第五章 弗洛姆的三节

"MARY GOT A QUARTER"

“玛丽的一刻钟”

Joe Flom is the last living "named" partner of the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom.

乔·弗洛姆(JoeFlom)是世达律师事务所最后一位尚健在的“指定合伙人”。

He has a corner office high above the Conde Nast tower in Manhattan.

他在曼哈顿康泰纳仕塔楼（CondéNasttower）最顶层的一角拥有一间办公室。

He is short and slightly hunched.

他身材矮小，稍微有些发福。

His head is large, framed by long prominent ears, and his narrow blue eyes were hidden by oversize aviator-style glasses.

他的脑袋比较大，一双大耳朵显得挺长，他细长的蓝眼睛隐藏在一幅特大号的太阳镜后面。

He is slender now, but during his heyday, Flom was extremely overweight.

与壮年时期相比，他已经算是苗条了不少，那时候他的体重严重超标。

He waddles when he walks.

他走起路来有些摇摇摆摆，

He doodles when he thinks.

他思考的时候常显得心不在焉，

He mumbles when he talks, and when he makes his way down the halls of Skadden, Arps, conversations drop to a hush.

他说话的时候总喜欢喃喃而语，只要他一走进世达律师事务所的大厅，里面立即会变得安静起来。

Flom grew up in the Depression in Brooklyn's Borough Park neighborhood.

弗洛姆自小生活在布鲁克林市区公园附近一个令人沮丧的地区。

His parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

他的父母是来自东欧的犹太移民。

His father, Isadore, was a union organizer in the garment industry who later went to work sewing shoulder pads for ladies' dresses.

他的父亲，伊萨多，是外衣制造业一个协会的组织者，后来他改成专门缝制女装的披肩。

His mothers worked at what was called piecework, doing applique at home. They were desperately poor.

他母亲的工作属于计件工作——在家里为别人的衣服缝制饰品。他们穷困潦倒。

His family moved nearly every year when he was growing up because the custom in those days was for landlords to give new tenants a month's free rent,

在他的记忆中，几乎每一年他们就要搬一次家，因为那时候的租税制度规定，房东必须免去新租户一个月的房租，

and without that, his family could not get by.

正因为这样，他们搬一次家，就可以节省一部分费用。

In junior high school, Flom took the entrance exam for the elite Townsend Harris public high school on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan,

读完初中，弗洛姆通过了汤森哈理斯公立高中的入学考试，这是位于曼哈顿列克星敦大道的一所著名高中。

a school that in just forty years of existence produced three Nobel Prize winners, six Pulitzer Prize winners, and one Supreme Court Justice,

在这所高中短短的四十年中，培养出了三位诺贝尔奖获得者、六位普利策奖获得者、一位最高法院法官，

not to mention George Gershwin and Jonas Salk, the inventer of polio vaccine.

脊髓灰质炎疫苗的发明者乔治·格什温（GeorgeGershwin）和乔纳斯·索尔克（JonasSalk）也来自这所高中。

He got in. His mother would give him a dime in the morning for breakfast- three donuts, orange juice, and coffee at Nedick's.

弗洛姆来到这里，他的母亲每天早上都会给他一角硬币吃早餐——在勒迪克（Nedick’s）吃三个油炸圈饼、喝杯橙汁或者咖啡。

After school, he pushed a hand truck in the garment district.

放学之后，他就到外衣制作区推手推车。

He did two years of night schools at City College in upper Manhattan, working during the days to make ends meet,

他在上曼哈顿地区的城市学院读了两年夜校——为了维持生计，他白天一直在工作

signed up for the army, served his time, and applied to Harvard Law School.

随后他报名参军，在服役期间，他申请了哈佛大学法学院。

"I wanted to get into the law since I was six years old," Flom says.

“从6岁开始，我就希望自己能进入法律界，”弗洛姆说，

He didn't have a degree in college.

但他没能在学院获得学位，

Harvard took him anyway.

哈佛大学遗弃了他。

"Why? I wrote them a letter on why I was the answer to sliced bread," is how Flom explains it.

“为什么？我给他们写了一封信，告诉他们为什么我只适合去切面包，”他解释说，一如他言简意赅的言谈风格。

At Harvard, in the late 1940s, he never took notes.

在20世纪40年代，正在哈佛大学读书的弗洛姆从来没有做过笔记。

"All of us were going through this first year idiocy of writing notes carefully in the classroom and doing an outline of that, then a condensation of that,

“我们无一例外都要经历枯燥无味的一年，我们必须呆在教室认真做笔记，根据笔记写一个纲要，然后再把要点整理出来，

and then doing it again on onionskin paper, on top of other paper," remembers Chars Haar, who was a classmate of Flom.

最后写在一张放在最上面的薄光泽纸上，””弗洛姆的同班同学查尔斯·哈尔说，

"It was a routinized way of trying to learn the cases. Not Joe. He wouldn't have any of that.

“我们循规蹈矩地学习那些案例，但这对乔不适合。他几乎从来不记笔记。

But he had that quality which we always vaguely subsumed under 'thinking like a lawyer.' He had the great capacity for judgement."

他拥有一种潜质，能‘像律师一样思考’，而我们在这方面却总是差强人意。他拥有过人的判断能力。

Flom was Law Review- the honor reserved for the very top students in the class.

弗洛姆曾是《法律评论》（LawReview）的编辑——这是赋予班级最拔尖学生的一项荣誉。

During "hiring season", the Christmas break of his second year, he went down to New York to interview with the big cooperate law firms of the day.

第二年的圣诞假期属于弗洛姆的“应聘季节”，他来到纽约参加一些大的律师事务所的面试。