The wedding date, of course, was unchanged—it wasn't every day a country had a five hundredth anniversary—but all the festivities were either curtailed entirely or vastly cut down. And Prince Humperdinck became, forty-five days before the wedding, King of Florin, and that changed everything, because, before, he had taken nothing but his hunting seriously, and now he had to learn, learn everything, learn to run a country, and he buried himself in books and wise men and how did you tax this and when should you tax that and foreign entanglements and who could be trusted and how far and with what? And before her lovely eyes, Humperdinck changed from a man of fear and action to one of frenzied wisdom, because he had to get it all straight now before any other country dared interfere with the future of Florin, so the wedding, when it actually took place, was a tiny thing and brief, sandwiched in between a ministers' meeting and a treasury crisis, and Buttercup spent her first afternoon as queen wandering around the castle not knowing what in the world to do with herself. It wasn't until King Humperdinck walked out on the balcony with her to greet the gigantic throng that had spent the day in patient waiting that she realized it had happened, she was the Queen, her life, for whatever it was worth, belonged now to the people.
They stood together on the castle balcony, accepting the cheers, the cries, the endless thunderous "hip hips," until Buttercup said, "Please, may I walk once more among them?" and the King said with a nod that she might and down she went again, as on the day of the wedding announcement, radiant and alone, and again the people swept apart to let her pass, weeping and cheering and bowing and—
—and then one person booed.
On the balcony watching it all Humperdinck reacted instantly, gesturing soldiers into the area where the sound had come from, dispatching more troops quickly down to surround the Queen, and like clockwork Buttercup was safe, the booer apprehended and led away.
"Hold a moment," Buttercup said, still shaken by the unexpectedness of what had happened. The soldier who held the booer stopped. "Bring her to me," Buttercup said, and in a moment the booer was right there, eye to eye.
It was an ancient woman, withered and bent, and Buttercup thought of all the faces that had gone by in her lifetime, but this one she could not remember. "Have we met?" the Queen asked.
The old one shook her head.
"Then why? Why on this day? Why do you insult the Queen?"
"Because you are not worthy of cheers," the old woman said, and suddenly she was yelling, "You had love in your hands and you gave it up for gold!" She turned to the crowd. "It is true what I tell you—there was love alongside her in the Fire Swamp and she dropped it from her fingers like garbage, and that is what she is, the Queen of Garbage."
"I had given my word to the Prince—" Buttercup began, but the old woman would not be quieted.
"Ask her how she got through the Fire Swamp? Ask her if she did it alone? She threw love away to be the Queen of Grime, the Queen of Muck—I am old and life means nothing to me, so I am the only person in all this crowd to dare to tell truth, and truth says bow to the Queen of Feculence if you want to, but not I. Cheer the Queen of Slime and Ordure if you want to, but not I. Rave over the beauty of the Queen of Cesspools, but not I. Not I!" She was advancing on Buttercup now.
"Take her away," Buttercup ordered.
But the soldiers could not stop her, and the old woman kept coming on, her voice getting LOUDER and louder and Louder! and louder! and LOUDER and LOUDER! and—
Buttercup woke up screaming.
She was in her bed. Alone. Safe. The wedding was still sixty days away.
But her nightmares had begun.
The next night she dreamed of giving birth to their first child and
Interruption, and hey, how about giving old Morgenstern credit for a major league fake-out there. I mean, didn't you think for a while at least that they really were married? I did.
It's one of my biggest memories of my father reading. I had pneumonia, remember, but I was a little better now, and madly caught up in the book, and one thing you know when you're ten is that, no matter what, there's gonna be a happy ending. They can sweat all they want to scare you, the authors, but back of it all you know, you just have no doubt, that in the long run justice is going to win out. And Westley and Buttercup—well, they had their troubles, sure, but they were going to get married and live happily ever after. I would have bet the family fortune if I'd found a sucker big enough to take me on.
Well, when my father got through with that sentence where the wedding was sandwiched between the ministers' meeting and the treasury whatever, I said, 'You read that wrong.'
My father's this little bald barber—remember that too? And kind of illiterate. Well, you just don't challenge a guy who has trouble reading and say he's read something incorrectly, because that's really threatening. 'I'm doing the reading,' he said.
'I know that but you got it wrong. She didn't marry that rotten Humperdinck. She marries Westley.'
'It says right here,' my father began, a little huffy, and he starts going over it again.
'You must have skipped a page then. Something. Get it right, huh?'
By now he was more than a tiny bit upset. 'I skipped nothing. I read the words. The words are there, I read them, good night,' and off he went.
'Hey please, no,' I called after him, but he's stubborn, and, next thing, my mother was in saying, 'Your father says his throat is too sore; I told him not to read so much,' and she tucked and fluffed me and no matter how I battled, it was over. No more story till the next day.
I spent that whole night thinking Buttercup married Humperdinck. It just rocked me. How can I explain it, but the world didn't work that way. Good got attracted to good, evil you flushed down the john and that was that. But their marriage—I couldn't make it jibe. God, did I work at it. First I thought that probably Buttercup had this fantastic effect on Humperdinck and turned him into a kind of Westley, or maybe Westley and Humperdinck turned out to be long-lost brothers and Humperdinck was so happy to get his brother back he said, 'Look, Westley, I didn't realize who you were when I married her so what I'll do is I'll divorce her and you marry her and that way we'll all be happy.' To this day I don't think I was ever more creative.
But it didn't take. Something was wrong and I couldn't lose it. Suddenly there was this discontent gnawing away until it had a place big enough to settle in and then it curled up and stayed there and it's still inside me lurking as I write this now.
The next night, when my father went back to reading and the marriage turned out to have been Buttercup's dream, I screamed I knew it, all along I knew it,' and my father said, 'So you're happy now, it's all right now, we can please continue?' and I said 'Go' and he did.
But I wasn't happy. Oh my ears were happy, I guess, my story sense was happy, my heart too, but in my, I suppose you have to call it 'soul,' there was that damn discontent, shaking its dark head.