It’s the opening line in Anna Karenina, isn’t it, the one about happy families being the same and unhappy ones being unhappy in their own way? Because it’s Tolstoy, and he presumably knew about such things, I’ll let it pass, though it occurs to me that what families are in their own way is weird. Perhaps happy or unhappy, but decidedly weird.
As kids, we assume that our family is the standard, for that’s what we see. After all, we end up talking the way they do, having their social and fiscal ideas, dealing with stress or drink or the law in pretty much the same way they do. So it’s but a little jump to thinking that such behaviour is normal, no matter how peculiar that behaviour might be.
We observe strangeness in other people and in their families. God knows, I saw a fair bit of it when I was a kid. But perhaps because we have so little experience of the world, we don’t register it as weirdness at the time and don’t come to that assessment until we’re older.
Part of the cast during my childhood were my mother’s three aunts, who lived together in a 12-room house not far from our farm. Aunt Trace was a widow, though I never learnt more about her husband than that he had been a pharmacist (this created endless room for speculation as to the cause of his death); Aunt Gert and Aunt Mad had never married. These three women lived in perfect harmony in the house, and by the time I was old enough to visit them they no longer worked – if, in fact, they ever had.
They played cards, specifically bridge. Their days were filled with cards, as were their evenings. They had a circle of women friends with whom they played.
Because they went to church on Sunday, they did not play bridge on Sunday, not unless the church had a bridge evening. And Gert cheated. My mother delighted in telling me about this, since Gert was a pillar of the church. Over the years, she had developed a language of dithering and hesitation that was as clear a signal to her partner as if she had laid her cards face up on the table. “Oh, I think I’ll just risk one heart.” “I wonder if I dare raise that bid to two clubs?”
Since I never played bridge, I can’t decode these messages; it was enough for us to know that she cheated. The stakes were perhaps, after four hours of play, a dollar. But she cheated. She also gave thousands of dollars to charity every year and was wonderfully generous with every member of a large and generally thankless family, but cheat she would.
She gave thousands of dollars to charity every year and was wonderfully generous with every member of a large and thankless family, but cheat she would.
I remember little things about Gert. She always put the flowers in the refrigerator at night so they would last longer; she telephoned and complained to the parents of any child who stepped on her grass; she always wore a hat when leaving the house.
Towards the end of her life, after Mad and Trace had died, she was left alone in the 12-room house and was eventually persuaded to sell it and move to a mere six rooms. She died soon thereafter and left, in the linen closet, the sheets and towels that had been part of her dowry. Beautiful, hand-embroidered linen and all unused. I still have six table napkins.
My brother, three years older than me, also inherited my mother’s chipper stance towards the world, as well as the almost total lack of ambition that has characterised our lives. And he has, to a remarkable degree, what the Italians would call the ability to arrangiarsi, to find a solution, to find a way to get around a problem, to land on his feet.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the story of the dirt. His last job, before he retired, was as manager of a complex of about 100 apartments. His job was to administer contracts and rent payments and to see that the buildings were sufficiently well cared for. At a certain point, the owners decided to convert the buildings to gas heating, and that meant the old oil-burning system had to be removed, as well as the storage tank that lay under one of the parking lots.
The demolition men came and took out the furnace, then dug up the tank and removed it. Whereupon arrived the inspectors from the Environmental Protection Agency, declaring that because the tank had sprung a leak sometime in the past and spilled oil into the earth, the dirt that had been piled up around it was both contaminated and sequestered and could not be removed save by paying a special haulage company to take it away.
My brother, long a resident of the town, knew a bit more than the average citizen about the connection between the inspectors and the haulage company because of his hunting buddies, some of whom belonged to an organisation that – hmm, how to express this delicately – worked at some variance to the law. (We’re in New Jersey, Italians, the building trade … get it?) And so he had some suspicions about the actual level of contamination in the dirt.
As fortune would have it, he was about to leave for two weeks’ vacation. And so, the night before he left, he called one of his hunting pals, who just happened to be in the business of supplying landfill to various building projects and just happened to be a member of that same organisation.
My brother explained that he was going to be away for some time and that his friend, whose name he never disclosed to me, was free to come in at any time during the next two weeks and pick up the dirt that surrounded the excavated hole where the tank had been. The only caveat was that the trucks had to be unmarked and had to come at night.
Two weeks later, tanned and fit, he and his wife returned from vacation. As he stepped out of the taxi that had brought them from the airport, he looked about, like a good custodian, at the buildings and grounds that were in his care. Shocked by what he saw, he slapped his hand to his forehead and exclaimed, “My God, they’ve stolen my dirt.” Whereupon he went inside and called the police to report the theft.
The same was to be found on my father’s side of the family, though the suggestion of strangeness was provided by legend rather than witnesses. There was his uncle Raoul, bilingual in Spanish and English, who always answered the phone in heavily accented English and, when he found himself asked for, responded that he was the butler but he would go and enquire “if Meester Leon was libre”.
My father’s Uncle Bill lived in a vast, sprawling mansion about 50 miles north of New York City and often disappeared for short or long periods of time to the various banana republics of South and Central America. The official story was that he was in the coffee trade, so why all those other stories about meeting various heads of state while surrounded by machine-gun-toting guards?
Uncle Bill was married to the painted woman of the family, Aunt Florence, who was not only divorced but Jewish and had married into a Spanish-Irish Catholic family. Further, they had lived together “in sin”, as one said then, before their union was sanctioned by the state, the clergy wanting no part of them.
In the face of these impediments, we were all more than willing to overlook the fact that she bore a frightening resemblance to a horse and was, to boot, significantly less intelligent than one. Her mantra, which she repeated openly whenever we visited, was that a woman must pretend to be stupid so that a man would marry her. My brother and I never saw evidence that she was pretending.
And yes, this comes to me now that I think about them: Henry. Henry was their Japanese cook, a sort of unseen presence who was said to be in the kitchen, though none of us ever laid eyes on him. It is part of family lore that Henry wrote in his will that he left his life savings to the United States. Because no will was found when he died and there was no living relative, he got his wish.
My father’s brother, my uncle, a man of stunning handsomeness in the photos we still have of him, was an officer in the merchant marine. He was rumoured, though neither my brother nor I can recall the source of this rumour, to have been a lover of Isadora Duncan, though I was surely too young to know who she was when I first heard this story.
Family memories, family mysteries.
这是《安娜-卡列尼娜》中的开场白吧，关于幸福的家庭千篇一律，不幸的家庭各有各的不幸？因为是托尔斯泰写的，而且他应该知道这些事情，所以我就不去想它了，不过我想到，家庭以自己的方式存在是很奇怪的。也许幸福，也许不幸，但绝对是怪异的。
小时候，我们认为自己的家庭就是标准，因为我们看到的就是这样。毕竟，我们最终会以他们的方式交谈，拥有他们的社交和理财观念，以与他们几乎相同的方式处理压力、酗酒或法律问题。因此，无论这种行为多么奇特，我们都会认为这种行为是正常的。
我们在其他人和他们的家庭中观察到奇怪的行为。天知道，我小时候也见过不少。但也许是因为我们对这个世界的体验太少，我们当时并没有把它当作怪事，直到我们长大后才会有这样的评价。
在我的童年时期，我母亲的三个姨妈是我童年生活的一部分，她们一起住在离我们农场不远的一栋有 12 个房间的房子里。特蕾丝姨妈是个寡妇，虽然我从未了解过她丈夫的更多情况，只知道他曾是一名药剂师（这为人们猜测他的死因提供了无尽的空间）；格特姨妈和玛德姨妈从未结过婚。这三个女人在家里和睦相处，当我长大到可以去看望她们的时候，她们已经不再工作了–如果事实上她们曾经工作过的话。
她们打牌，尤其是桥牌。她们白天打牌，晚上也打牌。他们有一圈女性朋友，和她们一起打牌。
因为他们周日去教堂，所以周日不打桥牌，除非教堂有桥牌晚会。格特作弊了。因为格特是教会的顶梁柱，所以我母亲很乐意告诉我这些。多年来，她已经形成了一种犹豫不决的语言，就像她把牌正面朝上放在桌子上一样，向她的搭档发出了明确的信号。”哦，我想我就赌一颗红心吧” “不知道我敢不敢把出价提高到两张梅花？”
因为我从不打桥牌，所以无法解读这些信息；但我们知道她出老千就足够了。经过四个小时的比赛，赌注也许只有一美元。但她作弊了。她每年还向慈善机构捐献数千美元，对这个大家庭的每个成员都慷慨大方，但她还是会出老千。
她每年都向慈善机构捐出数千美元，对这个大家庭的每个成员都非常慷慨，但她也会作弊。
我还记得格特的一些小事。她总是在晚上把花放在冰箱里，这样花的花期会更长；如果有孩子踩坏了她的草坪，她会打电话向孩子的父母抱怨；她出门时总是戴着帽子。
在她生命的最后时刻，在麦德和索斯去世后，她独自一人留在这栋有 12 个房间的房子里，最终在别人的劝说下，她卖掉了房子，搬到了只有 6 个房间的地方。此后不久，她就去世了，并在亚麻壁橱里留下了作为嫁妆一部分的床单和毛巾。这些床单和毛巾都是手工刺绣的，非常漂亮，而且都没用过。我现在还保留着六条餐巾。
我的哥哥比我大三岁，他也继承了我母亲对世界的温和态度，以及我们生活中几乎完全没有野心的特点。而他在很大程度上拥有意大利人所说的 “arrangiarsi “能力，即找到解决办法、找到绕过问题的方法、站稳脚跟的能力。
泥土的故事最能说明这一点。他退休前的最后一份工作是担任一个拥有约 100 套公寓的综合大楼的经理。他的工作是管理合同和租金支付，并确保大楼得到充分的维护。到了某一时刻，业主决定将楼房改用天然气供暖，这就意味着必须拆除旧的燃油系统，以及其中一个停车场下面的储油罐。
拆迁人员来到现场，拆除了火炉，然后挖出储油罐并将其移走。这时，环境保护局的检查人员来了，他们宣布，由于储油罐在过去的某个时候发生过泄漏，油溢出到了地里，因此储油罐周围堆积的泥土既受到了污染，又被封存了起来，除非花钱请专门的运输公司运走，否则无法清除。
我的哥哥长期居住在这个小镇上，他比普通人更了解检查员和运输公司之间的关系，因为他有一些打猎的朋友，其中有些人属于一个组织–嗯，怎么说呢–这个组织的工作与法律有些出入。(我们在新泽西，意大利人，建筑行业……明白吗？）因此，他对泥土中的实际污染程度有所怀疑。
幸运的是，他马上就要去度两周的假了。于是，在他离开的前一天晚上，他给他的一个打猎的朋友打了个电话，这个朋友恰好从事为各种建筑项目提供垃圾填埋场的生意，而且恰好也是那个组织的成员。
我哥哥解释说，他要离开一段时间，他的朋友（他从未向我透露过他的名字）可以在接下来的两周内随时过来，把挖掘出来的土坑周围的泥土运走。唯一的注意事项是，卡车必须没有标志，而且必须在晚上来。
两周后，他和妻子度假归来，皮肤黝黑，体格健壮。当他走下把他们从机场接来的出租车时，他像一个好管理员一样，环顾了一下由他看管的建筑物和场地。他被眼前的景象震惊了，用手拍了拍额头，惊呼道：”天哪，他们偷了我的土。” 于是，他进屋报警。
同样的情况也发生在我父亲的家族中，尽管这种奇怪的暗示是由传说而不是目击者提供的。他的叔叔拉乌尔精通西班牙语和英语，总是用带着浓重口音的英语接听电话，当他发现有人找他时，就回答说他是管家，但他会去询问 “莱昂小姐是否有空”。
我父亲的比尔叔叔住在纽约市以北约 50 英里的一栋宽敞的大宅子里，经常或长或短地消失在南美洲和中美洲的各个香蕉共和国。官方说法是他从事咖啡贸易，那为什么还有其他关于他在持机关枪的卫兵包围下会见各国首脑的故事呢？
比尔叔叔娶了家里的油漆女弗洛伦斯婶婶，她不仅离过婚，还是犹太人，嫁到了一个西班牙-爱尔兰天主教家庭。此外，在他们的结合得到国家认可之前，他们就已经 “罪孽深重 “地生活在一起了，就像当时人们所说的那样，神职人员根本不想管他们。
面对这些障碍，我们都很愿意忽略一个事实，那就是她长得像一匹可怕的马，而且，她的智力明显不如一匹马。她的口头禅是：女人必须装傻，男人才会娶她。我和弟弟从未见过她装傻的证据。
是的，现在想起他们，我就想到了这一点： 亨利 亨利是他们家的日本厨子，据说他就在厨房里，虽然我们谁也没见过他。亨利在遗嘱中写道，他把毕生积蓄留给了美国，这是家族传说的一部分。因为他去世时没有找到遗嘱，也没有活着的亲人，所以他如愿以偿了。
我父亲的兄弟，也就是我的叔叔，在我们还保留着的他的照片中，他英俊潇洒，是商船队的一名军官。有传言说他是伊莎多拉-邓肯（Isadora Duncan）的情人，虽然我和我哥哥都不记得这个传言的来源，但我第一次听到这个故事时肯定还太小，不知道她是谁。
家族记忆，家族之谜。
陳旭@perth 