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She wrote back in an unusually cheery vein intended to demonstrate, I suppose, that she was mending her ways. Referring to my visit, she wrote: "If I seemed unhappy to you at times, I am, but there's really nothing anyone can do about it, because I'm just so very tired and lonely that I'll just go to sleep and forget it." She was then seventy-eight.
她以一种不同寻常的、轻松欢快的语气回了信。我猜想，这是她在努力补救自己做法的一种表示。在提到我的探望时，她写道如果有时候你见到我不快乐，那么我的确是不快乐的。不过对此谁都无能为力，因为我只是太累了，太孤独了，我只能睡一觉，把这些全忘了。”那年她78岁。
Now three years later, after the last bad fall, she had managed to forget the fatigue and loneliness and to recapture happiness. I soon stopped trying to argue her back to what I considered the real world and tried to travel along with her on those fantastic journeys into the past. One day when I arrived at her bedside she was radiant.
现在，三年过去了，她严重摔伤，她已经忘记了那些疲惫和孤独，重新找回了快乐。我很快便停止了对她的劝说，不再试图把她拉回到我以为的“现实”中来，并且尽力同她一起踏上那些神奇的旅行，回到那些过去的岁月当中。一天，我来到她床边时，发现她容光焕发。
Feeling good today, I said.
“今天挺精神的嘛。”我说。
Why shouldn't I feel good? she asked. "Papa's going to take me up to Baltimore on the boat today."
“为什么不呢？”她反问，“今天爸爸要带我坐船去巴尔的摩。”
At that moment she was a young girl standing on a wharf, waiting for the Chesapeake Bay steamer with her father, who had been dead sixty-one years. William Howard Taft was in the White House, America was a young country, and the future stretched before it in beams of crystal sunlight. "The greatest country on God's green earth," her father might have said, if I had been able to step into my mother's time machine.
那时的她还是个小女孩，站在码头上，和她的父亲一起等候着切萨皮克湾的汽轮——事实上她的父亲已经去世61年了。那时，威廉·霍华德·塔夫特正在白宫执政，美国还是一个年轻的国家，展现在这个国家面前的是一片光辉灿烂的前景。“美国是上帝赋予的这个绿色星球上最伟大的国家。”——若我能进入母亲的时光机，或许就能听到外祖父这样说。
About her father, my grandfather, my mother's childhood and her people, I knew very little.
关于我母亲的父亲也就是我的外祖父、她的童年以及她的家人，我几乎一无所知。
