“Dear Mr. Goldman: Thank you for the book. I have not had time yet to read it, but I am sure it is a fine endeavor. I of course remember you. I remember all my students. Yours sincerely, Antonia Roginski.”
What a crusher. She didn’t remember me at all. I sat there holding the note, rocked. People don’t remember me. Really. It’s not any paranoid thing; I just have this habit of slipping through memories. It doesn’t bother me all that much, except I guess that’s a lie; it does. For some reason, I test very high on forgettability.
So when Miss Roginski sent me that note making her just like everyone else, I was glad she’d never gotten married, I’d never liked her anyway, she’d always been a rotten teacher, and it served her right her first name was Antonia.
“I didn’t mean it,” I said out loud right then. I was alone in my one-room job on Manhattan’s glamorous West Side and talking to myself. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I went on. “You got to believe that, Miss Roginski”
What had happened, of course, was that I’d finally seen the postscript. It was on the back of the thank-you note and what it said was, “Idiot. Not even the immortal S. Morgenstern could feel more parental than I.”
S. Morgenstern! The Princess Bride. She remembered!
Flashback.
1941. Autumn. I’m a little cranky because my radio won’t get the football games. Northwestern is playing Notre Dame, it starts at one, and by one-thirty I can’t get the game. Music, news, soap operas, everything, but not the biggie. I call for my mother. She comes. I tell her my radio’s busted, I can’t find Northwestern-Notre Dame. She says, you mean the football? Yes yes yes, I say. It’s Friday, she says; I thought they played on Saturday.
Am I an idiot!
I lie back, listening to the soaps, and after a little I try finding it again, and my stupid radio will pick up every Chicago station except the one carrying the football game. I really holler now, and again my mother tears in. I’m gonna heave this radio right out the window, I say; it won’t get it, it won’t get it, I cannot make it get it. Get what? she says. The football game, I say; how dumb are you, the gaaaaame. Saturday, and watch your tongue, young man, she says—I already told you, it’s Friday. She goes again.
Was there ever so ample a dunce?
Humiliated, I flick around on my trusty Zenith, trying to find the football game. It was so frustrating I was lying there sweating and my stomach felt crazy and I was pounding the top of the radio to make it work right and that was how they discovered I was delirious with pneumonia.
Pneumonia today is not what it once was, especially when I had it. Ten days or so in the hospital and then home for the long recuperating period. I guess it was three more weeks in bed, a month maybe. No energy, no games even. I just was this lump going through a strength-gathering time, period.
Which is how you have to think of me when I came upon The Princess Bride.
It was my first night home. Drained; still one sick cookie. My father came in, I thought to say good night. He sat on the end of my bed. “Chapter One. The Bride,” he said.
It was then only I kind of looked up and saw he was holding a book. That alone was surprising. My father was next to illiterate. In English. He came from Florin (the setting of The Princess Bride) and there he had been no fool. He said once he would have ended up a lawyer, and maybe so. The facts are when he was sixteen he got a shot at coming to America, gambled on the land of opportunity and lost. There was never much here for him. He was not attractive to look upon, very short and from an early age bald, and he was ponderous at learning. Once he got a fact, it stayed, but the hours it took to pass into his cranium were not to be believed. His English always stayed ridiculously immigranty, and that didn’t help him either. He met my mother on the boat over, got married later and, when he thought they could afford it, had me. He worked forever as the number-two chair in the least successful barbershop in Highland Park, Illinois. Toward the end, he used to doze all day in his chair. He went that way. He was gone an hour before the number-one guy realized it; until then he just thought my father was having a good doze. Maybe he was. Maybe that’s all any of this is. When they told me I was terribly upset, but I thought at the same time it was an almost Existence-Proving way for him to go.