At their next encounter, Delacour expressed surprise at her presence at the graveside. Lagrange had never, as far as he knew, exercised the right to use the municipal baths.
“He was my father,” she replied.
Of Paternity and Filiation, he thought. Decree of March 23, 1803, promulgated April 2nd. Chapters 1, 2, and 3.
“How?” was all he could say.
“How?” she repeated.
“Yes, how?”
“In the usual manner, I am sure,” the girl said.
“Yes.”
“He used to visit my mother as…”
“As I visit you.”
“Yes. He was much taken with me. He wished to acknowledge me, to make me…”
“Legitimate?”
“Yes. My mother did not want this. There was a dispute. She feared he would try to steal me. She guarded me. Sometimes he would spy on us. When she was dying, my mother made me promise never to receive him or to have contact with him. I promised. I did not think that…that the funeral amounted to contact.”
Jean-Étienne Delacour sat on the girl’s narrow bed. Something was slipping in his mind. The world was making less sense than it should. This child, provided it survived the hazards of accouchement, would be Lagrange’s grandchild. What he chose not to tell me, what Jeanne’s mother kept from him, what I, in my turn, have not told Jeanne. We make the laws but the bees swarm anyway, the rabbit seeks a different warren, the pigeon flies to another’s dovecote.
“When I was a gambler,” he said finally, “people disapproved. They thought it was a vice. I never thought so. To me it seemed the application of logical scrutiny to human behavior. When I was a gourmand, people judged it an indulgence. I never thought so. To me it seemed a rational approach to human pleasure.”
He looked at her. She seemed to have no idea what he was talking about. Well, that was his own fault. “Jeanne,” he said, taking her hand. “You need have no fear for your child. No fear of the kind your mother had. It is not necessary.”
“Yes, sir.”
At supper, he listened to his grown-up son’s prattle and declined to correct numerous idiocies. He chewed on a sliver of tree bark, but without appetite. Later, his cup of milk tasted as if it had come from a copper pan, his stewed lettuce stank of the dunghill, his rennet apple had the texture of a horsehair pillow.
In the morning, when they found him, his linen nightcap was grasped in a rigid hand, though whether he had been about to put it on, or whether for some reason he had just chosen to remove it, no one could tell.
2002
“Dinner is scrambled.”
Copyright © 2007 by The New Yorker Magazine
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
All pieces in this collection were originally published in The New Yorker.
The publication dates are given at the end of each piece.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, for permission to reprint an excerpt from Underworld by Don DeLillo, copyright © 1997 by Don DeLillo. First published as “Sputnick” in The New Yorker, September 8, 1997. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Secret ingredients: the New Yorker book of food and drink / edited by David Remnick.
p. cm.
1. Gastronomy—Literary collections. 2. Food—Literary collections. 3. Food habits—Literary collections. I. Remnick, David. II. New Yorker (New York, N.Y.: 1925)
PN6071.G3N49 2007
809'.933559—dc22 2007014490
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eISBN: 978-1-58836-823-2
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