《幸福国的故事》这部迷人而精巧的短篇集，具备多克托罗代表长篇的重量和回响，包含各种情绪和声音，有力描绘了美国人的灵魂图景，堪称杰作。《幸福国的故事》中这五个关于信仰、爱和权力滥用的锐利短篇，完美融合了作者的高超技艺、怜悯和节制的愤怒。残忍母子，穷苦白人，少数族裔，宗教狂热分子，敢于对抗白宫的探员，多克托罗笔下的人物令人印象深刻，情节张力十足，展示了美国社会内在的悖论。
【作品名称】：幸福国的故事（Sweet Land Stories）
【丛书名称】：上海文艺版（短经典·第1辑03）
【作 者】：[美]E.L.多克托罗（E. L. Doctorow）
【译 者】：朱世达 / 邹海仑
【出 版 社】：上海文艺出版社 / 99读书人
【出版时间】：2013-10
【页 数】：192页
【I S B N 】：9787532150168
【定 价】：￥ 22.00
【目 录】：
平原上的屋子（A House on the Plains）………………………………… 001
婴儿威尔逊（Baby Wilson） ……………………………………………… 034
乔伦的人生（Jolene：A Life） …………………………………………… 063
沃尔特·约翰·哈蒙（Walter John Harmon）……………………………… 100
玫瑰园中的死孩子（Child，Dead，In the Rose Garden） …………… 136
【作品简介】：
E.L.多克托罗编著的《幸福国的故事》并不是一部长篇小说，而是多克托罗的一部最新的短篇小说集 。多克托罗作为小说家，主要从事长篇小说的创作，短篇小说写得较少。他的第一本短篇小说集出版至今已经过去了20年的时间，这部短篇小说集是迄今为止多克托罗出版的第二本短篇小说集。本书书名所说的“幸福国”指的就是美国，但是我们在这些小说中看到的人物的生活却并不幸福，因而这本书的书名显然含有强烈的反讽意味。《幸福国故事集》包含多克托罗近些年写的五篇短篇小说。与戴维·瓦莱斯、乔纳 森·弗兰岑这些年轻一代的作家的作品不同，多克托罗所写的人物不是美国社会制度的参与者，而是这个 制度之外的一些所谓“不可救药的人”，他们总是在毫无希望地反对美国的现存制度。这些小说都描写了一种黑暗的社会氛围或精神氛围。也许正是因为如此，有些美国文学评论家认为多克托罗具有“社会主义思想”。《幸福国的故事》这部迷人而精巧的短篇集，具备多克托罗代表长篇的重量和回响，包含各种情绪和声音，有力描绘了美国人的灵魂图景，堪称杰作。
【相关评论】：
★美国文学大师 E.L.多克托罗
★短篇小说代表作，细说“美国梦”的背面
多克托罗的天赋和想象力令人惊叹……他已成为美国神话的伟大记录者。
——乔伊斯·卡罗尔·欧茨
多克托罗遵从伟大的美国小说的传统，通过《幸福国的故事》，重新审视了美国梦。这些故事，展示了他作为叙述者的灵巧。
——《洛杉矶时报》
好的短篇小说是一部被熬成速食肉汤块的长篇，也可能仅是折射出一个世界的一滴水。老巫师多克托罗的这部美国灵魂快照集，似乎接近这一理想的状态……多克托罗对他的人物非常尊敬，善于在看似寻常的人生中发现不寻常的故事。
——《泰晤士报》
“This is an extraordinary contemporary novel, a stunning work.”
—The San Francisco Chronicle, about The Book of Daniel
“A wonderful addition to the ranks of American boy heroes . . . Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer with more poetry, Holden Caulfield with more zest and spirit . . . the kind of book you find yourself finishing at three in the morning after promising at midnight that you’ll stop at the next page.”
—The New York Times Book Review, about Billy Bathgate
“Marvelous . . . You get lost in World’s Fair as if it were an exotic adventure. You devour it with the avidity usually provoked by a suspense thriller.”
—The New York Times, about World’s Fair
【作者简介】：
E.L.多克托罗（1931- ），美国当代著名作家，生于纽约犹太人家庭，在哥伦比亚大学攻读戏剧硕士学位时参军。退伍后相继担任哥伦比亚电影公司审读员、新美国文库出版社编辑、日晷出版社总编辑，1969年起专事写作，并在美国多所大学执教。
多克托罗自1961年发表小说《欢迎来到艰难时代》至今笔耕不辍。主要作品还包括《但以理之书》、《雷格泰姆音乐》、《卢恩湖》、《诗人的生活》、《世界博览会》、《比利·巴思盖特》、《大进军》、《纽约兄弟》等。作品被翻译成三十多种文字。
多克托罗获得美国国家图书奖、两次国家书评人协会小说奖、美国笔会/福克纳小说奖，伊迪丝·沃顿小说奖，美国艺术与人文学院威廉·迪恩·豪斯奖，以及由美国总统颁发的国家人文奖章。
多克托罗现居于纽约，任纽约大学英美文学讲席教授。
E. L. Doctorow’s works of fiction include Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, Billy Bathgate, The Waterworks, City of God, The March, Homer & Langley, and Andrew’s Brain. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle awards, two PEN/Faulkner awards, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. In 2009 he was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, honoring a writer’s lifetime achievement in fiction, and in 2012 he won the PEN/ Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to an author whose “scale of achievement over a sustained career places him in the highest rank of American literature.” In 2013 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Gold Medal or Fiction. In 2014 he was honored with the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
【作品阅读】：
·上海文艺出版社·2013版·[美]E.L.多克托罗 著 朱世达/邹海仑 译·《幸福国的故事》·
·E.L.Doctorow（Sweet Land Stories）·
平原上的屋子
Mama said I was thenceforth to be her nephew, and to call her Aunt Dora. She said our fortune depended on her not having a son as old as eighteen who looked more like twenty. Say Aunt Dora, she said. I said it. She was not satisfied. She made me say it several times. She said I must say it believing she had taken me in since the death of her widowed brother, Horace. I said, I didn’t know you had a brother named Horace. Of course I don’t, she said with an amused glance at me. But it must be a good story if I could fool his son with it.
I was not offended as I watched her primp in the mirror, touching her hair as women do, although you can never see what afterwards is different.
With the life insurance, she had bought us a farm fifty miles west of the city line. Who would be there to care if I was her flesh and blood son or not? But she had her plans and was looking ahead. I had no plans. I had never had plans—just the inkling of something, sometimes, I didn’t know what. I hunched over and went down the stairs with the second trunk wrapped to my back with a rope. Outside, at the foot of the stoop, the children were waiting with their scraped knees and socks around their ankles. They sang their own dirty words to a nursery rhyme. I shooed them away and they scattered off for a minute hooting and hollering and then of course came back again as I went up the stairs for the rest of the things.
Mama was standing at the empty bay window. While there is your court of inquest on the one hand, she said, on the other is your court of neighbors. Out in the country, she said, there will be no one to jump to conclusions. You can leave the door open, and the window shades up. Everything is clean and pure under the sun.
Well, I could understand that, but Chicago to my mind was the only place to be, with its grand hotels and its restaurants and paved avenues of trees and mansions. Of course not all Chicago was like that. Our third floor windows didn’t look out on much besides the row of boardinghouses across the street. And it is true that in the summer people of refinement could be overcome with the smell of the stockyards, although it didn’t bother me. Winter was another complaint that wasn’t mine. I never minded the cold. The wind in winter blowing off the lake went whipping the ladies’ skirts like a demon dancing around their ankles. And winter or summer you could always ride the electric streetcars if you had nothing else to do. I above all liked the city because it was filled with people all a-bustle, and the clatter of hooves and carriages, and with delivery wagons and drays and the peddlers and the boom and clank of the freight trains. And when those black clouds came sailing in from the west, pouring thunderstorms upon us so that you couldn’t hear the cries or curses of humankind, I liked that best of all. Chicago could stand up under the worst God had to offer. I understood why it was built—a place for trade, of course, with railroads and ships and so on, but mostly to give all of us a magnitude of defiance that is not provided by one house on the plains. And the plains is where those storms come from.
Besides, I would miss my friend Winifred Czerwinska, who stood now on her landing as I was going downstairs with the suitcases. Come in a minute, she said, I want to give you something. I went in and she closed the door behind me. You can put those down, she said of the suitcases.
My heart always beat faster in Winifred’s presence. I could feel it and she knew it too and it made her happy. She put her hand on my chest now and she stood on tiptoes to kiss me with her hand under my shirt feeling my heart pump.
Look at him, all turned out in a coat and tie. Oh, she said, with her eyes tearing up, what am I going to do without my Earle? But she was smiling.
Winifred was not a Mama type of woman. She was a slight, skinny thing, and when she went down the stairs it was like a bird hopping. She wore no powder or perfumery except by accident the confectionary sugar which she brought home on her from the bakery where she worked behind the counter. She had sweet, cool lips but one eyelid didn’t come up all the way over the blue, which made her not as pretty as she might otherwise be. And of course she had no titties to speak of.
You can write me a letter or two and I will write back, I said.
What will you say in your letter?
I will think of something, I said.
She pulled me into the kitchen, where she spread her feet and put her forearms flat on a chair so that I could raise her frock and fuck into her in the way she preferred. It didn’t take that long, but even so, while Winifred wiggled and made her little cat sounds I could hear Mama calling from upstairs as to where I had gotten.
We had ordered a carriage to take us and the luggage at the same time rather than sending it off by the less expensive Railway Express and taking a horsecar to the station. That was not my idea, but exactly the amounts that were left after Mama bought the house only she knew. She came down the steps under her broad-brim hat and widow’s veil and held her skirts at her shoe tops as the driver helped her into the carriage.
We were making a grand exit in full daylight. This was pure Mama as she lifted her veil and glanced with contempt at the neighbors looking out from their windows. As for the nasty children, they had gone quite quiet at our display of elegance. I swung up beside her and closed the door and at her instruction threw a handful of pennies on the sidewalk, and I watched the children push and shove one another and dive to their knees as we drove off.
When we had turned the corner, Mama opened the hatbox I had put on the seat. She removed her black hat and replaced it with a blue number trimmed in fake flowers. Over her mourning dress she draped a glittery shawl in striped colors like the rainbow. There, she said. I feel so much better now. Are you all right, Earle?
Yes, Mama, I said.
Aunt Dora.
Yes, Aunt Dora.
I wish you had a better mind, Earle. You could have paid more attention to the Doctor when he was alive. We had our disagreements, but he was smart for a man.
The Train stop of La Ville was a concrete platform and a lean-to for a waiting room and no ticket-agent window. When you got off, you were looking down an alley to a glimpse of their Main Street. Main Street had a feed store, a post office, a white wooden church, a granite stone bank, a haberdasher, a town square with a four-story hotel, and in the middle of the square on the grass the statue of a Union soldier. It could all be counted because there was just one of everything. A man with a dray was willing to take us. He drove past a few other streets where first there were some homes of substance and another church or two but then, as you moved further out from the town center, worn looking one-story shingle houses with dark little porches and garden plots and clotheslines out back with only alleys separating them. I couldn’t see how, but Mama said there was a population of over three thousand living here. And then after a couple of miles through farmland, with a silo here and there off a straight road leading due west through fields of corn, there swung into view what I had not expected, a three-story house of red brick with a flat roof and stone steps up to the front door like something just lifted out of a street of row houses in Chicago. I couldn’t believe anyone had built such a thing for a farmhouse. The sun flared in the windowpanes and I had to shade my eyes to make sure I was seeing what I saw. But that was it in truth, our new home.
Not that I had the time to reflect, not with Mama settling in. We went to work. The house was cobwebbed and dusty and it was rank with the droppings of animal life. Blackbirds were roosting in the top floor, where I was to live. Much needed to be done, but before long she had it all organized and a parade of wagons was coming from town with the furniture she’d Expressed and no shortage of men willing to hire on for a day with hopes for more from this grand good-looking lady with the rings on several fingers. And so the fence went up for the chicken yard, and the weed fields beyond were being plowed under and the watering hole for stock was dredged and a new privy was dug, and I thought for some days Mama was the biggest employer of La Ville, Illinois.
But who would haul the well water and wash the clothes and bake the bread? A farm was a different life, and days went by when I slept under the roof of the third floor and felt the heat of the day still on my pallet as I looked through the little window at the remoteness of the stars and I felt unprotected as I never had in the civilization we had retreated from. Yes, I thought, we had moved backward from the world’s progress, and for the first time I wondered about Mama’s judgment. In all our travels from state to state and with all the various obstacles to her ambition, I had never thought to question it. But no more than this house was a farmer’s house was she a farmer, and neither was I.
One evening we stood on the front steps watching the sun go down behind the low hills miles away.
Aunt Dora, I said, what are we up to here?
I know, Earle. But some things take time.
She saw me looking at her hands, how red they had gotten.
I am bringing an immigrant woman down from Wisconsin. She will sleep in that room behind the kitchen. She’s to be here in a week or so.
Why? I said. There’s women in La Ville, the wives of all these locals come out here for a day’s work who could surely use the money.
I will not have some woman in the house who will only take back to town what she sees and hears. Use what sense God gave you, Earle.
I am trying, Mama.
Aunt Dora, goddamnit.
Aunt Dora.
Yes, she said. Especially here in the middle of nowhere and with nobody else in sight.
She had tied her thick hair behind her neck against the heat and she went about now loose in a smock without her usual women’s underpinnings.
But doesn’t the air smell sweet, she said. I’m going to have a screen porch built and fit it out with a settee and some rockers so we can watch the grand show of nature in comfort.
She ruffled my hair. And you don’t have to pout, she said. You may not appreciate it here this moment with the air so peaceful and the birds singing and nothing much going on in any direction you can see. But we’re still in business, Earle. You can trust me on that.
And so I was assured.
By And by we acquired an old-fashioned horse and buggy to take us to La Ville and back when Aunt Dora had to go to the bank or the post office or provisions were needed. I was the driver and horse groom. He—the horse—and I did not get along. I wouldn’t give him a name. He was ugly, with a sway back and legs that trotted out splayed. I had butchered and trimmed better looking plugs than this in Chicago. Once, in the barn, when I was putting him up for the night, he took a chomp in the air just off my shoulder.
Another problem was Bent, the handyman Mama had hired for the steady work. No sooner did she begin taking him upstairs of an afternoon than he was strutting around like he owned the place. This was a problem as I saw it. Sure enough, one day he told me to do something. It was one of his own chores. I thought you was the hired one, I said to him. He was ugly, like a relation of the horse—he was shorter than you thought he ought to be with his long arms and big gnarled hands hanging from them.
Get on with it, I said.
Leering, he grabbed me by the shoulder and put his mouth up to my ear. I seen it all, he said. Oh yes. I seen everything a man could wish to see.
At this I found myself constructing a fate for Bent the handyman. But he was so drunkly stupid I knew Mama must have her own plan for him or else why would she play up to someone of this ilk, and so I held my ideas in abeyance.
In fact I was by now thinking I could wrest some hope from the wide loneliness of this farm with views of the plains as far as you could see. What had come to mind? A sense of expectancy that I recognized from times past. Yes. I had sensed that whatever was going to happen had begun. There was not only the handyman. There were the orphan children. She had contracted for three from the do-good agency in New York that took orphans off the streets and washed and dressed them and put them on the train to their foster homes in the midland. Ours were comely enough children, though pale, two boys and a girl with papers that gave their ages, six, six, and eight, and as I trotted them to the farm they sat up behind me staring at the countryside without a word. And so now they were installed in the back bedroom on the second floor, and they were not like the miserable street rats from our neighborhood in the city. These were quiet children except for the weeping they were sometimes given to at night, and by and large they did as they were told. Mama had some real feeling for them—Joseph and Calvin and the girl, Sophie, in particular. There were no conditions as to what faith they were to be brought up in nor did we have any in mind. But on Sundays, Mama took to showing them off to the Methodist church in La Ville in the new clothes she had bought for them. It gave her pleasure, and was besides a presentation of her own pride of position in life. Because it turned out, as I was learning, that even in the farthest reaches of the countryside, you lived in society.
And in this great scheme of things my Aunt Dora required little Joseph, Calvin, and Sophie to think of her as their mama. Say Mama, she said to them. And they said it.
Well, So Here was this household of us, ready made, as something bought from a department store. Fannie was the imported cook and housekeeper, who by Mama’s design spoke no English but understood well enough what had to be done. She was heavyset, like Mama, with the strength to work hard. And besides Bent, who skulked about by the barns and fences in the sly pretense of work, there was a real farmer out beyond, who was sharecropping the acreage in corn. And two mornings a week a retired county teacher woman came by to tutor the children in reading and arithmetic.
Mama said one evening: We are an honest to goodness enterprise here, a functioning family better off than most in these parts, but we are running at a deficit, and if we don’t have something in hand before winter the only resources will be the insurance I took out on the little ones.
She lit the kerosene lamp on the desk in the parlor and wrote out a Personal and read it to me: “Widow offering partnership in prime farmland to dependable man. A modest investment is required.” What do you think, Earle?
It’s okay.
She read it again to herself. No, she said. It’s not good enough. You’ve got to get them up off their ass and out of the house to the Credit Union and then on a train to La Ville, Illinois. That’s a lot to do with just a few words. How about this: “Wanted!” That’s good, it bespeaks urgency. And doesn’t every male in the world thinks he’s what is wanted? “Wanted—Recently widowed woman with bountiful farm in God’s own country has need of Nordic man of sufficient means for partnership in same.”
What is Nordic? I said.
Well that’s pure cunning right there, Earle, because that’s all they got in the states where we run this—Swedes and Norwegies just off the boat. But I’m letting them know a lady’s preference.
All right, but what’s that you say there—“of sufficient means”? What Norwegie off the boat’ll know what that’s all about?
This gave her pause. Good for you, Earle, you surprise me sometimes. She licked the pencil point. So we’ll just say “with cash.”
We Placed the Personal in one paper at a time in towns in Minnesota, and then in South Dakota. The letters of courtship commenced, and Mama kept a ledger with the names and dates of arrival, making sure to give each candidate his sufficient time. We always advised the early-morning train when the town was not yet up and about. Beside my regular duties, I had to take part in the family reception. They would be welcomed into the parlor, and Mama would serve coffee from a wheeled tray, and Joseph, Calvin, and Sophie, her children, and I, her nephew, would sit on the sofa and hear our biographies conclude with a happy ending, which was the present moment. Mama was so well spoken at these times I was as apt as the poor foreigners to be caught up in her modesty, so seemingly unconscious was she of the great-heartedness of her. They by and large did not see through to her self-congratulation. And of course she was a large, handsome woman to look at. She wore her simple finery for these first impressions, a plain pleated gray cotton skirt and a starched white shirtwaist and no jewelry but the gold cross on a chain that fell between her bosoms and her hair combed upward and piled atop her head in a state of fetching carelessness.
I am their dream of heaven on earth, Mama said to me along about the third or fourth. Just to see how their eyes light up standing beside me looking out over their new land. Puffing on their pipes, giving me a glance that imagines me as available for marriage—who can say I don’t give value in return?
Well that is one way to look at it, I said.
Don’t be smug, Earle. You’re in no position. Tell me an easier way to God’s blessed Heaven than a launch from His Heaven on earth. I don’t know of one.
And so our account in the La Ville Savings Bank began to compound nicely. The late summer rain did just the right thing for the corn, as even I could see, and it was an added few unanticipated dollars we received from the harvest. If there were any complications to worry about it was that fool Bent. He was so dumb he was dangerous. At first Mama indulged his jealousy. I could hear them arguing upstairs—he roaring away and she assuring him so quietly I could hardly hear what she said. But it didn’t do any good. When one of the Norwegies arrived, Bent just happened to be in the yard, where he could have a good look. One time there was his ugly face peering through the porch window. Mama signaled me with a slight motion of her head and I quickly got up and pulled the shade.
It was true Mama might lay it on a bit thick. She might coquette with this one, yes, just as she might affect a widow’s piety with that one. It all depended on her instinct of the particular man’s character. It was easy enough to make believers of them. If I had to judge them as a whole I would say they were simple men, not exactly stupid, but lacking command of our language and with no wiles of their own. By whatever combination of sentiments and signatures, she never had anything personal intended but the business at hand, the step-by-step encouragement of the cash into our bank account.
The fool Bent imagined Mama looking for a husband from among these men. His pride of possession was offended. When he came to work each morning, he was often three sheets to the wind and if she happened not to invite him upstairs for the afternoon siesta, he would go home in a state, turning at the road to shake his fist and shout up at the windows before he set out for town in his crouching stride.
Mama said to me on one occasion, The damned fool has feelings.
Well that had not occurred to me in the way she meant it, and maybe in that moment my opinion of the handyman was raised to a degree. Not that he was any less dangerous. Clearly he had never learned that the purpose of life is to improve your station in it. It was not an idea available to him. Whatever you were, that’s what you would always be. So he saw these foreigners who couldn’t even talk right not only as usurpers but as casting a poor light on his existence. Was I in his position, I would learn from the example of these immigrants and think what I could do to put together a few dollars and buy some farmland for myself. Any normal person would think that. Not him. He just got enough of the idea through his thick skull to realize he lacked the hopes of even the lowest foreigner. So I would come back from the station with one of them in the buggy and the fellow would step down, his plaid suit and four-in-hand and his bowler proposing him as a man of sufficient means, and it was like a shadow and sudden chilling as from a black cloud came over poor Bent, who could understand only that it was too late for him—everything, I mean, it was all too late.
And finally, to show how dumb he was, what he didn’t realize was that it was all too late for them, too.
Then Everything green began to fade off yellow, the summer rains were gone, and the wind off the prairie blew the dried-out topsoil into gusty swirls that rose and fell like waves in a dirt sea. At night the windows rattled. At first frost, the two little boys caught the croup.
Mama pulled the Wanted ad back from the out-of-state papers, saying she needed to catch her breath. I didn’t know what was in the ledger, but her saying that meant our financial situation was improved. And now, as with all farm families, winter would be a time for rest.
Not that I was looking forward to it. How could I with nothing to do?
I wrote a letter to my friend Winifred Czerwinska, in Chicago. I had been so busy until now I hardly had the time to be lonely. I said that I missed her and hoped before too long to come back to city life. As I wrote, a rush of pity for myself came over me and I almost sobbed at the picture in my mind of the Elevated trains and the moving lights of the theater marquees and the sounds I imagined of the streetcars and even of the lowings of the abattoir where I had earned my wages. But I only said I hoped she would write me back.
I think the children felt the same way about this cold countryside. They had been displaced from a greater distance away, in a city larger than Chicago. They could not have been colder huddled at some steam grate than they were now with blankets to their chins. From the day they arrived they wouldn’t leave one another’s side, and though she was not croupy herself, Sophie stayed with the two boys in their bedroom, attending to their hackings and wheezes and sleeping in an armchair in the night. Fannie cooked up oatmeal for their breakfasts and soup for their dinners, and I took it upon myself to bring the tray upstairs in order to get them talking to me, since we were all related in a sense and in their minds I would be an older boy orphan taken in, like them. But they would not talk much, only answering my friendly questions yes or no in their soft voices, looking at me all the while with some dark expectation in their eyes. I didn’t like that. I knew they talked among themselves all the time. These were street-wise children who had quickly apprised themselves of the lay of the land. For instance, they knew enough to stay out of Bent’s way when he was drinking. But when he was sober they followed him around. And one day I had gone into the stable, to harness the horse, and found them snooping around in there, so they were not without unhealthy curiosity. Then there was the unfortunate matter of one of the boys, Joseph, the shorter darker one—he had found a pocket watch and watch fob in the yard, and when I said it was mine he said it wasn’t. Whose is it then, I said. I know it’s not yours, he said as he finally handed it over. To make more of an issue of it was not wise, so I didn’t, but I hadn’t forgotten.
Mama and I were nothing if not prudent, discreet, and in full consideration of the feelings of others in all our ways and means, but I believe children have a sense that enables them to know something even when they can’t say what it is. As a child I must have had it, but of course it leaves you as you grow up. It may be a trait children are given so that they will survive long enough to grow up.
But I didn’t want to think the worst. I reasoned to myself that were I plunked down so far away from my streets among strangers who I was ordered to live with as their relation, in the middle of this flat land of vast empty fields that would stir in any breast nothing but a recognition of the presiding deafness and dumbness of the natural world, I too would behave as these children were behaving.
And then one stinging cold day in December, I had gone into town to pick up a package from the post office. We had to write away to Chicago for those things it would not do to order from the local merchants. The package was in, but also a letter addressed to me, and it was from my friend Winifred Czerwinska.
Winifred’s penmanship made me smile. The letters were thin and scrawny and did not keep to a straight line but went slanting in a downward direction, as if some of her mortal being was transferred to the letter paper. And I knew she had written from the bakery, because there was some powdered sugar in the folds.
She was so glad to hear from me and to know where I was. She thought I had forgotten her. She said she missed me. She said she was bored with her job. She had saved her money and hinted that she would be glad to spend it on something interesting, like a train ticket. My ears got hot reading that. In my mind I saw Winifred squinting up at me. I could almost feel her putting her hand under my shirt to feel my heart the way she liked to do.
But on the second page she said maybe I would be interested in news from the old neighborhood. There was going to be another inquest, or maybe the same one reopened.
It took me a moment to understand she was talking about the Doctor, Mama’s husband in Chicago. The Doctor’s relatives had asked for his body to be dug up. Winifred found this out from the constable who knocked on her door as he was doing with everyone. The police were trying to find out where we had gone, Mama and I.
I hadn’t gotten your letter yet, Winifred said, so I didn’t have to lie about not knowing where you were.
I raced home. Why did Winifred think she would otherwise have to lie? Did she believe all the bad gossip about us? Was she like the rest of them? I thought she was different. I was disappointed in her, and then I was suddenly very mad at Winifred.
Mama read the letter differently. Your Miss Czerwinska is our friend, Earle. That’s something higher than a lover. If I have worried about her slow eye being passed on to the children, if it shows up we will just have to have it corrected with surgery.
What children, I said.
The children of your blessed union with Miss Czerwinska, Mama said.
Do not think Mama said this merely to keep me from worrying about the Chicago problem. She sees things before other people see them. She has plans going out through all directions of the universe—she is not a one-track mind, my Aunt D
ora. I was excited by her intentions for me, as if I had thought of them myself. Perhaps I had thought of them myself as my secret, but she had read my secret and was now giving her approval. Because I certainly did like Winifred Czerwinska, whose lips tasted of baked goods and who loved it so when I fucked into her. And now it was all out in the open, and Mama not only knew my feelings but expressed them for me and it only remained for the young lady to be told that we were engaged.
I thought then her visiting us would be appropriate, especially as she was prepared to pay her own way. But Mama said, Not yet, Earle. Everyone in the house knew you were loving her up, and if she was to quit her job in the bakery and pack a bag and go down to the train station, even the Chicago police, as stupid as they are, they would put two and two together.
Of course I did not argue the point, though I was of the opinion that the police would find out where we were regardless. There were indications all over the place—not anything as difficult as a clue to be discerned only by the smartest of detectives, but bank account transfers, forwarding mail, and such. Why, even the driver who took us to the station might have picked up some remark of ours, and certainly a ticket-seller at Union Station might remember us. Mama being such an unusual-looking woman, very decorative and regal to the male eye, she would surely be remembered by a ticket-seller, who would not see her like from one year to the next.
Maybe a week went by before Mama expressed an opinion about the problem. You can’t trust people, she said. It’s that damn sister of his, who didn’t even shed a tear at the grave. Why, she even told me how lucky the Doctor was to have found me so late in life.
I remember, I said.
And how I had taken such good care of him.
Which was true, I said.
Relatives are the fly in the ointment, Earle.
Mama’s not being concerned so much as she was put out meant to me that we had more time than I would have thought. Our quiet lives of winter went on as before, though as I watched and waited she was obviously thinking things through. I was satisfied to wait, even though she was particularly attentive to Bent, inviting him in for dinner as if he was not some hired hand but a neighboring farmer. And I had to sit across the table on the children’s side and watch him struggle to hold the silver in his fist and slurp his soup and pity him the way he had pathetically combed his hair down and tucked his shirt in and the way he folded his fingers under when he happened to see the dirt under his nails. This is good eats, he said aloud to no one in particular, and even Fannie, as she served, gave a little hmph as if despite having no English she understood clearly enough how out of place he was here at our table.
Well as it turned out there were things I didn’t know, for instance that the little girl, Sophie, had adopted Bent, or maybe made a pet of him as you would any dumb beast, but they had become friends of a sort and she had confided to him remarks she overheard in the household. Maybe if she was making Mama into her mama she thought she was supposed to make the wretched bum of a hired hand into her father, I don’t know. Anyway, there was this alliance between them that showed to me that she would never rise above her unsavory life in the street as a vagrant child. She looked like an angel with her little bow mouth and her pale face and gray eyes and her hair in a single long braid, which Mama herself did every morning, but she had the hearing of a bat and could stand on the second-floor landing and listen all the way down the stairs to our private conversations in the front parlor. Of course I only knew that later. It was Mama who learned that Bent was putting it about to his drinking cronies in town that the Madame Dora they thought was such a lady was his love slave and a woman on the wrong side of the law back in Chicago.
Mama, I said, I have never liked this fool, though I have been holding my ideas in abeyance for the fate I have in mind for him. But here he accepts our wages and eats our food then goes and does this?
Hush, Earle, not yet, not yet, she said. But you are a good son to me, and I can take pride that as a woman alone I have bred in you the highest sense of family honor. She saw how troubled I was. She hugged me. Are you not my very own knight of the roundtable? she said. But I was not comforted. It seemed to me that forces were massing slowly but surely against us in a most menacing way. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it that we were going along as if everything was hunky dory, even to giving a grand Christmas Eve party for the several people in La Ville who Mama had come to know—how they all drove out in their carriages under the moon that was so bright on the plains of snow that it was like a black daytime, the local banker, the merchants, the pastor of the First Methodist church, and other such dignitaries and their wives. The spruce tree in the parlor was imported from Minnesota and all alight with candles and the three children were dressed for the occasion and went around with cups of eggnog for the assembled guests. I knew how important it was for Mama to establish her reputation as a person of class who had flattered the community by joining it, but all these people made me nervous. I didn’t think it was wise having so many rigs parked in the yard and so many feet tromping about the house or going out to the privy. Of course it was a lack of self-confidence on my part, and how often was it Mama had warned me nothing was more dangerous than that, because it was translated into the face and physique as wrongdoing, or at least defenselessness, which amounted to the same thing. But I couldn’t help it. I remembered the pocket watch that the little sniveling Joseph had found and held up to me swinging it from its fob. I sometimes made mistakes, I was human, and who knew what other mistakes lay about for someone to find and hold up to me.
But now Mama looked at me over the heads of her guests. The children’s tutor had brought her harmonium and we all gathered around the fireplace for some carol singing. Given Mama’s look, I sang the loudest. I have a good tenor voice and I sent it aloft to turn heads and make the La Villers smile. I imagined decking the halls with boughs of holly until there was kindling and brush enough to set the whole place ablaze.
Just After the New Year a man appeared at our door, another Swede, with his Gladstone bag in his hand. We had not run the Wanted ad all winter and Mama was not going to be home to him, but this fellow was the brother of one of them who had responded to it the previous fall. He gave his name, Henry Lundgren, and said his brother Per Lundgren had not been heard from since leaving Wisconsin to look into the prospect here.
Mama invited him in and sat him down and had Fannie bring in some tea. The minute I looked at him, I remembered the brother. Per Lundgren had been all business. He did not blush or go shy in Mama’s presence, nor did he ogle. Instead, he asked sound questions. He had also turned the conversation away from his own circumstances, family relations and so on, which Mama put people through in order to learn who was back home and might be waiting. Most of the immigrants, if they had family, it was still in the old country, but you had to make sure. Per Lundgren was close mouthed, but he did admit to being unmarried and so we decided to go ahead.
And here was Henry, the brother he had never mentioned, sitting stiffly in the wing chair with his arms folded and the aggrieved expression on his face. They had the same reddish fair skin, with a long jaw and thinning blond hair, and pale woeful-looking eyes with blond eyelashes. I would say Henry here was the younger by a couple of years, but he turned out to be as smart as Per, or maybe even smarter. He did not seem to be as convinced of the sincerity of Mama’s expressions of concern as I would have liked. He said his brother had made the trip to La Ville with other stops planned afterwards to two more business prospects, a farm some twenty miles west of us and another in Indiana. Henry had traveled to these places, which is how he learned that his brother never arrived for his appointments. He said Per had been traveling with something over two thousand dollars in his money belt. ……
……………
如果是年轻时候读E·L·多克托罗，我想，自己一定会目瞪口呆，浑身颤栗。如今，我全然挣扎在无用的人生里，既无力亦多余，邂逅多克托罗，细细想来，倒也算得上是合宜。我指的是《幸福国的故事》。不能说幸福国里的故事完全没有幸福，这并非多克托罗倾心营造的反讽。幸福国里的故事是有幸福的，只是这幸福的代价太高，高到没有多少人承受得起，也就高到没有多少人理解得了，于是以反讽的名义一律抹去。但是，这不是多克托罗意义上的反讽，而是平庸正确意义上的反讽——主流的反讽，一目了然的人生，是非好坏仿佛世界的B面，清晰地立在镜中。幸福国里的幸福不是普遍的幸福，平庸理解不了也接受不了。平庸渴望正确，一切都要正确，政治正确、道德正确、伦理正确、价值正确、主流正确……一切正确编织的网络便是合理的世界，因为合理所以幸福。如此正确的幸福并非只是一种私密的感受与体验，它们有着雄浑厚重的堡垒，一切文化与历史、神话与传说披坚执锐为其保驾护航，它们因此是系统的客观的公共的，也因此是不容置疑的。
然而，多克托罗却是渎神者，他不仅置疑，而且置疑得全面而彻底，一切文化、历史、神话、传说，以及所有这一切言说拱卫的正确，都被多克托罗以文学的方式加以拆解重构，于是有了不一样的幸福。这才是多克托罗的反讽：幸福国里的幸福一点也不正确，它有着异质的道德观、伦理观、价值观为之筑基，有着别样的历史、神话、传说、文化为之加持，它们没有一样是正确的，但这所有的不正确融铸的不正确的幸福是实实在在的幸福。这也许最本质地符合幸福国的最高原则：每个人都有权利追求享受自己认定的幸福。反讽的目的不在反讽，反讽也不指向纯然的否定与讽刺，多克托罗的反讽就是如此果断地不够正确。于是，如果正确的幸福并不那么“正确”，反讽追求的就是对幸福的还原；如果正确的幸福过于狭隘逼窄，反讽追求的就是对幸福边界的拓展延伸。多克托罗对反讽的运用宛如上帝对语言的运用，他以文学的名义创造生活；他的反讽粗鲁直接却又温情脉脉，与正确无关，一切顺应人性的随波逐流都自有其真实充盈的幸福，人性的局限在此成为漫无边际的存在视角，每一种局限都是一种存在依托，多克托罗的存在则依托于对所有这一切依托局限的存在的通感同情。多克托罗的反讽通向一个更人道也更人性的世界，一个全新的世界，前所未有地宽容多元。
抵达如此生存意义上的反讽并不容易，必得有宽容坦荡的胸怀、多元恢弘的价值网络、敏感多思的心灵，必得念念于心高举公义于罪恶之城……多克托罗具备这一切，他似乎轻而易举地抵达了这存在论意义上的反讽，他还原了也拓展了幸福国的内涵与边界。这是如何做到的？首先，多克托罗衷情于书写边缘人生与暗黑生存，他的主人公们游走于罪恶之城，身份卑微随波逐流却如鱼得水自在圆融。在他的幸福国里，这些边缘小人物获得了生存的权力，他们的暗黑人生获得了讨论与辩难的尊重，他们的罪与罚得以作为另类神话与传说散发生命的光彩。多克托罗并不否认这些小人物们的罪与恶，他从没打算为他们做无聊的翻案文章，他否认的是罪恶之城里的善恶分野与善恶等级，以及由此而生的惩罚系统。多克托罗坚执地认定幸福国即罪恶之城，无人不活在罪与苦之中，无人有权利定他人的罪，最大的罪就是人对人的善恶定义与奖惩。多克托罗也坚执地认定，善只能产生自罪恶之城的内部而非外部，上帝之城不在天国而在罪恶之城。或者说，罪恶之城必须上升为上帝之城，上升的通道就在人性里，那些挣扎在罪与苦中的人们，其内心深处始终存在着善的种子。多克托罗并不沉溺于罪与苦，他书写边缘与暗黑人生，因为他知道这罪与苦的人生里始终萌动着善的微光，从未全然磨灭消泯。挖掘罪苦中的善意，示现罪苦中善的挣扎突围，展示罪苦中人性对幸福的不懈追求，幸福国便名实相符有了神性的光辉。是的，幸福就是善，罪苦里开出这灿烂的花，罪恶之城就处在了通达上帝之城的通道里。这可谓多克托罗的全部创作内核。
其次，多克托罗对叙事视角的选择可谓苦心孤诣。公义在心的小说家深知叙事视角并非技术问题而是道德问题。劫匪盗贼强人骗子伪士恶棍倘若获得了言说的权利，他们不仅会为自身的罪恶开脱，而且还会将自己的罪恶打造成良善，把自己的无耻行径粉饰为传奇功业。那么，小说将在读者那里制造巨大的道德混乱甚至道德错位。多克托罗深知这一点，但他仍然通过叙述视角的授权赋予了他笔下的罪人们以言说的权利。《幸福国的故事》凡五篇，《平原上的屋子》《婴儿威尔逊》《沃尔特·约翰·哈蒙》都是第一人称视角，《平原上的屋子》的第一人称叙述者厄尔是骗子与杀人犯，《婴儿威尔逊》的第一人称叙述者菜斯特是小偷，《沃尔特·约翰·哈蒙》的第一人称叙述者吉姆是邪教徒。随着叙事的展开，厄尔为我们展示了一个精心谋划的骗局与残忍的谋杀，菜斯特为我们铺陈了一个婴儿偷窃潜逃之旅，吉姆则为我们描述了一个邪教的诞生与成长。
但多克托罗并没有忘记自己心中的公义，他并不给罪苦以伪饰的机会，他怎么避免第一人称叙事不可避免的道德自淫？他选择的叙述人都不是案件的主犯，厄尔并非骗局与谋杀的策划者与施行者，他只是一个少年，在他的生存处境里协从了他的母亲，他的母亲才是主犯。菜斯特也并非偷窃婴儿的人，他只是顺应了女朋友的偷窃行为，在形格势禁中带着女朋友与偷来的孩子一起潜逃。吉姆在邪教里只是一个首鼠两端心怀疑虑的小人物，并非邪教魁首教宗。这真是精心绝妙的选择，这些叙述者相对于他们叙述参与的罪恶事件，隔着一段距离；相对于所谓正确世界的中心地带，也隔着一段距离——他们是双重边缘人，他们成为至关重要的一点，把本来层级分明的罪恶世界与正确世界联系在一起，从而以双重张力把两个世界联成一体。于是，罪还是罪，罪可以为自己辩护，却不可以为自己涂脂抹粉；正确不绝对完全“正确”，正确的边界与内涵自然而然得到重新阐述与延展。多克托罗以此将宽容与多元视角注入固化的正确世界，使得道德没有遭遇混乱与错位，却遭遇了重组与升华。
《乔伦的人生》与《玫瑰园中的死孩子》都是第三人称叙事视角，《乔伦的人生》的女主角乔伦在自己的美貌中飘若浮萍，在短短十年时间里，嫁过三任丈夫，跟过五个男人，从少女到成年，她听任美貌的支配，随遇而安。但是，多克托罗在乔伦的人生叙述里采取的并非全然客观冷静的态度，作为隐含的叙述作者，他的确立场超然，但他在进行第三人称叙事时，却又尽量贴着人物写，仿佛他是口述史的整理者，虽然力求历史的真实，却又无法完全抹去口述者本人的主观立场。如此，在客观与主观之间形成了巨大的张力空间，我们由此得以脑补乔伦人生里那些没有叙述出来的罪与苦、那些痛与哭、那些天真的轻浮、那些纯洁的迎合、那些本能的执着、那些不假思索的追求、那些轻易的满足与碎片似的快乐……这样的人生，如果没有多元的视角与宽容的体贴，对她下道德判断是难的，因为她并不判断自己，她只是坚韧地生活。
《玫瑰园中的死孩子》的第三人称叙事视角也很特殊，多克托罗采用了侦探小说模式，小说本身写的也的确是一桩在正确的世界里会被视为惊世骇俗的案子。在一场大型公共活动之后，白宫玫瑰园里高朋散尽，佳宾远引，却留下了一个陌生孩子的尸骸。白宫是什么地方，那是正确世界的心脏。想想看克里姆林宫里出现了一具陌生尸骸，会发生什么事？倘若京先生的宫殿里出现了一具陌生尸骸，不知有多少人会被炮决犬刑，他的幸福国不知要戒严多久。好在以白宫为心脏的幸福国的确有着相对合理的幸福，所以，沒有戒严，没有全国搜查交待，没有炮决犬刑，但案子仍然以正确世界的逻辑发酵，先是总统及其班底为安全计撤出白宫，然后是对清空的白宫进行地毯式的大搜索，接着，退休特工莫罗伊受命秘密调查。随着莫罗伊调查的深入，案件真相浮出水面：这是一起作案手段非常业余的案子，与恐怖主义无关，与政治抗议无关，与种族主义冲突无关，与党派政治攻击无关，与左派或右派知识分子立场无关……与一切正确的逻辑结论都没有任何关系。
莫罗伊的调查并非一帆风顺，在短暂的惊慌失态后，白宫为案子定了性——这是一起政治性恶搞，其目的是为了打击总统及其党派，是知识分子忘恩负义的反美示威，因此，为了让对手的攻击目的落空，案子的调查成了例行公事的政治行为，一切调查资料与结果最终都将被无声无息地秘密存档，一切知情者都将被封口，而对公众而言，白宫从未发生过这件事，玫瑰园里从来就不曾出现过一具陌生孩子的尸骸，白宫没有发生过任何不正常的事件。莫罗伊对白宫针对案子的政治形势论没有兴趣，对白宫对整个事件的抹杀不以为然，他固执地要查出真相。他也查出了真相：这个孩子不是被谋杀的，他在自然死亡之后，被一位当时的受邀佳宾克里斯蒂娜带进了白宫。克里斯蒂娜的父亲斯蒂文斯先生乃幸福国最富有的人之一，动力公司的董事长，总统的朋友与兄弟，他对女儿的所作所为伤心之至。克里斯蒂娜背叛了她的父亲，背叛了他父亲所代表的主流文化价值。她的超越性在于，她的作为与党派政治斗争没有任何关系，她也不受任何流行的思潮与主义的影响，同时也游离于习惯站队的任何知识分子立场之外，她这么做是对幸福国的价值系统的全面置疑，她只是站在人的立场，站在被侮辱被损害者的位置，站在弱者的痛苦中心，站在人所固有的尊严与平等的诉求里，站在人性深处善与通感同情的悸动里。一如小说中的那位心理学家所言，这个孩子的尸骸是一个象征，抗议的或恶心的象征，但不是象征种族抗议，而是象征人的抗议。幸福国的内涵过于封闭，幸福国的边界过于狭隘，许多人被排除在外，被取消了幸福的权利。这个死去的底层移民的孩子，代表了这些沉默的被排除在外的人们。他被克里斯蒂娜带进白宫，他以死亡之身无言地向这个伊甸园里的大人物们索要属于自己的幸福。
毫无疑问，《玫瑰园的死孩子》非同凡响，其以侦探小说的模式破获的是幸福国的“幸福”真相，在莫罗伊的侦探之眼烛照下，幸福国的幽暗与罪恶，幸福国价值系统的荒谬与不义无所遁形。在这篇小说里，多克托罗不再刻意冷静，而是热血澎湃，尽管幸福国的正确逻辑强大无匹，死孩子事件为之不存在，克里斯蒂娜为之被精神病，但莫多伊却利用知情人的身份干了这样一件事：他告诉白宫联络官，如果那个死去的孩子父母不被移民局释放和允许回家，那么，他们将会发现，这个事件将人尽皆知。随后，他给孩子的父母写了一封信，他说，孩子的坟墓可能没有标志，但是他安息在阿灵顿国家公墓中那些为国捐躯的人当中。这是小说的最后一句话，可谓激情洋溢公义璀璨，孩子得以进入幸福国的叙事系统——当死人开始说话，世界就开始重置，这再一次证明，多克托罗坚信，幸福国的幸福是可以正当正义的。
《幸福国的故事》在多克托罗的全部创作里既典型又不典型。多克托罗向来被视为后现代主义文学大师，《幸福国的故事》就题材而言，是典型的后现代作家衷情的题材：边缘暗黑、破碎邪异的人生故事。但作为后现代文学大师的多克托罗在其长篇小说中频繁采用的多线头立体叙事，蒙太奇碎片叙事在这里却是不存在的。《幸福国的故事》尽管每篇的叙事视角都出人意料匠心独具，但是就叙事的过程而言，却规规矩矩，是完完全全的整体顺序叙事。多克托罗如此选择，事实上给了笔下这些边缘暗黑的人物以正史作传的地位，这真是煞费苦心，其言外之意就在于，这些人的幸福非常重要，幸福国必须意识到这一点，否则，幸福国就只能是个正确意义上的反讽。
事实上，不论多克托罗采用什么样的叙述策略，他的创作焦点始终在于把地上的城罪里的城建成上帝之城，他关心罪，探讨罪的成因与社会心理机制，不是因为对罪有特别的兴趣，而是唯有弄清了罪，才能弄清何谓真正的幸福，才能建立上帝之城。就此而言，后现代主义叙事只是多克托罗的文学工具，他本质上其实是现实主义的。一切文学形式无论如何奇巧淫技，无论如何花样翻新，无论如何惊彩绝艳……如果最终不是现实主义的，那就只能是空中楼阁，水中花月，最终归于虚无。多克托罗的后现代主义只是丰富了繁荣了也深化了他的现实主义，不明白这一点，就理解不了他的温情与冷峻是多么现实主义。
《平原上的屋子》在杀人骗局外，还有另一条线，厄尔与泽温斯卡的爱情，只有最本质的现实主义者才会给予一个残酷的杀人犯以爱情的渴望，而且这爱情还如此正常与温暖；《婴儿威尔逊》里凯伦有偷盗癖，但她偷孩子却是基于过分外溢突然暴发的母爱与对男友菜斯特的狂热爱情，而菜斯特正是在保护凯伦不得不潜逃的过程中才重新发现并确证了自己对凯伦的爱，罪与爱是如此深刻地纠缠在一起，这是只有现实主义者的整体思维才能认识到的。如果说这两篇小说以及《乔伦的人生》充满了这种现实主义者的温情，那么，《沃尔特·约翰·哈蒙》则入骨三分地展现了多克托罗作为一个现实主义者的深刻冷峻。该小说中，吉姆本来对他所置身的邪教与教宗沃尔特是心怀疑虑的，但在沃尔特诱拐他的妻子携款潜逃后，他的心理却发生了出人意料的变化：他不是确证沃尔特骗子淫棍的真相，而是完全认同了沃尔特的邪恶教义，坚定了他邪恶的信仰：作为该教的圣人，沃尔特是要入地狱的，他不净化所有人的罪而是承担所有人的罪，他为他们入地狱。
这真是奇特的逻辑：因为要承担人们的罪，所以圣人就要集所有人的罪于一身，怎么集呢？你们的钱我来花，你们的妻子女儿我来淫，你们的一切欲望我来欲望，你们的一切罪行我来实施，你们将因此而干净，而我将因此而入地狱，我心甘情愿，我如此成为圣人。不仅吉姆如此心理畸变，其他教徒大部分亦如此，吉姆甚至因此而成为下一代教主，本该分崩离析的邪教出人意料却又在情理之中延续下去。这种心理探讨可谓透骨吸髓，深刻到了令人不敢正视难以接受的程度，但这不正是人的潜隐心理吗？顺势而为，补偿，自我欺骗……如此深刻真实的心理展示罕见之至，世界文学里只有极少数人才可达到。
如此操持着后现代主义的各种技艺，多克托罗把自己送进了现实主义大师的圣殿，他对上帝之城的梦想与建筑，会永远丰富着人类关于未来的想象。
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