At the hospital they say Janice has the baby with her for a moment and would he please wait? He is sitting in the chair with chrome arms leafing through a Woman's Day backwards1 when a tall woman with backswept gray hair and somehow silver, finely wrinkled skin comes in and looks so familiar he stares. She sees this and has to speak; he feels she would have preferred to ignore him. Who is she? Her familiarity has touched him across a great distance. She looks into his face reluctantly and tells him, "You're an old student of Marty's. I'm Harriet Tothero. We had you to dinner once. I can almost think of your name."
Yes, of course, but it wasn't from that dinner he remembers her, it was from noticing her on the streets. The students at Mt. Judge High knew, most of them, that Tothero played around, and his wife appeared to their innocent eyes wreathed in dark flame, a walking martyr3, a breathing shadow of sin. It was less pity than morbid4 fascination5 that singled her out; Tothero was himself such a windbag6, such a speechifier, that the stain of his own actions slid from him, oil off a duck. It was the tall, silver, serious figure of his wife that accumulated the charge of his wrongdoing, and released it to their young minds with an electrical shock that snapped their eyes away from the sight of her, in fear as much as embarrassment7. Harry8 stands up, surprised to feel that the world she walks in is his world now. "I'm Harry Angstrom," he says.
"Yes, that's your name. He was so proud of you. He often talked to me about you. Even recently."
Recently. What did he tell her? Does she know about him? Does she blame him? Her long schoolmarmish face, as always, keeps its secrets in. "I've heard that he was sick."
"Yes, he is, Harry. Quite sick. He's had two strokes, one since he came into the hospital."
"He's here?"
"Yes. Would you like to visit him? I know it would make him very happy. For just a moment. He's had very few visitors; I suppose that's the tragedy of teaching school. You remember so many and so few remember you."
"I'd like to see him, sure."
"Come with me, then." As they walk down the halls she says, "I'm afraid you'll find him much changed." He doesn't take this in fully9; he is concentrating on her skin, trying to see if it does look like a lot of little lizard10 skins sewed together. Just her hands and neck show.
Tothero is in a room alone. Like waiting presences white curtains hang expectantly around the head of his bed. Green plants on the windowsills exhale11 oxygen. Canted panes12 of glass lift the smells of summer into the room. Footsteps crunch13 on the gravel14 below.
"Dear, I've brought you someone. He was waiting outside in the most miraculous15 way."
"Hello, Mr. Tothero. My wife's had her baby." He speaks these words and goes toward the bed with blank momentum16; the sight of the old man lying there shrunken, his tongue sliding in his lopsided mouth, has stunned17 him. Tothero's face, spotted18 with white stubble, is yellow in the pillows, and his thin wrists stick out from candy?striped pajama sleeves beside the shallow lump of his body. Rabbit offers his hand.
"He can't lift his arms, Harry," Mrs. Tothero says. "He is helpless. But talk to him. He can see and hear." Her sweet patient enunciation19 has a singing quality that is sinister20, as if she is humming to herself.
Since he has extended his hand, Harry presses it down on the back of one of Tothero's. For all its dryness, the hand, under a faint scratchy fleece, is warm, and to Harry's horror moves, revolves21 stubbornly, so the palm is presented upward to Harry's touch. Harry takes his fingers back and sinks into the bedside chair. His old coach's eyeballs shift with scattered22 quickness as he turns his head an inch toward the visitor. The flesh under them has been so scooped23 that they are weakly protrusive24. Talk, he must talk. "It's a little girl. I want to thank you" ? he speaks loudly ? "for the help you gave in getting me and Janice back together again. You were very kind."
Tothero retracts25 his tongue and shifts his face to look at his wife. A muscle under his jaw26 jumps, his lips pucker27, and his chin crinkles repeatedly, like a pulse, as he tries to say something. A few dragged vowels28 come out; Harry turns to see if Mrs. Tothero can decipher them, but to his surprise she is looking elsewhere. She is looking out the window, toward an empty green courtyard. Her face is like a photograph.
Is it that she doesn't care? If so, should he tell Tothero about Margaret? But there was nothing to say about Margaret that might make Tothero happy. "I'm straightened out now, Mr. Tothero, and I hope you're up and out of this bed soon."
Tothero's head turns back with an annoyed quickness, the mouth closed, the eyes in a half?squint29, and for this moment he looks so coherent Harry thinks he will speak, that the pause is just his old disciplinarian's trick of holding silent until your attention is complete. But the pause stretches, inflates30, as if, used for sixty years to space out words, it at last has taken on a cancerous life of its own and swallowed the words. Yet in the first moments of the silence a certain force flows forth31, a human soul emits its invisible and scentless32 rays with urgency. Then the point in the eyes fades, the drooping33 lids close, the lips part, the tip of the tongue appears.
"I better go down and visit my wife," Harry shouts. "She just had the baby last night. It's a girl." He feels claustrophobic, as if he's inside Tothero's skull34; when he stands up, he has the fear he will bump his head, though the white ceiling is yards away.
"Thank you very much, Harry. I know he's enjoyed seeing you," Mrs. Tothero says. Nevertheless from her tone he feels he's flunked35 a recitation. He walks down the hall springingly, dismissed. His health, his reformed life, make space, even the antiseptic space in the hospital corridors, delicious. Yet his visit with Janice is disappointing. Perhaps he is still choked by seeing poor Tothero stretched out as good as dead; perhaps out of ether Janice is choked by thinking of how he's treated her. She complains a lot about how much her stitches hurt, and when he tries to express his repentance36 again she seems to find it boring. The difficulty of pleasing someone begins to hem2 him in. She asks how he spent the night and, sure enough, she asks him to describe Mrs. Eccles.
"About your height," he answers carefully. "A few freckles37."
"Her husband's been wonderful," she says. "He seems to love everybody."
"He's O.K.," Rabbit says. "He makes me nervous."
"Oh, everybody makes you nervous."
"No now that's not true. Marty Tothero never made me nervous. I just saw the poor old bastard38, stretched out in a bed up the hall. He can't say a word or move his head more than an inch."
"He doesn't make you nervous but I do, is that right?"
"I didn't say that."
"Oh no. Ow. These damn stitches they feel like barbed wire. I just make you so nervous you desert me for two months. Over two months."
"Well Jesus Janice. All you did was watch television and drink all the time. I mean I'm not saying I wasn't wrong, but it felt like I had to. You get the feeling you're in your coffin39 before they've taken your blood out. On that first night, when I got in the car in front ofyour parents' place, even then I might just as easy have gone down to get Nelson and driven it home. But when I let the brake out -" Her face goes into that bored look again. Her head switches from side to side, as if to keep flies from settling. He says, "Shit."
This gets her. She says, "I see your language hasn't been improved by living with that prostitute."
"She wasn't a prostitute, exactly. She just kind of slept around. I think there are a lot of girls like her around. I mean if you're going to call everybody who isn't married a prostitute -"
"Where are you going to stay now? Until I get out of the hospital."
"I thought Nelson and me would move into our apartment."
"I'm not sure you can. We didn't pay any rent on it for two months."
"Huh? You didn't?"
"Well my goodness, Harry. You expect a lot. You expect Daddy to keep paying rent? I didn't have any money."
"Well did the landlord call? What happened to our furniture? Did he put it out on the street?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know? Well what do you know? What have you been doing all this time? Sleeping?"
"I was carrying your baby."
"Well hell, I didn't know you have to keep your whole mind on that all the time. The trouble with you, kid, is you just don't give a damn. Really."
"Well listen to you."
He does listen to what he's been sounding like, remembers how he felt last night, and after a pause tries to begin all over again. "Hey," he says, "I love you."
"I love you," she says. "Do you have a quarter?"
"I guess. I'll look. What do you want it for?"
"If you put a quarter in that" ? she points toward a small television set on a high stand, so patients can see it over the foot of their beds ? "it'll play for an hour. There's a silly program on at two that Mother and I got to watching when I was home."
So for thirty minutes he sits by her bed watching some crewcut M.C. tease a lot of elderly women from Akron, Ohio, and Oakland, California. The idea is all these women have tragedies they tell about and then get money according to how much applause there is, but by the time the M.C. gets done delivering commercials and kidding them about their grandchildren and their girlish hairdos there isn't much room for tragedy left. Rabbit keeps thinking that the M.C., who has that way of a Jew of pronouncing very distinctly, no matter how fast the words, is going to start plugging the MagiPeel Peeler but the product doesn't seem to have hit the big time yet. It isn't too bad a show; a pair of peroxide twins with twitchy tails push the women around to various microphones and booths and applause areas. It even makes for a kind of peace; he and Janice hold hands. The bed is almost as high as his shoulders when he sits down, and he enjoys being in this strange relation to a woman ?as if he's carrying her on his shoulder but without the weight. He cranks her bed up and pours her a drink of water and these small services suit some need he has. The program isn't over when a nurse comes and says, "Mr. Angstrom, if you want to see your baby the nurse is holding them to the window now."
He goes down the hall after her; her square hips40 swing under the starched41 white. From just the thickness of her neck he figures her for a good solid piece: haunchy. Big above the knee. He does like women big above the knee. Also he's worrying about what a woman from Springfield, Illinois, was going to say happened after her son's dreadful automobile42 accident, in which he lost an arm. So he's quite unprepared when the nurse in the baby room, where little bundles with heads like oranges lie in rows of supermarket baskets, some tilted44, brings his girl to the viewing window, and it's like a damper being slid back in his chest. A sudden stiff draft freezes his breath. People are always saying how ugly new babies are, maybe this is the reason for the amazement45. The baby is held by the nurse so her profile is sharp red against the buttoned white bosom46 of the uniform. The folds around the nostril47, worked out on such a small scale, seem miraculously48 precise; the tiny stitchless seam of the closed eyelid49 runs diagonally a great length, as if the eye, when it is opened, will be huge. In the suggestion of pressure behind the tranquil50 lid and in the tilt43 of the protruding51 upper lip he reads a delightful52 hint of disdain53. She knows she's good. What he never expected, he can feel she's feminine, feels something both delicate and enduring in the arc of the long pink cranium, furred in bands with black licked swatches. Nelson's head had been full of lumps and frightening blue veins54 and bald except at the base of the neck. Rabbit looks down through the glass with a timidity in the very act of seeing, as if rough looking will smash the fine machinery55 of this sudden life.
The smile of the nurse, foreshortened and flickering56 cutely between his eyes and the baby's nose, reassures57 him that he is the father. Her painted lips wrinkle a question through the glass, and he calls, "O.K., yeah," and gestures, throwing his hands, fingers splayed, to the height of his ears. "She's great," he adds, in a forced voice meant to carry through glass, but the nurse is already returning his daughter to her supermarket basket. Rabbit turns the wrong way, into the sleepless58 face of the father next in line, and laughs outright59. He goes back to Janice with the wind swirling60 through him and fire the red of the baby's skin blazing. In the soap?scented61 hall he gets the idea: they should call the girl June. This is June, she was born in June. He's never known a June. It will please Janice because of the J. But Janice has been thinking about names too and wants to call her after her mother. Harry never thinks of Mrs. Springer as having a first name. It is Rebecca. His warm gust62 of pride in his child mollifies Janice, and he in turn is touched by her daughterly wish; it worries him at times that she does not seem to love her mother. They compromise: Rebecca June Angstrom.
收听单词发音 |
1
backwards
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| adv.往回地，向原处，倒，相反，前后倒置地 | |
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hem
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| n.贴边，镶边；vt.缝贴边；(in)包围，限制 | |
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martyr
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| n.烈士，殉难者；vt.杀害，折磨，牺牲 | |
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morbid
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| adj.病的；致病的；病态的；可怕的 | |
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fascination
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| n.令人着迷的事物，魅力，迷恋 | |
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windbag
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| n.风囊，饶舌之人，好说话的人 | |
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embarrassment
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| n.尴尬；使人为难的人(事物)；障碍；窘迫 | |
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harry
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| vt.掠夺，蹂躏，使苦恼 | |
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fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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lizard
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| n.蜥蜴，壁虎 | |
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exhale
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| v.呼气，散出，吐出，蒸发 | |
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panes
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| 窗玻璃( pane的名词复数 ) | |
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crunch
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| n.关键时刻；艰难局面；v.发出碎裂声 | |
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gravel
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| n.砂跞；砂砾层；结石 | |
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miraculous
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| adj.像奇迹一样的，不可思议的 | |
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momentum
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| n.动力，冲力，势头；动量 | |
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stunned
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| adj. 震惊的，惊讶的 动词stun的过去式和过去分词 | |
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spotted
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| adj.有斑点的，斑纹的，弄污了的 | |
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enunciation
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| n.清晰的发音；表明，宣言；口齿 | |
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sinister
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| adj.不吉利的，凶恶的，左边的 | |
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revolves
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| v.（使）旋转( revolve的第三人称单数 )；细想 | |
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scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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scooped
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| v.抢先报道( scoop的过去式和过去分词 )；（敏捷地）抱起；抢先获得；用铲[勺]等挖（洞等） | |
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protrusive
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| adj.伸出的，突出的 | |
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retracts
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| v.撤回或撤消( retract的第三人称单数 )；拒绝执行或遵守；缩回；拉回 | |
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jaw
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| n.颚，颌，说教，流言蜚语；v.喋喋不休，教训 | |
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pucker
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| v.撅起，使起皱；n.（衣服上的）皱纹，褶子 | |
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vowels
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| n.元音，元音字母( vowel的名词复数 ) | |
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29
squint
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| v. 使变斜视眼, 斜视, 眯眼看, 偏移, 窥视; n. 斜视, 斜孔小窗; adj. 斜视的, 斜的 | |
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30
inflates
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| v.使充气（于轮胎、气球等）( inflate的第三人称单数 )；（使）膨胀；（使）通货膨胀；物价上涨 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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scentless
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| adj.无气味的，遗臭已消失的 | |
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drooping
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| adj. 下垂的，无力的 动词droop的现在分词 | |
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skull
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| n.头骨；颅骨 | |
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35
flunked
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| v.( flunk的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）（考试、某学科的成绩等）不及格；评定（某人）不及格；（因不及格而） 退学 | |
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repentance
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| n.懊悔 | |
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freckles
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| n.雀斑，斑点( freckle的名词复数 ) | |
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bastard
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| n.坏蛋，混蛋；私生子 | |
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coffin
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| n.棺材，灵柩 | |
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hips
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| abbr.high impact polystyrene 高冲击强度聚苯乙烯，耐冲性聚苯乙烯n.臀部( hip的名词复数 )；[建筑学]屋脊；臀围（尺寸）；臀部…的 | |
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41
starched
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| adj.浆硬的，硬挺的，拘泥刻板的v.把（衣服、床单等）浆一浆( starch的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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42
automobile
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| n.汽车，机动车 | |
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43
tilt
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| v.(使)倾侧；(使)倾斜；n.倾侧；倾斜 | |
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44
tilted
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| v. 倾斜的 | |
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amazement
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| n.惊奇，惊讶 | |
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bosom
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| n.胸，胸部；胸怀；内心；adj.亲密的 | |
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nostril
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| n.鼻孔 | |
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48
miraculously
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| ad.奇迹般地 | |
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49
eyelid
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| n.眼睑，眼皮 | |
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50
tranquil
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| adj. 安静的, 宁静的, 稳定的, 不变的 | |
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51
protruding
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| v.（使某物）伸出，（使某物）突出( protrude的现在分词 )；凸 | |
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52
delightful
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| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
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53
disdain
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| n.鄙视，轻视；v.轻视，鄙视，不屑 | |
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54
veins
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| n.纹理；矿脉( vein的名词复数 )；静脉；叶脉；纹理 | |
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55
machinery
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| n.(总称)机械，机器；机构 | |
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56
flickering
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| adj.闪烁的，摇曳的，一闪一闪的 | |
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57
reassures
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| v.消除恐惧或疑虑，恢复信心( reassure的第三人称单数 ) | |
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58
sleepless
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| adj.不睡眠的，睡不著的，不休息的 | |
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59
outright
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| adv.坦率地；彻底地；立即；adj.无疑的；彻底的 | |
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60
swirling
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| v.旋转，打旋( swirl的现在分词 ) | |
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61
scented
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| adj.有香味的；洒香水的；有气味的v.嗅到(scent的过去分词) | |
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62
gust
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| n.阵风，突然一阵（雨、烟等），（感情的）迸发 | |
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