bullets, and it was not uncommon for the soldiers to complain about inaccurate flight. “I cannot listen to the carping,” Delvigne said to me. “When a man does for his army one tenth of what I have done, then I will listen to him, but only then. Meanwhile, bring me a wineglass and a nurse: you fill the one and I will fill the other.”
I took his words as a challenge. The thought of Delvigne listening! On one of those rare rainy days, I was trapped inside the tent alone. That was the moment inspiration chose to appear to me. It occurred to me that perhaps the best way to create a bullet that would keep its shape when hammered in—and not, afterward, lose its shape again when the powder blew out of the compartment near the breech and into the barrel—was to make it cylindrical, with a hollow base and a pointed tip. When the powder caught, the fire and expanding gases would enlarge the skirting of the bullet enough to align with the grooves of the inside of the barrel and seal the barrel beneath the bullet to ensure maximum accuracy. I went away from the tent through the rain to the company’s smith, and I asked him to fashion a few of these bullets. He complied, and I brought those bullets back to the tent and placed them on top of an envelope that contained a note for Delvigne. “Captain,” it began, “here is a type of bullet that I have invented. I have simultaneously built upon the foundation you laid and razed the structure erected by Thouvenin, who is a scoundrel and a traitor and, from what I hear, a silent player in the symphony of love, if you take my meaning: he endeavors with all his might to bring sound out of his instrument but cannot.” The note was folded in neat thirds like a proper letter. I was and have continued to be meticulous in that regard.
That was when Delvigne returned to the tent. He did not read my letter. (I hope that you do not make that same mistake, my dear. If this letter is down in a pile, neglected, it will cause me unimaginable pain.) He lay down in the tent, clutched his head, and told me that he was sicker than he had ever been. When I asked the telegraph operator to check the weather, Delvigne called out that he expected more rain and then lapsed back into illness. He retched off the side of the bed, filling his hat. I waited for him to ask me about my morning, at which time I would have told him that I thought I had solved the problem of the rifle bullets. But he did not ask. He moaned and clutched his head some more. As I have said, he was not the brave soldier I had heard about through my youth. He writhed as if in the grips of a fit. He called out pitifully the names of women he had loved. He prayed for them to come and save him. The one he called for most passionately was named Isabel. I never knew the woman, never even received a description of her, but the way in which Delvigne wailed for her stuck to my heart like a stubborn burr, and when I saw you that first day of your life, and my soul went out to you with the purest love I have ever known, I knew that your name should be Isabel.
Delvigne eventually stopped calling for Isabel and then for all the women. In the afternoon, a doctor stopped by: a corporal in an adjoining tent had heard Delvigne’s cries and thought to summon medical help. The doctor touched Delvigne’s forehead, felt around his neck, and then declared that there was very little he could do. Delvigne, he explained, had contracted an infection that had colonized most of his body. The second he left, Delvigne began to thrash more violently. Blood welled up in his nose. His eyes snapped open. He recognized me. “Captain Minie,” he said. “Please help me.” His entire body began to shiver. His eyes were a fearsome shade of yellow. “Captain,” he said, “reach beneath my bed and find a rifle.” I did not move, so he bent down and produced the rifle himself. “The powder is already loaded. Will you shoot me?” he said. I ignored the request and looked away. He followed my gaze, which had quite accidentally landed on the bullets that I had designed. He reached out a sweaty arm and gathered the bullets into his palm. He looked at them. “Hollow base,” he said. “Nice.” He slid one into the barrel, weakly took a ramrod into his hand, and pounded the bullet down. He was turning the rifle around when his finger slipped and pulled the trigger. The shot was deafening on the tent. The bullet came out of the barrel with a severe leftward deviation. Delvigne began to make a noise that was halfway between a laugh and a sob. “There should be an iron plug into the base.” Then he lapsed into a silence that seemed to my untrained eye like a coma.
When the doctor returned, I did not mention the shot. It seemed undignified, at least. The doctor loaded Delvigne onto a narrow cot and carried him out of the tent. After a while I reached for a piece of paper. Delvigne’s ravings had given me an idea. With the smith’s help, I improved upon my own invention by the addition of a small iron plug in the bullet’s hollow base that, on firing, would be propelled upward to help shape the bullet and strengthen the tip as the skirting flattened out. I left northern Africa early the next week, while Delvigne was still recuperating, and though I thought for a time that he might die, I had not correctly estimated his physical capabilities. He fought his infection for weeks but recovered nearly to perfect health, was discharged from military service, and married a young woman who was an actress on the Paris stage. This was just before Delvigne took her to America and tried to make his fortune in the West, which means that it was just before he went mad. They say that the fever that almost took him in the tent may have lain in wait inside his mind for years, springing forth at a later date without any warning. His life became a series of irrational connections and concoctions. He came to believe that the Americans were fighting for French independence. He believed that his wife was also a character in a book he had yet to read. He could no longer distinguish between the real and unreal, not from the first arrival of his madness until the moment of his death. I never met his wife, but I can only assume that this changed her tune.
But what of me? I left the service and met your mother. We fell in love immediately. The first night, I was hungrier for her than I had ever been for anything in my life. I hope you do not blush to read this, my dear daughter. I wish that one day you will find a man with as great an appetite for you. Nine months later, you were born and your mother died. I do not know a more elegant way to describe this turn of events. My sorrow raised you. I hope that it did not poison you.
I have come somewhat far from the history book. I am sorry, my dear, just as I am sorry that I only send you a letter once each year, on your birthday. Any more would put me in the ground, and I do not believe that you want me there. It is time for my letter to end now. As usual, I will close without a comma, with hope.
Love
your father
SEVENTEEN DIFFERENT WAYS TO GET A LOAD OF THAT
(Lunar City, 1989)
From the air, the house looked like a joke told by someone with no sense of timing, a big brown rectangle in the middle of a slightly bigger green rectangle tatted with a white picket fence. The fence looked flimsy because the fence was flimsy. A child could knock it down, and did, several times, mostly as a result of trying to hurdle it and failing, sometimes just for spite. My father put up the fence when we moved in, to keep the dog in the yard. “Will you get a load of that?” said my mother, puffing on a cigarette. “Your father wants to prove that a lawyer can do more than lawyering. I’m pretty sure he can’t.” And sure enough, within three months, the dog—a small schnauzer beloved by my sister and my father, despised by my mother, and, for me, an object lesson in indifference—was gone through a corner of the fence where the slats flexed enough to permit its passage. “Where is Goosey?” Jill said, in a voice loaded up with tragic tones she had learned from the television. She did this all the time. It was difficult to take her seriously. “Where is my little dog Goosey?”
“I am so sorry,” said my father. The grief in his voice was real.
Since both my parents worked late, our dinners were prepared by a cook, a tall, thin woman named Catherine who was planning to open her own restaurant and who was, my mother told us, attempting to trick my father into becoming an angel. “That’s a kind of investor,” she said, as if there were any confusion. “I think he should think long and hard before he makes that kind of decision.” She was one to talk. When my mother had been in charge of the cooking, dinner was a roll of the dice, both random and risky. We could have pizza four nights in a row, and then not see it again for a month. We could have fried chicken every other night for two months and then lose it for the better part of a year. It made for an unstable relationship with food. With Catherine, we entered into a regimen of strict rotation: chicken, pork, fish, pasta, beef. Each day of the week partnered with a certain entree. “It’s to help me learn what I need to know,” Catherine said, her eyes glazing over as she drifted into thoughts of her future restaurant, which she was going to call the Hungry Cat. Fridays were for experiments; she tried tagines, pastry
