《渺小一生》:她年纪比我父亲大

　 We lived on West End, at Eighty-second Street, and his practice was in our building, on the ground floor, and I used to come by to visit after school. All his patients knew me, and I was proud to be the doctor’s son, to say hello to everyone, to watch the babies he had delivered grow into kids who looked up to me because their parents told them I was Dr. Stein’s son, that I went to a good high school, one of the best in the city, and that if they studied hard enough, they might be able to as well. “Darling,” my father called me, and when he saw me after school on those visits, he would place his palm on the back of my neck, even when I grew taller than he, and kiss me on the side of my head. “My darling,” he’d say, “how was school?”

我们住在西端大道，靠82街，他的诊所就在我们住的那栋楼的一楼，我放学后常常会进去转一下。他的病人都认识我，我也以身为医生的儿子为荣，跟每个人打招呼，看着他接生的婴儿变成小孩，抬头看着我，因为他们的父母告诉他们我是斯坦医生的儿子，说我在一所很好的中学读书，是全纽约市最好的中学之一，还说如果他们够用功，说不定以后也可以去读。“亲爱的，”我父亲会这么喊我。即使我后来长得比他高了，每次放学后去诊所里，他一看到我，就把手掌放在我的后颈，吻一下我的脸颊。“我亲爱的，”他会说，“今天在学校过得怎么样？”

　 When I was eight, he married his office manager, Adele. There was never a moment in my childhood in which I was not aware of Adele’s presence: it was she who took me shopping for new clothes when I needed them, she who joined us for Thanksgiving, she who wrapped my birthday presents. It was not so much that Adele was a mother to me; it’s that to me, a mother was Adele.

我8岁时，他娶了他的办公室主任阿黛儿。我童年的每个时刻她都不曾缺席：她总是带着我去买需要的新衣服，陪着我们父子过感恩节，准备好我的生日礼物。对我而言，不是阿黛尔像母亲，而是母亲就该像阿黛尔。

　 She was older, older than my father, and one of those women whom men like and feel comfortable around but never think of marrying, which is a kind way of saying she wasn’t pretty. But who needs prettiness in a mother? I asked her once if she wanted children of her own, and she said I was her child, and she couldn’t imagine having a better one, and it says everything you need to know about my father and Adele and how I felt about them and how they treated me that I never even questioned that claim of hers until I was in my thirties and my then-wife and I were fighting about whether we should have another child, a child to replace Jacob.

她年纪比我父亲大，是男人会很喜欢、相处自在，但从来不会想娶回家的那种女人。说得直白一点，就是她长得不漂亮。谁需要母亲漂亮呢？我有回问她是不是想要自己的孩子，她说我就是她的孩子，还说她无法想象能有更好的孩子。这说明了你需要知道的一切：关于我父亲、阿黛尔，以及我对他们的感觉。他们对待我的方式使得我从来不曾质疑她那番话，直到我三十几岁，跟我当时的太太为了该不该再生一个孩子（取代雅各布）而争吵。

　 She was an only child, as I was an only child, and my father was an only child, too: a family of onlys. But Adele’s parents were living—my father’s were not—and we used to travel out to Brooklyn, to what has now been swallowed by Park Slope, to see them on weekends. They had lived in America for almost five decades and still spoke very little English: the father, timidly, the mother, expressively. They were blocky, like she was, and kind, like she was—Adele would speak to them in Russian, and her father, whom I called Grandpa by default, would unclench one of his fat fists and show me what was secreted within: a wooden birdcall, or a wodge of bright-pink gum. Even when I was an adult, in law school, he would always give me something, although he no longer had his store then, which meant he must have bought them somewhere. But where? I always imagined there might be a secret shop full of toys that went out of fashion generations ago, and yet was patronized, faithfully, by old immigrant men and women, who kept them in business by buying their stocks of whorl-painted wooden tops and little metal soldiers and sets of jacks, their rubber balls sticky with grime even before their plastic wrap had been torn.

阿黛尔是独生女，而我是独生子，我父亲也是：一家三口都是唯一的孩子。但阿黛尔的父母当时还健在（我父亲的父母则不在了），我们周末常常到布鲁克林去拜访他们，现在那一带已经被纳入公园坡了。他们住在美国近五十年，还是不太会讲英文，阿黛尔的父亲很害羞，母亲则很勇于表达情感。他们跟阿黛尔一样身材矮壮，而且跟她一样很和蔼。阿黛尔会跟他们讲俄语，然后她父亲（我理所当然喊他爷爷）会张开胖胖的拳头，给我看里头有什么秘密：一只木制鸟笛，或是一大块鲜艳的粉红色口香糖。即使我成年了，读法学院了，他照样会给我一些小玩意儿。他的杂货店老早就关了，这表示他那些玩意儿一定是从别处买来的。但是哪里呢？我一直想象有间秘密商店，里面都是几十年前流行过的玩具，但一些老移民还是忠实地光顾，买店家囤积的那些漆着螺纹的木陀螺、金属玩具兵和抛接沙包，里头的橡胶球在没拆开的塑料袋里就已经黏着污垢了。

　 I had always had a theory—born of nothing—that men who had been old enough to witness their father’s second marriage (and, therefore, old enough to make a judgment) married their stepmother, not their mother. But I didn’t marry someone like Adele. My wife, my first wife, was cool and self-contained. Unlike the other girls I knew, who were always minimizing themselves—their intelligence, of course, but also their desires and anger and fears and composure—Liesl never did. On our third date, we were walking out of a café on MacDougal Street, and a man stumbled from a shadowed doorway and vomited on her. Her sweater was chunky with it, that pumpkin-bright splatter, and I remember in particular the way a large globule clung to the little diamond ring she wore on her right hand, as if the stone itself had grown a tumor. The people around us gasped, or shrieked, but Liesl only closed her eyes. Another woman would have screeched, or squealed (I would have screeched or squealed), but I remember she only gave a great shudder, as if her body were acknowledging the disgust but also removing itself from it, and when she opened her eyes, she was recovered. She peeled off her cardigan, chucked it into the nearest garbage can. “Let’s go,” she told me. I had been mute, shocked, throughout the entire episode, but in that moment, I wanted her, and I followed her where she led me, which turned out to be her apartment, a hellhole on Sullivan Street. The entire time, she kept her right hand slightly aloft from her body, the blob of vomit still clinging to her ring.

我以前一直有个毫无根据的理论，认为男生如果年纪够大（因为此年纪足以做出判断），目睹了他父亲的第二段婚姻，那么他日后娶的太太就会像继母，而非母亲。结果我娶的人并不像阿黛尔。我的第一任太太莉柔，冷静又独立自主。她不像我认识的其他女生，总是把自己缩到最小（包括她们的才智，这是当然了，还包括她们的愿望、愤怒、恐惧与沉着），但莉柔从来不会。我们第三次约会时，才刚走出麦克杜格尔街的一家小餐馆，忽然有一名男子从旁边一处阴暗的走道踉跄走来，吐在她身上。她的毛衣沾了厚厚的橘黄色呕吐物，我清晰地记得其中一大团黏在她右手的那枚小钻戒上头，好像钻石上长出了肿瘤。周围的人猛吸一口气或惊叫起来，但莉柔只是闭上眼睛。换作别的女人，一定会尖叫（换作是我也会尖叫），但我记得她只是打了个明显的寒战，好像她的身体承认那很恶心，也同时摆脱了那种恶心。等到睁开眼睛，她就恢复了。她脱掉那件开襟毛衣，扔进最近的垃圾桶。“走吧。”她告诉我。我震惊得说不出话来，但是那一刻，我想要她，于是我跟着她一直走，最后走到她的公寓，是沙利文街的一个烂地方。从头到尾，她的右手一直微微举着，而那团呕吐物还黏在她的戒指上面。

　 Neither my father nor Adele particularly liked her, although they never told me so; they were polite, and respectful of my wishes. In exchange, I never asked them, never made them lie. I don’t think it was because she wasn’t Jewish—neither of my parents were religious—but, I think, because they thought I was too much in awe of her. Or maybe this is what I’ve decided, late in life. Maybe it was because what I admired as competence, they saw as frigidity, or coldness. Goodness knows they wouldn’t have been the first to think that. They were always polite to her, and she reasonably so to them, but I think they would have preferred a potential daughter-in-law who would flirt with them a little, to whom they could tell embarrassing stories about my childhood, who would have lunch with Adele and play chess with my father. Someone like you, in fact. But that wasn’t Liesl and wouldn’t ever be, and once they realized that, they too remained a bit aloof, not to express their displeasure but as a sort of self-discipline, a reminder to themselves that there were limits, her limits, that they should try to respect. When I was with her, I felt oddly relaxed, as if, in the face of such sturdy competence, even misfortune wouldn’t dare try to challenge us.

我父亲跟阿黛尔都不是特别喜欢她，虽然他们从来没这么跟我说；他们很有礼貌，也尊重我的意愿。为了礼尚往来，我也从来没问过他们，免得逼他们撒谎。我不认为是因为莉柔不是犹太人（我父母并不虔诚），但是我想他们觉得我太敬畏她了。这也可能是我年老后才判定的。或许我佩服莉柔的那种能干，在他们眼里却是冷淡或冷漠。天晓得他们不是第一个这样想的人。他们对她总是很有礼貌，她对他们也相当客气，但我想，他们比较想要的媳妇，应该会稍微跟他们撒撒娇，让他们讲些我小时候丢脸的故事，可以跟阿黛尔吃午餐，跟我爸下西洋棋。事实上，就像你。但莉柔不是那样的人，也永远不会是。一旦我父母理解到这点，他们就保持一些距离，不是要显示他们不高兴，而是某种自律，好提醒自己应该试着尊重某些界限，比如她的界限。我跟她在一起时总觉得异常放松，仿佛面对她那样强悍的能力，连厄运都不敢来挑战我们。

　 We had met in New York, where I was in law school and she was in medical school, and after graduating, I got a clerkship in Boston, and she (one year older than I) started her internship. She was training to be an oncologist. I had been admiring of that, of course, because of what it suggested: there is nothing more soothing than a woman who wants to heal, whom you imagine bent maternally over a patient, her lab coat white as clouds. But Liesl didn’t want to be admired: she was interested in oncology because it was one of the harder disciplines, because it was thought to be more cerebral. She and her fellow oncological interns had scorn for the radiologists (too mercenary), the cardiologists (too puffed-up and pleased with themselves), the pediatricians (too sentimental), and especially the surgeons (unspeakably arrogant) and the dermatologists (beneath comment, although they of course worked with them frequently). They liked the anesthesiologists (weird and geeky and fastidious, and prone to addiction), the pathologists (even more cerebral than they), and—well, that was about it. Sometimes a group of them would come over to our house, and would linger after dinner discussing cases and studies, while their partners—lawyers and historians and writers and lesser scientists—were ignored until we slunk off to the living room to discuss the various trivial, less-interesting things with which we occupied our days.

我们是在纽约认识的，她比我大一岁。当时我在上法学院，她在读医学院。毕业后，我在波士顿找到法官助理的工作，她则开始实习。她专攻肿瘤科。当然，我一直很佩服，因为这会让人想到：再也没有什么比一个想治愈你的女医生更抚慰人心了，你想象她像个母亲般弯腰察看病人，身上的医生袍洁白如云。但莉柔不想被人佩服，她对肿瘤科有兴趣是因为这一科比较难，大家公认比较花脑筋。她和其他的肿瘤科实习生非常瞧不起放射科医生（太唯利是图）、心脏科医生（太趾高气扬且自鸣得意）、小儿科医生（太多愁善感），尤其是外科医生（极度傲慢）和皮肤科医生（不值一评，尽管他们常常和皮肤科医生合作）。他们喜欢麻醉科医生（诡异的书呆子、吹毛求疵，而且有上瘾倾向）、病理学医生（比他们还花脑筋），还有……唔，大概就这样了。有时他们一群人来我们家，吃过晚餐后会一起讨论病例和研究，而他们的伴侣（律师、历史学者、作家和比较次要的科学家）就被冷落在一旁。最后，我们便溜到客厅，讨论日常生活里各式琐碎、比较无趣的事情。

　 We were two adults, and it was a happy enough life. There was no whining that we didn’t spend enough time with each other, from me or from her. We remained in Boston for her residency, and then she moved back to New York to do her fellowship. I stayed. By that time I was working at a firm and was an adjunct at the law school. We saw each other on the weekends, one in Boston, one in New York. And then she completed her program and returned to Boston; we married; we bought a house, a little one, not the one I have now, just at the edge of Cambridge.

我们是两个成年人，那样的生活也够快乐。我们从不抱怨相处的时间不够多，无论是她还是我。她当住院医生期间，我们继续住在波士顿，然后她在研究生期间搬回纽约，我则留下。当时我一面在一家律师事务所工作，一面在法学院兼课。我们每个周末会轮流在波士顿和纽约碰面。她完成医生训练后搬回波士顿，我们结婚，买了栋房子（不是我现在那栋），小小的，就在剑桥市的边缘。

　 My father and Adele (and Liesl’s parents, for that matter; mysteriously, they were considerably more emotive than she was, and on our infrequent trips to Santa Barbara, while her father made jokes and her mother placed before me plates of sliced cucumbers and peppered tomatoes from her garden, she would watch with a closed-off expression, as if embarrassed, or at least perplexed by, their relative expansiveness) never asked us if we were going to have children; I think they thought that as long as they didn’t ask, there was a chance we might. The truth was that I didn’t really feel the need for it; I had never envisioned having a child, I didn’t feel about them one way or another. And that seemed enough of a reason not to: having a child, I thought, was something you should actively want, crave, even. It was not a venture for the ambivalent or passionless. Liesl felt the same way, or so we thought.

我父亲和阿黛尔从来没问我们是否打算生小孩（说起来，莉柔的父母也是；难以理解的是，他们都比她容易动感情得多，我们少数几次去加州圣巴巴拉看他们，她父亲会跟我说笑打趣，她母亲则端上一盘盘切成薄片的小黄瓜和撒了胡椒的西红柿片，都是他们自己菜园里种的，而莉柔会以一脸保持距离的表情看着我们，好像很难为情，至少被他们相对的开朗弄得不知所措。），我想他们以为只要不过问，就还有一点机会。但事实是，我觉得没有生小孩的必要；我从没想过要有小孩，甚至对小孩没特别的感觉。这个理由似乎足够让我们不要生了。我觉得，要生小孩，就应该很想要，甚至很渴望才行。这种事可不是怀着矛盾心理或毫无热情就能去试试看的。莉柔的感觉也一样，或者我是这么以为的。

　 But then, one evening—I was thirty-one, she was thirty-two: young—I came home and she was already in the kitchen, waiting for me. This was unusual; she worked longer hours than I did, and I usually didn’t see her until eight or nine at night.

但接着，在我31岁、她32岁那年，有一天晚上我回到家，发现她已经在厨房里等着我。这很不寻常，她的工作时间比我长，通常要晚上8、9点才会到家。

　 “I need to talk to you,” she said, solemnly, and I was suddenly scared. She saw that and smiled—she wasn’t a cruel person, Liesl, and I don’t mean to give the impression that she was without kindness, without gentleness, because she had both in her, was capable of both. “It’s nothing bad, Harold.” Then she laughed a little. “I don’t think.”

“我得跟你谈一谈。”她说，很严肃，我忽然害怕起来。她看到我的表情，露出微笑；她不是个冷酷的人，我也不想让你以为她没有关怀和柔情，她其实都有。“不是什么坏事，哈罗德。”然后她笑了一声，“我想不是。”

　 I sat. She inhaled. “I’m pregnant. I don’t know how it happened. I must’ve skipped a pill or two and forgotten. It’s almost eight weeks. I had it confirmed at Sally’s today.” (Sally was her roommate from their med-school days, her best friend, and her gynecologist.) She said all this very quickly, in staccato, digestible sentences. Then she was silent. “I’m on a pill where I don’t get my periods, you know, so I didn’t know.” And then, when I said nothing, “Say something.”

我坐下来，她吸了口气：“我怀孕了。我不知道是怎么发生的，一定是有一两次忘了吃避孕药。快八周了。我今天去萨莉那确认了。”（萨莉是她医学院时期的室友，也是她最要好的朋友兼妇科医生。）她说得很快，用不连贯、摘要式的句子。接着她沉默了一会儿：“之前我还吃了催经药，你知道，所以我不知道自己怀孕了。”然后，看我没吭声，“你说点话吧。”

　 I couldn’t, at first. “How do you feel?” I asked.

一开始我没办法开口，好一会儿才问：“你觉得怎么样？”

　 She shrugged. “I feel fine.”

她耸耸肩：“我觉得还好。”

　 “Good,” I said, stupidly.

“很好。”我愚蠢地说。

　 “Harold,” she said, and sat across from me, “what do you want to do?”

“哈罗德，”她说，在我对面坐下来，“你想怎么做？”

　 “What do you want to do?”

“那你想怎么做？”

　 She shrugged again. “I know what I want to do. I want to know what you want to do.”“You don’t want to keep it.”

她又耸耸肩：“我知道我想怎么做，但我想知道你的想法。”“你不想留下。”

　 She didn’t disagree. “I want to hear what you want.”

她没有反驳：“我想听听你的意见。”

　 “What if I say I want to keep it?”

“如果我想留下呢？”