely omitted mention of his work in progress, lest it never progress.

I had high hopes that this year’s visiting writer would be better. For one thing he possessed the irresistibly German name of Gruene Albrech; for another, his brooding voice, accepting my invitation to appear on my interview show, had suggested a prodigal son come home to confront an archetypal father—to kill or to forgive him (depending on the size of the Dobie grant).

Now, considering him through the pane of glass, he didn’t look as I expected. He was not brooding at all; in fact, he seemed eager as a kid on his first day of school all decked out in new clothes, which he was—board-stuff jeans, creased Western pearl-snapped shirt, hand-tooled glossy leather boots. Even, sticking from his back pocket, a red bandana with the price tag still on it.

Right off I could see he was no German. Looking closer at his wide face whose skin stretched across high cheek-bones tight as a drum, I decided he must be Slavic. His deep almost golden tan gave him a general yellow wash that appeared to color even the whites of his eyes and his teeth, and darkened to copper his bow-shaped mouth. In the manner of symmetrical faces, his chin was cleft in the center, Czech, there was no question.

That charade was all right with me; I was used to that. Things are seldom what they seem. None of us are as we present ourselves.

The old men in this fenced-in town in Central Texas, named for Prince Solms, the nobleman who brought their ancestors from the old country inland from the coast to this rolling edge of a ring of weathered hills, purport to live in a German-speaking Hamlet.

In fact, they dream of a remembered past; today they make up less than half the town. Beer-bellied, polka-dancing Mexicans, heirs of the original land-grant holders, now outnumber the beer-belled, polka-dancing German descendants of the prince’s immigrants. Nor is this the lush verdant farmland they claim to their grandsons, hoping to keep them close at hand; only the thinnest veneer of grass and scrubby shrubs cover the rocky soil of this insular place...